And the Mountains Echoed

“Is she writing?”

“She hasn’t been.”

He soon changed the subject. Pari was relieved. She didn’t want to talk about Maman and her drinking and the struggle to get her to keep taking her pills. Pari remembered all the awkward gazes, all the times when they were alone, she and Julien, Maman getting dressed in the next room, Julien looking at Pari and her trying to think of something to say. Maman must have sensed it. Could it be the reason she had ended it with Julien? If so, Pari had an inkling she’d done so more as a jealous lover than a protective mother.

A few weeks later, Julien asked Pari to move in with him. He lived in a small apartment on the Left Bank in the 7th arrondissement. Pari said yes. Collette’s prickly hostility made for an untenable atmosphere at the apartment now.

Pari remembers her first Sunday with Julien at his place. They were reclined on his couch, pressed against each other. Pari was pleasantly half awake, and Julien was drinking tea, his long legs resting on the coffee table. He was reading an opinion piece on the back page of the newspaper. Jacques Brel played on the turntable. Every now and then, Pari would shift her head on his chest, and Julien would lean down and place a small kiss on her eyelid, or her ear, or her nose.

“We have to tell Maman.”

She could feel him tightening. He folded the paper, removed his reading glasses and put them on the arm of the couch.

“She needs to know.”

“I suppose,” he said.

“You ‘suppose’?”

“No, of course. You’re right. You should call her. But be careful. Don’t ask for permission or blessing, you’ll get neither. Just tell her. And make sure she knows this is not a negotiation.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Well, perhaps. Still, remember that Nila is a vindictive woman. I am sorry to say this, but this is why it ended with us. She is astonishingly vindictive. So I know. It won’t be easy for you.”

Pari sighed and closed her eyes. The thought of it made her stomach clench.

Julien stroked her back with his palm. “Don’t be squeamish.”

Pari called her the next day. Maman already knew.

“Who told you?”

“Collette.”

Of course, Pari thought. “I was going to tell you.”

“I know you were. You are. It can’t be hidden, a thing like this.”

“Are you angry?”

“Does it matter?”

Pari was standing by the window. With her finger, she absently traced the blue rim of Julien’s old, battered ashtray. She shut her eyes. “No, Maman. No it doesn’t.”

“Well, I wish I could say that didn’t hurt.”

“I didn’t mean it to.”

“I think that’s highly debatable.”

“Why would I want to hurt you, Maman?”

Maman laughed. A hollow, ugly sound.

“I look at you sometimes and I don’t see me in you. Of course I don’t. I suppose that isn’t unexpected, after all. I don’t know what sort of person you are, Pari. I don’t know who you are, what you’re capable of, in your blood. You’re a stranger to me.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” Pari said.

But her mother had already hung up.

FROM “AFGHAN SONGBIRD,” AN INTERVIEW WITH

NILA WAHDATI BY ÉTIENNE BOUSTOULER,

Parallaxe 84 (Winter 1974), p. 38

EB: Did you learn your French here?

NW: My mother taught me in Kabul when I was little. She spoke only French to me. We had lessons every day. It was very hard on me when she left Kabul.

EB: For France?

NW: Yes. My parents divorced in 1939 when I was ten. I was my father’s only child. Letting me go with her was out of the question. So I stayed, and she left for Paris to live with her sister, Agnes. My father tried to mitigate the loss for me by occupying me with a private tutor and riding lessons and art lessons. But nothing replaces a mother.

EB: What happened to her?

NW: Oh, she died. When the Nazis came to Paris. They didn’t kill her. They killed Agnes. My mother, she died of pneumonia. My father didn’t tell me until the Allies had liberated Paris, but by then I already knew. I just knew.

EB: That must have been difficult.

NW: It was devastating. I loved my mother. I had planned on living with her in France after the war.

EB: I assume that means your father and you didn’t get along.

NW: There were strains between us. We were quarreling. Quite a lot, which was a novelty for him. He wasn’t accustomed to being talked back to, certainly not by women. We had rows over what I wore, where I went, what I said, how I said it, who I said it to. I had turned bold and adventurous, and he even more ascetic and emotionally austere. We had become natural opponents.

She chuckles, and tightens the bandanna’s knot at the back of her head.

NW: And then I took to falling in love. Often, desperately, and, to my father’s horror, with the wrong sort. A housekeeper’s son once, another time a low-level civil servant who handled some business affairs for my father. Foolhardy, wayward passions, all of them doomed from the start. I arranged clandestine rendezvous and slipped away from home, and, of course, someone would inform my father that I’d been spotted on the streets somewhere. They would tell him that I was cavorting—they always put it like that—I was “cavorting.” Or else they would say I was “parading” myself. My father would have to send a search party to bring me back. He would lock me up. For days. He would say from the other side of the door, You humiliate me. Why do you humiliate me so? What will I do about you? And sometimes he answered that question with his belt, or a closed fist. He’d chase me around the room. I suppose he thought he could terrorize me into submission. I wrote a great deal at that time, long, scandalous poems dripping with adolescent passion. Rather melodramatic and histrionic as well, I fear. Caged birds and shackled lovers, that sort of thing. I am not proud of them.

I sense that false modesty is not her suit and therefore can assume only that this is her honest assessment of these early writings. If so, it is a brutally unforgiving one. Her poems from this period are stunning in fact, even in translation, especially considering her young age when she wrote them. They are moving, rich with imagery, emotion, insight, and telling grace. They speak beautifully of loneliness and uncontainable sorrow. They chronicle her disappointments, the crests and troughs of young love in all its radiance and promises and trappings. And there is often a sense of transcendent claustrophobia, of a shortening horizon, and always a sense of struggle against the tyranny of circumstance—often depicted as a never named sinister male figure who looms. A not so-opaque allusion to her father, one would gather. I tell her all this.