Yahya picks grapes off the bunch I hold in my hands.
“Dear Mahnaz, why do you want to help me?”
She’ll shrug her shoulders. She won’t say a word. She’ll give me a look that says, “What a stupid question! If you don’t want to be here — leave! Go on — God be with you!”
“I’m asking you because I need to know what’s going on — and I need to get to know you, too …”
“Why?”
“In your eyes, in the things you say, there’s a secret that I see in my mother’s eyes … a secret I’ve never …”
With two fingers she’ll lift the hair from the side of her face and she’ll laugh at me! She’ll smile at me and shake her head. She’ll assume I’m trying to catch her out … that it’s impossible for me to believe a woman can have integrity … that …
“Farhad, I’m so sorry to have left you on your own all this time!”
Her voice shocks me from my reverie. I try to sit up on the cushion, then I stand up, clutching the stripped bunch of grapes that I pass, stupidly, from one hand to another. I feel sure that Mahnaz has been waiting outside the door reading my mind, hearing every word of our imaginary conversation. I turn scarlet with shame.
“I’m making something to eat.”
With unsteady steps, I cross the carpet toward her. Without having a clue of what I’m about to say to her, I hear myself speak:
“My mother … Please don’t go to any more trouble … She’ll come as … soon as possible …”
“Of course, but in the meantime, let’s have something to eat.”
She stares at the naked bunch of grapes I’m holding in my hands. I move a little closer to her. My heart pounds in my chest.
“I’ve caused you so much trouble … I hope that … Yahya’s grandmother …”
A grim smile settles on her lips.
“Don’t worry about that.”
She looks away from the shriveled branch in my hands and peers down the corridor.
“As I told you last night, my husband was murdered when he was in prison …”
“Peace be with him …” I say, softly.
“And now my husband’s family wants me to marry my brother-in-law … But that’s not what I want … I keep telling them I don’t feel as though I’m really a widow. No one has seen my husband’s body … since, in prison, they bury the dead in unmarked, communal graves …”
A sudden shiver goes right through me. I don’t know whether it’s a tremor of fear, or hatred, or anger — or from thinking thoughts like these about Mahnaz. I look down, away from her face, and stare at the carpet.
“Now all of my husband’s family is going to Pakistan … But I don’t want to go …”
Mahnaz’s delicate feet blend into the black patterns on the carpet. The patterns have neither ending nor beginning. These elaborate octagonal designs are infinitely intertwined and interwoven with endless other octagons. The octagons give birth to rectangles, the rectangles give birth to tiny dots …
I snap out of staring at the carpet when I catch sight of Mahnaz’s feet moving a little to the left. The lock of hair hides the left side of her face. I look into her eyes. She is waiting for an answer to a question that I have not yet been asked.
The sudden loud hiss of the pressure cooker takes Mahnaz’s questioning gaze out of the room.
I stay behind to keep company with her unspoken words.
Why on earth did I keep my mouth shut? Why didn’t I say something helpful in response to Mahnaz’s terrible story? Maybe this was the first time she’d confided this painful secret to anyone. And all I did was stand there, red-faced and dumbstruck, staring like an idiot at the carpet!
Mahnaz didn’t just want to tell me about her suffering. Like any other woman, like my mother, she wanted someone to understand her pain. She wanted to share her distress with somebody else. The last thing she needs is another Moheb in her life — someone deaf to her cries and dead to the world!
I go back to my cushion under the window. Reaching one hand behind the colossus of candle wax, I open the curtains to let more light fall onto the carpet. Below me, the courtyard, alive with anxiety, awaits my mother’s arrival.
I collapse with exhaustion onto the flower-patterned cushion.
In the clear light of day, the black lines on the carpet seem blacker than ever, and its deep red background glows with the quintessence of red. Suddenly I realize that these carpets are woven from hatred and anger. Black against red! As though the carpet weavers twisted the red weft of their anger with the black warp of their hatred … Women carpet weavers … children …
I’m sick to death of carpets!
I turn away from the black dots inside the rectangles of the carpet and lean back against the cushion’s flowers.
Up on the ceiling, a spider has spun its web around the lampshade.
I lower my face into her hands. Her hands are frozen. They tremble. But they hold me so tenderly!
My mother. She got here an hour ago. In disguise, well concealed — underneath the local laundrywoman’s veil. She couldn’t risk anyone spotting how scared she was coming here.
At first even I didn’t recognize her. There was a knock on the door. From behind the curtain I could see it was a heavily veiled woman. With her was an old porter with a large carpet balanced on one shoulder. They entered the room with Mahnaz. The porter deposited the carpet in the corner and went out. Then Mahnaz left too, closing the door behind her. My mother took off her veil and examined her battered son with exhausted eyes, her troubled face lit up with a beautiful smile. But not a word escaped her lips, shut tight as always between those two tense brackets. And me, I shook. I shook deep down inside. I trembled in her arms. I could not speak. We stand together in silence. My head in her hands. I can hear her breath laboring in her chest. I can’t open my eyes. I imagine she has loosened her blouse to take her worn-out breast and place it between my dry lips.
Her hand, shaking with anxiety, hovers over the gash on my temple.
“At three this afternoon, a trafficker is coming here to take you to Pakistan wrapped up in this carpet …”
That’s all she says. I lift my head from her hands.
“Mother, but …”
“But what?”
Looking directly into her terrified eyes, I find that all that I wanted to say is reduced to a single word:
“Nothing.”
She hands me an envelope. Inside is my father’s address, together with a little money.
“Mother, where should I go?”
“Where else can you go?”
I put my father’s unbearable pride back in the envelope.
“But what about you? And Parwaneh? What about Farid?”
She looks away, taking my hand in hers. She clears her throat. Trying not to cry.
“Things will get better soon.”
I press her hand to get her to look at me. But she won’t. She stares down at the carpet. Perhaps, for the very first time, my mother grasps the hatred and anger that has gone into weaving this carpet.
“Mother, let’s both go!”
A bitter laugh shakes her tiny frame. Her eyes repeat her father’s words:
“Faith is better than a roof!”