The Lemon Grove
Page 18
She makes sure the blanket is covering me. “It is true,” she says. “It’s getting colder every day.”
“And I’m burning up from fever in here. Noorahmad didn’t ask for more money, did he?”
“No.”
“Good. What else did Ruzbeh say?”
“Well, he couldn’t believe it was me talking, but then …” She hesitates.
“What?”
“He said he felt that half of him wasn’t there.” She gives me another candy. “Did you take your medicine?”
“Yes, I did. What else did he say?”
“He sounded fine—you know, like when he was well. He said that the Indian doctor—Dr. Sharma—has been very helpful. He’s giving him something that helps him with his headaches so he can sleep and rest. Farideh has been very good in helping him also. He said he misses us and has decided to come. He wanted to talk to you, thinking you were with me. I didn’t tell him you aren’t feeling well. The connection wasn’t good at all. I got disconnected twice, and the young man there—Mostefa, you remember him? He was in the office when we went there last week?—he dialed and dialed, but he couldn’t get through. I asked him to try again.” She laughs. “You know me. I wouldn’t give up that easily. Finally he connected the call again. I guess it was our lucky day. But I couldn’t say much on the phone. I didn’t mention Afghanistan, Kandahar, or Pakistan. I didn’t want to risk anything. Anyway, Ruzbeh said to tell you that he has something in the palm of his hand, something from long ago—he said you would understand.”
It takes a minute for my mind to travel back to our childhood days. I nod and smile.
She looks at me and then goes on. “I also talked to Farideh briefly. We were excited hearing each other’s voices. She said they were planning a trip to the north—not immediately, but soon. Maybe she was trying to tell me something. Didn’t you say they were planning to leave the country too?”
She grows quiet for a moment and looks out into the yard. There is something different about her. Something in her eyes, or in her face—I can’t tell what—as if she is thinking of the past, or is it the future?
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all could be together again?” she says.
“Of course,” I answer, wondering about such a possibility.
She stays quiet for a long time, looking at me lying under the blanket, my forehead damp with perspiration.
“Behruz?” she says and waits. “Do you think he’s coming? Or is he just saying that?”
“He’s coming,” I say.
“How can you be sure?”
“From something you said.”
“What?”
I wait.
“What? Tell me.”
“Do you remember our summers in the Naranjestan? When we were little, I mean. Ruzbeh had a game.”
“What game?” she breaks in.
“One you didn’t know about. Summer nights we would go up to the roof of the farmhouse and look at the stars. We would hold our arms up high and try to catch a star. Sometimes we thought of the stars as girls.”
She laughs, her eyes lighting up.
“We would close our palms and bring them down to see if we had caught one. I never did, but Ruzbeh always said he did. He would open his palm, saying, ‘Here, here! I got one!’ ‘Who?’ I would ask. ‘Shireen,’ he would say. Every time it would be you.”
She blushes.
“It’s true, and we believed it. We did. When he opened his palm, I would see a soft floating light there.”
She stays quiet for a while. “I miss him, Behruz,” she says finally. “I miss him so much. I miss it all—our mothers, our home, the lemon grove.”
She wipes away her tears. “Behruz, tell me …”
“Tell you what?”
“It won’t be like home where we are going, will it? …”
I hesitate, looking at her moist eyes.
“Even if it isn’t,” she says, “we have to go. We have to go on.”
I stay quiet since she has answered her own question.
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The book’s epigraph is reprinted from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1962, 1975, by the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © renewed 2003 by University of Nebraska Press.
copyright © 2012 by Ali Hosseini
cover design by Steven Seighman
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