Page 92 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

No I didn’t.

But you did. On Monday you did!
Disagreements on how many games of chess we had played the day before.
Why did I always set his water on the windowsill, knowing the sun would warm
it?
Why didn’t you call for the bedpan, Suleiman?
I did, a hundred times I did!

Which are you calling me, deaf or lazy?
No need to pick, I’m calling you both!
You have some gall calling me lazy for someone who lies in bed all day.

On and on.
He would snap his head side to side when I tried to feed him. I would leave
him and give the door a good slam on my way out. Sometimes, I admit, I
willfully made him worry. I left the house. He would cry, Where are you going?
and I would not answer. I pretended I was leaving for good. Of course I would
merely go down the street somewhere and smoke—a new habit, the smoking,
acquired late in life—though I did it only when I was angry. Sometimes I stayed
out for hours. And if he had really roiled me up, I would stay out until dark. But
I always came back. I would enter his room without saying a word and I would
turn him over and fluff his pillow, both of us averting our eyes, both of us tight-
lipped, waiting for a peace offering from the other.

Eventually, the fighting ended with the arrival of the Taliban, those sharp-
faced young men with dark beards, kohl-rimmed eyes, and whips. Their cruelty
and excesses have also been well documented, and once again I see little reason
to enumerate them for you, Mr. Markos. I should say that their years in Kabul
were, ironically enough, a time of personal reprieve for me. They saved the bulk
of their contempt and zealotry for the young, especially the poor women. Me, I
was an old man. My main concession to their regime was to grow a beard,
which, frankly, spared me the meticulous task of a daily shave.
“It’s official, Nabi,” Suleiman breathed from the bed, “you’ve lost your looks.

You look like a prophet.”
On the streets, the Taliban walked past me as though I were a grazing cow. I
helped them in this by willfully taking on a muted bovine expression so as to
avoid any undue attention. I shudder to think what they would have made of—
and done to—Nila. Sometimes when I summoned her in my mind, laughing at a
party with a glass of champagne in hand, her bare arms, her long, slender legs, it
was as though I had made her up. As though she had never truly existed. As
though none of it had ever been real—not only she but I too, and Pari, and a