“… I didn’t scream, I didn’t smile, I didn’t cry …”
She takes a few chicken wings out of a bag.
“… They all thought I’d been born deaf and dumb. So when I was a little girl they arranged for me to be married to my cousin. He was deaf and dumb too. When I got older, though, it turned out that I was neither deaf nor dumb. But by then it made no difference to them …”
She washes the chicken wings under the tap.
“… My father died when I was young. I was never close to my mother. When I grew up, I had no choice but to marry my cousin. So I ran away and married Yahya’s father.”
She lifts the lid and pours some more water in the pan.
“The night when all of my family fled to Pakistan, my mother came and left Moheb behind on our doorstep.”
With my back to the wall I slide down slowly until I’m crouching on the floor. Once again, the story of Mahnaz’s life reduces me to silence. Once again, anything I could say seems completely pointless.
I forget the smell of frying onions. For some time, I stare at the black locks of her hair falling down her back.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?” I ask her without thinking.
She gives me a painful smile.
“Nothing!”
Even her throwaway “Nothing” bears the weight of a history that demands to be known.
“Why don’t we go to Iran? Your husband’s family couldn’t find you there.”
She remains silent for a moment. Tipping the chicken wings into the pan, without turning around to look at me, she says, “Farhad my dear, my husband’s family are very strange people. The type for whom blood and family honor are one and the same. Don’t get yourself mixed up with us. I’ll be fine here.”
She puts the lid back on the saucepan.
In a corner of the kitchen, my heart fills with love.
All of us sit around the tablecloth spread on the floor of Moheb’s room. All of us eat in silence. Chicken wings have taken the place of words. As if we had already said all there is to be said. No more questions to be put, no more answers to be heard. We are all waiting for the trafficker to bang on the door.
A knock. Yahya gets up and runs down the corridor, a chicken wing in his hand. The sound of his small feet echoes from the courtyard. He reaches the street door. Having answered the door, he rushes back out of breath.
“It’s a man who says he’s come to buy a carpet.”
I jump to my feet without thinking. My heart plummets. My legs go weak.
“It’s the trafficker,” I tell Mahnaz, “I can’t go with him!”
Mahnaz gets up and tucks her hair behind her ear.
“Put on your shoes,” she says in her usual even tone.
I stare deep into her eyes. But she turns her head away. I want to put my life in her hands. Mahnaz leaves the room. Moheb starts to moan. I begin to cry inside, in silence.
Mahnaz takes the trafficker to the room where I spent the night.
“Father, will you come back soon?” Yahya asks, grasping my hand, greasy with chicken.
I follow the trafficker into the room without even washing my hands. He has spread our carpet across the floor. From it rises the sound of all the guests who’ve ever walked across it. Our best carpet. Its color seems even redder than before, its “elephant-foot” patterns even bigger and blacker.
“Hey, Brother, let’s give it a go.”
Mahnaz is standing by the door. Yahya leans his little head against the green flowers patterning his mother’s skirt. My unsteady frame collapses into the middle of the carpet under Mahnaz’s inscrutable gaze. The trafficker swiftly rolls me up into the carpet saying “Ya Ali!” as he heaves us both up onto his strong, broad shoulders and takes a first step. From the sound of his feet I can work out when we leave the room and when we reach the courtyard. Where is he going? Where is he taking me? No, first I have to say goodbye to Mahnaz! The street door is opening. No!
“Mahnaz!”
My cry is smothered in the patterns of our carpet. I try to struggle free.
“Brother, be quiet! We’re outside in the street.”
“I don’t want to go! Hey, do you hear me? Mahnaz! Yahya!”
My cries are cut off by the sound of a car door opening. The trafficker brings the carpet down from his shoulders and slides it inside. He shuts the door. I want to move, I want to get free of these carpet patterns.
“Father! Father!”
Yahya’s cries chase the sounds of our guests from this carpet forever.
I have no idea anymore whether the patterns on our carpet have gotten bigger, or whether I’ve gotten smaller. I’m running along the black lines of the patterns. My father stands over me. He is big. Immense. He won’t allow my feet to slip off the black patterns onto the red background of the carpet. I’m running. I’m spinning. As if I am trapped in a labyrinth. The black patterns have neither beginning nor end. All the lines turn back on themselves. Octagons and rectangles. I am crying and running.
“Run! Run!” my father shouts. “Shut up and stop crying! You unbeliever!”
I’m trying to work out how to escape from these octagons and rectangles without stepping onto the red background. The only possible way is to get through to the other side, to run and run till the carpet wears out under my feet. I run. I’m getting smaller and smaller with every turn. I run and I run. The patterns get bigger and bigger. As though I’m a part of the carpet’s design. I can feel the texture of the threads.
I only know I’m in the carpet because of its smell. I can’t see a thing. Just blackness. I can’t breathe. I can’t move.
“Tell him to keep still …”
I make out the sound of the trafficker’s voice over the monotonous thrum of the engine.
“Brother, keep still,” I hear a woman say. “We’re coming up to a checkpoint.”
I hold in my breath and my fear under the weight of the two bodies that sit on top of the carpet.
My head spins in the red-and-black labyrinth of the carpet.
As usual he sits with his hands laced across his bloated stomach, a look of complete indifference on his face.
“Hello, Father!”
No, I will not call him Father.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
What next?
“So, what brings you here, then?”
Hiding his contempt with a laugh.
“You left your mother, your sister, and your brother behind to come and visit me?”
His arrogant sneer brings back the memory of the last thing I said to him before he walked out on us with his second wife in tow — a phrase that unfortunately escapes my mind as two people shift about on the carpet wrapped around me. The car comes to a halt. I leave my father with his disdain, his fat stomach, and his second wife. The back door of the car opens.
“Where are you going?” booms a voice.
The voice of the trafficker replies to the soldier: “Moosa-e-Logar.”
“Who are these people?”
“My two wives.”
I can feel the bayonet of a gun poking the carpet.
“Where are you taking this carpet?”
“It’s a wedding present for my brother.”
The door slams shut. The car moves off. The two people get off the carpet. A cold sweat films my entire body. They loosen the two pieces of cloth tucked into the ends of the carpet. I gasp for air.
My sweating face trapped inside the carpet heightens its smell. Such a familiar smell. The smell of our front room. Parwaneh used to play marbles on the black patterns of this carpet. Farid used to race his matchbox cars along its black lines … It was the best carpet in the house — my mother’s dowry, given by her father to take to her new husband’s house.