Page 114 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

around his waist, a tide of relief washing over her face. His visits are what she

looks forward to most, she has told him. Sometimes she clutches his hand with
both of hers as they watch a tape. When he is away from her, he thinks often of
the faint yellow hairs on her arms, her narrow hazel eyes, her pretty feet, her
rounded cheeks, the way she cups her chin in her hands as he reads her one of
the children’s books he has picked up from a bookstore near the French lycée. A
few times, he has allowed himself to fleetingly imagine what it would be like to
bring her to the U.S., how she would fit in with his boys, Zabi and Lemar, back
home. This last year, he and Nahil had talked about the possibility of a third
child.
“What now?” Amra says the day before he is scheduled to leave.
Earlier that day, Roshi had given Idris a picture, pencil-drawn on a sheet of

hospital chart paper, of two stick figures watching a television. He’d pointed to
the one with long hair. This is you?
And that one is you, Kaka Idris.
You had long hair, then? Before?
My sister brushed it every night. She knew how to do it so it didn’t hurt.

She must have been a good sister.
When it grows back, you can brush it.
I think I’d like that.
Don’t go, Kaka. Don’t leave.

“She is a sweet girl,” he says to Amra. And she is. Well-mannered, and
humble too. With some guilt, he thinks of Zabi and Lemar back in San Jose, who
have long professed their dislike of their Afghan names, who are fast turning
into little tyrants, into the imperious American children he and Nahil had vowed
they would never raise.
“She is survivor,” Amra says.
“Yes.”

Amra leans against the wall. A pair of orderlies rush past them, pushing a
gurney. On it lies a young boy with blood-soaked bandaging around his head and
some kind of open wound on his thigh.
“Other Afghans from America, or from Europe,” Amra says, “they come and
take picture of her. They take video. They make promises. Then they go home
and show their families. Like she is zoo animal. I allow it because I think maybe
they will help. But they forget. I never hear from them. So I ask again, what
now?”

“The operation she needs?” he says. “I want to make it happen.”