And the Mountains Echoed

live.
    My own living space was a shack in the back of the yard. It had a window, clean walls with white paint, and provided enough space to accommodate an unmarried young man his meager needs. I had a bed, a desk and a chair, and enough room to unroll my prayer rug five times a day. It suited me just fine then and it suits me fine now.
    I cooked for Mr. Wahdati, a skill I had picked up first from observing my late mother and later from an elderly Uzbek cook who worked at a household in Kabul where I had served for a year as his help. I was also, and quite happily, Mr. Wahdati’s chauffeur. He owned a mid-1940s model Chevrolet, blue with a tan top, matching blue vinyl seats, and chrome wheels, a handsome car that drew lingering looks wherever we went. He allowed me to drive because I had proven myself to be a prudent and skilled driver, and, besides, he was the rare breed of man who did not enjoy the act of operating a car.
    Please do not think I am boasting, Mr. Markos, when I say I was a good servant. Through careful observation, I had familiarized myself with Mr. Wahdati’s likes and dislikes, his quirks, his peeves. I had come to know his habits and rituals well. For instance, every morning after breakfast he liked to go for a stroll. He disliked walking alone, however, and thus I was expected to accompany him. I abided by this wish, of course, though I did not see the point of my presence. He hardly said a word to me in the course of these walks and seemed forever lost in his own thoughts. He walked briskly, hands clamped behind his back, nodding at passersby, the heels ofhis well-polished leather loafers clicking against the pavement. And because his long legs made strides I could not match, I was always falling behind and forced to catch up. The rest of the day, he mostly retreated to his study upstairs, reading or playing a game of chess against himself. He loved to draw—though I could not attest to his skills, at least not then, because he never shared his artwork with me—and I would often catch him up in the study, by the window, or on the veranda, his brow furrowed in concentration, his charcoal pencil looping and circling over the sketch pad.
    I drove him around the city every few days. He went to see his mother once a week. There were also family gatherings. And though Mr. Wahdati avoided most of them, he did attend on occasion, and so I would drive him there, to funerals, birthday parties, weddings. I drove him monthly to an art supply store, where he restocked his pastel pencils, his charcoal, and his erasers and sharpeners and sketchbooks. Sometimes, he liked to sit in the backseat and just go for a drive. I would say,
Where to, Sahib?
and he would shrug, and I would say,
Very well, Sahib
, and I would shift into gear and off we would go. I would drive us around the city, for hours, without aim or purpose, from one neighborhood to another, alongside the Kabul River, up to Bala Hissar, sometimes out to the Darulaman Palace. Some days, I drove us out of Kabul and up to Ghargha Lake, where I would park near the banks of the water. I would turn off the engine, and Mr. Wahdati would sit perfectly still in the backseat, not saying a word to me, seemingly content enough to just roll down the window and look at the birds darting from tree to tree, and the streaks of sunlight that struck the lake and scattered into a thousand tiny bobbing specks on the water. I would gaze at him in the rearview mirror and he looked to me like the most lonesome person on earth.
    Once a month, Mr. Wahdati, quite generously, let me borrowhis car, and I would drive down to Shadbagh, my native village, to visit my sister Parwana and her husband, Saboor. Whenever I drove into the village, I would be greeted by hordes of hollering children, who would scamper alongside the car, slapping the fender, tapping at the window. Some of the little runts would even try to climb atop the roof, and I would have to shoo them away for fear that they would scratch the paint or cause a dent in the fender.
    Look at you, Nabi
, Saboor said to me.
You are a celebrity
.
    Because his children, Abdullah and Pari, had lost their natural mother (Parwana was their stepmother), I always tried to be attentive to them, especially to the older boy, who most seemed to need it. I offered to take him alone for rides in the car, though he always insisted on bringing his baby sister, holding her tightly in his lap, as we circled the road around