And the Mountains Echoed (30 page)

Inevitably, someone at these parties will ask Pari her views on the developments in Afghanistan. One evening, a slightly tipsy visiting
professor named Chatelard asks Pari what she thinks will happen to Afghanistan when the Soviets leave. “Will your people find peace, Madame Professeur?”

“I wouldn't know,” she says. “Practically speaking, I'm Afghan only in name.”

“Non mais, quande-même,”
he says. “But, still, you must have some insight.”

She smiles, trying to keep at bay the inadequacy that always creeps in with these queries. “Just what I read in
Le Monde
. Like you.”

“But you grew up there,
non
?”

“I left when I was very little. Have you seen my husband? He's the one with the elbow patches.”

What she says is true. She does follow the news, reads in the papers about the war, the West arming the Mujahideen, but Afghanistan has receded in her mind. She has plenty to keep her busy at home, which is now a pretty four-bedroom house in Guyancourt, about twenty kilometers from the center of Paris. They live on a small hill near a park with walking trails and ponds. Eric is writing plays now in addition to teaching. One of his plays, a lighthearted political farce, is going to be produced in the fall at a small theater near Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and he has already been commissioned to write another.

Isabelle has grown into a quiet but bright and thoughtful adolescent. She keeps a diary and reads a novel a week. She likes Sinéad O'Connor. She has long, beautiful fingers and takes cello lessons. In a few weeks, she will perform Tchaikovsky's
Chanson Triste
at a recital. She was resistant at first to taking up the cello, and Pari had taken a few lessons with her as a show of solidarity. It proved both unnecessary and unfeasible. Unnecessary because
Isabelle quickly latched onto the instrument of her own accord and unfeasible because the cello made Pari's hands ache. For a year now, Pari has been waking in the morning with stiffness in her hands and wrists that won't loosen up for half an hour, sometimes an hour. Eric has quit pressuring her to see a doctor and is now insisting. “You're only forty-three, Pari,” he says. “This is not normal.” Pari has set up an appointment.

Alain, their middle child, has a sly roguish charm. He is obsessed with martial arts. He was born prematurely and is still small for a boy of eleven, but what he lacks in stature he more than makes up for with desire and gumption. His opponents are always fooled by his wispy frame and slim legs. They underestimate him. Pari and Eric have often lain in bed at night and marveled at his enormous will and ferocious energy. Pari worries about neither Isabelle nor Alain.

It is Thierry who concerns her. Thierry, who perhaps on some dark primordial level, senses that he was unexpected, unintended, uninvited. Thierry is prone to wounding silences and narrow looks, to fussing and fiddling whenever Pari asks something of him. He defies her for no other reason, it seems to Pari, than defiance itself. Some days, a cloud gathers over him. Pari can tell. She can almost see it. It gathers and swells until at last it splits open, spilling a torrent of cheek-quivering, foot-stomping rage that frightens Pari and leaves Eric to blink and smile miserably. Pari knows instinctively that Thierry will be for her, like the ache in her joints, a lifelong worry.

She wonders often what sort of grandmother Maman would have made. Especially with Thierry. Intuitively, Pari thinks Maman would have proved helpful with him. She might have seen something of herself in him—though not biologically, of course, Pari
has been certain of that for some time. The children know of Maman. Isabelle, in particular, is curious. She has read many of her poems.

“I wish I'd met her,” she says.

“She sounds glamorous,” she says.

“I think we would have made good friends, she and I. Do you think? We would have read the same books. I would have played cello for her.”

“Well, she would have loved that,” Pari says. “That much I am sure of.”

Pari has not told the children about the suicide. They may learn one day, probably will. But they wouldn't learn it from her. She will not plant the seed in their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them
You are not enough
. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been enough. They always will be.

In the summer of 1994, Pari and Eric take the children to Majorca. It's Collette who, through her now thriving travel agency, organizes the holiday for them. Collette and Didier meet up with them in Majorca, and they all stay together for two weeks in a beachfront rental house. Collette and Didier don't have children, not by some biological misfortune but because they don't want any. For Pari, the timing is good. Her rheumatoid is well controlled at the time. She takes a weekly dose of methotrexate, which she is tolerating well. Fortunately, she has not had to take any steroids of late and suffer the accompanying insomnia.

“Not to speak of the weight gain,” she tells Collette. “Knowing I'd have to get into a bathing suit in Spain?” She laughs. “Ah, vanity.”

They spend the days touring the island, driving up the northwest coast by the Serra de Tramuntana Mountains, stopping to stroll by the olive groves and into the pine forest. They eat
porcella
,
and a wonderful sea bass dish called
lubina
, and an eggplant and zucchini stew called
tumbet
. Thierry refuses to eat any of it, and at every restaurant Pari has to ask the chef to make him a plate of spaghetti with plain tomato sauce, no meat, no cheese. At Isabelle's request—she has recently discovered opera—one night they attend a production of Giacomo Puccini's
Tosca
. To survive the ordeal, Collette and Pari surreptitiously pass each other a silver flask of cheap vodka. By the middle of act two, they are sloshed, and can't help giggling like schoolgirls at the histrionics of the actor playing Scarpia.

One day, Pari, Collette, Isabelle, and Thierry pack a lunch and go to the beach; Didier, Alain, and Eric had left in the morning for a hike along Sóller Bay. On the way to the beach, they visit a shop to buy Isabelle a bathing suit that has caught her eye. As they walk into the shop, Pari catches a glimpse of her reflection in the plate glass. Normally, especially of late, when she steps in front of a mirror an automatic mental process kicks into gear that prepares her to greet her older self. It buffers her, dulls the shock. But in the shopwindow, she has caught herself off guard, vulnerable to reality undistorted by self-delusion. She sees a middle-aged woman in a drab floppy blouse and a beach skirt that doesn't conceal quite enough of the saggy folds of skin over her kneecaps. The sun picks out the gray in her hair. And despite the eyeliner, and the lipstick that defines her lips, she has a face now that a passerby's gaze will engage and then bounce from, as it would a street sign or a mailbox number. The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what aging is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unkind moments that catch you when you least expect them.

Later, when they return from the beach to the rental house, they find that the men have already returned.

“Papa's getting old,” Alain says.

From behind the bar, Eric, who is mixing a carafe of sangria, rolls his eyes and shrugs genially.

“I thought I'd have to carry you, Papa.”

“Give me one year. We'll come back next year, and I'll race you around the island,
mon pote
.”

They never do come back to Majorca. A week after they return to Paris, Eric has a heart attack. It happens while he is at work, speaking to a lighting stagehand. He survives it, but he will suffer two more over the course of the next three years, the last of which will prove fatal. And so at the age of forty-eight Pari finds herself, like Maman had, a widow.

One day, early in the spring of 2010, Pari receives a long-distance phone call. The call is not unexpected. Pari, in fact, has been preparing for it all morning. Prior to the call, Pari makes sure she has the apartment to herself. This means asking Isabelle to leave earlier than she customarily does. Isabelle and her husband, Albert, live just north of Île Saint-Denis, only a few blocks from Pari's one-bedroom apartment. Isabelle comes to see Pari in the morning every other day, after she drops off her kids at school. She brings Pari a baguette, some fresh fruit. Pari is not yet bound to the wheelchair, an eventuality for which she has been preparing herself. Though her disease forced her into early retirement the year before, she is still fully capable of going to the market on her own, of taking a daily walk. It's the hands—the ugly, twisted hands—that fail her most, hands that on bad days feel like they
have shards of crystal rattling around the joints. Pari wears gloves, whenever she is out, to keep her hands warm, but mostly because she is ashamed of them, the knobby knuckles, the unsightly fingers with what her doctor calls
swan neck deformity
, the permanently flexed left pinkie.

Ah, vanity
, she tells Collette.

This morning, Isabelle has brought her some figs, a few bars of soap, toothpaste, and a Tupperware containerful of chestnut soup. Albert is thinking of suggesting it as a new menu entry to the owners of the restaurant where he is the sous-chef. As she unloads the bags, Isabelle tells Pari of the new assignment she has landed. She writes musical scores for television shows now, commercials, and is hoping to write for film one day soon. She says she will begin scoring a miniseries that is shooting at the moment in Madrid.

“Will you be going there?” Pari asks. “To Madrid?”

“
Non
. The budget is too small. They won't cover my travel cost.”

“That's a pity. You could have stayed with Alain.”

“Oh, can you imagine, Maman? Poor Alain. He hardly has room to stretch his legs.”

Alain is a financial consultant. He lives in a tiny Madrid apartment with his wife, Ana, and their four children. He regularly e-mails Pari pictures and short video clips of the children.

Pari asks if Isabelle has heard from Thierry, and Isabelle says she has not. Thierry is in Africa, in the eastern part of Chad, where he works at a camp with refugees from Darfur. Pari knows this because Thierry is in sporadic touch with Isabelle. She is the only one he speaks to. This is how Pari knows the general outlines of her son's life—for instance, that he spent some time in Vietnam. Or that he was married to a Vietnamese woman once, briefly, when he was twenty.

Isabelle sets a pot of water on to boil and fetches two cups from the cabinet.

“Not this morning, Isabelle. Actually, I need to ask you to leave.”

Isabelle gives her a wounded look, and Pari chides herself for not wording it better. Isabelle has always had a delicate nature.

“What I mean to say is, I'm expecting a call and I need some privacy.”

“A call? From who?”

“I'll tell you later,” Pari says.

Isabelle crosses her arms and grins. “Have you found a lover, Maman?”

“A lover. Are you blind? Have you even looked at me recently?”

“There is not a thing wrong with you.”

“You need to go. I'll explain later, I promise.”

“D'accord, d'accord.”
Isabelle slings her purse over her shoulder, grabs her coat and keys. “But I'll have you know I'm duly intrigued.”

The man who calls at 9:30 A.M. is named Markos Varvaris. He had contacted Pari through her Facebook account with this message, written in English:
Are you the daughter of the poet Nila Wahdati? If so, I would like very much to speak with you about something that will be of interest to you
. Pari had searched the web for his name and found that he was a plastic surgeon who worked for a nonprofit organization in Kabul. Now, on the phone, he greets her in Farsi, and continues to speak in Farsi until Pari has to interrupt him.

“Monsieur Varvaris, I'm sorry, but maybe we speak in English?”

“Ah, of course. My apologies. I assumed … Although, of course, it does make sense, you left when you were very young, didn't you?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“I learned Farsi here myself. I would say I am more or less functional
in it. I have lived here since 2002, since shortly after the Taliban left. Quite optimistic days, those. Yes, everybody ready for rebuilding and democracy and the like. Now it is a different story. Naturally, we are preparing for presidential elections, but it is a different story. I'm afraid it is.”

Pari listens patiently as Markos Varvaris makes protracted detours into the logistical challenge that are the elections in Afghanistan, which he says Karzai will win, and then on to the Taliban's troubling forays into the north, the increasing Islamist infringement on news media, a side note or two on the overpopulation in Kabul, then on the cost of housing, lastly, before he circles back and says, “I have lived in this house now for a number of years. I understand you lived in this house too.”