life have turned upside down so quickly, Mariam asked herself. She kept her gaze to the
ground, on her feet, stepping on the gray stone path. She was aware of the presence of
people in the garden, murmuring, stepping aside, as she and Jalil walked past. She sensed
the weight of eyes on her, looking down from the windows upstairs.
Inside the house too, Mariam kept her head down. She walked on a maroon carpet with a
repeating blue and yellow octagonal pattern, saw out of the corner of her eye the marble
bases of statues, the lower halves of vases, the frayed ends of richly colored tapestries
hanging from walls. The stairs she and Jalil took were wide and covered with a similar
carpet, nailed down at the base of each step. At the top of the stairs, Jalil led her to the left,
down another long, carpeted hallway. He stopped by one of the doors, opened it, and let her
in.
"Your sisters Niloufar and Atieh play here sometimes," Jalil said, "but mostly we use this
as a guest room. You'll be comfortable here, I think. It's nice, isn't it?"
The room had a bed with a green flowered blanket knit in a tightly woven, honeycomb
design. The curtains, pulled back to reveal the garden below, matched the blanket. Beside
the bed was a three drawer chest with a flower vase on it. There were shelves along the
walls, with framed pictures of people Mariam did not recognize. On one of the shelves,
Mariam saw a collection of identical wooden dolls, arranged in a line in order of decreasing
size.
Jalil saw her looking."Matryoshka dolls. I got them in Moscow. You can play with them,
if you want. No one will mind."
Mariam sat down on the bed.
"Is there anything you want?" Jalil said.
Mariam lay down. Closed her eyes. After a while, she heard him softly shut the door.
Except for "when she had to use the bathroom down the hall, Mariam stayed in the room.
The girl with the tattoo, the one who had opened the gates to her, brought her meals on a
tray: lamb kebab, sabzi, aush soup. Most of it went uneaten. Jalil came by several times a
day, sat on the bed beside her, asked her if she was all right.
"You could eat downstairs with the rest of us," he said, but without much conviction. He
understood a little too readily when Mariam said she preferred to eat alone.
From the window, Mariam watched impassively what she had wondered about and longed
to see for most of her life: the comings and goings of Jalil's daily life. Servants rushed in
and out of the front gates. A gardener was always trimming bushes, watering plants in the
greenhouse. Cars with long, sleek hoods pulled up on the street. From them emerged men
in suits, in chapcms and caracul hats, women in hijabs, children with neatly combed hair.