Page 255 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

vertigo.

“You are okay?” she says, eyeing me as she snaps the seat-belt buckle.
“I keep thinking you’ll disappear.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s just … a little unbelievable,” I say, laughing nervously. “That you really
exist. That you’re actually here.”

She nods, smiling. “Ah, for me too. For me too it is strange. You know, my
whole life I never meet anyone with the same name as me.”
“Neither have I.” I turn the ignition key. “So tell me about your children.”
As I pull out of the parking lot, she tells me all about them, using their names
as though I had known them all my life, as though her children and I had grown
up together, gone on family picnics and to camp and taken summer vacations to

seaside resorts where we had made seashell necklaces and buried one another
under sand.
I do wish we had.
She tells me her son Alain—“and your cousin,” she adds—and his wife, Ana,
have had a fifth baby, a little girl, and they have moved to Valencia, where they
have bought a house. “Finalement, they leave that detestable apartment in
Madrid!” Her firstborn, Isabelle, who writes musical scores for television, has
been commissioned to compose her first major film score. And Isabelle’s
husband, Albert, is now head chef at a well-regarded restaurant in Paris.

“You owned a restaurant, no?” she asks. “I think you told me this in your e-
mail.”
“Well, my parents did. It was always my father’s dream to own a restaurant. I
helped them run it. But I had to sell it a few years back. After my mother died
and Baba became … incapable.”
“Ah, I am sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be. I wasn’t cut out for restaurant work.”
“I should think not. You are an artist.”
I had told her, in passing the first time we spoke and she asked me what I did,
that I had dreams of going to art school one day.
“Actually, I am what you call a transcriptionist.”

She listens intently as I explain to her that I work for a firm that processes
data for big Fortune 500 companies. “I write up forms for them. Brochures,
receipts, customer lists, e-mail lists, that sort of thing. The main thing you need
to know is how to type. And the pay is decent.”
“I see,” she says. She considers, then says, “Is it interesting for you, doing