And the Mountains Echoed

don’t approve.
    NW: Whether I approve or not is irrelevant. This is France, Monsieur Boustouler, not Afghanistan. Young people don’t live or die by the stamp of parental approval.
    EB: Your daughter has no ties to Afghanistan, then?
    NW: We left when she was six. She has limited memory of her time there.
    EB: But not you, of course.
    I ask her to tell me about her early life.
    She excuses herself and leaves the room for a moment. When she returns, she hands me an old, wrinkled black-and-white photograph. A stern-looking man, heavyset, bespectacled, hair shiny and combed with an impeccable part. He sits behind a desk, reading a book. He wears a suit with peaked lapels, double-breasted vest, high-collared white shirt and bow tie.
    NW: My father. Nineteen twenty-nine. The year I was born.
    EB: He looks quite distinguished.
    NW: He was part of the Pashtun aristocracy in Kabul. Highly educated, unimpeachable manners, appropriately sociable. A great raconteur too. At least in public.
    EB: And in private?
    NW: Venture to guess, Monsieur Boustouler?
    I pick up the photo and look at it again.
    EB: Distant, I would say. Grave. Inscrutable. Uncompromising.
    NW: I really insist you have a glass with me. I hate—no, I loathe—drinking alone.
    She pours me a glass of the Chardonnay. Out of politeness, I take a sip.
    NW: He had cold hands, my father. No matter the weather. His hands were always cold. And he always wore a suit, again no matter the weather. Perfectly tailored, sharp creases. A fedora too. And wingtips, of course, two-toned. He was handsome, I suppose, though in a solemn way. Also—and I understood this only much later—in a manufactured, slightly ridiculous, faux-European way—complete, of course, with weekly games of lawn bowling and polo and the coveted French wife, all of it to the great approval of the young progressive king.
    She picks at her nail and doesn’t say anything for a while. I flip the tape in my recorder.
    NW: My father slept in his own room, my mother and I in ours. Most days, he was out having lunch with ministers and advisers to the king. Or else he was out riding horses, or playing polo, or hunting. He loved to hunt.
    EB: So you didn’t see much of him. He was an absentee figure.
    NW: Not entirely. He made it a point every couple of days to spend a few minutes with me. He would come into my room and sit on my bed, which was my signal to climb into his lap. He would bounce me on his knees for a while, neither one of us saying much, and finally he would say, “Well, what shall we do now, Nila?” Sometimes he would let me take the handkerchief from his breast pocket and let me fold it. Of course I would just ball it up and stuff it back into his pocket, and he would feign an expression of mock surprise, which I found highly comical. And we’d keep doing this until he tired of it, which was soon enough. And then he would stroke my hair with his cold hands and say, “Papa has to go now, my fawn. Run along.”
    She takes the photograph back to the other room and returns, fetches a new pack of cigarettes from a drawer and lights one.
    NW: That was his nickname for me. I loved it. I used to hop around the garden—we had a very large garden—chanting, “I am Papa’s fawn! I am Papa’s fawn!” It wasn’t until much later that I saw how sinister the nickname was.
    EB: I’m sorry?
    She smiles.
    NW: My father shot deer, Monsieur Boustouler.
    They could have walked the few blocks to Maman’s apartment, but the rain has picked up considerably. In the taxi, Maman sits balled up in the backseat, draped by Pari’s raincoat, wordlessly staring out the window. She looks old to Pari at this instant, far older than her forty-four years. Old and fragile and thin.
    Pari has not been to Maman’s apartment in a while. When she turns the key and lets them in, she finds the kitchen counter cluttered with dirty wineglasses, open bags of chips and uncooked pasta, plates with clumps of unrecognizable food fossilized onto them. A paper bag stuffed with empty wine bottles sits on the table, precariously close to tipping over. Pari sees newspapers on the floor, one of them soaking up the blood spill from earlier in the day, and, on it, a single pink wool sock. It frightens Pari to see Maman’s living space in this state. And she feels guilt as well. Which, knowing Maman, may have been the intended effect. And then she hates