We stand naked and unadorned. Mama talks, walks, her heart works like a Casio clock. Laya, twenty years old, tucks red daisies under her arm and laughs genuinely. Rehi has returned, kisses Laya, regrets. I am in the moment, ripping apart the future, spitting on the past. We look at me, Rehi, Laya, and Mama who have slackened, a white froth slipping from their mouths, stinking. Judah says the sorcery of the world is closed, we laugh.
Twenty-year-old Laya stood in a doorway, the daisies tucked under the fold of her skirt to keep from wilting. She cracks an egg, I crack another and pour it into the bowl. Unsatisfied with just standing idly, she went to the end of the road and back; again and again. Returning, blood dripped from her bare feet.
She yells, “Why did you spill the yolks?!” She didn’t shout, didn’t slam her room door shut, sat right where she first said the house was infested with ants and Rehi had stuck his head out of the sack to ask Laya for cinnamon to kill the ants. Laya laughed and Rehi snapped photos of me, Laya, and Mama.
Laya pounded the wilted daisies into the dry earth, raised her astonishment, then scattered like pollen on the ground. The yolks retreat from the spoon, like a knife thrust into someone’s side.
Now there’s a blue pool there, where blood flowed under Laya and made Rehi’s departure pointless. Six fish swim in the pool with orange, fig, and melon.
She peels fresh peaches and grates them, so elegantly and proudly as if she has been entrusted with copying the last image of the world. She also spins the mixer to life.
After a month, she found her voice. She didn’t check on herself or her baby, asked where the daisies she picked for Rehi were. I pointed to the pit at the end of the yard:
“Your child is dead, Laya.”
Last Tuesday evening, when I was returning from the city, I bluntly told her I had seen Rehi, Laya, he wants to come back to see you, Mama stirred and fell sideways. Laya again painted the walls white and covered the roof beams that had been praying to fall on our heads.
She dusts the china plates and rearranges them in the wooden shelves of the blue cupboard, as if settling a part of herself inside.
Five months before our lives tangled like yarn for twenty years, Rehi had come to the village with a tripod, a large box camera, and a tent like a black flag. Mama said he should take our photo.
I think to myself, “Has twenty years of dirt piled on our lives, and now is one return so important that it washes away the departure?”
Without looking at her, I say:
“What if he doesn’t come today?”
She doesn’t hear, lost in herself. Perhaps she’s tracing the lines of wrinkles on her forehead or the thin, gray hairs at her temples, thinking, “Yes, Leila, it’s important enough that it could even wash us all away.”
The way twenty-year-old Laya would devour her insides, I said:
“Do you know it’s all because of your mess, Mama threw herself out of the upper window that day and became paralyzed?”
Twenty years later, Laya pulls the plug on the mixer:
“What did you say?”
I remember Mama didn’t throw herself, someone pushed her. Resolutely, I pour the cinnamon into the cake batter. I take the bowl from her hands and place it in the oven.
I say nothing, and she says Mama has started to twitch today, putting double breaths in her throat as if she wants to say something. She’s more excited:
“The joy of Rehi’s return has brought light to Mama’s eyes.”
What has Mama been all these years but a piece of waterlogged meat at the bottom of a house that now needs to understand what’s happening or who’s coming? I think I should cut a larger piece of cake for Mama.
I guess she understood, or maybe not, and I pushed her needlessly. I go outside and look into her eyes. She’s frail with bones adhering to her skin, motionless, weak, lying there as if her doll-like eyes are aimlessly turning; the light Laya spoke of shines violet, like light through the punched holes of a burlap sack hitting a mouse at the bottom. I pull myself back.
I pulled back and said I don’t want to cut off anyone Laya wants to remember badly. I didn’t say it because she’s full; if I had, she wouldn’t have gone, she would have stayed. She said every Monday at the entrance of Cinema Azadi by Jalal’s ice cream shop.
The ice cream shop was leveled, a house was built, then shops, and then busy streets and alternating Mondays.
I tell Mama:
“I’ve come for your forgiveness and such. Or rather, I’ve come to say I accidentally did something that made you miserable all these years in the corner of the house, and now I want to set you free.”
Whispering in her ear:
“You understood, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have seen.”
From behind the glass, Laya in the kitchen with her hands all around, all those flowers and a table as if prepared for the Holy Grail, looks like rolls of velvet, satin, and tulle behind a fabric shop display. Judah goes inside.
Sweat trickles down Judah’s neck and runs down his chest. Judah’s center of gravity pounds there, below.
Rehi’s green Chevrolet snorts and drives away. The dust of “go and never return” that Judah said hangs suspended between the wheels kicked up by the car.
The green Chevrolet snorts and comes growling to the slaughter. Laya’s skirt catches on a chair leg and she spins it frantically. She runs out. The car brakes.
Judah takes the cinnamon cake outside, and an hour later we stand naked and unadorned, looking at me, Mama, Laya, and Rehi, crumpled like burnt ants. We laugh.
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