Page 235 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

One morning in 2002, more than thirty years later, around the time I
am preparing to move from Athens to Kabul, I stumble upon Madaline’s
obituary in the newspaper. Her last name is listed now as Kouris, but I recognize
in the old woman’s face a familiar bright-eyed grin, and more than detritus of
her youthful beauty. The small paragraph below says that she had briefly been an
actress in her youth prior to founding her own theater company in the early
1980s. Her company had received critical praise for several productions, most
notably for extended runs of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in
the mid-1990s, Chekhov’s The Seagull, and Dimitrios Mpogris’s Engagements.
The obituary says she was well known among Athens’s artistic community for
her charity work, her wit, her sense of style, her lavish parties, and her

willingness to take chances on unheralded playwrights. The piece says she died
after a lengthy battle with emphysema but makes no mention of a surviving
spouse or children. I am further stunned to learn that she lived in Athens for
more than two decades, at a house barely six blocks from my own place on
Kolonaki.
I put down the paper. To my surprise, I feel a tinge of impatience with this
dead woman I have not seen for over thirty years. A surge of resistance to this
story of how she had turned out. I had always pictured her living a tumultuous,
wayward life, hard years of bad luck—fits and starts, collapse, regret—and ill-
advised, desperate love affairs. I had always imagined that she’d self-destructed,
likely drank herself to the kind of early death that people always call tragic. Part
of me had even credited her with the possibility that she had known this, that she
had brought Thalia to Tinos to spare her, rescue her from the disasters Madaline

knew she was helpless from visiting upon her daughter. But now I picture
Madaline the way Mamá always must have: Madaline, the cartographer, sitting
down, calmly drawing the map of her future and neatly excluding her
burdensome daughter from its borders. And she’d succeeded spectacularly, at
least according to this obituary and its clipped account of a mannered life, a life
rich with achievement, grace, respect.
I find I cannot accept it. The success, the getting away with it. It is
preposterous. Where was the toll, the exacting comeuppance?

And yet, as I fold the newspaper, a nagging doubt begins to set in. A faint
intimation that I have judged Madaline harshly, that we weren’t even that
different, she and I. Hadn’t we both yearned for escape, reinvention, new
identities? Hadn’t we each, in the end, unmoored ourselves by cutting loose the
anchors that weighed us down? I scoff at this, tell myself we are nothing alike,