Excerpts from "And the Mountains Echoed" by Khalid Hosseini

Out beyond ideas

Of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
                   Jelaluddin Rumi, 13^th century

In the end, the solution Baba Ayub found was a simple one, as the best solutions are: he removed a tiny bell from around the neck of one of his goats and hung it instead around Qais’s neck. This way the bell would wake someone if Qais were to rise in the middle of the night. The sleepwalking stopped after a time, but Qais grew attached to the bell and refused to part with it. And so even though it didn’t serve its original use, the bell remained fastened to the string around the boy’s neck.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.

There was a flat rock at the edge of his field and he lowered himself upon it. He often sat there for an hour or more, gazing up at the stars, the clouds floating past the moon. He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more,  to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty.

These were gestures, Abdullah knew. Acts of duty, drawn from a well far shallower than the one she reached into for Iqbal. In the end it came down to a simple thing: they were not her children, he and Pari.

Abdullah knew it was not a sensible thing he had done. But when he knelt beside Pari, gently shook her away from a nap, and produced the feather from behind his back like a magician, it was all worth it – worth it for the way her face broke open with surprise first, then delight; for the way she stamped his cheeks with kisses; for how she cackled when he tickled her chin with soft end of the feather - and suddenly his feet didn’t hurt at all.

Her hair reminded Abdullah of his mother’s, and he ached for her all over again, for her gentleness, her inborn happiness, her bewilderment at people’s cruelty. He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn’t. It spilled out of her, came pouring out of her eyes. He knew that in their mother’s dying, something of her had passed on to Pari; something of her cheerful devotion, her guilelessness, her unabashed hopefulness. Pari was the only person in the world who would never, could never, hurt him. Some days, Abdullah felt she was the only true family he had.

He loved the fact that he was the one to help her with her first step, to gasp at her ffirst uttered word. This was his purpose, he believed, the reason God had made him, so he would be there to take care of Pari when He took away their mother.

There was no forgetting. Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah’s vision everywhere he went. She was like dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent in the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.

All her life Parwana had made sure to avoid standing in front of a mirror with her sister. It robbed her of hope to see her face beside Masooma’s, to see so plainly what she had been denied. But in public, every stranger’s eye was a mirror. There was no escape.

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with mountains only. The question whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

I could only infer that for some people, particularly women, marriage – even an unhappy one such as this - is an escape from even greater unhappiness.

I rarely heard him address her by anything other than aziz, which means “beloved”, “darling” and yet never did the couple seem more distant from each other than when he said it, and never this term of endearment sound so starched as when it came from Mr. Wahdati’s lips.

I took those two helpless children, in whom love of the simplest and purest kind had found expression, and I tore one from the other. I will never forget the sudden emotional mayhem.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

I was not altogether surprised to learn that she had taken her own life. I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately; intensely; and without recourse.

It seemed to him that Timur was a man who wrote his own press kit, and his generosity, Idris suspected, was a calculated piece of an intricately constructed character.

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. He recognizes the fierce determination that had seized him for what it really was, an illusion, a mirage. He had fallen under the influence of something like a drug. The distance between him and the girl feels vast now. It feels infinite, insurmountable, and her promise to her misguided, a reckless mistake, a terrible misreading of the measures of his own powers and will and character; something best forgotten.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent most of my childhood years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self.

What I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they’re all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a bit of charm – or a lot – and that can fool you. But really they are all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven’t been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it’s a mistake to give it to them. They can’t accept it. They can’t accept the very thing they are needing. They end up hating you for it.  And it never ends because they can’t hate you enough. It never ends – the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all.

I don’t recognize myself in this version of the story. I resent him for being the way he is. I resent him for the narrowed borders of my existence, for being the reason my best years are draining away from me. There are days when all I want is to be free of him and his petulance and neediness. I am nothing like a saint.

I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast, and permanent  as the sky, and 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.

It was easier with mother – always had been – less complicated, less treacherous. I didn’t have to be on my guard so much. I didn’t have to watch what I said all the time for fear of inflicting a wound.

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”.

I can barely admit it to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath. The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back.

You say you felt a presence, but I sensed only an absence; a vague pain without a source. I was like the patient who can’t explain to the doctor where it hurts, but only that it does.

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I have this on the shore for you, I pray you find it sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.