Sketching
When we arrived, there in the approaching bend, a woman riding a bicycle was passing by. She passes still, her torso following a curved line, garbed in a shirt, short-sleeved and white. She pedals on, her hair wafting seaward on her shoulders, looking toward the street we later saw, when the woman was no longer there; the street that parallels the harbor, and then turns left into a place that exists still, but which we never got a chance to see. She was gone. It was not our fault that we did not see her again, though when I saw that she was not there, I thought perhaps Shirin had intentionally prevented it. Nevertheless, I see her still, with the corner of her shirt floating in the air. Her pants were of black cotton. I can also see the sandal on one of her feet, the one with the back lace untied. She pedals and holds her face straight into the wind and she goes. For a moment, we parked near the sidewalk, so that Shirin could step out and light us both a cigarette, and I could only get a glimpse of her slightly bent torso and her uptilted head, facing into the wind, with her brunette hair, all with the backdrop of a calm blue sea. Later, when we reached the corner we forgot about her, for, hearing the whistle of a boat, we looked toward the sea. The ship was docking and Maziar and Zohre were standing on deck, holding onto the rails with their hands. They weren’t waving. Then I remembered the woman, and I saw that the street was empty clear to the bend. But at the harbor, there were some people waiting; they had parked their automobiles bumper to bumper, and had now, like Shirin, gotten out of their cars and were waving. On the pretense of parking, I tried to go forward a little. “Can’t you see there is no place?” Shirin said, “Stay here. We’ll be back soon.”
At the end, near the bend, there was an empty place. I thought there was still a chance that we would return together. Shirin did not come. So she had not seen her pedal and move on. She is still going, even if she’s gotten old, like me or even like Shirin, and every morning she goes to the veranda of one of those two-story houses facing the sea, with her white shirt and dark cotton pants, and puts one hand on the railings and turns the other hand into a shade for her upright seaward face so that she could see which of the newcomers on the deck seemed familiar.
It always happens like this, like me now on the veranda overlooking a deserted avenue and my vista is mud rooftops whose uniform color is only disturbed by the turquoise twelve-sided dome of Baba Ismail, and I am waiting for the spring again and the arrival of a postcard from Shirin with a week or ten days’ delay. She also remembers the date of our wedding anniversary and every time sends the same postcard of green pine trees with a small yellow dot sitting in for the sun, as if she had bought ten or twelve of the same card, or maybe even twenty or more, if of course she is still alive by then, or still remembers. The kids, Maziar and Zohre, only write two letters a year, both now in English, and each time they apologize for having forgotten their Persian. And I send neither postcards nor write letters.