Page 94 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

“Not yet. I’m going to nurse you back. You’ll see. We’ll get through it like

we always have.”
You promised.
How long did I sit there by him? How long did I try to negotiate? I cannot tell
you, Mr. Markos. I do remember that I finally rose, walked around the side of
the bed, and lay down next to him. I rolled him over so he faced me. He felt light
as a dream. I placed a kiss on his dry, cracked lips. I put a pillow between his
face and my chest and reached for the back of his head. I held him against me in
a long, tight embrace.
All I remember after was the way the pupils of his eyes had spread out.

I walked over to the window and sat, Suleiman’s cup of tea still on the platter
at my feet. It was a sunny morning, I remember. Shops would open soon, if they
hadn’t already. Little boys heading off to school. The dust rising already. A dog
loped lazily up the street escorted by a dark cloud of mosquitoes swirling around
its head. I watched two young men ride past on a motorcycle. The passenger,
straddling the rear carrier pack, had hoisted a computer monitor on one shoulder,
a watermelon on the other.

I rested my forehead against the warm glass.

The note in Suleiman’s drawer was a will in which he had left me
everything. The house, his money, his personal belongings, even the car, though
it had long decayed. Its carcass still sat in the backyard on flat tires, a sagging
hulk of rusted-over metal.

For a time, I was quite literally at a loss as to what to do with myself. For
more than half a century I had looked after Suleiman. My daily existence had
been shaped by his needs, his companionship. Now I was free to do as I wished,
but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken
from me. They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is
only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely
one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and
adrift.

I found I could not sleep in the house any longer; I could hardly stay in it.
With Suleiman gone, it felt far too big. And every corner, every nook and
cranny, evoked ripe memories. So I moved back into my old shack at the far end
of the yard. I paid some workers to install electricity in the shack so that I would