Things We Left Unsaid (21 page)

I sat on the bed. ‘No, she’s not.’

She pulled out a heavy album from under the bed. It had a red leather cover etched in gold and embossed in turquoise. I had never seen anything like it. She opened it and muttered,
‘She’ll show up, no doubt she’ll show up,’ and then fell silent for a while.

I looked around the dimly lit and sparsely furnished room. It looked as if its occupant had moved in that very day and had not yet had a chance to set out her things, or perhaps the occupant had
packed everything up to move out the next day.

Mrs. Simonian handed me a photograph. A young man in a white suit was standing on a broad staircase, one foot on the step above him. The staircase had a stone bannister lined with stone
flowerpots full of flowers. The young man was smiling into the camera. His eyes looked to be light in color.

‘This was the entrance to our house in Isfahan,’ explained Mrs. Simonian. ‘The one your mother said it was a pity to sell.’ She smirked. ‘I hated the entire place:
the large garden, the high-ceilinged rooms, the wood floors of the corridors, all the expensive furniture. My father used to say, “What more could you want?” For years I did not know
what I wanted, and when I finally figured it out and asked for it, he said no.’

She held out another photo to me, the same young man behind a desk covered with books and papers, staring into the camera, a pen in one hand and his chin resting in the other. He had
close-cropped hair and wore a striped coat and vest. I was mentally comparing it to a suit I had seen Mr. Davtian wearing, when my neighbor handed me a third photo. In this one the young man had on
a white shirt with a broad, open collar – like a Russian shirt. His hair spilled down to his shoulders and he wore a thin beard. He stood, hand on his waist, next to a high-backed chair,
again staring into the camera. A girl was sitting in the chair, her hair gathered atop her head. The girl was wearing a dark buttoned-up blouse and a necklace with several strands of tiny pearls.
You could only see her from the knees up. The man’s eyes were definitely light.

That girl in the picture, fifty or sixty years on and now sitting in front of me, closed her eyes. ‘My father said that a poet was not the kind of person to build a life with. Father said
it was only because of my money that he wanted to marry me. No one falls in love with a midget girl, he said. But my husband and my father did fall in love. They fell in love with each
other’s money. My father said that if I refused to marry him...’ She opened her eyes, leaned forward and took the picture from my hands. ‘We took this picture without my
father’s permission, at the photography studio of Thooni Johannes in Julfa. Thooni promised not to tell my father, and he didn’t. He was a good man.’ She stared at the photo and
pressed her lips together, emphasizing the creases around her mouth. The frogs were croaking in the yard.

I was about to ask, ‘Then what happened?’ when she looked at me and smiled. ‘What happened?’ She opened the album and flipped to a particular page. There she was with the
young man, sitting on a wrought iron bench in front of the Eiffel Tower. In the next picture she was with the young man, riding in a rickshaw pulled by a brown-skinned man wearing a loincloth.
Again, she and the young man were in the next picture, sitting at a table in a sidewalk café on a crowded street.

As she talked, I looked at the pictures and listened. ‘He followed me everywhere – India, England, France, back to India. When my husband died, I thought I was free, I thought we
would finally marry, I thought I was the luckiest woman on Earth.’ She ran her hand over the photos, then slowly turned the pages. She came to the last page, which contained a very large
photo. It was a grave in a cemetery with large trees. Elmira Simonian was standing next to the grave in a black dress, hat, and veil and holding the hand of a little boy in a black suit and tie.
Mrs. Simonian’s voice seemed to come from far away. ‘A few months later he was gone, too. We were in Paris. I buried him in Père-Lachaise.’

She fell silent, leaned back on the headboard and stared at the ceiling. I felt she was no longer in the room. She might have been at the Eiffel Tower, or in some side street of Bombay, or a
coffeehouse in England. Or maybe in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, with its large trees.

I closed the album and picked up the studio photo. The girl in the photo had a cold look. The young man seemed angry and his eyes were green, or maybe blue.

‘Did he have blue eyes?’

She drew her hand across her forehead, took the photograph from my hand, stuck it inside the album with the rest of the pictures, and stood up.

We walked together without a word to the end of the yard. The gate was open. She stopped and took hold of my arm. ‘I’m sorry. I was feeling sad and nostalgic. Good evening.’ As
I headed across the street, she called out to me. I turned around. She was the same height as the gate. In the dark I could not see her face, but her voice seemed again to come from far away.
‘They were green. The same color as his son’s.’

I was left alone in the street. The boxwood hedges and Msasa trees were almost black. Moths were circling the street lamps and you could smell the gas from the refinery.

I opened our door and stepped inside. It was totally quiet. I bent over to pick up a hairband that had fallen near the telephone table. Was it Armineh’s or Arsineh’s? I
couldn’t tell. How could anyone tell one sister’s hairband from the other’s, when even their pencils were sharpened to the same length and had identical bite-marks? Under the
telephone table a decorative hairpin sparkled. Whose was that? Not difficult to tell, this one – it belonged to the blond.

I went to the kitchen and wondered when Emile had come to fetch Emily. When had they returned home, and how could I have failed to notice their arrival? Had Nina and Sophie gone? What did the
children have for dinner? How long had I been gone? I stared at the sweet peas on the window ledge. My head was still swimming from all the photographs and the talk. The table was filled with dirty
cups and dishes. I put on my apron and started washing the dishes. I heard footsteps behind me, but kept on washing.

Artoush said, ‘Were you with Mrs. Simonian?’

I scraped the leavings of a tomato omelette off a plate into the trash. How did he know? He answered my thought. ‘Emile went to get you.’

I couldn’t see him, but I could picture him, leaning in the doorway, playing with his goatee, with his other hand probably in his pants pocket. When he knew I was upset, that is what he
would do while trying to snap me out of it. He would never ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ Not even when, like this evening, my being upset had nothing to do with him. I rubbed some
dishwashing powder onto a plate. It was Emile, I thought, and not my husband, who had come looking for me.

I heard the legs of a chair scrape on the floor. ‘Your mother and Alice argued again, about what I don’t know. They left early. Nina fixed omelettes for the kids. I gave her and
Sophie a ride home. The car, confound it, was acting up again. It was a real pain to get it started.’

I held the plate under the water and read on the dishwashing canister: ‘Norman’s Dishwashing Powder. Suitable for cleaning dishes, tiles, bathrooms.’ Under the words was a
funny picture of Norman Wisdom in his tweed cap. I was about to say, ‘Don’t read me any bedtime stories, I’m not upset with you. I’m not actually upset with anyone.’
Before I could say it, he continued with his recital. ‘Armen did not eat. We couldn’t find Ishy, and Arsineh cried.’ I untied the apron.

Artoush was scooting something across the table from one hand to the other. The sugar shaker, or maybe the salt shaker. I knew he was searching for something to say next. I guessed he might ask,
‘What are you cooking tomorrow?’ but when he asked, ‘Was Mrs. Simonian alright?’ I burst out laughing.

I turned around to look at him, and spoke in measured tones. ‘Ishy disappears almost every night. Armen has not been eating for several days because he’s fallen in love. I
don’t feel well, but it has nothing to do with you. Mrs. Simonian was fine, which can’t concern you very much.’ He looked for a few seconds at the sugar shaker, then at me. He
pushed back the chair, got up and left the kitchen. The sugar shaker lay overturned on the table. I was choked up, and turned back to the dishes. Norman Wisdom was still laughing.

Armen and Artoush left the house together. Neither of them said goodbye.

In the hallway I tightened the ribbons around the twins’ pigtails, one by one, and said goodbye to them. Armineh stuck her recess snack in her satchel and zipped it up. ‘Aren’t
you coming to the door with us?’ I kissed her cheek, and shook my head. Arsineh asked, ‘Are you tired?’ I kissed her cheek and nodded.

Armineh peeked through the lace curtain of the door. ‘It’s foggy again.’ I looked in the yard. The twins were afraid to venture into the yard in thick fog. I never let on that
I knew they were scared. I would hold their hands and walk them through the yard, singing ‘We’re floating through the clouds.’

I straightened up the curtain. ‘The two of you can float through the clouds together today, okay?’ They looked at each other, then at me. Their eyes looked sad, lacking their usual
sparkle.

Through the lace curtain, I watched them walk hand in hand down the path and disappear into the fog. I couldn’t see the gate. The swing seat, the willow tree and part of the lawn looked
like an impressionist watercolor, wispy and blurred.

I always walked my children to the bus stop. Why, I wondered, not this morning? How could I make them worry like that? So, I’m exhausted and in a bad mood, but what fault is it of the
children? My compassionate side offered consolation: ‘You’re only human. You have the same right as everyone else to be tired now and then. Like everyone else, you...’ The
telephone rang.

Mrs. Nurollahi asked, ‘If you have some time this morning, may I come over?’

As if all the other excitement wasn’t enough. I searched for some excuse. ‘Aren’t you at the office today?’

‘My boss has given me some time off. My good-natured boss. I think you know him, no?’ She laughed at her own joke.

‘Thank God he’s good-natured with someone, at least,’ I thought to myself. After overturning the sugar shaker, her boss had not spoken a single word to me. I searched for some
other excuse. ‘I was going to go downtown today...’

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I have to do some shopping, too. We can meet together at the
Milk Bar
at ten o’clock.’ Before I could come up with another
excuse, she thanked me with three very long sentences, said goodbye with a single word, then hung up.

There was still some time before ten o’clock. Today was the day to change the sheets. I went to Armen’s room.

I tried not to view his room as messy and unkempt. Shoes, socks, books, magazines, 45rpm records, and empty milk glasses which would of course have been impossible for him to return to the
kitchen. I picked the balled-up pyjamas and a few books and notebooks off his bed, then pulled the sheets off the mattress. The mattress jiggled slightly, and a piece of paper fell to the ground. I
imagined at first it was another of the monthly tests he would hide when the grade was not so good. I found a not inconsiderable number of such papers; he always hid them, like the twins’
toys, in what he thought were unlikely hiding places: behind the air-conditioning vent, above the medicine cabinet, under the Persian carpets. I unfolded it and saw from the first line that it was
a letter. I told myself I shouldn’t read it. It’s an invasion of privacy to read other people’s letters, even if he is your child. You shouldn’t read it. You
shouldn’t.

And I did. From the scribbled writing and the repetitions and crossed out words, it was obviously only a first draft:

With the letter in my hand, I sat down on the bed and stared out the window at the jujube tree. And there I was, feeling ambushed, as though suddenly thrust in front of a mirror
that reflected back an utterly unrecognizable image of myself. I folded the letter and put it back under the mattress, changed the sheets and pillowcase, straightened the bed, and left the room. I
could barely read the clock through my tears. It was after nine. I really did not want to go out. I really did not want to see Mrs. Nurollahi, or anyone else. I really wished I was still a child
and could put my arms around Father’s neck and cry my little heart out.

I was the only passenger on the bus. The driver hummed an Arabic song under his breath. I could tell from the soulful way he sang ‘Ya habibi’ and ‘Ya
azizi’ that it must be a love song. We passed Cinema Taj. It seemed like only yesterday I would take Armen to Cinema Taj. When the twins were small, I would leave them with Mother every
Friday and make mortadella sandwiches at home, with diced onions and chopped parsley – he really liked those. He also loved Canada Dry Orange soda, and insisted on going up to the Cinema Taj
snack bar to buy it for himself. We would watch the film, eat our sandwiches, and have great fun together. On the way back home, his hand in mine, he would recount the plot two or three times from
beginning to end.

The bus stopped in front of the Blue Star store. How long had it been since I held Armen’s hand? How long had it been since we went to the movies, just the two of us? Before getting off
the bus, I told the driver, ‘What a pretty song you were singing.’ He laughed – a young man, with three gold teeth.

I stood in front of the Blue Star display window, wondering. What did Mrs. Nurollahi want? Did my boy really hate me? Why hadn’t Artoush taken any steps to make up with me? Taped in the
window was a square piece of cardboard: ‘See our
Easy
model washing machines inside the store. Made in America!’