“Agha isn’t here,” she says as soon as I walk in through the door. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

Agha is her husband — dead for thirty-five years and buried in Iran — but she speaks about him as if he were just out running an errand.

“No point waiting around for him,” she tells me with characteristic bluntness. “Go home and do something useful.”

We’re in her room on the third floor of the Ocean Towers Convalescent Home in Santa Monica. Khanum has lived here for nearly ten years — ever since she broke her hip and had to have it replaced by that young Iranian doctor who called all his female patients “Khanum” — Lady — because they’re old, and he meant to show respect, and because this way, he didn’t have to remember their names. Khanum had liked the doctor: he had hazel eyes and light hair, and he was Jewish. She told him if she came out of surgery alive, she would find him a nice girl from a good family. But she also told him she didn’t believe her hip was broken — all I did was stand up from the couch and suddenly, I found myself on the ground. To this day, she wonders if the young doctor operated on her unnecessarily, if he didn’t read the x-rays properly or decided he was going to cut her up anyway, put a piece of plastic where bones had held up just fine for nearly a century, get some experience and some money he didn’t look like he needed.

Depending on whom you ask, Khanum is somewhere between 97 and 104 years old. She has bad eyes and trouble walking — what with the plastic hip and all–and she gets tired easily, but she’s otherwise in fine health. She needs constant care, which she resents wholeheartedly and refuses often. Her mind is in good shape most of the time, but lately, her short-term memory has been lapsing for minutes or hours at a time. When this happens, she can tell you about all the people she knew and places she had been to in her twenties and thirties, but she won’t recall when she last ate, or what day it is, or what the person she’s been talking to has just said. She becomes young again, a new bride in her husband’s house, unwavering in her love for and loyalty.

“I’m not here to see Agha,” I tell her. “I’ve come to see you.”

Next to her, the private nurse who has been caring for her for the last three years smiles knowingly and shakes her head. The nurse is Mexican, but she understands Farsi perfectly well, and she has heard this conversation before.

Khanum doesn’t believe me.

“Get on your way already,” she snaps. “Go make dinner and look after your kids.”

I realize she has confused me with one of the many callers who used to knock at her door day or night in Tehran in the years before her husband died. They never called ahead of time, or asked permission to visit, because they knew they would not be welcome: they were either selling something, or asking for money, collecting a bribe instead of taxes, or hoping to enlist her husband’s help in some decades’ old feud that would never be resolved. Whenever the doorbell rang, her husband would curse under his breath and call for her to go to the door and act as gatekeeper.

I kiss her on both cheeks and ask how she’s doing.

“Why do you want to know?” she responds.

To my embarrassment, I feel relieved that she hasn’t recognized me yet, that she doesn’t remember how long it has been since my last visit. The nurse, though, is quite aware of my long and inexcusable absence, and is looking at me with eyes that accuse and condemn at once.

“She recognizes her frequent visitors quite well.”

We sit — she in her wheelchair, I on the edge of her hospital bed — for a while without speaking. On the wall behind me is a collage of family pictures, a full-page, typed list of next-of-kin names and phone numbers, and half a dozen signs posted for the benefit of the night nurse. The small television that hangs from the ceiling is tuned to one of the many Farsi-language satellite stations based in Los Angeles. Persian music blares from someone’s radio next door.

“Give me a kiss and get on your way,” Khanum starts again after a while. It’s only six o’clock in the afternoon, but the December sky has been dark for nearly an hour. “You shouldn’t be out on the street so late at night anyway.”

Ocean Towers is one of many establishments of its kind in Santa Monica — a gray, seven-story box of a building with cement walls and a flat room, situated, for practical reasons, within a ten-block radius of St. John’s Hospital. On its right is a much newer, more upscale nursing home with a mustard-yellow shell and square balconies. On the left is a car dealership. We’re only twelve blocks away from Third Street Promenade with its trendy shops and overly-aggressive street performers, only minutes away from the beach, but we might as well be in Tehran: There are three Iranian restaurants within walking distance of this building, three grocery stores, an Iranian Kosher butcher shop. There is an Iranian bakery around the corner, two hair-salons, and an electronics store that promises, in big bold letters painted on the windows, to meet or beat any competitor’s price anywhere.

On the third floor, all the residents are Iranian. So are some of the doctors and nurses, the nutrition experts and physical therapists. The arrangement seems to be as much by design as by coincidence, but it suits everyone just fine. Most of the residents here know each other from the years in Iran — before the revolution forced them out of the country and sent them to a place where youth and beauty are revered above wisdom and tradition, where children are allowed to disobey their parents, or dishonor them by marrying out of their faith or divorcing their spouses, or entrust the care of their elders to strangers in bright purple uniforms who think they can know a person merely by looking into her file, reading the notes made by other strangers, asking questions they already know the answer to. They’re like old people anywhere, and yet they’re different: they’ve each lived three, sometimes four lifetimes — the ghetto, the years on Cyrus Street, the years of glory under the Shah, the years of exile in Los Angeles, and now, this other existence — this single stretch of time unbroken by any milestones, untouched by what happens on the outside and that they hear about but in which they cannot participate.

The visitors, too, know most of the patients. They bring Iranian food and magazines and candy, fill the patients in on the latest goings on. But in the afternoon, the floor quiets down. Dinner is at 5:30 and after that, the latest hold-outs go home to their husbands and families. The nurses’ shift changes, and dusk settles onto the bare hallways and narrow beds with plastic mattresses.

“It’s a long night for her,” Khanum’s nurse tells me as she, too, prepares to leave for the day. “She can use the company if you want to stay a while.”

When I first started writing, I sat with Khanum and her contemporaries for hours at a time, asking about the past. I was twenty-one years old and on leave of absence from law school. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, but I knew some stories from Iran, and I had begun to write them. They were scattered pieces of people’s lives, bits of conversations I had overheard through the years, rumors that had been whispered too many times and taken on a reality that may or may not have been deserved. Almost all the stories, however, were about my own family: we were — still are — unusually open, among Iranian Jews, about our past. Others are more guarded, more aware of the consequences of revealing themselves in a society built as much on appearances as on facts, a society where Truth would, far from setting you free, most likely close a thousand doors and come back to haunt you for good.

So I went to Khanum and others like her, asking questions they were often reluctant to answer, that they found pointless and annoying.

“What is it with you and these stories?” Khanum would ask in response to every one of my questions. She was in her eighties, living alone in an apartment in the flats of Beverly Hills. She took the bus from one end of town to the other, shopped in the Persian grocery stores, took long walks along Wilshire Boulevard and watched the well-dressed women who went into and out of Saks and I. Magnin.

“Don’t you have something more useful to do than to ask about the past? Can’t you go out with your friends or go to the gym or at least talk about something pleasant?”

I told her I wanted to write a book about the Jews of Iran.

“What for?” she would ask. “Who wants to know?”

I didn’t have the answer to this, but I kept asking any way. In the end, Khanum would sigh and look at me in despair. Reluctantly, she would mutter an answer or two, then suggest I talk to one of her friends — go ask her, she knows more than I do, her memory is better than mine, she’s older and has better stories.

I took eight years to write the first book. By then, Khanum had become more frail, more reluctant to go out alone, but she remained as forward thinking and open to the future as ever.

“I hope you made some decent money off that book of yours,” she would say every time I went to see her.

“Decent,” I told her, “is a relative term.”

“You should at least have made enough to buy a house and a new car,” she insisted.

A very used car, maybe, and a house off a dirt road in a Third World country.

She wouldn’t believe me.

“You pestered me for ten years and wrote a whole book. You must have gotten rich off it.”

“You’re hiding the money,” she decided. “You don’t want to share the spoils.”

I was halfway through the second book when I heard she had broken her hip. I went to see her in the hospital after the surgery. I was careful not to ask any questions, but she suspected my motives anyway.

“You’ve come to ask everything you want to know because you think I’m going to die and take it all to the grave,” she laughed.

What is it with you and these stories? Don’t you know it’s all in the past, we’ve all moved on, covered up our scars and counted our losses and besides, what makes you think anyone out there will want to read your book, who died and gave you permission to make public lives that have been lived in private, to make a three-hundred pages out of three hundred years?

I still don’t know the answer to this, but I’ve kept writing anyway, through passing years and fading memories. I’ve kept writing because I think they’re good stories. Because I like to see them, Khanum and the other women her age, as they had been before they came to America, before they became old, and home-bound, and dependent on the kindness of others. Or maybe because I want to give permanence to lives that are fleeting and short, even if you do live to be a hundred, because I hope to thwart the ravages of time, to save us all — myself and the people I write about — from fading too soon into the dark.

She’s still looking at me when I see a shadow in her eyes. She’s deep in thought, nodding her head as if in response to some bad news she has just received. I ask her if she has remembered who I am, but she doesn’t answer. She’s preoccupied with another thought, present in another time. I ask if she remembers her husband’s name, if she knows where he is, if she really thinks he’ll come back. She nods softly and looks down.

“He died, you know,” she says, and her voice is naked and soft, devoid of its earlier combativeness. She looks suddenly heartbroken, as if she has learned of her husband’s passing for the first time, read the story all the way through and discovered loss at the end.

I want to tell her something — something meaningful and comforting — but I can’t. I feel I’ve intruded in a deeply personal moment, that I’ve put myself where I have no right to be. That I’ve appeared at her door, unannounced and uninvited, only to remind her that she has no longer has a gate to keep, or a husband to protect.

“I know,” I tell her.

I know because I’ve asked, because you have told me already, because I’ve written the story and moved on, made myself a living out of the lives of others and, along the way, abandoned the characters to the dusk of a December afternoon in a place haunted by young ghosts who strut the halls, confident and unafraid and still untouched, all those years ago, by the knowledge of what awaits them in old age.

“It’s a shame,” Khanum says — resigned but devastated. “A great shame.”