And the Mountains Echoed

Thousands of cases of property disputes already clogged the country’s courts. Timur’s father had told them that they would have to “maneuver” through the infamously sluggish, ponderous Afghan bureaucracy—a euphemism for “find the right palms to grease.”
    â€œThat would be my department,” Timur had said as if it needed saying.
    Idris’s own father had died nine years before after a long bout with cancer. He had died at his home, with his wife, two daughters, and Idris at his bedside. The day he died, a mob descended on the house—uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, andacquaintances—sitting on the couches, the dining chairs, and, when those were taken, on the floor, the stairs. Women gathered in the dining room and kitchen. They brewed thermos after thermos of tea. Idris, as the only son, had to sign all the papers—papers for the medical examiner, who arrived to pronounce his father dead; papers for the polite young men from the funeral home, who came with a stretcher to take his father’s body.
    Timur never left his side. He helped Idris answer phone calls. He greeted the waves of people who came to pay respects. He ordered rice and lamb from Abe’s Kabob House, a local Afghan restaurant run by Timur’s friend Abdullah, whom Timur teasingly called
Uncle Abe
. Timur parked cars for elderly guests when it started to rain. He called a buddy of his at one of the local Afghan TV stations. Unlike Idris, Timur was well connected in the Afghan community; he once told Idris that he had over three hundred contact names and numbers on his cell phone. He made arrangements for an announcement to run on Afghan TV that same night.
    Early that afternoon, Timur drove Idris to the funeral home in Hayward. It was pouring by then, and traffic was slow on the northbound lanes of the 680.
    â€œYour dad, he was all class, bro. He was old-school,” Timur croaked as he took the Mission off-ramp. He kept wiping tears with the palm of his free hand.
    Idris nodded somberly. His whole life he’d not been able to cry in the presence of other people, at events where it was called for such as funerals. He saw this as a minor handicap, like color blindness. Still, he felt vaguely—and, he knew, irrationally—resentful toward Timur for upstaging him back at the house with all the running around and dramatic sobbing. As if it was
his
father who had died.
    They were escorted to a sparely lit, quiet room with heavy darktonedfurniture. A man in a black jacket and hair parted in the middle greeted them. He smelled like expensive coffee. In a professional tone, he offered Idris his condolences, and had him sign the Interment Order and Authorization form. He asked how many copies of the death certificate the family would desire. When all the forms were signed, he tactfully placed before Idris a pamphlet titled “General Price List.”
    The funeral home director cleared his throat. “Of course these prices don’t apply if your father had membership with the Afghan mosque over on Mission. We have a partnership with them. They’ll pay for the lot, the services. You’d be covered.”
    â€œI have no idea if he did or not,” Idris said, scanning the pamphlet. His father had been a religious man, he knew, but privately so. He’d rarely gone to Friday prayer.
    â€œShall I give you a minute? You could call the mosque.”
    â€œNo, man. No need,” Timur said. “He wasn’t a member.”
    â€œYou’re sure?”
    â€œYeah. I remember a conversation.”
    â€œI see,” the funeral director said.
    Outside, they shared a cigarette by the SUV. It had stopped raining.
    â€œHighway robbery,” Idris said.
    Timur spat into a puddle of dark rainwater. “Solid business, though—death—you have to admit. Always a need for it. Shit, it beats selling cars.”
    At the time, Timur co-owned a used-car lot. It had been failing, quite badly, until Timur had gone in on it with a friend of his. In less than two years, he had turned it around into a profitable enterprise.
A self-made man
, Idris’s father had liked to say of his nephew. Idris, meanwhile, was earning slave wages finishing up his second year of internal medicine residency at UC Davis. His wife ofone year, Nahil, was putting in thirty hours a week as a secretary at a law firm while she studied for her LSATs.
    â€œThis is a loan,” Idris