B

Azin Neishaboori

Ms. Salahi looked at the spider web in the corner of the family room window and said in a melancholy tone, “Don’t you think that if there were a path that connected us to the people of the past, it would have to pass through spider webs? Imagine that for centuries, spider webs have been spun in the corners of every palace, every corridor, and every dark dungeon. Imagine that the scene I am looking at now has risen from the depths of history.” 

Ms. Salahi’s husband shrugged with indifference, and vehemently pointed the TV remote towards the TV, as if to kill her thoughts and words. He flipped through the channels and stopped at a comedy show.  

That day Ms. Salahi had not gone to work. She had a cold that came with a cough and body pain. The cold had caused muscle spasms in her upper back and neck, which made sitting by a computer difficult. Her husband, who owned a real estate business he had inherited from his father, had no clients today, and like most other such days, stayed at home and watched TV. 

She returned to her armchair in the family room and lifted her book, which had been resting open-faced on the coffee table. This she did in defense of the book, which was being threatened by her husband’s feet. She gently caressed it while trying to undo the bent corner of its cover. In the caress of her fingers lay an invisible admonition directed at her husband’s heedless feet. She tried in vain to continue reading her book, despite her aching neck and shoulder. Her husband was watching his comedy show and every so often would burst into a fit of laughter. Ms. Salahi, who thought his show was stupid and unfunny, found his fits of laughter annoying. She generally believed that watching TV during daylight was the height of idleness. Her hatred of idleness was deeply rooted; her parents used to think of idleness as humankind’s most unforgivable sin, and although Ms. Salahi had fought most of their opinions all her life, to this particular opinion, she had fully subscribed. 

A little while later, in a bored tone, Ms. Salahi’s husband turned his head away from the TV, looked over at his wife assessingly, and suddenly claimed, “Maybe reading these kinds of books is the reason that spider webs form in the corners of your mind.” Ms. Salahi tried to respond to this comment, but a sudden bout of coughing stopped her. She coughed until tears ran down her cheeks. Then, she got up and went to the window again. Their apartment was located on the sixth floor. From the family room window that faced north, she could see Damavand mountain. Outside, she saw a sunny winter day over a canvass of soft blue sky. But the mountainous horizon looked unsurmountable, lifeless and cruel.  

“Did you take your cough medicine?” asked Ms. Salahi’s husband in an irritable yet concerned tone. 

Ms. Salahi did not hear his question. She continued to stare outside the window, feeling wounded and unsettled. 

Afsaneh Salahi and her husband were both forty-seven and had been married for seventeen years. They lived in a tall apartment building in Shahrak Gharb, a neighborhood of Tehran. They did not have any children due to infertility issues. Medical reasons aside, Ms. Salahi was privately skeptical of the kind of offspring she and her husband would have created.  

Ms. Salahi had a tall and slender figure, prominent cheekbones, and glowing eyes, thanks to which she had entered middle age gracefully. To many, she had been an attractive woman in her youth and even later. Yet, Ms. Salahi was one of those attractive people who was almost entirely unaware of her appeal, and while this unawareness may have saved her from the plague of vanity, it could also make her beauty irrelevant and insignificant.  

Ms. Salahi was a computer engineer at a mid-sized company who had stayed in the same position for as long as she remembered. Indeed, she was one of those people who rarely received promotions. In Ms. Salahi’s case, this had relatively complex reasons, the simplest and most obvious of which was perhaps her insecurity about her knowledge and competence. In fact, she consistently scored her competence at a B, and thus would continually try to hide the true boundaries of her knowledge and skills from the public eye. Not being sure if she could manage any new responsibilities, she would often make an active effort to evade any opportunity to take one on. In this respect, she had not changed much from her school days. She often remembered an old scene where, looking to call upon a student to solve a problem on the blackboard, her algebra teacher would scan the students’ faces, while young Afsaneh would do her best to avoid his gaze. She slouched and stooped and made herself as small a target as possible, as if in a war zone. She did all this despite knowing how to solve the problem at hand. If one hypnotized or psychoanalyzed Ms. Salahi today, she would probably discover that this behavior persisted throughout her adult life. 

Among other reasons for Ms. Salahi’s professional stagnancy was her belief that she was not the captain of the ship upon which she sailed, nor were her hands the ones that steered it. She had internalized this feeling to such an extent that even the thought of being assigned to “steer a small boat in a shallow river” appeared unnerving. Thus she would refuse to take on any roles that required taking charge of anything, however small. 

Aside from the above reasons, of which she was only subconsciously aware, Ms. Salahi felt consciously unhappy and frustrated with her professional stagnancy and attributed it to her incompetence, thereby entrapping herself in a vicious cycle which, while not as deadly and disastrous as living in the midst of war and calamity, was still sufficiently exasperating, even in times of peace. 

Despite all these self-doubts, one would not conclude that Ms. Salahi thought of herself as less competent or more stupid than others. Quite the contrary. Throughout the years, Ms. Salahi had reached the conclusion that the world was a place where stupid people rewarded each other, promoted each other, and felt ever more convinced of their own wisdom and competence and the stupidity and incompetence of others. It was in this way that the sagacious and sagacity would always get buried under the heavy weight of doubt and incredulity, while the stupidity and ignorance of feeble and limited minds would thrive and flourish to take over the world like weeds. In Ms. Salahi’s opinion, it would always be the sage who received a B and the stupid who received an A, until the end of time. The idiots would make history and rule the future, while the wise scurried to a corner lest someone ask them a question, for they were never certain of their answers. For how could one see the world in all its ludicrous absurdity and chaos, in its bloodbaths and endless wars, and not doubt her own answers? 

Hearing harsh bouts of coughing from his wife and starting to feel hungry, Ms. Salahi’s husband rose from his armchair and went to the kitchen to cook them southern Iranian sausage with extra paprika. The smell of southern sausage prevailed in the house and induced more coughing from Ms. Salahi.  

Maybe it was her cold, her lack of appetite, or her mood that day that made her feel suddenly utterly dejected, banal and depressed. So strongly did these feelings seize her that, to save her sanity, she felt an urge to leave the house and take a walk outside, in spite of her cold and aching body. 

Ms. Salahi wrapped her old green scarf, a companion during many winters, around her neck, put on a thick jacket, picked up her voluminous and heavy leather purse and left her apartment building. Outside she was affronted by the smell of smoke in Tehran’s polluted air and the sting of cold. While coughing from the smoke, Ms. Salahi remembered those times long ago, when she and her husband lived outside Iran, when nostalgia and melancholy would overtake her every time she inhaled the exhaust emitted by old cars, finding it sweet and friendly. 

Dazed and directionless, Ms. Salahi surveyed her surroundings for a few moments before realizing suddenly that she knew exactly where she wanted to go. Pulling her scarf toward herself again tightly and determinedly as if to fend off both the cold and her fears, she walked uphill to the main road, hailed a cab, and gave the driver directions toward her intended destination. 

Ms. Salahi’s intended destination was the old residence of Mr. Mehrdad Abdollahi on Shahrara Street. She was not sure if Mr. Abdollahi still lived there, but she knew of no better way to find him. For years she had been hoping to randomly run into Mr. Abdollahi. This hoped-for encounter she had imagined many times. In fact, it would not be far off to say that Ms. Salahi had plotted her life around this longed-for coincidence. For example, for years Ms. Salahi was in quest of the perfect look to make her appear an enviable woman, a beautiful, prominent, and competent woman, a woman who gazed at far horizons, a woman out of reach, a woman for all seasons, a woman who had the answers, a woman whom one felt intimidated yet captivated by, a woman whose kindness beamed through as did the heart of a pomegranate seed. A woman who knew things others didn’t. A woman who was beyond all other women seen on streets or in markets. 

For all these imagined virtues, Ms. Salahi had an intended audience. She sometimes wished to become famous, maybe an artist, a director, a writer, or even the head of a renowned corporation. Then she would debut her new self to Mr. Abdollahi at their fantasized encounter. Perhaps Mr. Abdollahi would have already seen her name on the cover of magazines and newspapers. Maybe he would have even heard one of her interviews on public TV. After his random encounter with Ms. Salahi, she imagined that Mr. Abdollahi would be seized by deep melancholy and lamentation over what he had lost. He would repentantly reminisce about her virtues, talents, and distinctions, all of which were now publicly recognized and extolled, and regret having once foolishly dismissed them.   

Ms. Salahi was not unaware of the limited reach of her dreams, nor of how frivolous and insignificant they could be deemed. Quite the contrary. The limited bounds of her dreams only aggravated her sufferings. Yet, unfortunately, Ms. Salahi belonged to that group of people whose bird counterparts would only sing in the presence of listening ears. While this was never held against those birds, their human counterparts were often accused of pretension, vanity, dishonesty, disingenuousness, and even stupidity. 

Before turning forty, Ms. Salahi often searched for biographies of prominent people who had their breakthroughs around her age or even older. To her disappointment, none of those people were magnificent enough for her, not a Dostoevsky, a Kafka, or a Camus, and she wished to stand tall in front of Mr. Abdollahi. 

Alas, years passed and eventually Ms. Salahi came to realize that she was not ever going to have a breakthrough, that she was never to become somebody or to accomplish anything extraordinary, that she was not but one of the multitudes of ordinary people who shove their way through life amongst many others, who run after buses and taxi cabs, elbow others to find themselves a spot on a crowded subway train, who sometimes fall, and sometimes bicker with others. 

After entering her fifth decade of life and giving up on her dreams of ever making a breakthrough, Ms. Salahi decided that before she died, she needed to run into Mr. Abdollahi at least once, and that she needed to learn how he lived his life, the years she had missed. For years, Ms. Salahi had done everything in her power to find any trace of him. She had looked him up on every social network and had searched his name, hoping to find any mention, an image, or a new address. Sadly, she found nothing. Their common friends had all left the country, and although it was theoretically possible for Ms. Salahi to find their email addresses, reach out to them, and after brief greetings ask about Mr. Abdollahi, she found that route prohibitively degrading. 

Thus, on this sunny winter day when the weather was particularly cold and polluted, Ms. Salahi wrapped her green scarf around her head and neck and rode toward his parents’ old residence. Her initial decision was to hide in a good spot close to the house and keep watch from a safe distance. Should she run into Mr. Abdollahi while hiding, she would have to come up with an excuse for being in that area. Interestingly, after twenty years of imagining this “random” coincidence, Ms. Salahi still was not sure what kind of excuse would save her in such a situation. 

Like an amateur felon, Ms. Salahi hid behind the wall of a house intersecting the street where Mr. Abdollahi’s old house stood, and took up her watch. The house was the second one from the entrance of the alley. It was an old two-story house with a double door, which had been painted in stripes of brown and white. She stood there for a long time. The wind was blowing. The longer she waited, enduring the cold and suffering her aching sinuses, the more stupid, dejected, degraded, and despondent she felt. She felt possessed and debilitated by an old bitter feeling, the feeling of not being the captain of her own ship, of instead being a traveler who could do nothing but patiently stand visible at the dock, watching ships come and go. She, Afsaneh Salahi, was a traveler who had waited for years, as she was expected to, hoping for a captain to take her in his ship. Finally, one did: a captain who watched low-grade comedy during the day and laughed out loud at mediocre jokes, a captain who would cook her southern sausage with extra paprika when she had a cold and cough. 

Ms. Salahi abhorred such dark thoughts. Every time they occurred to her, she would push them down into the depths of a chest hidden in a spider-webbed corner of her mind. Yet, that day, weakened by the cold wind and her painful sinuses, and humiliated by her stealthy watch on Mr. Abdollahi’s old house, her thoughts lay too bare to deny. Nothing like that moment served as better testimony to the factuality of those humiliating and disturbing thoughts. 

Twenty years ago, on another cold and sunny winter day, Ms. Salahi and Mr. Abdollahi were sitting in a café, drinking tea and eating pastry, a big piece of Napoleon. By an implicit agreement, Ms. Salahi was designated to cut the pastry in half. Though she fought valiantly, the layers failed to yield, and the pastry was brought to near demolition. Unnerved and frustrated, she persevered in futility until she was stopped by Mr. Abdollahi, who having just finished his tea in anticipation of his share of the ill-fated pastry, calmly declared, “You know, Afsaneh, this relationship only gets a B, and I need an A.” 

“B,” Ms. Salahi repeated. And the word reverberated in her head. 

Mr. Abdollahi’s final and irrefutable evaluation of three years of Ms. Salahi’s love, dedication, and an imagined future of shared happiness had simply amounted to a B. In the moments after Mr. Abdollahi uttered those words, B seeped into each cell of her body. She recalled a distant day in middle school when she had received a B on one of her math tests, contrary to the expectations of the teacher and her fellow students. That day, little Afsaneh felt everyone casting disapproving looks at her, and got so embarrassed that for many days after she would slouch and look down while walking at school. After hearing Mr. Abdollahi’s declaration, she decided she was deserving of that earlier B, after all. 

Although it was unlikely that the grade she had received from Mr. Abdollahi was related to her performance cutting the Napoleon pastry, Ms. Salahi’s mind associated the two. Ever since, she would get nervous doing anything manual in front of others. The realm of such discomfort included cooking, driving, peeling fruits, typing, or even using silverware. 

For the twenty years that followed, Ms. Salahi had recurring dreams of having been seated as a defendant in a courtroom. In her dreams, the judge was a faceless man, monstrous in size, who sat behind a big podium, and in a voice that reverberated around the room, would exclaim, “Ms. Afsaneh Salahi, life is not just about solving geometry problems! Your final grade is B.” With a lump in her throat, Ms. Salahi would plead, “But your honor, I do know other things besides solving geometry problems. Your honor, please give me a chance to explain, one moment, your honor…” 

Sometimes she would wake up at this point. Other times she would dream that somebody had seized her by the elbow and was forcefully dragging her out of the courtroom. And sometimes she would dream that she was ordered to cut a Napoleon pastry in half in front of the judge, only to fail and destroy its texture. She would then wake up with her face wet from perspiration and tears. 

A short time after receiving her B, Ms. Salahi heard from her friends that Mr. Abdollahi’s mother had found his son a “doll” and that he and his mother had both bestowed upon the doll an A. 

Ms. Salahi drew her woolen scarf harder toward her face. Thinking about all those memories brought her to the verge of tears. As to why, despite receiving a B from Mr. Abdoallahi, Ms. Salahi still lived her waking life, her reveries and her dreams around his judgments, opinions and emotions, one might ask in return why it was that despite all evidence to the contrary, when it came to love, two plus two seldom, if ever, equaled four. 

Ms. Salahi was immersed in these thoughts when the brown door suddenly opened and out of it emerged a middle-aged Mr. Abdollahi. He had developed a round, flabby belly; his hair had retreated from life. The spring and summer of his days had come and gone. He walked slowly. One of his arms supported an older woman who appeared to be his mother. Then came two boys, seemingly around ten to fourteen years of age, who had very round heads full of straight black hair. A woman around Ms. Salahi’s age or slightly younger, who was probably the doll, emerged at the end. Mr. Abdollahi opened the door to a black car, which had been parked a few meters away from the house, and helped his mother sit in the front seat. The doll and her two sons sat in the back, and the doors closed. Ms. Salahi mused that someday, each of those boys would get together with their mother and grade the women of their lives. Some of them they would reject, and one of them they would deem qualified to sit in the back seat. 

A few seconds later, Ms. Salahi heard the car start. As she turned to slowly walk away, she realized, to her horror, that the car was turning into the street she was in, and that she would soon be exposed. She pulled her green scarf closer to hide her face, only to remember that it would be precisely the scarf which could betray her. Hurriedly, she tried to unwrap her scarf. As Ms. Salahi lowered her head to look less conspicuous, she tripped over a crack in the cobble stone on the pavement and fell, her heavy purse following her. A second later she found herself disassembled on the ground, with the contents of her purse scattered around in full display. The car stopped, and the voice, his voice, called: “Are you okay, khanum?” She felt petrified as she heard Mr. Abdollahi open his door and step out of his car. There was no way out. She had to, absolutely had to, lift her face and respond. Inside she felt numb. It was far too surreal. She thought of all the effort she had made, all the emotion she had experienced in the past twenty years. She thought of all the imaginary encounters and hypothetical dialogues she had had with Mr. Abdollahi. When she lifted her head and turned it upward, she saw Mr. Abdollahi staring at her and her green scarf, still halfway around her neck, in astonishment. She tried to say something. But no words came out.  

“Afsaneh?? Is that you?” 

“Excuse me?” She thought pretending to not know him might be the only way out of complete disgrace, even though she knew that he knew that she very well knew who he was.  

“It’s me, Mehrdad! What are you doing here? Are you okay?” 

He stretched a helping hand toward her. She started at the hand, aghast, and did not take it.  

“Mehrdad?? What are YOU doing here? I live close by.” 

Mr. Abdullahi laughed nervously, then bent down and helped her put her tube of hand cream, her lipstick, her utility bills, her receipts, and her small bag of facial tissues back in her purse. The few pieces of half-used and crumbled tissues on the ground, he left to her to pick up. As he bent, Ms. Salahi stared at his balding head near her face.  

“You do?” he asked, and then added, “Don’t you want to get up?” 

“Thank you,” Ms. Salahi replied as she was picking up the used tissues and stuffing them in her jacket pocket hurriedly. 

She searched in her mind. She could find no reason to get up. In fact she felt she would rather sit there and let the world pass her by, as it was doing anyway. But the hand stretched again. “Come on, let me help you,” said Mr. Abdollahi. This time, she felt obliged to take the hand. The hand lifted her as she picked up her purse. Ms. Salahi tried to tidy up and dust her jacket. She looked at Mr. Abdollahi and smiled what must have been the fakest smile in history. 

She opened her mouth to utter something, something that could make him believe her story, that she did live close by. But then, the sound of a horn echoed in the empty street. Both of them turned their heads toward the source and saw one of the boys had stretched and reached the horn on the front of Mr. Abdollahi’s car and honked. The boy looked expectantly at his father from within the car and pressed the horn again. 

“I have to go! We are late. It was good to see you, Afsaneh! Take care!” 

He hurried back to the other side of the street and got into his car. The sound of the driver-side door being shut reverberated in Ms. Salahi’s head. Soon the black car was out of sight.  

It was cold out. But inside Ms. Salahi, it felt like Kelvin’s zero. She resumed walking. The street sloped downhill, thus accelerating the steps she took as she walked away from Mr. Abdollahi’s old house, an acceleration not to reach a destination, but to get away from everything that until a few minutes ago had formed the pillars of Ms. Salahi’s adult existence. 

Ms. Salahi did not want to go home. She did not wish to take a taxi. So she walked the very long distance back home. On her way, she kicked the little pieces of gravel she stumbled upon and stepped on all the dried leaves on the pavement just to hear them crunch. She stopped by some grocery stores, drank chocolate milk or juice, and kept on walking. 

When she finally made it back home, it was almost sunset. Her back and legs were weary and aching. Outside the door, a little black-and-white kitten gazed at her hesitantly for a long while. Ms. Salahi beckoned the kitten and whispered, “Come to me, so I may tell you how vast is my solitude.” *

*Author’s translation of a verse of a famous poem by Sohrab Sepehri, Iranian poet, called “To the Garden of Comrades.”

Azin Neishaboori was born and raised in Iran. In 2003, after finishing college, she moved to the U.S. to attend Penn State University where she received her PhD in Electrical Engineering. Her works of fiction have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Oyster River Pages, Eclectica, Potomac Review, and The Deadly Writers Patrol. In her writing, she aspires to challenge the prevalent narrative and hopes to share an authentic and non-politicized perspective of Iranians and other Middle Easterners with the readers.