Page 201 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Eight

Fall 2010

This evening, I come home from the clinic and find a message from Thalia on
the landline phone in my bedroom. I play it as I slip off my shoes and sit at my
desk. She tells me she has a cold, one she is sure she picked up from Mamá, then

she asks after me, asks how work is going in Kabul. At the end, just before she
hangs up, she says, Odie goes on and on about how you don’t call. Of course she
won’t tell you. So I will. Markos. For the love of Christ. Call your mother. You
ass.
I smile.
Thalia.
I keep a picture of her on my desk, the one I took all those years ago at the
beach on Tinos—Thalia sitting on a rock with her back to the camera. I have
framed the photo, though if you look closely you can still see a patch of dark

brown at the left lower corner courtesy of a crazed Italian girl who tried to set
fire to it many years ago.
I turn on my laptop and start typing up the previous day’s op notes. My room
is upstairs—one of three bedrooms on the second floor of this house where I
have lived since my arrival in Kabul back in 2002—and my desk sits at the
window overlooking the garden below. I have a view of the loquat trees my old
landlord, Nabi, and I planted a few years ago. I can see Nabi’s onetime quarters
along the back wall too, now repainted. After he passed away, I offered them to
a young Dutch fellow who helps local high schools with their IT. And, off to the
right, there is Suleiman Wahdati’s 1940s Chevrolet, unmoved for decades,

shrouded in rust like a rock by moss, currently covered by a light film of
yesterday’s surprisingly early snowfall, the first of the year thus far. After Nabi
died, I thought briefly of having the car hauled to one of Kabul’s junkyards, but I
didn’t have the heart. It seemed to me too essential a part of the house’s past, its
history.
I finish the notes and check my watch. It’s already 9:30 P.M. Seven o’clock
in the evening back in Greece.
Call your mother. You ass.

If I am going to call Mamá tonight, I can’t delay it any longer. I remember