Page 162 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

design, violet drapes and orange pillows everywhere, curly-haired oud player on

a small stage. Collette has not arrived alone. She has brought a young man with
her. His name is Eric Lacombe. He teaches drama to seventh and eighth graders
at a lycée in the 18th. He tells Pari he has met her before, a few years earlier, at a
student protest against seal hunting. At first Pari cannot recall, and then she
remembers that he was the one with whom Collette had been so angry over the
low turnout, the one whose chest she’d knuckled. They sit on the ground, atop
fluffy mango-colored cushions, and order drinks. Initially, Pari is under the
impression that Collette and Eric are a couple, but Collette keeps praising Eric,
and soon Pari understands he has been brought for her benefit. The discomfort
that would normally overtake her in a situation like this is mirrored in—and
mitigated by—Eric’s own considerable unease. Pari finds it amusing, and even
endearing, the way he keeps blushing and shaking his head in apology and
embarrassment. Over bread and black olive tapenades, Pari steals glances at him.
He could not be called handsome. His hair is long and limp, tied with a rubber
band at the base of his neck. He has small hands and pale skin. His nose is too
narrow, his forehead too protruding, the chin nearly absent, but he has a bright-

eyed grin and a habit of punctuating the end of each sentence with an expectant
smile like a happy question mark. And though his face does not enthrall Pari as
Julien’s had, it is a far kinder face and, as Pari will learn before long, an external
ambassador for the attentiveness, the quiet forbearance, and the enduring
decency that resides within Eric.
They marry on a chilly day in the spring of 1977, a few months after Jimmy
Carter is sworn into office. Against his parents’ wishes, Eric insists on a small
civil ceremony, no one present but the two of them and Collette as witness. He
says a formal wedding is an extravagance they cannot afford. His father, who is
a wealthy banker, offers to pay. Eric, after all, is their only child. He offers it as a

gift, then as a loan. But Eric declines. And though he never says so, Pari knows
it is to save her the awkwardness of a ceremony at which she would be alone,
with no family to sit in the aisles, no one to give her away, no one to shed a
happy tear on her behalf.
When she tells him of her plans to go to Afghanistan, he understands in a way
that Pari believes Julien never would. And also in a way that she had never
openly admitted to herself.
“You think you were adopted,” he says.
“Will you go with me?”

They decide they will travel that summer, when school is out for Eric and Pari
can take a brief hiatus from her Ph.D. work. Eric registers them both for Farsi