And the Mountains Echoed (48 page)

But until then, the only escape was to slacken the reins on my mind. From time to time, I would find myself thinking of Jeremy Warwick, from math. Jeremy had laconic blue eyes and a white-boy Afro. He was secretive and brooding. He played guitar in a garage band—at the school's annual talent show, they played a raucous take on “House of the Rising Sun.” In class, I sat four seats behind and to the left of Jeremy. Sometimes I pictured us kissing, his hand cupped around the back of my neck, his face so close to mine it eclipsed the whole world. A sensation would spread through me like a warm feather gently shivering across my belly, my limbs. Of course it could never happen.
We
could never happen, Jeremy and I. If he had even the dimmest inkling of my existence, he had never given a clue. Which was just as well, really. This way, I could pretend the only reason we couldn't be together was that he didn't like me.

I worked summers at my parents' restaurant. When I was younger, I had loved to wipe the tables, help arrange plates and silverware, fold paper napkins, drop a red gerbera into the little round vase at the center of each table. I pretended I was indispensable to the family business, that the restaurant would fall apart without me to make sure all the salt and pepper shakers were full.

By the time I was in high school, days at Abe's Kabob House dragged long and hot. Much of the luster that the things inside the restaurant had held for me in childhood had faded. The old
humming soda merchandiser in the corner, the vinyl table covers, the stained plastic cups, the tacky item names on the laminated menus—
Caravan Kabob
,
Khyber Pass Pilaf
,
Silk Route Chicken
—the badly framed poster of the Afghan girl from
National Geographic
, the one with the eyes—like they had passed an ordinance that every single Afghan restaurant had to have her eyes staring back from the wall. Next to it, Baba had hung an oil painting I had done in seventh grade of the big minarets in Herat. I remember the charge of pride and glamour I had felt when he had first put it up, when I watched customers eating their lamb kabobs beneath my artwork.

At lunch hour, while Mother and I ping-ponged back and forth from the spicy smoke in the kitchen to the tables where we served office workers and city employees and cops, Baba worked the register—Baba and his grease-stained white shirt, the bushel of gray chest hair spilling over the open top button, his thick, hairy forearms. Baba beaming, waving cheerfully to each entering customer.
Hello, sir! Hello, madam! Welcome to Abe's Kabob House. I'm Abe. Can I take your order please?
It made me cringe how he didn't realize that he sounded like the goofy Middle Eastern sidekick in a bad sitcom. Then, with each meal I served, there was the sideshow of Baba ringing the old copper bell. It had started as a kind of joke, I suppose, the bell, which Baba had hooked to the wall behind the register counter. Now each table served was greeted by a hearty clang of the copper bell. The regulars were used to it—they barely heard it anymore—and new customers mostly chalked it up to the eccentric charm of the place, though there were complaints from time to time.

You don't want to ring the bell anymore
, Baba said one night. It was in the spring quarter of my senior year in high school. We were in the car outside the restaurant, after we had closed, waiting for Mother, who had forgotten her antacid pills inside and had run back in to fetch them. Baba wore a leaden expression. He had been
in a dark mood all day. A light drizzle fell on the strip mall. It was late, and the lot was empty, save for a couple of cars at the KFC drive-thru and a pickup parked outside the dry-cleaning shop, two guys inside the truck, smoke corkscrewing up from the windows.

It was more fun when I wasn't supposed to
, I said.

Everything is, I guess
. He sighed heavily.

I remembered how it used to thrill me, when I was little, when Baba lifted me up by the underarms and let me ring the bell. When he put me down again, my face would shine happy and proud.

Baba turned on the car heater, crossed his arms.

Long way to Baltimore
.

I said brightly,
You can fly out to visit anytime
.

Fly out anytime
, he repeated with a touch of derision.
I cook kabob for a living, Pari
.

Then I'll come visit
.

Baba rolled his eyes toward me and gave me a drawn look. His melancholy was like the darkness outside pushing against the car windows.

Every day for a month I had been checking our mailbox, my heart riding a swell of hope each time the delivery truck pulled up to the curb. I would bring the mail inside, close my eyes, think,
This could be it
. I would open my eyes and sift through the bills and the coupons and the sweepstakes. Then, on Tuesday of the week before, I had ripped open an envelope and found the words I had been waiting for:
We are pleased to inform you
…

I leapt to my feet. I screamed—an actual throat-ripping yowl that made my eyes water. Almost instantaneously, an image streaked through my head: opening night at a gallery, me dressed in something simple, black, and elegant, encircled by patrons and crinkle-browed critics, smiling and answering their questions, as
clusters of admirers linger before my canvases and servers in white gloves float around the gallery pouring wine, offering little square bites of salmon with dill or asparagus spears wrapped in puff pastry. I experienced one of those sudden bursts of euphoria, the kind where you want to wrap strangers in a hug and dance with them in great big swoops.

It's your mother I worry for
, Baba said.

I'll call every night. I promise. You know I will
.

Baba nodded. The leaves of the maples near the entrance to the parking lot tossed about in a sudden gust of wind.

Have you thought some more
, he said,
about what we discussed?

You mean, junior college?

Only for a year, maybe two. Just to give her time to get accustomed to the idea. Then you could reapply
.

I shuddered with a sudden jolt of anger.
Baba, these people reviewed my test scores and transcripts, and they went through my portfolio, and they thought enough of my artwork not only to accept me but to offer me a scholarship. This is one of the best institutes of art in the country. It's not a school you say no to. You don't get a second chance like this
.

That's true
, he said, straightening up in his seat. He cupped his hands and blew warm air into them.
Of course I understand. Of course I'm happy for you
. I could see the struggle in his face. And the fear too. Not just fear
for
me and what might happen to me three thousand miles from home. But fear
of
me, of losing me. Of the power I wielded, through my absence, to make him unhappy, to maul his open, vulnerable heart, if I chose to, like a Doberman going to work on a kitten.

I found myself thinking of his sister. By then, my connection with Pari—whose presence had once been like a pounding deep within me—had long waned. I thought of her infrequently. As the years had swept past, I had outgrown her, the way I had outgrown
favorite pajamas and stuffed animals I had once clung to. 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.

Baba cleared his throat and looked out the window at the dark sky and the clouded-over moon, his eyes liquid with emotion.

Everything will remind me of you
.

It was in the tender, slightly panicky way he spoke these words that I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast, and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.

I reached over from the darkened backseat and touched his face. He leaned his cheek onto my palm.

What's taking so long?
he murmured.

She's locking up
, I said. I felt exhausted. I watched Mother hurry to the car. The drizzle had turned into a downpour.

A month later, a couple of weeks before I was due to fly east for a campus visit, Mother went to Dr. Bashiri to tell him the antacid pills had done nothing to help her stomach pain. He sent her for an ultrasound. They found a tumor the size of a walnut in her left ovary.

“Baba?”

He is on the recliner, sitting motionless, slumped forward. He has his sweatpants on, his lower legs covered by a checkered
wool shawl. He is wearing the brown cardigan sweater I bought him the year before over a flannel shirt he has buttoned all the way. This is the way he insists on wearing his shirts now, with the collar buttoned, which makes him look both boyish and frail, resigned to old age. He looks a little puffy in the face today, and strands of his white hair spill uncombed over his brow. He is watching
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
with a somber, perplexed expression. When I call his name, his gaze lingers on the screen like he hasn't heard me before he drags it away and looks up with displeasure. He has a small sty growing on the lower lid of his left eye. He needs a shave.

“Baba, can I mute the TV for a second?”

“I'm watching,” he says.

“I know. But you have a visitor.” I had already told him about Pari Wahdati's visit the day before and again this morning. But I don't ask him if he remembers. It is something that I learned early on, to not put him on the spot, because it embarrasses him and makes him defensive, sometimes abusive.

I pluck the remote from the arm of the recliner and turn off the sound, bracing myself for a tantrum. The first time he threw one, I was convinced it was a charade, an act he was putting on. To my relief, Baba doesn't protest beyond a long sigh through the nose.

I motion to Pari, who is lingering in the hallway at the entrance to the living room. Slowly, she walks over to us, and I pull her up a chair close to Baba's recliner. She is a bundle of nervous excitement, I can tell. She sits erect, pale, leaning forward from the edge of the chair, knees pressed together, her hands clamped, and her smile so tight her lips are turning white. Her eyes are glued on Baba, as if she has only moments with him and is trying to memorize his face.

“Baba, this is the friend I told you about.”

He eyes the gray-haired woman across from him. He has an unnerving way of looking at people these days, even when he is staring directly at them, that gives nothing away. He looks disengaged, closed off, like he meant to look elsewhere and his eyes happened upon them by accident.

Pari clears her throat. Even so, her voice shakes when she speaks. “Hello, Abdullah. My name is Pari. It's so wonderful to see you.”

He nods slowly. I can practically
see
the uncertainty and confusion rippling across his face like waves of muscle spasm. His eyes shift from my face to Pari's. He opens his mouth in a strained half smile the way he does when he thinks a prank is being played on him.

“You have an accent,” he finally says.

“She lives in France,” I said. “And, Baba, you have to speak English. She doesn't understand Farsi.”

Baba nods. “So you live in London?” he says to Pari.

“Baba!”

“What?” He turns sharply to me. Then he understands and gives an embarrassed little laugh before switching from Farsi. “Do you live in London?”

“Paris, actually,” Pari says. “I live in a small apartment in Paris.” She doesn't lift her eyes from him.

“I always planned to take my wife to Paris. Sultana—that was her name, God rest her soul. She was always saying,
Abdullah, take me to Paris. When will you take me to Paris?
”

Actually, Mother didn't much like to travel. She never saw why she would forgo the comfort and familiarity of her own home for the ordeal of flying and suitcase lugging. She had no sense of culinary adventure—her idea of exotic food was the
Orange Chicken
at
the Chinese take-out place on Taylor Street. It is a bit of a marvel how Baba, at times, summons her with such uncanny precision—remembering, for instance, that she salted her food by bouncing the salt grains off the palm of her hand or her habit of interrupting people on the phone when she never did it in person—and how, other times, he can be so wildly inaccurate. I imagine Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist. She is becoming a ghostly outline, a hollow shell, that he feels compelled to fill with bogus details and fabricated character traits, as though false memories are better than none at all.

“Well, it is a lovely city,” Pari says.