A man is sitting in a cell, alone.
He holds a stone in one hand, a sewing needle in the other.
He carves the stone with the point of the needle.
He is engraving a name.
*
Every day, he scratches, he sculpts the name into the stone. It stops him from losing his mind in this prison.
The name is Maryam. She has just been born, and he is trying to fill his absence beside her by making a present which he hopes he can give her someday.
He found the stone in the prison courtyard, and managed to secretly filch a little sewing needle.
A way of saying that he’s thinking of her, this baby who is only a few days old and has her whole life in front of her.
Once upon a time there was the mother’s tummy
A girl is growing in a woman’s belly.
—No, you won’t go to the protest, you’re a woman and it’s dangerous.
Her older brother has just slapped her hard. She doesn’t say anything but digs into his eyes with her obstinate woman’s black stare, and goes out to raise her fist proudly in the street, to add her voice to the voice of the angry crowd. There will be many more slaps, and insults too, but at twenty years old nothing can stop her, neither her brother’s blows, nor her pregnancy, nor even the fear of being killed.
*
1980—Tehran University
A cloud of smoke in the distance, gunshots, screams.
I’m frightened, I can sense danger and I curl up a little more inside the tummy, but this tummy is heading for death, pushed by an irresistible force.
The young mother runs through the university corridors. She almost falls: she nearly slipped in a puddle of blood whose trace leads to a classroom from which piercing screams are coming.
She moves closer and looks. Through the half-open door, she sees a young woman lying on a table, a man trying to rape her. Beside her, on the ground, a young man, his skull being cracked by blows from a stick. She puts her hand over her mouth to stifle a cry of terror.
She is panicking, her legs are shaking.
Sheets of paper are flying everywhere, class notes, registration slips, folders. Pages of books are torn out; whole bookshelves are tipped over; hands are searching drawers; mouths are screaming. Women’s veils are trampled; hands are pulling out their hair. Women are being dragged on the ground; they fight back as best they can and the men dragging them call them dirty whores. These men have bloodshot eyes and are waving sticks studded with nails. They scream, “Allahu Akbar.”
The sound of a skull being cracked.
She is still running but can’t find the exit. She sees young people falling to the ground; she hears screams, her ears are bleeding; she wishes she could disappear—to become as small as an ant—and find a corner in which to hide with her baby.
Her baby. Suddenly, she remembers she is pregnant.
My mother carries my life, but Death is dancing all around her, sniggering with its back bent, its long skeletal arms want to grab her child, its mouth with jagged teeth opens up on the young pregnant woman to gobble her up.
Two men have seen her, they have studded sticks dangling from their hands, they come towards her. A window is open.
Seven months pregnant, she will have to jump from the second floor, she hesitates, turns around, then her gaze falls on those sticks, she can already feel the nails digging into her flesh.
*
She jumps and I fall.
You are suspended in mid-air and I am the one falling.
I am falling and your tummy is hollowing out, I cower inside it to the point of disappearing.
I am falling and you’re abandoning me in this tummy suspended in the void.
You are throwing me out from inside you. My first rejection. My first wound from love.
Angel with no wings, my irresponsible fool, my gentle assassin, at that very moment, you dug a hole inside me where all the anxieties of my future life will take root.
You are falling and I am dying, in the space of a second, inside your tummy which has become a tomb.
*
The mother is stretched out on the ground, unable to move, a searing pain in her leg. Her head turned to the sky, her eyes wide open, she stares at the white clouds. She sees the shape of a horse in a cloud. Her sight grows dim, her head is heavy: just before she dives into deep sleep, she puts her hands on her belly.
The baby moves.
Once upon a time there was the grandmother’s voice
In the beginning she is a voice, only a voice for me.
Her voice comes to me through the wall of skin, flesh, blood, and placenta that is protecting me from the barbarity of the outside world.
Her voice is frail, mineral, with high-pitched stresses, lace vibrating in the wind, but with a little needle hidden there, forgotten, ready to prick at a moment’s notice to defend herself or to call us to order.
*
—You’re completely out of your mind! You’re going to kill yourself and kill my first granddaughter too.
—I have to. I can’t let my friends get killed like that.
—So you saved someone, did you, with your big seven-month belly?
—No I didn’t save anyone, but I saw.
—And what did you see?
—Madar, if only you knew . . . No one should ever forget that.
—That’s enough madness, do you hear me? You’ll stay here until you deliver. And after that, may the devil take you!
—I will bear witness to what my eyes have seen.
—“Witness,” what does “witness” even mean?
—This baby will bear witness too, when her time comes, I know it.
—Well you’re going to try and give this baby three months’ rest from now on. See this key? It’s the key to this bedroom, and I’m going to lock you up until you give birth.
*
So there you are, confined to my grandmother’s house.
You’re lying on a soft couch in the living room. It’s good. A mother is feeding her daughter who is feeding her baby. My grandmother’s hands are busy. She’s fixing things to eat: a good smell of rice with saffron butter is coming from the kitchen.
I already love my grandmother, my great protector. I immediately recognize the sound of her voice from the depths of this restless tummy. Maman Masoumeh, I wish you could hold us hostage in this house forever, that you would never let us go. Give us more delicious food, tea, warmth, treats. Take care of my first house. Wrap us up, make the cries of the world go away, talk to us some more. The kettle is whistling on the fire, the vines are swishing against the walls, a cat sneaks past, my mother strokes her belly. At last she is resting like a sensible pregnant woman should. Far from the protests, the tracts, the nails driven into youths’ skulls. She shuts her eyes to forget, but the gruesome images keep coming back behind her eyelids to torment her. An army of ghosts with no mouths, demanding she bear witness, but not now, for pity’s sake, leave us in peace. I kick you to chase you away. My mother starts. That’s good, I’ve brought you back to the edge of life, my grandmother’s voice has too. Between the two of us, we’ll keep you away from them.
The gift
The mother’s eyes are watching a feather fly off into the distance. She knows they need to leave. She has bought clothes and shoes, for over there. The little girl must give her toys to the neighborhood kids. She has absolutely no wish to do this. But her parents have taught her that property is a bad thing. They have read this in a book by Makarenko. She doesn’t understand what the word “property” means.
—Why do I have to give away my toys?
—Because we can’t take them with us over there.
—But I don’t want to.
—Listen, it’s wonderful to give, you understand?
—No, I have to give, that’s not the same thing. I don’t want to!
The mother sighs.
—Good gracious, what in the world did we do to have such a child! She doesn’t get a thing about communism.
Another word the five-year-old girl doesn’t understand.
She takes refuge in her room, and brings together all of her toys under a tent that she has made with a sheet and two chairs, and she talks to them:
—Listen to me, they want to separate us, but I don’t want that, so we’re going to stay here, we’re not going to move and I’ll tell you lots and lots of stories until everybody goes to sleep and then I’ll dig a hole in the ground at the foot of the tree in the garden and I’ll hide you there. I’ll come back to get you later, but I’ll come back soon and we can play together again. I don’t trust the other children in the neighborhood. They’re savages, they’ll break you. I know how to look after you and I won’t let you go.
*
And the little girl opens a first book and tells a story to the assembly of toys, who look at her without saying anything, worried about their fate.
[ . . . ]
My grandmother tore out her hair when she found out that the toys she had chosen with so much care and love had been given to the neighborhood children. She tried to stop them but nothing could change my parents’ mind. They were convinced that they were teaching me one of the fundamental lessons of life: material detachment and the abolition of property.
I would go snuggle into those soft warm arms, it was my only consolation. My grandmother would tell me again and again that she would buy others for me, that I mustn’t cry, that she would pray for my safety from those barbarous communists, and her long fingers with their perfectly manicured nails which smelled of orange blossom water and roses would wipe away my fat tears carrying all the despair of the world.
Noushabey
It’s my birthday. I am five years old. There’s a big cake on the table with lots of icing.
One person is missing: my uncle, my mother’s brother. His name is Saman. He always gives me a flower for my birthday, a single flower called “Golé Maryam.” It’s our ritual: every birthday, a Golé Maryam. I love its scent.
This time, he’s not here. He won’t be coming. There will be no Golé Maryam for my fifth birthday.
*
The telephone rings. My mother picks it up. She listens and does not talk. She hangs up.
He’s been caught. He’s in prison in Evin. He had tracts on him. Later, when the police searched his place, they found a gun as well. He had just turned nineteen.
*
Women dressed in black are queuing to see their prisoners. Silent black silhouettes, with baskets of food in their arms. They are waiting for their turn to visit.
I queue with my grandmother and then, a little later, I am sitting across from my uncle. There is a pane of glass separating us. I speak to him through a telephone. He smiles with some effort. I know what that smile cost him. I tell him these men with their beards smell bad and are ugly. He bursts out laughing but catches himself and puts his finger to his mouth as a sign of silence. Don’t talk like that here. My grandmother scolds me as well. I’m bored. I want to leave. I hate this place, my uncle is in a cage guarded by disgusting men.
I think about my toys, which I will need to abandon.
I don’t want to be in a cage like him. I want to go there. Maybe it will be better there.
*
2005—Paris—Café Sancerre near Abbesses
It’s late, past midnight. I am twenty-five. My uncle Saman is here, sitting in front of me at a table on the sidewalk, my mother too. He doesn’t stop talking. He has never been so garrulous. He’s had a bit to drink. His tongue is freed. It’s the first time he’s spoken about prison.
*
I spent eight years of my life in one of the worst prisons in the world. I left my hair there, my teeth, my youth. He takes a sip of beer.
The first year, I shared a cell with a great activist journalist whose writing was well known in all the intellectual Iranian circles. I was so proud to share my cell with him. But this celebrity activist had a strange habit: every morning he watched the same cartoon on TV. The cartoon was nothing special, just an ordinary one like so many others. He watched that thing every morning with uncompromising persistence and concentration. He followed all the episodes, there was nothing in the world that could have made him miss a minute of the adventures of little Noushabey, that was the name of the cartoon.
One day, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I ask him why he watches it every day. It surprises me that a journalist like him, well-known, progressive, and jailed because of his political ideas, could find anything interesting in this stupid cartoon, and honestly I’m worried about him because I think this obsession might be a kind of regression.
The man looks up and stares at me. He smiles.
He answers slowly:
—This is not a stupid cartoon and I am not regressing, don’t worry. You see the character of Noushabey? The little bottle which speaks in this cartoon? That’s my wife’s voice.
—Your wife’s voice?
—It’s her job, she’s does dubbing. She does the voice of this character and every morning it’s her voice I hear.
*
I went back to my cell and wrote “Noushabey” in my notebook so I would never forget.
*
I would like to spend my life gathering stories. Beautiful stories. I would put them into a bag and take them with me. And then, when the right time comes, I could offer them to an attentive ear and see magic appear in someone’s eyes. I would like to sow stories into the ears of all beings. I want them to blossom, to send out scented flowers in the place of all the missing, absent flowers, all the Golé Maryam that should have been given, but weren’t.
[ . . . ]
Waiting
It’s late. My mother is reading me a book. I can’t get to sleep. Her reading is labored, she’s just following a routine. She’s not here. I see fewer and fewer birds circling around her head, her dreams are slowly disappearing. It’s as if she were shooing them away, one by one.
*
—Mum, where’s Dad?
—In another country.
—What’s another country?
—It’s called France.
—France? But when are we going to go there?
—Soon.
—When’s soon?
—I don’t know.
*
The little girl doesn’t ask any more questions. She understands that the answers will always be just as evasive and uncertain.
She goes to sleep.
[ . . . ]
Croissants
My father has bought croissants at the bakery across the street. He carefully sets them out on the table, explaining that this is the kind of thing French people eat for breakfast. He makes us repeat their name so we remember it.
My mother doesn’t eat any and neither do I. She isn’t hungry anymore. I am hungry but I want lavash, the white Iranian bread so thin it looks like paper, or naan-e sangak, another thicker kind of bread, cooked in an oven on a bed of hot stones, so that sometimes one or two stay stuck to the bread. I also want black tea and Tabriz paneer.
I say that to my father. He sighs and gets cross. We’re in France now, I can’t go out into the street and buy those things for you, you’ll have to get used to it. We’re not in Iran anymore, so do me a favor, eat what I’ve just bought.
*
I see our house at Tehranpars again. The little kitchen smelling of black tea and warm naan-e sangak. I see my mother cutting a big slice of paneer and putting it on a plate. There’s also that climbing plant in the living room that covers the walls and grows all the way up to the ceiling. My grandmother used to say that that kind of houseplant would always send the occupants packing in the end. Every time I had one of those plants at my place I never ended up staying very long.
I also remember the sound of the radio, which was always turned on, the cry of the beetroot seller passing in the street, my father repairing something in the garage, I can hear him hammering away on metal.
I am sitting in my favorite chair with the doll my grandmother brought back from Germany, I was so proud of that doll which had come from so far away. To think that I also had to give her away to the poor children of the neighborhood. I’m waiting for my mother to make little mouthfuls of buttered bread and cheese. But I don’t like it when she puts in too much butter. I’m impatient to go out to play with my best friend, Shahla. I know she is impatient too. She lives just across the street from us. She likes to wear my clothes and borrow my toys. The clothes she wears are just like a boy’s. I borrow her trousers and she borrows my dresses. When we swap clothes, she becomes more like a girl and I become more like a boy. I like that a lot.
*
But what are we doing here? In this hole that smells of damp and deprivation, where beauty is reserved only for the bottom four floors of the building.
The three of us are sitting at a table with these things that are impossible to pronounce. No one says anything.
I think about my suitcase and all the new clothes inside it, I was given lots of pretty dresses on our departure from Iran. That brings me a sudden little burst of sly joy.
There is an unpleasant silence in the room.
I look at these croissants, set out sadly on the table, empty of all memory, with no familiar flavor, which my mother and I are obstinately rejecting.
In the end my father eats them all, almost in rage, without saying a word, his eyes glued to what he is eating.
*
2012—The hutongs of Beijing
I’m thirty-two years old. I’ve been living in China for two years. I would give anything for a real croissant, just for their smell, the smell of French bakeries that penetrates your nose from down the street. It makes me feel nostalgic. I close my eyes and seek their smell in my memory as I pedal along between the old hutongs of Beijing.
The park
On the weekends, sometimes my mother and I go for walks in the neighborhood. We have discovered a little park. Children come and play there after school. The mums sit on the wooden benches with barricades of push-chairs around them. They chat, smoke, snack. The children shout, run, cry, laugh, throw sand or toys at each other; sometimes coalitions are formed to exclude a more vulnerable child, sometimes passionate friendships are born, sudden bonds that last a moment or the duration of a game; sometimes there’s a drama, and pain and sorrow dribble down their dirty cheeks. And all these people seem to love the park. I don’t like this place. And so I always sit close to my mother on the bench, stuck to her, which drives her mad. She keeps telling me to go play with the other children but I don’t dare. All the same, I’d really like to but I am stuck to this bench by some unknown power.
—Why don’t you get up and go play with those children?
—I don’t want to. They’re too wild.
—Some of them look calmer, go on, get up, you’ll see, you’ll have fun.
—No.
She sighs deeply.
—What about you, Mum, why don’t you talk to the other mums?
—Have you heard my French? They’ll make fun of me. And I won’t understand anything they’re talking about either.
—Then why do we come here?
—It’s interesting to observe them, don’t you think?
*
September 1998
I’m with my mother and we go back to this neighborhood near the Max Dormoy metro station, we’re standing in front of the building where we lived for a year.
A dull sadness comes over us, we don’t dare go up, there’s an entry code now and we don’t have the code or the desire to go in. We walk along the surrounding streets, stop in front of the entrance to a little park, look at each other: we have recognized our famous park. We go in and sit on a bench but the park has changed. We can’t quite find it again. And then, at this hour of the day it’s empty, there’s not much to look at: a man sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette with a pensive look on his face, an old lady breaking up dry bread into crumbs for the pigeons, a street sweeper pushing a few leaves about. No children’s shouts. No pushchairs. No mums gossiping. I look at my mother for a reality check. I feel like everything is going to fade away one day like this park. No place will be the same as it was long ago.
We leave. We are like two wandering ghosts and we don’t know what we’ve come looking for here. We hardly speak, we dimly understand what it happening with us.
What did we bury there, in those streets, at the top of that sixth floor, in that maid’s room, in that entrance to the metro we plunged into to get to my school every morning and to return every evening; what did we leave behind at each metro stop?
*
May 2014—Istanbul—Karaköy
My mother came to see me in Istanbul, where I’ve been living for a little over a year. We are sitting in front of the Bosporus, near the Galata bridge, holding balik ekmek fish sandwiches. We are observing Istanbul life around us. Street sellers grilling mackerel, selling pomegranate or orange juice, Syrian refugees begging, hoping for a small coin, gypsies playing the accordion hoping for a few coins too, Africans selling watches, cats everywhere, looking at us, waiting, hoping for a scrap of fish, boatmen tying up their dinghies, tourists happy to be here, their guidebook on the table and their cameras around their necks, and my mother enjoying her balik ekmek with her big eyes always gobbling up the world.
We continue to observe, first in silence, each for herself. This is always how we operate. We need to digest what we see, then we comment on it, we share, we exchange impressions. Sometimes we deduce fascinating things about existence, about life and death. Our observations carry us far.
I remember that line of Hafez which said: “Sit by the side of a stream, and watch the passage of life . . . ”
*
Contemplating the world around us. You’re the one who taught me that. The hours we spent in the park, later on in the Paris cafés where we smoked a packet of cigs, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk, on park benches, at the edge of the hutongs in Beijing, on the banks of the Bosporus, in the winding alleyways of the great bazaar of Teheran, just that, looking and commenting on what we saw around us: people, attitudes, gaits, styles and silhouettes, dogs, cats, birds, vegetation, buildings, objects behind windowpanes, signs, vehicles rolling past, everything went through the great laboratory-observatory of life.
That park in the 18th arrondissement of Paris was the prelude to our longstanding intimacy as observers.
[ . . . ]
The battle of languages
—I have triumphed. I am the language of the Enlightenment and of Molière.
—I am the language of your early years.
—Don’t listen to her. That language is from the long-gone past.
—Remember the soil you came from.
—Learn me and forget the rest.
—Persian is the bow that makes your body vibrate.
—It’s the language of exile, of rupture, of trauma.
—I may be a lame old woman rejected by life, the sound of my cane and my heavy leg I drag along is unbearable, but that sound will follow you all of your life unless you hold my hand.
—Forget that old stuttering fool and let her babble her gibberish. I will offer you a world of integration, of recognition, of success.
—I will offer you reconciliation and peacefulness.
—Wrong! She will stop you moving forward.
—I am the bridge between your two homelands.
—She smells of death.
—If you forget me, you will forget yourself.
—Claptrap! Your salvation is in French.
—You love to draw, don’t you? Trace the letters of my alphabet with the point of your pencil: it’s just like drawing.
—You love to read, don’t you? Leave those childish arabesques and follow me, I’ll take you across my literary oceans.
—I will keep quiet but I will follow you in silence.
—Choose the winners’ side. Leave those ghost stories behind.
—I am not your mother’s language, I am your language’s mother.
—Listen to me: that doesn’t mean a thing. I told you, it’s just gibberish.
—You will come back to me, to my swaying letters, to my soft plaintive music, to my poetry too.
—Who does she think she is? You won’t go back anywhere. You will advance straight ahead.
—You will come back, I know. I’ll leave you for now, in your flaming conquest of French.
*
Then French envelops the little girl with her royal cloak of fleur-de-lys and elitism. They walk together towards a grand edifice of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Bits of paper dance over their heads: glowing school reports, well-deserved congratulations, acclaimed poems joyously swirling around them as they walk.
Persian, a little to one side on a bench, watches them move away. A thoughtful old woman, surrounded by thick solitude, the end of her cane sweeping away a few leaves, and bits of trash, and old dreams from the past.
[ . . . ]
Reconciliation
A young woman is sitting on a bench across from a primary school. She is staring at the big blue door and the flag hanging above it. She is lost in thought and her memory journeys through time.
She is six years old. She can see herself in front of this same door, sitting on the same bench, when she escaped from school and her grandmother appeared to her. Water under the bridge, now, as they say. Water, wind, dust. Time, the days strung together one after the other like beads on a necklace, has changed the stubborn, mute little girl into a woman who is still just as stubborn, but whose tongue is now unbound and feeling freer all the time.
She feels again the sadness of that first year in France. But she also feels a timid joy softly showing the end of its nose: the joy of reconciliation. Finally, she clears away the earth and finds her roots in soil that no longer smells of the past but of the future.
*
A strange noise attracts her attention. It’s the noise of a walking stick hitting the paving stones. She turns her head and sees an old lady coming towards her. Her face is covered, but a familiar and reassuring scent is coming from her. She sits next to her on the bench.
*
—I told you: you’ll come back to me. You’re back now.
—Who are you?
—Don’t you recognize me? I’m your mother tongue. I’ve been waiting for you all this time.
I’ve hung around for years in front of this school, sat for hours on this bench. I was near you through all your lessons, from primary school to high school. I used to hide in a corner when you scribbled pages and pages in the Sorbonne lecture theatres. I’ve even paced every street where you’ve lived. I followed your footsteps and waited for you at the exit to trendy Paris bars, I sat a few seats away from you in theatres, cinemas, concert halls. I would stroll slowly on the Pont des Arts when you spent hours there reading or talking with your artistic friends. I’ve tried to slip into your life without forcing things. I was so happy when you decided to study literature. And when you chose Hedayat and Khayyam, I jumped for joy despite my lame leg. I cried, to be honest, because I knew you had just found the thread that would lead you to me. We would make peace.
*
I’m leaving now, you’ve found me, I don’t need to shadow you anymore.
*
The old lady gets up, and with an easy, almost airy step, glides along the ground of the avenue Claude-Vellefaux in the 10th arrondissement in Paris.
Then she disappears round a street corner. The young woman notices she left her walking stick on the bench. She wants to call her but there is no trace of the old woman.
She studies the stick, senses it has been left behind on purpose.
She takes it with her.
[ . . . ]
A free woman?
“Your upbringing has made you a free woman, you can’t live here anymore . . . ”
*
It’s settled: we’re all going back to live in Iran. The house is on the market. People are coming to visit it.
I’m twelve years old. It’s summer. I’m cycling in the street in shorts and a tank top. My father looks at me, thoughtful and worried, and says to my mother: “She will never be able to do that in Iran, that simple thing: cycling in shorts and a tank top. We can’t leave. I don’t want to deprive her of this innocent freedom.”
*
I’m sixteen. I’m madly in love with a boy. I want him to stay the night at our house. My father gets cross, yells, bangs his fist on the table. He is red in the face, taken unaware, having never prepared himself for such a situation. I stand my ground. I insist, and finally I let him have it: “Yes, my little Maryam, we left Iran so you could grow up in a free and modern country so you could have a free and modern education so that you could grow up to be a free and modern woman one day. What a joke!” I go up to my room and slam the door as hard as I can.
A few hours later, my father calls me. I come down. “I have talked it over with your mother and she has helped me understand that you weren’t doing anything wrong by wanting to invite this boy to our house. I would be curious to meet him.”
*
I’m eighteen. I jump into my boyfriend’s arms. He has the voice of Serge Gainsbourg and the face of Jacques Brel. I’m mad about him. We kiss on the benches of the Canal Saint-Martin, sometimes we smoke and talk until dawn, walking along the banks of the Seine. He sings “Black Trombone” or Gainsbourg’s “La Chanson de Prévert” to me.
The passersby don’t see us. The two of us are in a world of our own and that world is protected by Paris.
*
I’m twenty. The car window is down, my hair is whipping my face and my hand is trying to catch the wind. I’m drunk and I’m laughing.
*
It’s late. I run to find a casual lover. My heels are clacking on the Paris pavements. I catch the man’s mouth in the middle of the street, I drink his desire and his sweat, with no fear or shame.
*
I am sitting on the steps of Sacré-Cœur with a friend. Paris is spread out at our feet and listening to us. We recite Baudelaire and Rimbaud like a mistress to her lover and the wine bottle passes from hand to hand.
*
I’m thirty. I’ve travelled in China for two months. I’m in Beijing, I’m due to take a plane in two hours to go back to Paris. I’m in a bar, surrounded by expats who have been living in Beijing for years. We drink, we sing, I have no desire to get on that plane. They challenge me to stay with them. “You’ll see, you’ll be happy in the Middle Kingdom.” They insist. I’m itching to take up the challenge. And to give in to the madness of missing my flight on purpose as well: an absolute affirmation of freedom, for me, at this late and well-oiled hour of the night.
I leap to my feet, I raise my glass and say loud and clear: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m staying.”
I stayed for four years.
*
I’m thirty-four. My eyes follow the slow, inexorable progress of the enormous cargo ships ploughing through the Bosporus. I’ve been living in Istanbul for a year. I have fallen in love with this city but there is now some weariness in our love.
It’s only now, after living abroad for more than five years, that I feel like boarding that plane which will take me back to Paris.
[ . . . ]
