Page 82 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

eyeliner. She had been in Mr. Wahdati’s room saying her good-byes.

I asked her how he was.
“Relieved, I think,” she said, then added, “although that may be my wishful
thinking.” She closed the zipper to her purse and slung the strap over her
shoulder.
“Don’t tell anyone where I’m going. It would be for the best.”
I promised her I would not.

She told me she would write soon. She then looked me long in the eyes, and I
believe I saw genuine affection there. She touched my face with the palm of her
hand.
“I’m happy, Nabi, that you’re with him.”
Then she pulled close and embraced me, her cheek against mine. My nose

filled with the scent of her hair, her perfume.
“It was you, Nabi,” she said in my ear. “It was always you. Didn’t you
know?”
I didn’t understand. And she broke from me before I could ask. Head
lowered, boot heels clicking against the asphalt, she hurried down the driveway.
She slid into the backseat of the taxi next to Pari, looked my way once, and
pressed her palm against the glass. Her palm, white against the window, was the
last I saw of her as the car pulled away from the driveway.

I watched her go, and waited for the car to turn at the end of the street before I
pulled the gates shut. Then I leaned against them and wept like a child.

Despite Mr. Wahdati’s wishes, a few visitors still trickled in, at least
for a short while longer. Eventually, it was only his mother who turned up to see
him. She came once a week or so. She would snap her fingers at me and I would
pull up a chair for her, and no sooner had she plopped down next to her son’s
bed than she would launch into a soliloquy of assaults on the character of his
now departed wife. She was a harlot. A liar. A drunk. A coward who had run to
God knows where when her husband needed her most. This, Mr. Wahdati would
bear in silence, looking impassively past her shoulder at the window. Then came
an interminable stream of news and updates, much of it almost physically
painful in its banality. A cousin who had argued with her sister because her sister
had had the gall to buy the same exact coffee table as she. Who had got a flat tire
on the way home from Paghman last Friday. Who had got a new haircut. On and