And the Mountains Echoed

The story moves its focus to Pari, Abdullah’s sister, as a young adult living in Paris. She reluctantly receives a call from her mother's doctor. She reveals that there has been a past of her mother having her mother has “accidents,” and each time she answers these calls she thinks, “This time, this is the time” (178). The injury is not serious, but she cancels her plans with her boyfriend and friends.

The narration then moves to an excerpt of a magazine interview with Nila. She opens the interview admitting that she wants to sever her ties with Afghanistan, and she discusses King Amanullah, the “visionary” who wanted to free women from the veil and allow them to attend school:. “The king made the earth move, you see, but he was surrounded by an ocean of zealots, and you well know what happens when the ocean floor trembles” (182). She wanted to move away from Afghanistan for her daughter, so she would not become “one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or doing the wrong thing” (182). However, she ends the interview saying, “children are never everything you'd hoped for” (183).

The narration shifts back to Pari at the hospital ER to pick up her mother. We learn that she still believes Nila is her birth mother. Nila hasd told her some lie about her Caesarean scar.

The story then moves into a flashback to when Pari had first met Julien, her boyfriend. The three went out to dinner together. Julien and her mother seem to hit it off, for they are similar in age:. “What did not surprise [Pari] was Maman's effortless and thorough seduction of Julien” (188). However, Julien had verbally flirted with Pari when Maman was not around, but her mother and he were lovers for about six months.

After leaving the hospital, the narration moves back to the interview with Nila again.

Nila reveals that she and Pari left Afghanistan when Pari was six. She tells a few details about her father; he was a cultured, respected member of the aristocracy in Kabul. She remembers his cold hands and his meticulous dress. His nickname forof her is “fawn” which she only later realizes its sinister implications; he was a deer hunter.

The narration shifts back to Pari and her mother leaving the hospital. At Nila's apartment, the place is in disarray with old food on dishes and empty wine bottles everywhere. She puts her mother to bed and tends to the cleans up.

Pari has a flashback that includes having a coffee date with Julien as he “rescued” her from a protest her roommate dragged her to. She tells him she would like to travel, especially to Afghanistan to visit where she was born. Her love for and study of Mathematics includes “complex variables.”. Julien replies to this fondness for Mathematics as being “Nothing like life […] , in other words...[t]There, it's questions with either no answers or messy ones” (204). 

Only a few weeks after their coffee date, Pari and Julien move in together. When pondering how to tell Nila, Julien reminds Pari that her mother is “vindictive” (206). When Pari does call her mother, her roommate has already let her mother know. Clearly, she is hurt by Pari's relationship with Julien. “I look at you sometimes and I don't see me in you. Of course I don't. I suppose that isn't expected, after all. I don't know what sort of person you are, Pari. I don't know who you are, what you're capable of, in your blood. You're a stranger to me” (206).

The story shifts again back to the interview with Nila. We learn that Nila’s mother left Kabul when she was ten10, moving to France. Her mother died of pneumonia during World War II, and her father and she and her father had a constant strain between them. Nila talked back and was a free-spirited young woman, while her father grew “more ascetic and emotionally austere” (208). She wrote what she believes to be overdramatic poems during her adolescence and is not proud of them despite the interviewer seeing otherwise. She admits to finding “it hard to flaunt something obtained through morally questionable means” (211). She reveals a few details about her sickness in India, how she “had left something vital of [herself] behind” there (214). After a year's long stint in loneliness and deep depression, she was arranged to marry Suleiman. She tells the interviewer that she believes her daughter is her “punishment” (216).

The narration shifts back to Pari, although a year has passed, and she has left Julien. A package has arrivedarrives at her apartment with a note from Julien to “read [it] at [her] own peril” (217). Even before she reads it, she is overcome with guilt over her fling with Julien; she sees it as the last push towards her mother's inevitable death. However, reading the interview providesd some further insight into her mother’s mysterious nature, but also revealsed so many large gaps in her own story:. “What Pari had always wanted from her mother was the glue to bond together her loose, disjointed scraps of memory, to turn them into some sort of cohesive narrative” (218). Pari goes out for a walk in the rain and is deeply troubled by the interview. It leaves her more confused than ever; her confusion is mainly of herself and her identity. She is unsure if the interview is all overdramatic lies meant to harm Pari or that there is some truth in it.

Pari She decides to try and meet with Colette, her former roommate. They do meet and she is setColette sets her up with Eric, who she ends up marrying in the spring of 1977. The narration then moves swiftly. Eric and Pari plan a trip to Afghanistan but then postpone the trip because Pari is pregnant. The money should be used for a proper home for the new little family. Once Isabelle is born, Pari doesn’t feel the need to find her roots: “Pari no longer feels the piercing urge to search for answers and roots. Because of Eric and his steadying, comforting companionship. And because of Isabelle, who has solidified the ground beneath Pari's feet” (224). Another two children are born: Alain and Thierry. Eric suffers from three heart attacks, and at the age of forty-eight48, Pari is a widow.

In the spring of 2010, Pari is expecting a phone call from Markos. Isabelle usually stops in for tea and the essentials her mother needs (her arthritis is debilitating), and Pari asks her to leave without the tea. She wants privacy for this phone call. Markos has the long letter that Nabi wrote him. He gave instructions that he read it “only after his death” (236) and to find Pari. Luckily, Markos is able to findfinds Pari through the internet. She is eager and scared to hear the letter, knowing that “for a long time that she was lied to by Maman about her childhood” (236). He reads her the whole letter over the phone.

After the phone call, memories come flooding back. The little red wagon, a big dog, swinging lines from a big tree, and an “elusive shadow” (237). This is the hole she has always felt. She remembers a brother, but no face. She vows to make a trip to Kabul.