Page 148 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

fun at her own ignorance. Oh là là, she would say, grinning, my head! My head!

Spinning like a totem! I’ll make you a deal, Pari. I’ll pour us some tea, and you
return to the planet, d’accord? She would chuckle, and Pari would humor her,
but she sensed an edge to these jokes, an oblique sort of chiding, a suggestion
that her knowledge had been judged esoteric and her pursuit of it frivolous.
Frivolous. Which was rich, Pari thought, coming from a poet, though she would
never say so to her mother.
Julien asked what she saw in mathematics and she said she found it
comforting.
“I might have chosen ‘daunting’ as a more fitting adjective,” he said.

“It is that too.”
She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical
truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that
the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting,
chalk scribbles away.
“Nothing like life, in other words,” he said. “There, it’s questions with either
no answers or messy ones.”

“Am I that transparent?” She laughed and hid her face with a napkin. “I sound
like an idiot.”
“Not at all,” he said. He plucked away the napkin. “Not at all.”
“Like one of your students. I must remind you of your students.”
He asked more questions, through which Pari saw that he had a working
knowledge of analytic number theory and was, at least in passing, familiar with

Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. They spoke until the sky darkened. They
drank coffee, and then beer, which led to wine. And then, when it could not be
delayed any longer, Julien leaned in a bit and said in a polite, dutiful tone, “And,
tell me, how is Nila?”
Pari puffed her cheeks and let the air out slowly.
Julien nodded knowingly.

“She may lose the bookstore,” Pari said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Business has been declining for years. She may have to shut it down. She
wouldn’t admit to it, but that would be a blow. It would hit her hard.”
“Is she writing?”

“She hasn’t been.”
He soon changed the subject. Pari was relieved. She didn’t want to talk about
Maman and her drinking and the struggle to get her to keep taking her pills. Pari