Page 105 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

the brow. He has a closely cropped beard, and the sunken cheeks of the nearly

toothless. He is wearing a shabby, oversize olive-colored suit that may have been
in style back in the 1940s. Markos smiles at the old man with open affection.
“Nabi jan?” Timur exclaims, and suddenly Idris remembers too.
The old man grins back shyly. “Forgive me, have we met before?”
“I’m Timur Bashiri,” Timur says in Farsi. “My family used to live down the
street from you!”

“Oh great God,” the old man breathes. “Timur jan? And you must be Idris
jan?”
Idris nods, smiling back.
Nabi embraces them both. He kisses their cheeks, still grinning, and eyes
them with disbelief. Idris remembers Nabi pushing his employer, Mr. Wahdati,
in a wheelchair up and down the street. Sometimes he would park the chair on
the sidewalk, and the two men would watch him and Timur play soccer with the
neighborhood kids.

“Nabi jan has lived in this house since 1947,” Markos says, his arm around
Nabi’s shoulder.
“So you own this place now?” Timur says.
Nabi smiles at the look of surprise on Timur’s face. “I served Mr. Wahdati
here from 1947 until 2000, when he passed away. He was kind enough to will
the house to me, yes.”

“He gave it to you,” Timur says incredulously.
Nabi nods. “Yes.”
“You must have been one hell of a cook!”
“And you, if I may say, were a bit of a troublemaker, as I recall.”

Timur cackles. “Never did care for the straight and narrow, Nabi jan. I leave
that to my cousin here.”
Markos, swirling his glass of wine, says to Idris, “Nila Wahdati, the wife of
the previous owner, she was a poet. Of some small renown, as it turns out. Have
you heard of her?”
Idris shakes his head. “All I know is that she’d already left the country by the
time I was born.”

“She lived in Paris with her daughter,” one of the Germans, Thomas, says.
“She died in 1974. Suicide, I think. She had problems with alcohol, or, at least,
that is what I read. Someone gave me a German translation of one of her early
volumes a year or two ago and I thought it was quite good, actually. Surprisingly
sexual, as I recall.”