And the Mountains Echoed

white, with parapets and turrets and pointed eaves and mosaics and mirrored skyscraper glass. A monument to kitsch gone woefully awry.
    â€œMy God!” I breathe.
    â€œC’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.”
    â€œSo this is all that’s left of Shadbagh?”
    â€œOf the old village, yes. This, and many acres of fruit trees of—what do you call it?—
des vergers
.”
    â€œOrchards.”
    â€œYes.” 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 childhoodfriend 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.
    â€œThat was the night that we met,” Pari says. “It was a setup.”
    â€œHe 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 staresat 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.”
    â€œI am sorry, ‘close call’?”
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œNo. 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.
    â€œThis is Maman. My mother, Nila Wahdati. Or, I thought she was my mother. You understand.”
    â€œShe’s gorgeous,” I say.
    â€œShe was. She committed suicide. Nineteen seventy-four.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œ
Non, non
. It’s all right.” She brushes the