Page 160 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

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?

Pari does not know—she does not know. And that, perhaps, may have been
Maman’s true intent, to shift the ground beneath Pari’s feet. To intentionally
unsteady and upend her, to turn her into a stranger to herself, to heave the weight
of doubt on her mind, on all Pari thought she knew of her life, to make her feel
as lost as if she were wandering through a desert at night, surrounded by
darkness and the unknown, the truth elusive, like a single tiny glint of light in the
distance flickering on and off, forever moving, receding.