Page 207 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

my ear. Other times, I am telling her about something I saw at the clinic—some

bloodied boy carried by his father, for instance, shrapnel embedded deep in his
cheeks, ear torn clean off, another victim of playing on the wrong street at the
wrong time of the wrong day—and then, without warning, a loud clunk, and
Mamá’s voice suddenly distant and muffled, rising and falling, the echo of
footsteps, of something being dragged across the floor, and I clam up, wait until
she comes back on, which she does eventually, always a bit out of breath,
explaining, I told her I was fine standing up. I said it clearly. I said, “Thalia, I
would like to stand at the window and look down on the water as I’m talking to
Markos.” But she says, “You’ll tire yourself out, Odie, you need to sit.” Next
thing I know, she’s dragging the armchair—this big leather thing she bought me
last year—she’s dragging it to the window. My God, she’s strong. You haven’t
seen the armchair, of course. Well, of course. She then sighs with mock
exasperation and asks that I go on with my story, but by then I am too
unbalanced to. The net effect is that she has made me feel vaguely reprimanded
and, what’s more, deserving of it, guilty of wrongs unspoken, offenses I’ve
never been formally charged with. Even if I do go on with my story, it sounds

diminished to my own ears. It does not measure up to Mamá’s armchair drama
with Thalia.
“What was her name again?” Mamá says now. “Pari something, no?”
I have told Mamá about Nabi, who was a dear friend to me. She knows the
general outline of his life only. She knows that in his will he left the Kabul house
to his niece, Pari, who was raised in France. But I have not told Mamá about
Nila Wahdati, her escape to Paris after her husband’s stroke, the decades Nabi
spent caring for Suleiman. That history. Too many boomeranging parallels. Like

reading aloud your own indictment.
“Pari. Yes. She was nice,” I say. “And warm. Especially for an academic.”
“What is she again, a chemist?”
“Mathematician,” I say, closing the lid of the laptop. It has started snowing
again, lightly, tiny flakes twisting in the dark, flinging themselves at my
window.

I tell Mamá about Pari Wahdati’s visit late this past summer. She really was
quite lovely. Gentle, slim, gray hair, long neck with a full blue vein crawling up
each side, warm gap-toothed smile. She seemed a bit brittle, older than her age.
Bad rheumatoid arthritis. The knobby hands, especially, still functional, but the
day is coming and she knew it. It made me think of Mamá and the coming of her
day.
Pari Wahdati stayed a week with me at the house in Kabul. I gave her a tour