And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

pillbox hat.

And then I witnessed the most extraordinary thing, something I thought I’d no sooner see than King Constantine himself turning up at our door dressed in a clown suit: a single tear, swelling at the edge of my mother’s right eye.

The net effect is that she has made me feel vaguely reprimanded and, what’s more, deserving of it, guilty of wrongs unspoken, offenses I’ve never been formally charged with.

I can all but see Mamá’s lips tighten skeptically. She’s an islander. She suspects the motives of all mainlanders, looks askance at their apparent acts of goodwill. This was one of the reasons I knew, when I was a boy, that I would leave Tinos one day when I had the chance. A kind of despair used to get hold of me whenever I heard people talking this way.

Mamá’s uncomplicated, fierce loyalty, her mountainous resolve. Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock.

gnomon?”

died on one of those mountains. He worked for a green-marble quarry and one day, when Mamá was six months pregnant with me, he slipped off a cliff and fell a hundred feet. Mamá said he’d forgotten to secure his safety harness. “You should stop,” Thalia said.

Madeleine was blowing on her nails in between drags and talking about Pattakos, Papadopoulos, and Makarezos, the three colonels who had staged a military coup—the Generals’ Coup, as it was known then—earlier that year in Athens.

the ESA, to make them talk?”

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

When people speak this way, they’re likely disclosing, revealing, confessing some catastrophe, beseeching the listener. It’s a staple of the military’s casualty notification teams knocking on doors, lawyers touting the merits of plea deals to clients, policemen stopping cars at 3 A.M., cheating husbands. How many times have I used it myself at hospitals here in Kabul? How many times have I guided entire families into a quiet room, asked them to sit, pulled a chair up for myself, gathering the will to give them news, dreading the coming conversation?

nimbus

huaso

litre

Salto del Apoquindo,

Or the three months in Cairo in the basement of a ramshackle tenement run by a hashish-addicted landlord. I spend Thalia’s money riding buses in Iceland, tagging along with a punk band in Munich. In 1977, I break an elbow at an antinuclear protest in Bilbao.

tavli.

mana

Another hour or two and the smell of cooking fish will waft from kitchens.

building south of Tinos town, with views of Mykonos and the Aegean.

“Here and there,” Thalia says. “You know the times.” We both shake our heads. In Kabul, I had followed news about the rounds of austerity measures. I had watched on CNN masked young Greeks stoning police outside the parliament, cops in riot gear firing tear gas, swinging their batons.

I tiptoe up the steps to the bedroom. The room is dark. A single long narrow slab of light shoots through the pulled curtains, slashes across Mamá’s bed. The air is heavy with sickness. It’s not quite a smell; rather, it’s like a physical presence. Every doctor knows this. Sickness permeates a room like steam.

Me, some of the children, Nabi in the back, standing rigidly, hands behind his back, looking simultaneously foreboding, shy, and dignified, as Afghans often manage to in pictures. Amra is there too with her adopted daughter, Roshi. All the children are smiling.

Ah, tonight. Well, tonight is a special one, he always said before going on to tell me about it. He would make up a story on the spot. In one of the dreams he gave me, I had become the world’s most famous painter. In another, I was the queen of an enchanted island, and I had a flying throne. He even gave me one about my favorite dessert, Jell-O. I had the power to, with a wave of my wand, turn anything into Jell-O—a school bus, the Empire State Building, the entire Pacific Ocean, if I liked. More than once, I saved the planet from destruction by waving my wand at a crashing meteor. My father, who never spoke

We hug, and she kisses me on the cheeks. Her skin is soft like felt. When we pull back, she holds me at a distance, hands cupping my shoulders, and looks into my face as if she were appraising a painting. There is a film of moisture over her eyes. They’re alive with happiness.

For me, it was a bit like watching an exciting movie with the sound turned off. I felt removed from all the cheerfulness, cut off from the celebratory mood—the way I did every December when my classmates went home to Douglas firs and stockings dangling over fireplaces and pyramids of presents.

everything around me suddenly pin-drop quiet. It was a shock, yes, the sort of third-act theatrical thing that

and mosaics and mirrored skyscraper glass. A monument to kitsch gone woefully awry.

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

Bactrian camels—they’re the ones with two humps! One of

recites the lyrics: Sur le pont d’Avignon L’on y danse, l’on y danse Sur le pont d’Avignon L’on y danse tous en rond.

ramparts ringing the ancient town center and its tangle of narrow, crooked streets; the west tower of the Avignon Cathedral, the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary gleaming atop it. Pari tells me the history of the bridge—the young shepherd who, in the twelfth century, claimed that angels told him to build a bridge across the river and who demonstrated the validity of his claim by lifting up a massive rock and hurling it in the water. She tells me about the boatmen on the Rhône who climbed the bridge to honor their patron, Saint Nicholas. And about all the floods over the centuries

How is he? Pari asked in Paris during the taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle to her apartment. Further along the path, I said.

Avignon. That’s a town near the South of France. It’s where the popes lived in the fourteenth century. So we’ll do some sightseeing there. But the great part is, Pari has told all her children about my visit and they’re going to join us.

vacation home in Provence, near a town called Les Baux.

Pont Saint-Bénezet—the bridge the children’s song is about. It’s a half bridge, really, as only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short.

Discussion Questions 1. And the Mountains Echoed introduces us to Saboor and his children, Abdullah and Pari, and the shocking, heartbreaking event that divides them. From there, the book branches off to include multiple other characters and storylines before circling back to Abdullah and Pari. How does each of the other characters relate back to the original story? What themes is the author exploring by having these stories counterpoint one another? 2. The novel begins with an extraordinary sacrifice that has ramifications for generations. What do you think of the decision Saboor makes? How are Nila and Nabi implicated in it? What do you think of their motives? Whom do you think has the best intentions of these three adults? Ultimately, do you think Pari would have had a happier life if she had stayed with her birth family? 3. Think of other sacrifices that are made throughout the book. Are there certain choices that are easier than others? Is Saboor’s sacrifice of Pari easier or more difficult than Parwana’s sacrifice of her sister? How are they similar and how are they different? Who else makes sacrifices in the book? What do you think the author is saying about the nature of the decisions we make in our lives and the ways in which they affect others? 4. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. / I’ll meet you there.” The author chose this thirteenth-century Rumi poem as the epigraph for the book. Discuss the novel in light of this poem. What ...