Page 100 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

“Ah? It must be shocking for you, then. This hospital.”
“What happened to her?” Idris says. “To Roshi. Who did that to her?”
Amra’s face closes. When she speaks, it is with the pitch of maternal
determination. “I fight for her. I fight government, hospital bureaucracy, bastard
neurosurgeon. Every step, I fight for her. And I don’t stop. She has nobody.”
Idris says, “I thought there was an uncle.”

“He’s bastard too.” She flicks her cigarette ash. “So. Why you come here,
boys?”
Timur launches into it. The outline of what he says is more or less true. That
they are cousins, that their families fled after the Soviets rolled in, that they spent
a year in Pakistan before settling in California in the early eighties. That this is
the first time back for them both in twenty years. But then he adds that they have
come back to “reconnect,” to “educate” themselves, “bear witness” to the
aftermath of all these years of war and destruction. They want to go back to the
States, he says, to raise awareness, and funds, to “give back.”

“We want to give back,” he says, uttering the tired phrase so earnestly it
embarrasses Idris.
Of course Timur does not share the real reason they have come back to
Kabul: to reclaim the property that had belonged to their fathers, the house
where both he and Idris had lived for the first fourteen years of their lives. The
property’s worth is skyrocketing now that thousands of foreign-aid workers have
descended on Kabul and need a place to live. They were there earlier in the day,
at the house, which is currently home to a ragtag group of weary-looking
Northern Alliance soldiers. As they were leaving, they had met a middle-aged
man who lived three houses down and across the street, a Greek plastic surgeon

named Markos Varvaris. He had invited them to lunch and offered to give them
a tour of Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, where the NGO he worked for had an
office. He also invited them to a party that night. They had learned about the girl
only upon their arrival at the hospital—overhearing two orderlies talking about
her on the front steps—after which Timur had elbowed Idris and said, We should
check it out, bro.
Amra seems bored with Timur’s story. She flings her cigarette away and
tightens the rubber band that holds her curly blond hair in a bun. “So. I see you
boys at party tonight?”