If nothing could change mother from the "look at poor me", woman that she had become, her children thought, perhaps if they would become successful in this parting from family, she could.
"Mother told Neda one day:
"Your life, as moderate as it is from the rest of the world, from us, it is making me, I believe, perfectly happy; but like everything else in my own way that your greatness will make me great, too."
Neda believed her then; but she knew her mother's wretchedness would move backward and forward. She thought about her childhood, about everything that had happened to her and brought her to this point. She recalled when she was a little girl, there were times that she felt so unwanted like her mother these days. "I guess everyone feels this way at some point of their lives!" However, her mother's had begun when father took another wife. The days of her childhood that she deemed undesirable, rejected, and even was called cold more than once, she conjured up that she broke her little money box and took all the money that she had, mostly were coins, and went to the store. She bought presents for herself. She brought them home and wrapped them in beautiful papers that she had taken from her mother's closet and gave them to herself. At home, she told that her friends had given those to her; and at school she told her classmates that her family had done so. She thought if other children and her family saw how many presents she had gotten for her birthday, or New Year, or ... they would think that she was very popular and they wanted to be her friends! But it did not work that way. Her classmates had figured her out. They told her so to make her embarrassed and because they were hateful and mean spirited like most children at certain point of their lives. They told her that she was strange and weird. Where were they to see her now, to see how famous she had become at such a young age, the same weird, and strange girl!
Autumn came. Then it was winter, spring and summer which followed in the order that nature wanted them to, as they always would! The threesomes now were more like friends than relatives. They lived peacefully under one roof. But something new was happening which Neda had known it even before the other two, who were involved. The players of this new event did not know it yet. But Neda knew it even before the real participants. She had an eyes of the poet, heart of a poet; and she knew that her brother and cousin were falling in love with each other. The way they looked at each other at the dinner table, without even knowing why, a small touch of their bodies in passing one another, the way they listened to the other with so much interest, all these, indicated to Neda that she was right. What had happened to the promise that they had given each other not to ever fall in love?
One night, in their joint room with Maryam, she asked her in her own style of straight forwardness:
"Are you falling in love with Sohrab?"
Maryam, who was lying down, stretching herself from a day of hard work and standing on her feet, suddenly sat up on bed, confused, harassed, and petrified.
"Why do you ask such thing?"
"I'm not blind. I love it. Love is beautiful. Tell me you are; tell me you're in love with Sohrab! I know they say that first cousins should not mix up, but love is more vital. Love is life!" Neda was very excited. The thought of her brother and Maryam, her beat friend and cousin, in love was delightful to her.
Maryam thought for a moment.
"I think I am!"
Neda rose up from the chair which was behind the small desk they had fit with difficulty in the room, where she was writing. She threw herself on Maryam's bed and began kissing and hugging her. Things that she was saying to Maryam were mostly meaningless, inaudible, and funny; but they were the true feeling of happiness that she was sharing with Maryam. Both of them were laughing loud and making strange, girlish noises. The door of their room suddenly opened. Sohrab was standing inside the door way and looking at her sister and cousin with confusion. He loved them both; but at that moment, he did not know what their silliness was all about!
To Be Continued
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