novels

I stood surrounded by hundreds of sick roses and crowds of people, who had come to see them, just like me. Stained black and brown, their brittle leaves looked like they might go up in flames any minute. Only the musk-colored buds survived. The roses were dying before my eyes, all our eyes, one by one, in a sight both familiar and tragic. They would be pulled up to punish them for failing to achieve the whiteness coveted by the shared gaze of the crowds. I hear Yoska’s voice from behind saying: “Sick, healthy, youthful or old, what does it matter? The very idea of the rose lives on.”

I turned to him, and he looks into my tired eyes. “You were distracted during our gathering, as if you were elsewhere,” he says. “I thought I’d find you here or in the Western park. I don’t know the reason for the sadness you’re trying to hide, but I know how to listen, especially if the words are coming out of your mouth.” A feeling of shyness rippled through me and I whispered: “It’s not time yet…………I wouldn’t know where to start…..but I’m comforted by your words.” I mull over what he said, about the idea of the rose. Maybe that is why I couldn’t forget Jalal. Our love affair had ended abruptly, and he had disappeared from my life. Yet my yearning for the passion we felt, the primary rose, did not subside.