And the Mountains Echoed

Nila wrote about love, and by love I do not mean the Sufi yearnings of Rumi or Hafez but instead physical love. She wrote about lovers whispering across pillows, touching each other. She wrote about pleasure. I had never heard language such as this spoken by a woman. I would stand there, listening to Nila’s smoky voice drift down the hallway, my eyes closed and my ears burning red, imagining she was reading to me, that
we
were the lovers in the poem, until someone’s call for tea or fried eggs would break the spell, and then Nila would call my name and I would run.
    That night, the poem she chose to read caught me off guard. It was about a man and his wife, in a village, mourning the death of the infant they had lost to the winter cold. The guests seemed to love the poem, judging by the nods and the murmurs of approval around the room, and by their hearty applause when Nila looked up from the page. Still, I felt some surprise, and disappointment, that my sister’s misfortune had been used to entertain guests, and I could not shake the sense that some vague betrayal had been committed.
    A couple of days after the party, Nila said she needed a new purse. Mr. Wahdati was reading the newspaper at the table, where I had served him a lunch of lentil soup and
naan
.
    â€œDo you need anything, Suleiman?” Nila asked.
    â€œNo,
aziz
. Thank you,” he said. I rarely heard him address herby anything other than
aziz
, which means “beloved,” “darling,” and yet never did the couple seem more distant from each other than when he said it, and never did this term of endearment sound so starched as when it came from Mr. Wahdati’s lips.
    On the way to the store, Nila said she wanted to pick up a friend and gave me directions to the home. I parked on the street and watched her walk up the block to a two-story house with bright pink walls. At first, I left the engine running, but when five minutes passed and Nila hadn’t returned I shut it off. It was a good thing I did for it was not until two hours later that I saw her slim figure gliding down the sidewalk toward the car. I opened the rear passenger door and, as she slid in, I smelled on her, underneath her own familiar perfume, a second scent, something faintly like cedarwood and perhaps a trace of ginger, an aroma I recognized from having breathed it at the party two nights before.
    â€œI didn’t find one I liked,” Nila said from the backseat as she applied a fresh coat of lipstick.
    She caught my puzzled face in the rearview mirror. She lowered the lipstick and gazed at me from under her lashes. “You took me to two different stores but I couldn’t find a purse to my liking.”
    Her eyes locked onto mine in the mirror and lingered there awhile, waiting, and I understood that I had been made privy to a secret. She was putting my allegiance to the test. She was asking me to choose.
    â€œI think maybe you visited three stores,” I said weakly.
    She grinned.
“Parfois je pense que tu es mon seul ami, Nabi.”
    I blinked.
    â€œIt means ‘Sometimes I think you are my only friend.’ ”
    She smiled radiantly at me, but it could not lift my sagging spirits.
    The rest of that day, I set about my chores at half my normal speed and with a fraction of my customary enthusiasm. When the men came over for tea that night, one of them sang for us, but his song failed to cheer me. I felt as though I had been the one cuckolded. And I was sure that the hold she had on me had loosened at last.
    But in the morning I rose and there it was, filling my living quarters once more, from floor to ceiling, seeping into the walls, saturating the air I breathed, like vapor. It was no use, Mr. Markos.
    I cannot tell you when, precisely, the idea took hold. Perhaps it was the windy autumn morning I was serving tea to Nila, when I had stooped and was cutting for her a slice of
roat
cake, that from the radio sitting on her windowsill came a report that the coming winter of 1952 might prove even more brutal than the previous one. Perhaps it was earlier, the day I took her to the house with the bright pink walls, or perhaps earlier still, the time I held her hand in the car as she sobbed.
    Whatever the timing, once the idea entered my head there was no purging it.
    Let me say, Mr. Markos, that I proceeded with a mostly clean conscience, and with the conviction that my proposal was born of goodwill and honest intentions.