Juliette had been in the little house on the edge of the forest for three days, waiting—for what, she couldn’t say. She knew only that this was a cold, peaceful place, incredibly luminous, vast, empty; that she sank into it without resisting, with relief even.
She had cried a lot, at first. Like a child experiencing her first disappointment, an adolescent her first heartbreak. The sight of a cup of coffee made her burst into tears; an old black sweater flung over the back of a chair had her sobbing. It reminded her of the misshapen jumper worn by that familiar, clumsy, gangly form—even though this one was an extra small, whose sleeves had shrunk in the wash, into which Soliman couldn’t even have wriggled his long arms.
Firouzeh remained imperturbable, following her with her gaze but not attempting to comfort her, other than to bring her endless cups of tea.
“You could have been English, couldn’t you?” said Juliette between sobs, wiping her eyes with the corner of the shawl which Zaide, full of concern, had wrapped around her shoulders. “The English think that tea is the answer to everything. In Agatha Christie’s novels—”
“I’ve never read them,” Firouzeh interrupted her lightheartedly. “I told you, I prefer images. Colors. Gestures that caress the paper, the skin…”
She put the cup down on the mantelpiece. Her hand was trembling a little.
“His skin … Soliman’s skin … it was olive, but not the same all over, with dark hollows, pale areas … a mole … and the shape of his thighs … I must show you … I must draw…”
“No,” whispered Juliette, staring at the tips of her shoes.
Firouzeh held a hand out toward her.
“Juliette … you and he … you weren’t…?”
“No.”
“But you’re crying.”
“Yes. It’s not normal, is that what you mean?” she burst out, suddenly aggressive. “And Zaide isn’t crying. Is that normal?”
Firouzeh placed her fingers over Juliette’s. It felt as if a woodland bird had just chosen her as a perch, and she found it strangely comforting.
“Normal. I’ve never understood the meaning of the word. Have you?”
Juliette was silent, and so Firouzeh just stroked her daughter’s hair. Zaide had snuggled up to her and was beginning to hum. The melody was surprising, sometimes low to the point of being inaudible—only a vibration of her throat indicated the sound emanating from her—and sometimes high, reedy, and taut like a child’s solo. Zaide closed her eyes, put her thumb in her mouth, and fell asleep.
Juliette allowed one last tear to dry on her cheek and gazed at her. She watched the years fade away on a face that was already so young, and saw the little girl morph into the newborn that had lain on her mother’s stomach the day she was born.
“I don’t know if it’s normal,” Juliette said after a time. “I feel empty, that’s all. My life was filled with trivial things. I didn’t like them, well, not really; but they were there, they were enough. And then I met them, the pair of them…”
She closed her eyes for a moment.
“I should say the four of them. Soliman, Zaide, the man in the green hat, and the woman who … who died, too. Each of them gave me something and, at the same time, they’ve taken everything away. There’s nothing left, do you see? I’m like a shell. I feel the draft blowing through me. I’m cold.”
“You’re lucky,” said Firouzeh slowly. “Me, I’m full of this child I’ve been reunited with. Of her absence. Of her presence. Of the death that has brought us together. It’s the end of my journey … for the time being. But don’t think I regret it.”
She extricated herself gently from the little arms embracing her, walked over to the windows, and opened both. A gust of strong wind blew into the room, and blue flames leapt up from the embers.
“The wind,” she said, “the wind … Get out of here, Juliette, go and breathe. Go and listen to it. You’ve stayed shut up inside with your books for too long. Like him. Books and people need to travel.”
Zaide hadn’t woken up. She shifted slightly all the same, like a kitten stretching in the clutches of a dream.
Firouzeh had been right about her. Juliette did have a book in her pocket. She could feel its shape against her as she walked around the house with tiny steps.
I’m pathetic. Like an old lady.
It did her good to laugh at herself. As did feeling the soft cover through the fabric. It was a book by Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter, which she’d stuffed in her pocket at the last minute, before leaving. Because it was within reach on top of a pile. Because it wasn’t very big, and their two bags were already heavy. (She wasn’t used to choosing her reading material by weight: that was a first. But not necessarily a bad idea, she said to herself: it was a way of classifying the books she hadn’t yet tackled—fat fireside tomes or long, lazy holiday reads, picnic books, short-story collections for brief, frequent journeys, themed anthologies to dip into on each break, when the telephone is quiet, when your colleagues are at lunch, when you’re propped on your elbows on the counter of a café, drinking a double espresso that you eke out until you reach the end of the section you’re reading.)
During the journey, she’d merely flicked through the book; Zaide had kept pointing out sights glimpsed in passing—the red-and-white-striped roof of a circus big top, an oblong pond where ducks were swimming, a bonfire in a garden, its smoke spiraling up in the sunshine. And all those roads and cars, all going somewhere, like them.
“People are going places, it’s crazy,” Zaide declared. “All the time.”
Just then, Juliette’s finger slid between two pages, and she read:
I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
She hadn’t managed to read on. She’d picked up the slim volume again in the evening, on the living-room sofa where Firouzeh had heaped pillows and a warm duvet for her. It wasn’t a poem by the author; it was by Mari Evans—Mari Evans, whose name she’d immediately googled, to learn—squinting, enlarging the page on her smartphone—that she’d been born in 1919 in Ohio, and that that poem, “I Am a Black Woman,” had become a sort of rallying cry for many African American women, including Maya Angelou, who herself had fought for black women throughout her life. Michelle Obama had said that for her it had been the power of Maya Angelou’s words that had led a little black girl from the poor neighborhoods of Chicago to the White House.
In her book, Angelou cited this poem as giving heart to African Americans in general and women in particular.
And its last lines were:
Look
on me and be
renewed.