by Zoya Pirzad
I shooed away a mosquito that was trying to fly up my nose. Why had I come to Abadan in the first place? Why hadn’t I stayed in Tehran? Because Artoush got hired by the Oil Company, because Alice got a job in the Oil Company hospital, and because Mother came with Alice to Abadan. Had Mother come to be with Alice, or to be near me? Has anyone ever done anything just for my sake? What had I, at the age of thirty-eight, ever done solely for my own sake?
It was getting dark. The square was empty, with no one about. Through the boxwood hedges ringing the houses, I could see the lights coming on one by one. I turned my head toward our street. I had to go back. The thought of all the things I had to do depressed me: making dinner, planning Thursday’s party, a brewing argument with Armen about the pants he had been nagging me to buy for ages and which he would certainly want to wear on Thursday night, and above all, inviting Mrs. Simonian. Demanding, selfish harpy, I thought. She imagines everyone’s her personal maid and servant. Instead of all these tasks I did not like but had to do, I just wanted to lean back in the easy chair and find out what the hero of Sardo’s story would choose in the end: love or responsibility?
A dark shadow turned the corner and I leapt up. In the fading twilight I could not see well. It must be one of the children. They must have gotten worried. I started heading toward it, then almost ran, then stopped in my tracks. Mrs. Simonian also stopped in her tracks. She was wearing a white crew-neck blouse with black pants, just like her granddaughter’s outfit from that afternoon. Wearing flats, she seemed even shorter than usual.
She stood motionless for a moment, then continued on her way, and without looking at me, said, ‘So, you like to take walks, too.’ It was not a question. I did not know what to do, whether to walk with her, or not. She stopped and turned around. ‘You were on your way back home.’ Again, not a question. ‘Shall we walk together a little ways?’ This time it was a question. It even had the hint of a request about it.
I walked beside her, feeling ashamed for having called her in my head a ‘demanding, selfish harpy.’ Something in her voice made me feel sorry for her. We walked back to the square in silence and, heading toward the bench where I had been sitting just a few minutes before, my neighbor asked, ‘Shall we sit here a while? I’m tired.’
The bench was tall for her, but she sat with ease, neither hopping nor jumping, but rather gently pulling herself up onto the seat. She’s had a whole lifetime to practice, I thought. A whole lifetime of practice, just to sit down.
It was dark and muggy, and the air was still. I heard the monotonous ribbeting of the frogs in the drainage channel and the sound of splashing every time one of them jumped. I smelled my hand. It still smelled of eucalyptus.
A bicycle circled around the square, with a large box fastened to the back. It was Hajji, or as the kids called him, ‘Bread Man,’ an old man who sold Lavash in the mornings and evenings at the Oil Company locales. He must have been on his way back home to Ahmadabad and the tiny, dusty, dirty lane where his house was. He’d have more than an hour left to pedal. A few years earlier, his son had drowned in the Shatt al-Arab river, and I paid a consolation visit to Hajji’s wife, who, as he said, was just dying of grief. When Mother and Alice found out that I had gone to see Hajji’s wife, they said, ‘You’re crazy.’
Artoush said, ‘It was a good thing you did.’
Before the forty days of mourning for the boy were over, Hajji’s wife set herself on fire and died.
Hajji remarried two months later. ‘Won’t you take a wedding gift for Hajji?’ laughed Mother and Alice. Artoush just shook his head, and I stopped buying Lavash from Hajji.
‘What a lifeless city,’ Mrs. Simonian said.
I thought I would broach the matter of Thursday’s dinner party and kill two birds with one stone. ‘The family who used to live in G-4 – you saw them yesterday at our house – have arranged...’
She did not let me finish. She turned her head to face me and spoke very deliberately. ‘I saw them. Let me guess. They want to invite my son and because they want to invite my son, they have invited me and Emily, as well. And you must be invited too, right? Or maybe they’ve even stuck you with hosting the party?’ And she sneered.
I held my breath. A warm breeze knocked a few petals on the ground from the oleander bush behind us. I peered at the Msasa trees surrounding the square in the faint light of the metal lamp posts. How did she know?
She put her hand on my knee. ‘Clarice, I like you.’ It was the first time she used the informal ‘you’ with me. ‘You are different from other women. You pay attention to things that others don’t. Things which are not important to other women are important to you. You are just like me, or rather, like me in my younger days.’
The idea that I might be like Mrs. Simonian was the last thing that would ever occur to me and the last thing I might wish for. Why was everyone saying that I reminded them of someone? Nina said I reminded her of Violette, and now...
She lifted her hand from my knee. ‘I don’t like this city. It’s been years since I liked any city I’ve been in. I put up with it for the sake of Emile and Emily.’ She fell silent. I noticed once again that she was talking more informally than usual.
Her eyes were fixed on the water tank. ‘Ever since I was old enough to know myself, I have always chosen to put up with things. First for the sake of my father, then for my husband, now for my son and granddaughter. I have never done anything for my own sake.’ She seemed to be talking to herself. I stared at the water tank, standing atop its metal legs like a giant bogeyman peering down from on high at us two women.
She sneered again. ‘Are you surprised? Like everyone else, you suppose that I have done and had whatever I wanted in life?’ She slid off the bench and stood there. ‘Come on. I want to show you the rest of the photographs.’ And off she went.
I did not think of the children’s dinner, nor of Nina, nor of Mother and Alice. I did not want to deal with any of them. I wanted to do something that I wanted to do. I wanted to see the photographs.
The gate of G-4 was open. We crossed the yard. The flowerbed on the right was overgrown with weeds, but the soil in the flowerbed on the left was newly overturned. Did he pull the weeds himself, I wondered? Did he hoe the ground himself?
The house was dark and quiet. Mrs. Simonian headed for the bedrooms. She stopped next to the statue of the elephant with the broken trunk to stroke its head. ‘Ganesh is the god of fortune and wealth for the Hindus.’ She stroked the broken trunk. ‘You see? Even this poor fellow’s patience has been broken by me.’ She opened her bedroom door. ‘Emily is at your house. Emile has gone to fetch her and must have stayed. Is the blond at your house, too? Sit here on the bed.’
I sat on the bed. ‘No, she’s not.’
She pulled out a heavy album from under the bed. It had a red leather cover etched in gold and embossed in turquoise. I had never seen anything like it. She opened it and muttered, ‘She’ll show up, no doubt she’ll show up,’ and then fell silent for a while.
I looked around the dimly lit and sparsely furnished room. It looked as if its occupant had moved in that very day and had not yet had a chance to set out her things, or perhaps the occupant had packed everything up to move out the next day.
Mrs. Simonian handed me a photograph. A young man in a white suit was standing on a broad staircase, one foot on the step above him. The staircase had a stone bannister lined with stone flowerpots full of flowers. The young man was smiling into the camera. His eyes looked to be light in color.
‘This was the entrance to our house in Isfahan,’ explained Mrs. Simonian. ‘The one your mother said it was a pity to sell.’ She smirked. ‘I hated the entire place: the large garden, the high-ceilinged rooms, the wood floors of the corridors, all the expensive furniture. My father used to say, “What more could you want?” For years I did not know what I wanted, and when I finally figured it out and asked for it, he said no.’
She held out another photo to me, the same young man beh
ind a desk covered with books and papers, staring into the camera, a pen in one hand and his chin resting in the other. He had close-cropped hair and wore a striped coat and vest. I was mentally comparing it to a suit I had seen Mr. Davtian wearing, when my neighbor handed me a third photo. In this one the young man had on a white shirt with a broad, open collar – like a Russian shirt. His hair spilled down to his shoulders and he wore a thin beard. He stood, hand on his waist, next to a high-backed chair, again staring into the camera. A girl was sitting in the chair, her hair gathered atop her head. The girl was wearing a dark buttoned-up blouse and a necklace with several strands of tiny pearls. You could only see her from the knees up. The man’s eyes were definitely light.
That girl in the picture, fifty or sixty years on and now sitting in front of me, closed her eyes. ‘My father said that a poet was not the kind of person to build a life with. Father said it was only because of my money that he wanted to marry me. No one falls in love with a midget girl, he said. But my husband and my father did fall in love. They fell in love with each other’s money. My father said that if I refused to marry him...’ She opened her eyes, leaned forward and took the picture from my hands. ‘We took this picture without my father’s permission, at the photography studio of Thooni Johannes in Julfa. Thooni promised not to tell my father, and he didn’t. He was a good man.’ She stared at the photo and pressed her lips together, emphasizing the creases around her mouth. The frogs were croaking in the yard.
I was about to ask, ‘Then what happened?’ when she looked at me and smiled. ‘What happened?’ She opened the album and flipped to a particular page. There she was with the young man, sitting on a wrought iron bench in front of the Eiffel Tower. In the next picture she was with the young man, riding in a rickshaw pulled by a brown-skinned man wearing a loincloth. Again, she and the young man were in the next picture, sitting at a table in a sidewalk café on a crowded street.
As she talked, I looked at the pictures and listened. ‘He followed me everywhere – India, England, France, back to India. When my husband died, I thought I was free, I thought we would finally marry, I thought I was the luckiest woman on Earth.’ She ran her hand over the photos, then slowly turned the pages. She came to the last page, which contained a very large photo. It was a grave in a cemetery with large trees. Elmira Simonian was standing next to the grave in a black dress, hat, and veil and holding the hand of a little boy in a black suit and tie. Mrs. Simonian’s voice seemed to come from far away. ‘A few months later he was gone, too. We were in Paris. I buried him in Père-Lachaise.’
She fell silent, leaned back on the headboard and stared at the ceiling. I felt she was no longer in the room. She might have been at the Eiffel Tower, or in some side street of Bombay, or a coffeehouse in England. Or maybe in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, with its large trees.
I closed the album and picked up the studio photo. The girl in the photo had a cold look. The young man seemed angry and his eyes were green, or maybe blue.
‘Did he have blue eyes?’
She drew her hand across her forehead, took the photograph from my hand, stuck it inside the album with the rest of the pictures, and stood up.
We walked together without a word to the end of the yard. The gate was open. She stopped and took hold of my arm. ‘I’m sorry. I was feeling sad and nostalgic. Good evening.’ As I headed across the street, she called out to me. I turned around. She was the same height as the gate. In the dark I could not see her face, but her voice seemed again to come from far away. ‘They were green. The same color as his son’s.’
I was left alone in the street. The boxwood hedges and Msasa trees were almost black. Moths were circling the street lamps and you could smell the gas from the refinery.
I opened our door and stepped inside. It was totally quiet. I bent over to pick up a hairband that had fallen near the telephone table. Was it Armineh’s or Arsineh’s? I couldn’t tell. How could anyone tell one sister’s hairband from the other’s, when even their pencils were sharpened to the same length and had identical bite-marks? Under the telephone table a decorative hairpin sparkled. Whose was that? Not difficult to tell, this one – it belonged to the blond.
I went to the kitchen and wondered when Emile had come to fetch Emily. When had they returned home, and how could I have failed to notice their arrival? Had Nina and Sophie gone? What did the children have for dinner? How long had I been gone? I stared at the sweet peas on the window ledge. My head was still swimming from all the photographs and the talk. The table was filled with dirty cups and dishes. I put on my apron and started washing the dishes. I heard footsteps behind me, but kept on washing.
Artoush said, ‘Were you with Mrs. Simonian?’
I scraped the leavings of a tomato omelette off a plate into the trash. How did he know? He answered my thought. ‘Emile went to get you.’
I couldn’t see him, but I could picture him, leaning in the doorway, playing with his goatee, with his other hand probably in his pants pocket. When he knew I was upset, that is what he would do while trying to snap me out of it. He would never ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ Not even when, like this evening, my being upset had nothing to do with him. I rubbed some dishwashing powder onto a plate. It was Emile, I thought, and not my husband, who had come looking for me.
I heard the legs of a chair scrape on the floor. ‘Your mother and Alice argued again, about what I don’t know. They left early. Nina fixed omelettes for the kids. I gave her and Sophie a ride home. The car, confound it, was acting up again. It was a real pain to get it started.’
I held the plate under the water and read on the dishwashing canister: ‘Norman’s Dishwashing Powder. Suitable for cleaning dishes, tiles, bathrooms.’ Under the words was a funny picture of Norman Wisdom in his tweed cap. I was about to say, ‘Don’t read me any bedtime stories, I’m not upset with you. I’m not actually upset with anyone.’ Before I could say it, he continued with his recital. ‘Armen did not eat. We couldn’t find Ishy, and Arsineh cried.’ I untied the apron.
Artoush was scooting something across the table from one hand to the other. The sugar shaker, or maybe the salt shaker. I knew he was searching for something to say next. I guessed he might ask, ‘What are you cooking tomorrow?’ but when he asked, ‘Was Mrs. Simonian alright?’ I burst out laughing.
I turned around to look at him, and spoke in measured tones. ‘Ishy disappears almost every night. Armen has not been eating for several days because he’s fallen in love. I don’t feel well, but it has nothing to do with you. Mrs. Simonian was fine, which can’t concern you very much.’ He looked for a few seconds at the sugar shaker, then at me. He pushed back the chair, got up and left the kitchen. The sugar shaker lay overturned on the table. I was choked up, and turned back to the dishes. Norman Wisdom was still laughing.
29
Armen and Artoush left the house together. Neither of them said goodbye.
In the hallway I tightened the ribbons around the twins’ pigtails, one by one, and said goodbye to them. Armineh stuck her recess snack in her satchel and zipped it up. ‘Aren’t you coming to the door with us?’ I kissed her cheek, and shook my head. Arsineh asked, ‘Are you tired?’ I kissed her cheek and nodded.
Armineh peeked through the lace curtain of the door. ‘It’s foggy again.’ I looked in the yard. The twins were afraid to venture into the yard in thick fog. I never let on that I knew they were scared. I would hold their hands and walk them through the yard, singing ‘We’re floating through the clouds.’
I straightened up the curtain. ‘The two of you can float through the clouds together today, okay?’ They looked at each other, then at me. Their eyes looked sad, lacking their usual sparkle.
Through the lace curtain, I watched them walk hand in hand down the path and disappear into the fog. I couldn’t see the gate. The swing seat, the willow tree and part of the lawn looked like an impressionist watercolor, wispy and blurred.
I always walked my children to the bus stop. Why, I wonder
ed, not this morning? How could I make them worry like that? So, I’m exhausted and in a bad mood, but what fault is it of the children? My compassionate side offered consolation: ‘You’re only human. You have the same right as everyone else to be tired now and then. Like everyone else, you...’ The telephone rang.
Mrs. Nurollahi asked, ‘If you have some time this morning, may I come over?’
As if all the other excitement wasn’t enough. I searched for some excuse. ‘Aren’t you at the office today?’
‘My boss has given me some time off. My good-natured boss. I think you know him, no?’ She laughed at her own joke.
‘Thank God he’s good-natured with someone, at least,’ I thought to myself. After overturning the sugar shaker, her boss had not spoken a single word to me. I searched for some other excuse. ‘I was going to go downtown today...’
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I have to do some shopping, too. We can meet together at the Milk Bar at ten o’clock.’ Before I could come up with another excuse, she thanked me with three very long sentences, said goodbye with a single word, then hung up.
There was still some time before ten o’clock. Today was the day to change the sheets. I went to Armen’s room.
I tried not to view his room as messy and unkempt. Shoes, socks, books, magazines, 45rpm records, and empty milk glasses which would of course have been impossible for him to return to the kitchen. I picked the balled-up pyjamas and a few books and notebooks off his bed, then pulled the sheets off the mattress. The mattress jiggled slightly, and a piece of paper fell to the ground. I imagined at first it was another of the monthly tests he would hide when the grade was not so good. I found a not inconsiderable number of such papers; he always hid them, like the twins’ toys, in what he thought were unlikely hiding places: behind the air-conditioning vent, above the medicine cabinet, under the Persian carpets. I unfolded it and saw from the first line that it was a letter. I told myself I shouldn’t read it. It’s an invasion of privacy to read other people’s letters, even if he is your child. You shouldn’t read it. You shouldn’t.