This is the sad story of love. A story which repeats as long as the crystal ball of time continues to exist, as long as this ball has not crashed into a star, a star from another time. "Time" will perhaps explode from within because of these sad stories which repeat and fill it to capacity. When time fills with love, overflows with feeling, and chokes with tears and shouted loneliness, its crystal walls will break. But every love story will make a home in the particles of this broken sphere and will, itself, make a new "time." And perhaps a day will come when eternity and everything that has been created and everything that has not been created will be nothing but crystal particles which have in their heart a seed of love, a seed of the sad story of love. Then, time will be a woman and a man sleeping in a bubble of time.... stories with endings not quite the same.
Many know the woman now, for this very story, and to name her doesn't change anything. She was a woman who wrote herself into her stories. And there is the man whose existence or absence is the same since no one knows him. How they got to know each other is not very important either. When a story wants to take shape, it will find its way: looking for a job, reading a tale, publishing a book, it makes no difference.
The woman was simple. There was no distance between her mind, her tongue, and her heart. Her speech was the same as her thoughts and her feelings. In the business of love, she did not believe in time really. She was in love all the time, unlike those who fall in love in a moment and then forget all about it....
That is why when she first saw the man she said, "you are very handsome, let's be friends... I am very lonely."
The man was sitting behind the desk with an untidy face and hair, and a thick stubble about his face. He stared at the woman, smiling lightly. Her manner of behavior was such that he formed no impression about her except that the woman was not more than a child from whom a novelist could be made.
The man had read the woman's short stories and pretended to be interested in them, began to speak about the things that he was supposed to mention without uttering a word about love. The woman concluded that if she wrote good stories, the man would be hers.
The days passed and the man maintained the silent smile on his lips and left everything conditional and hanging in the air.
The woman was as she had always been. She would pace the room, search the books and the shelves, organize the papers on the desk, spread them out, and reorganize them again.... The woman was impatient in every step she took and in every word she uttered and one day after she had messed up things all over the place, she sat in front of the man and said, "Give me your hand, I want to tell your fortune."
The man said, "Wait until you become a writer."
The woman said, But I want to hold your hand, I want you to stroke my hair."
The man smiled and asked, "why?'
The woman said, "I want to caress my hair with your hand."
The man laughed and said, "you're crazy," and did not give his hand.
I am writing this story very quickly because I am afraid someone may come in and sit by that window and look at me and ask; How far has the work come? I am writing this story far from peoples' eyes, because I don't like anyone to read it while it is not yet finished. This is why I avoid naming places, cities, and buildings because it not only takes a lot of time, time that I really don't have, but also because it doesn't matter at all. It is enough to know that everything is happening in the crystal ball of the time.
Time for a woman like her who was after someone to love her, meant only time. She did not see any difference between a moment or a year. Whichever corner she was in, she would milk time to reach the moment when she could see him as a man and herself as a woman, and nothing else.
That is how she started her work, as she used her being to give the words life. As if the words were coming from her body and soul. She wrote story after story, day after day, and all of them romantic. The man was there. He would read the stories, shake his head, and be satisfied with his work.
Sometimes, when the woman finished a story, she would read it to the man and then say, "I am tired, lets go for a walk."
The man would smile and shake his head and the woman knew that it was not yet the time for him to appear with her in public. She would accept the distance between them and would doubt her work. She would then go back to reading and writing.
Time passed and the woman's books were published one after another. The man had begun to spent all his time reading her works. He began to think more and more about her, or more precisely about the heroine of her stories. The man would go to the woman's office and she would jump from one subject to another. She had not been coherent in her speech for some time and her situation was becoming more serious every day to the extent that the man couldn't discern which was speaking, the woman or the protagonist of her stories. The strophe-poem of her conversations had become, "Do you love me?"
The man laughed every time she said this and commented with only, "How far has your work progressed?"
And she would suddenly come to her senses, get herself together, and show her hand which had the pen and pencil marks all over it. Her hand had also toughened and the man said, "It is work."
The woman would go back to work.
How long did it take, how much time passed, before these changes settled into her body and soul? The woman who was so conscious about the door and had wanted the man to come in and read her stories, began to be scared of the thought that the door would open and someone would come in and bend over the pages blackened with words.
Time was never important in the woman's life. If the seed was cultivated, the seed of love, nothing could have harmed it. The man saw gradually that the woman did not show enthusiasm and if he called her, she turned her head to him very slowly. It seemed her look no longer had that romantic shine, that childish excitement. However, the eyes of the woman hero of her stories were shining, she gazed romantically, and her acts and behavior became enthusiastically child-like.
The man read the stories everyday, before and after publishing them, and became familiar with the woman more and more, the woman who felt her skin and blood in her stories.
The man played music for her so that she would write more and give the same romantic air to her stories. Hoping that the movement of her neck and head wouldn't remain so slow, he also prepared fruit juice for her and cared more about her diet. But the woman did not pay attention to these acts of kindness. She only wrote. One day when the man said "you seem tired, let's go for a walk," the woman answered with a weak voice and a dull gaze, "I cannot, I am busy."
And she didn't go. She didn't pay attention to critics of her work either. Journals were racing to talk about her, but she did not even know the number of her books' printings. She didn't react to the acclamations of the man who stood in front of her with newspapers in his hands. Her movements only became slower everyday.
One day when the man woke up, he laughed. He had never laughed like that before, especially alone with himself. He had a strange feeling as he remembered the woman's humor and wit, her childish moves and her strophe-poem "Do you love me?"
The man was singing to himself and felt drawn toward the woman. He eventually went to a flower shop, bought a bouquet and set out. The woman was writing as usual. It seemed as though she was writing the last sentence of a short story for only her hand was moving and her body was like a stone statue. She was far from everything, including time. It seemed as though she was only a hand writing hurriedly. He put the flower in a vase before her, but the woman did not look up. She was staring at what she was writing. She didn't even blink. It seemed as though she had reached the end of the last sentence. The man saw her place a period and her hand came to rest on the page. The man slowly took the papers out from under her hand. He read the title of the story: "The Sad Story of Love." He laughed. He touched the woman's shoulder, and looked at her face and froze. The woman was not a woman any more. She had turned into a statue of words, and when the man touched her on the shoulder thousands of words suddenly spread on the ground and among all those thousands of words the man saw these; "You are very handsome... let's be friends....I am very lonely." From the collection: Sang'ha-yi Shaytan. (Tehran: Markaz, 1990), 29-34.
