Urgency

Translated from the Persian original.

I had gone to the neighborhood hypermarket to buy a few specific groceries. My dear, you know I don't buy anything for the fridge unless I have to; it puts my mind more at ease that way. You only ever drank tea, but I don't know why you'd sometimes open the fridge door, and you always laughed. When I'd finished shopping and went to take one of the store's narrow aisles to the checkout, a woman who had done quite a haul with a big shopping cart had taken up nearly the whole width of the aisle, and I said, quietly but clearly, excuse me, so she'd move aside, but she was so absorbed in examining the goods that she didn't notice at all. Just then I noticed the different tins of instant coffee on the shelf in front of her and remembered that my coffee had run out. I went to take one of the tins I'd bought before and already knew the taste of, when the elderly woman looked at me and asked, in her seasoned voice, which one is better? Cast by her question as the man in the know, I said, with a particular tone and patience, this one is such-and-such and that one tastes such-and-such, and this one I picked is more for coffee drinkers. Before I'd finished explaining she said, a coffee drinker doesn't buy instant coffee. Well, I had neither the time nor an answer for her, and besides, I had to get home soon because I had one of those urgent dates with you. She, having shopped at her leisure, came up behind me to pay, and the cashier, who of course and as a rule makes more of a fuss over people like her, set about bagging our groceries. When I got home I hurriedly washed a glass and then went to put the groceries into my big but empty fridge, when I noticed a pack of cigarettes in the bag that had been put in by mistake and seemed to belong to that same woman. On the pack, beneath a picture of two lungs, one healthy and the other not, it said: judge for yourself. And I instantly sank into thought, and you instantly came, and I instantly brewed tea and we drank it, and you instantly left. Judge for yourself: in that instant state of affairs, who was I filling the fridge for? Keeping a fridge full inevitably means throwing out the extras and the leftovers every day to keep it fresh inside. When I think about brewed coffee and how it differs from instant, I see that drinking brewed coffee requires you to keep throwing out the grounds and keep the machine clean. When you left I didn't feel like doing anything. I fell asleep on the couch; it still smelled of your clothes. As so often, suddenly there was an earthquake. My doctor says this is my unconscious reacting to sudden palpitations in my sleep, used to say the palpitations were a side effect of quitting the pills I'd been taking, said I shouldn't worry. Lately I had dreamed this earthquake so often that in the dream world I had built a hidden hatch under the rug in the house, leading to an underground shelter, and every time the earthquake came I would hurry down through it and wait for things to blow over. My dear, the doctor says my unconscious put that hatch there too, so that I wouldn't wake up; otherwise, as you know, my house has no rug. I went down. This time the basement was full of shelves, and the shelves were full of tins and jars of coffee that fell to the floor with the tremors and shattered, and the bitter aroma of coffee, which with the dust made you feel you were suffocating, had made the thick basement air heavier still. Maybe that's why I feel more at ease with my fridge empty. It's nothing, of course; Freudian dream interpretation says I'd probably been sleeping in a position that pressed on my airway. I woke up and everything instantly went back to normal. The next day, on my way back, I stopped by the store to return the pack of cigarettes, and the cashier said I should keep it, that after I'd left the woman had paid for it for me. So I bought her one of those same instant coffees and left it with the cashier for her. She was a woman who had tasted the hot and the cold of life, but she had never tasted an instant like you, my dear, to know what urgency means. She didn't know that I have so little of you that I can't even keep a little of you, let alone throw out your excess. She was used to brewing coffee and smoking, to consuming. I'm used to stockpiling you on top of yourself, stacking you inside me and keeping you way down there. Now my shelves are so empty of you, and down there is in such a mess, that there's no safe place for me down there even during your earthquake. I want to go and tell my doctor to think of a new shelter. My dear, the doctor is only in on Wednesdays. So when an earthquake or a flood or a storm comes on any other day, I'll have to deal with it myself. With you gone, no emergency service in my world answers for urgencies. Tonight, when the rain comes, my house will float on a bitter lake, but maybe the old woman, in her house by a window open to the damp air, is smoking a cigarette and drinking brewed coffee.

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