Page 208 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

of it when she arrived from Paris. She had last seen the house back in 1955 and

seemed quite surprised at the vividness of her own memory of the place, its
general layout, the two steps between the living room and dining room, for
instance, where she said she would sit in a band of sunlight midmornings and
read her books. She was struck by how much smaller the house really was
compared to the version of it in her memory. When I took her upstairs, she knew
which had been her bedroom, though it’s currently taken up by a German
colleague of mine who works for the World Food Program. I remember her
breath catching when she spotted the short little armoire in the corner of the
bedroom—one of the few surviving relics of her childhood. I remembered it
from the note that Nabi had left me prior to his death. She squatted next to it and
ran her fingertips over the chipped yellow paint and over the fading giraffes and
long-tailed monkeys on its doors. When she looked up at me, I saw that her eyes
had teared a little, and she asked, very shyly and apologetically, if it would be
possible to have it shipped to Paris. She offered to pay for a replacement. It was
the only thing she wanted from the house. I told her it would be my pleasure to
do it.

In the end, other than the armoire, which I had shipped a few days after her
departure, Pari Wahdati returned to France with nothing but Suleiman Wahdati’s
sketch pads, Nabi’s letter, and a few of her mother Nila’s poems, which Nabi
had saved. The only other thing she asked of me during her stay was to arrange a
ride to take her to Shadbagh so she could see the village where she had been
born and where she hoped to find her half brother, Iqbal.
“I assume she’ll sell the house,” Mamá says, “now that it’s hers.”

“She said I could stay on as long as I liked, actually,” I say. “Rent-free.”
I can all but see Mamá’s lips tighten skeptically. She’s an islander. She
suspects the motives of all mainlanders, looks askance at their apparent acts of
goodwill. This was one of the reasons I knew, when I was a boy, that I would
leave Tinos one day when I had the chance. A kind of despair used to get hold of
me whenever I heard people talking this way.
“How is the dovecote coming along?” I ask to change the subject.

“I had to give it a rest. It tired me out.”
Mamá was diagnosed in Athens six months ago by a neurologist I had
insisted she see after Thalia told me Mamá was twitching and dropping things all
the time. It was Thalia who took her. Since the trip to the neurologist, Mamá has
been on a tear. I know this through the e-mails Thalia sends me. Repainting the
house, fixing water leaks, coaxing Thalia into helping her build a whole new
closet upstairs, even replacing cracked shingles on the roof, though thankfully