In my office, I carefully lay Nadi’s mother’s table on its face upon the floor. Kathy Nicolo is silent within the bathroom and I feel indecent to have taken note of this. I return to the kitchen and living-room area and sit at the counter. Between the steaming dishes upon the floor Nadi has placed three lighted candles in a small candelabra upon the sofreh, and she has extinguished the lamp near the sofa and the bungalow smells wonderfully of meat and saffron rice and cooked tomatoes. I have a large hunger and hope Kathy Nicolo presents herself very soon. I pick up the weapon once again. It is well maintained and smells strongly of gun oil. I pull backward on its ejection mechanism and allow it to slide back into position and the sound it makes startles Nadi and she nearly drops the warmed plates in her hands.
“Nakon,Massoud.” She tells to me to put the weapon out of sight of the poor girl, and I apologize to my wife for frightening her, but I do not yet put away the pistol for I am thinking of Friday afternoons during the months before Ramadan, when Pourat and I would use the firing range built by the Americans at Mehrabad. We would wear headphones and smoke French cigarettes and we would fire with one hand or two, attempting to shoot holes into the black silouhettes of paper men at the far end of the gallery. Pourat was not comfortable with his weapon, a 9mm pistol such as Kathy Nicolo’s, and he would jerk the trigger and miss the entire target, and his bullet would disappear into the sandbags against the concrete wall. But General Pourat did not care. He laughed at himself, even in the presence of the soldiers posted at the door, and he would give to me the weapon and I would allow him the use of my .45-caliber with the cowboy and rearing horse in its grip and Pourat would shoot even less accurately with that. But I was younger, my eyes clear, and many times I held my breath and squeezed the trigger and made a substantial number of holes in the chests and stomachs of the paper men. Later, Pourat would boast of my shooting to other officers. One year, all the spring season, he called me Duke Behrani after the American actor John Wayne, but of course Pourat’s laugh was always last, for in Farsi Duke sounds very much like our word for liar.
I lay the weapon and its loaded magazine on a folded paper towel and set it against the flower pots upon the counter. Outdoors, in the twilight fog, comes the familiar metallic rolling sound of my son’s skateboard wheels upon the concrete sidewalk. I begin to prepare myself for speaking with him and when he enters the home wearing only shorts and basketball shoes and a loose black T-shirt, I scold him for both underdressing and for dressing too darkly as well. In the doorway he stands as tall as a man. His black hair is matted wet upon his forehead from the fog and his own sweat, and his eyes survey the sofreh, the four plates there instead of three. Nadi is near to the sink preparing the samovar for later and she calls out in Farsi for Esmail to take off his shoes and then come into the kitchen for washing. She regards me, her hands upon the samovar lid, and she motions with her head for me to commence explaining. Esmail removes his shoes, asks me if the automobile in the driveway does not belong to that woman, Bawbaw-jahn? Again I am faced with the moment of not knowing how much of our situation to share with my son. But then I tell to myself it is his situation as well; the woman Kathy Nicolo has slept in hisbed. I ask my tall handsome son of fourteen years to the counter where I show him the unloaded weapon and tell him everything.
Esmail’s face looks as it did when he was a small boy, before he had his own television, computer, and video games, when he was still interested in stories of people, of hearing me talk of soldiers and their triumphs or failures, hearing his mother or older sister speak with pity of crippled beggars in the marketplace. His eyes would grow larger, more round, and a bit moist with a curiosity so sharp it became nearly fear as well. He appears this way now, and his eyes linger on the weapon as I speak. Twice he turns and looks down the corridor to the closed bathroom door.
Nadereh approaches him, wiping the samovar lid with a dry cloth. In Farsi she says that the woman is not well. “You must be a gentleman, joon-am. Very kind. Very polite. Very quiet.” She asks him to quickly retrieve long pants, a shirt, and socks from his room and he may dress in her bedroom and wash at the kitchen sink. Our son’s eyes have changed now. They shine with the joy of adventure, and soon he is dressed and clean and sitting upon the floor at the sofreh, the light from the candles in his eyes. I sit there as well, giving to him permission to eat bread, perhaps a toropcheh, a radish. The covered dishes are cooling, the candle sticks burning shorter, and soon the scent of the samovar’s tea will fill the room, so I tell to my wife to please inform Kathy Nicolo of her waiting meal.
Nadi disappears into the hallway, knocks upon the bathroom door. “Please, hello? Your food is to be eating soon. Hello?”
My son and I smile at one another over Nadi’s English. We eat bread and listen to her knock again. But there is only silence. Too much silence. And it is in this silence my heart quickens and I stand. I hear Nadi turn the knob and open the door and I am moving down the darkened corridor in my socks, a prowler against my own knowledge of what is to come: I should have taken more precautions with this woman. I curse myself, and I am not surprised when my wife screams and I enter the bathroom and see in the sink the empty pharmaceutical bottle, Kathy Nicolo lying nude in the clear water, her face as white and still as if she were in the deepest of sleeps. Nadi cries out in Farsi that we must hurry, we must make her lose her stomach! I avert my eyes from the woman’s breasts only to see the darkness between her legs. My face becomes very warm, my limbs clumsy. Nadi pulls on her wet arms and Kathy Nicolo opens her eyes, but they are narrow and quite dark, as if she were blind or seeing us only in a dream. Nadereh appears startled, but she regains herself and without turning around orders me in Farsi to leave the room immediately.
I obey. Esmail is standing there as well and I know he has seen the naked woman but I say nothing of this.
“What happened,Bawbaw?”
I tell to him to return to the sofreh and eat his dinner. My son opens his mouth to speak once more but I shake my head and point my arm to the living-room area. He does nearly as I instruct, except he does not eat at the sofreh. He fills his bowl with rice and obgoosht and sits at the counter bar where he has a view of the corridor and me and the bathroom’s closed door. I stand there listening, but the sound of my own heart fills my ears. I turn the knob and open the door a fraction. My wife speaks softly, half in English, half in Farsi, and the woman Kathy Nicolo speaks as well but I cannot understand her words, for they are in the high bewildered tone of a child.
“Yes, good,” Nadi says. “Een bosheh. Beeah. Very good.”
There is the sloshing of water, the rustle of a towel, and Kathy Nicolo’s voice telling to my wife she is very beautiful, but the words are thick and her statement sounds more to me as a question would. Nadereh thanks her and tells to Kathy Nicolo that she too is beautiful. Khelee zeebah. Then Nadi says, “Bee-ah injah. Come to here, please.” And I hear only silence. Then Nadereh speaks again: “Yes, your mouth to open. Khelee khobe, very good.” Her voice is near the door and I am certain the two women are upon their knees at the toilet. Kathy Nicolo asks a question but once again I cannot understand the words. They are merged one over the other. She begins to cough and retch and there is a contracted silence, then her vomit hitting the toilet water.
I return to the living-room area, but the smells of obgoosht and saffron rice no longer attract me. I sit beside my son at the counter, my heart a presence in my hands, and tell to him to finish eating. He fills his spoon with rice. “Bawbaw-jahn?”