“These were yours when you were a little girl. I kept them with me and looked at them and rubbed them against my face when I got too lonely.” She held some children’s clothing before me—a red-checkered dress, one in baby-blue. “For a moment it would seem you were with me.”

“I remember I took a rag doll you’d bought for me to bed every night,” I said.

“This is a picture of you just before I left,” she said, taking out an enlarged and faded photograph from the bottom of the trunk.

I looked at it for a long time.

In the photograph I was sitting on a wooden chair with a high back, holding a rose in my hand. It suddenly seemed time had congealed with me caught in it.

“Did you ever regret leaving my father?” I asked. I had avoided the subject so far.

She paused for a long time and I was sorry I had asked.

“At the time I had no choice. It was as though someone had opened the door of a prison for me and I had to run out.”

“Wasn’t it like being in prison later, too? Is this life what you expected?”

“At least now I have only myself to blame.”

Then, in a voice not so much wistful as incredulous, she told me how she would first steal only glimpses of that man as he came to work, and how one day a single look between them sealed them together. She described the subsequent brief meetings between them, the guilt, the fear, the fits of depression and crying following every meeting, how they both finally decided to avoid seeing each other for a while and how those days were even more hellish than the time when they did see each other.

Then one night she was awakened by the sound of gravel being thrown against the window. She tiptoed to the window and looked out. In the moonlight she could see him, the man, signalling to her to come down. She would not have gone except for the expression on his face. He looked so wan and drawn out. He was unshaven and his hair disheveled. She put her chador on, but before going down, she came into my room and looked at me. Then she went to the outside door and opened it. Standing in the privacy of the doorway, she and the man talked for a long time, whispering. Their voices were quieter than the ripples of water running in the gutters. He told her that he had locked himself in a room and had not eaten for days. That he seemed to be living in hell already and so he might as well sin and persuade another man’s wife to go away with him. That night they agreed to leave together for a village not far from Teheran. Once safely settled with him there, she would come back and take me away. She planned to talk my father into giving her a divorce.