Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

mirror each day, to take stock of its ghastly ruin, and to summon the will to accept it. The mountainous strain of it, the effort, the patience. Her acceptance taking shape slowly, over years, like rocks of a beachside cliff sculpted by the pounding tides. It took the dog minutes to give Thalia her face, and a lifetime for her to mold it into an identity. She would not let me undo it all with my scalpel. It would be like inflicting a fresh wound over the old one.

I dig into the eggs, knowing it will please her, even though I am not really hungry. “This is good, Thalia.”

“So, are you excited?” “What do you mean?”

She reaches behind her and pulls open a kitchen-counter drawer. She retrieves a pair of sunglasses with rectangular lenses. It takes me a moment. Then I remember. The eclipse.

“Ah, of course.”

“At first,” she says, “I thought we’d just watch it through a pinhole. But then Odie said you were coming. And I said, ‘Well, then, let’s do it in style.’ ”

We talk a bit about the eclipse that is supposed to happen the next day. Thalia says it will start in the morning and be complete by noon or so. She has been checking the weather updates and is relieved that the island is not due for a cloudy day. She asks if I want more eggs and I say yes, and she tells me about a new Internet café that has gone up where Mr. Roussos’s old pawnshop used to sit.

“I saw the pictures,” I say. “Upstairs. The article too.”

She wipes my bread crumbs off the table with her palm, tosses them over her shoulder into the kitchen sink without looking. “Ah, that was easy. Well, scanning and uploading them was. The hard part was organizing them into countries. I had to sit and figure it

out because you never sent notes, just the pictures. She was very specific about that, the having it organized into countries. She had to have it that way. She insisted on it.”

“Who?”

She issues a sigh. “ ‘Who?’ he says. Odie. Who else?”

“That was her idea?”

“The article too. She was the one who found it on the web.”

“Mamá looked me up?” I say.

“I should have never taught her. Now she won’t stop.” She gives a chuckle. “She checks on you every day. It’s true. You have yourself a cyberspace stalker, Markos Varvaris.”

…

Mamá comes downstairs early in the afternoon. She is wearing a dark blue

bathrobe and the fuzzy slippers that I have already come to loathe. It looks like she has brushed her hair. I am relieved to see that she appears to be moving normally as she walks down the steps, as she opens her arms to me, smiling sleepily.

We sit at the table for coffee.

“Where is Thalia?” she asks, blowing into her cup.

“Out to get some treats. For tomorrow. Is that yours, Mamá?” I point to a cane leaning against the wall behind the new armchair. I hadn’t noticed it when I had first come in.

“Oh, I hardly use it. Just on bad days. And for long walks. Even then, mostly for peace of mind,” she says too dismissively, which is how I know she relies on it far more than she lets on. “It’s you I worry for. The news from that awful country. Thalia doesn’t want me listening to it. She says it will agitate me.”

“We do have our incidents,” I say, “but mostly it’s just people going about their lives.

And I’m always careful, Mamá.” Of course I neglect to tell her about the shooting at the guesthouse across the street or the recent surge in attacks on foreign-aid workers, or that by careful I mean I have taken to carrying a 9mm when I am out driving around the city, which I probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

Mamá takes a sip of coffee, winces a bit. She doesn’t push me. I am not sure whether this is a good thing. Not sure whether she has drifted off, descended into herself as old people do, or whether it is a tactic to not corner me into lying or disclosing things that would only upset her.

“We missed you at Christmas,” she says. “I couldn’t get away, Mamá.”

She nods. “You’re here now. That’s what matters.”

I take a sip of my coffee. I remember when I was little Mamá and me eating breakfast at this table every morning, quietly, almost

solemnly, before we walked to school together. We said so little to each other.

“You know, Mamá, I worry for you too.” “No need to. I take care of myself all right.”

A flash of the old defiant pride, like a dim glint in the fog.

“But for how long?” “As long as I can.”

“And when you can’t, then what?” I am not challenging her. I ask because I don’t know. I don’t know what my own role will be or whether I will even play one.

She levels her gaze at me evenly. Then she adds a teaspoon of sugar to her cup, slowly stirs it in. “It’s a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”

“I don’t follow, Mamá.”

“Well, take you, for instance. Leaving here. The life you’ve made for yourself. You were

afraid of being confined here. With me. You were afraid I would hold you back. Or, take Thalia. She stayed because she didn’t want to be stared at anymore.”

I watch her taste her coffee, pour in another spoonful of sugar. I remember how out of my depth I’d always felt as a boy trying to argue with her. She spoke in a way that left no room for retort, steamrolling over me with the truth, told right at the outset, plainly, directly. I was always defeated before I’d so much as said a word. It always seemed unfair.

“What about you, Mamá?” I ask. “What are you scared of? What don’t you want?”

“To be a burden.” “You won’t be.”

“Oh, you’re right about that, Markos.” Disquiet spreads through me at this

cryptic remark. My mind flashes to the letter Nabi had given me in Kabul, his posthumous confession. The pact Suleiman Wahdati had

made with him. I can’t help but wonder if Mamá has forged a similar pact with Thalia, if she has chosen Thalia to rescue her when the time comes. I know Thalia could do it. She is strong now. She would save Mamá.

Mamá is studying my face. “You have your life and your work, Markos,” she says, more softly now, redirecting the course of the conversation, as if she has peeked into my mind, spotted my worry. The dentures, the diapers, the fuzzy slippers—they have made me underestimate her. She still has the upper hand. She always will. “I don’t want to weigh you down.”

At last, a lie—this last thing she says—but it’s a kind lie. It isn’t me she would weigh down. She knows this as well as I do. I am absent, thousands of miles away. The unpleasantness, the work, the drudgery, it would fall on Thalia. But Mamá is including me, granting me something I have not earned, nor tried to.

“It wouldn’t be like that,” I say weakly. Mamá smiles. “Speaking of your work, I

guess you know that I didn’t exactly approve when you decided to go to that country.”

“I had my suspicions, yes.”

“I didn’t understand why you would go. Why would you give everything up—the practice, the money, the house in Athens—all you’d worked for—and hole up in that violent place?”

“I had my reasons.”

“I know.” She raises the cup to her lips, lowers it without sipping. “I’m no damn good at this,” she says slowly, almost shyly, “but what I’m getting around to telling you is, you’ve turned out good. You’ve made me proud, Markos.”

I look down at my hands. I feel her words landing deep within me. She has startled me. Caught me unprepared. For what she said. Or for the soft light in her eyes when she said

it. I am at a loss as to what I am expected to say in response.

“Thank you, Mamá,” I manage to mutter. I can’t say any more, and we sit quietly for

a while, the air between us thick with awkwardness and our awareness of all the time lost, the opportunities frittered away.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Mamá says.

“What is it?”

“James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?”

I blink and my mother blinks back, and then she is laughing and so am I. Even as I crumple inside.