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.

Avesta needed me now. That attempt at a handshake gave it away. He would have air-kissed me otherwise.

I reached over and kissed my mother. Her reaction was slow but definite. “Why have you no hand?” she said. Then her head swiveled just as slowly and she zeroed back in on the television. She was a blank. I was losing her the way you lose a toy you stopped playing with years ago.

“What can I do for you?” I said to the pretend cousin.

“You have to write an article and take everything back about what you said regarding that Homa woman.”

“Miss Homa to you.”

“Whatever. She’s becoming too famous outside of this dump of a country and—”

“It doesn’t suit you?”

“Because of what you wrote, everyone here thinks I stole my dome and minaret paintings from her.”

“Well, the domes you did steal from her. And the minarets you stole out of inspiration from the domes. So technically you are a thief.”

“A curse on you, Saleh!”

“But no worries, cousin. In art everyone is a thief. I don’t see why you’ve come all the way from—wherever it is you live now, Paris? Berlin? New York?—come all the way here to this, as you correctly put it, dump of a country to complain about an article no one cares about.”

He stared at his invented aunt, my mother, as if he needed a witness.

There are people who want and want. I had spent the last years of childhood being invited once in a blue moon to this family’s immaculate homes in the north of Tehran where they kept pristine swimming pools even in the worst days of the revolution and during the war with Iraq; I’d been relegated to the kitchen to eat with the servants while my mother worked to ingratiate herself with our new rich relatives.