Sara Salar

The protagonist is a young woman: she lives in Tehran with a young child, is separated, is seeing a therapist, and has a friend: Gandom. The story unfolds over the span of a few hours. Waking up disoriented to the ringing of her ex-husband's call, she finds herself covered in bruises, with a black eye (was she beaten?); she barely remembers sending her child to kindergarten by taxi; immediately, she begins an imaginary dialogue with Gandom. > Why didn't I ever tell her that sometimes dreams accompanied by fears, anxieties, and worries are more beautiful than reality, and sometimes even more real than reality... They were childhood friends; they grew up in the same provincial town and left it together to study in Tehran; they fell in love with the same man, but then the protagonist married the one chosen by her family. She leaves the house; the traffic is heavy and noisy; the radio invades the car's interior with commercials, news items steeped in political propaganda, religious appeals: > Cick, Cick, Cick... the chocolate for young and old, (...) Economic troubles are a plot by the enemy, (...) Women and men are essentially different. If a woman strays from the path of purity, she brings dishonour upon her husband, but if a man..., (...) When a child is to be born, an angel comes from God (...). The angel ushers it into this world and watches over it for life... She keeps talking to Gandom, and so we learn that her father and brothers have died, and that she grew up in a family ruined by debt, with a cold, severe mother. > Since when, since when have I covered myself with this heavy, black chador? (...) Perhaps I left something behind somewhere, in the past. (...) Ah, if only it were possible, with a single deep breath, to swallow the past and gulp it down forever.... Gandom is altogether different: full of life, joyful, confident, with an affectionate father, a kind grandmother, and plenty of money to spend on shopping. They are inseparable, with the friend ever ready to assert her superiority, knowing her better than she knows herself. > Gandom always had to humiliate me, both when she threw my fears in my face and when she didn't. My entire life went to shit with this person, a person who seemed to know everything about me, as if she knew my hidden corners, as if she were closer to me than I was to myself... my entire life... it makes me laugh... . She hasn't seen her in many years; she must find her because she cannot live without her; she seeks her out through the man they both loved. > I am thirty-five years old. Tomorrow I will take Samiar to kindergarten, and when I walk out the front door, I will see a thirty-five-year-old woman standing there, watching me with a smile. This time, after all these years, I recognize her, with those bright black eyes, with that smooth, amber skin, with all that hair escaping here and there from her headscarf and framing her face... with that smile that brings two dimples to her cheeks... I go toward her and grasp her hands tightly in mine. She says: how warm they are. I would like to tell her that it is not my hands that are warm... I say nothing... I just hold them tight in mine and smile... after all these years, I know that when I smile, dimples appear on my face too . It is the story of a split personality. Oppressed by the nightmares of the past, from which she tried in vain to escape by moving to the big city—only to find herself even more isolated and desperate—the protagonist has slipped into schizophrenia. > I placed my hand on hers. Her perpetual presence was better than her absence. Her presence, with all the suffering it caused me, and perhaps with all the suffering I caused myself... (...) It is as if I had lost myself years ago, lost under that star-filled sky of Zahedan . To find herself again, she would have to return to childhood, deep into the past, and that is impossible. Will maternal love save her? > I weep... I weep out loud, (...) Samiar strokes my hair and I sink into his embrace... . The narrative is constructed on several levels: the real, insignificant plot; the rapid-fire dialogues with Gandom, which are obviously soliloquies; the visits to the therapist, brief and useless for understanding the protagonist; and contemporary Iran, caught between modernity and traditionalist Islam. What emerges is a fragmented, disjointed narrative, further marred by an exasperating overuse of ellipses—intended to convey a stream of consciousness, but in truth merely a trite literary device to avoid delving into the protagonist's existential drama. One is left perplexed and unsatisfied, with the impression of a superficial, contrived, overly intellectualized story, lacking the weight of genuine lived experience. Why skip it? Inconsequential and pointless.