The abyss she had been afraid to look in, now was opened again as mysteriously as when there had not been any chasm. She looked into it. To feel Neda's emotions and thoughts, one had to search nineteen years of foreign mental hardship that she had tried to avoid before but to no avail. To feel her daughter's, Arianna, psychological affliction, Neda had to put herself in her place. But was that Possible?
After that long, unexpected contact from her daughter, only in Neda's eyes since no one knew her true feeling, eyes that had been in anticipation for all these years, She put her long, loose coat on, wore a big scarf on her head and tied the two corners of it under her neck as carefully as she could do. Then she left home. To Kasra, her friend's questioning eyes, who was editing her last book, she said with a wave of her hand:
"It's been nineteen years!"
Kasra gave her a knowing glance and gently embraced her.
"I know. Be careful!"
As she drove up from the narrow street where her home was located on, she reflected on a poem she had written only a few days ago without knowing her long, unfulfilled yearning would be over soon; or that poem might had been the result of a dream she had had. She did not remember why she wrote it, but now she contemplated it:
"I know somewhere in a house so far,
Joy of living has changed to a war.
I know a child cries herself to sleep.
Longs her mother at side for keep.
But I am tired of dreams;
I only go on the journeys of extreme.
Poem is my lover, it is my friend.
I've taken only journeys to that end."
In the next street, before she was able to make a U turn to avoid the surge of the Revolutionists, a bearded man, acting as though in charge, jumped in front of her car and made her to come to a sudden halt. "Not now, ... not now!" She said those to herself with so much distaste for these people. She was about to disobey the man and circumvent his design. But the man was pointing his Uzi at her. He also had a Kalashnikov on his shoulder. Then she thought of that long awaited meeting. "No, no, I can't fight now." She rolled the window of her car down and then put her head on the steering wheel.
"Don't you know you can't drive here?" The bearded man broke in rudely.
She pondered for a second and felt sorry for these decadent and corrupt rioters, whom otherwise were just simple, uneducated people that had filled Tehran streets from their villages all over the country. Not long ago, they all were working in their farms and having difficult life. Now they worshiped or pretended to glorify something that did not exist. However they had made Imam Khomeini to look like God. She remembered a friend's words who was involved in Revolution not long ago: "They stole our Revolution!" In the short period between the two regimes, that vacuum was filled by religious power that otherwise had very little authority. When America turned its back to the Shah because of his human right violation, the Mullahs took over.
To Be Continued
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