Page 288 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

shapes. Short, dense green feathers; long black-stemmed ones the color of

ginger; a peach-colored feather, possibly from a mallard, with a light purple cast;
brown feathers with dark blotches along the inner vanes; a green peacock feather
with a large eye at the tip of it.
I turn to Pari. “Do you know what this means?”
Chin quivering, Pari slowly shakes her head. She takes the box from me and
peers inside it. “No,” she says. “Only that when we lost each other, Abdullah and
I, it hurt him much more than me. I was the lucky one because I was protected
by my youth. Je pouvais oublier. I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not.”
She lifts a feather, brushes it against her wrist, eyeing it as though hoping it
might spring to life and take flight. “I don’t know what this feather means, the
story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He

remembered me.”
I put an arm around her shoulder as she weeps quietly. I watch the sun-
washed trees, the river flowing past us and beneath the bridge—the Pont Saint-
Bénezet—the bridge the children’s song is about. It’s a half bridge, really, as
only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it
reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short.
That night at the hotel, I lie awake in bed and watch the clouds nudging
against the big swollen moon hanging in our window. Down below, heels click

on the cobblestones. Laughter and chatter. Mopeds rattling past. From the
restaurant across the street, the clinking of glasses on trays. The tinkling of a
piano meanders up through the window and to my ears.
I turn over and watch Pari sleeping soundlessly beside me. Her face is pale in
the light. I see Baba in her face—youthful, hopeful Baba, happy, how he used to
be—and I know I will always find him whenever I look at Pari. She is my flesh
and blood. And soon I will meet her children, and her children’s children, and
my blood courses through them too. I am not alone. A sudden happiness catches
me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and
hope.
As I watch Pari sleep, I think of the bedtime game Baba and I used to play.

The purging of bad dreams, the gift of happy ones. I remember the dream I used
to give him. Careful not to wake Pari, I reach across now and gently rest my
palm on her brow. I close my own eyes.
It is a sunlit afternoon. They are children once more, brother and sister, young
and clear-eyed and sturdy. They are lying in a patch of tall grass in the shade of
an apple tree ablaze with flowers. The grass is warm against their backs and the
sun on their faces, flickering through the riot of blossoms above. They rest