Neda took the hot tea with her to the bedroom and sat on the chair by the window. Suddenly she felt cold in the hot August night. She did not understand this constant change of her body that made her cold in a very unseasonable way. She picked up her grandmother's shawl from the back of the chair and wrapped it around her shoulders. She sat there in dark, holding the hot cup in her hand and listened to Mansour drunken breathing. She could neither think about anything nor wanted to think. Nonetheless, the fragments and images of different thoughts formed in her mind one after the other. Those anticipations had neither a beginning nor an ending; and those fraction of ideas did not connect with each other. As she was sitting on the chair, shivering for unknown reason to her, she found out that she was dozing. What was it that shivered her? Was it the wind outside or her heartbeat? Perhaps it was her fear and misery! A sudden concept flashed in her mind. She would end this misery for herself and for everyone else involved by taking her life! A joy came to her for finding a solution. But as she had discovered this resolution in anguish, she could not find a way in her mind how to do it. She stood up in front of the window, pulled up the blind a little and gazed into the dark to the one tree in front of her bedroom window. It moved violently. She realized that although the thought of suicide had come to her at the time of the most wretched anxiety, and in spite on the bottle of Valium that her parents had gotten her from the doctor for her extreme anxiety during the days of preparation for wedding, and now it was flashing in her mind, she had said a profound lie internally about taking her life. She had just discovered something about herself. "I'm not brave enough!" She was not aware that this new unearthing might have been an indication about the future greatness in her life; the rebirth and reawakening of new things!
Gradually she refurbished her life. It was as though a new birth, a slow transition from the world of the dead to the world of living! It was like a friendship with what was and what was not.
All she knew from this short experience, this hurried union, was that marriage was not like anything else she knew. The closeness that marriage brought to two total strangers was awful. Neda thought about love that did not exist in her marriage! What would it be like if she loved Mansour?! Would love make it more tolerable? No, there was no way to transport life, to observe any distinguished point from the beginning of this uniting, what made it real, its duration, its complex and pointed existence! All these were impossible thoughts to her. She felt as she dreamed alone, she should live alone, too.
All these discoveries about life, marriage, loneliness to the end, and the whole essence of what was and was not, were Neda's gradual reawakening and revival, her undisturbed transition from the world she knew to another world that she would come to know; her grasp to this new absoluteness which formerly had been totally unknown to her. To do what she knew the best, and her soul yearned to carry it out, she needed to cut completely from everyone and become a loner through and through; since in her society for a married woman especially to a man like Mansour, who did not care about her soul, she had no chance of doing what she longed to do. All these thoughts brought her to the conclusion that she needed to break this new chain of slavery and free herself. She needed to go against the will of these strong people around her and to become a pioneer, and she intended to do just that. But how would she start? And if she did, in what way?
To Be Continued
No comments:
Post a Comment