I close my eyes and see: there is Zahir smiling at Nasrin, there is Nasrin smiling at Zahir, there is Dad cutting a watermelon, there is Mom looking into a microscope, there is Rustam, whom I didn’t know, stepping down from the photograph and sitting beside me. We are all here. We are all in this box, in this house, in this desert. And it is so sad, and so unbearable, and so beautiful that I want to cry, but there are no tears, only dry sand in my throat and the memory of music that will be no more
