Page 165 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

patiently, “Didier.”

“Ah, sorry. What I mean is, it sounds like the first manifestation of a cold
sore.”
“A cold sore.”
Then he adds the happiest words Pari has ever heard in her life. “I think she’s
going to be fine.”
Pari has met Didier only twice, once before and once after his wedding to

Collette. But at that instant, she loves him truly. She tells him so, weeping into
the phone. She tells him she loves him—several times—and he laughs and
wishes her a good night. Pari calls Eric, who will take Isabelle in the morning to
see Dr. Perrin. Afterward, her ears ringing, Pari lies in bed, looking at the
streetlight streaming in through the dull-green wooden shutters. She thinks of the
time she had to be hospitalized with pneumonia, when she was eight, Maman
refusing to go home, insisting on sleeping in the chair next to her bed, and she
feels a new, unexpected, belated kinship with her mother. She has missed her
many times over the last few years. At her wedding, of course. At Isabelle’s
birth. And at myriad random moments. But never more so than on this terrible
and wondrous night in this hotel room in Munich.

Back in Paris the next day, she tells Eric they shouldn’t have any more
children after Alain is born. It only raises the odds of heartbreak.
In 1985, when Isabelle is seven, Alain four, and little Thierry two, Pari
accepts an offer to teach at a prominent university in Paris. She becomes subject,
for a time, to the expected academic jostling and pettiness—not surprising, given
that, at thirty-six, she is the youngest professor in the department and one of only
two women. She weathers it in a way that she imagines Maman never could or
would have. She does not flatter or butter up. She refrains from locking horns or
filing complaints. She will always have her skeptics. But by the time the Berlin
Wall comes down, so have the walls in her academic life, and she has slowly
won over most of her colleagues with her sensible demeanor and disarming
sociability. She makes friends in her department—and in others too—attends
university events, fund-raisers, the occasional cocktail hour and dinner party.

Eric goes with her to these soirees. As an ongoing private joke, he insists on
wearing the same wool tie and corduroy blazer with elbow patches. He wanders
around the crowded room, tasting hors d’oeuvres, sipping wine, looking jovially
bewildered, and occasionally Pari has to swoop in and steal him away from a
group of mathematicians before he opines on 3-manifolds and Diophantine
approximations.
Inevitably, someone at these parties will ask Pari her views on the