As the angry and sad crowd in their house added to Anna's agitation, she imprisoned herself in her room. The customary mourning lasted one week. She could not stand it anymore. She noticed that her father was also in his study most of the time while her mother along with other women cried aloud. That bloody collapse of everything obscured her vision; that artificially prolonged mourning damaged her unconquerable resilience. Nevertheless, her inflamed soul along with an inability to do what was important was present. Keeping her sanity was indispensable.
While Fatie, her mother, wanted to stifle her with her unnecessary love, she took shelter in her father most of the times. She was just beginning to know him. That feeling was mutual since Shahzdeh did not mind his daughter's visits. They would sit in his study for hours. Just being together was a great empathy. Sometimes they talked, but most other times Shahzdeh dozed knowing Anna was there; and Anna read a book. She was safe there because she knew no one was allowed to enter that room without permission even her mother. There, she would dream, think back, hallucinate, and relax. She remembered the time that she was only a little girl who was not allowed even to enter that room; the time that Shahzdeh thought only about his son's success and finding a husband for his daughter. Now his son was dead and his daughter had become his son. Anna now was everything to him. What a strange world!
It came a day that Shahzdeh asked Anna to take a ride with him to the center of the city. She remembered once he had told her: "Girls don't need to go to city." In the back seat of the car, she thirstily looked at the streets, people, peddlers, and everything else that she had seldom seen. Strange world, being born in Tehran, living there all your life, and not knowing anything about it. All or almost all was new to her. Around noon, Shahzdeh asked the driver to take them to a restaurant in the northern part of the city. Two years ago, She could nerve imagined a day like this. What they were doing, for their class, perhaps had never been done by another father and daughter. There, in that moment, past was gone and present was fused into a future of growing, a growing of a father and daughter together.
In that restaurant, even though both were overwhelmed by melancholy, they found a new life, energy, a new beginning, a beginning of a relationship between two entirely different people, yet very much alike. He was more interested to hear about his daughter's goals and dreams than her sorrow for Aria's death. Yes, it was definitely a new and fresh start for them, who at one point had never gotten along.
She asked herself: "Why am I here with him?" But at the same time she realized his endless love, and his sorrow which did not interfere with this new discovery.
When she had left Iran a year and half ago, she was an immature girl according to her family; now no one could and would treat her that way, the old way. She demanded respect and her father backed her up. Her loving mother wanted to rain her with love, buy her clothes and jewelry, but Shahzdeh ordered her to leave Anna alone: "If she needs anything, she asks for it."
Anna did not need anything; in fact, first she mastered that situation in her mind and then she moved away from it in her heart. She had an unmistakable cognizance of the things she was able to claim and the ones she was not. She would habitually deal with her former life in that house with the understanding that her father's early age was not hers and her mother's staying submissive was not her concern any longer. For her, at that moment, even her own previous life was a consequence of the past. She did not know how to love her past, for its shadows haunted her like ghosts. The past had lost its enchantment, and those lost fascinations possessed her ambiguity.
As a custom of worshipping dead perplexed her while she, herself, could not forget that inauspicious death even for a moment, she thought if her family's attitude was that the dead person was more important than the ones alive, they had to be all dead, too. To her, life was more precious than death, and every second of living was much more superior than the Kingdom of Death.
She carried with her all those recollection when leaving after a month and a half being in Iran. It was late September. Not only she, but her father, too, did not want her to miss school more than what she had already missed. At the moment of this second separation from her family, she did not only carry her luggage but a load of bygone yesterday, prolonged present, and a conviction for future. She was ready to allow those minutes, not their visions, to live in her but not to rule her.
There, at the airport, before parting from her family, she made a decision: "I move on forward. I make my father happy and proud for the trust he had placed on me after a long uncertainly."
To Be Continued
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