Page 75 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

down the sidewalk toward the car. I opened the rear passenger door and, as she

slid in, I smelled on her, underneath her own familiar perfume, a second scent,
something faintly like cedarwood and perhaps a trace of ginger, an aroma I
recognized from having breathed it at the party two nights before.
“I didn’t find one I liked,” Nila said from the backseat as she applied a fresh
coat of lipstick.
She caught my puzzled face in the rearview mirror. She lowered the lipstick
and gazed at me from under her lashes. “You took me to two different stores but
I couldn’t find a purse to my liking.”
Her eyes locked onto mine in the mirror and lingered there awhile, waiting,

and I understood that I had been made privy to a secret. She was putting my
allegiance to the test. She was asking me to choose.
“I think maybe you visited three stores,” I said weakly.
She grinned. “Parfois je pense que tu es mon seul ami, Nabi.”
I blinked.

“It means ‘Sometimes I think you are my only friend.’ ”
She smiled radiantly at me, but it could not lift my sagging spirits.
The rest of that day, I set about my chores at half my normal speed and with a
fraction of my customary enthusiasm. When the men came over for tea that
night, one of them sang for us, but his song failed to cheer me. I felt as though I
had been the one cuckolded. And I was sure that the hold she had on me had
loosened at last.

But in the morning I rose and there it was, filling my living quarters once
more, from floor to ceiling, seeping into the walls, saturating the air I breathed,
like vapor. It was no use, Mr. Markos.

I cannot tell you when, precisely, the idea took hold. Perhaps it was
the windy autumn morning I was serving tea to Nila, when I had stooped and
was cutting for her a slice of roat cake, that from the radio sitting on her
windowsill came a report that the coming winter of 1952 might prove even more
brutal than the previous one. Perhaps it was earlier, the day I took her to the
house with the bright pink walls, or perhaps earlier still, the time I held her hand
in the car as she sobbed.
Whatever the timing, once the idea entered my head there was no purging it.