Page 206 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

scene like a photograph, frozen. Madaline smoking, standing at the bedroom

window, looking at the sea through a set of teashade glasses with yellow lenses,
one hand on her hip, ankles crossed. Her pillbox hat sits on the dresser. Above
the dresser is a mirror and in the mirror is Thalia, sitting on the edge of the bed,
her back to me. She is stooped down, doing something, maybe undoing her
shoelaces, and I can see that she has removed her mask. It’s sitting next to her on
the bed. A thread of cold marches down my spine and I try to stop it, but my
hands tremble, which makes the porcelain cup clink on the saucer, which makes
Madaline turn her head from the window to me, which makes Thalia look up. I
catch her reflection in the mirror.
The tray slipped from my hands. Porcelain shattered. Hot liquid spilled and
the tray went clanking down the steps. It was sudden mayhem, me on all fours,
retching all over shards of broken porcelain, Madaline saying, “Oh dear. Oh
dear,” and Mamá running upstairs, yelling, “What happened? What did you do,
Markos?”

A dog bit her, Mamá had told me by way of a warning. She has a scar. The
dog hadn’t bitten Thalia’s face; it had eaten it. And perhaps there were words to
describe what I saw in the mirror that day, but scar wasn’t one of them.
I remember Mamá’s hands grabbing my shoulders, her pulling me up and
whirling me around, saying, “What is with you? What is wrong with you?” And
I remember her gaze lifting over my head. It froze there. The words died in her
mouth. She went blank in the face. Her hands dropped from my shoulders. And

then I witnessed the most extraordinary thing, something I thought I’d no sooner
see than King Constantine himself turning up at our door dressed in a clown suit:
a single tear, swelling at the edge of my mother’s right eye.

“So what was she like?” Mamá asks.

“Who?”
“Who? The French woman. Your landlord’s niece, the professor from Paris.”
I switch the receiver to my other ear. It surprises me that she remembers. All
my life, I have had the feeling that the words I say to Mamá vanish unheard in
space, as if there is static between us, a bad connection. Sometimes when I call
her from Kabul, as I have now, I feel as though she has quietly lowered the
receiver and stepped away, that I am speaking into a void across the continents

—though I can feel my mother’s presence on the line and hear her breathing in