And the Mountains Echoed

became a blur for me what was performance and what real—which at least made me think of her as an infinitely more
interesting
actress.
    â€œHow many times did I come running to this house, Odie?” Madaline said. Now the smiling again, the swell of laughter. “Your poor parents. But this house was my haven. My sanctuary. It was. A little island within the greater one.”
    Mamá said, “You were always welcomed here.”
    â€œIt was your mother who put an end to the beatings, Markos. Did she ever tell you?”
    I said she hadn’t.
    â€œHardly surprises me. That’s Odelia Varvaris for you.”
    Mamá was unfurling the edge of the apron in her lap and flattening it again with a daydreamy look on her face.
    â€œI came here one night, bleeding from the tongue, a patch of hair ripped from the temple, my ear still ringing from a blow. He’d really gotten his hooks into me that time. What a state I was in. What a state!” The way Madaline was telling it, you might have thought she was describing a lavish meal or a good novel. “Your mother doesn’t ask because she knows. Of course she knows. She just looks at me for a long time—at me standing there, trembling—andshe says, I still remember it, Odie, she said,
Well, that’s about enough of this business
. She says,
We’re going to pay your father a visit, Maddie
. And I start begging. I worried he was going to kill us both. But you know how she can be, your mother.”
    I said I did, and Mamá tossed me a sidelong glance.
    â€œShe wouldn’t listen. She had this look. I’m sure you know the look. She heads out, but not before she picks up her father’s hunting rifle. The whole time we’re walking to my house, I’m trying to stop her, telling her he hadn’t hurt me that bad. But she won’t hear it. We walk right up to the door and there’s my father, in the doorway, and Odie raises the barrel and shoves it against his chin and says,
Do it again and I will come back and shoot you in the face with this rifle
.
    â€œMy father blinks, and for a moment he’s tongue-tied. He can’t say a word. And you want to know the best part, Markos? I look down and see a little circle, a circle of—well, I think you can guess—a little circle quietly expanding on the floor between his bare feet.”
    Madaline brushed back her hair and said, to another flick of the lighter, “And that, my dear, is a true story.”
    She didn’t have to say it, I knew it was true. I recognized in it Mamá’s uncomplicated, fierce loyalty, her mountainous resolve. Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And I could tell it was true from the closemouthed groan Mamá gave at the mention of that last detail. She disapproved. She probably found it distasteful, and not only for the obvious reason. In her view, people, even if they had behaved deplorably in life, deserved a modicum of dignity in death. Especially family.
    Mamá shifted in her seat and said, “So if you don’t like to travel, Thalia, what do you like to do?”
    All our eyes turned to Thalia. Madaline had been speaking for a while, and I recall thinking, as we sat in the courtyard with the sunlight falling in patches all around us, that it was a measure of her capacity to absorb attention, to pull everything into her vortex so thoroughly that Thalia had gone forgotten. I also left room for the possibility that they had adapted to this dynamic out of necessity, the quiet daughter eclipsed by the attention-diverting self-absorbed mother routine, that Madaline’s narcissism was perhaps an act of kindness, of maternal protectiveness.
    Thalia mumbled something.
    â€œA little louder, darling,” came the suggestion from Madaline.
    Thalia cleared her throat, a rumbling, phlegmy sound. “Science.”
    I noticed for the first time the color of her eyes, green like ungrazed pasture, the deep, coarse dark of her hair, and that she had unblemished skin like her mother. I wondered if she’d been pretty once, maybe even beautiful like Madaline.
    â€œTell them about the sundial, darling,” Madaline said.
    Thalia shrugged.
    â€œShe built a sundial,” Madaline said. “Right in our backyard. Last summer. She had no help. Not from Andreas. And certainly not from me.” She chortled.
    â€œEquatorial or horizontal?”