And the Mountains Echoed

Shadbagh. I let him work the wipers, honk the horn. I showed him how to switch the headlights from dim to full.
    After all the fuss about the car died down, I would sit for tea with my sister and Saboor and I would tell them about my life in Kabul. I took care not to say too much about Mr. Wahdati. I was, in truth, quite fond of him, for he treated me well, and speaking of him behind his back seemed to me like a betrayal. If I had been a less discreet employee, I would have told them that Suleiman Wahdati was a mystifying creature to me, a man seemingly satisfied with living the rest of his days off the wealth of his inheritance, a man with no profession, no apparent passion, and apparently no impulse to leave behind something of himself in this world. I would have told them that he lived a life lacking in purpose or direction. Like those aimless rides I took him on. A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by. An indifferent life.
    This is what I would have said, but I did not. And a good thing I did not. For how wrong I would have been.
    â€¦
    One day, Mr. Wahdati came into the yard wearing a handsome pin-striped suit, one I had never seen on him before, and requested that I drive him to an affluent neighborhood of the city. When we arrived, he instructed me to park on the street outside a beautiful high-walled house, and I watched him ring the bell at the gates and enter when a servant answered. The house was huge, bigger than Mr. Wahdati’s, and even more beautiful. Tall, slender cypresses adorned the driveway, along with a densely packed array of bushes of a flower I did not recognize. The backyard was at least twice the size of Mr. Wahdati’s, and the walls stood tall enough that if a man climbed on the shoulders of another, he still could hardly steal a peek. This was wealth of another magnitude, I recognized.
    It was a bright early-summer day, and the sky was brilliant with sunshine. Warm air wafted in through the windows, which I had rolled down. Though a chauffeur’s job is to drive, he actually spends most of his time waiting. Waiting outside stores, engine idling; waiting outside a wedding hall, listening to the muffled sound of the music. To pass the time that day, I played a few games of cards. When I tired of cards, I stepped out of the car and took a few steps in one direction, then the other. I sat inside once more, thinking I might steal a nap before Mr. Wahdati returned.
    It was then that the front gates opened and a black-haired young woman emerged. She wore sunglasses and a short-sleeved tangerine-colored dress that fell short of the knees. Her legs were bare, and so were her feet. I did not know whether she had noticed me sitting in the car, and, if she had, she offered no indication. She rested the heel of one foot against the wall behind her and, when she did, the hem of the dress pulled up slightly and thus revealeda bit of the thigh beneath. I felt a burning spread down from my cheeks to my neck.
    Allow me to make another confession here, Mr. Markos, one of a somewhat distasteful nature, leaving little room for elegant handling. At the time, I must have been in my late twenties, a young man at the prime of his desires for a woman’s company. Unlike many of the men I grew up with in my village—young men who had never seen the bare thigh of a grown woman and married, in part, for the license to at last cast their gaze upon such a sight—I did have some experience. I had found in Kabul, and on occasion visited, establishments where a young man’s needs could be addressed with both discretion and convenience. I mention this only to make the point that no whore I had ever lain with could compare with the beautiful, graceful creature who had just stepped out of the big house.
    Leaning against the wall, she lit a cigarette and smoked without hurry and with bewitching grace, holding it at the very tip of two fingers and cupping her hand before her mouth each time she raised it to her lips. I watched with rapt attention. The way her hand bent at its slender wrist reminded me of an illustration I had once seen in a glossy book of poems of a long-lashed woman with flowing dark hair lying with her lover in a garden, offering him a cup of wine with her pale delicate fingers. At one point, something seemed to catch the woman’s attention up the street in the opposite direction, and I used the brief chance to quickly finger-brush my hair, which was beginning