The Shipwrecked Read Online Free

whoever shows up.” And then he glanced over at Mr. Golestani’s Adidas shoes and heaved a sigh.
    From where she was sitting, she saw the gravedigger take a five hundred-tuman bill from one of the women accompanying Mrs. Golestani and then he sat at Golestani’s feet and yanked the shoes off his feet and untied the shoelaces with his teeth. Golestani had no control over his legs; they just lay there like a pair of dry sticks. And finally the gravedigger stood up, holding a pair of Adidas shoes. The grave was now ready. . .
    â€œGrave ready, Adidas shoes,” she tried to write these words on the top margin of the page, above the word “Monday.” The paper was wet, the pen was streaking, and the ink was discolored, as if it had remained unused for years.
    Her head ached, her mouth tasted bitter, and the pack of cigarettes was on the table, cigarettes that with the slightest touch would unravel. Mr. Golestani was a smoker. All the dead who have now gathered beneath the sea waters and are talking with each other or sitting alone in a corner and trying to heal their bullet wounds with sea plants or the remains of dead oysters were smokers.
    She picked up the pen to write, and she wrote, “The smell of mustiness, the smell of decay, and the flames of four candles reflecting on the cellar’s salt-stained walls and the shadows and light they created. The woman was sitting at the head of the bed, with her elbows resting on thebedframe and her lips moving. The blanket had slipped off his face and Mr. Golestani, pale and drained of blood, was lying there. His mouth was open. Half-open with his teeth exposed, as if he had wanted to laugh heartily but had swallowed his laughter, and Mrs. Golestani was a thin and pallid apparition.”
    When she looked at the page, she saw that it only bore the grooves made by the tip of the pen and that the wet paper was still white. Surprised, she got up. How fortunate that Mr. Golestani, with those black eyes and the gleam that always shined in them whenever she saw him, wasn’t there to wag his long, slim finger and say: “You’re kidding yourself. You pretend you want to write, yet you run away from face-to-face encounters. All alone, writing to what end? History can only put someone on trial when the accused either no longer exists or has lost his power . . .”
    She felt as if someone was beating drums in her head; she had difficulty breathing. She was standing in front of the window. There was no light anywhere. She glanced at her watch that was rusted. With her long brittle nails she tried to scrape away some of the rust. The watch face had a yellowish hue, the hands had stopped on two. Just like the hands on Mr. Golestani’s watch that had stopped on three and the date that remained on Tuesday, December 26. “They shot him at three o’clock, in the middle of the night,” Mrs. Golestani said. “Watches stop working the instant they shoot you.”
    And now it was two o’clock in the middle of the nightand there was a faint light coming from over there, from the direction of the house, Golestani’s house . . . No, the light wasn’t from the cellar, it was from a window, which someone had perhaps intentionally half opened, so that while standing there, facing the darkness, she could look directly ahead and count the graves, graves that stood in rows, one after the other, small and large, as far as infinity.
    If Mr. Golestani were alive, he would now be sitting at that window reading a book. He would read and leave the window half open, but Mr. Golestani is dead and his wife is probably sitting at that window, crying. The same crying that is impossible to include in the cellar story.
    The wind suddenly slammed the two window panes shut. She was frightened. Of that vague commotion and that noise which sounded as if people, young people, in the depths of the green sea were pushing away the water with their crippled hands