Miss Homa placed sweet mint tea in front of us and sat gazing at Proust. It was a curious look. She obviously could not decide whether she should be amused or angry at me for bringing a perfect stranger to her house at night. Proust, meanwhile, looked on in awe around the living room. Miss Homa’s canvases, especially those domes and minarets, appeared to overwhelm him. In the days ahead I would come to know as much as there was to know about Proust. Born in one of the shore towns of the Caspian Sea, he’d scored high enough on his national exams to be accepted to the state medical school. But he’d opted for literature, the fool. After four years of reading the Persian classics and another four toward two higher degrees in French literature and translation, respectively, he’d finally landed back on earth to face reality—there was not a bloody thing for him to do to make a living. His family had supported him far longer than they should have and then one day told him to get a life. Which meant get married, settle down in small-town Iran, and, at best, become a bank clerk or a schoolteacher. I’d encountered dozens similar to this poor bookish fuck. I’d worked with them, heard them out when they contemplated suicide, and I had drunk to their afterlives once they’d hanged themselves or went missing or threw themselves under a truck. These were not the martyr types. They did not go to war. They read modernist European literature instead, in barely passable translation, and dreamed of other places—of Paris in the 1920s maybe, Vienna during the late Hapsburg period, or Madrid and Hemingway and bullfighting. They were budding Middle Eastern poets with nowhere to go, no visas to the West they could procure, no doors of the greater good world open to them. They had no money and they dreamed of ordering whiskey in a bar somewhere where there was a hint of freedom. They could just about taste that real whiskey that they’d never before tasted while simultaneously imagining writing the next great Persian novel, not realizing that the previous great Persian novel had never been written. And when that avalanche of reality one day finally came bearing down on them, they either got enough prescriptions of antianxiety pills to put a horse into a deep coma or else they jumped off a cliff. Usually they did both, though with a several-year interval of utter misery in between. That was Daliri/Proust in a nutshell. I’d had students like him at the University of Art in downtown Tehran. There must be a factory somewhere where they made the likes of him—with that bowl-shaped haircut and writerly glasses and hangdog look.

I did not want to waste time. “What were you thinking showing up in Tehran like this? You’re supposed to be dead, son.”