Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

coat, looking for a moment like a character from a Melville policier.

“I’ll only be a minute,” Pari says. Julien casts a skeptical glance.

Julien’s apartment is small. Six quick steps and she has crossed the foyer, passed the kitchen, and is seated on the edge of the bed, reaching for the phone on the lone nightstand for which they have room. The view, however, is spectacular. It is raining now, but on a clear day she can look out the eastfacing window and see most of the 19th and 20th arrondissements.

“Oui, allo?” she says into the receiver.

A man’s voice answers. “Bonsoir. Is this Mademoiselle Pari Wahdati?”

“Who is calling?”

“Are you the daughter of Madame Nila Wahdati?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Dr. Delaunay. I am calling about your mother.”

Pari shuts her eyes. There is a brief flash of guilt before it is overtaken by a customary dread. She has taken calls of this sort before, too many to count now, from the time that she was an adolescent, really, and even before that—once, in fifth grade, she was in the middle of a geography exam, and the teacher had to interrupt, walk her out to the hallway, and explain in a hushed voice what had happened. These calls are familiar to Pari, but repetition has not led to insouciance on her part. With each one she thinks, This time, this is the time, and each time she hangs up and rushes to Maman. In the parlance of economics, Julien has said to Pari that if she cut off the supply of attention, perhaps the demands for it would cease as well.

“She’s had an accident,” Dr. Delaunay says.

Pari stands by the window and listens as the doctor explains. She coils and uncoils the

phone cord around her finger as he recounts her mother’s hospital visit, the forehead laceration, the sutures, the precautionary tetanus injection, the aftercare of peroxide, topical antibiotics, dressings. Pari’s mind flashes to when she was ten, when she’d come home one day from school and found twenty-five francs and a handwritten note on the kitchen table. I’ve gone to Alsace with Marc. You remember him. Back in a couple of days. Be a good girl. (Don’t stay up late!) Je t’aime. Maman. Pari had stood shaking in the kitchen, eyes filling up, telling herself two days wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t so long.

The doctor is asking her a question. “Pardon?”

“I was saying will you be coming to take her home, mademoiselle? The injury is not serious, you understand, but it’s probably best that she not go home alone. Or else we could call her a taxi.”

“No. No need. I should be there in half an hour.”

She sits on the bed. Julien will be annoyed, probably embarrassed as well in front of Christian and Aurelie, whose opinions seem to matter a great deal to him. Pari doesn’t want to go out in the hallway and face Julien. She doesn’t want to go to Courbevoie and face her mother either. What she would rather do is lie down, listen to the wind hurl pellets of rain at the glass until she falls asleep.

She lights a cigarette, and when Julien enters the room behind her and says, “You’re not coming, are you?” she doesn’t answer.

EXCERPT FROM “AFGHAN SONGBIRD,” AN INTERVIEW WITH NILA WAHDATI BY ÉTIENNE BOUSTOULER,

Parallaxe 84 (WINTER 1974), P. 33

EB: So I understand you are, in fact, half Afghan, half French?

NW: My mother was French, yes. She was a Parisian.

EB: But she met your father in Kabul. You were born there.

NW: Yes. They met there in 1927. At a formal dinner in the Royal Palace. My mother had accompanied her father—my grandfather—who had been sent to Kabul to counsel King Amanullah on his reforms. Are you familiar with him, King Amanullah?

We are sitting in the living room of Nila Wahdati’s small apartment on the thirtieth

floor of a residential building in the town of Courbevoie, just northwest of Paris. The room is small, not well lit, and sparsely decorated: a saffronupholstered couch, a coffee table, two tall bookshelves. She sits with her back to the window, which she has opened to air the smoke from the cigarettes she lights continually.

Nila Wahdati states her age as forty-four. She is a strikingly attractive woman, perhaps past the peak of her beauty but, as yet, not far past. High royal cheekbones, good skin, slim waist. She has intelligent, flirtatious eyes, and a penetrating gaze under which one feels simultaneously appraised, tested, charmed, toyed with. They remain, I suspect, a redoubtable

seduction tool. She wears no makeup save for lipstick, a smudge of which has strayed a bit from the outline of her mouth. She wears a bandanna over her brow, a faded purple blouse over jeans, no socks, no shoes. Though it is only eleven in the morning, she pours from a bottle of Chardonnay that has not been chilled. She has genially offered me a glass and I have declined.

NW: He was the best king they ever had.

I find the remark of interest for its choice of pronoun.

EB: “They”? You don’t consider yourself Afghan?

NW: Let’s say I’ve divorced myself from my more troublesome half.

EB: I’m curious as to why that is.

NW: If he had succeeded, meaning King Amanullah, I might have answered your question differently.

I ask her to explain.

NW: You see, he woke one morning, the king, and proclaimed his plan to reshape the country—kicking and screaming, if need be—into a new and more enlightened nation. By God! he said. No more wearing of the veil, for one. Imagine, Monsieur

Boustouler, a woman in Afghanistan arrested for wearing a burqa! When his wife, Queen Soraya, appeared barefaced in public? Oh là là. The lungs of the mullahs inflated with enough gasps to fly a thousand Hindenburgs. And no more polygamy, he said! This, you understand, in a country where kings had legions of concubines and never set eyes on most of the children they’d so frivolously fathered. From now on, he declared, no man can force you into marriage. And no more bride price, brave women of Afghanistan, and no more child marriage. And here is more: You will all attend school.

EB: He was a visionary, then.

NW: Or a fool. I have always found the line perilously thin myself.

EB: What happened to him?

NW: The answer is as vexing as it is predictable, Monsieur Boustouler. Jihad, of course. They declared jihad on him, the mullahs, the tribal chiefs. Picture a thousand fists shot heavenward! The king had made the earth move, you see, but he was surrounded by an ocean of zealots, and you know well what happens when the ocean floor trembles, Monsieur Boustouler. A tsunami of bearded rebellion crashed down upon the poor king and carried him off, flailing helplessly, and spat him out on the