Page 164 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

to go to Munich for a conference. She will present a paper she has coauthored on

the use of modular forms outside of number theory, specifically in topology and
theoretical physics. The presentation is received well, and afterward Pari and a
few other academics go out to a noisy bar for beer and pretzels and Weisswurst.
She returns to the hotel room before midnight and goes to bed without changing
or washing her face. The phone wakes her at 2:30 A.M. Eric, calling from Paris.
“It’s Isabelle,” he says. She has a fever. Her gums have suddenly swollen and
turned red. They bleed profusely at the lightest touch. “I can hardly see her teeth.
Pari. I don’t know what to do. I read somewhere that it could be …”
She wants him to stop. She wants to tell him to shut up, that she cannot bear
to hear it, but she’s too late. She hears the words childhood leukemia, or maybe
he says lymphoma, and what’s the difference anyway? Pari sits on the edge of

the bed, sits there like a stone, head throbbing, skin drenched with sweat. She is
furious with Eric for planting a thing as horrible as this in her mind in the middle
of the night when she’s seven hundred kilometers away and helpless. She is
furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this,
voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A
spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you
do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith
that the world will not destroy you. I don’t have the heart for this. She actually
says this under her breath. I don’t have the heart for this. At that moment, she
cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a
parent.

And part of her—God help me, she thinks, God forgive me for it—part of her
is furious with Isabelle for doing this to her, for making her suffer like this.
“Eric. Eric! Ecoute moi. I’m going to call you back. I need to hang up now.”
She empties her purse on the bed, finds the small maroon notebook where she
keeps phone numbers. She places a call to Lyon. Collette lives in Lyon now with
her husband, Didier, where she has started a small travel agency. Didier is
studying to be a doctor. It’s Didier who answers the phone.
“You do know I’m studying psychiatry, Pari, don’t you?” he says.

“I know. I know. I just thought …”
He asks some questions. Has Isabelle had any weight loss? Night sweats,
unusual bruises, fatigue, chronic fevers?
In the end, he says Eric should take her to a doctor in the morning. But, if he

recalls correctly from his general training back in medical school, it sounds to
him like acute gingivostomatitis.
Pari clutches the receiver so hard, her wrist aches. “Please,” she says