Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

“I really owe you.”

“Hey, I really like the new painting, girl. The one with the kid in the funny hat? Abe here showed it to me. He was all proud too. I was, like, damn! You should be proud, man.” I smile as I shift lanes to let a tailgater pass. “Maybe I know what to give you for

Christmas now.”

“Remind me again why we can’t get married?” Hector says. I hear Baba protesting in the background and Hector’s laugh, away from the receiver. “I’m joking, Abe. Go easy on me. I’m a cripple.” Then, to me, “I think your father just flashed me his inner Pashtun.”

I remind him to give Baba his late-morn- ing pills and hang up.

…

It’s like seeing the photo of a radio personality, how they never turn out to look the way you had pictured them in your mind, listening to their voice in your car. She is old, for one thing. Or oldish. Of course I knew this. I had done the math and estimated she had to be around her early sixties. Except it is hard to reconcile this slim grayhaired woman with the little girl I’ve always envisioned, a three-year-old with dark curly hair and long eyebrows that almost meet, like mine. And she is taller than I imagined. I can tell, even though she is sitting, on a bench near a sandwich kiosk, looking around timidly like she’s lost. She has narrow shoulders and a delicate build, a pleasant face, her hair pulled back taut and held with a crocheted headband. She wears jade earrings, faded jeans, a long salmon tunic sweater, and a yellow scarf wrapped around

her neck with casual European elegance. She had told me in her last e-mail that she would wear the scarf so I could spot her quickly.

She has not seen me yet, and I linger for a moment among the travelers pushing luggage carts through the terminal, the towncar chauffeurs holding signs with clients’ names. My heart clamoring inside my rib cage, I think to myself, This is her. This is her. This is really her. Then our eyes connect, and recognition ripples across her face. She waves.

We meet at the bench. She grins and my knees wobble. She has Baba’s grin ex- actly—except for a rice grain’s gap between her upper front teeth—crooked on the left, the way it scrunches up her face and nearly squeezes shut her eyes, how she tilts her head just a tad. She stands up, and I notice the hands, the knobby joints, the fingers bent away from the thumb at the first knuckle, the

chickpea-sized lumps at the wrist. I feel a twist in my stomach, it looks so painful.

We hug, and she kisses me on the cheeks. Her skin is soft like felt. When we pull back, she holds me at a distance, hands cupping my shoulders, and looks into my face as if she were appraising a painting. There is a film of moisture over her eyes. They’re alive with happiness.

“I apologize for being late.”

“It’s nothing,” she says. “At last, to be with you! I am just so glad”—Is nussing. At lass, too be weez yoo! The French accent sounds even thicker in person than it did on the phone.

“I’m glad too,” I say. “How was your flight?”

“I took a pill, otherwise I know I cannot sleep. I will stay awake the whole time. Because I am too happy and too excited.” She holds me with her gaze, beaming at me—as if she is afraid the spell will break if she looks

away—until the PA overhead advises passengers to report any unsupervised luggage, and then her face slackens a bit.

“Does Abdullah know yet that I am coming here?”

“I told him I was bringing home a guest,” I say.

Later, as we settle into the car, I steal quick looks at her. It’s the strangest thing. There is something oddly illusory about Pari Wahdati, sitting in my car, mere inches from me. One moment, I see her with perfect clar- ity—the yellow scarf around her neck, the short, flimsy hairs at the hairline, the coffeecolored mole beneath the left ear—and, the next, her features are enfolded in a kind of haze, as if I am peering at her through bleary glasses. I feel, in passing, a kind of vertigo.

“You are okay?” she says, eyeing me as she snaps the seat-belt buckle.

“I keep thinking you’ll disappear.” “I’m sorry?”

“It’s just … a little unbelievable,” I say, laughing nervously. “That you really exist. That you’re actually here.”

She nods, smiling. “Ah, for me too. For me too it is strange. You know, my whole life I never meet anyone with the same name as me.”

“Neither have I.” I turn the ignition key. “So tell me about your children.”

As I pull out of the parking lot, she tells me all about them, using their names as though I had known them all my life, as though her children and I had grown up together, gone on family picnics and to camp and taken summer vacations to seaside resorts where we had made seashell necklaces and buried one another under sand.

I do wish we had.

She tells me her son Alain—“and your cousin,” she adds—and his wife, Ana, have had a fifth baby, a little girl, and they have moved to Valencia, where they have bought a

house. “Finalement, they leave that detestable apartment in Madrid!” Her firstborn, Isabelle, who writes musical scores for television, has been commissioned to compose her first major film score. And Isabelle’s husband, Albert, is now head chef at a well-re- garded restaurant in Paris.

“You owned a restaurant, no?” she asks. “I think you told me this in your e-mail.”

“Well, my parents did. It was always my father’s dream to own a restaurant. I helped them run it. But I had to sell it a few years back. After my mother died and Baba became … incapable.”

“Ah, I am sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be. I wasn’t cut out for restaurant work.”

“I should think not. You are an artist.”

I had told her, in passing the first time we spoke and she asked me what I did, that I had dreams of going to art school one day.

“Actually, I am what you call a transcriptionist.”

She listens intently as I explain to her that I work for a firm that processes data for big Fortune 500 companies. “I write up forms for them. Brochures, receipts, customer lists, e-mail lists, that sort of thing. The main thing you need to know is how to type. And the pay is decent.”

“I see,” she says. She considers, then says, “Is it interesting for you, doing this work?”

We are passing by Redwood City on our way south. I reach across her lap and point out the passenger window. “Do you see that building? The tall one with the blue sign?”

“Yes?”

“I was born there.”

“Ah, bon?” She turns her neck to keep looking as I drive us past. “You are lucky.”

“How so?”

“To know where you came from.”

“I guess I never gave it much thought.”

“Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.”

I imagine this is how Baba feels these days. His life, riddled with gaps. Every day a mystifying story, a puzzle to struggle through.

We drive in silence for a couple of miles. “Do I find my work interesting?” I say. “I

came home one day and found the water running in the kitchen sink. There was broken glass on the floor, and the gas burner had been left on. That was when I knew that I couldn’t leave him alone anymore. And because I couldn’t afford a live-in caretaker, I looked for work I could do from home. ‘Interesting’ didn’t figure much into the equation.”

“And art school can wait.”

“It has to.”

I worry she will say next how lucky Baba is to have me for a daughter, but, to my relief and gratitude, she only nods, her eyes swimming past the freeway signs. Other people, though—especially Afghans—are always pointing out how fortunate Baba is, what a blessing I am. They speak of me admiringly. They make me out to be a saint, the daughter who has heroically forgone some glittering life of ease and privilege to stay home and look after her father. But, first, the mother, they say, their voices ringing, I imagine, with a glistening kind of sympathy. All those years of nursing her. What a mess that was. Now the father. She was never a looker, sure, but she had a suitor. An American, he was, the solar fellow. She could have married him. But she didn’t. Because of them. The things she sacrificed. Ah, every parent should have a daughter like this. They compliment me on my good humor. They marvel