On the wider street I could smell bread being cooked on hot gravel in a bakery. Simin and I embraced and kissed before she got on the bus.

I did not return to my father’s house immediately. I stopped at spots I had frequented as a child—a little stationery store where I used to buy school supplies, a bakery with its display of sweets, the school with its heavy iron door. I put my head to the door and looked in. No one was in the yard. I had a recollection of myself standing there once alone, crying.

I had a little friend with whom I used to walk back and forth to school, accompanied by my father or Darius. Once, she and I had identical dresses made by a tailor—blue crepe-de-chine dresses with ruffles around the sleeves and collars—and we paraded the streets wearing them, self-conscious, as if the whole world was looking at us. We had a favorite game in which we were sisters. In the game, we always went on a long imaginary expedition somewhere far away, a place with vast rivers and vast mountains, shady forests and cool wide spaces. We rowed over a creek and found ourselves on that huge magical land. I heard later that she had gotten married, become very fat, and had four fat children. She could be passing me now among the crowd and I would not know her. I wondered where she was that day when I stood in the schoolyard, crying all alone—I was missing my mother.

I recalled trying to cross a busy street with my mother. Many cars, bicycles, horsecarts, went by, on and on. She held my hand and helped me across through a slight opening in the traffic. “You’ll help me when I’m old and feeble, won’t you?” she said. I shook my head vaguely, unable to comprehend the possibility that she would ever become old and feeble.

Other memories swarmed over me as I walked back through the crowded streets, where thin men brushed against me for a mere touch of a naked arm, where women clung to their chadors with resignation.

It was dusk when I returned. A mass of birds flew away above the courtyard. Kites dived in the air like fish. I went directly to my room.

“Did you get a lot done?” I asked Tony.

“A fair amount.” He barely glanced at me.

I watched him, his mild but precise gestures, the controlled charm in his manner. This was the quality that seemed to draw women to him, that once had appealed to me so much. But now all that was dead for me. No, I could not put up the struggle needed to revive things between us. I could not go back with him, not now anyway, not until the spell of my own past had lifted.

I sat down on the floor and began to take out some of the things I had packed in my suitcase.

“What are you doing?” Tony asked. “We have to leave for the airport soon.”