Me: Are you having me followed? Because I am being followed right now.

H: It’s not us. It’s someone from your own family.

Me: I don’t have a family.

H: Certainly you do. Your mother is family.

Me: Well yes. But that doesn’t really count. Besides, she is indisposed.

H: I am not talking about her.

Me: Who then?

He did not answer.

I spent the rest of the night in the darkness of the apartment mostly staring out the window. The courtyard of the synagogue was like an old friend. Inside it the place was blinking. From its upper story the dimmed light of the chandeliers gave one a feeling of martyrs and magic and afterlife.

I went back to that first e-mail that had come from abroad: I am a scholar interested in the old Jewish quarter of your city. Your article . . .

I finally replied to the e-mail: What can I do for you?

Around three a.m. there was another text from H: Don’t e-mail this person again.

I wrote: Entrapment?

H: Not quite.

Me: Why are you helping me?

H: Because I don’t like my life.

* * *

When I opened my eyes at three p.m. there had been fifteen missed calls on the phone. All of them came from my mother’s nursing home.

“Is she dead?”

“Sir?”

“You people have been calling me nonstop. Is my mother dead?” I gave my name.

“There is a visitor. We cannot give out telephone numbers. So we dialed your number for them.”

Since the Persian language lacks feminine or masculine pronouns, I had to ask, “Is them a man or a woman?”

“Man.”

In an hour I was at the nursing home. My mother was staring vacantly at her Turkish soap opera. The woman next door who had relived the Bolshevik invasion every day for the last forty years had finally died. In her place they’d wheeled in an ancient Hungarian who kept asking, in perfect Persian, about tomorrow’s weather.

On the other side of bed sat an owl of a man. His eyes were fixed, hardly batting an eyelash. Avesta—short, fifty, neurotic, and always looking slightly desperate despite the fame he’d manufactured for himself abroad—stood up and came at me with a handshake that felt like a knife. We did not like each other and were make-believe cousins by obligation because of my mother’s second marriage into wasted wealth. Even his name gave me hiccups, one of those pre-Islamic decorations that the rich always like to give their sons and daughters. Whereas I’d grown up in near poverty, Avesta and his kin had gone to the best schools abroad. Francophones to the hilt, they went out of their way to show they did not mind you being French-illiterate. But of course they did mind. A lot. And I had always been that poor pretend cousin whom they kept at a distance, but not too far because, after all, I did write for the papers for a living. They might need me sometime.