Page 166 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

developments in Afghanistan. One evening, a slightly tipsy visiting professor

named Chatelard asks Pari what she thinks will happen to Afghanistan when the
Soviets leave. “Will your people find peace, Madame Professeur?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “Practically speaking, I’m Afghan only in
name.”
“Non mais, quande-même,” he says. “But, still, you must have some insight.”
She smiles, trying to keep at bay the inadequacy that always creeps in with
these queries. “Just what I read in Le Monde. Like you.”

“But you grew up there, non?”
“I left when I was very little. Have you seen my husband? He’s the one with
the elbow patches.”
What she says is true. She does follow the news, reads in the papers about the
war, the West arming the Mujahideen, but Afghanistan has receded in her mind.
She has plenty to keep her busy at home, which is now a pretty four-bedroom
house in Guyancourt, about twenty kilometers from the center of Paris. They live

on a small hill near a park with walking trails and ponds. Eric is writing plays
now in addition to teaching. One of his plays, a lighthearted political farce, is
going to be produced in the fall at a small theater near Hôtel de Ville in Paris,
and he has already been commissioned to write another.
Isabelle has grown into a quiet but bright and thoughtful adolescent. She
keeps a diary and reads a novel a week. She likes Sinéad O’Connor. She has
long, beautiful fingers and takes cello lessons. In a few weeks, she will perform
Tchaikovsky’s Chanson Triste at a recital. She was resistant at first to taking up
the cello, and Pari had taken a few lessons with her as a show of solidarity. It
proved both unnecessary and unfeasible. Unnecessary because Isabelle quickly
latched onto the instrument of her own accord and unfeasible because the cello
made Pari’s hands ache. For a year now, Pari has been waking in the morning
with stiffness in her hands and wrists that won’t loosen up for half an hour,

sometimes an hour. Eric has quit pressuring her to see a doctor and is now
insisting. “You’re only forty-three, Pari,” he says. “This is not normal.” Pari has
set up an appointment.
Alain, their middle child, has a sly roguish charm. He is obsessed with martial
arts. He was born prematurely and is still small for a boy of eleven, but what he
lacks in stature he more than makes up for with desire and gumption. His
opponents are always fooled by his wispy frame and slim legs. They
underestimate him. Pari and Eric have often lain in bed at night and marveled at
his enormous will and ferocious energy. Pari worries about neither Isabelle nor
Alain.