And the Mountains Echoed

kitchen to get some bread and marmalade. I slipped. I’m not sure how, or on what, but my head caught the oven-door handle on the way down. I think I might have blacked out for a minute or two. Sit down, Pari. You’re looming over me.”
    Pari sits. “The doctor said you were drinking.”
    Maman cracks one eye half open. Her frequenting of doctors is exceeded only by her dislike of them. “That boy? He said that?
Le petit salaud
. What does he know? His breath still smells of his mother’s tit.”
    â€œYou always joke. Every time I bring it up.”
    â€œI’m tired, Pari. You can scold me another time. The whipping post isn’t going anywhere.”
    Now she does fall asleep. Snores, unattractively, as she does only after a binge.
    Pari sits on the bedside stool, waiting for Dr. Delaunay, picturing Julien at a low-lit table, menu in hand, explaining the crisis to Christian and Aurelie over tall goblets of Bordeaux. He offered to accompany her to the hospital, but in a perfunctory way. It was a mere formality. Coming here would have been a bad idea anyway. If Dr. Delaunay thought he had seen theatrical earlier … Still, even if he couldn’t come with her, Pari wishes he hadn’t gone to dinner without her either. She is still a little astonished that he did. He could have explained it to Christian and Aurelie. They could have picked another night, changed the reservations. But Julien had gone. It wasn’t merely thoughtless. No. There was something vicious about this move, deliberate, slashing. Pari has known for some time that he has that capacity. She has wondered of late whether he has a taste for it as well.
    It was in an emergency room not unlike this one that Maman first met Julien. That was ten years ago, in 1963, when Pari was fourteen. He had driven a colleague, who had a migraine. Mamanhad brought Pari, who was the patient that time, having sprained her ankle badly during gymnastics in school. Pari was lying on a gurney when Julien pushed his chair into the room and struck up a conversation with Maman. Pari cannot remember now what was said between them. She does remember Julien saying, “Paris—like the city?” And from Maman the familiar reply, “No, without the
s
. It means ‘fairy’ in Farsi.”
    They met him for dinner on a rainy night later that week at a small bistro off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Back at the apartment, Maman had made a protracted show of indecision over what to wear, settling in the end for a pastel blue dress with a close-fitting waist, evening gloves, and sharp-pointed stiletto shoes. And even then, in the elevator, she’d said to Pari, “It’s not too Jackie, is it? What do you think?”
    Before the meal they smoked, all three of them, and Maman and Julien had beer in oversize frosted mugs. They finished one round, Julien ordered a second, and there was a third as well. Julien, in white shirt, tie, and a checkered evening blazer, had the controlled courteous manners of a well-bred man. He smiled with ease and laughed effortlessly. He had just a pinch of gray at the temples, which Pari hadn’t noticed in the dim light of the emergency room, and she estimated his age around the same as Maman’s. He was well versed in current events and spent some time talking about De Gaulle’s veto of England’s entry into the Common Market and, to Pari’s surprise, almost succeeded in making it interesting. Only after Maman asked did he reveal that he had started teaching economics at the Sorbonne.
    â€œA professor? Very glamorous.”
    â€œOh, hardly,” he said. “You should sit in sometime. It would cure you of that notion swiftly.”
    â€œMaybe I will.”
    Pari could tell Maman was already a little drunk.
    â€œMaybe I will sneak in one day. Watch you in action.”
    â€œ ‘Action’? You
do
recall I teach economic theory, Nila. If you do come, what you’ll find is that my students think I’m a twit.”
    â€œWell, I doubt that.”
    Pari did too. She guessed that a good many of Julien’s students wanted to sleep with him. Throughout dinner, she was careful not to get caught looking at him. He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it. A parenthesis-shaped piece of hair managed to fall on his