My mother had closed her eyes and was praying. She pursed her lips and blew her breath into my face as if forcing the prayer on me physically.

She opened her eyes.

“Remember you were sick once and kept saying, ‘shake me, shake me!’” She moved her head rhythmically and laughed. “You said, ‘shake me like a rug.’”

“You must have had fever,” my uncle said.

“A neighbor had just died—Hamideh khanom—you were very attached to her. You kept saying, ‘pick her up and hang her on the wall.’” She laughed again.

“I remember her,” I said. “She was a tall, sturdy looking woman.”

“You used to get so attached to everyone we knew and they to you. You’d go from house to house, visiting. I had to look for you all over every day.”

“Yes,” I said.

“One day, after I had left, I asked a neighbor to go and see you for me. She said you’d become very withdrawn and wouldn’t talk to anyone. You’d changed.” She began to stare at her hands.

We were all silent again. I closed my eyes and thought about that childhood illness.

I had been feverish all day and I woke up in the middle of the night to shadows all around. I sat up to see my mother, father, and a group of men and women sitting on two separate rugs. Oil lamps hung on a tree and on the arch of the hallway …. I stayed in bed for what seemed like weeks. I would trace the intricate designs on the rug below my bed or look at the pattern on the ceiling. Sometimes my mother would sit in the corner of the room, cross-legged, fanning herself, reading the Koran, or cleaning out grains of rice and beans. She would give me a bowl of multicolored beans to play with—red, yellow, black, white with a black heart—and I would separate them and line them up like marbles. Once she gave me a crystal drop from a chandelier and I held it against the sun, excited by the richness of the color it produced. Finally a new doctor came and gave my mother some capsules for me. I was well in a few days. “That doctor did a miracle,” my mother had said. “It was God’s will to send him to us.”

I was given more and more medication but the pain persisted.

Hours, several days passed. I had not heard from Tony. I asked Manijeh if there was a way to call the United States from the hospital. “That wouldn’t be easy,” she said. “The connection with other countries is very bad here. Sometimes it can take hours to get through and even then the voices won’t be very clear. Some of our doctors have tried and given up.”

I decided to wait. Tony might have extended his trip or perhaps my telegram was still on the way, slow in delivery …. My emotions became dull and colorless as if they had been bleached.