Nahid Rachlin

Homa reread Tom’s letter.
With you all the way in Tehran, the apartment, Columbus, feel empty…
Hadn’t that been the case even when she was there, with him, she thought. She wished she could call him and talk about that. But phone connections had been difficult since she came to Tehran a month ago. Lines to the US either rang busy or there was just a dead hum. She hadn’t been able to set up an internet connection and so she couldn’t even e-mail Tom.
Maybe just as well to have the distance; it would help to clarify certain things for both of them. As she abandoned the letter on the mantle, it landed next to a prism, part of a high school project. In fact the room was more or less the same as ten years ago when she left Iran to go to college in America-- the blue carpet with arabesque patterns, the embroidered bedspread, the peach colored walls. Her mother had made the ell of the spacious living room into a bedroom and kept Homa’s room intact, as if she expected her to return any day and live there.
Out of the window she could see that Moghadessi Alley with its gas lamps, cobble-stoned sidewalks and tall sycamore trees, was the same too as she recalled it. And the sounds were the same -- children’s voices as they played soccer or marbles on its sidewalks, a cat mewing, the blacksmiths banging on metal in the adjacent bazaar. Their apartment in Columbus overlooked a row of identical buildings with shutters covering their windows. The main sound that reached her there was the hum of traffic from the street below.
It amazed her how much she liked being here among the familiar sights and sounds that she had once yearned to get far away from. She might not have come had it not been for her cousin, Noushin’s urgent phone call. “Your mother needs help,” Noushin had said. Her mother, sixty-five, was too young to need extensive care, had it not been for a stroke. Homa had no siblings with whom to share the responsibility and her father had died. Her mother’s brother, sixty-seven, lived far away, in Kashan, and her older sister, sixty-nine, was in a nursing home due to a hip fracture that had not healed. Noushin had three young children, ranging from one to five years old and was also responsible for attending to her nearly blind mother-in-law.
The call from Nousin had come six months ago, but it took this long for her to be able to get a visa and all the necessary papers. Her spring semester at OU, where she was getting a masters degree in nutrition science had ended and she didn’t have a full time job lined up yet. She had been doing temp work while going to school part time.
Since she came to Tehran a month ago she had put many things in motion for her mother. The tenants of the first floor apartment of the three story house had left and Homa found a woman, Fatemeh, and her ten year old son, Ali, to live there rent-free in return for taking care of some of her mother’s daily needs-- cleaning and shopping and cooking, attending to the flowers in the courtyard that could wilt in the dry summer months when it never rained. Now she needed to set straight her mother’s jumbled finances.
She left to go to the living room, where her mother was sitting on the sofa. She looked so thin and frail. Once she had been energetic, running the household, gardening, embroidering, entertaining relatives and friends. But at least since she came here her mother’s spirits had lifted and she wasn’t as withdrawn or forgetful.
Homa sat next to her and, taking her hand, she said, “I’m here now. We’re together.”
“Yes, you’re home now.”
Fatemeh came in, accompanied by Ali. They were carrying a samovar, a tea pot, cups and saucers, and cookies. She was a tall heavy-set woman with strong arms. Homa liked that, thinking she could take good care of her mother. Fatemeh and her son arranged everything on the coffee table next to a bowl of rock sugar and a geranium pot.
“Stay and have tea with us,” Homa said to them.
“Thank you but we have a lot to do,” Fatemeh said. “What would you like for dinner?”
“Today is vegetarian day. Make kuku and cucumber and yogurt salad,” Homa said.
Fatemeh and Ali left and Homa poured the concentrated tea from the pot into cups, then added water from the samovar’s faucet. Her mother managed to put rock sugars into her own cup and stir the tea with a spoon.
“Would you like to watch a program on TV?” Homa asked.
“There’s nothing good on TV. All propaganda.”
“We have to get satellite TV, hide one on the roof, like everyone else does.”
“You disappeared for years,” her mother said.
”You know how hard it has been at times for me to get a visa, and harder for Tom. There isn’t even an American Embassy here.” But her not having come to Iran all these years went beyond practical difficulties. Her parents had never approved of her marrying Tom and that had created a strain. Fresh grief floated to Homa’s heart that she hadn’t been able to see her father in his last days in life, that she hadn’t been there to commiserate with her mother.
She looked at the framed family photograph hanging on a wall. Her mother and father sat on a chair, she, their only child, in front of them. In the picture her mother had all her dark wavy hair, now a fuzz of gray. Her father had a pile of curly brown hair, light brown eyes, and the warm smile she liked so much. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes but though she resembled her mother in looks they had gone in a different directions. Unlike her mother who would never dream of leaving Iran, in spite of all her criticisms, Homa had wanted to see the world, live in a freer country. Then her advisor in high school told her about scholarships available at Oberlin College in Ohio. She applied and got in and was granted a full scholarship, including tuition, room and board. Her parents had finally given up trying to talk her into staying in Iran, to arrange a marriage for her. They did not guess that she would marry an American man and stay in America. She had left Iran without thinking about her future after college. But once she got to America she found herself pulled more and more into the culture. She could say and do what she wanted without fear of being criticized, being arrested. She felt relieved that going back and forth to Iran was difficult, at times impossible.
“I’ll take you to the porch,” she said to her mother after they finished drinking their tea. She helped her get up and walk to the porch on her cane and settled her on the rocking chair in the shade of a plum tree. It was a good place for her to sit. She could look at the activities on the street on the other side of the courtyard-- people coming and going from the mosque with its large blue dome dominating the view, vendors hawking their merchandise from trays balanced over their heads; I have the reddest tomatoes at the lowest prices, practically free.
Then Homa left the apartment to go to the courthouse. It would be open now after the long midday siesta. She wanted to check on the progress of the law suits her mother had set in motion long ago and now was unable to manage. She had lent money to a rug merchant who wasn’t returning it now that she needed it. Tenants of an apartment she owned on the other side of the city hadn’t paid their rent for over a year. Homa had spoken to the lawyer her mother had hired but he told her it was now in the hands of a local court judge. The easiest thing and maybe fastest was for Homa to go to the courthouse, he had said, and a judge would either see her immediately or she would be able to make an appointment with him. A chaotic legal system. But she brushed away that feeling, thinking how chaotic her own personal life had become in a more orderly Ohio. She and Tom came and went from their small two bedroom apartment at different times, not knowing which one of them had picked up the grocery on the way home. The refrigerator, kitchen shelves, were either overflowing with duplicate items or missing essentials. Tom gave his work clothes to different dry cleaners and failed to pick them up and the tickets got lost. He would just buy new shirts and jackets. He liked to sleep late and sometimes the sounds of her getting ready in the morning woke him up and threw him into a tantrum. Books and magazines, paperwork for filing taxes, were all piled up in irrational ways on every possible table or counter top.
As Homa reached the second floor, Massoumeh, the tenant of the apartment there, opened her door and said to her, “Can I talk to you for a few moments?”
Homa went in; Massoumeh offered her fruit from a bowl.
“I’ve had too much to eat already, thank you,” Homa said and sat on the chair that Massoumeh pointed to. A pile of army uniforms lay on the floor next to a sewing box. Massoumeh had told her plaintively that she sewed buttons on the jackets to supplement her income, that her husband, a retired doctor, had a second wife who absorbed all his money. Massomeh sat on another chair and said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your servant, Fatemeh.”
Homa became riveted on her, pulled by the intensity of her tone.
“Fatemeh has an eye on my husband,” she said. “She comes to my apartment when he’s home and flirts with him. I’ve seen a lot of men coming and going from her apartment. Who knows what kind of people they are.”
Homa was startled by the accusation. How could that be? Fatemeh seemed so upright. And she had her son living with her. True she had seen some men entering and leaving her apartment but they could be relatives. With her slender figure, striking large hazel eyes, Massoumeh was much more attractive than Fatemeh; Homa was surprised at her insecurity.
“She pretends that her son has health problems and seeks my husband’s advice.” She added in a whisper, “Fatemeh sells her body. You can’t trust her with your mother when you leave the country. I’d look for someone else.”
“No one is willing to be a servant these days,” Homa said.
“Look for someone in the villages.”
“I’ll have a talk with Fatemeh,” Homa said, though she wasn’t sure what she would say exactly. She had no evidence that Fatemeh sold her body or flirted with Massoumeh’s husband. Anyway Fatemeh’s relationships with men weren’t her business.
“I didn’t know he would get another wife when I married him,” Massoumeh said. “And now I’m trapped. If I left him I’d have to live like Fatemeh”
“I’m so sorry,” Homa said, getting up. “I should be going now before offices close.”
Massoumeh walked her to the door and said, “I hope I haven’t upset you.”
“No, no, I just have to get to the court while it’s open,” she said, though she was feeling upset. Massoumeh had put a grain of doubt in her mind about Fatemeh’s trustworthiness.

Outside Homa turned to Valiasr Avenue and waited for a taxi or bus, whichever came first. But none were stopping. It was a pleasantly cool day with a breeze blowing, making it easier for her to bear the mandatory scarf and long-sleeved, long-skirted rupush. The air was vibrant with the voices of people wandering about, music coming out of car radios. But she felt heaviness in her heart from her conversation with Massoumeh. Not only did it give her concern about leaving her mother’s care to Fatemeh, but it also turned her mind to her own marital problems. She had gone all the way to the other side of the world to find a better life, yet in some ways she felt trapped like Massoumeh. The memory of that afternoon when she had come home early from work and found a young woman in the house with Tom, rushed before her eyes. Their clothes, hair, were rumpled-- it seemed they had just gotten out of bed. He introduced the woman and Homa to each other in an awkward way, then she left in a hurry. He told Homa he was collaborating with her, writing a script that they were hoping to sell to a TV channel.
“Come on Tom!”
He turned on the TV and started watching it.
“I want an honest explanation,” she said, going over the TV and turning it off with an angry motion. “Don’t try to brush this aside.”
He was silent, letting the question dangle between them.
“Tom, I hate this life,” she suddenly burst out.
He finally looked at her directly and said, “She means nothing to me. We’re just friends.”
“Then why didn’t you ever mention her?” She left and went into the bedroom, opened a suitcase, and started to pack. She thought she would stay in the bed-and-breakfast near the advertising company building where she worked at the time, and try to pull her life together apart from Tom.
In a moment Tom came into the room. “It’s really nothing. I won’t have anything to do with her any more,” he said. He held his head between his hands as if trying to hide the tears that rolled down his eyes and said, “It’s been so frustrating, with no decent jobs.” He had begged her to stay.
When she just met Tom, in one of their courses in their senior year in the Communication department at the university in Columbus, she had been attracted to him partly because he came from a different world. They were sitting next to each other in the Investigative Journalism course, waiting for the professor to arrive. Tom had turned to her and said, “You have a nice accent, where are you from?” That was how it started between them. It was late spring then and he took her for rides in his red convertible MG. They stopped by different stretches of woods and parks and took walks. Their conversations were accompanied by birds singing and the gentle thrashing of leaves. He showed her the house he had grown up in standing on the top of a hill in the outskirts of Athens, an hour from Columbus. While he was in college his parents moved to Florida. His father designed programs online and his mother stayed home as she always did. His brother went to California and basically disappeared; they rarely heard from him. “I felt lonely living with my family anyway,” Tom told her. “Their moving didn’t make it worse.” They expected little emotionally from their children or from each other. Her home life was quite different from his, she told him. “There were no silences, but then no sense of privacy. It was stifling.”
Paradoxically she could be at ease and act more herself with him because of being from a different culture. After they went out a few times, he invited her to spend the night in his apartment. She went against all the warnings she grew up with that she shouldn’t mingle, much less spend a night, with a man not related to her. Earlier that day, high on the feeling of rebellion, she went to a department store and bought a black nightgown with lace trim and matching underpants, a shimmering pink satin bathrobe, pink satin slippers.
“You look like a model,” he said that night as they got ready for bed.
In the morning, at breakfast, he said, “I’m in love with you, you know that.”
“I love you too,” she said.
Soon after those declarations they got married by a justice of the peace and had a small reception at a friend’s apartment.
She was exhilarated that she had married someone of her own choice but still she couldn’t help feeling guilty that she had excluded her parents from this important step in her life.
Then gradually tension began to build up between her and Tom. She mainly attributed the change in him to his failure as a documentary film maker. He could not raise funds for his projects and ended up working as a film editor for a local TV station. But it had to be more than that, she thought at other times. The gray chasm that yawned between him and his family stood also between the two of them. “Why do you act so superior?” he said, after she had suggested that he go back to school at night and get a more practical degree, as she was doing. Once during a heated argument he accused her of having married him to become an American citizen. There seemed to be a whirlpool at the center of his existence that pulled him inward. But at times he would become the person she had loved and they would have a few days of celebratory reconciliation.
She lamented the distance but had no idea how to change it; neither of them talked of separating or divorce. More than anything, she felt her life had become meaningless.
At the beginning her father made attempts to win her back home. Being the director of a fish company, he sent her postcards from different cities where he went to select fish and supervise their transportation to Tehran restaurants and markets. The postcards often depicted local fish, lying still, jumping into the air or entwined with another fish. “Light of our eyes, come back to us,” he would write. She had pinned some of them to the cork bulletin board above her desk. Her mother wrote long letters. “I hold your letters in my hand and read them over and over again,” she wrote. Then, after she married Tom, their communications became sporadic.
Finally a taxi stopped and she got in. The driver was a woman. Homa gave her the courthouse’s address.
“I take someone there every day,” the driver said. “In this city everyone has problems.”
“People have problems everywhere,” Homa said.
A policeman stopped them and asked the driver to show him her license.
“Move on,” he said rudely after she showed it to him.
“They can’t bear to see a woman driving,” she said to Homa.
Then they were at the courthouse. Homa gave the driver a large tip and got out.
The marble-covered walls and floor and a gold-rimmed chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the waiting room pointed to a once richer and more glorious Iran. It was filled with people roaming around restlessly or sitting on benches, looking jittery.
She took a numbered card from the clerk and sat on a bench next to two women who were talking to each other. One said to the other that she was there to file a request to increase compensation from the government for having lost a husband in the war with Iraq. “With the inflation, I’m hoping for more.” The other woman wanted to file suit against a relative who had stolen a piece of property belonging to her by forging her name on the deed.
It was already four o’clock and the courthouse closed at five. The numbers were going very slowly and there were at least ten ahead of her.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” an official’s voice reached her. “It’s five o’clock. You’ll have to return tomorrow. Hold on to your numbers.”
She got up and left.
In Moghadassi Alley people were coming and going from their houses. A young man passed on his bicycle, carrying a loaf of sangag bread. He smiled at her and she smiled back. What would my life have been like if I had married a boy from my neighborhood, she wondered? I would have stayed closer to my family, would not have felt the pangs of guilt that had begun to occur with frequency. But then I would always be restless, yearning for more.
When she entered the house, Fatemeh was in the courtyard rinsing clothes under the pool’s faucet. Ali and another boy were sitting on a rug, playing a card game.
“Your uncle Mohammad is here from Kashan,” Fatemeh told Homa.
Homa dashed to the stairway and climbed up rapidly, eager to see her uncle to whom she had been very attached as a child. He was sitting on one of the chairs by the dining table with a suitcase next to him. Her mother was asleep. He greeted Homa and got up to embrace her. His eyes were heavy-lidded and his hair all gray. He had once projected strength. In a photograph she still had of him in an old album he was posing in his gym clothes, displaying his muscular arms and chest, and he was smiling brightly. But sitting with him and talking to him began to bring back the familiar uncle from long ago. He used to take her to the amusement park, play card games with her. He made shadow pictures on the wall with his hands. He played his violin for her, enveloping her in dreamy melodies.
An hour or so later, when they were all eating dinner, her uncle and mother talked about their childhood. “Do you remember when Baba brought us those clay animals and dried cherries from his trips?” “Do you remember we used to shake the mulberry tree in the courtyard and the fruit came down in a white stream?”
It was clear to Homa that her uncle hoped to stay on here. He had lost his wife to cancer and his two sons had gotten killed as young boys in the Iran-Iraq war. He was lonely. He had worked as a clerk in the city hall in Kashan; his whole income, now that he was retired, was a small pension. His wife, before she died, brought in some money by baking bread in a deep stone oven in their basement and selling it to the neighborhood people. He had health problems, the most serious, he told Homa, was hepatitis which had done irreparable damage to his liver.
Moving in with his sister was the best option, Homa thought, and quickly began to prepare for that. She took out one of the folding cots from the closet and put it in a corner of the living room for him to sleep on. As she rummaged through the closet for a blanket, sheets, and a pillow, she came across a box full of her childhood belongings-- the rag dolls, a lacy pink dress with a white collar she loved to wear.
“I wish your aunt Maryam was here with us rather than in the nursing home,“ her uncle said to her the following morning.
His remark only fed into what she was feeling herself. Relatives had put her there after she had fallen and broken her hip. Her husband had been very old and died years ago. She had never been able to get pregnant. Some female relatives had hoped to take her into their own homes, but then their husbands had objected on the grounds that they themselves had other dependants they wanted to take in.
“There’s enough room for her among us,” her uncle added.
“Yes, we should take her out of the nursing home.” A few days ago, Homa had visited her in the nursing home. Maryam’s mind was totally alert. Tears had rolled down her eyes. “My dear Homa, we thought we’d never see you again.” She was sitting in a wheelchair in a large room among other women. One of them said to Homa, “You take her home.”
Homa’s mind filled with memories of the time she was a child and Maryam made her rag dolls, told her stories of ancient kings and princesses. Homa used to be happy when she came home from school and found Maryam there, talking to her mother. She sat close to them, in the radiance of their love for each other and for herself.
She would have to give Fatemeh more than just a rent free apartment to take care of all the three. In addition she would need to hire someone else too to come in daily to help. In fact that would be a good idea. It would be less likely that Fatemeh would do anything wrong with someone else present there.

As Homa was leaving the house to go to the nursing home to take her aunt out, Massoumeh approached her in the second floor corridor again and said, “If the family needs extra care, I’d be happy to do it. I love your mother and can use the money as well.”
“Fatemeh is doing some of the extra work, but we can still use more help. Who’d be better than you.”
They discussed the details of her tasks and her pay. Then Homa went down into the courtyard where Ali waited; he was going to the nursing home with her, to help her to get her aunt out.
As soon as her aunt was in the living room Homa knew that it was the right thing to have done. Though Maryam too was frail and still had a hard time walking, her face became alert and radiant as she sat with her siblings and Homa.

Homa was aware of magical moments of closeness between the siblings. They prayed together three times a day, ate together, sat on the porch and talked. They even liked sleeping in the same room in close proximity to each other. She constructed balanced menus for them. She made sure her uncle went out for a walk every day and she took her mother and aunt into the courtyard so that they could enjoy the flowers and tumbling of goldfish in the pool.
Days were going by and she realized she wasn’t ready to go back. She still had to settle her mother’s tangled financial affairs, and also she needed to be there to make sure Fatemeh and Massoumeh would get along. Then the hard truth went through her mind: I haven’t resolved how I feel about continuing with Tom. Will I ever go back? She would let the question slide until the answer came to her. It could happen at any time, even in the middle of the night when she woke from a forgotten dream. Perhaps Tom would actually welcome her being away; perhaps this length of separation would determine which way their relationship would go-- become fresh and exciting like the early days of their marriage, or get irrevocably severed. But more than anything she could already feel the reward of helping people she had loved and abandoned for so long. She wrote to Tom:
…I can’t come back just yet. My mother’s financial affairs aren’t settled. Also I want to make sure, before I leave, that the women taking care of some tasks here are working out well. The household has expanded to include my aunt and uncle, who also need care. After having abandoned them for so long, this is the least I can do. I hope you understand…
She went on to describe the daily routine she had established for them, though she was not sure if Tom would be interested in any of the details.