“What are you talking about? What do you mean she went away with another man?”

My father sat down on the bricks around the flower bed. Crocuses, roses. A whiff of my childhood. My mother standing in a doorway and calling me, “Feri, come in and eat,” or waving her hand, “Watch out, you’re going to fall.” She was a large woman and had a mass of dark, wavy hair that she usually wore loose down her back.

“No one ever told me anything about this,” I said to my father.

“Why inflict a child with shame?”

“Who was this other man?”

“Do you really want to know? A scoundrel who soon abandoned her.”

“Where is she now? Does she live in Teheran?” I was raising my voice.

“Do you think I’ve kept track?” he said listlessly, getting up and brushing off the dirt from his pants.

Ziba came into the courtyard. “What’s going on?” Her hair was henna red, and she had remnants of mascara smeared around her eyes. “The neighbors can hear you.” She turned to me. “Do you have to stir things up?”

Her voice had the unsparing coldness I recalled from the past.

How I had recoiled from her that very first day she had come to live with us. She sat by a samovar, holding a cube of sugar between her teeth and sucking tea through it. She had regarded me with a shrewd, judging look and, taking out the sugar cube, she said, “Come here, let me kiss you.” I was wearing a full dress and as I began to walk it seemed to wrap around my legs. “She hates me, I can tell,” she had said.

She would often be sitting in the courtyard when I got back from school, letting henna dry on her hair and finger-nails. She would have a series of errands for me to do.

“Water stopped running in the faucet today. I want you to pump some from the cistern.”

“Not now. I’m too tired.”

“Tired! You haven’t done anything all day. You’ve just been playing at school.”

“I worked at school.”

“You don’t know what work is. I used to do all the housework and take care of five brothers and sisters when I was your age.” Her voice was low, barely hiding hostility.

I went to the hand pump in the corner of the courtyard and filled the pail with water.

When I left for the United States she had stood in the same spot. “It will be peaceful here with you gone. We’ll have some rest,” she had said. I ignored her, consoled by my own fantasies. Now I was face to face with her again but was no longer protected by those fantasies.

“Leave her alone,” my father shouted at Ziba. “You’ve never had eyes to see her. You’re the one who drove her away from here.”

“Her mother was a whore and you’re still talking about her.”

“Shut up or else …”

“I’m only telling the truth.”