I could see her white hands and long, thin fingers among the green stems and huge leaves of the cucumber plants. Her hands looked unusually beautiful.

It was the beginning of Asad and extremely hot. She was dripping all over with sweat. Her forehead was unusually wet, as if she were washing her face. Her cheeks were red, though she looked pale as yogurt from dehydration. We were given only a one-and-a-half liter bottle of water per day.

The sun beat down on the roof and the thick plastic walls of the greenhouse, which was located outside the city in a vast desert. The heat was so scorching that not even the birds were flying. We were all hard at work, one woman per row, trying to twist the thorny stems of the fruit around the long strings hanging from the metal rods in the ceiling. The strings helped the plants grow taller and produce more cucumbers, but the stems burned when we touched them. The combination of heat and the closeness of the greenhouse made it difficult to breathe.

The girl was hidden by the plants. I could see her from time to time. Her face was pretty, without any makeup, but tired and agitated. Occasionally she found a spot on the damp hot floor to sit for a break. When our eyes met, she looked down, and then got up from her  hiding place in the small furrow between the cucumber plants.

Perhaps she thought that I was like the other women and would tell on her to Mr. Khairkhwa, the owner of the greenhouse.

She had only just started in the greenhouse, and sometimes the delicate, soft stems of cucumber would break in her hand, exactly as they had done when I had started here a few years earlier. My husband had just died and I needed to earn a living. I had been as young and inexperienced as she was, but being responsible for my children pushed me to learn the necessary skills—and how to survive the thorny stems of the cucumber plants.

Mr. Khairkhwa was a short man with a receding hairline. His shoes were a few sizes bigger than his feet and made a strange noise when he walked. As he approached her, she closed her eyes, and I heard her whisper to herself, “I hope he doesn’t see me, hope he doesn’t see me.”

The workers were all women from Afghanistan. We were always on the alert. A tiny mistake was more than enough for Mr. Khairkhwa to fire you without any pay. He was the only man on site. Poverty and many other problems forced us to work so hard in the greenhouse despite the extreme heat, and, even worse, to tolerate Mr. Khairkhwa and his temper.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon and time to eat. We had brought our packed lunches in a variety of pots, small and large. I left the greenhouse and sat with the other women in the shade of the wall. The young girl had brought bread, cheese, and some tea. Surprisingly, she had a fork and knife with her. The others didn’t even bother to take a minute to wash their hands. They ate quickly to have more time for their tea afterward. Following the famous maxim that heat could only be beaten by heat, they believed that the only way to survive the greenhouse was to drink more tea. I turned to the girl, and made an excuse to her about my teacup being empty and that on the way my tea flask had spilled and—

She interrupted me. “Have you been working here long?”

“Yes, almost five years. I know everything about greenhouses, but I don’t have enough money to have my own,” I joked.  “You brought this classy fork and knife with you, but why don’t you wear gloves or protect your face?”

She looked at me with surprise. “Why? Is it necessary?”

I looked at her hands. “Your thumb and index fingers have blisters because of the thorns.” Her eyes filled with tears and glistened like a mirror showered with water. She started to speak, but something seemed to stop her. She was just a few years younger than me, and I felt really sorry for her. I didn’t want her to end up doing this kind of hard labor for the rest of her life.

When I had arrived in Iran with my husband, I had thought the hard days were over, that by escaping the war in Afghanistan I would have a better life. But when my husband died, I had to become both mother and father to my children. I had barely any education, so could only work in farming and had ended up in the greenhouse. My life was back to what it had been before the move, but even worse.

The lunch break was over and we all went back to work. I asked one of the other women, “Why is this young girl so quiet?”

“She joined us recently,” she replied, “when you were away. I heard from Panah’s mom that they just arrived in Iran from Afghanistan. She’s a university graduate and the breadwinner of the family. Panah’s mom is their neighbor, and she says that her father is disabled and can’t work. They don’t have the proper paperwork so she can’t work in an office. We may not be as young and pretty as her, but she doesn’t have the right documents!”

In the morning, when I had first seen her, I had felt sorry for her because of her youth, but now I realized that her situation was a lot worse than mine. Now I could see that when she tried to pick up the basket full of cucumbers, her frail hands shook.

I went over to her, took the other handle of the basket to ease her load, and helped her carry it out of the greenhouse.