They had some difficulty finding the house. It was two kilometers from the station, in the direction of the woods, the woods that Zaide’s mother had painted on the letters sent to her daughter, with overlapping patches of yellow ochre and tender green watercolor. There was a smell of woodsmoke in the air. A bright blue birdhouse served as a letter box; it was planted lopsidedly near a young cherry tree for which it acted as a stake.
“Is this it?” asked Zaide solemnly.
“I think so,” replied Juliette.
Suddenly, words had the weight and density of the iron bowls that the men rolled, on a sandy oblong marked out in the courtyard of an apartment building on the other side of the depot wall. For years Zaide must have listened to the sound they made when they banged together, and the furious or delighted exclamations of the pétanque players. And Juliette couldn’t help looking down at the little girl’s mouth, imagining that out of it would come some extraordinary object, like she’d read about in a fairy tale once.
But nothing happened. The ground at the foot of the birdhouse had often been trampled; around it, footprints could be seen everywhere, coming from the house, and returning in the same direction. Shallow but clearly defined prints. Firouzeh has a dancer’s feet, observed Juliette. She must be small and light—an adult Zaide, in other words.
Still holding hands, they followed the footprints until they reached the freshly painted door, which was the same color as the birdhouse. Juliette raised her other hand and knocked. The door opened at once: had Firouzeh been watching out for them at one of the low windows either side of the front door? Probably. But the woman who appeared in the doorway bore no resemblance to the one Juliette had pictured: auburn-haired and curvaceous, she wore a big fringed poncho and little, round, steel-framed glasses on her snub nose. Ignoring Juliette, she crouched down beside her daughter and held out her hands, palms upward; Zaide stood stock-still for a moment, looking solemn, then bent down and lay her forehead, just for a moment, on the joined fingers. Perhaps she whispered a word that Juliette guessed at without really hearing.
“Dead.”
A truck drove past and the windows rattled. They made a little tinkling sound, and suddenly Juliette saw Soliman busying himself with his makeshift coffee percolator, banging the cups together, while the heady aroma of coffee wafted among the books.
Firouzeh murmured something in Farsi.
Of course Juliette didn’t understand that these words were addressed to her, or perhaps to both Zaide and her, any more than she was aware that she was crying, before feeling tears running down her neck and wetting her scarf, the blue one, her favorite.
They had drunk tea and lit the fire, and were sprawled on cushions scattered around the stone hearth. Firouzeh was holding a flyswatter, sending back the sparks thrown out by the logs at the back of the fireplace. Each time, Zaide applauded. Juliette let the honey glide along the handle of her teaspoon, watching the golden liquid shimmer scarlet and green in the light of the flames leaping from the burned-out logs.
Again. And again.
“I didn’t want to leave my country,” said Firouzeh abruptly. “My mother and father were there. They were getting old. And besides, they’d never liked Soliman. They thought he was a paper man, do you understand? He didn’t really exist. You don’t know what’s going on in his head, my father used to say. But I knew, or I thought I did. Love for me, for our daughter, for the mountains—we used to live at the foot of the mountains—for poetry. That’s enough to fill a life, don’t you think?”
She didn’t expect a reply, murmuring as she poked the embers.
“In any case, I believed it because it suited me. Me, poetry … it’s too complicated, a tortuous road that sometimes leads nowhere. I prefer images, colors. Ultimately, perhaps it’s the same thing. Soliman and I argued about it endlessly, and it tired me. I said to him, life isn’t an almond: you won’t find the best of it by removing the shell and then the skin. But he persisted. That’s how he was. He went out less and less; he stayed shut up in one room all day long, that one with the window looking out onto the almond orchard. The same things, he would say, looked at often, observed determinedly, can give us the key to what we are. I don’t know what he was seeking, what he wanted…”
Firouzeh looked up. Her gaze was fixed, very somber.
“I never understood him. And he never understood me. That’s how it is, I suppose, with most couples. They tell each other about themselves with passion, they think they know everything, understand everything, accept everything, and then the first crack appears, the first blow, not necessarily dealt out of spite, but dealt, and everything is shattered … and you find yourself naked and alone, next to a stranger who is also naked and alone. It’s unbearable.”
“He couldn’t bear it,” said Juliette softly.
“No.”
“He left.”
“Yes. With Zaide. I was the one who wanted it. She was closer to him than to me. I knew that everything would be easier for her here. And perhaps for him.”
“So why did you leave your house in the end?”
“My parents died. I no longer had anyone back there. When I got here, I could only think of one thing: seeing my daughter again. I almost … and then…”
Her eyelids closed.
“I wasn’t complete. Exile is … I don’t know how else to explain it. I was no longer complete, and I didn’t want to inflict that on Zaide. This emptiness, this anxiety, this ‘nothingness’ that I couldn’t shake off. So I waited. We sold land; we weren’t hard up. Back there I had my job. I was a teacher, a French teacher … here, I started illustrating children’s books. That helps. The money helped Soliman, too, at first.”
“Even though he started going around in circles in one room again,” Juliette interjected.
“He used to say that one room can contain an entire world.”
“Books,” murmured Juliette. “Of course.” And she began to tell her story.