And the Mountains Echoed (28 page)

She empties her glass of wine and refills it with what remains in the bottle.

NW: What I can tell you, however, is that no one was touting me in Kabul. No one in Kabul considered me a pioneer of anything but bad taste, debauchery, and immoral character. Not least of all, my father. He said my writings were the ramblings of a
whore
. He used that word precisely. He said I'd damaged his family name beyond repair. He said I had betrayed him. He kept asking why I found it so hard to be respectable.

EB: How did you respond?

NW: I told him I did not care for his notion of respectable. I told him I had no desire to slip the leash around my own neck.

EB: I suppose that only displeased him more.

NW: Naturally.

I hesitate to say this next.

EB: But I do understand his anger.

She cocks an eyebrow.

EB: He was a patriarch, was he not? And you were a direct challenge to all he knew, all that he held dear. Arguing,
in a way, through both your life and your writing, for new boundaries for women, for women to have a say in their own status, to arrive at legitimate selfhood. You were defying the monopoly that men like him had held for ages. You were saying what could not be said. You were conducting a small, one-woman revolution, one could say.

NW: And all this time, I thought I was writing about sex.

EB: But that's part of it, isn't it?

I flip through my notes and mention a few of the overtly erotic poems—“Thorns,” “But for the Waiting,” “The Pillow.” I also confess to her that they are not among my favorites. I remark that they lack nuance and ambiguity. They read as though they have been crafted with the sole aim of shocking and scandalizing. They strike me as polemical, as angry indictments of Afghan gender roles.

NW: Well, I
was
angry. I was angry about the attitude that I had to be protected from sex. That I had to be protected from my own body. Because I was a woman. And women, don't you know, are emotionally, morally, and intellectually immature. They lack self-control, you see, they're vulnerable to physical temptation. They're hypersexual beings who must be restrained lest they jump into bed with every Ahmad and Mahmood.

EB: But—forgive me for saying this—you did just that, no?

NW: Only as a protest against that very notion.

She has a delightful laugh, full of mischief and cunning intelligence. She asks if I want lunch. She says her daughter has recently restocked her refrigerator and proceeds to make what turns out to be an excellent
jambon fumé
sandwich. She makes only one. For herself, she uncorks a new bottle of wine and lights another cigarette. She sits down.

NW: Do you agree, for the sake of this chat, that we should remain on good terms, Monsieur Boustouler?

I tell her I do.

NW: Then do me two favors. Eat your sandwich and quit looking at my glass.

Needless to say, this preemptively quells any impulse I may have had to ask about the drinking.

EB: What happened next?

NW: I fell ill in 1948, when I was nearly nineteen. It was serious, and I will leave it at that. My father took me to Delhi for treatment. He stayed with me for six weeks while doctors tended to me. I was told I could have died. Perhaps I should have. Dying can be quite the career move for a young poet. When we returned, I was frail and withdrawn. I couldn't be bothered with writing. I had little interest in food or conversation or entertainment. I was averse to visitors. I just wanted to pull the curtains and sleep all day every day. Which was what I did mostly. Eventually, I got out of bed and slowly resumed my
daily routines, by which I mean the stringent essentials a person must tend to in order to remain functional and nominally civil. But I felt diminished. Like I had left something vital of myself behind in India.

EB: Was your father concerned?

NW: Quite the contrary. He was encouraged. He thought that my encounter with mortality had shaken me out of my immaturity and waywardness. He didn't understand that I felt lost. I've read, Monsieur Boustouler, that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise. That was how I felt, disoriented, suspended in confusion, stripped of my compass. Unspeakably depressed as well. And, in that state, you are vulnerable. Which is likely why I said yes the following year, in 1949, when Suleiman Wahdati asked my father for my hand.

EB: You were twenty.

NW: He was not.

She offers me another sandwich, which I decline, and a cup of coffee, which I accept. As she sets water on to boil, she asks if I am married. I tell her I am not and that I doubt I ever will be. She looks at me over her shoulder, her gaze lingering, and grins.

NW: Ah. I can usually tell.

EB: Surprise!

NW: Maybe it's the concussion.

She points to the bandanna.

NW: This isn't a fashion statement. I slipped and fell a couple of days ago, tore my forehead open. Still, I should have known. About you, I mean. In my experience, men who understand women as well as you seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.

She gives me the coffee, lights a cigarette, and takes a seat.

NW: I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks. Me, I didn't even need that long. My husband was a decent man. But he was much too serious, aloof, and uninteresting. Also, he was in love with the chauffeur.

EB: Ah. That must have come as a shock.

NW: Well, it did thicken the proverbial plot.

She smiles a little sadly.

NW: I felt sorry for him, mostly. He could not have chosen a worse time or worse place to be born the way he was.

He died of a stroke when our daughter was six. At that point, I could have stayed in Kabul. I had the house and my husband's wealth. There was a gardener and the aforementioned chauffeur. It would have been a comfortable life. But I packed our bags and moved us, Pari and me, to France.

EB: Which, as you indicated earlier, you did for her benefit.

NW: Everything I've done, Monsieur Boustouler, I've done for my daughter. Not that she understands, or appreciates, the full measure of what I've done for her. She can be breathtakingly thoughtless, my daughter. If she knew the life she would have had to endure, if not for me …

EB: Is your daughter a disappointment to you?

NW: Monsieur Boustouler, I've come to believe she's my punishment.

One day in 1975, Pari comes home to her new apartment and finds a small package on her bed. It is a year after she fetched her mother from the emergency room and nine months since she left Julien. Pari is living now with a nursing student named Zahia, a young Algerian woman with curly brown hair and green eyes. She is a competent girl, with a cheerful, unfrazzled disposition, and they have lived together easily, though Zahia is now engaged to her boyfriend, Sami, and moving in with him at the end of the semester.

There is a folded sheet of paper next to the package.
This came
for you. I'm spending the night at Sami's. See you tomorrow. Je t'embrasse. Zahia
.

Pari rips the package open. Inside is a magazine and, clipped to it, another note, this one written in a familiar, almost femininely graceful script.
This was sent to Nila and then to the couple who live in Collette's old apartment and now it is forwarded to me. You should update your forwarding address. Read this at your own peril. Neither of us fares very well, I'm afraid. Julien
.

Pari drops the journal on the bed and makes herself a spinach salad and some couscous. She changes into pajamas and eats by the TV, a small black-and-white rental. Absently, she watches images of airlifted South Vietnamese refugees arriving in Guam. She thinks of Collette, who had protested the American war in Vietnam in the streets. Collette, who had brought a wreath of dahlias and daisies to Maman's memorial, who had held and kissed Pari, who had delivered a beautiful recitation of one of Maman's poems at the podium.

Julien had not attended the services. He'd called and said, feebly, that he disliked memorials, he found them depressing.

Who doesn't?
Pari had said.

I think it's best I stay clear
.

Do as you like
, Pari had said into the receiver, thinking, But it won't absolve you, not coming. Any more than attending will absolve me. Of how reckless we were. How thoughtless. My God. Pari had hung up with him knowing that her fling with Julien had been the final push for Maman. She had hung up knowing that for the rest of her life it would slam into her at random moments, the guilt, the terrible remorse, catching her off guard, and that she would ache to the bones with it. She would wrestle with this, now and for all days to come. It would be the dripping faucet at the back of her mind.

She takes a bath after dinner and reviews some notes for an upcoming exam. She watches some more TV, cleans and dries the dishes, sweeps the kitchen floor. But it's no use. She can't distract herself. The journal sits on the bed, its calling to her like a lowfrequency hum.

Afterward, she puts a raincoat over her pajamas and goes for a walk down Boulevard de la Chapelle, a few blocks south of the apartment. The air is chilly, and raindrops slap the pavement and shopwindows, but the apartment cannot contain her restlessness right now. She needs the cold, the moist air, the open space.

When she was young, Pari remembers, she had been all questions.
Do I have cousins in Kabul, Maman? Do I have aunts and uncles? And grandparents, do I have a
grand-pére
and a
grand-maman?
How come they never visit? Can we write them a letter? Please, can we visit them?

Most of her questions had revolved around her father.
What was his favorite color, Maman? Tell me, Maman, was he a good swimmer? Did he know a lot of jokes?
She remembers him chasing her once through a room. Rolling her around on a carpet, tickling her soles and belly. She remembers the smell of his lavender soap and the shine of his high forehead, his long fingers. His oval-shaped lapis cuff links, the crease of his suit pants. She can see the dust motes they had kicked up together off the carpet.

What Pari had always wanted from her mother was the glue to bond together her loose, disjointed scraps of memory, to turn them into some sort of cohesive narrative. But Maman never said much. She always withheld details of her life and of their life together in Kabul. She kept Pari at a remove from their shared past, and, eventually, Pari stopped asking.

And now it turns out that Maman had told this magazine
writer, this Étienne Boustouler, more about herself and her life than she ever did her own daughter.

Or had she.

Pari read the piece three times back at the apartment. And she doesn't know what to think, what to believe. So much of it rings false. Parts of it read like a parody. A lurid melodrama, of shackled beauties and doomed romances and pervasive oppression, all told in such breathless, high-spirited fashion.

Pari heads westbound, toward Pigalle, walking briskly, hands stuffed into the pockets of her raincoat. The sky is darkening rapidly, and the downpour lashing at her face is becoming heavier and more steady, rippling windows, smearing headlights. Pari has no memory of ever meeting the man, her grandfather, Maman's father, has seen only the one photograph of him reading at his desk, but she doubts that he was the mustache-twirling villain Maman has made him out to be. Pari thinks she sees through this story. She has her own ideas. In her version, he is a man rightfully worried over the well-being of a deeply unhappy and self-destructive daughter who cannot help making shambles of her own life. He is a man who suffers humiliations and repeated assaults on his dignity and still stands by his daughter, takes her to India when she's ill, stays with her for six weeks. And, on that subject, what really was wrong with Maman? What did they do to her in India? Pari wonders, thinking of the vertical pelvic scar—Pari had asked, and Zahia had told her that cesarian incisions were made horizontally.

And then what Maman told the interviewer about her husband, Pari's father. Was it slander? Was it true that he'd loved Nabi, the chauffeur? And, if it was, why reveal such a thing now after all this time if not to confuse, humiliate, and perhaps inflict pain? And, if so, on whom?

As for herself, Pari is not surprised by the unflattering treatment Maman had reserved for her—not after Julien—nor is she surprised by Maman's selective, sanitized account of her own mothering.

Lies?

And yet …

Maman had been a gifted writer. Pari has read every word Maman had written in French and every poem she had translated from Farsi as well. The power and beauty of her writing was undeniable. But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician, with a pen for a wand, able to move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even possible?