Page 221 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

cheating husbands. How many times have I used it myself at hospitals here in

Kabul? How many times have I guided entire families into a quiet room, asked
them to sit, pulled a chair up for myself, gathering the will to give them news,
dreading the coming conversation?
“She’s talking about Andreas,” Thalia said evenly. “I bet she is. They had a
big fight. Pass me the tape and those scissors.”
“What is he like? Besides being rich, I mean?”
“Who, Andreas? He’s all right. He travels a lot. When he’s home, he always
has people over. Important people—ministers, generals, that kind. They have
drinks by the fireplace and they talk all night, mostly business and politics. I can

hear them from my room. I’m supposed to stay upstairs when Andreas has
company. I’m not supposed to come down. But he buys me things. He pays for a
tutor to come to the house. And he speaks to me nicely enough.”
She taped a rectangular piece of cardboard, which we’d also colored black,
over the pinhole.
Things were quiet downstairs. I choreographed the scene in my head.
Madaline weeping without a sound, absently fiddling with a handkerchief like it

was a clump of Play-Doh, Mamá not much help, looking on stiffly with a pinch-
faced little smile like she’s got something sour melting under her tongue. Mamá
can’t stand it when people cry in her presence. She can barely look at their puffy
eyes, their open, pleading faces. She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish
appeal for attention, and she won’t indulge it. She can’t bring herself to console.
Growing up, I learned that it was not one of her strong suits. Sorrow ought to be
private, she thinks, not flaunted. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d
cried when my father had fallen to his death.
At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
No, I did not.

Because you weren’t sad?
Because it was nobody’s business if I was.
Would you cry if I died, Mamá?

Let’s hope we never have to find out, she said.
Thalia picked up the box of photographic paper and said, “Get the flashlight.”
We moved into Mamá’s closet, taking care to shut the door and snuff out
daylight with towels we stuffed under it. Once we were in pitch-darkness, Thalia
asked me to turn on the flashlight, which we had covered with several layers of
red cellophane. All I could see of Thalia in the dim glow was her slender fingers
as she cut a sheet of photographic paper and taped it to the inside of the shoe box
opposite the pinhole. We had bought the paper from Mr. Roussos’s shop the day