“I’ll bet he’s disappointed,” Collette said. “That you don’t go out with them.”
“Well, if he is, he’s not letting on.”
“He wouldn’t let on, would he? What would your mother think?”
“About what?” Pari said, though she knew, of course. She knew, and what she wanted was to hear it said.
“About what?” Collette’s tone was sly, excited. “That he’s with her to get to you. That it’s you he wants.”
“That is disgusting,” Pari said with a flutter.
“Or maybe he wants you both. Maybe he likes a crowd in bed. In which case, I might ask you to put in a good word for me.”
“You’re repulsive, Collette.”
Sometimes when Maman and Julien were out, Pari would undress in the hallway and look at herself in the long mirror. She would find faults with her body. It was too tall, she would think, too unshapely, too … utilitarian. She had inherited none of her mother’s bewitching curves. Sometimes she walked like this, undressed, to her mother’s room and lay on the bed where she knew Maman and Julien made love. Pari lay there stark-naked with her eyes closed, heart battering, basking in heedlessness, something like a hum spreading across her chest, her belly, and lower still.
It ended, of course. They ended, Maman and Julien. Pari was relieved but not surprised. Men always failed Maman in the end. They forever fell disastrously short of whatever ideal she held them up to. What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits and the flinging of cooking utensils and collapse. High drama. Maman was incapable of either starting or ending a relationship without excess.
Then the predictable period when Maman would find a sudden taste for solitude. She would stay in bed, wearing an old winter coat over her pajamas, a weary, doleful, unsmiling presence in the apartment. Pari knew to leave her alone. Her attempts at consoling and companionship were not welcome. It lasted weeks, the sullen mood. With Julien, it went on considerably longer.
“Ah, merde!” Maman says now.
She is sitting up in bed, still in the hospital gown. Dr. Delaunay has given Pari the discharge papers, and the nurse is unhooking the intravenous from Maman’s arm.
“What is it?”
“I just remembered. I have an interview in a couple of days.”
“An interview?”
“A feature for a poetry magazine.”
“That’s fantastic, Maman.”
“They’re accompanying the piece with a photo.” She points to the sutures on her forehead.
“I’m sure you’ll find some elegant way to hide it,” Pari says.
Maman sighs, looks away. When the nurse yanks the needle out, Maman winces and barks at the woman something unkind and undeserved.
FROM “AFGHAN SONGBIRD,” AN INTERVIEW WITH
NILA WAHDATI BY ÉTIENNE BOUSTOULER,
Parallaxe 84 (WINTER 1974), P. 36
I look around the apartment again and am drawn to a framed photograph on one of the bookshelves. It is of a little girl squatting in a field of wild bushes, fully absorbed in the act of picking something, some sort of berry. She wears a bright yellow coat, buttoned to the throat, which contrasts with the dark gray overcast sky above. In the background, there is a stone farmhouse with closed shutters and battered shingles. I ask about the picture.
NW: My daughter, Pari. Like the city but no s. It means “fairy.” That picture is from a trip to Normandy we took, the two of us. Back in 1957, I think. She must have been eight.
EB: Does she live in Paris?
NW: She studies mathematics at the Sorbonne.
EB: You must be proud.
She smiles and shrugs.
EB: I am struck a bit by her choice of career, given that you devoted yourself to the arts.
NW: I don’t know where she gets the ability. All those incomprehensible formulas and theories. I guess they’re not incomprehensible to her. I can hardly multiply, myself.
EB: Perhaps it’s her way of rebelling. You know a thing or two about rebellion, I think.
NW: Yes, but I did it the proper way. I drank and smoked and took lovers. Who rebels with mathematics?
She laughs.
NW: Besides, she would be the proverbial rebel without a cause. I’ve given her every freedom imaginable. She wants for nothing, my daughter. She lacks nothing. She’s living with someone. He is quite a bit older. Charming to a fault, well-read, entertaining. A raging narcissist, of course. Ego the size of Poland.
EB: You don’t approve.
NW: Whether I approve or not is irrelevant. This is France, Monsieur Boustouler, not Afghanistan. Young people don’t live or die by the stamp of parental approval.
EB: Your daughter has no ties to Afghanistan, then?
NW: We left when she was six. She has limited memory of her time there.
EB: But not you, of course.
I ask her to tell me about her early life.
She excuses herself and leaves the room for a moment. When she returns, she hands me an old, wrinkled black-and-white photograph. A stern-looking man, heavyset, bespectacled, hair shiny and combed with an impeccable part. He sits behind a desk, reading a book. He wears a suit with peaked lapels, double-breasted vest, high-collared white shirt and bow tie.
NW: My father. Nineteen twenty-nine. The year I was born.
EB: He looks quite distinguished.
NW: He was part of the Pashtun aristocracy in Kabul. Highly educated, unimpeachable manners, appropriately sociable. A great raconteur too. At least in public.
EB: And in private?
NW: Venture to guess, Monsieur Boustouler?
I pick up the photo and look at it again.
EB: Distant, I would say. Grave. Inscrutable. Uncompromising.
NW: I really insist you have a glass with me. I hate—no, I loathe—drinking alone.
She pours me a glass of the Chardonnay. Out of politeness, I take a sip.
NW: He had cold hands, my father. No matter the weather. His hands were always cold. And he always wore a suit, again no matter the weather. Perfectly tailored, sharp creases. A fedora too. And wingtips, of course, two-toned. He was handsome, I suppose, though in a solemn way. Also—and I understood this only much later—in a manufactured, slightly ridiculous, faux-European way—complete, of course, with weekly games of lawn bowling and polo and the coveted French wife, all of it to the great approval of the young progressive king.
She picks at her nail and doesn’t say anything for a while. I flip the tape in my recorder.
NW: My father slept in his own room, my mother and I in ours. Most days, he was out having lunch with ministers and advisers to the king. Or else he was out riding horses, or playing polo, or hunting. He loved to hunt.