And the Mountains Echoed

now so I wouldn’t have to later.

I won’t, she said. And don’t you go thinking I will. The time has come, you have to be ready for
it.

I blew out a gush of air; a hardness lodged in my throat. Somewhere, a chain saw buzzed to life,
the crescendo of its whine at violent odds with the stillness of the woods.

Your father is like a child. Terrified of being abandoned. He would lose his way without you, Pari,
and never find his way back.

I made myself look at the trees, the wash of sunlight falling on the feathery leaves, the rough
bark of the trunks. I slid my tongue between the incisors and bit down hard. My eyes watered,
and the coppery taste of blood flooded my mouth.

A brother, I said.

Yes.

I have a lot of questions.

Ask me tonight. When I’m not as tired. I’ll tell you everything I know.

I nodded. I gulped the rest of my tea, which had gone cold. At a nearby table, a middle-aged
couple traded pages of the newspaper. The woman, red-haired and open-faced, was quietly
watching us over the top of her broadsheet, her eyes switching from me to my gray-faced
mother, her beanie hat, her hands mapped with bruises, her sunken eyes and skeletal grin.
When I met her gaze, the woman smiled just a tad like there was a secret knowledge between
us, and I knew that she had done this too.

So what do you think, Mother? The fair, are you up for it?

Mother’s gaze lingered on me. Her eyes looked too big for her head and her head too big for
her shoulders.

I could use a new hat, she said.

I tossed the napkin on the table and pushed back my chair, walked around to the other side. I
released the brake on the wheelchair and pulled the chair away from the table.

Pari? Mother said.

Yes?

She rolled her head all the way back to look up at me. Sunlight pushed through the leaves of
the trees and pinpricked her face. Do you even know how strong God has made you? she said.
How strong and good He has made you?

There is no accounting for how the mind works. This moment, for instance. Of the thousands
and thousands of moments my mother and I shared together through all the years, this is the
one that shines the brightest, the one that vibrates with the loudest hum at the back of my
mind: my mother looking up at me over her shoulder, her face upside down, all those dazzling
points of light shimmering on her skin, her asking did I know how good and strong God had
made me.

…

After Baba falls asleep on the recliner, Pari gently zips up his cardigan and pulls up
the shawl to cover his torso. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear and stands over
him, watching him sleep for a while. I like watching him sleep too because then you can’t tell
something is wrong. With his eyes closed, the blankness is lifted, and the lackluster, absent gaze
too, and Baba looks more familiar. Asleep, he looks more alert and present, as if something of
his old self has seeped back into him. I wonder if Pari can picture it, looking at his face resting
on the pillow, how he used to be, how he used to laugh.

We move from the living room to the kitchen. I fetch a pot from the cabinet and fill it at the
sink.

“I want to show you some of these,” Pari says, a charge of excitement in her voice. She’s sitting
at the table, busily flipping through a photo album that she fished from her suitcase earlier.

“I’m afraid the coffee won’t be up to Parisian standards,” I say over my shoulder, pouring water
from the pot into the coffeemaker.

“I promise you I am not a coffee snob.” She has taken off the yellow scarf and put on reading
glasses, through which she is peering at pictures.

When the coffeemaker begins to gurgle, I take my seat at the kitchen table beside Pari. “Ah oui.
Voilà. Here it is,” she says. She flips the album around and pushes it over to me. She taps on a
picture. “This is the place. Where your father and I were born. And our brother Iqbal too.”

When she first called me from Paris, she mentioned Iqbal’s name—as proof, perhaps, to
convince me she was not lying about who she said she was. But I already knew she was telling
the truth. I knew it the moment I picked up the receiver and she spoke my father’s name into
my ear and asked whether it was his residence she had reached. And I said, Yes, who is this?
and she said, I am his sister. My heart kicked violently. I fumbled for a chair to drop into,
everything around me suddenly pin-drop quiet. It was a shock, yes, the sort of third-act
theatrical thing that rarely happens to people in real life. But on another plane—a plane that
defies rationalizing, a more fragile plane, one whose essence would fracture and splinter if I
even vocalized it—I wasn’t surprised that she was calling. As if I had expected it, even, my
whole life, that through some dizzying fit of design, or circumstance, or chance, or fate, or
whatever name you want to slap on it, we would find each other, she and I.

I carried the receiver with me to the backyard then and sat on a chair by the vegetable patch,
where I have kept growing the bell peppers and giant squash my mother had planted. The sun
warmed my neck as I lit a cigarette with quivering hands.

I know who you are, I said. I’ve known all my life.

There was silence at the other end, but I had the impression she was weeping soundlessly, that
she had rolled her head away from the phone to do it.

We spoke for almost an hour. I told her I knew what had happened to her, how I used to make
my father recount the story for me at bedtime. Pari said she had been unaware of her own
history herself and would have probably died without knowing it if not for a letter left behind
by her stepuncle, Nabi, before his own death in Kabul, in which he had detailed the events of

her childhood among other things. The letter had been left in the care of someone named
Markos Varvaris, a surgeon working in Kabul, who had then searched for and found Pari in
France. Over the summer, Pari had flown to Kabul, met with Markos Varvaris, who had
arranged for her to visit Shadbagh.

Near the end of the conversation, I sensed her gathering herself before she finally said, Well, I
think I am ready. Can I speak with him now?

That was when I had to tell her.

I slide the photo album closer now and inspect the picture that Pari is pointing to. I see a
mansion nestled behind high shiny-white walls topped with barbed wire. Or, rather, someone’s
tragically misguided idea of a mansion, three stories high, pink, green, yellow, white, with
parapets and turrets and pointed eaves and mosaics and mirrored skyscraper glass. A
monument to kitsch gone woefully awry.

“My God!” I breathe.

“C’est affreux, non?” Pari says. “It is horrible. The Afghans, they call these Narco Palaces. This
one is the house of a well-known criminal of war.”

“So this is all that’s left of Shadbagh?”

“Of the old village, yes. This, and many acres of fruit trees of—what do you call it?—des
vergers.”

“Orchards.”

“Yes.” She runs her fingers over the photo of the mansion. “I wish I know where our old house
was exactly, I mean in relation to this Narco Palace. I would be happy to know the precise
spot.”

She tells me about the new Shadbagh—an actual town, with schools, a clinic, a shopping
district, even a small hotel—which has been built about two miles away from the site of the old
village. The town was where she and her translator had looked for her half brother. I had
learned all of this over the course of that first, long phone conversation with Pari, how no one
in town seemed to know Iqbal until Pari had run into an old man who did, an old childhood
friend of Iqbal’s, who had spotted him and his family staying on a barren field near the old
windmill. Iqbal had told this old friend that when he was in Pakistan, he had been receiving
money from his older brother who lived in northern California. I asked, Pari said on the phone,
I asked, Did Iqbal tell you the name of this brother? and the old man said, Yes, Abdullah. And
then, alors, after that the rest was not so difficult. Finding you and your father, I mean.

I asked Iqbal’s friend where Iqbal was now, Pari said. I asked what happened to him, and the
old man said he did not know. But he seemed very nervous, and he did not look at me when he
said this. And I think, Pari, I worry that something bad happened to Iqbal.

She flips through more pages now and shows me photographs of her children—Alain, Isabelle,
and Thierry—and snapshots of her grandchildren—at birthday parties, posing in swimming
trunks at the edge of a pool. Her apartment in Paris, the pastel blue walls and white blinds
pulled down to the sills, the shelves of books. Her cluttered office at the university, where she
had taught mathematics before the rheumatoid had forced her into retirement.

I keep turning the pages of the album as she provides captions to the snapshots—her old friend
Collette, Isabelle’s husband Albert, Pari’s own husband Eric, who had been a playwright and
had died of a heart attack back in 1997. I pause at a photo of the two of them, impossibly
young, sitting side by side on orange-colored cushions in some kind of restaurant, her in a white
blouse, him in a T-shirt, his hair, long and limp, tied in a ponytail.

“That was the night that we met,” Pari says. “It was a setup.”

“He had a kind face.”

Pari nods. “Yes. When we get married, I thought, Oh, we will have a long time together. I
thought to myself, Thirty years at least, maybe forty. Fifty, if we are lucky. Why not?” She stares
at the picture, lost for a moment, then smiles lightly. “But time, it is like charm. You never have
as much as you think.” She pushes the album away and sips her coffee. “And you? You never
get married?”

I shrug and flip another page. “There was one close call.”

“I am sorry, ‘close call’?”

“It means I almost did. But we never made it to the ring stage.”

This is not true. It was painful and messy. Even now, the memory of it is like a soft ache behind
my breastbone.

She ducks her head. “I am sorry. I am very rude.”

“No. It’s fine. He found someone both more beautiful and less … encumbered, I guess. Speaking
of beautiful, who is this?”

I point to a striking-looking woman with long dark hair and big eyes. In the picture, she is
holding a cigarette like she is bored—elbow tucked into her side, head tilted up
insouciantly—but her gaze is penetrating, defiant.

“This is Maman. My mother, Nila Wahdati. Or, I thought she was my mother. You understand.”

“She’s gorgeous,” I say.

“She was. She committed suicide. Nineteen seventy-four.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Non, non. It’s all right.” She brushes the picture absently with the side of her thumb. “Maman
was elegant and talented. She read books and had many strong opinions and always she was
telling them to people. But she had also very deep sadness. All my life, she gave to me a shovel
and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.”

I nod. I think I understand something of that.

“But I could not. And later, I did not want to. I did careless things. Reckless things.” She sits back
in the chair, her shoulders slumping, puts her thin white hands in her lap. She considers for a
minute before saying, “J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is
something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I
wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.” For a moment, her face looks
stricken. She is like a helpless schoolgirl. “It would not have been so difficult,” she says tiredly.

“I should have been more kind. I should have been more like you.”

She lets out a heavy breath and folds the photo album shut. After a pause, she says brightly,
“Ah, bon. Now I wish to ask something of you.”

“Of course.”

“Will you show me some of your paintings?”

We smile at each other.

Pari stays a month with Baba and me. In the mornings, we take breakfast together
in the kitchen. Black coffee and toast for Pari, yogurt for me, and fried eggs with bread for
Baba, something he has found a taste for in the last year. I worried it was going to raise his
cholesterol, eating all those eggs, and I asked Dr. Bashiri during one of Baba’s appointments. Dr.
Bashiri gave me one of his tight-lipped smiles and said, Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it. And that
reassured me—at least until a bit later when I was helping Baba buckle his seat belt and it
occurred to me that maybe what Dr. Bashiri had really meant was, We’re past all that now.

After breakfast, I retreat into my office—otherwise known as my bedroom—and Pari keeps
Baba company while I work. At her request, I have written down for her the schedule of the TV
shows he likes to watch, what time to give him his midmorning pills, which snacks he likes and
when he’s apt to ask for them. It was her idea I write it all down.

You could just pop in and ask, I said.

I don’t want to disturb you, she said. And I want to know. I want to know him.

I don’t tell her that she will never know him the way she longs to. Still, I share with her a few
tricks of the trade. For instance, how if Baba starts to get agitated I can usually, though not
always, calm him down—for reasons that baffle me still—by quickly handing him a free home-
shopping catalog or a furniture-sale flyer. I keep a steady supply of both.

If you want him to nap, flip on the Weather Channel or anything to do with golf. And never let
him watch cooking shows.

Why not?

They agitate him for some reason.

After lunch, the three of us go out for a stroll. We keep it short for both their sakes—what with
Baba tiring quickly and Pari’s arthritis. Baba has a wariness in his eyes, tottering anxiously along
the sidewalk between Pari and me, wearing an old newsboy cap, his cardigan sweater, and
wool-lined moccasins. There is a middle school around the block with an ill-manicured soccer
field and, across that, a small playground where I often take Baba. We always find a young
mother or two, strollers parked near them, a toddler stumbling around in the sandbox, now
and then a teenage couple cutting school, swinging lazily and smoking. They rarely look at
Baba—the teenagers—and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my
father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.

One day, I pause during dictation and go to the kitchen to refresh my coffee and I find the two
of them watching a movie together. Baba on the recliner, his moccasins sticking out from under

the shawl, his head bent forward, mouth gaping slightly, eyebrows drawn together in either
concentration or confusion. And Pari sitting beside him, hands folded in her lap, feet crossed at
the ankles.

“Who’s this one?” Baba says.

“That is Latika.”

“Who?”

“Latika, the little girl from the slums. The one who could not jump on the train.”

“She doesn’t look little.”

“Yes, but a lot of years have passed,” Pari says. “She is older now, you see.”

One day the week before, at the playground, we were sitting on a park bench, the three of us,
and Pari said, Abdullah, do you remember that when you were a boy you had a little sister?

She’d barely finished her sentence when Baba began to weep. Pari pressed his head into her
chest, saying, I am sorry, I am so sorry, over and over in a panicky way, wiping his cheeks with
her hands, but Baba kept seizing with sobs, so violently he started to choke.

“And do you know who this is, Abdullah?”

Baba grunts.

“He is Jamal. The boy from the game show.”

“He is not,” Baba says roughly.

“You don’t think?”

“He’s serving tea!”

“Yes, but that was—what do you call it?—it was from the past. From before. It was a …”

Flashback, I mouth into my coffee cup.

“The game show is now, Abdullah. And when he was serving tea, that was before.”

Baba blinks vacantly. On the screen, Jamal and Salim are sitting atop a Mumbai high-rise, their
feet dangling over the side.

Pari watches him as though waiting for a moment when something will open in his eyes. “Let
me ask you something, Abdullah,” she says. “If one day you win a million dollars, what would
you do?”

Baba grimaces, shifting his weight, then stretches out farther in the recliner.

“I know what I would do,” Pari says.

Baba looks at her blankly.

“If I win a million dollars, I buy a house on this street. That way, we can be neighbors, you and
me, and every day I come here and we watch TV together.”

Baba grins.

But it’s only minutes later, when I am back in my room wearing earphones and typing, that I
hear a loud shattering sound and Baba screaming something in Farsi. I rip the earphones off
and rush to the kitchen. I see Pari backed up against the wall where the microwave is, hands
bunched protectively under her chin, and Baba, wild-eyed, jabbing her in the shoulder with his
cane. Broken shards of a drinking glass glitter at their feet.

“Get her out of here!” Baba cries when he sees me. “I want this woman out of my house!”

“Baba!”

Pari’s cheeks have gone pale. Tears spring from her eyes.

“Put down the cane, Baba, for God’s sake! And don’t take a step. You’ll cut your feet.”

I wrestle the cane from his hand but not before he gives me a good fight for it.

“I want this woman gone! She’s a thief!”

“What is he saying?” Pari says miserably.

“She stole my pills!”

“Those are hers, Baba,” I say. I put a hand on his shoulder and guide him out of the kitchen. He
shivers under my palm. As we pass by Pari, he almost lunges at her again, and I have to restrain
him. “All right, that’s enough of that, Baba. And those are her pills, not yours. She takes them
for her hands.” I grab a shopping catalog from the coffee table on the way to the recliner.

“I don’t trust that woman,” Baba says, flopping into the recliner. “You don’t know. But I know. I
know a thief when I see one!” He pants as he grabs the catalog from my hand and starts
violently flipping the pages. Then he slams it in his lap and looks up at me, his eyebrows shot
high. “And a damn liar too. You know what she said to me, this woman? You know what she
said? That she was my sister! My sister! Wait ’til Sultana hears about this one.”

“All right, Baba. We’ll tell her together.”

“Crazy woman.”

“We’ll tell Mother, and then us three will laugh the crazy woman right out the door. Now, you
go on and relax, Baba. Everything is all right. There.”

I flip on the Weather Channel and sit beside him, stroking his shoulder, until his shaking ceases
and his breathing slows. Less than five minutes pass before he dozes off.

Back in the kitchen, Pari sits slumped on the floor, back against the dishwasher. She looks
shaken. She dabs at her eyes with a paper napkin.

“I am very sorry,” she says. “That was not prudent of me.”

“It’s all right,” I say, reaching under the sink for the dustpan and brush. I find little pink-and-
orange pills scattered on the floor among the broken glass. I pick them up one by one and
sweep the glass off the linoleum.

“Je suis une imbécile. I wanted to tell him so much. I thought maybe if I tell him the truth … I

don’t know what I was thinking.”

I empty the broken glass into the trash bin. I kneel down, pull back the collar of Pari’s shirt, and
check her shoulder where Baba had jabbed her. “That’s going to bruise. And I speak with
authority on the matter.” I sit on the floor beside her.

She opens her palm, and I pour the pills into it. “He is like this often?”

“He has his spit-and-vinegar days.”

“Maybe you think about finding professional help, no?”

I sigh, nodding. I have thought a lot lately of the inevitable morning when I will wake up to an
empty house while Baba lies curled up on an unfamiliar bed, eyeing a breakfast tray brought to
him by a stranger. Baba slumped behind a table in some activity room, nodding off.

“I know,” I say, “but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can.”

Pari smiles and blows her nose. “I understand that.”

I am not sure she does. I don’t tell her the other reason. I can barely admit it to myself. Namely,
how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me,
what I will do with myself, when Baba is gone. All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in
the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have
been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But
I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence
that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly,
now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified
that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop
around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.

The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back.

Why else had I so readily surrendered my dreams of art school, hardly mounting a resistance
when Baba asked me not to go to Baltimore? Why else had I left Neal, the man I was engaged
to a few years ago? He owned a small solar-panel-installation company. He had a square-
shaped, creased face I liked the moment I met him at Abe’s Kabob House, when I asked for his
order and he looked up from the menu and grinned. He was patient and friendly and even-
tempered. It isn’t true what I told Pari about him. Neal didn’t leave me for someone more
beautiful. I sabotaged things with him. Even when he promised to convert to Islam, to take Farsi
classes, I found other faults, other excuses. I panicked, in the end, and ran back to all the
familiar nooks and crannies, and crevasses, of my life at home.

Next to me, Pari begins to get up. I watch her flatten the wrinkles of her dress, and I am struck
anew by what a miracle it is that she is here, standing inches from me.

“I want to show you something,” I say.

I get up and go to my room. One of the quirks of never leaving home is that no one cleans out
your old room and sells your toys at a garage sale, no one gives away the clothes you have
outgrown. I know that for a woman who is nearly thirty, I have too many relics of my childhood
sitting around, most of them stuffed in a large chest at the foot of my bed whose lid I now lift.
Inside are old dolls, the pink pony that came with a mane I could brush, the picture books, all