And the Mountains Echoed

charged with. Even if I do go on with my story, it sounds diminished to my own ears. It does not measure up to Mamá’s armchair drama with Thalia.
    â€œWhat was her name again?” Mamá says now. “Pari something, no?”
    I have told Mamá about Nabi, who was a dear friend to me. She knows the general outline of his life only. She knows that in his will he left the Kabul house to his niece, Pari, who was raised in France. But I have not told Mamá about Nila Wahdati, her escape to Paris after her husband’s stroke, the decades Nabi spent caring for Suleiman.
That
history. Too many boomeranging parallels. Like reading aloud your own indictment.
    â€œPari. Yes. She was nice,” I say. “And warm. Especially for an academic.”
    â€œWhat is she again, a chemist?”
    â€œMathematician,”
I say, closing the lid of the laptop. It has started snowing again, lightly, tiny flakes twisting in the dark, flinging themselves at my window.
    I tell Mamá about Pari Wahdati’s visit late this past summer. She really was quite lovely. Gentle, slim, gray hair, long neck with a full blue vein crawling up each side, warm gap-toothed smile. She seemed a bit brittle, older than her age. Bad rheumatoid arthritis. Theknobby hands, especially, still functional, but the day is coming and she knew it. It made me think of Mamá and the coming of
her
day.
    Pari Wahdati stayed a week with me at the house in Kabul. I gave her a tour of it when she arrived from Paris. She had last seen the house back in 1955 and seemed quite surprised at the vividness of her own memory of the place, its general layout, the two steps between the living room and dining room, for instance, where she said she would sit in a band of sunlight midmornings and read her books. She was struck by how much smaller the house really was compared to the version of it in her memory. When I took her upstairs, she knew which had been her bedroom, though it’s currently taken up by a German colleague of mine who works for the World Food Program. I remember her breath catching when she spotted the short little armoire in the corner of the bedroom—one of the few surviving relics of her childhood. I remembered it from the note that Nabi had left me prior to his death. She squatted next to it and ran her fingertips over the chipped yellow paint and over the fading giraffes and long-tailed monkeys on its doors. When she looked up at me, I saw that her eyes had teared a little, and she asked, very shyly and apologetically, if it would be possible to have it shipped to Paris. She offered to pay for a replacement. It was the only thing she wanted from the house. I told her it would be my pleasure to do it.
    In the end, other than the armoire, which I had shipped a few days after her departure, Pari Wahdati returned to France with nothing but Suleiman Wahdati’s sketch pads, Nabi’s letter, and a few of her mother Nila’s poems, which Nabi had saved. The only other thing she asked of me during her stay was to arrange a ride to take her to Shadbagh so she could see the village where she had been born and where she hoped to find her half brother, Iqbal.
    â€œI assume she’ll sell the house,” Mamá says, “now that it’s hers.”
    â€œShe said I could stay on as long as I liked, actually,” I say. “Rent-free.”
    I can all but see Mamá’s lips tighten skeptically. She’s an islander. She suspects the motives of all mainlanders, looks askance at their apparent acts of goodwill. This was one of the reasons I knew, when I was a boy, that I would leave Tinos one day when I had the chance. A kind of despair used to get hold of me whenever I heard people talking this way.
    â€œHow is the dovecote coming along?” I ask to change the subject.
    â€œI had to give it a rest. It tired me out.”
    Mamá was diagnosed in Athens six months ago by a neurologist I had insisted she see after Thalia told me Mamá was twitching and dropping things all the time. It was Thalia who took her. Since the trip to the neurologist, Mamá has been on a tear. I know this through the e-mails Thalia sends me. Repainting the house, fixing water leaks, coaxing Thalia into helping her build a whole new closet upstairs, even replacing cracked shingles on the roof, though thankfully Thalia put an end to that. Now the dovecote. I picture Mamá with her sleeves rolled high, hammer in