The other woman came to Gulia’s apartment late in the morning, after Rashid had left for Munich. He’d flown out of Tashkent while the sun was rising, to transact business with a resort developer who wanted to buy his rugs. At four, Gulia and Rashid had woken up to sip coffee, waiting for the driver to arrive. She had fallen asleep again for a few hours, on his side of the bed, until it was time to get Layli ready for school.

Around eleven the doorbell rang, two short chirps followed by a looping canary twitter of someone holding down the buzzer. When Gulia opened the door, she knew who it was—the nun, clasping the cuff of her long sleeve and staring up at Gulia the way a child would stare at an elephant. The woman’s face glistened in the October heat, the top of her forehead covered by a hijab of gray chiffon draped tightly under her chin. She glimpsed past Gulia into the darkness of the apartment.

“Who are you looking for?”

The woman ignored her.

“You forgot your manners?”

“And you?” the woman said. “You plan to keep me standing here all day?” She stepped inside and led herself into the living room, eyeing the wool rugs (from Rashid’s factory) on the floor, before fixing her eyes on the twin bouquets of roses on the table, which Rashid had brought home a day earlier for Gulia’s thirty-first birthday.

“I’m Nasrin,” she said, inspecting the collection of bohemian glass on display in Gulia’s wall unit.

“I know who you are.”

“You bought all this yourself?”

“What do you need to know that for?”

“He doesn’t buy me such things.”

Her face was long, heavy in the jaw, Gulia noted, her eyebrows virtually triangles, untouched by tweezers. Only once, at a large wedding in town, had she seen Nasrin up close. Gulia had come with Rashid, while Nasrin had arrived on the arm of Rashid’s mother. In the carnival atmosphere of a wedding it had been easy for the two of them to keep a measured distance from each other’s tables.

Nasrin was relaxing into one of the dining room chairs when Gulia returned with tea from the kitchen. She had unwrapped her hijab and was fanning herself now with her hand, as though she were next to a kiln. Her hair was black, like Gulia’s before she started dying it copper. But coarse strands of gray already appeared in the thick part, and above her temple, a coin-sized patch was almost completely bald, like the skin of an animal that had clawed out its own fur.

“Mother-in-law told me you were ugly, but I see you are not bad-looking,” Nasrin said.

Gulia reached over to pour herself tea. Whatever village they’d plucked her from, she thought, Rashid’s family had obviously forgotten to teach Nasrin how not to fart out the first thought that came into her head.

“I won’t lie, you are pretty,” she added. “You are five years older than me, but you look young.”

She had the same little-girl voice Gulia knew from the phone—a voice that had once called her a divorced prostitute and declared her womb a barren pit. It wasn’t unusual for Nasrin to force both of her howling children to wail into the phone before hanging up. Gulia had come to expect these calls whenever Rashid left town on business.

Gulia set the teapot down between them. “What do you want here?”

“I came to say I cannot live like this anymore. You think I don’t see how my husband treats me? Like I’m a puddle he has to step over every day.”

“What does this have to do with me? I was here before you came around.”

“No one told me about you. Is it my fault everyone deceives me?”

You could tell from the woman’s face, Gulia decided, that it cost her nothing to open her mouth and lie. Just as it cost her nothing to shriek into the phone and leave clumps of cat fur and needles on Gulia’s doorstep. Nasrin would never admit to such witchcraft now, passing herself off as a good Muslim, taking up the hijab to please Rashid’s mother, who with her own deranged ideas had all but turned the family into a clan of Wahhabi fanatics. The doorstep gifts had seemed like a joke at first, the hexes of a backward villager. But the fact that in their nine years together Rashid had succeeded in making Gulia pregnant only once, and that even this had ended with miscarriage, made her worry that the cat hair and broken eggs, the oaths and curses, had thrown something off balance in her.

“No one told you about me?” Gulia said. “Half of Fergana knew, and you didn’t?”

“I thought we could get along. My uncle has two wives in one house, and they live like close girlfriends.”

“I’m not interested in your family or how you were raised.”

“And how were you raised?” The woman started up off her chair. “To become a divorced prostitute and keep a man away from his children!”

Again, the children. Nasrin had announced her first pregnancy just weeks after Rashid and Gulia’s own wedding party, when they’d gone to a mullah and then invited their friends to a restaurant—everyone from Gulia’s job at the bank and their circle from the university attending to support Gulia, the real wife. Afterward Rashid had begged Gulia’s forgiveness, explaining that Nasrin’s pregnancy was the result of the wedding night, when proof of a soiled sheet had been unavoidable. He swore he had not slept with Nasrin since then and didn’t plan to again. And for almost a year he had kept his promise, spending his nights at Gulia’s apartment, their life together interrupted occasionally by the five o’clock morning phone calls from Rashid’s mother, reminding him to be home for his first namaz prayer. But after a year of neglect, Nasrin had started to complain to the relatives. “People will talk about me,” Rashid told Gulia. “It’s a sin not to sleep with your own wife.” Could she not wait a little longer until he divorced Nasrin? Hadn’t he, after all, waited for her the same way?

When Nasrin’s second child was born, there were no more apologies. “What are you so sad about?” Rashid had asked indifferently. “You already have a child. If it’s not enough, have another!” There was nothing to say back. Was she going to deny him the right to have his own children?

But now she wanted the woman out of her apartment.