And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

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

If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.

Meaning that the lines on a Muslim’s left hand make the Arabic number eighty-one, and the ones on the right the number eighteen. Subtract eighteen from eighty-one and what do you get? You get sixty-three. The Prophet’s age when he died, peace be upon him.”

I remember that when my parents fought, they did not stop until a clear victor had been declared. It was their way of sealing off unpleasantness, to caulk it with a verdict, keep it from leaking into the normalcy of the next day. Not so with the Wahdatis. Their fights didn’t so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered.

married Mr. Wahdati? I lacked the courage to ask. Such trespass of propriety was beyond me by nature.

all of them chewing naswar tobacco.

Inshallah,

As you well know, we Afghans love our poetry; even the most uneducated among us can recite verses of Hafez or Khayyám or Saadi.

Because even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls.

bulbul

aziz.

aziz, which means “beloved,” “darling,”

The 1980s, as you know, Mr. Markos, were actually not so terrible in Kabul since most of the fighting took place in the countryside. Still, it was a time of exodus, and many families from our neighborhood packed their things and left the country for either Pakistan or Iran, with hopes of resettling somewhere in the West.

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.

“I have tea, wine, and beer. Or maybe you prefer something heavier?” “You point and I pour,” Timur said. “Oh, I like you. There, by the stereo. Ice is safe, by the way. Made from bottled water.” “God bless.” Timur is in his element at gatherings like this, and Idris cannot help but admire him for the ease of his manners, the effortless wisecracking, the self-possessed charm. He follows Timur to the bar, where Timur pours them drinks from a ruby bottle.

He does his best. He describes for her the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it’s like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. Kabul’s vivid, arresting details—the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window. Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story. In the backseat,

“Kabul is . . .” Idris searches for the right words. “A thousand tragedies per square mile.”

“For the price of that home theater we could have built a school in Afghanistan.”

overbooks—squeezes, as the doctors call them—inserted into his time slots all week.

chief, Joan Schaeffer, who tells him that a patient he had diagnosed with pneumonia just before his trip to Kabul turned out to have congestive heart failure instead. The case will be used next week for Peer Review, a monthly video conference watched by all the facilities during which mistakes by physicians, who remain anonymous, are used to illustrate learning points. The anonymity doesn’t go very far, Idris knows. At least half the people in the room will know the culprit.

anterior myocardial infarction.

“And don’t feel bad. It could happen to any of us. CHF and pneumonia on X-ray, sometimes it’s hard to tell.” “Thanks, Joan.” He gets up

As he tucks each into bed, an awareness sets in of the heartbreak that is in store for him with his boys. In a few years, he will be replaced. The boys will become enamored with other things, other people, embarrassed by him and Nahil. Idris thinks longingly of when they were small and helpless, so wholly dependent on him. He remembers how terrified Zabi was of manholes when he was little, walking wide, clumsy circles around them. Once, watching an old film, Lemar had asked Idris if he had been alive back when the world was in black and white. The memory brings a smile. He kisses his sons’ cheeks. He sits back in the dark, watching Lemar sleep. He had judged his boys hastily, he sees now, and unfairly. And he had judged himself harshly too. He is not a criminal. Everything he owns he has earned. In the nineties, while half the guys he knew were out clubbing and chasing women, he had been buried in study, dragging himself through hospital corridors at two in the morning, forgoing leisure, comfort, sleep. He had given his twenties to medicine. He has paid his dues. Why should he feel badly? This is his family. This is his life.

In the last month, Roshi has become something abstract to him, like a character in a play. Their connection has frayed. The unexpected intimacy he had stumbled upon in that hospital, so urgent and acute, has eroded into something dull. The experience has lost its power.

Her long dark hair, her full chest, her startling eyes, and a face that glowed with the intimidating sheen of classic regal features. Pari marveled further at how little resemblance she herself bore to Maman, with her solemn pale eyes, her long nose, her gap-toothed smile, and her small breasts. If she had any beauty, it was of a more modest earthbound sort. Being around her mother always reminded Pari that her own looks were woven of common cloth. At times, it was Maman herself who did the reminding, though it always came hidden in a Trojan horse of compliments. She would say, You’re lucky, Pari. You won’t have to work as hard for men to take you seriously. They’ll pay attention to you. Too much beauty, it corrupts things. She would laugh. Oh, listen to me. I’m not saying I speak from experience. Of course not. It’s merely an observation. You’re saying I’m not beautiful. I’m saying you don’t want to be. Besides, you are pretty, and that is plenty good enough. Je t’assure, ma cherie. It’s better, even. She didn’t resemble her father much either, Pari believed. He had been a tall man with a serious face, a high forehead, narrow chin, and thin lips. Pari kept a few pictures of him in her room from her childhood in the Kabul house. He had fallen ill in 1955—which was when Maman and she had moved to Paris—and had died shortly after. Sometimes Pari found herself gazing at one of his old photos, particularly a black-and-white of the two of them, she and her father, standing befo...

plates with clumps of unrecognizable food fossilized onto them.

Jane Birkin

familiar with Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann.

And there is often a sense of transcendent claustrophobia, of a shortening horizon, and always a sense of struggle against the tyranny of circumstance—often depicted as a never named sinister male figure who looms.

polemical,

the attitude that I had to be protected from sex. That I had to be protected from my own body. Because I was a woman. And women, don’t you know, are emotionally, morally, and intellectually immature. They lack self-control, you see, they’re vulnerable to physical temptation. They’re hypersexual beings who must be restrained lest they jump into bed with every Ahmad and Mahmood.

Dying can be quite the career move for a young poet.

you will know within two weeks if it’s going to work. It’s astonishing how many people remain

sous-chef.

They had done it for their country, Baba jan said, and they had done it for God. This was what jihad was all about, he said. Sacrifice. You sacrificed your limbs, your sight—your life, even—and you did it gladly. Jihad also earned you certain rights and privileges, he said, because God sees to it that those who sacrifice the most justly reap the rewards as well. Both in this life and the next, Baba jan said, pointing his thick finger first down, then up.

President Karzai at Arg, the Presidential Palace in Kabul.

“Is Baba jan going to help them?” “Probably,” Kabir sighed. “Your father is a river to his people.” He lowered the paper and grinned. “What’s that from? Come on, Adel. We saw it last month.” Adel shrugged. He started heading upstairs. “Lawrence,” Kabir called from the couch. “Lawrence of Arabia.

upstairs. He lived in a mansion, but in a shrunken world.

reprieve.

“Maradona was a cheater! ‘Hand of God,’ remember?” “Everyone cheats and everyone lies.”

Ronaldo the Brazilian and Adel’s had Ronaldo the Portuguese.

Afghanistan. He had lived his whole life in Pakistan in the Jalozai refugee

But Gholam had already moved on. This was often the pattern of their conversations, Gholam choosing what they would talk about, launching into a story with gusto, roping Adel in, only to lose interest and leave both the story and Adel dangling.

And when he did, there would be no going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: once you became one, you died one.

business now and owned a big firm in Athens. They had had a falling-out recently, a row, Madeleine and Mr. Gianakos. Mamá didn’t tell me any of this information; I

Should I utter so much as a word of dissent, I am confident they would label me a communist anarchist, and then even Andreas’s influence would not save me from the dungeons.

the Aegean, blue and calm in the summer morning, white-capped in the afternoon when the meltemi winds blew in from the north.

August fifteenth, the Feast of the Dormition at the Panagia Evangelistria Church, when pilgrims descended on Tinos from everywhere in the Mediterranean to pray before the church’s famed icon.

Mamá believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. Especially at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner you had to tell it. She had no patience for soft spines. She was—is—a woman of enormous will, a woman without apology, and not a woman with whom you want to have a dispute—though I have never really understood, even now, whether her temperament was God-given or one she adopted out of necessity, what with her husband dying barely a year into their marriage and leaving her to raise me all on her own.

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