And the Mountains Echoed

he’s not letting on.”
    â€œHe wouldn’t let on, would he? What would your mother think?”
    â€œAbout what?” Pari said, though she knew, of course. She knew, and what she wanted was to hear it said.
    â€œAbout what?” Collette’s tone was sly, excited. “That he’s with her to get to you. That it’s you he wants.”
    â€œThat is disgusting,” Pari said with a flutter.
    â€œOr maybe he wants you both. Maybe he likes a crowd in bed. In which case, I might ask you to put in a good word for me.”
    â€œYou’re repulsive, Collette.”
    Sometimes when Maman and Julien were out, Pari would undress in the hallway and look at herself in the long mirror. She would find faults with her body. It was too tall, she would think, too unshapely, too … utilitarian. She had inherited none of her mother’s bewitching curves. Sometimes she walked like this, undressed, to her mother’s room and lay on the bed where she knew Maman and Julien made love. Pari lay there stark-naked with her eyes closed, heart battering, basking in heedlessness, something like a hum spreading across her chest, her belly, and lower still.
    It ended, of course. They ended, Maman and Julien. Pari was relieved but not surprised. Men always failed Maman in the end. They forever fell disastrously short of whatever ideal she held them up to. What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits and the flinging of cooking utensils and collapse. High drama. Maman was incapable of either starting or ending a relationship without excess.
    Then the predictable period when Maman would find a sudden taste for solitude. She would stay in bed, wearing an old winter coat over her pajamas, a weary, doleful, unsmiling presence in the apartment. Pari knew to leave her alone. Her attempts at consolingand companionship were not welcome. It lasted weeks, the sullen mood. With Julien, it went on considerably longer.
    â€œAh, merde!”
Maman says now.
    She is sitting up in bed, still in the hospital gown. Dr. Delaunay has given Pari the discharge papers, and the nurse is unhooking the intravenous from Maman’s arm.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œI just remembered. I have an interview in a couple of days.”
    â€œAn interview?”
    â€œA feature for a poetry magazine.”
    â€œThat’s fantastic, Maman.”
    â€œThey’re accompanying the piece with a photo.” She points to the sutures on her forehead.
    â€œI’m sure you’ll find some elegant way to hide it,” Pari says.
    Maman sighs, looks away. When the nurse yanks the needle out, Maman winces and barks at the woman something unkind and undeserved.
    FROM “AFGHAN SONGBIRD,” AN INTERVIEW WITH
NILA WAHDATI BY ÉTIENNE BOUSTOULER,
Parallaxe
84 (WINTER 1974), P. 36
    I look around the apartment again and am drawn to a framed photograph on one of the bookshelves. It is of a little girl squatting in a field of wild bushes, fully absorbed in the act of picking something, some sort of berry. She wears a bright yellow coat, buttoned to the throat, which contrasts with the dark gray overcast sky above. In the background, there is a stone farmhouse with closed shutters and battered shingles. I ask about the picture.
    NW: My daughter, Pari. Like the city but no
s
. It means “fairy.” That picture is from a trip to Normandy we took, the two of us. Back in 1957, I think. She must have been eight.
    EB: Does she live in Paris?
    NW: She studies mathematics at the Sorbonne.
    EB: You must be proud.
    She smiles and shrugs.
    EB: I am struck a bit by her choice of career, given that you devoted yourself to the arts.
    NW: I don’t know where she gets the ability. All those incomprehensible formulas and theories. I guess they’re not incomprehensible to her. I can hardly multiply, myself.
    EB: Perhaps it’s her way of rebelling. You know a thing or two about rebellion, I think.
    NW: Yes, but I did it the proper way. I drank and smoked and took lovers. Who rebels with mathematics?
    She laughs.
    NW: Besides, she would be the proverbial rebel without a cause. I’ve given her every freedom imaginable. She wants for nothing, my daughter. She lacks nothing. She’s living with someone. He is quite a bit older. Charming to a fault, well-read, entertaining. A raging narcissist, of course. Ego the size of Poland.
    EB: You