Tonight is an important night, because Ashura is coming. Taj is in his house, watching the maid polish the floor. When the house was built, he had men lay lapis lazuli tiles because it made the floor look like the evening sky, and he liked the thought of walking on the sky at night. This is his home. These are the first walls that belong completely to him.
The maid is working hard, beads of sweat glowing on her forehead. The house smells of scouring powder and ammonia. She says to bring cut flowers that smell good, but Taj won’t do this because flowers are not to be cut and thrown in vases where they die a pointless death.
There is a knock, and he sends the maid away. Taj and Ashura play cards while she drinks cognac, and it makes her giggle and move her limbs in a languid way that he likes. She was one of Nazook’s girlfriends, and long ago she looked at Taj like he was a child. She called him Boy, because that was what he was. Ashura is the daughter of a bookseller, and she is prettier than girls who take their clothes off in foreign magazines. There was a time those pictures excited him, but now they do not because girls who are paid are not worthy of a king. He is tired of them. He has not paid a girl in four months. He has been saving himself for Ashura, crossing off each day on the calendar. He read in a wise man’s book that he who has power over his body has power over his mind. And Taj knows the happiest kings are those who exercise absolute power.
Ashura looks into his eyes and runs her hand through her hair, letting her fingers glide down her neck as she returns to the cards. Taj takes something from his pocket and leans across the table to give it to her. She gasps when she opens the box and discovers the emerald earrings. He tells her they sparkle like her eyes, and she laughs when she puts them on, slapping his hand away when he tries to help. She tosses her head so the earrings dangle, and she asks: “How do I look?”
She undoes a button and smiles when she slips out of the blouse. He pulls her close, but something is wrong. Taj does not feel what he should feel. Nothing stirs except a dark, churning thought in his brain: that all she wants are the jewels, that he is nothing, nothing without the poppies, that he is a man made of brown sticky resin inside.
He bundles the blouse into her arms and tells her to get dressed and go. Before slamming the door, she tells him he has no class, even though he pretends to. When she is gone, Taj slips into Nazook’s old Opel, which is his now. He could drive something fancy, but if everyone knows you are a king, many will want your crown. Outside, his house is modest, too, a plain place without a garden, and no one knows that he walks on a lapis lazuli sky-floor.
His heart is pounding fast. He goes where he often goes when he feels like this. Soon he pulls up in front of the big house with the big garden. The girls no longer live there, and the lady with the henna hair and the tiny waist has grown large, while her husband has turned gray. Tonight Taj scales the wall while the people sleep. The flowers and the grass are not asleep. They rustle quietly, welcoming him home. There is no tent anymore. No one living in the yard. But his mother is still there: he thinks they buried her in the tiny plot surrounded by white stones, and he has come here many times late at night.
He lies down on the grass and gets lost in the dark sky, and soon it starts to rain. He lets the rain soak him as he falls half-asleep for hours. When it is almost light, he looks around and sees that the garden isn’t the same as it used to be. They’ve made new flower beds, and the hedges aren’t cut the same. It isn’t his garden anymore. Taj decides he will never come back.
Lying awake on his toshak pillow at home, he thinks of Ashura. He will always remember how pretty she was, and how much he had wanted her once. Most of all, he will remember that the last thing she did before slamming the door was touch her ears to make sure the earrings were still there.
When he falls asleep, he dreams that he is wandering in the old garden with the high walls, and that he knows that outside them he will never be safe.