The familiar fragrance of spring filled Neda's lungs as she returned home from hospital. She told herself that one should absorb the scent of the life, but the same person should never remember its features. To her details of everything was boring. Perhaps since the color of life for her was left in the hospital, or taken from hospital somewhere else, not her house, the elements had become irksome as well.
She returned quickly to normalcy from a painful and long pregnancy and childbirth. Some aroma of life returned to her face. She even gained some weight; however, that piece of her which was taken from her by the black law of religion and men had made an empty hole, very deep within her, which was not noticeable to anyone but her brother and her cousin. Sohrab was drafted into the army, which was mandatory for all men unless they had some physical or mental disability, or they were the soul provider for their parents, or even in some cases some would buy their way out of it! He had not passed the big exam to enter the university two years in a row after graduating from high school. Once he told Neda:
"I guess I'm not smart enough!"
Neda did not like her brother to belittle himself in any shape or form:
"You're smart enough. It's just very difficult when only one tenth of the people who take the exam, are expected. That is only ten percent. Why don't you go to a privet college?"
He had thought about that himself. But he did not have the money for it; and father, who had the money, refused to help his son. For the first time, Mehri, their mother, told Jalal:
You took all my money and you don't even want to help your own son and send him to college!"
Of course Jalal did not like the money matter would be mentioned at all; but he knew what his first wife was saying, was correct. Everything he had belonged to Mehri, his first wife, who had inherited from his father.
Sohrab had no choice but to go for his two years draft. He spent the next two years as a regular soldier since he had no college degree. The only thing that the father did after Mehri cried her heart out to use his influence to get their son a good assignment, was to arrange for their son to serve his two years in the suburb of Tehran, not some far away Military base in some horrible place; and to have somewhat an easy task.
Neda suffered very much when her brother left. But that was out of every one's hand. All young men should go to service either before or after college. There was no escaping it. That was the law of the land; what an irony, the same law that too Neda's baby from her.
Sohrab was the only one who understood Neda, talked to her in a level she wanted. he was the only one that deemed his sister was a poet. Before sending her poems to the magazine, Sohrab read them and became her best critics; even though mostly he did not understand the complexity that Neda used in her poetry.
To Be Continued
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