My Name is Red 精彩片段：
I AM ESTHER
I was putting lentil soup on the boil for our evening meal when Nesim said, “There’s a visitor at the door.” I replied, “Make sure the soup doesn’t burn,” handing him the spoon and giving it a couple of turns in the pot while holding his aged hand. If you don’t show them, they’ll stand there for hours idly holding the spoon in the pot.
When I saw Black at the door I felt nothing but pity for him. There was such an expression on his face I was afraid to ask what had happened.
“Don’t bother to come inside,” I said, “I’ll be out as soon as I change clothes.”
I donned the pink and yellow garments that I wear when I’m invited to Ramadan festivities, wealthy banquets and lengthy weddings, and took up my holiday satchel. “I’ll have my soup when I get back,” I said to poor Nesim.
Black and I had crossed one street in my little Jewish neighborhood whose chimneys labor to expel their smoke, the way our kettles force out their steam, and I said:“Shekure’s former husband is back.”
Black fell silent and stayed that way until we left the neighborhood. His face was ashen, the color of the waning day.
“Where are they?” he asked sometime later.
From this question I guessed that Shekure and her children weren’t at home. “They’re at their house,” I said. Because I meant Shekure’s previous home, and knew at once that this would singe Black’s heart, I opened a door of hope for him by tacking the word “probably” onto the end of my statement.
“Have you seen her newly returned husband?” he asked me, looking deep into my eyes.
“I haven’t seen him, neither did I see Shekure’s flight from the house.”
“How did you know they’d left?”
“From your face.”
“Tell me everything,” he said decisively.
Black was so troubled he didn’t understand that Esther—her eye eternally at the window, her ear eternally to the ground—could never “tell everything” if she wanted to continue to be the Esther who found husbands for so many dreamy maidens and knocked on the doors of so many unhappy homes.