And the Mountains Echoed

surprised to find swollen tears shivering theatrically in his eyes.
    The girl twitches and makes a grunting sound.
    â€œOkay, finished, we go now,” Amra says sharply.
    Outside, on the crumbling front steps, the nurse pulls a pack of Marlboro Reds from the breast pocket of her pale blue scrubs. Timur, whose tears have vanished as swiftly as they’d materialized, takes a cigarette and lights both hers and his. Idris feels queasy, light-headed. His mouth has gone dry. He worries he’s going to vomit and disgrace himself, confirm Amra’s view of him, of them—the wealthy, wide-eyed exiles—come home to gawk at the carnage now that the boogeymen have left.
    Idris expected Amra to reprimand them, at least Timur, but her manner is more flirtatious than scolding. This is the effect Timur has on women.
    â€œSo,” she says, coquettishly, “what do you say for yourself, Timur?”
    In the States, Timur goes by “Tim.” He changed his name after 9/11 and claims that he has nearly doubled his business since. Losing those two letters, he has said to Idris, has already done more for his career than a college degree would have—if he’d gone to college, which he hadn’t; Idris is the Bashiri family academic. But now since their arrival in Kabul, Idris has heard him introduce himself only as Timur. It is a harmless enough duplicity, even a necessary one. But it rankles.
    â€œSorry about what happened in there,” Timur says.
    â€œMaybe I punish you.”
    â€œEasy, pussycat.”
    Amra turns her gaze to Idris. “So. He’s cowboy. And you, you are quiet, sensitive one. You are—what do they call it?—
introvert
.”
    â€œHe’s a doctor,” Timur says.
    â€œAh? It must be shocking for you, then. This hospital.”
    â€œWhat happened to her?” Idris says. “To Roshi. Who did that to her?”
    Amra’s face closes. When she speaks, it is with the pitch of maternal determination. “I fight for her. I fight government, hospital bureaucracy, bastard neurosurgeon. Every step, I fight for her. And I don’t stop. She has nobody.”
    Idris says, “I thought there was an uncle.”
    â€œHe’s bastard too.” She flicks her cigarette ash. “So. Why you come here, boys?”
    Timur launches into it. The outline of what he says is more or less true. That they are cousins, that their families fled after the Soviets rolled in, that they spent a year in Pakistan before settling in California in the early eighties. That this is the first time back for them both in twenty years. But then he adds that they have come back to “reconnect,” to “educate” themselves, “bear witness” to the aftermath of all these years of war and destruction. They want to go back to the States, he says, to raise awareness, and funds, to “give back.”
    â€œWe want to give back,” he says, uttering the tired phrase so earnestly it embarrasses Idris.
    Of course Timur does not share the real reason they have come back to Kabul: to reclaim the property that had belonged to their fathers, the house where both he and Idris had lived for the first fourteen years of their lives. The property’s worth is skyrocketing now that thousands of foreign-aid workers have descended on Kabul and need a place to live. They were there earlier in the day,at the house, which is currently home to a ragtag group of weary-looking Northern Alliance soldiers. As they were leaving, they had met a middle-aged man who lived three houses down and across the street, a Greek plastic surgeon named Markos Varvaris. He had invited them to lunch and offered to give them a tour of Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, where the NGO he worked for had an office. He also invited them to a party that night. They had learned about the girl only upon their arrival at the hospital—overhearing two orderlies talking about her on the front steps—after which Timur had elbowed Idris and said,
We should check it out, bro
.
    Amra seems bored with Timur’s story. She flings her cigarette away and tightens the rubber band that holds her curly blond hair in a bun. “So. I see you boys at party tonight?”
    It was Timur’s father, Idris’s uncle, who had sent them to Kabul. The Bashiri family home had changed hands a number of times over the last two decades of war. Reestablishing ownership would take time and money.