And the Mountains Echoed

EB: So you didn’t see much of him. He was an absentee figure.

NW: Not entirely. He made it a point every couple of days to spend a few minutes with me. He would come into my room and sit on my bed, which was my signal to climb into his lap. He would bounce me on his knees for a while, neither one of us saying much, and finally he would say, “Well, what shall we do now, Nila?” Sometimes he would let me take the handkerchief from his breast pocket and let me fold it. Of course I would just ball it up and stuff it back into his pocket, and he would feign an expression of mock surprise, which I found highly comical. And we’d keep doing this until he tired of it, which was soon enough. And then he would stroke my hair with his cold hands and say, “Papa has to go now, my fawn. Run along.”

She takes the photograph back to the other room and returns, fetches a new pack of cigarettes from a drawer and lights one.

NW: That was his nickname for me. I loved it. I used to hop around the garden—we had a very large garden—chanting, “I am Papa’s fawn! I am Papa’s fawn!” It wasn’t until much later that I saw how sinister the nickname was.

EB: I’m sorry?

She smiles.

NW: My father shot deer, Monsieur Boustouler.

They could have walked the few blocks to Maman’s apartment, but the rain has picked up considerably. In the taxi, Maman sits balled up in the backseat, draped by Pari’s raincoat, wordlessly staring out the window. She looks old to Pari at this instant, far older than her forty-four years. Old and fragile and thin.

Pari has not been to Maman’s apartment in a while. When she turns the key and lets them in, she finds the kitchen counter cluttered with dirty wineglasses, open bags of chips and uncooked pasta, plates with clumps of unrecognizable food fossilized onto them. A paper bag stuffed with empty wine bottles sits on the table, precariously close to tipping over. Pari sees newspapers on the floor, one of them soaking up the blood spill from earlier in the day, and, on it, a single pink wool sock. It frightens Pari to see Maman’s living space in this state. And she feels guilt as well. Which, knowing Maman, may have been the intended effect. And then she hates that she had this last thought. It’s the sort of thing Julien would think. She wants you to feel badly. He has said this to her several times over the last year. She wants you to feel badly. When he first said it, Pari felt relieved, understood. She was grateful to him for articulating what she could not, or would not. She thought she had found an ally. But, these days, she wonders. She catches in his words a glint of meanness. A troubling absence of kindness.

The bedroom floor is littered with pieces of clothing, records, books, more newspapers. On the windowsill is a glass half filled with water gone yellow from the cigarette butts floating in it. She swipes books and old magazines off the bed and helps Maman slip beneath the blankets.

Maman looks up at her, the back of one hand resting on her bandaged brow. The pose makes her look like an actress in a silent film about to faint.

“Are you going to be all right, Maman?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. It doesn’t come out like a plea for attention. Maman says this in a flat, bored voice. It sounds tired and sincere, and final.

“You’re scaring me, Maman.”

“Are you leaving now?”

“Do you want me to stay?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

“Turn off the light.”

“Maman?”

“Yes.”

“Are you taking your pills? Have you stopped? I think you’ve stopped, and I worry.”

“Don’t start in on me. Turn off the light.”

Pari does. She sits on the edge of the bed and watches her mother fall asleep. Then she heads for the kitchen to begin the formidable task of cleaning up. She finds a pair of gloves and starts with the dishes. She washes glasses reeking of long-soured milk, bowls crusted with old cereal, plates with food spotted with green fuzzy patches of fungus. She recalls the first time she had washed dishes at Julien’s apartment the morning after they had slept together for the first time. Julien had made them omelets. How she’d relished this simple domestic act, washing plates at his sink, as he played a Jane Birkin song on the turntable.

She had reconnected with him the year before, in 1973, for the first time in almost a decade. She had run into him at a street march outside the Canadian Embassy, a student protest against the hunting of seals. Pari didn’t want to go, and also she had a paper on meromorphic functions that needed finishing, but Collette insisted. They were living together at the time, an arrangement that was increasingly proving to their mutual displeasure. Collette smoked grass now. She wore headbands and loose magenta-colored tunics embroidered with birds and daisies. She brought home long-haired, unkempt boys who ate Pari’s food and played the guitar badly. Collette was always in the streets, shouting, denouncing cruelty to animals, racism, slavery, French nuclear testing in the Pacific. There was always an urgent buzz around the apartment, people Pari didn’t know milling in and out. And when they were alone, Pari sensed a new tension between the two of them, a haughtiness on the part of Collette, an unspoken disapproval of her.

“They’re lying,” Collette said animatedly. “They say their methods are humane. Humane! Have you seen what they use to club them over the head? Those hakapiks? Half the time, the poor animal hasn’t even died yet, and the bastards stick their hooks in it and drag it out to the boat. They skin them alive, Pari. Alive!” The way Collette said this last thing, the way she emphasized it, made Pari want to apologize. For what, she was not quite sure, but she knew that, these days, it squeezed the breath out of her being around Collette and her reproaches and many outrages.

Only about thirty people showed up. There was a rumor that Brigitte Bardot was going to make an appearance, but it turned out to be just that, only a rumor. Collette was disappointed at the turnout. She had an agitated argument with a thin, pale bespectacled young man named Eric, who, Pari gathered, had been in charge of organizing the march. Poor Eric. Pari pitied him. Still seething, Collette took the lead. Pari shuffled along toward the back, next to a flat-chested girl who shouted slogans with a kind of nervous exhilaration. Pari kept her eyes to the pavement and tried her best to not stand out.

At a street corner, a man tapped her on the shoulder.

“You look like you’re dying to be rescued.”

He was wearing a tweed jacket over a sweater, jeans, a wool scarf. His hair was longer, and he had aged some, but elegantly, in a way that some women his age might find unfair and even infuriating. Still lean and fit, a couple of crow’s-feet, some more graying at the temples, his face set with just a light touch of weariness.