And the Mountains Echoed

soul. She was always saying,
Abdullah, take me to Paris. When will you take me to Paris?
”
    Actually, Mother didn’t much like to travel. She never saw why she would forgo the comfort and familiarity of her own home for the ordeal of flying and suitcase lugging. She had no sense of culinary adventure—her idea of exotic food was the
Orange Chicken
atthe Chinese take-out place on Taylor Street. It is a bit of a marvel how Baba, at times, summons her with such uncanny precision—remembering, for instance, that she salted her food by bouncing the salt grains off the palm of her hand or her habit of interrupting people on the phone when she never did it in person—and how, other times, he can be so wildly inaccurate. I imagine Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist. She is becoming a ghostly outline, a hollow shell, that he feels compelled to fill with bogus details and fabricated character traits, as though false memories are better than none at all.
    â€œWell, it is a lovely city,” Pari says.
    â€œMaybe I’ll take her still. But she has the cancer at the moment. It’s the female kind—what do you call it?—the …”
    â€œOvarian,”
I say.
    Pari nods, her gaze flicking to me and back to Baba.
    â€œWhat she wants most is to climb the Eiffel Tower. Have you seen it?” Baba says.
    â€œThe Eiffel Tower?” Pari Wahdati laughs. “Oh yes. Every day. I cannot avoid it, in fact.”
    â€œHave you climbed it? All the way to the top?”
    â€œI have, yes. It is beautiful up there. But I am scared of high places, so it is not always comfortable for me. But at the top, on a good sunny day, you can see for more than sixty kilometers. Of course a lot of days in Paris it is not so good and not so sunny.”
    Baba grunts. Pari, encouraged, continues talking about the tower, how many years it took to build it, how it was never meant to stay in Paris past the 1889 World’s Fair, but she can’t read Baba’s eyes like I can. His expression has flattened. She doesn’t realize that she has lost him, that his thoughts have already shifted course like windblown leaves. Pari nudges closer on the seat. “Did youknow, Abdullah,” she says, “that they have to paint the tower every seven years?”
    â€œWhat did you say your name was?” Baba says.
    â€œPari.”
    â€œThat’s my daughter’s name.”
    â€œYes, I know.”
    â€œYou have the same name,” Baba says. “The two of you, you have the same name. So there you have it.” He coughs, absently picks at a small tear in the leather of the recliner’s arm.
    â€œAbdullah, can I ask you a question?”
    Baba shrugs.
    Pari looks up at me like she is asking for permission. I give her the go-ahead with a nod. She leans forward in the chair. “How did you decide to choose this name for your daughter?”
    Baba shifts his gaze to the window, his fingernail still scraping the tear in the recliner’s arm.
    â€œDo you remember, Abdullah? Why this name?”
    He shakes his head. With a fist, he yanks at his cardigan and clutches it shut at his throat. His lips barely move as he begins to hum under his breath, a rhythmic muttering he always resorts to when he is marauded by anxiety and at a loss for an answer, when everything has blurred to vagueness and he is bowled over by a gush of disconnected thoughts, waiting desperately for the murkiness to clear.
    â€œAbdullah? What is that?” Pari says.
    â€œNothing,” he mutters.
    â€œNo, that song you are singing—what is it?”
    He turns to me, helpless. He doesn’t know.
    â€œIt’s like a nursery rhyme,” I say. “Remember, Baba? You said you learned it when you were a boy. You said you learned it from your mother.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œCan you sing it for me?” Pari says urgently, a catch in her voice. “Please, Abdullah, will you sing it?”
    He lowers his head and shakes it slowly.
    â€œGo ahead, Baba,” I say softly. I rest my hand on his bony shoulder. “It’s okay.”
    Hesitantly, in a high, trembling voice and without looking up, Baba sings the same two lines several times:
    I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree
.
    â€œHe used to say there was a second verse,” I say to Pari, “but