Page 225 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

the time I reach the campsite. I search all over, kicking bushes, looking between

rocks, dread building as I rummage in vain. Then, just as I try to resign myself to
the worst, I spot a flash of white in a batch of shrubs up a shallow slope. I find
the photo wedged between a tangle of brambles. I pluck it free, beat dust from it,
my eyes brimming with tears of relief.
Twenty-three … twenty-four … twenty-five …
In Caracas I sleep under a bridge. A youth hostel in Brussels. Sometimes I
splurge and rent a room in a nice hotel, take long hot showers, shave, eat meals
in a bathrobe. I watch color TV. The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people
I meet—they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But
more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to
me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has

been leading up to.
Thirty-four … thirty-five … thirty-six …
My fourth day in India. I totter down a dirt road among stray cattle, the world
tilting under my feet. I have been vomiting all day. My skin is the yellow of a
sari, and it feels like invisible hands are peeling it raw. When I can’t walk
anymore, I lie down on the side of the road. An old man across the road stirs
something in a big steel pot. Beside him is a cage, inside the cage a blue-and-red
parrot. A dark-skinned vendor pushing a cartful of empty green bottles passes

me by. That’s the last thing I remember.
Forty-one … forty-two …
I wake up in a big room. The air is thick with heat and something like rotting
cantaloupe. I am lying on a twin-sized steel-frame bed, cushioned from the hard,
springless platform by a mattress no thicker than a paperback book. The room is
filled with beds like mine. I see emaciated arms dangling over the sides, dark
matchstick legs protruding from stained sheets, scant-toothed mouths open. Idle
ceiling fans. Walls marked by patches of mold. The window beside me lets in
hot, sticky air and sunlight that stabs the eyeballs. The nurse—a burly, glowering
Muslim man named Gul—tells me I may die of hepatitis.

Fifty-five … fifty-six … fifty-seven …
I ask for my backpack. What backpack? Gul says with indifference. All my
things are gone—my clothes, my cash, my books, my camera. That’s all the thief
left you, Gul says in his rolling English, pointing to the windowsill beside me.
It’s the picture. I pick it up. Thalia, her hair flapping in the breeze, the water
bubbling with froth around her, her bare feet on the rocks, the leaping Aegean
flung out before her. A lump rises to my throat. I don’t want to die here, among
these strangers, so far away from her. I tuck the photo in the wedge between the