Outside, in the stalls, in open cafes, and on sidewalks, men sipped tea or smoked water pipes. By daylight the streets suggested languor rather than threat. All my tensions and fears disappeared. How gentle and harmless everyone seemed, how indifferent to my existence. I paused by a stall where hot beets and milk were sold and had some of each.

Then I took a taxi to my mother’s address. This time the door was open but a heavy cloth blocked the view inside. I knocked on the open door. Again there was no answer. I pushed the cloth aside, entered a hallway and called, “Is anyone in?” No one answered. I went out, thinking she could not be too far.

I walked for a while through the maze of lanes and then climbed the stairway to the roof of a house that had nearly collapsed. I looked at a wide expanse of the town enveloped in early morning silence—the cupolas, the windtowers.

“You’d better come down. It’s dangerous up there,” said a woman from below. She was old and wore a polka dot chador, greasy strands of hair showed on her forehead. “Just the other day another tourist was up on a roof and it crumbled beneath him. Come down, come down.” She waved her hands in alarm.

I came down.

“Many visitors come and go in this town—mostly from other countries—some of them know Farsi.” She looked at me intensely, assessing me. “But you are Iranian.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for Banoo Khanom but she isn’t home. Do you by chance know her?”

“Of course. She can’t be too far. Maybe she went to the bazaar.”

“So she should be back soon,” I said.

“How do you know her?”

“I’m related to her,” I said.

“Maybe her brother is home.”

“No one was there just a minute ago.”

“If you like, I’ll show you Mr. Boroojerdi’s house while you’re waiting. All tourists look at it.”

I followed the woman through several streets. She took me inside a house with an immense courtyard and old cypress trees. We climbed up a flight of stairs to a porch and went into a complex of rooms. I looked at the fading friezes, inlays, and murals on the walls and ceilings.

“It took fifteen years to build this house. Mr. Boroojerdi and his family lived here. During the day the women would sit in these rooms and weave rugs. On hot days they would bathe in that pool, cool off and start all over again,” the woman said. “At night they would play music, and sing and dance.”

“Did you know them?” I asked.

She nodded; her dark eyes became opaque. “Yes, I visited here often. Sometimes I stayed for weeks. It was a beautiful house. They were great people. Now I live in that room and take care of the house.”

I looked towards the squalid room, separate from the complex of rooms, on the other side of the courtyard. A woman and two little boys pushed aside a dark, dusty cloth hanging on its doorway and sat on the steps below.