Page 210 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

I wished Madaline had come by herself. I liked Madaline just fine. We sat,

the four of us, in the small square-shaped courtyard outside our front door, and
she sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes one after the other, the angles of her
face shaded by our olive tree and a gold straw cloche that should have looked
absurd on her, would have on anyone else—like Mamá, for instance. But
Madaline was one of those people to whom elegance came effortlessly as though
it were a genetic skill, like the ability to curl your tongue into the shape of a
tube. With Madaline, there was never a lull in the conversation; stories just
trilled out of her. One morning she told us about her travels—to Ankara, for
instance, where she had strolled the banks of the Enguri Su and sipped green tea
laced with raki, or the time she and Mr. Gianakos had gone to Kenya and ridden
the backs of elephants among thorny acacias and even sat down to eat cornmeal
mush and coconut rice with the local villagers.
Madaline’s stories stirred up an old restlessness in me, an urge I’d always had
to strike out headlong into the world, to be dauntless. By comparison, my own

life on Tinos seemed crushingly ordinary. I foresaw my life unfolding as an
interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent most of my childhood years
on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my
real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more
hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home.
Madaline said that in Ankara she had gone to a place called Kuğulu Park and
watched swans gliding in the water. She said the water was dazzling.

“I’m rhapsodizing,” she said, laughing.
“You’re not,” Mamá said.
“It’s an old habit. I talk too much. I always did. You remember how much
grief I’d bring us, chattering in class? You were never at fault, Odie. You were
so responsible and studious.”
“They’re interesting, your stories. You have an interesting life.”

Madaline rolled her eyes. “Well, you know the Chinese curse.”
“Did you like Africa?” Mamá asked Thalia.
Thalia pressed the handkerchief to her cheek and didn’t answer. I was glad.
She had the oddest speech. There was a wet quality to it, a strange mix of lisp
and gargle.

“Oh, Thalia doesn’t like to travel,” Madaline said, crushing her cigarette. She
said this like it was the unassailable truth. There was no looking to Thalia for
confirmation or protest. “She hasn’t got a taste for it.”
“Well, neither do I,” Mamá said, again to Thalia. “I like being home. I guess
I’ve just never found a compelling reason to leave Tinos.”