And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. —JELALUDDIN RUMI, 13th century

“For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.”

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

Most people loved their own. It couldn’t be helped that he and his sister didn’t belong to her. They were another woman’s leftovers.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

This was his purpose, he believed, the reason God had made him, so he would be there to take care of Pari when He took away their mother.

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.

She and Markos kiss Afghan-style, three times on the cheek, same with the Germans.

pretending he is one of them, like he’s been here all along, like he wasn’t lifting at Gold’s in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when these people were getting shelled, murdered, raped. It is hypocritical, and distasteful. And it astonishes Idris that no one seems to see through this act.

roughshod sexuality,

But this cannot be blamed on Hekmatyar, or Mullah Omar, or Bin Laden, or Bush and his War on Terror.

It’s what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

you meet them, they smile and pretend they have no misgivings at all. As though they lead enviable lives. But you look closely and you see the helpless look, the desperation, and how it belies all their show of good humor.

there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away.

Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.

she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.

What she says is true. She does follow the news, reads in the papers about the war, the West arming the Mujahideen, but Afghanistan has receded in her mind.

they’re all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven’t been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it’s a mistake to give it to them. They can’t accept it. They can’t accept the very thing they’re needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can’t hate you enough. It never ends—the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all.

I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not. Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”

You’ve turned out good. You’ve made me proud, Markos. I am fifty-five years old. I have waited all my life to hear those words.

all good things in life were fragile and easily lost

tacky item names on the laminated menus—Caravan Kabob, Khyber Pass Pilaf, Silk Route Chicken—the badly framed poster of the Afghan girl from National Geographic, the one with the eyes—like they had passed an ordinance that every single Afghan restaurant had to have her eyes staring back from the wall.

I am not alone.

Forough Farrokhzad.