Nahid Rachlin

FORGET ME

As I pack, my eyes repeatedly find their way to the photograph of my mother and me on my desk. Finally my sister, Lily, and I are ready for the trip to Iran to find Mom. We will leave from JFK in three days and be in Mehrabad Airport in four, losing one day on the way. We managed to get visas through the Interest Section of Iran, in the Pakistani Embassy in D.C. No planes go to Iran from America, ever since the two countries broke relationship, so we will be going to Turkey and from there will take Iran Air. It will be worth the effort if we find our mother who left our Long Island home ten years ago and never returned. I was eleven and Lily thirteen-- but my sense of loss is still fresh.
In the photograph Mom and I are both dressed up. I am wearing a blue dress with a pleated skirt, a blue ribbon in my hair, white shoes and socks. She is wearing a chocolate-colored dress, high heels, and a hat. Her dark hair flows over her shoulders. She is slender, her eyes dark and dreamy, her lips almost heart-shaped. I must have been nine or ten when the photograph was taken. Could it have been the day I looked up at her as we stood on the steps of the church and saw tears rolling down her face? Later that day I found her sitting in a chair by the window in her room, smoking a cigarette, looking sad and withdrawn. "What's wrong Mom?" I asked. "This isn't the way I was raised,” she said in her heavily accented English. Only later did I understand what she meant-- she had converted to Catholicism to please my father and his family.
How could she leave us suddenly and without explanation? At the beginning, after she left, she sent presents along with short notes to me and Lily, and later for my son, Javad, whom I had when I was only nineteen years old, having married Chuck right after I finished high school. But she never gave us a return address. I still have some of the presents-- a blue and white hand knit sweater for Javad, which no longer fits him but I keep anyway, a flower-shaped barrette that I still wear sometimes, a rag doll with black braids that I keep on my dresser. I used to take the doll to bed with me like a child seeking comfort. As I held it a warm wave of feelings would envelop me. I would see my mother's face close to mine, feel her arm around me, hear her telling me stories, the way she used to before she left. After a while her notes and gifts stopped. I wrote her many letters, sending them to Aunt Narghes in Tehran to forward to her, begging her to come back, asking her forgiveness for the mischievous things Lily and I had done, which were, I was certain, the main reason she had left us. I promised to be a good girl, to obey her. I wrote about lonely nights and how empty the house was without her. I even wrote Aunt Narghes, asking her why Mom didn’t respond to my letters, but she never answered. I had horrible visions of Mom being locked up in a mental hospital or worse, dead.
Then there came the letter that ignited the idea for the trip to Iran. I noticed the blue air-mail envelope among the stuff I pulled out of mailbox one day when I came home from work. It was from Aunt Narghes. I ran inside and read the letter. I learned the language from Mom well enough to read, if the vocabulary was simple enough.
... I passed on your letter and the photograph of your beautiful little boy to your mother. She cried when she saw the picture. All I can tell you about your mother is not to worry. She’s fine and she thinks about you, Lily, and your father all the time. She has never stopped loving you. But keeping a distance is the only way she can live her new life, one that makes her happy finally.

I breathed deeply, painfully. Perhaps the decisive force behind her finally responding after all these years, even though it was no more than a brief message sent through her sister, was the letter I had written to her about Javad, and my having moved in with Dad.
... I'm back living with Dad. Divorced. Javad is three years old. I wish I had you to talk to in the midst of all this. Lily too just broke up with her boy friend. A lot of broken hearts here... How are you, do you think about us?...

Does Mom see my moving in with my father as a desperate act, stirring guilt in her for not being here for me? Is she feeling guilty or does it simply make her yearn for what she has left behind? Does she think it is strange that I have moved with my father? There are, of course, many benefits. I can save on rent and go back to school. More important, Javad has the benefit of being with his grandfather daily, and he has more room to run around in. His room once belonged to Lily and is almost as large as the whole apartment we had moved into after the divorce.
I close the suitcase and go into the kitchen to get dinner ready. As I beat the eggs for a cake, I remember coloring eggs for Easter when Lily and I were children. Mom added designs to them: stripes, dots, little chickens. Then we piled up the eggs in a basket and put it on the dining room table. I can’t recall whether before Mom walked out the door forever, she had displayed any extra affection for Lily and me. After she left, Dad tried to be both father and mother to us. After work he shopped and cooked for us. He helped us with homework. Most of the time he put up a cheerful front, but once I caught him crying. It was twilight and he was leaning on the patio railing, holding his head between his hands, and tears were streaming down his face. I asked him what was wrong.
"Nothing, nothing, life just gets sad sometimes,” he said..
"Dad, you won't go away from us like Mommy did, will you?"
"No, no, of course not," he said, wiping his tears and pulling me up into his arms. "I'll be here with you, don’t worry.”
But insecurity lingered with me. "Do you love me?" I asked him over and over,
"You and Lily are my whole life, I love you more than you can imagine." He gave us as much as any father could but all his attention didn't compensate for the loss and the trauma of Mom's sudden departure.
I hear the outside door opening and then Dad comes in and helps me set the table. I used to do my homework at the same oak table while I watched Mom cook. My interest in school and studying declined after she left. It all seemed so irrelevant. In the classroom I daydreamed about my mother instead of listening to the teachers. I imagined us in an empty room with no one to disrupt our complete focus on each other. "You aren't living up to your potential,” my teachers said.
The dining room is filled with light because of its south-facing windows. “I love, need, light. We had so much of it in our house in Tehran,” Mom always said.
Javad comes in from his room and Dad picks him up and they kiss. Then we sit down at the table, with Javad on a chair between us. Dad attends to him, cutting up a tiny piece of chicken for him and wiping the sauce off his face. Dad is much more subdued than he used to be. Before Mom left he was flamboyant, liked to joke, dance with Mom or with Lily or me.
Javad gets up and turns on the TV. He changes channels until he finds cartoons. Then he takes his plate off the table to eat by the TV.
"The happiest days for your mother were just after you and Lily’s births,” Dad says. “I I know your mother is going to come back. She'll want to claim her family one day."
“It has been ten years, Dad.”
“Your mother was running away from something but she will come back. Runaway kids eventually return home.”
Maybe Dad thinks of my mother as a young girl still, the age he just met her. They had met in Iran at the Shah’s time when many Americans were employed there. Dad went there to represent his pharmaceutical company. He had met her at a friend's house. Within a few months they were engaged, though they hardly knew each other. She had pleaded with her parents to let her marry him. At first they opposed the marriage because he was American, but eventually they reluctantly gave in. She was nineteen and my father twenty-six. They came to live in America after his contract expired. These are the bare facts. The rest, the yearning, the pain, the blame and self-blame Dad, Lily and I have suffered following her departure, are more elusive. We have gone over the events so many times that they have come to resemble eroded, jagged, stones at the bottom of a stream.
My parents aren’t officially divorced. He is reticent about new women in his life. In fact he has never mentioned anyone specific to Lily and me. He has acknowledged only having "women friends." Every year I expected him to announce that there was a romance in his life, someone just widowed or divorced, but none of that has happened yet.
After dinner Dad helps me clean up, then he goes to his room and I take Javad into the bathroom to give him his nightly bath. He misses his Dad, whom he sees on weekends, and keeps asking about him. What exactly went wrong between Chuck and me? I remember a vague depression settling on me and growing. Even simple things befuddled me. I was filled with self-doubt as a mother. Am I doing the right thing rushing to Javad every time he starts to cry? Do I give in to his demands for milk or give him the pacifier too quickly? Once when Chuck came home and found me sitting idly on the sofa with the house in a jumbled mess, he said, “You’ve become impossible.” Sometimes after a scene like that he stormed out of the house and didn’t come back until the middle of the night. “I can’t take this any more,” he said one evening and left me for good.
We all go to bed and I fall asleep, then wake from a dream. Mom and I were standing together at the rail of a cruise ship. We were wearing identical blue dresses, black patent-leather shoes and gold necklaces. Mom began to laugh. "They're going to get us mixed up," she said. I do resemble Mom. Lily has always looked more like Dad; she has his light brown hair and blue-gray eyes. I used to think that being the first-born brought me closer to Mom, and that Lily was closer to Dad. Now Lily rarely visits our father; she keeps herself busy, maybe too busy, with her work in the cosmetics department of Macy’s, and with a string of boy friends.
In two days we'll be in Tehran... hope so much we'll be with our mother. I think of that one time she took Lily and me, when we were children, to Iran for a visit. We stayed in a big house in a village just outside of Tehran, an oasis at the edge of a desert. Mountains were visible in the distance and they changed color from rust to salmon to a deep blue. Wolves and jackals lived in the mountains. Next to the house was an orchard with a spring in the middle of it. Lily and I and other local children used to go to the orchard, pick fruit from the trees or swim in the stream running through it. At night we slept under mosquito nets in the courtyard where the stars and the moon were brighter than I had ever seen. I remember nightingales whistling at dawn, owls howling in the evening, and jackals shrieking in the middle of the night. Then there was the voice of the muezzin three times a day calling people to prayer. Many relatives came to the big house and fussed over Lily and me. They gave us presents-- jewelry, clay animals and rag dolls. I remember Mom whispering things to her relatives about religion, a certain concern on their faces at what she said, nervousness on her part. These images and sounds have come to me repeatedly over the years, like a dream; they are so disconnected from my life in Long Island.
Except for that visit, for years Mom kept a distance from her family. She followed Dad’s religion, observed the American holidays. Her relatives didn’t visit us. But the truth is she never really became a part of American culture, not in her heart. She had few American friends. She was shy with other mothers. She never went to open houses at our school or to PTA meetings. At our birthday parties it was our father who took charge, decorating the house with balloons and colorful streamers, arranging games, and preparing party favors for the children to take home. She smiled pleasantly at the other mothers but rarely engaged them in conversation. She spent hours alone at home painting flowers. A few of her paintings-- a bunch of tulips, a large iris, two roses-- hang on the walls of the living room
"She's sick, she went to recuperate at her family's house,” Dad lied to us after she left. As time went by and there was no sign of her, he said, "Don’t worry, one day you'll come home and see her waiting for you."

Lily and I arrived in Tehran early this afternoon and I am staying in the hotel room to rest, tired from the long flights while Lily went to take a walk. A bowl of water with jasmine petals floating on it stands on the top of the dressing, filling the air with its fragrance. A colorful klim covers the floor and posters of a garden in Isfahan and a mosque in Tehran hang on the walls. The serenity of the room doesn’t calm my anxiety over the uncertainty of being able to find our mother. At one time Dad came here to search for our mother and Aunt Narghes rebuffed him, told him nothing of Mom’s whereabouts. He tried to find her in other ways too but he never succeeded. Will Lily and I have better luck? Narghes has no phone number, her house being in an old section of Tehran, where no phone lines have been installed. But we didn’t want to contact her anyway before coming, in fear that she herself would hide from us.
Lily comes back and we leave the hotel immediately to look for Aunt Narghes’s address. We pass the Grand Bazaar, some university buildings; we enter a neighborhood with all old Muslim style houses set within courtyards. We reach a square crowded with people standing around a podium. A young, bearded man wearing a black shirt is standing behind the podium giving a lecture on morals. “Respect your elders, listen to your mullahs, avoid superpowers’ propaganda, leading you astray...Women who don’t observe the hejab will burn in the fires of hell. ”
“ It’s a good thing we came when it’s cool or else wearing the head scarf and the rupush would be even more intolerable,” Lily says as we quickly leave the square.
“It’s only for two weeks,” I say.
Then we are at the mouth of Cheragi Street, lined by trees redolent with blossoms on this late May day. Number 17 is in the middle of the street. It is an old stone house with a small shuttered up window facing the street, unusual for Muslim houses, which have no windows and are surrounded by high walls of courtyards, to protect women from the eyes of passers by. A young man opens the door.
“Is Narghes khanoom in?” I ask in Farsi which I have brushed up for the trip.
“Narghes... no one by that name lives here.”
“This is the address we have for her.”
He stares at me as if he is insulted. “I’m sorry Khanoom you have the wrong address.” “It was a mistake not to contact Aunt Narghes before we came,” Lily says as we walk away.
We stop at shops in the area and ask the owners if they knew Narghes. They have contradictory responses. One says he knows her and she still lives at that address. Another says she moved away from Tehran recently.
Not knowing what to do, Lily and I walk aimlessly on the wide Vali Asr Avenue, teeming with with people, vehicles of all kinds-- bicycles, motor scooters, horse carts, cars.
“It’s strange to see all the women in chadors and rupushes,” Lily says. “I don’t know how Mom is adjusting to it. Maybe she has gone back to her own religion.”
“She must be missing us, that’s why she sent that message through Aunt Narghes,” I say.
“I hope you’re right.” After a moment she says, “I think she has forgotten us.”
We sit in an Iranian restaurant in Food Court, filled with restaurants from different countries, Japanese, Mexican, Korean, as well as a few Iranian. A waiter comes over to take our order. We sit in an Iranian restaurant . Lily smiles at the waiter and he smiles back flirtatiously, lingers a bit, trying to talk to her in English. She is looking striking in her peach head scarf and blue rupush.
“Miriam, wasn’t he attractive?” Lily says outside after we leave the restaurant.
I shrug wearily at her constant attempt to meet new men.
In the room I call I call information to see if there is a new address for Aunt Narghes but nothing.
We don’t know anything about our other relatives’ whereabouts. “There must be a way to find her,” I say to Lily, not wanting to lose hope. “I’ll go to the post office tomorrow and see.”
We take turn taking showers in the blue tiled bathroom and go to bed. Being with her in the same room with the lights out I feel like we are children again, close and yet separated by our different views and dreams. But what are my dreams exactly? I meander through life, not quite knowing what I want. I have this feeling that I will be more focused if I find Mom, talk to her.

In the morning Lily decides to go shopping instead of going in the search with me.
“I love the jewelry here, the deep color of the gold. And the turquoise. Do you mind?” she says. She likes shopping which is probably why she has managed to hang on to her job at Macy’s.
I go to the post office closest to the address I had for Aunt Narghes. They can tell me nothing. Outside I notice a photography shop standing among a row of other shops.
“Do you have any photographs of the Anjomani family, I’m a relative, I came here from America to see my aunt and can’t find her at the address I have for her,” I tell the man inside standing behind the counter.
“Why come here, to this mad place, if you have America.... Yes, I know the Anjomani family. I have taken a lot of photos of them.”
“Do you mind showing them to me, if you have any?”
He hesitates.
“ Maybe if I recognize my aunt in a photograph you can lead me to her.”
He turns to a stack of photograph proofs in a drawer and takes out some and puts them on the counter.
All the women are wearing chadors or head scarves as it is the law to do so even in photographs. One women in a head scarf and a long rupush and standing next to another similarly-dressed woman, strongly resembles Aunt Narghes in a photograph of her we have in a family album, though that was taken several years ago. “That’s my aunt, I’m almost sure. Has she moved out of her house?” I give him the address.
“You went to the wrong street. Her street name is changed to Martyr Ali, after the name of a mosque at its corner. The exchanged the name with the one you went to.”
“Is it the same house number?”
He looks in his thick address book on a desk. “No, it’s number 22 now.”
I thank him and leave. A little girl opens the door to me.
“My aunt Narghes lives here, can I see her?”
This girl nods vaguely, strangely. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone anything,” she says.
“All I want is to see her and talk to her. I’m her niece.”
“She isn’t here,” she says scrutinizing me. “ She went to see her sister.”
“Her sister Pari?” My heart beats with hope.
She nods.
“Please, can you give me her address?” The girl is wearing cheap clothes and has the ruddy skin of a village girl. I take out some money and give it to her.
She goes inside and returns in a moment, giving me a piece of paper. “Narghes Khanoom left me this address for her sister. No phone number.”
It provides no last name, only an address in Rey, not far from Tehran.
At least I have an address, though I am not entirely sure if I can trust the strange girl.
I go to the hotel to see if Lily is back. In the lobby the clerk tells me the best way to go to Rey is by train. He calls for me and finds out that the next one is tomorrow morning. Because of some track damage that have never been quite repaired since the Iran-Iraq war the trains aren’t running every day.
“How about going by taxi or renting a car?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t advise it, the roads are in bad shape right now.”
When I enter the hotel room Lily is coming out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her, water glistening on her skin, dripping down her hair. I notice the large bruise on her arm, which she has told me is from Jarred, her last boy friend’s abuse. Her relationships with men worry me, though I am not proud of my own broken marriage and other broken relationships. I tell her about the address the girl gave me.
"I hope it isn't a false lead,” Lily says. She is finished drying herself and she begins to dress. "I met a really good looking boy, right in the lobby. We just started talking. He has actually lived here for almost three months. He’s English. He wants to renew his visa and stay on longer. He’s a writer, finishing up a novel. He's gorgeous." She says all that in an excited tone.
“How does he get the money to stay for so long in a hotel, if he’s a struggling writer.”
“It’s much cheaper when you stay for a long time. Anyway maybe he isn’t struggling. We’re going out tonight. He has a friend who’s single, he wants you to meet him.” She looks at me for my reaction.
“That’s a real risk. You know in Iran people can get arrested for being with members of the opposite sex, who aren’t their bother, husband, father...”
“We could stay in the hotel. There are so many foreigners staying here. All the government rules aren’t enforced by the hotel staff. We can even have alcoholic drinks. They pay off the police. A lot goes on underground.”
“I’m not in the mood to meet anyone right now.” I wish she were more focused on our mother. After all that is why we have come all the way here, saved up money and time for. “Are you sure?” she asks.
“I don’t mind being alone tonight.”
I read for a while and fall asleep before Lily returns.

In the morning I see my name written in large letters on a piece of hotel stationery on the side table. A note from Lily.
Miriam, I hope you don't mind but I'm going to spend the day with James. If the address turns out to be Mom’s of course I’ll go to see her tomorrow. I love you.

How could she spend this, of all days, with a man she will probably not see again once we leave Tehran? Doesn’t she miss our mother as much as I do? Or is she more pessimistic than I am? I think of her as a teenager telling her friends that Mom died. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night and heard Lily crying in her room.
The train isn’t crowded and I easily find a seat by a window. We pass fields covered by wild flowers, small mud and straw houses with chickens and goats wandering around them. In two hours the train stops in Rey. I get off and walk on the main street, passing a naval college, tea houses, shops, horse drawn carriages transporting people. I come to a little square, its shops carrying the essentials, sugar, rice, matches. A mill, a low clay building with a tower, stands on one side of the square and a dilapidated rooming house on the other side. The early summer sunlight, so lucid and golden, adds a luster to everything and even the most squalid sights have a richness to them.
Then I come to an intersection. At one corner of it stands a mosque with a group of women wearing black chadors, sitting on its steps, crying, perhaps moved by a sermon they heard inside. Next to the mosque is an immense poplar tree with a hollow made in its trunk. An old man is lying on a mat spread in the hollow. Children have collected around him, taunting him, throwing coins to him. What a different world this is from Long Island.
I reach a cluster of narrow lanes and begin to look for the address. I see Rezai Street written on a tile imbedded on the wall of an alley. There it is, I think excitedly and turn into it. The alley is lined with gardens and orchards and stone and brick houses. In the hallway of a brick house two children are kneeling and playing with marbles. Then I am in front of number 30. I stand back and look at it. It is an old, seedy, brick house, sagging a little. Weathered rust colored tiles flank the dark, heavy door. The shabby appearance of the house is redeemed by small fruit trees standing at its sides and the golden sunlight shining on it. The mere thought that my mother might be inside there fills me with awe.
As I ring the rusty bell my heart flutters as if I am about to reunite with a lover. How will she react to my turning up at her house unannounced? How will she explain leaving us? I put my head on the door and listen for sounds inside. I hear children's voices and then a woman's barely audible voice. I begin to cough. I remember when Mom left us I developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. Dad took me to a doctor and got a prescription. Later, when I was older, he told me the medicine was placebo, that the doctor had said my cough was from nervousness. I ring the bell again.
"Mother, someone is at the door," I hear a boy saying. Footsteps follow. Could I have the wrong address, the wrong person? The door opens and a little boy stands before me, staring at me with his dark eyes.
"I'm looking for Pari Anjomani. Does she live here?"
The boy runs back inside. "Mother, Mother,” he yells.
I stand frozen in my spot. A moment later I see a woman approaching in the dim hallway. My eyes are glued to her and as she comes closer I can see that she resembles my mother. "Are you Pari?" I ask through my tightened throat. It’s hard to believe it’s her I am standing face to face with after all the years of separation..
She nods, staring at me without recognition.
This maybe a different Pari altogether. But her eyes... "Do you know who I am?" I ask. “Miriam, your daughter.”
She waves her hand in the air as if about to shut the door on me. "Oh, Miriam, Miriam,” she says. “You came, why did you... I'm so happy to see you... you shouldn't have come."
"Mom, I've been searching for you, Lily and I." I walk into the hallway and we embrace tightly.
“Tell me, my dear, dear Miriam, how did you find me?”
“I went to Aunt Narghes’s house and a girl who opened the door gave it to me. She said Aunt Narghes was visiting you here.”
“You just missed your aunt.”
“It’s you I’m here to see.”
I follow her to the living room with its whitewashed walls and simple furnishings. On the worn mosaic-covered mantle above the stone fireplace stand a few enlarged, framed photographs and clay toys.
"Let me get you something to eat," she says.
"I'm not hungry."
"Where is my dear Lily, didn’t she come with you?"
I grope for an answer. "She had to rest. She had a stomach ache."
"I’ll get you a cool drink. Doogh, sharbat?"
"Doogh is fine." There is a strange formality between us, not surprising of course after years of separation, but sad, hard to accept.
I go to the kitchen with her. The kitchen is large, also has whitewashed walls, and it smells pleasantly of spices. Baskets heaped with fruit, garlic, onions, and other vegetables lie on a tiled counter; copper pots and pans hang from hooks on the wall. She takes out a jug of doogh from a stumpy ice box, pours some in two glasses, and we go back into the living room. We sit on the rug on the floor and lean against cushions.
"Please don't tell my other children who you are. I'll explain everything, my Miriam, my dear daughter,” she whispers.
Other children. But she is still married to my father. This is too confrontational a question to ask her at the moment. I’m hoping she herself will offer an explanation.
"I'm sorry I haven't been in touch,” she says.
Haven't been in touch is too light a phrase to substitute her abandoning us, its traumatic effect. I am not the same person I was before she left. I have been through a divorce; broken relationships, I have a child who misses his father.
She begins to knit, with blue and green yarn. Memories, half-faded, spill over me. Mom sitting under a tree, knitting a sweater then too, for Lily or me. Lily and I asking her for things, competing for her attention.
"Mom, why have you been hiding from us? Why did you leave us?”
My mother hangs her head down and doesn’t say anything. When she lifts her head I see her eyes are glistening with tears. We both take sips of our doogh and I have a momentary illusion of closeness to her, the way I did as a child, sitting with her, feeling protected. So many times I have woken in the middle of the night from dreams about her, so often I have lain in the dark thinking of questions I would ask her if I ever came face-to-face with her. During those wakeful moments I felt that some piece of my own existence would always be missing unless I found her.
She asks me questions about my life, about Lily, about Dad.
“Mom, you tell me about yourself,” I say after filling her in briefly.
The boy who opened the door to me comes in. He whispers something in Mom’s ear, she whispers something back and he leaves.
“He’s my son, Hassan, his younger sister is Guity,” she tells me. “I have four children now, counting you and Lily.”
“Mom, who is their father...”
“Miriam, I’ll explain everything, and I hope you’ll understand, that you can forgive me.”
I look at her eagerly.
“One day I was alone in the house. You and Lily were at school, and your father was out working,” she starts telling me. “I was feeling depressed. There was a knock on the door. I went to open it, thinking maybe it was a neighbor though I hadn’t really become friendly with anyone living around us. When I opened the door I saw a man standing there. He said abruptly, in a familiar tone as if he knew me, 'I finally found you, do you know how long I've been looking.' I couldn't believe it but it was Ahmad, a boy I had known in our neighborhood in Tehran. His family had asked my parents to let me marry him, and I would have, if I hadn’t met your father. I was so shaken to see him...”
She stops.
“Mom, please tell me more.”
That day when Ahmad came to our Long Island house the two of them went for a walk in the park close by. As they talked about old times she felt she was falling into some kind of delirium. She wasn’t sure where she was, in what country, in what park. Wasn’t sure about her age or who this man was, holding her arm. Being with him at once calmed and excited her. What calmed her was his mere presence and what excited her was what his presence had opened up; he had punctured a capsule in which powerful memories had been bottled up. In the days that followed, the mere thought of him was like a magnet pulling her to her past. Everything around her-- the streets with no sidewalks, the similarity of the houses, the nondescript malls, seemed desolate. Her life, married to my father, adopting his religion, living in America, all seemed artificial.
Again she stops speaking.
“It’s so amazing,” I say finally. I remember how she used to withdraw into some inner compartment of herself, shutting out everything around her. Still that hadn’t signaled anything so drastic as her leaving us.
"Is he the person you live with now, the father of your new children?"
She nods. "We got married when I came here."
"But you're married to my father,” I have to say.
"No one here knows that, except for Ahmad of course. It’d have terrible consequences for me if anyone knew,” she says.
“You could have gotten a divorce from my father.”
She looks at me sadly. “He didn’t want to give it to me. Then there’s the Catholic Church.”
"Did you ever love Dad?" I ask.
"I was very young when we met. I was swept away by the idea of living in America. But it took every ounce of my will to try to adjust to it. I did my best, but then something broke when I saw Ahmad. True, Ahmad is possessive, jealous, but in some ways I feel more free with him than I ever did with your father. We can laugh together."
“Don’t you feel bad about all the restrictions here? You were so free in America.”
“Freedom is a subjective feeling. I was shut out of things there, locked up in a dark box.”
Her daughter comes into the room.
"She's a friend visiting from America,” Mom says to her. She turns to me. "This is Guity"
I smile at Guity. She smiles back, then leaves the room.
"She's a wonderful child, perfect."
She is a substitute for me and Lily, I think painfully.
Mom looks animated now; her eyes are glistening. And I become aware that the house, in spite of its decaying condition, is filled with happiness and warmth.
"What does he..." I have a hard time saying "Your husband," and an equally hard time saying his name.
"He's a carpenter, builds cabinets, closets.” There is a touch of pride in her tone. "He's a good man." She points to one of the photographs on the mantle. “That’s him.”
He is heavy set, has a mustache and a lively expression. Not nearly as handsome as my father, with his tall, slender build, high cheeks bones, blue gray eyes.
"But Miriam, if you love me, if you truly care about my well-being and happiness, you have to promise to forget about me,” Mom says in a pleading tone.
“I'd better go back," I say, getting up.
"Wait," she says. She walks into the adjacent room and comes back, holding something. "Here, I want you to have this, a memento."
It is a gold necklace-- a heart with a tiny latch on it, hanging from a chain.
"Open it," she says.
I open the heart and inside see a photograph of her.
“Whenever you miss me just look at the picture.”
I feel like crying. How can a picture be a substitute for her in flesh? I put the necklace in my purse and we walk to the door together. In the hallway we embrace again. As I pull away, I see her face from memory, warm, dreamy, but also discontented. When I return to the present, to her face now, it is peaceful and content.
"Did the American leave already?" Outside, I hear Guity's voice.
"Yes," my mother tells her without elaborating.
I walk at a brisk pace to the train station. Moving calms me down a little.

Lily is in the hotel room when I arrive.
“I heard about the oddest sex act ever,” she says, without introduction. “These two young women were talking in the lobby. They’re apparently from England. I was sitting on a chair behind them but they didn’t notice me. They were whispering but I heard everything they said.”
“Don’t you want to know about Mom?”
“I guess you didn’t find her... One of them is having an affair with a Korean man who knows little English. Do you know what she does... this is the odd part. She has a girl friend who knows both Korean and English to sit with them while they make love so that she can translate. Can you believe it? What does the friend translate other than put your hand on my...”
What she is telling me sounds particularly vulgar in this Islamic culture and particularly strange since with it she’s brushing off any conversation about our mother.
At that moment I decide not to tell her about having found Mom and her telling me that Lily and me should forget her. What would Lily’s reaction be other than, "I always knew she forgot us."
A little later, when Lily isn’t in the room, I go to the window and stare outside. Mist has gathered in the air, obscuring the view. Only the dome and minarets of a mosque are clearly visible. A brown finch comes and sits on the window sill.
I throw the necklace out, into the joob that runs along the street. I have a sudden feeling of lightness. Now I can begin to finally focus on my own happiness. After all, that’s what Mom has done.