Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

shores of India, then Italy, and at last Switzerland, where he crawled from the muck and died a disillusioned old man in exile.

EB: And the country that emerged? I gather it did not suit you well.

NW: The reverse is equally true.

EB: Which was why you moved to France in 1955.

NW: I moved to France because I wished to save my daughter from a certain kind of life.

EB: What kind of life would that be?

NW: I didn’t want her turned, against both her will and nature, into one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or doing the wrong thing. Women who are admired by some in the West—here in France, for in- stance—turned into heroines for their hard lives, admired from a distance by those who couldn’t bear even one day of walking in their shoes. Women who see their desires doused and their dreams renounced, and yet—and this is the worst of it, Monsieur Boustouler—if you meet them, they smile and pretend they have no misgivings at all. As though they lead

enviable lives. But you look closely and you see the helpless look, the desperation, and how it belies all their show of good humor. It is quite pathetic, Monsieur Boustouler. I did not want this for my daughter.

EB: I gather she understands all this?

She lights another cigarette.

NW: Well, children are never everything you’d hoped for, Monsieur Boustouler.

In the emergency room, Pari is instructed by an ill-tempered nurse to wait by the registration desk, near a wheeled rack filled with clipboards and charts. It astonishes Pari that

there are people who voluntarily spend their youths training for a profession that lands them in a place such as this. She cannot begin to understand it. She loathes hospitals. She hates seeing people at their worst, the sickly smell, the squeaky gurneys, the hallways with their drab paintings, the incessant paging overhead.

Dr. Delaunay turns out younger than Pari had expected. He has a slender nose, a narrow mouth, and tight blond curls. He guides her out of the emergency room, through the swinging double doors, into the main hallway.

“When your mother arrived,” he says in a confidential tone, “she was quite inebriated

…You don’t seem surprised.” “I’m not.”

“Neither were a number of the nursing staff. They say she runs a bit of a tab here. I am new here myself, so, of course, I’ve never had the pleasure.”

“How bad was it?”

“She was quite ornery,” he says. “And, I should say, rather theatrical.”

They share a brief grin. “Will she be all right?”

“Yes, in the short term,” Dr. Delaunay says. “But I must recommend, and quite emphatically, that she reduce her drinking. She was lucky this time, but who’s to say next time …”

Pari nods. “Where is she?”

He leads her back into the emergency room and around the corner. “Bed three. I’ll be by shortly with discharge instructions.”

Pari thanks him and makes her way to her mother’s bed.

“Salut, Maman.”

Maman smiles tiredly. Her hair is disheveled, and her socks don’t match. They have wrapped her forehead with bandages, and a colorless fluid drips through an intravenous linked to her left arm. She is wearing

a hospital gown the wrong way and has not tied it properly. The gown has parted slightly in the front, and Pari can see a little of the thick, dark vertical line of her mother’s old cesarian scar. She had asked her mother a few years earlier why she didn’t bear the customary horizontal mark and Maman explained that the doctors had given her some sort of technical reason at the time that she no longer remembered. The important thing, she said, was that they got you out.

“I’ve ruined your evening,” Maman mutters.

“Accidents happen. I’ve come to take you home.”

“I could sleep a week.”

Her eyes drift shut, though she keeps talking in a sluggish, stalling manner. “I was just sitting and watching TV. I got hungry. I went to the kitchen to get some bread and marmalade. I slipped. I’m not sure how, or on what, but my head caught the oven-door

handle on the way down. I think I might have blacked out for a minute or two. Sit down, Pari. You’re looming over me.”

Pari sits. “The doctor said you were drinking.”

Maman cracks one eye half open. Her frequenting of doctors is exceeded only by her dislike of them. “That boy? He said that? Le petit salaud. What does he know? His breath still smells of his mother’s tit.”

“You always joke. Every time I bring it up.” “I’m tired, Pari. You can scold me another time. The whipping post isn’t going

anywhere.”

Now she does fall asleep. Snores, unattractively, as she does only after a binge.

Pari sits on the bedside stool, waiting for Dr. Delaunay, picturing Julien at a low-lit table, menu in hand, explaining the crisis to Christian and Aurelie over tall goblets of Bordeaux. He offered to accompany her to the hospital, but in a perfunctory way. It was

a mere formality. Coming here would have been a bad idea anyway. If Dr. Delaunay thought he had seen theatrical earlier … Still, even if he couldn’t come with her, Pari wishes he hadn’t gone to dinner without her either. She is still a little astonished that he did. He could have explained it to Christian and Aurelie. They could have picked another night, changed the reservations. But Julien had gone. It wasn’t merely thoughtless. No. There was something vicious about this move, deliberate, slashing. Pari has known for some time that he has that capacity. She has wondered of late whether he has a taste for it as well.

It was in an emergency room not unlike this one that Maman first met Julien. That was ten years ago, in 1963, when Pari was fourteen. He had driven a colleague, who had a migraine. Maman had brought Pari, who was the patient that time, having sprained her ankle badly during gymnastics in school.

Pari was lying on a gurney when Julien pushed his chair into the room and struck up a conversation with Maman. Pari cannot remember now what was said between them. She does remember Julien saying, “Paris—like the city?” And from Maman the familiar reply, “No, without the s. It means ‘fairy’ in Farsi.”

They met him for dinner on a rainy night later that week at a small bistro off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Back at the apartment, Maman had made a protracted show of indecision over what to wear, settling in the end for a pastel blue dress with a closefitting waist, evening gloves, and sharp-poin- ted stiletto shoes. And even then, in the elevator, she’d said to Pari, “It’s not too Jackie, is it? What do you think?”

Before the meal they smoked, all three of them, and Maman and Julien had beer in oversize frosted mugs. They finished one round, Julien ordered a second, and there

was a third as well. Julien, in white shirt, tie, and a checkered evening blazer, had the controlled courteous manners of a well-bred man. He smiled with ease and laughed effortlessly. He had just a pinch of gray at the temples, which Pari hadn’t noticed in the dim light of the emergency room, and she estimated his age around the same as Maman’s. He was well versed in current events and spent some time talking about De Gaulle’s veto of England’s entry into the Common Market and, to Pari’s surprise, almost succeeded in making it interesting. Only after Maman asked did he reveal that he had started teaching economics at the Sorbonne.

“A professor? Very glamorous.”

“Oh, hardly,” he said. “You should sit in sometime. It would cure you of that notion swiftly.”

“Maybe I will.”