“Yes, something like that, Saleh.” She shoved one of the invitation cards into my hand. “Come tomorrow night if you like. Or don’t come. I don’t care.”

She walked away. Walking like a trailing oud solo behind the looking glass and beyond my reach forever.

Oh Atia!

* * *

I was being followed again.

I texted H: The art of life is to reach the divine through those who make us suffer.

He replied almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting: To glimpse something anew is to revisit all that one’s eyes saw the first time.

H, I decided, had lost his mind. He was sitting in his interrogation room reading a mountain of a European book from early in the twentieth century. I wondered if he’d ever had to torture anyone.

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.