Roya couldn’t sleep. When she did, it was in fits and spurts but with vivid, detailed dreams.
In the dream that haunted her the most, she entered Mr. Fakhri’s shop, the bell above the door ringing like always. Inside, it smelled of ink and books; the familiar comforting coolness enveloped her. At first she didn’t see Mr. Fakhri, but then there he was, behind the counter, writing in his inventory book, the fountain pen gliding across the page. He looked like himself again: clean and calm, his glasses on straight. He had nothing of the wild look that she remembered from that fateful day in the square.
He looked up and for just a second panic crossed his face. Then he broke into his usual smile. In the polite voice to which Roya was accustomed, he asked how her parents were doing, how her sister, Zari Khanom, was, how all of the extended family fared, if all was going well in their neighborhood, may they all be healthy and live long lives. He added extra heapings of Persian tarof—the formal niceties required in every social interaction.
“Have you heard from Bahman?” she asked.
“Roya Khanom, no.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not one word.”
“But he was delivering his letters to you till just a few days ago. Right?”
Mr. Fakhri sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “My advice to you, young lady, is to forget about that young man. Move on with your life. Get married. Have children. Be good.”
“I’m sorry?” Roya’s heart banged against her chest. “Get married is exactly what I am going to do. I’m engaged to him.”
“Yes, well, sometimes engagements don’t work out. Did you know that?” He said the words delicately, as if they could break her if he said them carelessly.
“I want to know if he’s all right. No one has heard from him. I just thought maybe you had, since—”
Mr. Fakhri held up his hand. “We do not always get what we want, Roya Khanom. Things do not always work out the way we planned. Those who are young tend to think that life’s tragedies and miseries and its bullets will somehow miss them. That they can buoy themselves with naïve hope and energy. They think, wrongly, that somehow youth or desire or even love can outmatch the hand of fate.” He took a breath. “The truth is, my young lady, that fate has written the script for your destiny on your forehead from the very beginning. We can’t see it. But it’s there. And the young, who love so passionately, have no idea how ugly this world is.” He rested both hands on the counter. “This world is without compassion.”
Roya felt like she had suddenly been soaked in ice.
“You would do well to remember that,” Mr. Fakhri said. A low, grating whistle passed between his teeth. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and finally said, “It seems to me that he never loved you. It was all a game for him.”
Roya would wake up with a start then, soaked with cold sweat.
Even awake, she could feel Mr. Fakhri in the Stationery Shop as it used to be, taking inventory of his stock, organizing the translations of authors from all over the world. She could see him dust the table that carried volumes of poetry, including the ones in which she and Bahman had passed their notes. He had opened up a world of possibilities for her, offering a place where her dreams had formed into a viable path, where she had escaped the tumult of politics and found refuge. Where she had fallen in love.
She could still feel the shelves digging against her back where she had leaned as Bahman pressed into her, whispering to her.
But in her dream, Mr. Fakhri always said that Bahman had never loved her. He told her to start a new chapter of her life. Even if so many unanswered questions remained in this one.
He had been their ally, their encouraging chaperone. A middle-aged man dusting books and arranging school stationery in a shop, talking to the young and helping them secretly get access to political material and exchange love notes.
He was gone. He was gone, and but for the grace of God, it could have been her. Quite possibly should have been her. It was something she would always carry, like a scar, like a cold truth, like the sizzling embers of the shop’s remains embedded in her skin, like the body of Mr. Fakhri carried invisible above her extended arms forever.
Now that Mr. Fakhri was gone, she thought about him more than ever. What personal pain he had carried inside, she did not know.
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
1916
* * *
The Melon Seller’s Daughter
A young man meanders through winding alleys of the bazaar downtown. Since his birth, his marriage has been arranged to his second cousin, Atieh. Atieh means “future,” but she is not the future he wants. He is in love with a young girl who works at the bazaar, who heaps melons onto crates every morning and stands haughtily next to her father as he haggles with the customers. Ali can’t stop thinking about this poor girl. He goes to the bazaar just to see her seed the melons, to catch any glimpse of her.
Amidst the cacophony and chaos of the stalls, he watches. She always wears a small headscarf. Her clothes are shabby, but her face is like the moon. She is young, too young perhaps, but stunning. With a knife that looks like a sword, the girl’s father magically whisks out the inner soft flesh of the fruit and sells slices and chunks to his thirsty customers. Some customers take a whole melon and drop it into their baskets; others want the immediate sweetness, the cool relief of melon cut and iced. The ice is just as special as the fruit, and the melon seller comes to the bazaar every morning carrying a coveted block of it. The girl guards the ice vigilantly, standing next to it with her hands on her hips.
Ali’s mother plans the items for his wedding sofreh. “Wasn’t I patient to wait till she’s older?” she says. “Your cousin is sixteen now and ripe and ready for you. You two were destined from birth. We all knew it.”
His mother chuckles, as though she is gaining something uniquely valuable. She tells the maids to make sure there is enough cinnamon to decorate the sholeh zard dessert on the wedding day. “At the end of summer, Ali Jan. Can you think of a better present for your eighteenth birthday?”
Ali thinks that Atieh looks like watery yogurt; he imagines her to be just as bland and tasteless. In his dreams, the shabbily dressed girl at the bazaar feeds him slivers of melon, the juice soaking his mouth.
One Friday, he walks downtown as usual to spy on her. He stands half-concealed behind a post at the spice stall as the girl arranges whole melons into pyramid-shaped heaps. He watches her slice the fruit into uneven pieces.
“Badri, bia, come!” Her father is toothless, skin leathered from too much time in the unforgiving sun.
Badri. Badri. Badri. Ali repeats the name under his breath as if he could possibly ever forget it. As if he won’t ache for years whenever he hears it.
Shoppers push and shove, women in chadors carry their baskets of greens and eggplants, babies cry, and peddlers moan about their wares. Badri, Badri, Badri. Ali, as the son of one of Tehran’s most esteemed scholars, will be sent off to Qom to study religion and the classics soon. This girl is not a thing that should enter his mind. She works with her father in the market. She is a dahati, a villager. A girl with nothing, from the same class as the servant who washes Ali’s clothes.