Page 237 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Many years later, when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood

something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos
for the boarding school. I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that
it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked
by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients
knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged
on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin
length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal
angle or not.
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
And so I chose my specialty to even out the odds for people like Thalia, to
rectify, with each slice of my scalpel, an arbitrary injustice, to make a small

stand against a world order I found disgraceful, one in which a dog bite could
rob a little girl of her future, make her an outcast, an object of scorn.
At least this is what I tell myself. I suppose there were other reasons I chose
plastic surgery. Money, for instance, prestige, social standing. To say I chose it
solely because of Thalia is too simple—lovely as the idea may be—a bit too
orderly and balanced. If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human
behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient
symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my
life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges
and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this

story.
I spent half of my practice in Athens, erasing wrinkles, lifting eyebrows,
stretching jowls, reshaping misbegotten noses. I spent the other half doing what I
really wanted to, which was to fly around the world—to Central America, to
sub-Saharan Africa, to South Asia, and to the Far East—and work on children,
repairing cleft lips and palates, removing facial tumors, repairing injuries to their
faces. The work in Athens was not nearly as gratifying, but the pay was good,
and it afforded me the luxury of taking weeks and months off at a time for my
volunteer work.
Then, early in 2002, I took a phone call in my office from a woman I knew.
Her name was Amra Ademovic. She was a nurse from Bosnia. She and I had

met at a conference in London a few years back and had had a pleasant,
weekend-long thing that we’d mutually kept inconsequential, though we had
remained in touch and seen each other socially on occasion. She said she was
working for a nonprofit in Kabul now and that they were searching for a plastic
surgeon to work on children—cleft lips, facial injuries inflicted by shrapnel and