I followed him inside. I too was in the grip of shyness, or something like it.

“I thought you’d never come back,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

“You aren’t even happy to see me.”

“That’s not true. I’m just …”

“You’re shocked. Of course you are.”

He went towards the rooms, arranged in a semicircle, on the other side of the courtyard. A veranda with columns extended along several of the rooms. Crocuses, unpruned rosebushes, and pomegranate trees filled the flower beds. A round pool of water stood between the flower beds. The place seemed cramped, untended. But still it was the same house. Roses would blossom, sparrows would chirp at the edge of the pool. At dawn and dusk the voice of the muezzin would mix with the noise of people coming from and going to the nearby bazaars.

We went up the steps onto the veranda and my father opened the door to one of the rooms. He stepped inside and turned on the light. I paused for a moment, afraid to cross the threshold. I could smell it: must, jasmin, rosewater, garlic, vinegar, recalling my childhood. Shut doors with confused noises behind them, slippery footsteps, black, golden-eyed cats staring from every corner, indolent afternoons when people reclined on mattresses, forbidden subjects occasionally reaching me—talk about a heavy flow of menstrual blood, sex inflicted by force, the last dark words of a woman on her death bed.

My father disappeared into another room. I heard voices whispering and then someone said loudly, “She’s here?” Footsteps approached. In the semidarkness of a doorway at the far end of the room two faces appeared and then another face, like three moons, staring at me.

“Feri, what happened?” a woman’s voice asked, and a figure stepped forward. I recognized my stepmother, Ziba. She wore a long, plain cotton nightgown.

“The time got mixed up, I guess.” My voice sounded feeble and hesitant.

A man laughed and walked into the light too. It was my stepbrother, Darius. He grinned at me, a smile disconnected from his eyes.

“Let’s go to the kitchen,” my father said. “So that Feri can eat something.”

They went back through the same doorway and I followed them. We walked through the dim, intersecting rooms in tandem. In one room all the walls were covered with black cloth, and a throne, also covered with a black cloth, was set in a corner—for monthly prayers when neighborhood women would come in and a Moslem priest was invited to give sermons. The women would wail and beat their chests in these sessions as the priest talked about man’s guilt or the sacrifices the leaders of Islam had made. They would cry as if at their own irrevocable guilt and sorrow.

We were together in the kitchen. Darius, Ziba, my father—they seemed at once familiar and remote like figures in dreams.

Ziba, her eyes still shrewd and slipping frequently into disapproval, lips thin and prim, hair frizzy from a permanent, breasts flat under the loose, white robe. A woman in her late forties but looking older, with deep frown lines on her forehead and creases all over her face as if a layer of anxiety had imprinted itself on her. Darius, wearing his stained work clothes—his dark, persistent gaze, protruding forehead, heavy sensual lips. The last I had heard, he worked as a garage mechanic instead of in my father’s fabric shop in Sabzi Bazaar as they had once both hoped. And my father, crouching on a chair, eyes almost hidden under his thick eyebrows as if he were trying to avoid confrontation with me.