Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

Pari nods. “Yes. When we get married, I thought, Oh, we will have a long time together. I thought to myself, Thirty years at least, maybe forty. Fifty, if we are lucky. Why not?” She stares at the picture, lost for a moment, then smiles lightly. “But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.” She pushes the album away and sips her coffee. “And you? You never get married?”

I shrug and flip another page. “There was one close call.”

“I am sorry, ‘close call’?”

“It means I almost did. But we never made it to the ring stage.”

This is not true. It was painful and messy. Even now, the memory of it is like a soft ache behind my breastbone.

She ducks her head. “I am sorry. I am very rude.”

“No. It’s fine. He found someone both more beautiful and less … encumbered, I guess. Speaking of beautiful, who is this?”

I point to a striking-looking woman with long dark hair and big eyes. In the picture, she is holding a cigarette like she is bored—elbow tucked into her side, head tilted up insouciantly—but her gaze is penetrating, defiant.

“This is Maman. My mother, Nila Wahdati. Or, I thought she was my mother. You understand.”

“She’s gorgeous,” I say.

“She was. She committed suicide. Nineteen seventy-four.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Non, non. It’s all right.” She brushes the picture absently with the side of her thumb. “Maman was elegant and talented. She read books and had many strong opinions and always she was telling them to people. But she had also very deep sadness. All my life, she

gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.”

I nod. I think I understand something of that.

“But I could not. And later, I did not want to. I did careless things. Reckless things.” She sits back in the chair, her shoulders slumping, puts her thin white hands in her lap. She considers for a minute before saying, “J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.” For a moment, her face looks stricken. She is like a helpless schoolgirl. “It would not have been so difficult,” she says tiredly. “I should have been more kind. I should have been more like you.”

She lets out a heavy breath and folds the photo album shut. After a pause, she says

brightly, “Ah, bon. Now I wish to ask something of you.”

“Of course.”

“Will you show me some of your paintings?”

We smile at each other.

Pari stays a month with Baba and me. In the mornings, we take breakfast together in the kitchen. Black coffee and toast for Pari, yogurt for me, and fried eggs with bread for Baba, something he has found a taste for in the last year. I worried it was going to raise his cholesterol, eating all those eggs, and I asked Dr. Bashiri during one of Baba’s appointments. Dr. Bashiri gave me one of his tight-lipped smiles and said, Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it. And that reassured me—at least until a bit later when I was

helping Baba buckle his seat belt and it occurred to me that maybe what Dr. Bashiri had really meant was, We’re past all that now.

After breakfast, I retreat into my of- fice—otherwise known as my bedroom—and Pari keeps Baba company while I work. At her request, I have written down for her the schedule of the TV shows he likes to watch, what time to give him his midmorning pills, which snacks he likes and when he’s apt to ask for them. It was her idea I write it all down.

You could just pop in and ask, I said.

I don’t want to disturb you, she said. And I want to know. I want to know him.

I don’t tell her that she will never know him the way she longs to. Still, I share with her a few tricks of the trade. For instance, how if Baba starts to get agitated I can usually, though not always, calm him down—for reasons that baffle me still—by quickly

handing him a free home-shopping catalog or a furniture-sale flyer. I keep a steady supply of both.

If you want him to nap, flip on the Weather Channel or anything to do with golf. And never let him watch cooking shows.

Why not?

They agitate him for some reason.

After lunch, the three of us go out for a stroll. We keep it short for both their sakes—what with Baba tiring quickly and Pari’s arthritis. Baba has a wariness in his eyes, tottering anxiously along the sidewalk between Pari and me, wearing an old newsboy cap, his cardigan sweater, and woollined moccasins. There is a middle school around the block with an ill-manicured soccer field and, across that, a small playground where I often take Baba. We always find a young mother or two, strollers parked near them, a toddler stumbling around in the sandbox, now and then a teenage couple

cutting school, swinging lazily and smoking. They rarely look at Baba—the teen- agers—and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.

One day, I pause during dictation and go to the kitchen to refresh my coffee and I find the two of them watching a movie together. Baba on the recliner, his moccasins sticking out from under the shawl, his head bent forward, mouth gaping slightly, eyebrows drawn together in either concentration or confusion. And Pari sitting beside him, hands folded in her lap, feet crossed at the ankles.

“Who’s this one?” Baba says. “That is Latika.”

“Who?”

“Latika, the little girl from the slums. The one who could not jump on the train.”

“She doesn’t look little.”

“Yes, but a lot of years have passed,” Pari says. “She is older now, you see.”

One day the week before, at the playground, we were sitting on a park bench, the three of us, and Pari said, Abdullah, do you remember that when you were a boy you had a little sister?

She’d barely finished her sentence when Baba began to weep. Pari pressed his head into her chest, saying, I am sorry, I am so sorry, over and over in a panicky way, wiping his cheeks with her hands, but Baba kept seizing with sobs, so violently he started to choke.

“And do you know who this is, Abdullah?” Baba grunts.

“He is Jamal. The boy from the game show.”

“He is not,” Baba says roughly. “You don’t think?”

“He’s serving tea!”

“Yes, but that was—what do you call it?—it was from the past. From before. It was a …”

Flashback, I mouth into my coffee cup. “The game show is now, Abdullah. And

when he was serving tea, that was before.” Baba blinks vacantly. On the screen, Jamal

and Salim are sitting atop a Mumbai highrise, their feet dangling over the side.

Pari watches him as though waiting for a moment when something will open in his eyes. “Let me ask you something, Abdullah,” she says. “If one day you win a million dollars, what would you do?”

Baba grimaces, shifting his weight, then stretches out farther in the recliner.

“I know what I would do,” Pari says. Baba looks at her blankly.

“If I win a million dollars, I buy a house on this street. That way, we can be neighbors, you and me, and every day I come here and we watch TV together.”

Baba grins.

But it’s only minutes later, when I am back in my room wearing earphones and typing, that I hear a loud shattering sound and Baba screaming something in Farsi. I rip the earphones off and rush to the kitchen. I see Pari backed up against the wall where the microwave is, hands bunched protectively under her chin, and Baba, wild-eyed, jabbing her in the shoulder with his cane. Broken shards of a drinking glass glitter at their feet.

“Get her out of here!” Baba cries when he sees me. “I want this woman out of my house!”

“Baba!”

Pari’s cheeks have gone pale. Tears spring from her eyes.

“Put down the cane, Baba, for God’s sake! And don’t take a step. You’ll cut your feet.”

I wrestle the cane from his hand but not before he gives me a good fight for it.

“I want this woman gone! She’s a thief!” “What is he saying?” Pari says miserably.