Page 283 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

musician, sitting on an apple crate, playing “Bohemian Rhapsody” on his

acoustic guitar. I don’t recall this loquaciousness from her visit in the U.S., and it
feels to me like a delaying tactic, like we are circling around the thing she really
wants to do—what we will do—and all these words are like a bridge.
“But you will see a real bridge soon,” she says. “When everybody arrives. We
will go together to the Pont du Gard. Do you know it? No? Oh là là. C’est
vraiment merveilleux. The Romans built it in the first century for transporting
water from Eure to Nîmes. Fifty kilometers! It is a masterpiece of engineering,
Pari.”
I have been in France for four days, in Avignon for two. Pari and I took the
TGV here from an overcast, chilly Paris, stepped off it to clear skies, a warm
wind, and a chorus of cicadas chirping from every tree. At the station, a mad

rush to haul my luggage out ensued, and I nearly didn’t make it, hopping off the
train just as the doors whooshed shut behind me. I make a mental note now to
tell Baba how three seconds more and I would have ended up in Marseille.
How is he? Pari asked in Paris during the taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle to
her apartment.
Further along the path, I said.

Baba lives in a nursing home now. When I first went to scout the facility,
when the director, Penny—a tall, frail woman with curly strawberry hair—
showed me around, I thought, This isn’t so bad.
And then I said it. This isn’t so bad.
The place was clean, with windows that looked out on a garden, where,
Penny said, they held a tea party every Wednesday at four-thirty. The lobby
smelled faintly of cinnamon and pine. The staff, most of whom I have now come
to know by first name, seemed courteous, patient, competent. I had pictured old
women, with ruined faces and whiskers on their chins, dribbling, chattering to
themselves, glued to television screens. But most of the residents I saw were not

that old. A lot of them were not even in wheelchairs.
I guess I expected worse, I said.
Did you? Penny said, emitting a pleasant, professional laugh.
That was offensive. I’m sorry.

Not at all. We’re fully conscious of the image most people have of places like
this. Of course, she added over her shoulder with a sober note of caution, this is
the facility’s assisted-living area. Judging by what you’ve told me of your father,
I’m not sure he would function well here. I suspect the Memory Care Unit would
be more suitable for him. Here we are.
She used a card key to let us in. The locked unit didn’t smell like cinnamon or