And the Mountains Echoed

fists shot heavenward! The king had made the earth move, you see, but he was surrounded by an ocean of zealots, and you know well what happens when the ocean floor trembles, Monsieur Boustouler. A tsunami of bearded rebellion crashed down upon the poor king and carried him off, flailing helplessly, and spat him out on the shores of India, then Italy, and at last Switzerland, where he crawled from the muck and died a disillusioned old man in exile.
    EB: And the country that emerged? I gather it did not suit you well.
    NW: The reverse is equally true.
    EB: Which was why you moved to France in 1955.
    NW: I moved to France because I wished to save my daughter from a certain kind of life.
    EB: What kind of life would that be?
    NW: I didn’t want her turned, against both her will and nature, into 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. Women who are admired by some in the West—here in France, for instance—turned into heroines for their hard lives, admired from a distance by those who couldn’t bear even one day of walking in their shoes. Women who see their desires doused and their dreams renounced, and yet—and this is the worst of it, Monsieur Boustouler—if you meet them, they smile and pretend they have no misgivings at all. As though they lead enviable lives. But you look closely and you see the helpless look, the desperation, and how it belies all their show of good humor. It is quite pathetic, Monsieur Boustouler. I did not want this for my daughter.
    EB: I gather she understands all this?
    She lights another cigarette.
    NW: Well, children are never everything you’d hoped for, Monsieur Boustouler.
    In the emergency room, Pari is instructed by an ill-tempered nurse to wait by the registration desk, near a wheeled rack filled with clipboards and charts. It astonishes Pari that there are people who voluntarily spend their youths training for a profession that lands them in a place such as this. She cannot begin to understand it. She loathes hospitals. She hates seeing people at their worst, the sickly smell, the squeaky gurneys, the hallways with their drab paintings, the incessant paging overhead.
    Dr. Delaunay turns out younger than Pari had expected. He has a slender nose, a narrow mouth, and tight blond curls. He guides her out of the emergency room, through the swinging double doors, into the main hallway.
    â€œWhen your mother arrived,” he says in a confidential tone, “she was quite inebriated … You don’t seem surprised.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œNeither were a number of the nursing staff. They say she runsa bit of a tab here. I am new here myself, so, of course, I’ve never had the pleasure.”
    â€œHow bad was it?”
    â€œShe was quite ornery,” he says. “And, I should say, rather theatrical.”
    They share a brief grin.
    â€œWill she be all right?”
    â€œYes, in the short term,” Dr. Delaunay says. “But I must recommend, and quite emphatically, that she reduce her drinking. She was lucky this time, but who’s to say next time …”
    Pari nods. “Where is she?”
    He leads her back into the emergency room and around the corner. “Bed three. I’ll be by shortly with discharge instructions.”
    Pari thanks him and makes her way to her mother’s bed.
    â€œSalut, Maman.”
    Maman smiles tiredly. Her hair is disheveled, and her socks don’t match. They have wrapped her forehead with bandages, and a colorless fluid drips through an intravenous linked to her left arm. She is wearing a hospital gown the wrong way and has not tied it properly. The gown has parted slightly in the front, and Pari can see a little of the thick, dark vertical line of her mother’s old cesarian scar. She had asked her mother a few years earlier why she didn’t bear the customary horizontal mark and Maman explained that the doctors had given her some sort of technical reason at the time that she no longer remembered.
The important thing
, she said,
was that they got you out
.
    â€œI’ve ruined your evening,” Maman mutters.
    â€œAccidents happen. I’ve come to take you home.”
    â€œI could sleep a week.”
    Her eyes drift shut, though she keeps talking in a sluggish, stalling manner. “I was just sitting and watching TV. I got hungry.I went to the