Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

should have. Dying can be quite the career move for a young poet. When we returned, I was frail and withdrawn. I couldn’t be bothered with writing. I had little interest in food or conversation or entertainment. I was averse to visitors. I just wanted to pull the curtains and sleep all day every day. Which was what I did mostly. Eventually, I got out of bed and slowly resumed my daily routines, by which I mean the stringent essentials a person must tend to in order to remain functional and nominally civil. But I felt diminished. Like

I had left something vital of myself behind in India.

EB: Was your father concerned?

NW: Quite the contrary. He was encouraged. He thought that my encounter with mortality had shaken me out of my immaturity and waywardness. He didn’t understand that I felt lost. I’ve read, Monsieur Boustouler, that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own

demise. That was how I felt, disoriented, suspended in confusion, stripped of my compass. Unspeakably depressed as well. And, in that state, you are vulnerable. Which is likely why I said yes the following year, in 1949, when Suleiman Wahdati asked my father for my hand.

EB: You were twenty.

NW: He was not.

She offers me another sandwich, which I decline, and a cup of coffee, which I accept. As she sets water on to boil, she asks if I am married. I tell her I am not and that I doubt I ever will

be. She looks at me over her shoulder, her gaze lingering, and grins.

NW: Ah. I can usually tell.

EB: Surprise!

NW: Maybe it’s the concussion.

She points to the bandanna.

NW: This isn’t a fashion statement. I slipped and fell a couple of days ago, tore my forehead open. Still, I should have known. About you, I mean. In my experience, men who understand women as well as you seem to rarely want to

have anything to do with them.

She gives me the coffee, lights a cigarette, and takes a seat.

NW: I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it’s that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it’s going to work. It’s astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks. Me, I didn’t even need that long. My husband was a

decent man. But he was much too serious, aloof, and uninteresting. Also, he was in love with the chauffeur.

EB: Ah. That must have come as a shock.

NW: Well, it did thicken the proverbial plot.

She smiles a little sadly.

NW: I felt sorry for him, mostly. He could not have chosen a worse time or worse place to be born the way he was.

He died of a stroke when our daughter was six. At that point, I could have

stayed in Kabul. I had the house and my husband’s wealth. There was a gardener and the aforementioned chauffeur. It would have been a comfortable life. But I packed our bags and moved us, Pari and me, to France.

EB: Which, as you indicated earlier, you did for her benefit.

NW: Everything I’ve done, Monsieur Boustouler, I’ve done for my daughter. Not that she understands, or appreciates, the full measure of what I’ve done for her. She can be breathtakingly thoughtless, my daughter. If she knew the

life she would have had to endure, if not for me …

EB: Is your daughter a disappointment to you?

NW: Monsieur Boustouler, I’ve come to believe she’s my punishment.

One day in 1975, Pari comes home to her new apartment and finds a small package on her bed. It is a year after she fetched her mother from the emergency room and nine months since she left Julien. Pari is living now with a nursing student named Zahia, a young Algerian woman with curly brown hair and green eyes. She is a competent girl, with a cheerful, unfrazzled disposition, and they have lived together easily, though Zahia is now engaged to her boyfriend, Sami, and

moving in with him at the end of the semester.

There is a folded sheet of paper next to the package. This came for you. I’m spending the night at Sami’s. See you tomorrow. Je t’embrasse. Zahia.

Pari rips the package open. Inside is a magazine and, clipped to it, another note, this one written in a familiar, almost femininely graceful script. This was sent to Nila and then to the couple who live in Collette’s old apartment and now it is forwarded to me. You should update your forwarding address. Read this at your own peril. Neither of us fares very well, I’m afraid. Julien.

Pari drops the journal on the bed and makes herself a spinach salad and some couscous. She changes into pajamas and eats by the TV, a small black-and-white rental. Absently, she watches images of airlifted South Vietnamese refugees arriving in Guam. She thinks of Collette, who had

protested the American war in Vietnam in the streets. Collette, who had brought a wreath of dahlias and daisies to Maman’s memorial, who had held and kissed Pari, who had delivered a beautiful recitation of one of Maman’s poems at the podium.

Julien had not attended the services. He’d called and said, feebly, that he disliked memorials, he found them depressing.

Who doesn’t? Pari had said.

I think it’s best I stay clear.

Do as you like, Pari had said into the receiver, thinking, But it won’t absolve you, not coming. Any more than attending will absolve me. Of how reckless we were. How thoughtless. My God. Pari had hung up with him knowing that her fling with Julien had been the final push for Maman. She had hung up knowing that for the rest of her life it would slam into her at random moments, the guilt, the terrible remorse, catching her off guard, and that she would ache to the