And the Mountains Echoed

lifetime. Entering my childhood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I’d started, then abandoned, long ago.
    â€œHow about some eggs?” Thalia says, already donning a print bib apron, pouring oil in a skillet. She moves about the kitchen with command, in a proprietary way.
    â€œSure. Where is Mamá?”
    â€œAsleep. She had a rough night.”
    â€œI’ll take a quick look.”
    Thalia fishes a whisk from the drawer. “You wake her up, you’ll answer to me, Doctor.”
    I tiptoe up the steps to the bedroom. The room is dark. A single long narrow slab of light shoots through the pulled curtains, slashes across Mamá’s bed. The air is heavy with sickness. It’s not quite a smell; rather, it’s like a physical presence. Every doctor knows this. Sickness permeates a room like steam. I stand at the entrance for a moment and allow my eyes to adjust. The darkness is broken by a rectangle of shifting colored light on the dresser on what I take to be Thalia’s side of the bed, my old side. It’s one of those digital picture frames. A field of rice paddies and wooden houses with gray-tiled roofs fade to a crowded bazaar with skinned goats hanging from hooks, then to a dark-skinned man squatting by a muddy river, finger-brushing his teeth.
    I pull up a chair and sit at Mamá’s bedside. Looking at her now that my eyes have adjusted, I feel something in me drop. I am startled by how much my mother has shrunk. Already. The floral-print pajamas appear loose around her small shoulders, over the flattened chest. I don’t care for the way she is sleeping, with her mouth open and turned down, as though she is having a sour dream. I don’t like seeing that her dentures have slid out of place in her sleep. Her eyelids flutter slightly. I sit there awhile. I ask myself, What did you expect? and I listen to the clock ticking on the wall, the clanging of Thalia’s spatula against the frying pan from downstairs. I take inventory of the banal details of Mamá’s life in this room. The flat-screen TV fastened to the wall; the PC in the corner; the unfinished game of Sudoku on the nightstand, the pagemarked by a pair of reading glasses; the TV remote; the vial of artificial tears; a tube of steroid cream; a tube of denture glue; a small bottle of pills; and, on the floor, an oyster-colored pair of fuzzy slippers. She would have never worn those before. Beside the slippers, an open bag of pull-on diapers. I cannot reconcile these things with my mother. I resist them. They look to me like the belongings of a stranger. Someone indolent, harmless. Someone with whom you could never be angry.
    Across the bed, the image on the digital picture frame shifts again. I track a few. Then it comes to me. I know these photos. I shot them. Back when I was … What? Walking the earth, I suppose. I’d always made sure to get double prints and mail one set to Thalia. And she’d kept them. All these years. Thalia. Affection seeps through me sweet as honey. She has been my true sister, my true Manaar, all along.
    She calls my name from downstairs.
    I get up quietly. As I leave the room, something catches my eye. Something framed, mounted on the wall beneath the clock. I can’t quite make it out in the dark. I open my cell phone and take a look in its silver glow. It’s an AP story about the nonprofit I work with in Kabul. I remember the interview. The journalist was a pleasant Korean-American fellow with a mild stutter. We had shared a plate of
qabuli
—Afghan pilaf, with brown rice, raisins, lamb. There is in the center of the story a group photo. Me, some of the children, Nabi in the back, standing rigidly, hands behind his back, looking simultaneously foreboding, shy, and dignified, as Afghans often manage to in pictures. Amra is there too with her adopted daughter, Roshi. All the children are smiling.
    â€œMarkos.”
    I flip the mobile closed and make my way downstairs.
    Thalia puts before me a glass of milk and a steaming plate ofeggs on a bed of tomatoes. “Don’t worry, I already sugared the milk.”
    â€œYou remember.”
    She takes a seat, not bothering to remove the apron. She rests her elbows on the table and watches me eat, dabbing now and then at her left cheek with a handkerchief.
    I remember all the times I tried to convince her to let me work on her face. I told her that surgical techniques