Page 238 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

bullets, that sort of thing. I agreed on the spot. I intended to stay for three

months. I went late in the spring of 2002. I never came back.

Thalia picks me up from the ferry port. She has on a green wool scarf
and a thick dull-rose-colored coat over a cardigan sweater and jeans. She wears
her hair long these days, loose over the shoulders and parted in the center. Her
hair is white, and it is this feature—not the mutilated lower face—that jars me
and takes me aback when I see her. Not that it surprises me; Thalia started going

gray in her mid-thirties and had cotton-white hair by the end of the following
decade. I know I have changed too, the stubbornly growing paunch, the just-as-
determined retreat of the hairline, but the decline of one’s own body is
incremental, as nearly imperceptible as it is insidious. Seeing Thalia white-
haired presents jolting evidence of her steady, inevitable march toward old age—
and, by association, my own.
“You’re going to be cold,” she says, tightening the scarf around her neck. It’s
January, late morning, the sky overcast and gray. A cool breeze makes the
shriveled-up leaves clatter in the trees.

“You want cold, come to Kabul,” I say. I pick up my suitcase.
“Suit yourself, Doctor. Bus or walk? Your choice.”
“Let’s walk,” I say.
We head north. We pass through Tinos town. The sailboats and yachts
moored in the inner harbor. The kiosks selling postcards and T-shirts. People
sipping coffee at little round tables outside cafés, reading newspapers, playing
chess. Waiters setting out silverware for lunch. Another hour or two and the

smell of cooking fish will waft from kitchens.
Thalia launches energetically into a story about a new set of whitewashed
bungalows that developers are building south of Tinos town, with views of
Mykonos and the Aegean. Primarily, they will be filled by either tourists or the
wealthy summer residents who have been coming to Tinos since the 1990s. She
says the bungalows will have an outdoor pool and a fitness center.
She has been e-mailing me for years, chronicling for me these changes that

are reshaping Tinos. The beachside hotels with the satellite dishes and dial-up
access, the nightclubs and bars and taverns, the restaurants and shops that cater
to tourists, the cabs, the buses, the crowds, the foreign women who lie topless at
the beaches. The farmers ride pickup trucks now instead of donkeys—at least the