Текст книги "And the Mountains Echoed"

Автор книги: Khaled Hosseini

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“I assume she’ll sell the house,” Mamá says, “now that it’s hers.”

“She said I could stay on as long as I liked, actually,” I say. “Rent-free.”

I can all but see Mamá’s lips tighten skeptically. She’s an islander. She suspects the motives of all mainlanders, looks askance at their apparent acts of goodwill. This was one of the reasons I knew, when I was a boy, that I would leave Tinos one day when I had the chance. A kind of despair used to get hold of me whenever I heard people talking this way.

“How is the dovecote coming along?” I ask to change the subject.

“I had to give it a rest. It tired me out.”

Mamá was diagnosed in Athens six months ago by a neurologist I had insisted she see after Thalia told me Mamá was twitching and dropping things all the time. It was Thalia who took her. Since the trip to the neurologist, Mamá has been on a tear. I know this through the e-mails Thalia sends me. Repainting the house, fixing water leaks, coaxing Thalia into helping her build a whole new closet upstairs, even replacing cracked shingles on the roof, though thankfully Thalia put an end to that. Now the dovecote. I picture Mamá with her sleeves rolled high, hammer in hand, sweat staining her back, pounding nails and sanding planks of wood. Racing against her own failing neurons. Wringing every last drop of use from them while there is still time.

“When are you coming home?” Mamá says.

“Soon,” I say. Soonwas what I said the year before too when she asked the same question. It has been two years since my last visit to Tinos.

A brief pause. “Don’t wait too long. I want to see you before they strap me in the iron lung.” She laughs. This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of bad luck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self-pity. It has the paradoxical—and I know calculated—effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune.

“Come for Christmas if you can,” she says. “Before the fourth of January, at any rate. Thalia says there is going to be a solar eclipse over Greece that day. She read it on the Internet. We could watch it together.”

“I’ll try, Mamá,” I say.

It was like waking up one morning and finding that a wild animal has wandered into your house. No place felt safe to me. She was there at every corner and turn, prowling, stalking, forever dabbing at her cheek with a handkerchief to dry the dribble that constantly flowed from her mouth. The small dimensions of our house rendered escape from her impossible. I especially dreaded mealtime when I had to endure the spectacle of Thalia lifting the bottom of the mask to deliver spoonfuls of food to her mouth. My stomach turned at the sight and at the sound. She ate noisily, bits of half-chewed food always falling with a wet splat onto her plate, or the table, or even the floor. She was forced to take all liquids, even soup, through a straw, of which her mother kept a stash in her purse. She slurped and gurgled when she sucked broth up the straw, and it always stained the mask and dripped down the side of her jaw onto her neck. The first time, I asked to be excused from the table, and Mamá shot me a hard look. And so I trained myself to avert my gaze and not hear, but it wasn’t easy. I would walk into the kitchen and there she would be, sitting still while Madaline rubbed ointment onto her cheek to prevent chafing. I began keeping a calendar, a mental countdown, of the four weeks Mamá had said Madaline and Thalia were staying.

I wished Madaline had come by herself. I liked Madaline just fine. We sat, the four of us, in the small square-shaped courtyard outside our front door, and she sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes one after the other, the angles of her face shaded by our olive tree and a gold straw cloche that should have looked absurd on her, wouldhave on anyone else—like Mamá, for instance. But Madaline was one of those people to whom elegance came effortlessly as though it were a genetic skill, like the ability to curl your tongue into the shape of a tube. With Madaline, there was never a lull in the conversation; stories just trilled out of her. One morning she told us about her travels—to Ankara, for instance, where she had strolled the banks of the Enguri Su and sipped green tea laced with raki, or the time she and Mr. Gianakos had gone to Kenya and ridden the backs of elephants among thorny acacias and even sat down to eat cornmeal mush and coconut rice with the local villagers.

Madaline’s stories stirred up an old restlessness in me, an urge I’d always had to strike out headlong into the world, to be dauntless. By comparison, my own life on Tinos seemed crushingly ordinary. 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. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home.

Madaline said that in Ankara she had gone to a place called Kuğulu Park and watched swans gliding in the water. She said the water was dazzling.

“I’m rhapsodizing,” she said, laughing.

“You’re not,” Mamá said.

“It’s an old habit. I talk too much. I always did. You remember how much grief I’d bring us, chattering in class? You were never at fault, Odie. You were so responsible and studious.”

“They’re interesting, your stories. You have an interesting life.”

Madaline rolled her eyes. “Well, you know the Chinese curse.”

“Did you like Africa?” Mamá asked Thalia.

Thalia pressed the handkerchief to her cheek and didn’t answer. I was glad. She had the oddest speech. There was a wet quality to it, a strange mix of lisp and gargle.

“Oh, Thalia doesn’t like to travel,” Madaline said, crushing her cigarette. She said this like it was the unassailable truth. There was no looking to Thalia for confirmation or protest. “She hasn’t got a taste for it.”

“Well, neither do I,” Mamá said, again to Thalia. “I like being home. I guess I’ve just never found a compelling reason to leave Tinos.”

“And I one to stay,” Madaline said. “Other than you, naturally.” She touched Mamá’s wrist. “You know my worst fear when I left? My biggest worry? How am I going to get on without Odie? I swear, I was petrified at the thought.”

“You’ve managed fine, it seems,” Mamá said slowly, dragging her gaze from Thalia.

“You don’t understand,” Madaline said, and I realized I was the one who didn’t understand because she was looking directly at me. “I wouldn’t have kept it together without your mother. She saved me.”

“ Nowyou’re rhapsodizing,” Mamá said.

Thalia upturned her face. She was squinting. A jet, up in the blue, silently marking its trajectory with a long, single vapor trail.

“It was my father,” Madaline said, “that Odie saved me from.” I wasn’t sure if she was still addressing me. “He was one of those people who are born mean. He had bulging eyes, and this thick, short neck with a dark mole on the back of it. And fists. Fists like bricks. He’d come home and he didn’t even have to do a thing, just the sound of his boots in the hallway, the jingle of his keys, his humming, that was enough for me. When he was mad, he always sighed through the nose and pinched his eyes shut, like he was deep in thought, and then he’d rub his face and say, All right, girlie, all right, and you knew it was coming—the storm, it was coming—and it could not be stopped. No one could help you. Sometimes, just him rubbing his face, or the sigh whooshing through his mustache, and I’d see gray.

“I’ve crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I’ve 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’re 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’re 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. My first husband was like that.”

I was stunned. No one had ever spoken this plainly in my presence before, certainly not Mamá. No one I knew laid bare their hard luck this way. I felt both embarrassed for Madaline and admiring of her candor.

When she mentioned the first husband, I noticed that, for the first time since I had met her, a shadow had settled on her face, a momentary intimation of something dark and chastening, wounding, at odds with the energetic laughs and the teasing and the loose pumpkin floral dress she was wearing. I remember thinking at the time what a good actress she must be to camouflage disappointment and hurt with a veneer of cheerfulness. Like a mask, I thought, and was privately pleased with myself for the clever connection.

Later, when I was older, it wasn’t as clear to me. Thinking back on it, there was something affected about the way she paused when she mentioned the first husband, the casting down of the gaze, the catch in the throat, the slight quiver of lips, just as there was about the walloping energy and the joking, the lively, heavy-footed charm, the way even her slights landed softly, parachuted by a reassuring wink and laugh. Perhaps they were both trumped-up affectations or perhaps neither was. It became a blur for me what was performance and what real—which at least made me think of her as an infinitely more interestingactress.

“How many times did I come running to this house, Odie?” Madaline said. Now the smiling again, the swell of laughter. “Your poor parents. But this house was my haven. My sanctuary. It was. A little island within the greater one.”

Mamá said, “You were always welcomed here.”

“It was your mother who put an end to the beatings, Markos. Did she ever tell you?”

I said she hadn’t.

“Hardly surprises me. That’s Odelia Varvaris for you.”

Mamá was unfurling the edge of the apron in her lap and flattening it again with a daydreamy look on her face.

“I came here one night, bleeding from the tongue, a patch of hair ripped from the temple, my ear still ringing from a blow. He’d really gotten his hooks into me that time. What a state I was in. What a state!” The way Madaline was telling it, you might have thought she was describing a lavish meal or a good novel. “Your mother doesn’t ask because she knows. Of course she knows. She just looks at me for a long time—at me standing there, trembling—and she says, I still remember it, Odie, she said, Well, that’s about enough of this business. She says, We’re going to pay your father a visit, Maddie. And I start begging. I worried he was going to kill us both. But you know how she can be, your mother.”

I said I did, and Mamá tossed me a sidelong glance.

“She wouldn’t listen. She had this look. I’m sure you know the look. She heads out, but not before she picks up her father’s hunting rifle. The whole time we’re walking to my house, I’m trying to stop her, telling her he hadn’t hurt me that bad. But she won’t hear it. We walk right up to the door and there’s my father, in the doorway, and Odie raises the barrel and shoves it against his chin and says, Do it again and I will come back and shoot you in the face with this rifle.

“My father blinks, and for a moment he’s tongue-tied. He can’t say a word. And you want to know the best part, Markos? I look down and see a little circle, a circle of—well, I think you can guess—a little circle quietly expanding on the floor between his bare feet.”

Madaline brushed back her hair and said, to another flick of the lighter, “And that, my dear, is a true story.”

She didn’t have to say it, I knew it was true. I recognized in it Mamá’s uncomplicated, fierce loyalty, her mountainous resolve. Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And I could tell it was true from the closemouthed groan Mamá gave at the mention of that last detail. She disapproved. She probably found it distasteful, and not only for the obvious reason. In her view, people, even if they had behaved deplorably in life, deserved a modicum of dignity in death. Especially family.

Mamá shifted in her seat and said, “So if you don’t like to travel, Thalia, what do you like to do?”

All our eyes turned to Thalia. Madaline had been speaking for a while, and I recall thinking, as we sat in the courtyard with the sunlight falling in patches all around us, that it was a measure of her capacity to absorb attention, to pull everything into her vortex so thoroughly that Thalia had gone forgotten. I also left room for the possibility that they had adapted to this dynamic out of necessity, the quiet daughter eclipsed by the attention-diverting self-absorbed mother routine, that Madaline’s narcissism was perhaps an act of kindness, of maternal protectiveness.

Thalia mumbled something.

“A little louder, darling,” came the suggestion from Madaline.

Thalia cleared her throat, a rumbling, phlegmy sound. “Science.”

I noticed for the first time the color of her eyes, green like ungrazed pasture, the deep, coarse dark of her hair, and that she had unblemished skin like her mother. I wondered if she’d been pretty once, maybe even beautiful like Madaline.

“Tell them about the sundial, darling,” Madaline said.

Thalia shrugged.

“She built a sundial,” Madaline said. “Right in our backyard. Last summer. She had no help. Not from Andreas. And certainly not from me.” She chortled.

“Equatorial or horizontal?” Mamá asked.

There was a flash of surprise in Thalia’s eyes. A kind of double take. Like a person walking down a crowded street in a foreign city catching within earshot a snippet of her native tongue. “Horizontal,” she said in that strange wet voice of hers.

“What did you use for a gnomon?”

Thalia’s eyes rested on Mamá. “I cut a postcard.”

That was the first time I saw how it could be between those two.

“She used to take apart her toys when she was little,” Madaline said. “She liked mechanical toys, things with inner contraptions. Not that she played with them, did you, darling? No, she’d break them up, all those expensive toys, open them up as soon as we gave them to her. I used to get into such a state over it. But Andreas—I have to give him credit here—Andreas said to let her, that it was a sign of a curious mind.”

“If you like, we can build one together,” Mamá said. “A sundial, I mean.”

“I already know how.”

“Mind your manners, darling,” Madaline said, extending, then bending, one leg, as though she were stretching for a dance routine. “Aunt Odie is trying to be helpful.”

“Maybe something else, then,” Mamá said. “We could build some other thing.”

“Oh! Oh!” Madaline said, hurriedly blowing smoke, wheezing. “I can’t believe I haven’t told you yet, Odie. I have news. Take a guess.”

Mamá shrugged.

“I’m going back to acting! In films! I’ve been offered a role, the lead, in a major production. Can you believe it?”

“Congratulations,” Mamá said flaccidly.

“I have the script with me. I’d let you read it, Odie, but I worry you won’t like it. Is that bad? I’d be crushed, I don’t mind telling you. I wouldn’t get over it. We start shooting in the fall.”

The next morning, after breakfast, Mamá pulled me aside. “All right, what is it? What’s wrong with you?”

I said I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“You best drop it. The stupid act. It doesn’t suit you,” she said. She had a way of narrowing her eyes and tilting her head just a shade. To this day it has a grip on me.

“I can’t do it, Mamá. Don’t make me.”

“And why not, exactly?”

It came out before I could do a thing about it. “She’s a monster.”

Mamá’s mouth became small. She regarded me not with anger but with a disheartened look, as though I’d drawn all the sap out of her. There was a finality to this look. Resignation. Like a sculptor finally dropping mallet and chisel, giving up on a recalcitrant block that will never take the shape he’d pictured.

“She’s a person who has had a terrible thing happen to her. Call her that name again, I’d like to see you. Say it and see what happens.”

A little bit later there we were, Thalia and I, walking down a cobblestone path flanked by stone walls on each side. I made sure to walk a few steps ahead so passersby—or, God forbid, one of the boys from school—wouldn’t think we were together, which, of course, they would anyway. Anyone could see. At the least, I hoped the distance between us would signal my displeasure and reluctance. To my relief, she didn’t make an effort to keep up. We passed sunburned, weary-looking farmers coming home from the market. Their donkeys labored under wicker baskets containing unsold produce, their hooves clip-clopping on the footpath. I knew most of the farmers, but I kept my head down and averted my eyes.

I led Thalia to the beach. I chose a rocky one I sometimes went to, knowing it would not be as crowded as some of the other beaches, like Agios Romanos. I rolled up my pants and hopped from one craggy rock to the next, choosing one close to where the waves crashed and retracted. I took off my shoes and lowered my feet into a shallow little pool that had formed between a cluster of stones. A hermit crab scurried away from my toes. I saw Thalia to my right, settling atop a rock close by.

We sat for a long while without talking and watched the ocean rumbling against the rocks. A nippy gust whipped around my ears, spraying the scent of salt on my face. A pelican hovered over the blue-green water, its wings spread. Two ladies stood side by side, knee-deep in the water, their skirts held up high. To the west, I had a view of the island, the dominant white of the homes and windmills, the green of the barley fields, the dull brown of the jagged mountains from which springs flowed every year. My father died on one of those mountains. He worked for a green-marble quarry and one day, when Mamá was six months pregnant with me, he slipped off a cliff and fell a hundred feet. Mamá said he’d forgotten to secure his safety harness.

“You should stop,” Thalia said.

I was tossing pebbles into an old galvanized-tin pail nearby and she startled me. I missed. “What’s it to you?”

“I mean, flattering yourself. I don’t want this any more than you do.”

The wind was making her hair flap, and she was holding down the mask against her face. I wondered if she lived with this fear daily, that a gust of wind would rip it from her face and she would have to chase after it, exposed. I didn’t say anything. I tossed another pebble and missed again.

“You’re an ass,” she said.

After a while she got up, and I pretended to stay. Then I looked over my shoulder and saw her heading up the beach, back toward the road, and so I put my shoes back on and followed her home.

When we returned, Mamá was mincing okra in the kitchen, and Madaline was sitting nearby, doing her nails and smoking, tapping the ash into a saucer. I cringed with some horror when I saw that the saucer belonged to the china set Mamá had inherited from her grandmother. It was the only thing of any real value that Mamá owned, the china set, and she hardly ever took it down from the shelf up near the ceiling where she kept it.

Madaline was blowing on her nails in between drags and talking about Pattakos, Papadopoulos, and Makarezos, the three colonels who had staged a military coup—the Generals’ Coup, as it was known then—earlier that year in Athens. She was saying she knew a playwright—a “dear, dear man,” as she described him—who had been imprisoned under the charge of being a communist subversive.

“Which is absurd, of course! Just absurd. You know what they do to people, the ESA, to make them talk?” She was saying this in a low voice as if the military police were hiding somewhere in the house. “They put a hose in your behind and turn on the water full blast. It’s true, Odie. I swear to you. They soak rags in the filthiest things—human filth, you understand—and shove them in people’s mouths.”

“That’s awful,” Mamá said flatly.

I wondered if she was already tiring of Madaline. The stream of puffed-up political opinions, the tales of parties Madaline had attended with her husband, the poets and intellectuals and musicians she’d clinked champagne flutes with, the list of needless, senseless trips she had taken to foreign cities. Trotting out her views on nuclear disaster and overpopulation and pollution. Mamá indulged Madaline, smiling through her stories with a look of wry bemusement, but I knew she thought unkindly of her. She probably thought Madaline was flaunting. She probably felt embarrassed for her.

This is what rankles, what pollutes Mamá’s kindness, her rescues and her acts of courage. The indebtedness that shadows them. The demands, the obligations she saddles you with. The way she uses these acts as currency, with which she barters for loyalty and allegiance. I understand now why Madaline left all those years ago. The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck. People always disappoint Mamá in the end, me included. They can’t make good on what they owe, not the way Mamá expects them to. Mamá’s consolation prize is the grim satisfaction of holding the upper hand, free to pass verdicts from the perch of strategic advantage, since she is always the one who has been wronged.

It saddens me because of what it reveals to me about Mamá’s own neediness, her own anxiety, her fear of loneliness, her dread of being stranded, abandoned. And what does it say about me that I know this about my mother, that I know precisely what she needs and yet how deliberately and unswervingly I have denied her, taking care to keep an ocean, a continent—or, preferably, both—between us for the better part of three decades?

“They have no sense of irony, the junta,” Madaline was saying, “crushing people as they do. In Greece! The birthplace of democracy … Ah, there you are! Well, how was it? What did you two get up to?”

“We played at the beach,” Thalia said.

“Was it fun? Did you have fun?”

“We had a grand time,” Thalia said.

Mamá’s eyes jumped skeptically from me to Thalia and back, but Madaline beamed and applauded silently. “Good! Now that I don’t have to worry about you two getting along, Odie and I can spend some time of our own together. What do you say, Odie? We have so much catching up to do still!”

Mamá smiled gamely and reached for a head of cabbage.

…

From then on, Thalia and I were left to our own devices. We were to explore the island, play games at the beach, amuse ourselves the way children are expected to. Mamá would pack us a sandwich each, and we would set off together after breakfast.

Once out of sight, we often drifted apart. At the beach, I took a swim or lay on a rock with my shirt off while Thalia went off to collect shells or skip rocks on the water, which was no good because the waves were too big. We went walking along the footpaths that snaked through vineyards and barley fields, looking down at our own shadows, each preoccupied with our own thoughts. Mostly we wandered. There wasn’t much in the way of a tourist industry on Tinos in those days. It was a farming island, really, people living off their cows and goats and olive trees and wheat. We would end up bored, eating lunch somewhere, quietly, in the shade of a tree or a windmill, looking between bites at the ravines, the fields of thorny bushes, the mountains, the sea.

One day, I wandered off toward town. We lived on the southwestern shore of the island, and Tinos town was only a few miles’ walk south. There was a little knickknack shop there run by a heavy-faced widower named Mr. Roussos. On any given day, you were apt to find in the window of his shop anything from a 1940s typewriter to a pair of leather work boots, or a weathervane, an old plant stand, giant wax candles, a cross, or, of course, copies of the Panagia Evangelistria icon. Or maybe even a brass gorilla. He was also an amateur photographer and had a makeshift darkroom in the back of the shop. When the pilgrims came to Tinos every August to visit the icon, Mr. Roussos sold rolls of film to them and developed their photos in his darkroom for a fee.

About a month back, I had spotted a camera in his display window, sitting on its worn rust-colored leather case. Every few days, I strolled over to the shop, stared at this camera, and imagined myself in India, the leather case hanging by the strap over my shoulder, taking photos of the paddies and tea estates I had seen in National Geographic. I would shoot the Inca Trail. On camelback, in some dust-choked old truck, or on foot, I would brave the heat until I stood gazing up at the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and I would shoot them too and see my photos published in magazines with glossy pages. This was what drew me to Mr. Roussos’s window that morning—though the shop was closed for the day—to stand outside, my forehead pressed to the glass, and daydream.

“What kind is it?”

I pulled back a bit, caught Thalia’s reflection in the window. She dabbed at her left cheek with the handkerchief.

“The camera.”

I shrugged.

“Looks like a C3 Argus,” she said.

“How would you know?”

“It’s only the best-selling thirty-five millimeter in the world for the last thirty years,” she said a little chidingly. “Not much to look at, though. It’s ugly. It looks like a brick. So you want to be a photographer? You know, when you’re all grown up? Your mother says you do.”

I turned around. “Mamá told you that?”

“So?”

I shrugged. I was embarrassed that Mamá had discussed this with Thalia. I wondered how she’d said it. She could unsheathe from her arsenal a mockingly grave way of talking about things she found either portentous or frivolous. She could shrink your aspirations before your very eyes. Markos wants to walk the earth and capture it with his lens.

Thalia sat on the sidewalk and pulled her skirt over her knees. It was a hot day, the sun biting the skin like it had teeth. Hardly anyone was out and about except for an elderly couple trudging stiffly up the street. The husband—Demis something—wore a gray flat cap and a brown tweed jacket that looked too heavy for the season. He had a frozen, wide-eyed look to his face, I remember, the way some old people do, like they are perpetually startled by the monstrous surprise that is old age—it wasn’t until years later, in medical school, that I suspected he had Parkinson’s. They waved as they passed and I waved back. I saw them take notice of Thalia, a momentary pause in their stride, and then they moved on.

“Do you have a camera?” Thalia said.

“No.”

“Have you ever taken a picture?”

“No.”

“And you want to be a photographer?”

“You find that strange?”

“A little.”

“So if I said I wanted to be a policeman, you’d think that was strange too? Because I’ve never slapped handcuffs on anyone?”

I could tell from the softening in her eyes that, if she could, she would be smiling. “So you’re a clever ass,” she said. “Word of advice: Don’t mention the camera in my mother’s presence or she’ll buy it for you. She’s very eager to please.” The handkerchief went to the cheek and back. “But I doubt that Odelia would approve. I guess you already know that.”

I was both impressed and a little unsettled by how much she seemed to have grasped in so little time. Maybe it was the mask, I thought, the advantage of cover, the freedom to be watchful, to observe and scrutinize.

“She’d probably make you give it back.”

I sighed. It was true. Mamá would not allow such easy amends, and most certainly not if it involved money.

Thalia rose to her feet and beat the dust from her behind. “Let me ask you, do you have a box at home?”

Madaline was sipping wine with Mamá in the kitchen, and Thalia and I were upstairs, using black markers on a shoe box. The shoe box belonged to Madaline and contained a new pair of lime green leather pumps with high heels, still wrapped in tissue paper.

“Where was she planning on wearing those?” I asked.

I could hear Madaline downstairs, talking about an acting class she had once taken where the instructor had asked her, as an exercise, to pretend she was a lizard sitting motionless on a rock. A swell of laughter—hers—followed.

We finished the second coat, and Thalia said we should put on a third, to make sure we hadn’t missed any spots. The black had to be uniform and flawless.

“That’s all a camera is,” she said, “a black box with a hole to let in the light and something to absorb the light. Give me the needle.”

I passed her a sewing needle of Mamá’s. I was skeptical, to say the least, about the prospects of this homemade camera, of it doing anything at all—a shoe box and a needle? But Thalia had attacked the project with such faith and self-assured confidence that I had to leave room for the unlikely possibility that it just might work. She made me think she knew things I did not.

“I’ve made some calculations,” she said, carefully piercing the box with the needle. “Without a lens, we can’t set the pinhole on the small face, the box is too long. But the width is just about right. The key is to make the correct-sized pinhole. I figure point-six millimeter, roughly. There. Now we need a shutter.”

Downstairs, Madaline’s voice had dropped to a low, urgent murmur. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she was speaking more slowly than before, enunciating well, and I pictured her leaning forward, elbows on knees, making eye contact, not blinking. Over the years, I have come to know this tone of voice intimately. When people speak this way, they’re likely disclosing, revealing, confessing some catastrophe, beseeching the listener. It’s a staple of the military’s casualty notification teams knocking on doors, lawyers touting the merits of plea deals to clients, policemen stopping cars at 3 A.M., cheating husbands. How many times have I used it myself at hospitals here in Kabul? How many times have I guided entire families into a quiet room, asked them to sit, pulled a chair up for myself, gathering the will to give them news, dreading the coming conversation?