Success followed Neda after her father's death even though her style of writing changed completely. Her publisher mentioned that to her once.
"Why? You don't like my writing anymore! As I change, my writing changes, too. I am not the same person. How do you expect my writing to stay the same!"
Her publisher did not want to anger her. She had stayed fateful to his publishing company all these years. He had made huge amount of money because of sales of her books. She could have gone to any publisher, and in fact she continuously was getting offer from other publishers. Others wanted her with delight.
When she wrapped her shawl around herself, it seemed as though she was wrapping her cold soul that was there and sometimes was not there. Her terror had gone. She told Kasra one day about that feeling of anxiety that she had had all these years from her father. As unbelievable as it sounded, Kasra understood her.
"You know, Kasra, I felt like an injured animal with a mental wound and a cut throat all these years; now suddenly I find myself without any injury, cut, or bruise and everything around me is without horror. They all have vanished."
One night she had a strange dream. She saw Ariana in her dream. In the dream Ariana was only eight years old. Her eyes were flashing. She looked Neda straight in the eyes. Neda touched both her shoulders. Ariana's face was filled with grief. Her lips were trembling violently.
"Why mother?" She cried.
Neda sat on her bed, shaking. She had sweat all over her body, yet she felt cold. She had to sit up in that position for a while to make sure that she was not asleep anymore; however, she remembered her dream fully and clearly. She recalled what Mansour had told her at her father's funeral. "You chose your poetry over your child!" She thought: "Had he influenced Ariana against me?" But she conjured up that her daughter did not even know that she existed. May be that was for best that she did not know about her real mother, or the switching in the hospital and all the other schemes that went along with it to hide the identity of the woman who gave birth to Ariana.
Now after the death of her father, she had more dreams about her daughter; as though her father was an obstacle or barrier to her dreams when he was alive; and now there was no impediment , no obstruction. As though her father had raised his hands from grave to help her, to tell her that it was okay to dream. But the dreams about her daughter were cruel, unfair, and they all were condemning her. They were all about her action, not her father's or Mansour's actions. In those dreams, her daughter was always blaming her, judging her, questioning her, and at the end disapproving of her.
"Oh, God, how could I know your will...? Who could have helped me, warned me about this? I was just a kid myself! I didn't know. Nobody told me anything! Who should I have asked for help? They took me out of school and put a wedding gown on me! Why wasn't anyone there to tell me to give up a child would become the greatest torture in my life? Why didn't my mother, or aunt said something to me? They are mothers. They knew how it would make me to suffer for ever! Did they think that I wouldn't care, I wouldn't suffer? How childish of them! Why do I have to ask all these empty questions from myself? Why did I have to marry so young and specially to a man that neither of us understood each other? Are these dreams telling me that there is something so terribly wrong loving poetry?"
To Be Continued
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