Page 228 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Athens library, looking down at a medical school application. In between

Manaar and the application are the two weeks I spent in Damascus, of which I
have virtually no memory other than the grinning faces of two women with
heavily lined eyes and a gold tooth each. Or the three months in Cairo in the
basement of a ramshackle tenement run by a hashish-addicted landlord. I spend
Thalia’s money riding buses in Iceland, tagging along with a punk band in
Munich. In 1977, I break an elbow at an antinuclear protest in Bilbao.
But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed
of a truck, my mind always circles back to Manaar. Thinking of him, of the
anguish of his final days, and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes
everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the
little vows you make yourself as you’re going to sleep, the ones you’ve already
forgotten by the time you wake up.

One hundred nineteen … one hundred twenty.
I drop the shutter.

One night at the end of that summer, I learned that Madaline was
leaving for Athens and leaving Thalia with us, at least for a short while.
“Just for a few weeks,” she said.
We were having dinner, the four of us, a dish of white bean soup that Mamá
and Madaline had prepared together. I glanced across the table at Thalia to see if
I was the only one on whom Madaline had sprung the news. It appeared I was.
Thalia was calmly feeding spoonfuls into her mouth, lifting her mask just a bit
with each trip of the spoon. By then, her speech and eating didn’t bother me

anymore, or at least no more than watching an old person eat through ill-fitting
dentures, like Mamá would years later.
Madaline said she would send for Thalia after she had shot her film, which
she said should wrap well before Christmas.
“Actually, I will bring you all to Athens,” she said, her face rinsed with the
customary cheer. “And we will go to the opening together! Wouldn’t that be
marvelous, Markos? The four of us, dressed up, waltzing into the theater in

style?”
I said it would be, though I had trouble picturing Mamá in a fancy gown or
waltzing into anything.
Madaline explained how it would work out just fine, how Thalia could