Page 216 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

six months pregnant with me, he slipped off a cliff and fell a hundred feet.

Mamá said he’d forgotten to secure his safety harness.
“You should stop,” Thalia said.
I was tossing pebbles into an old galvanized-tin pail nearby and she startled
me. I missed. “What’s it to you?”
“I mean, flattering yourself. I don’t want this any more than you do.”
The wind was making her hair flap, and she was holding down the mask

against her face. I wondered if she lived with this fear daily, that a gust of wind
would rip it from her face and she would have to chase after it, exposed. I didn’t
say anything. I tossed another pebble and missed again.
“You’re an ass,” she said.
After a while she got up, and I pretended to stay. Then I looked over my
shoulder and saw her heading up the beach, back toward the road, and so I put
my shoes back on and followed her home.

When we returned, Mamá was mincing okra in the kitchen, and Madaline was
sitting nearby, doing her nails and smoking, tapping the ash into a saucer. I
cringed with some horror when I saw that the saucer belonged to the china set
Mamá had inherited from her grandmother. It was the only thing of any real
value that Mamá owned, the china set, and she hardly ever took it down from the
shelf up near the ceiling where she kept it.
Madaline was blowing on her nails in between drags and talking about
Pattakos, Papadopoulos, and Makarezos, the three colonels who had staged a
military coup—the Generals’ Coup, as it was known then—earlier that year in
Athens. She was saying she knew a playwright—a “dear, dear man,” as she
described him—who had been imprisoned under the charge of being a

communist subversive.
“Which is absurd, of course! Just absurd. You know what they do to people,
the ESA, to make them talk?” She was saying this in a low voice as if the
military police were hiding somewhere in the house. “They put a hose in your
behind and turn on the water full blast. It’s true, Odie. I swear to you. They soak
rags in the filthiest things—human filth, you understand—and shove them in
people’s mouths.”
“That’s awful,” Mamá said flatly.

I wondered if she was already tiring of Madaline. The stream of puffed-up
political opinions, the tales of parties Madaline had attended with her husband,
the poets and intellectuals and musicians she’d clinked champagne flutes with,
the list of needless, senseless trips she had taken to foreign cities. Trotting out
her views on nuclear disaster and overpopulation and pollution. Mamá indulged