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.

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.

“I am,” she said.

They kissed on the cheek, and when he asked if she would have a coffee with him, she said yes.

“Your friend looks angry. Homicidally angry.”

Pari glanced behind her, saw Collette standing with Eric, still chanting and pumping her fist but also, absurdly, glaring at the two of them. Pari swallowed back laughter—that would have wrought irreparable damage. She shrugged apologetically and ducked away.

They went to a small café and sat at a table by the window. He ordered them coffee and a custard mille-feuille each. Pari watched him speak to the waiter in the tone of genial authority that she recalled well and felt the same flutter in the gut that she had as a girl when he would come over to pick up Maman. She felt suddenly self-conscious, of her bitten fingernails, her unpowdered face, her hair hanging in limp curls—she wished now that she’d dried it after the shower, but she’d been late, and Collette had been pacing like a zoo animal.

“I hadn’t pegged you as the protesting type,” Julien said, lighting her cigarette for her.

“I’m not. That was more guilt than conviction.”

“Guilt? Over seal hunting?”

“Over Collette.”

“Ah. Yes. You know I think I may be a little frightened of her.”

“We all are.”

They laughed. He reached across the table and touched her scarf. He dropped his hand. “It would be trite to say that you’re all grown up, so I won’t. But you do look ravishing, Pari.”

She pinched the lapel of her raincoat. “What, in this Clouseau outfit?” Collette had told her it was a stupid habit, this self-deprecating clowning around with which Pari tried to mask her nervousness around men she was attracted to. Especially when they complimented her. Not for the first time, and far from the last, she envied Maman her naturally self-assured disposition.

“Next you’ll say I’m living up to my name,” she said.

“Ah, non. Please. Too obvious. There is an art to complimenting a woman, you know.”

“No. But I’m certain you do.”

The waiter brought the pastries and coffee. Pari focused on the waiter’s hands as he arranged the cups and plates on the table, the palms of her own hands blooming with sweat. She had had only four lovers in her lifetime—a modest number, she knew, certainly compared to Maman at her age, even Collette. She was too watchful, too sensible, too compromising and adaptable, on the whole steadier and less exhausting than either Maman or Collette. But these were not qualities that drew men in droves. And she hadn’t loved any of them—though she had lied to one and said she did—but pinned beneath each of them she had thoughts of Julien, of him and his beautiful face, which seemed to come with its own private lighting.

As they ate, he talked about his work. He said he had quit teaching some time ago. He had worked on debt sustainability at the IMF for a few years. The best part of that had been the traveling, he said.

“Where to?”

“Jordan, Iraq. Then I took a couple of years to write a book on informal economies.”

“Were you published?”

“That is the rumor.” He smiled. “I work for a private consulting firm now here in Paris.”

“I want to travel too,” Pari said. “Collette keeps saying we should go to Afghanistan.”

“I suspect I know why she would want to go.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Going back there, I mean. I don’t care about the hashish, but I do want to travel the country, see where I was born. Maybe find the old house where my parents and I lived.”

“I didn’t realize you had this compulsion.”

“I’m curious. I mean, I remember so little.”

“I think one time you said something about a family cook.”

Pari was inwardly flattered that he recalled something she had told him so many years before. He must have thought of her, then, in the intervening time. She must have been on his mind.

“Yes. His name was Nabi. He was the chauffeur too. He drove my father’s car, a big American car, blue with a tan top. I remember it had an eagle’s head on the hood.”

Later, he asked, and she told him, about her studies and her focus on complex variables. He listened in a way that Maman never did—Maman, who seemed bored by the subject and mystified by Pari’s passion for it. Maman couldn’t even feign interest. She made lighthearted jokes that, on the surface, appeared to poke fun at her own ignorance. Oh là là, she would say, grinning, my head! My head! Spinning like a totem! I’ll make you a deal, Pari. I’ll pour us some tea, and you return to the planet, d’accord? She would chuckle, and Pari would humor her, but she sensed an edge to these jokes, an oblique sort of chiding, a suggestion that her knowledge had been judged esoteric and her pursuit of it frivolous. Frivolous. Which was rich, Pari thought, coming from a poet, though she would never say so to her mother.

Julien asked what she saw in mathematics and she said she found it comforting.

“I might have chosen ‘daunting’ as a more fitting adjective,” he said.

“It is that too.”

She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away.

“Nothing like life, in other words,” he said. “There, it’s questions with either no answers or messy ones.”

“Am I that transparent?” She laughed and hid her face with a napkin. “I sound like an idiot.”

“Not at all,” he said. He plucked away the napkin. “Not at all.”

“Like one of your students. I must remind you of your students.”

He asked more questions, through which Pari saw that he had a working knowledge of analytic number theory and was, at least in passing, familiar with Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. They spoke until the sky darkened. They drank coffee, and then beer, which led to wine. And then, when it could not be delayed any longer, Julien leaned in a bit and said in a polite, dutiful tone, “And, tell me, how is Nila?”

Pari puffed her cheeks and let the air out slowly.

Julien nodded knowingly.

“She may lose the bookstore,” Pari said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Business has been declining for years. She may have to shut it down. She wouldn’t admit to it, but that would be a blow. It would hit her hard.”

“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.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1575