And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

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

But every once in a while, he thought he heard another noise among these. It was always the same, the high-pitched jingle of a bell.

Just as he didn’t understand why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling, surprising him each time like an unexpected gust of wind. But then it passed, as all things do. It passed.

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

A feather. Small. Yellow. He took off one glove and picked it up.

Only in Shuja did Abdullah find a reflection of his own grief. The dog turned up at their door every day. Parwana threw rocks at him. Father went at him with a stick. But he kept returning.

Other than these words from Parwana: It had to be her. I am sorry, Abdullah. She had to be the one. The finger cut, to save the hand.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart. What

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

“You have left behind your country,” I said, “your friends, your family, and you have come here to this godforsaken city to help my homeland and my countrymen. How could I profit off you?”

know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.

You’re missing the point, Nahil. All I’m saying is that it’s crass to plaster your good deeds up on a billboard. Something to be said for doing it quietly, with dignity. There’s more to kindness than signing checks in public. Well, Nahil said, snapping the bedsheet, it does go a long way, honey.

She and Abdullah had married in Pakistan in the late 1970s, they have told Idris, after the communist takeover back home. They were granted asylum in the U.S. in 1982, the year their daughter, Pari, was born.

TEARS

didn’t want her turned, against both her will and nature, into one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or doing the wrong thing.

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. I don’t have the heart for this. She actually says this under her breath. I don’t have the heart for this. At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.

But something else too at the edge of it all, at the rim of her vision—and this is what draws her most—an elusive shadow. A figure. At once soft and hard. The softness of a hand holding hers. The hardness of knees where she’d once rested her cheek. She searches for his face, but it evades her, slips from her, each time she turns to it. Pari feels a hole opening up in her. There has been in her life, all her life, a great absence. Somehow, she has always known. “Brother,” she says, unaware she is speaking. Unaware she is weeping.

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.

The suffering, the despair in this place, is like a wave. It rolls out from every bed, smashes against the moldy walls, and swoops back toward you.

But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always circles back to Manaar. Thinking of him, of the anguish of his final days, and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you’re going to sleep, the ones you’ve already forgotten by the time you wake up.

Hadn’t we both yearned for escape, reinvention, new identities? Hadn’t we each, in the end, unmoored ourselves by cutting loose the anchors that weighed us down?

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.

I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story.

“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.”

Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don’t know how ill suited we have been for each other.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle.

But now I thought of her once more and of the ties that bound us. If what had been done to her was like a wave that had crashed far from shore, then it was the backwash of that wave now pooling around my ankles, then receding from my feet.

“But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.”

“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.”