Page 145 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

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.
“They’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.

“You look like you’re dying to be rescued.”
He was wearing a tweed jacket over a sweater, jeans, a wool scarf. His hair
was longer, and he had aged some, but elegantly, in a way that some women his
age might find unfair and even infuriating. Still lean and fit, a couple of crow’s-