“Do you feel a little better now?”
“Yes …”
Both of them are so sweet and kind! What do they want from me?
Yahya hands me a glass of water and sits down before me.
“Are you all right, Father?”
“Yahya, leave Farhad alone! Go into the other room!”
Mahnaz cleans up my vomit from the carpet. I should help her. But I can’t. The child gets up and leaves the room. I want to say something. But my tongue is heavy. I am still staring at Mahnaz’s hands. My heart beats more fiercely than ever. It pounds with utter exhaustion, it thumps with things unsaid … Mahnaz stands up.
“The curfew is over. I’ll go and get you some medicine.”
“Please don’t go to any trouble … Really, I’ll be fine …”
Mahnaz leaves the room.
Morning waits outside the window. It waits for the curtains to be drawn so it can slip into this room where I am waiting.
I will not draw back those curtains.
Daylight streams through the gap between the curtains, spilling onto the windowsill and down over the cushion that I’m sitting on, illuminating the black patterns woven into the deep red pile of the carpet. Mahnaz has gone out to get some bread for breakfast, and some medicine for me. Yahya sits on the cushion by the door. We both are silent. The child’s trusting face mocks me. He doesn’t look anything like me! Actually, he looks nothing like his mother, either. Which means he must take after his father. But, if that’s the case, why would he mistake me for him?
I trawl the blank white walls of the room searching for a photograph of his father. On the windowsill, next to the candle stub, are two large books with gold inlaid covers. I take down both of them. One is Haft Paikar and the other Khosraw & Sheerin. I put them back on the windowsill.
Why does Yahya call me “Father”? Mahnaz never answered my question. Maybe he’s never seen his father.
I call him over to me. He springs up with excitement and sits down in front of me, right in the middle of the sunbeam that falls onto the carpet through the gap between the curtains. He looks at me intently, unquestioningly. Yet the mind of a child like Yahya should be full of questions, particularly for someone he calls “Father!” A father who’s been missing for ages and has suddenly come back beaten to a pulp! Last night he asked me only one question—“Father, where have you been?”—and he did not wait for my answer. He left. It was a question without a question mark. He didn’t even repeat it. But I’ll be gone in a short while. He needs to understand that I’m not his father, that I’ll be going away, that …
“Yahya, I …”
The child moves his right eye out of the sunbeam. A constant smile on his face. Nothing in the way he looks at me gives me any impression that he’s eager for me to continue. On the contrary, he looks at me as though there’s an entirely different conversation going on inside his head: “For heaven’s sake, please leave me to my imagination. I know you’re not my father. But can’t we pretend for a while? Just as you want to imagine that everything that’s happened here is nothing other than a terrible nightmare, I need to inhabit the dream that my father has returned. Please don’t spoil it!”
“Father, I know where you’ve been!”
He says this like he’s revealing an incredible secret, in a voice that matches the secretive look on his face.
“You do? Where have I been?”
He wriggles his little body closer to mine.
“You’ve been in the city of Pul-e-Charkhi.”
“And what’s it like there?”
He fingers the sunbeam, then traces the flower-pattern on the cushion.
“It’s a very big city with a huge bridge in the middle — and the bridge spins around and around all the time.”
“Can you remember when I went away?”
“No, because I was fast asleep. The lamps had run out of oil. My mother said you’d gone out to get us some oil. Then you got lost and nobody recognized you there. You left your ID card at home so you got stuck and you couldn’t come back. The bridge wouldn’t stop spinning. When I asked Uncle Anwar when you’d be able to get off the bridge and leave Pul-e-Charkhi, he said: ‘In a dream!’ ”
The child stops playing with the sunbeam and the flowers on the cushion.
“My mother cried. She thought you would never come back again. But just like Uncle Anwar said, at night you came back in my dreams, although you’d disappear before we woke up. So I promised my mother that one night when you came into my dream I’d catch you and I wouldn’t let you go away again!”
The child has caught me in his dream. I am a dream-creature. I am an imaginary father, an imaginary husband … So why bother going back to my life?
I leave Yahya in his silent dreams of a city with a huge bridge that spins around and around for ever, and I close my eyes only to find myself in someone else’s dream — in the feverish dreams of my mother.
My mother hasn’t slept a wink. She’s even forgotten her morning prayers. Now that the curfew is over, she ventures outdoors to wait at the end of the street. But I’m nowhere to be seen. She goes back indoors. Where else can she go? Who would know where I might have gone? She goes to Enayat’s house. But I’m not there. Then what? Which department should she go to first — should she go to the Ministry?
“Over there, Mother, wait in the queue!”
She walks past another hundred mothers to find a place at the end of the queue. She smiles at the soldier for me. She calls him “Brother.”
“Dear Brother, Farhad son of Mirdad did not come home last night …”
“Well, he’s not here. He’s gone, he’s fled with the rest of them …”
“Gone. Fled.” She repeats the words over and over between her bracketed lips. “Gone where? Fled where? Why didn’t he say anything?”
How could I possibly leave my mother, Farid, and Parwaneh behind?
My mother has never forgotten how, when my father walked out on her and left her with three children, I cursed him — his cowardice and cruelty — to heaven and earth.
“No, he can’t have left us! But where on earth can he have gone? Has the army got hold of him? Is he in prison?”
She swallows her fear, covering her mouth with both hands to stop herself crying out loud. She decides to wait it out in a corner, under the sympathetic gaze of all the other mothers …
I have to go! I get up. Yahya watches me with his penetrating gaze. I take a few steps toward the corridor.
“Father, Mother’s coming back soon.”
Right. I must leave before Mahnaz gets back. I don’t want the look on her face to deflect my intentions. Where are my shoes? I look in the corridor. They’re nowhere to be seen. Have they hidden them away? I go back to the room. Yahya still sits there in silence, smiling to himself at my feeble attempt to escape.
“Where are my shoes?”
The child gets up calmly. With a tremulous look, full of longing for me to stay put, he walks past me down the corridor onto the terrace. He returns carrying my shoes.
“My mother cleaned them for you.”
He puts my shoes down next to my feet and goes back to the room to sit on the cushion by the door and stare at my hesitant feet. The shoes are still damp. Never mind. My mother is waiting.
I hate having to walk out on Yahya. His plaintive stare is paralyzing. I move purposefully across the courtyard toward the door to the street. The door opens. It is Mahnaz.