And the Mountains Echoed (50 page)

We move from the living room to the kitchen. I fetch a pot from the cabinet and fill it at the sink.

“I want to show you some of these,” Pari says, a charge of excitement in her voice. She's sitting at the table, busily flipping through a photo album that she fished from her suitcase earlier.

“I'm afraid the coffee won't be up to Parisian standards,” I say over my shoulder, pouring water from the pot into the coffeemaker.

“I promise you I am not a coffee snob.” She has taken off the yellow scarf and put on reading glasses, through which she is peering at pictures.

When the coffeemaker begins to gurgle, I take my seat at the kitchen table beside Pari. “
Ah oui
.
Voilà
. Here it is,” she says. She flips the album around and pushes it over to me. She taps on a picture. “This is the place. Where your father and I were born. And our brother Iqbal too.”

When she first called me from Paris, she mentioned Iqbal's name—as proof, perhaps, to convince me she was not lying about
who she said she was. But I already knew she was telling the truth. I knew it the moment I picked up the receiver and she spoke my father's name into my ear and asked whether it was his residence she had reached. And I said,
Yes
,
who is this?
and she said,
I am his sister
. My heart kicked violently. I fumbled for a chair to drop into, everything around me suddenly pin-drop quiet. It was a shock, yes, the sort of third-act theatrical thing that rarely happens to people in real life. But on another plane—a plane that defies rationalizing, a more fragile plane, one whose essence would fracture and splinter if I even vocalized it—I wasn't surprised that she was calling. As if I had expected it, even, my whole life, that through some dizzying fit of design, or circumstance, or chance, or fate, or whatever name you want to slap on it, we would find each other, she and I.

I carried the receiver with me to the backyard then and sat on a chair by the vegetable patch, where I have kept growing the bell peppers and giant squash my mother had planted. The sun warmed my neck as I lit a cigarette with quivering hands.

I know who you are
, I said.
I've known all my life
.

There was silence at the other end, but I had the impression she was weeping soundlessly, that she had rolled her head away from the phone to do it.

We spoke for almost an hour. I told her I knew what had happened to her, how I used to make my father recount the story for me at bedtime. Pari said she had been unaware of her own history herself and would have probably died without knowing it if not for a letter left behind by her stepuncle, Nabi, before his own death in Kabul, in which he had detailed the events of her childhood among other things. The letter had been left in the care of someone named Markos Varvaris, a surgeon working in Kabul, who had then searched for and found Pari in France. Over the summer,
Pari had flown to Kabul, met with Markos Varvaris, who had arranged for her to visit Shadbagh.

Near the end of the conversation, I sensed her gathering herself before she finally said,
Well, I think I am ready. Can I speak with him now?

That was when I had to tell her.

I slide the photo album closer now and inspect the picture that Pari is pointing to. I see a mansion nestled behind high shiny-white walls topped with barbed wire. Or, rather, someone's tragically misguided idea of a mansion, three stories high, pink, green, yellow, white, with parapets and turrets and pointed eaves and mosaics and mirrored skyscraper glass. A monument to kitsch gone woefully awry.

“My God!” I breathe.

“C'est affreux, non?”
Pari says. “It is horrible. The Afghans, they call these
Narco Palaces
. This one is the house of a well-known criminal of war.”

“So this is all that's left of Shadbagh?”

“Of the old village, yes. This, and many acres of fruit trees of—what do you call it?—
des vergers
.”

“Orchards.”

“Yes.” She runs her fingers over the photo of the mansion. “I wish I know where our old house was exactly, I mean in relation to this Narco Palace. I would be happy to know the precise spot.”

She tells me about the new Shadbagh—an actual town, with schools, a clinic, a shopping district, even a small hotel—which has been built about two miles away from the site of the old village. The town was where she and her translator had looked for her half brother. I had learned all of this over the course of that first, long phone conversation with Pari, how no one in town seemed to know Iqbal until Pari had run into an old man who did, an old childhood
friend of Iqbal's, who had spotted him and his family staying on a barren field near the old windmill. Iqbal had told this old friend that when he was in Pakistan, he had been receiving money from his older brother who lived in northern California.
I asked
, Pari said on the phone,
I asked, Did Iqbal tell you the name of this brother? and the old man said, Yes, Abdullah. And then
, alors,
after that the rest was not so difficult. Finding you and your father, I mean
.

I asked Iqbal's friend where Iqbal was now
, Pari said.
I asked what happened to him, and the old man said he did not know. But he seemed very nervous, and he did not look at me when he said this. And I think, Pari, I worry that something bad happened to Iqbal
.

She flips through more pages now and shows me photographs of her children—Alain, Isabelle, and Thierry—and snapshots of her grandchildren—at birthday parties, posing in swimming trunks at the edge of a pool. Her apartment in Paris, the pastel blue walls and white blinds pulled down to the sills, the shelves of books. Her cluttered office at the university, where she had taught mathematics before the rheumatoid had forced her into retirement.

I keep turning the pages of the album as she provides captions to the snapshots—her old friend Collette, Isabelle's husband Albert, Pari's own husband Eric, who had been a playwright and had died of a heart attack back in 1997. I pause at a photo of the two of them, impossibly young, sitting side by side on orange-colored cushions in some kind of restaurant, her in a white blouse, him in a T-shirt, his hair, long and limp, tied in a ponytail.

“That was the night that we met,” Pari says. “It was a setup.”

“He had a kind face.”

Pari nods. “Yes. When we get married, I thought, Oh, we will have a long time together. I thought to myself, Thirty years at least, maybe forty. Fifty, if we are lucky. Why not?” She stares
at the picture, lost for a moment, then smiles lightly. “But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.” She pushes the album away and sips her coffee. “And you? You never get married?”

I shrug and flip another page. “There was one close call.”

“I am sorry, ‘close call'?”

“It means I almost did. But we never made it to the ring stage.”

This is not true. It was painful and messy. Even now, the memory of it is like a soft ache behind my breastbone.

She ducks her head. “I am sorry. I am very rude.”

“No. It's fine. He found someone both more beautiful and less … encumbered, I guess. Speaking of beautiful, who is this?”

I point to a striking-looking woman with long dark hair and big eyes. In the picture, she is holding a cigarette like she is bored—elbow tucked into her side, head tilted up insouciantly—but her gaze is penetrating, defiant.

“This is Maman. My mother, Nila Wahdati. Or, I thought she was my mother. You understand.”

“She's gorgeous,” I say.

“She was. She committed suicide. Nineteen seventy-four.”

“I'm sorry.”

“
Non, non
. It's all right.” She brushes the picture absently with the side of her thumb. “Maman was elegant and talented. She read books and had many strong opinions and always she was telling them to people. But she had also very deep sadness. All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said,
Fill these holes inside of me, Pari
.”

I nod. I think I understand something of that.

“But I could not. And later, I did not want to. I did careless things. Reckless things.” She sits back in the chair, her shoulders slumping, puts her thin white hands in her lap. She considers for a minute before saying, “
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.” For a moment, her face looks stricken. She is like a helpless schoolgirl. “It would not have been so difficult,” she says tiredly. “I should have been more kind. I should have been more like you.”

She lets out a heavy breath and folds the photo album shut. After a pause, she says brightly, “
Ah, bon
. Now I wish to ask something of you.”

“Of course.”

“Will you show me some of your paintings?”

We smile at each other.

Pari stays a month with Baba and me. In the mornings, we take breakfast together in the kitchen. Black coffee and toast for Pari, yogurt for me, and fried eggs with bread for Baba, something he has found a taste for in the last year. I worried it was going to raise his cholesterol, eating all those eggs, and I asked Dr. Bashiri during one of Baba's appointments. Dr. Bashiri gave me one of his tight-lipped smiles and said,
Oh, I wouldn't worry about it
. And that reassured me—at least until a bit later when I was helping Baba buckle his seat belt and it occurred to me that maybe what Dr. Bashiri had really meant was,
We're past all that now
.

After breakfast, I retreat into my office—otherwise known as my bedroom—and Pari keeps Baba company while I work. At her request, I have written down for her the schedule of the TV shows he likes to watch, what time to give him his midmorning pills, which snacks he likes and when he's apt to ask for them. It was her idea I write it all down.

You could just pop in and ask
, I said.

I don't want to disturb you
, she said.
And I want to know. I want to know him
.

I don't tell her that she will never know him the way she longs to. Still, I share with her a few tricks of the trade. For instance, how if Baba starts to get agitated I can usually, though not always, calm him down—for reasons that baffle me still—by quickly handing him a free home-shopping catalog or a furniture-sale flyer. I keep a steady supply of both.

If you want him to nap, flip on the Weather Channel or anything to do with golf. And never let him watch cooking shows
.

Why not?

They agitate him for some reason
.

After lunch, the three of us go out for a stroll. We keep it short for both their sakes—what with Baba tiring quickly and Pari's arthritis. Baba has a wariness in his eyes, tottering anxiously along the sidewalk between Pari and me, wearing an old newsboy cap, his cardigan sweater, and wool-lined moccasins. There is a middle school around the block with an ill-manicured soccer field and, across that, a small playground where I often take Baba. We always find a young mother or two, strollers parked near them, a toddler stumbling around in the sandbox, now and then a teenage couple cutting school, swinging lazily and smoking. They rarely look at Baba—the teenagers—and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.

One day, I pause during dictation and go to the kitchen to refresh my coffee and I find the two of them watching a movie together. Baba on the recliner, his moccasins sticking out from under the shawl, his head bent forward, mouth gaping slightly, eyebrows drawn together in either concentration or confusion.
And Pari sitting beside him, hands folded in her lap, feet crossed at the ankles.

“Who's this one?” Baba says.

“That is Latika.”

“Who?”

“Latika, the little girl from the slums. The one who could not jump on the train.”

“She doesn't look little.”

“Yes, but a lot of years have passed,” Pari says. “She is older now, you see.”

One day the week before, at the playground, we were sitting on a park bench, the three of us, and Pari said,
Abdullah, do you remember that when you were a boy you had a little sister?

She'd barely finished her sentence when Baba began to weep. Pari pressed his head into her chest, saying,
I am sorry
,
I am so sorry
, over and over in a panicky way, wiping his cheeks with her hands, but Baba kept seizing with sobs, so violently he started to choke.

“And do you know who this is, Abdullah?”

Baba grunts.

“He is Jamal. The boy from the game show.”

“He is not,” Baba says roughly.