Page 74 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

This was my favorite part, by far, of the evening. When she started, I always

found some task that would keep me nearby. There I would be, frozen in place,
towel in hand, straining to hear. Nila’s poems did not resemble any I had grown
up with. As you well know, we Afghans love our poetry; even the most
uneducated among us can recite verses of Hafez or Khayyám or Saadi. Do you
recall, Mr. Markos, telling me last year how much you loved Afghans? And I
asked you why, and you laughed and said, Because even your graffiti artists
spray Rumi on the walls.
But Nila’s poems defied tradition. They followed no preset meter or rhyming
pattern. Nor did they deal with the usual things, trees and spring flowers and
bulbul birds. Nila wrote about love, and by love I do not mean the Sufi yearnings
of Rumi or Hafez but instead physical love. She wrote about lovers whispering
across pillows, touching each other. She wrote about pleasure. I had never heard
language such as this spoken by a woman. I would stand there, listening to
Nila’s smoky voice drift down the hallway, my eyes closed and my ears burning

red, imagining she was reading to me, that we were the lovers in the poem, until
someone’s call for tea or fried eggs would break the spell, and then Nila would
call my name and I would run.
That night, the poem she chose to read caught me off guard. It was about a
man and his wife, in a village, mourning the death of the infant they had lost to
the winter cold. The guests seemed to love the poem, judging by the nods and
the murmurs of approval around the room, and by their hearty applause when
Nila looked up from the page. Still, I felt some surprise, and disappointment, that
my sister’s misfortune had been used to entertain guests, and I could not shake
the sense that some vague betrayal had been committed.

A couple of days after the party, Nila said she needed a new purse. Mr.
Wahdati was reading the newspaper at the table, where I had served him a lunch
of lentil soup and naan.
“Do you need anything, Suleiman?” Nila asked.
“No, aziz. Thank you,” he said. I rarely heard him address her by anything
other than aziz, which means “beloved,” “darling,” and yet never did the couple
seem more distant from each other than when he said it, and never did this term
of endearment sound so starched as when it came from Mr. Wahdati’s lips.

On the way to the store, Nila said she wanted to pick up a friend and gave me
directions to the home. I parked on the street and watched her walk up the block
to a two-story house with bright pink walls. At first, I left the engine running, but
when five minutes passed and Nila hadn’t returned I shut it off. It was a good
thing I did for it was not until two hours later that I saw her slim figure gliding