And the Mountains Echoed

the yard, no way out, the walls too tall to climb. When the uncle burst out of the house and came for them, Roshi saw her little brother, who was five, throw himself into the
tandoor
, where, only an hour before, his mother had baked bread. Roshi could hear him screaming in the flames, when she tripped and fell. She turned onto her back in time to see blue sky and the ax whooshing down. And then nothing.
    Amra stops. Inside, Leonard Cohen sings a live version of “Who By Fire.”
    Even if he could talk, which he cannot at the moment, Idris wouldn’t know the proper thing to say. He might have said something, some offering of impotent outrage, if this had been the work of the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or some megalomaniacal Mujahideen commander. But this cannot be blamed on Hekmatyar, or Mullah Omar, or Bin Laden, or Bush and his War on Terror. The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word
senseless
springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It’s what people always say.
A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder
. As if you could commit sensible murder.
    He thinks of the girl, Roshi, back at the hospital, curled up against the wall, her toes knotted, the infantile look on her face.The crack in the crown of her shaved head, the fist-sized mass of glistening brain tissue leaking from it, sitting on her head like the knot of a sikh’s turban.
    â€œShe told you this story herself?” he finally asks.
    Amra nods heavily. “She remember very clearly. Every detail. She can tell to you every detail. I wish she can forget because of the bad dreams.”
    â€œThe brother, what happened to him?”
    â€œToo many burns.”
    â€œAnd the uncle?”
    Amra shrugs.
    â€œThey say be careful,” she says. “In my job, they say be careful, be professional. It’s not good idea to get attached. But Roshi and me...”
    The music suddenly dies. Another power outage. For a few moments all is dark, save for the moonlight. Idris hears people groaning inside the house. Halogen torches promptly come to life.
    â€œI fight for her,” Amra says. She never looks up. “I don’t stop.”
    The next day, Timur rides with the Germans to the town of Istalif, known for its clay pottery. “You should come.”
    â€œI’m going to stay in and read,” Idris says.
    â€œYou can read in San Jose, bro.”
    â€œI need the rest. I might have had too much to drink last night.”
    After the Germans pick up Timur, Idris lies in bed for a while, staring at a faded sixties-era advertising poster hanging on the wall, a quartet of smiling blond tourists hiking along Band-e-AmirLake, a relic from his own childhood here in Kabul before the wars, before the unraveling. Early afternoon, he goes for a walk. At a small restaurant, he eats kabob for lunch. It’s hard to enjoy the meal with all the grimy young faces peering through the glass, watching him eat. It’s overwhelming. Idris admits to himself that Timur is better at this than he is. Timur makes a game of it. Like a drill sergeant, he whistles and makes the beggar kids queue up, whips out a few bills from the
Bakhsheesh
bundle. As he hands out the bills, one by one, he clicks his heels and salutes. The kids love it. They salute back. They call him Kaka. Sometimes they climb up his legs.
    After lunch, Idris catches a taxi and asks to be taken to the hospital.
    â€œBut stop at a bazaar first,” he says.
    Carrying the box, he walks down the hallway, past graffiti-spangled walls, rooms with plastic sheeting for doors, a shuffling barefoot old man with an eye patch, patients lying in stifling-hot rooms with missing lightbulbs. A sour-body smell everywhere. At the end of the hallway, he pauses at the curtain before pulling it back. He feels a lurch in his heart when he sees the girl sitting on the edge of the bed. Amra is kneeling before her, brushing her small teeth.
    There is a man sitting on the other side of the bed, gaunt, sunburned, with a rat’s-nest beard and stubbly dark hair. When Idris enters, the man quickly gets up, flattens a hand against his chest, and bows. Idris is struck again by how easily the locals can tell he is a westernized Afghan, how the whiff of money and power affordshim unwarranted privilege in this city. The man tells Idris he is Roshi’s uncle, from the mother’s side.
    â€œYou’re back,”