Page 130 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

EB: But she met your father in Kabul. You were born there.

NW: Yes. They met there in 1927. At a formal dinner in the
Royal Palace. My mother had accompanied her father—my
grandfather—who had been sent to Kabul to counsel King
Amanullah on his reforms. Are you familiar with him, King
Amanullah?

We are sitting in the living room of Nila Wahdati’s small
apartment on the thirtieth floor of a residential building in the
town of Courbevoie, just northwest of Paris. The room is small,
not well lit, and sparsely decorated: a saffron-upholstered couch,
a coffee table, two tall bookshelves. She sits with her back to the
window, which she has opened to air the smoke from the
cigarettes she lights continually.

Nila Wahdati states her age as forty-four. She is a strikingly
attractive woman, perhaps past the peak of her beauty but, as
yet, not far past. High royal cheekbones, good skin, slim waist.
She has intelligent, flirtatious eyes, and a penetrating gaze under
which one feels simultaneously appraised, tested, charmed, toyed
with. They remain, I suspect, a redoubtable seduction tool. She
wears no makeup save for lipstick, a smudge of which has strayed

a bit from the outline of her mouth. She wears a bandanna over
her brow, a faded purple blouse over jeans, no socks, no shoes.
Though it is only eleven in the morning, she pours from a bottle
of Chardonnay that has not been chilled. She has genially offered
me a glass and I have declined.

NW: He was the best king they ever had.

I find the remark of interest for its choice of pronoun.

EB: “They”? You don’t consider yourself Afghan?

NW: Let’s say I’ve divorced myself from my more troublesome
half.

EB: I’m curious as to why that is.