And the Mountains Echoed

that she had this last thought. It’s the sort of thing Julien would think.
She wants you to feel badly
. He has said this to her several times over the last year.
She wants you to feel badly
. When he first said it, Pari felt relieved, understood. She was grateful to him for articulating what she could not, or would not. She thought she had found an ally. But, these days, she wonders. She catches in his words a glint of meanness. A troubling absence of kindness.
    The bedroom floor is littered with pieces of clothing, records, books, more newspapers. On the windowsill is a glass half filled with water gone yellow from the cigarette butts floating in it. She swipes books and old magazines off the bed and helps Maman slip beneath the blankets.
    Maman looks up at her, the back of one hand resting on her bandaged brow. The pose makes her look like an actress in a silent film about to faint.
    â€œAre you going to be all right, Maman?”
    â€œI don’t think so,” she says. It doesn’t come out like a plea for attention. Maman says this in a flat, bored voice. It sounds tired and sincere, and final.
    â€œYou’re scaring me, Maman.”
    â€œAre you leaving now?”
    â€œDo you want me to stay?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThen I’ll stay.”
    â€œTurn off the light.”
    â€œMaman?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you taking your pills? Have you stopped? I think you’ve stopped, and I worry.”
    â€œDon’t start in on me. Turn off the light.”
    Pari does. She sits on the edge of the bed and watches her mother fall asleep. Then she heads for the kitchen to begin the formidable task of cleaning up. She finds a pair of gloves and starts with the dishes. She washes glasses reeking of long-soured milk, bowls crusted with old cereal, plates with food spotted with green fuzzy patches of fungus. She recalls the first time she had washed dishes at Julien’s apartment the morning after they had slept together for the first time. Julien had made them omelets. How she’d relished this simple domestic act, washing plates at his sink, as he played a Jane Birkin song on the turntable.
    She had reconnected with him the year before, in 1973, for the first time in almost a decade. She had run into him at a street march outside the Canadian Embassy, a student protest against the hunting of seals. Pari didn’t want to go, and also she had a paper on meromorphic functions that needed finishing, but Collette insisted. They were living together at the time, an arrangement that was increasingly proving to their mutual displeasure.Collette smoked grass now. She wore headbands and loose magenta-colored tunics embroidered with birds and daisies. She brought home long-haired, unkempt boys who ate Pari’s food and played the guitar badly. Collette was always in the streets, shouting, denouncing cruelty to animals, racism, slavery, French nuclear testing in the Pacific. There was always an urgent buzz around the apartment, people Pari didn’t know milling in and out. And when they were alone, Pari sensed a new tension between the two of them, a haughtiness on the part of Collette, an unspoken disapproval of her.
    â€œThey’re lying,” Collette said animatedly. “They say their methods are humane. Humane! Have you seen what they use to club them over the head? Those
hakapiks
? Half the time, the poor animal hasn’t even died yet, and the bastards stick their hooks in it and drag it out to the boat. They skin them alive, Pari. Alive!” The way Collette said this last thing, the way she emphasized it, made Pari want to apologize. For what, she was not quite sure, but she knew that, these days, it squeezed the breath out of her being around Collette and her reproaches and many outrages.
    Only about thirty people showed up. There was a rumor that Brigitte Bardot was going to make an appearance, but it turned out to be just that, only a rumor. Collette was disappointed at the turnout. She had an agitated argument with a thin, pale bespectacled young man named Eric, who, Pari gathered, had been in charge of organizing the march. Poor Eric. Pari pitied him. Still seething, Collette took the lead. Pari shuffled along toward the back, next to a flat-chested girl who shouted slogans with a kind of nervous exhilaration. Pari kept her eyes to the pavement and tried her best to not stand out.
    At a street corner, a man tapped her on the shoulder.
    â€œYou