And the Mountains Echoed

mean?”
    â€œWho, Andreas? He’s all right. He travels a lot. When he’s home, he always has people over. Important people—ministers, generals, that kind. They have drinks by the fireplace and they talk all night, mostly business and politics. I can hear them from my room. I’m supposed to stay upstairs when Andreas has company. I’m not supposed to come down. But he buys me things. He pays for a tutor to come to the house. And he speaks to me nicely enough.”
    She taped a rectangular piece of cardboard, which we’d also colored black, over the pinhole.
    Things were quiet downstairs. I choreographed the scene in my head. Madaline weeping without a sound, absently fiddling with a handkerchief like it was a clump of Play-Doh, Mamá not much help, looking on stiffly with a pinch-faced little smile like she’s got something sour melting under her tongue. Mamá can’t stand it when people cry in her presence. She can barely look at their puffy eyes, their open, pleading faces. She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish appeal for attention, and she won’t indulge it. She can’t bring herself to console. Growing up, I learned that it was not one of her strong suits. Sorrow ought to be private, she thinks, not flaunted. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.
    At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
    No, I did not
.
    Because you weren’t sad?
    Because it was nobody’s business if I was
.
    Would you cry if I died, Mamá?
    Let’s hope we never have to find out
, she said.
    Thalia picked up the box of photographic paper and said, “Get the flashlight.”
    We moved into Mamá’s closet, taking care to shut the door and snuff out daylight with towels we stuffed under it. Once we were in pitch-darkness, Thalia asked me to turn on the flashlight, which we had covered with several layers of red cellophane. All I could see of Thalia in the dim glow was her slender fingers as she cut a sheet of photographic paper and taped it to the inside of the shoe box opposite the pinhole. We had bought the paper from Mr. Roussos’s shop the day before. When we walked up to the counter, Mr. Roussos peered at Thalia over his spectacles and said,
Is this a robbery?
Thalia pointed an index finger at him and cocked her thumb like pulling back the hammer.
    Thalia closed the lid on the shoe box, covered the pinhole with the shutter. In the dark she said, “Tomorrow, you shoot the first photo of your career.” I couldn’t tell if she was making fun or not.
    We chose the beach. We set the shoe box on a flat rock and secured it firmly with rope—Thalia said we couldn’t have any movement at all when we opened the shutter. She moved in next to me and took a peek over the box as if through a viewfinder.
    â€œIt’s a perfect shot,” she said.
    â€œAlmost. We need a subject.”
    She looked at me, saw what I meant, and said, “No. I won’t do it.”
    We argued back and forth and she finally agreed, but on the condition that her face didn’t show. She took off her shoes, walked atop a row of rocks a few feet in front of the camera, using her arms like a tightrope walker on a cable. She lowered herself on one of the rocks facing west in the direction of Syros and Kythnos. She flipped her hair so it covered the bands at the back of her head that held the mask in place. She looked at me over her shoulder.
    â€œRemember,” she shouted, “count to one twenty.”
    She turned back to face the sea.
    I stooped and peered over the box, looking at Thalia’s back, the constellation of rocks around her, the whips of seaweed entangled between them like dead snakes, a little tugboat bobbing in the distance, the tide rising, mashing the craggy shore and withdrawing. I lifted the shutter from the pinhole and began to count.
    One … two … three … four … five
…
    We’re lying in bed. On the TV screen a pair of accordion playersare dueling, but Gianna has turned off the sound. Midday sunlight scissors through the blinds, falling in stripes on the remains of the Margherita pizza we’d ordered for lunch from room service. It was delivered to us by a tall, slim man with impeccable slicked-back hair and a white coat with black tie. On the table he rolled into the room was a flute vase with a red rose in it. He lifted the domed plate cover off the