Page 172 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

“Monsieur Varvaris, do you have it? This note, this letter, or the translation?

Do you have it with you?”
“I do.”
“Maybe you read it for me? Can you read it?”
“You mean now?”
“If you have the time. I can call you, to collect the charge.”

“No need, no. But are you sure?”
“Oui,” she says into the phone. “I’m sure, Monsieur Varvaris.”
He reads it to her. He reads her the whole thing. It takes a while. When he
finishes, she thanks him and tells him she will be in touch soon.

After she hangs up, she sets the coffeemaker to brew a cup and moves to her
window. From it, the familiar view presents itself to her—the narrow
cobblestone path below, the pharmacy up the block, the falafel joint at the
corner, the brasserie run by the Basque family.
Pari’s hands shake. A startling thing is happening to her. Something truly
remarkable. The picture of it in her mind is of an ax striking soil and suddenly
rich black oil bubbling up to the surface. This is what is happening to her,
memories struck upon, rising up from the depths. She gazes out the window in
the direction of the brasserie, but what she sees is not the skinny waiter beneath
the awning, black apron tied at the waist and shaking a cloth over a table, but a
little red wagon with a squeaky wheel bouncing along beneath a sky of unfurling
clouds, rolling over ridges and down dried-up gullies, up and down ocher hills
that loom and then fall away. She sees tangles of fruit trees standing in groves,

the breeze catching their leaves, and rows of grapevines connecting little flat-
roofed houses. She sees washing lines and women squatting by a stream, and the
creaking ropes of a swing beneath a big tree, and a big dog, cowering from the
taunts of village boys, and a hawk-nosed man digging a ditch, shirt plastered to
his back with sweat, and a veiled woman bent over a cooking fire.
But something else too at the edge of it all, at the rim of her vision—and this
is what draws her most—an elusive shadow. A figure. At once soft and hard.
The softness of a hand holding hers. The hardness of knees where she’d once
rested her cheek. She searches for his face, but it evades her, slips from her, each
time she turns to it. Pari feels a hole opening up in her. There has been in her

life, all her life, a great absence. Somehow, she has always known.
“Brother,” she says, unaware she is speaking. Unaware she is weeping.
A verse from a Farsi song suddenly tumbles to her tongue:

I know a sad little fairy