Page 132 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

EB: And the country that emerged? I gather it did not suit you

well.

NW: The reverse is equally true.

EB: Which was why you moved to France in 1955.

NW: I moved to France because I wished to save my daughter
from a certain kind of life.

EB: What kind of life would that be?

NW: I didn’t want her turned, against both her will and nature,
into one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong
course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or
doing the wrong thing. Women who are admired by some in the
West—here in France, for instance—turned into heroines for
their hard lives, admired from a distance by those who couldn’t
bear even one day of walking in their shoes. Women who see
their desires doused and their dreams renounced, and yet—and
this is the worst of it, Monsieur Boustouler—if you meet them,
they smile and pretend they have no misgivings at all. As though
they lead enviable lives. But you look closely and you see the

helpless look, the desperation, and how it belies all their show of
good humor. It is quite pathetic, Monsieur Boustouler. I did not
want this for my daughter.

EB: I gather she understands all this?

She lights another cigarette.

NW: Well, children are never everything you’d hoped for,
Monsieur Boustouler.

In the emergency room, Pari is instructed by an ill-tempered nurse to wait by the
registration desk, near a wheeled rack filled with clipboards and charts. It
astonishes Pari that there are people who voluntarily spend their youths training