The Shipwrecked (9 page)

Since our apartment was on the first floor, we could hear the traffic up and down the staircase. Visitors were supposed to take their shoes off before ascending the carpeted stairs to the Yazdani residence. We could often hear Mr. Yazdani grumble audibly for the untidy way shoes had been left at the bottom of the staircase. He picked them up and neatly arranged them by the wall.

I fell in love with the place at first sight. It was quiet and afforded privacy. The rooms were freshly painted, sunny, and inviting. The kitchen was large with a window opening onto the alley. When I opened the window I could hear the birds singing. The alley was wide and clean, with old houses on either side. The house across from our kitchen window was well-kept, and its wall was covered with jasmine and musk-scented roses. In the afternoons, a little girl would come out to play in her toy car. With the baby in my arms, I would watch her from the window, as she appreciated the audience, pedaling faster and doing intricate maneuvers around the courtyard.

Mr. Yazdani handed me the basement key. “Dear girl, consider this your own home,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“You're like my own daughter.”

“Thank you.”

I had said “Thank you” one hundred times to get rid of him, but Yazdani had to explain the house rules over and
over again. There were certain conditions for the use of the yard. The shoe rack had to be placed at a certain angle at the entrance door. I could use the garden hose, but had to roll it up and hang it on the hook every time. He talked hurriedly and in a low whisper, putting his face close to my face, staring at me with inquisitive eyes, as if he was searching for some unknown secret. I could see the pupils of his eyes moving restlessly from side to side.

I had become aware of the old man's disturbing energy early on. He was unlike other elderly men who would slump down in a comfortable chair and doze off. Actually, I don't remember ever seeing him seated at all. He was always in motion, climbing up or down the stairs, or on his way somewhere. Every time I ran into him, he made a point of letting me know he was late to some important appointment, apologizing for not being able to stop for a chat, but half an hour later, he would appear again to greet me as if he had not seen me in ages and he had been longing for this encounter. Several times every morning and evening, he would knock on my door and apologize profusely for having been remiss in checking on me and offering his services.

Manizheh and Maliheh, the young sisters of Mammad, always hung around the hallway to run into Mr. Yazdani. They were so amused by his eccentricity. It was like they were watching a movie. They engaged him in conversation and later mimicked his mannerisms.

“Your landlord is a real gentleman,” they told me.

The “real gentleman” always held himself upright more elegantly than usual to bid farewell to them at the door. Sometimes he invited the young guests to stay for dinner or lunch upstairs. The exchange of compliments usually continued for some time before the young girls took their leave. The girls believed that the wife must be ugly and unpleasant. For some reason, I always took the side of the wife and expounded on her intelligence and exquisite taste. She was not beautiful in the conventional sense, I told the girls, but she was uniquely attractive. I always thought, what if Mrs. Yazdani happened to come down the stairs and run into Manizheh and Maliheh, who seemed to take my description of Mrs. Yazdani with a grain of salt, wondering why Mr. Yazdani, this darling of a man, spent so much time downstairs if he had an angel for a wife upstairs.

Mrs. Yazdani was always warm and receptive to Mammad's mother. “Dear lady,” she told her. “Visit your daughter-in-law more often.”

Before long, Mr. Yazdani knew one by one of the family members and friends that visited me at the apartment. He even had figured out the texture of my relationship with each. My mother-in-law approved of this level of close attention paid by Mr. Yazdani to my affairs. I could often hear her expressions of gratitude from the alley in the extended process of leave-taking. I would hug the baby and watch from the window as the guests departed. I felt an innate desire to leave with them. But I would be
brought back to the reality of my situation when I heard Yazdani as he cleaned the hallway and organized the shoes along the wall. To me, he had become an intrusive burden. The apartment that was once so welcoming, had become like a prison and, Mr. Yazdani like a vigilant prison warden, who guarded it incessantly.

Close to the sunset every evening there is a knock on my door.

“Yes?” I almost bark, knowing who is likely on the other side.

“It's me, my daughter.”

I crack the door. He thrusts in his hand, holding a loaf of flat bread.

“But thanks,” I say. “We have enough bread in the house.”

“Take it anyway, dear girl. I bought it especially for you. It is fresh. This is something your husband would have done, had he been here. But he is not. You see?”

There is no point in refusing the offer. So I take the bread. “Thank you and goodnight,” I mutter, trying to close the door. But he pleads for just a minute of my time to share “some very important information.” That means I have to listen to his gibberish for another half hour and be told again how happy he is to have a virtuous young lady like me as his tenant. So different from his former tenants, a couple that did not get along and quarreled all the time, ruining the reputation of the house in the neighborhood. He would then spend more time apologizing for assailing
my sensibilities by the use of such words as “slut,” “shameless,” and “shrew” in reference to his previous tenant. I am such an angel in nature and disposition that I should consider myself as the owner of the property and him as a mere caretaker. Somehow, I am defenseless against his intrusions. I promise myself to never accept anything from such an importunate, irritating man.

In their late teens, with clear complexions and hazel eyes, Manizheh and Maliheh were attractive. It gave them immense pleasure to have the old man stand reverentially in front of them and admire their youthful charm using quaint, archaic terms. His age and theatrical demeanor were amusing to them and his polite manner had put him beyond any suspicion, but the girls were curious to meet his wife, something that wasn't forthcoming, given Mrs. Yazdani's reluctance to mingle and her self-imposed isolation upstairs.

Once the girls came up with the idea of going to a fortuneteller. There was an Armenian lady who lived in the neighborhood and was well known for telling fortunes by reading coffee grinds. Everyone called her “Madame.”

I wanted no part of it. “I don't want to have my fortune told,” I said. “It is not fair for all of us to show up and only one pay for her services.” The girls were amused by my hesitancy. “Don't worry,” said one of them, snickering. “We will keep your secrets.”

“We could all three have our fortunes told,” was the decision.

Madame's front yard was immaculately kept with flowers and greeneries. The consulting room upstairs was dimly lit. It took us a few minutes to get used to the low light. We sat around a table and looked at an elegant cupboard full of antique china and ceramic dishes and receptacles. Madame watched us from the top of her spectacles and asked how many cups of coffee we wanted. She then left the room and returned with three cups on a tray. The aroma of coffee set off in me a bout of craving.

It was Maliheh's turn first. She kept glancing at us, clicking her tongue as Madame talked, indicating her astonishment at the veracity of Madame's prognostications. Manizheh, on the other hand, was not quite so impressed.

“And then what will happen, Madame?” she asked, when Madame stopped talking. There was a touch of skepticism in her voice.

“You will come into some money on two occasions,” Madame declared gravely.

“A whole bunch of money, or what?”

“I can't tell. But it will be on two occasions. They may be apart two days, two weeks, two months . . .” Madame answered, allowing her voice to trail.

My turn was last. Madame picked my cup and held it up close to my face. The girls craned their necks to see. The grounds had formed into a crisscrossing of tracks and roads.

“Your heart is not here,” she said. “You are a stranger
in your own house. You will be leaving this place in a near future.”

“Where is she going, Madame?” the girls asked in unison, clearly enjoying to let the word “Madame” roll off their tongues.

“I don't know. But she is going,” Madame answered.

“Perhaps you have some secret plans we know nothing about,” said Maliheh, looking at me askance.

“I have a secret plan to make a beautiful quilt,” I said, grinning and pointing to my belly.

THE GIRLS ENJOYED
talking about household goods and furnishings. Every time they came for a visit they commented on the pillows in the guest room. In this visit they had concluded that I needed new pillowcases because they showed their age.

“Polyester fill is better for pillows,” Maliheh opined.

“Wool is the best,” Manizheh interjected.

“Then I need to know what to do with all the feathers I have got in mine,” I said jokingly. This made us all laugh.

“We should have gone to the store today to buy pillowcases for feather pillows,” one of them suggested.

MANIZHEH WAS STILL
upset about her conversation with Madame. “That was a waste of money,” she complained.

I found myself in agreement with her. “She put me in the mood for travel,” I said.

“Perhaps you miss your dear husband,” said Manizheh, winking suggestively, “so you want to go see him, huh?”

Almost always there was something racy in their comments and body language when they spoke about husbands, matrimony, and such matters.

“He's going to be here in a few days,” I said. “No need for me to go see him.”

Then we started mimicking Madame. We all thought she was rather miserly in dispensing coffee in those tiny mugs. The girls were pleased and said theirs were good but yours—instead of babies and birds in your cup—was roads and highways. We all laughed.

After I saw my guests off at the top of the alley, I returned home, picked up the baby, and headed for the park to have a stroll and some ice cream. Afterward, near the playground, I plumped down on a bench next to an old women who sat motionless, staring into the empty space. The child left my side and went to play on the slide. For some reason I thought of the winding roads and tracks on the bottom of the coffee cup and Madame's predictions. Was it possible that I might leave this place for somewhere else? The only thing I had not thought about in recent years was leaving, going somewhere. It occurred to me that I had always trained myself to stay put, to remain static. In my mind I had sealed off all the possible exits to alternative modes of existence.

The sun had already set when I got home, but Mr. Yazdani was still there at the entrance to the house. When
he saw me he struck a pose as if he was about to recite an ode. I felt depressed. I said hello and rushed into the apartment, locking the door behind me. A few minutes later he was knocking on the door, offering his company as an antidote to my loneliness.

The old man had discovered in me a solitude and innocence that he desired to be part of and share. At every encounter he would smile at me and ruefully shake his head. Throughout the day he would frequently stop by the apartment and ask if there was anything he could do for me. He would consider it a privilege to be of service. I always had to cut him off. “I beg your pardon,” I would say and shut the door. On leaving the house, I had to make sure he was not anywhere near the hallway. I would bundle the baby, letting her know that we had to be quiet. We would move noiselessly to the door and reach for the lock, key in hand. Even so, more often than not he would materialize behind me and offer to help me open the door. “There is a trick to it,” he would say. “You can't handle it by yourself.”

Occasionally, Mrs. Yazdani would descend to the world below her upstairs domain. She was openly contemptuous of her husband and the way he looked. “In his seventies and he still wore tight jeans with a big belt buckle,” she would grumble. “He always smelled of a very strong cologne. He combed what was left of his gray hair on the sides of his head to cover the bald patch on his skull.” She found all that disgusting.

“He's become very effeminate,” she told me once. “He spends more time in front of the mirror than a woman.”

For her part, Mrs. Yazdani had given up on her femininity. She didn't pluck her eyebrows. She simply gathered her untended hair over her head in a shapeless bun. A black hair grew out of a mole on her cheek, tempting one to reach out and pluck it. She had missing teeth. A lifetime of discontent had tracked her face with lines of a permanent frown that did not dissipate even when she smiled on rare occasions.

When Mammad came for a visit on a weekend, I told him about my problem with Mr. Yazdani.

“Do you mean he is a lecher?” he wanted to know.

“No, he's not,” I replied emphatically, although deep down, I wasn't quite sure.

“You should be able to regulate your relationship with others,” he said. “I can do it for you, if you can't.”