our
crimes toward you and so many other innocent people. I can say it without trembling,
our crimes,
even though, for years, I distanced myself from everything that I eventually reproached Ala with so violently. I was at odds with the situation and did not want to admit it. It was only after his departure that I had to face facts. Of the two of us, who was more to blame? The young devoted soldier caught in the tyrants’ vice, or the scientist cloistered on her Olympus, refusing to see what was there before her eyes? An Olympus that Ala destroyed with a CD. The deep reason for my rage against my husband, which you render so well in your novel, is too shameful to admit. Why did he have to wrench me from my ivory tower just before we were due to depart? It was a question of his own survival. This constant need for an inconsolable love, a betrayed utopia. If I have an experience of soul-searching, it is something that I owe to you. It did not transform me. One can never change radically. But I won’t lie to myself anymore, nor will I lie to my children. What is prodigiously human — not to say monstrously human — in Vima 455 cancels out the monstrosity, pure and simple, of the murderers at Ravine: that is a message I shall not forget. It is you I have to thank for enabling me to see what human beings can attain if they look inside themselves. I could never have imagined that a few inches of ground in the most sordid of prisons could elevate a person to the same degree as the constellations of the Milky Way. I have my work cut out for me, to meditate on my flaws and to reconsider the way in which all the world’s believers are certain of a human purpose, something I have never paid any attention to before now, or very little. Science does not recognize either right or wrong. Before meeting you through that terrifying CD, I did not recognize any kind of truth other than the relative truth of science. Now, thanks to you, I can conceive of the complexity of the mystery of beings, the way that mystics experience it. Love is its axiom, and Utopia its motor. One day a poet friend told me that true meetings are merely instants, the fleeting magic which we call happiness, just to give meaning to the word.
Finally, as regards the parcel, it was handed to me at the airport. It is your husband’s former lawyer who gave it to me. I took it. I trusted him. That’s all I know about it. I will let you know as soon as I have the dates for my trip to Europe. You are in my thoughts, dear Vima, and I will see you soon.
~ ~ ~
Vima folds the sky blue silk veil, and places it next to the shoebox. Her hands begin to tremble when she sees the pair of little red boots in the box. A rolled sheet of paper, tied with a blue ribbon, is wedged between the boots. She picks it up, holding her breath. The poem that Del wrote to her years ago has been typed up and is followed by a sentence written in the hand of his eternal love.
The emotion is unbearable. She grabs the boots. Hurries down the stairs, barefoot, and enters the café on the corner of the wide boulevard. She orders a double cognac and drinks it in one go. The waiter who brings it to her hears her murmuring incomprehensibly. “I miss you, one grows weary of an apple, of an orange, of life sometimes. I cannot do without them, your feet, they’re so small, stamping the floor with anger. I ate my apple, drank from the orange, life goes on, when will you return, with your little feet?” Vima recites her love poem, over and over.
The waiter brings her another cognac, and hears her saying to him, absently, He’s asking me to forgive him for not being here with me, and he’s telling me he replaced the sandals with little boots to keep me warm, that’s what he wrote. I should tell my namesake that love is the only axiomatic reality, the diagonal line to the divine ratio connecting kindred spirits. The mystery of our being is God’s only refuge for when he feels like letting go.
Her eyes brim with tears but they do not spill. The pale, barefoot woman squeezes a pair of little red boots to her heart, then puts them on and slips out the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fariba Hachtroudi decided to leave her home country following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. After relocating to Sri Lanka in 1981, she taught at the University of Colombo for two years and studied Teravada Buddhism. Hachtroudi then pursued journalism and eventually went on to write a full-length non-fiction account about her revisit to Iran after 30 years in exile called
The Twelfth Imam’s a Woman?
In addition to writing, Hachtroudi also leads a foundation called MoHa for the advocacy of women’s rights, education, and secularism.