And the Mountains Echoed
Someone lets out an earsplitting shriek from across the room. I doze off.
Eighty-three ⦠eighty-four ⦠eighty-five
â¦
I learn that the boyâs name is Manaar. It means âguiding light.â His mother was a prostitute, his father a thief. He lived with his aunt and uncle, who beat him. No one knows exactly what is killing him, only that it is. No one visits him, and when he dies, a week from nowâa month, two at the outsideâno one will come to claim him. No one will grieve. No one will remember. He will die where he lived, in the cracks. When he sleeps, I find myself looking at him, at his cratered temples, the head thatâs too big for his shoulders, the pigmented scar on his lower lip where, Gul informed me, his motherâs pimp had the habit of putting out his cigarette. I try speaking to him in English, then in the few Urdu words I know, but he only blinks tiredly. Sometimes I put my hands together and make shadow animals on the wall to win a smile from him.
Eighty-seven ⦠eighty-eight ⦠eighty-nine
â¦
One day Manaar points to something outside my window. I follow his finger, raise my head, but I see nothing but the blue wisp of sky through the clouds, children below playing with water gushing from a street pump, a bus spewing exhaust. Then I realize he is pointing at the photo of Thalia. I pluck it from the window and hand it to him. He holds it close to his face, by the burnt corner, and stares at it for a long time. I wonder if it is the ocean that draws him. I wonder if heâs ever tasted salt water or got dizzy watching the tide pull away from his feet. Or perhaps, though he canât see her face, he senses a kin in Thalia, someone who knows what pain feels like. He goes to hand the photo back to me. I shake my head.
Hold on to it
, I say. A shadow of mistrust crosses his face. I smile. And, I cannot be sure, but I think he smiles back.
Ninety-two ⦠ninety-three ⦠ninety-four
â¦
I beat the hepatitis. Strange how I canât tell if Gul is pleased or disappointed at my having proved him wrong. But I know Iâve caught him by surprise when I ask if I can stay on as a volunteer. He cocks his head, frowns. I end up having to talk to one of the head nurses.
Ninety-seven ⦠ninety-eight ⦠ninety-nine
â¦
The shower room smells like urine and sulfur. Every morning I carry Manaar into it, holding his naked body in my arms, careful not to bounce himâIâd watched one of the volunteers carry him before over the shoulder as if he were a bag of rice. I gently lower him onto the bench and wait for him to catch his breath. I rinse his small, frail body with warm water. Manaar always sits quietly, patiently, palms on his knees, head hung low. He is like a fearful, bony old man. I run the soapy sponge over his rib cage, the knobs of his spine, over shoulder blades that jut out like shark fins. I carry him back to his bed, feed him his pills. It soothes him to have his feet and calves massaged, so I do that for him, taking my time. When he sleeps, it is always with the picture of Thalia half tucked under his pillow.
One hundred one ⦠one hundred two
â¦
I go for long, aimless walks around the city, if only to get away from the hospital, the collective breaths of the sick and dying. I walk in dusty sunsets through streets lined with graffiti-stained walls, past tin-shed stalls packed tightly against one another, crossing paths with little girls carrying basketfuls of raw dung on their head, women covered in black soot boiling rags in huge aluminum vats. I think a lot about Manaar as I meander down a catâs cradle of narrow alleyways, Manaar waiting to die in that room full of brokenfigures like him. I think a lot about Thalia, sitting on the rock, looking out at the sea. I sense something deep inside me drawing me in, tugging at me like an undertow. I want to give in to it, be seized by it. I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who I am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.
I am not saying Manaar changed everything. He didnât. I stumble around the world for still another year before I finally find myself at a corner desk in an Athens library, looking down at a medical school application. In between Manaar and the application are the two weeks I spent in Damascus, of which I have virtually no memory other than the grinning faces of two women with heavily lined eyes and a gold tooth each.
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