And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

“You are a cruel beast,” Baba Ayub said. 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.

“You say their stories, it is gift they give you.”

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.

human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

“We missed you at Christmas,” she says. “I couldn’t get away, Mamá.” She nods. “You’re here now. That’s what matters.”

“It’s a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.” “I don’t follow, Mamá.”

considers for a minute before saying, “J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.”