The next night she left with the man in a horsecart he brought to the wider street a block away. As they rode away in the horsecart she hid her face in her chador and cried. For days all she did was cry.

My mother stopped talking suddenly and began to put back the things she had taken out of the trunk.

“Why do you suppose he changed so much later?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He was such a nice man. Maybe our sin finally poisoned him.”

I realized she had never referred to him by his name. I asked her that.

“Sohrab,” she said. “But after a while I stopped calling him anything.”

By the door, just before leaving, she put her hands around my head and kissed me.

“Do you forgive me?” she asked.

“Of course, of course.”

“How could you?” she said softly, rhetorically.

The next day I stood in the doorway of my room and watched her. She dawdled instead of walking. Her arms and hands looked swollen and her skin was sallow, but her expression seemed livelier than in that first encounter when I arrived in Kashan.

She turned and looked at me.

“Feri,” she called. “You want to come out?”

Her voice was so real, so familiar. I went out into the courtyard. I sat at the edge of the pool, shaded by a wide eucalyptus tree, with one of my hands dangling in the water, and we talked some more.

It was one of those lukewarm breezy mornings that makes one expectant that things will happen. As I listened, her voice became monotonous and blurred, even more ghost-like than it had been the night before.

My father had not given her much trouble once she had left. He must have felt too disgraced. He gave her a divorce readily. They did not even encounter each other in court. He was willing to divorce her without requiring her presence and he did it within the first few days after she left. I was the only thing he held from her. Every time she asked for me he refused, and he made it legally impossible for her to get near me. She could not really blame him after what she had done to him.

She and the man got married immediately in a little mosque off a shrine. Then they spent the day in the holy place. Neither one of them was eager to leave as though the longer they stayed at the shrine the more sanctified their marriage, the more purified.

At first it was easy to live just for him. The village was primitive with one short main street and a few dirt roads. They lived in a tiny house with two rooms.

She spent the day at household chores while he went to work in Teheran, doing accounting for different families. In the evening before he came, she would sweep an area in the yard and spread a mattress for them to sleep on and would have the dinner all ready to serve. He told her of the events of the day as they ate. They huddled together in bed, awake for hours. Not from fear—although it would have been justifiable in that isolated place—but from a kind of almost unnatural exhilaration. They shuddered in each others’ arms. He was an inarticulate man and his emotions exploded sometimes, making him rough with her. On the days he did not work they took excursions on donkeys to other villages or to a shrine.