I woke, my heart thumping rapidly.

Now in Iran, things had quickly reversed—what had seemed mysterious was menacing and what had seemed sterile in the States appeared to be orderly, almost peaceful.

I missed, as if it were taken away from me permanently, my white shingled house in Lexington supplied with modern comforts, my neighbors, their talk about books, the latest movies, or plays. The green backyard, the smell of cut grass. The voices of Maria Muldaur or Steven Stills pouring out of the phonograph. My laboratory overlooking the Charles River. I spent long hours there every day, charting changes in the viscosity of hormones and enzymes, studying the abnormal growth of cells in rats. Tony, sitting across from me at night, working or examining a book he had just bought—he collected first editions of scientific books.

Impulsively I decided to get my exit visa and leave before the two weeks had passed. It would take time for the visa to be issued, a few days anyway.

The next morning, as I was heading towards the outside door, my father called after me, “Where are you going?”

I turned around. He was wearing a badly cut, somber looking suit. A watch on a chain hung from his trousers.

“To the passport bureau. I want to get my exit visa.”

“Already? You aren’t serious, are you. You’re angry at me or maybe at your uncle?”

“I’m not angry. I just have to get back sooner than I had planned. I have work to do—and there are things I forgot.”

“I can see you’re angry—I don’t blame you. But he loves you. He must have gone home and cried for what he did. He can’t help himself when he steals like that. It’s a sickness.”

“I’ll come back sooner next time. Or you could come and visit me. You’d like that.” I knew or rather hoped that he would not accept the invitation. I would have to attend to him as a child if he came. He did not know English or how to drive. Then, feeling selfish, I said, “You must come.”

He shook his head almost sadly. “I’m an old man. It isn’t easy for me to travel. Besides I have work too.” Then he grew angry. “Why did you come then, if you were going to run back immediately? You remind me of her, your mother. She had no regard for me either or else she wouldn’t have left like that for another man.”

The reference to my mother seemed suspended between us; I could feel my ears ringing. It had been years since anyone had mentioned her. She had remained sealed inside me like an illusion too real to discard altogether. My mother had simply disappeared one day, when I was eight years old. My father and my relatives always said the same thing in answer to my incessant questions about her—that she had responded to a religious calling and had gone away to devote herself to God. No one knew where she was. Then after a while, no one wanted to talk about her and she had gradually become a dark memory.