The Stationery Shop(75)

I’m not sure how I made it across that room. I bulldozed through what must have been piles of books and boxes of magazines and pamphlets. I got to my mother and jumped. I grabbed the knife she held. When I landed, I held it so tightly that I thought my hand would break.

“Bahman?” The color drained from my mother’s face.

A metallic, tinny taste filled my mouth. I thought I might be sick. All I could do was to wrap my arms around my mother’s knees as she stood on the stepladder. I still held the knife.

Gently, she stroked my head. When I looked up, drops of blood had bubbled up on her neck.

I let go of the knife and it landed on the floor with a sharp clang.

I pulled her down from the stepladder. She was in a daze. Her tearstained face was red and blotchy. She put a hand on the wound in her throat and extended her arm, looking at the blood on her fingers. “Look what you made me do,” she said. “Ali, it’s all because of you.”

Mr. Fakhri rocked back and forth and murmured a prayer. Then, with his perfectly polished shoe, he kicked my mother’s knife out of his way. He walked closer to her. From his pocket, he took out a square handkerchief. He leaned in and held it as if to press it against her throat.

She recoiled and hissed, “Don’t.”

The small beads of blood from her wound expanded in diameter, in what seemed a strangely symmetrical line.

“First you, then me, right?” She smiled sadly at me. She wouldn’t look at Mr. Fakhri. “You get your neck gashed in a demonstration, and I have to deal with the lies and betrayal of this traitor. Good thing we both know a good doctor. Do you think Jahangir’s father will give us a family discount?”

I felt sick. The books I had knocked over in my rush to get to her were scattered on the floor. The knife lay next to a pile of political magazines. Her attempt at levity was for my benefit; I could see how afraid she was of my own fear. Why on God’s earth was she this way? Why did she torment us, scare us, threaten us?

Then she wept freely, lost in an emotion so deep that the sounds she made were almost soft. I had seen her cry loudly, violently many times. I had never seen her cry like this. “It is too late,” she said. “It is absolutely too late. It’s too late for my child.”

I thought she meant me. I thought she meant my upcoming marriage, of which she disapproved. I thought she meant, in her own warped way, that it was too late for me to have the life she’d planned.

“You made me kill my baby. By myself.” She turned to Mr. Fakhri. “Because you are a coward.”

My breath caught in my throat. I was planted to the floor.

“Badri, I beg of you,” Mr. Fakhri said. “Don’t do this now.”

“After I killed it, my body was wrecked.” She looked at her stomach as if she were talking to some force she had pleaded with before. “My body was so broken it killed all the others. All of them.” She looked up at me. “Do you know how many children I buried? I should have told you before.”

“Badri, stop,” Mr. Fakhri whispered.

“They come out of you and you think they’re whole. You think you will be able to love them, raise them, cherish them. But then you see. Well, they come out of you not how they should. Too soon, or they just come out . . . silent, warm, and dead.”

I was burning with disbelief. I had never known my mother had lost children before. Neither she nor my father had told me. I was seventeen and only now finding out.

“You thought you could do whatever you wanted to me, Ali. Behind the mosque. In that square. You got away with everything. You had the money, the privilege. I had nothing.” She wept into her hands. “I was a child!”

“I am so sorry,” he said softly. “I am so, so sorry.”

Dust motes moved in the shaft of sunlight that came through the one small window in that storage room. What filled the space wasn’t the smell of books or my mother’s perfume or my own sour odor as I stood soaked in sweat. It was something different: something I couldn’t quite define, that would forever cloak that day and all the days that followed. It was, I think, the scent of grief.

Mr. Fakhri walked over to her. She folded into him. In his arms, my mother wept. She spoke of babies lost and babies dead, and I learned from her disjointed, somber narrative that I was not the first child my mother had borne. I was not her second nor her third nor her fourth. I was the fifth child my mother gave birth to, the only one who lived, the one, I now slowly came to realize, into whom she poured the hopes and dreams she’d had for all of the others. And it was with a chilling shiver in that storage room that I realized that my mother’s first baby—the one she’d aborted before it was due to be born, perhaps with her own hands—had been fathered by our soothing, calm stationer, Mr. Fakhri.

I stood among the fallen books, among the words of artists who’d spent happy, circuitous hours writing, honing their words for years. Mr. Fakhri bent over my mother like an animal wounded and lacerated himself.

I wanted to leave and not come back to that shop, to escape from the whole city, to run away and hide somewhere.

I rushed out. On the pavement I heaved forward and vomited and hid my tears as best I could from passersby.



When he saw my mother’s laceration, my father sped us to Jahangir’s. We couldn’t go to a hospital in Tehran. There was so much shame back then in all of it, Roya Joon. In her sickness. In her attempt to take her own life. In even the idea of suicide.