by Ali Araghi
Then one day, when Homa was deep into her textbook, Ahmad opened the door and came in, dressed in a long, dark raincoat and a black fedora. He stood in front of her and without a word or any significant gesture, pulled the key to the room out of his pocket, put it on the desk, and left. From behind the barred window, Homa watched him cross the yard, open the front door, and step out without turning around to take a second look at the house. The door closed with a clank. No one saw Ahmad leave but Homa. It was a cloudy afternoon.
25
MEER’S HAIR STARTED TO GROW WHITE on the temples when he was twenty-one. He looked into the mirror, turned his head right and then left, and was satisfied with the symmetry. He squeezed a whitehead on his nose with his thumbnails and then laced up his boots, put on his overcoat and wool hat, and stepped out of his room. With his shovel balanced on his shoulder, Ameer stood at the door and shouted to see if his mother wanted him to get anything on his way back. It was over a year now since he had started shoveling.
A few years after the snow had begun, one night the light bulb hanging above the family burnt out when they were sitting around the dinner sofreh. The snow had put extra burden on the city’s decrepit infrastructure. Power lines sagged with the weight of snow and mourning doves, and the fluctuation in electricity made appliances burn right and left. In the dark that filled the room, Ameer’s father pondered a little and said they had to change their fruit store to an electric shop. People could barely afford fruit and vegetables anymore. The first thing to do in the shop every morning was to throw out the rotten fruit and wilting herbs. Then they had to increase the prices which lowered the sales even more. “You can do without fruit, but you can’t live in the dark,” Salar said after Ameer had screwed in a new bulb. Even with that change, the family had a hard time making ends meet. The piece of land that Ameer’s grandfather had left him had to be sold to pay for his sister’s dowry. Ameer had started shoveling after finishing the daily work in the electric shop.
Sara opened the door and she, too, saw the white patches of hair sticking out from under Ameer’s wool hat. Her son had grown twice older than his age. Once again, she asked him to see a doctor and once again Ameer declined. He wore his abnormality with pride. Sara thought she knew everything about her son. What she did not know, though, was that every week Ameer rode the bus to the New Town neighborhood, in the far east of Tehran, and from among the two-story brick buildings whose red curtains were closed all evening and night, he entered the one in which he would find his Goli. Each apartment had three bedrooms. On the second floor, three girls lived and worked, each in her room which had to be neat and clean, in a presentable condition at all times. A fourth girl worked downstairs where the madame’s office also was. Ameer haggled with the middle-aged woman and slapped on the table less than what they agreed on. Then he stepped out of the first-floor apartment that was Madame’s office and climbed up the stairs.
Goli was a petite brunette who often dyed her hair blond and could not stay still for a moment. If Ameer arrived when she was with another customer, he would get mad, grab a lamp and smash it on Madame’s desk, throw a stapler at a frame on the wall, or break a window with his shovel before he left. He would return in a week or two, ask Goli about the other man, and watch her explain what kind of person he had been with her head bowed. Then, without putting a finger on her, Ameer went home to digest all he had heard. “Take care of yourself,” he would say, slapping a few bills onto the nightstand before he walked out. It was after Ameer learned that the madame appropriated the money that he pulled something like a notepad out of his breast pocket and pressed it into the girl’s hand.
“What’s this?” she said, not so much looking at the thing in her hand as Ameer’s eyes.
He had opened a bank account for her. Ameer was enchanted by her childish smile and half-open, clear eyes as she looked at the passbook. Lying on the bed, he asked her about her men.
“I’ve already told you,” she said with a smile, sitting cross-legged, playing with the lace hem of her red nightgown.
“Tell me again.” Ameer ran his palm over her back, every now and then twisting the tips of her long hair that poured down her back in locks.
They were random people. Some were shovelers like Ameer. “You can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles his shovel,” Goli said.
Ameer rolled onto his side. “How do I handle my shovel?”
“With grace.” She smiled at the ceiling. Ameer wanted to know who else handled his shovel with grace. There had been this one man who was not a shoveler, but had been decent. He had come one night and wrote strange things about cats in the margins of a fashion journal he grabbed from the nightstand. He had not said a word the whole night and took the journal with him when he left. There was something special in the way he wrote that Goli could not explain. She did not say those things to stir Ameer’s jealousy, but he was happy the man had not shown up again or given his name, even a fake one. He had been a nobody; there one night, gone the next. Ameer put more money into Goli’s account and soon forgot about the man.
* * *
—
AHMAD HAD NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT the girl again either. With his mind less cluttered than an hour before his visit to New Town, he went straight to Sara’s house. He was still not sure how to tell Sara or what, for that matter, was most important to tell. He had a cab and a bus ride to decide what to say:
It had taken him three years, but finally he had a poem, the poem. He had started shortly after Homa left him and finally he had written the poem of pure love, and they could use it to free Salman from the prison.
That was a clumsy, meaningless account that confused even Ahmad. The bus stopped and he stepped down onto hardened snow. He walked fast and soon unwound his scarf from around his neck and stuffed it into his pocket. Passing the ice cream shop that marked halfway between the bus stop and Sara’s house, he promised himself a bowl of saffron ice cream if it went well.
Sara herself was the consolingly familiar face that opened the door and tilted her head to the side with her arms akimbo as if to say, You again! What do you want now? But her arms fell to her sides and her eyes sparkled with interest and concern when she read Ahmad’s note. Anxiously, she asked him in and shook her head as Ahmad told her about his plan, making her gold earrings swing back and forth wildly. With Salman and Sara’s father dead, Sara was the only immediate family left, the only person who could visit Salman. But Sara did not want to hear more. She got to her feet and looked down at Ahmad. First, she was afraid; she could not bring herself to convey a message even in the crowded hall where every visitor and inmate tried to shout over the others. Salman had five more years in the general ward and he would be out. Solitary confinement and investigations were behind him. He was a burned wick that no one cared to hold a flame to anymore. What awaited him was boredom, not pain. Ahmad got up from his chair, too.
“You show up after God knows how long, with this? With more danger?” No one wants to be in there a day more than he has to. Sara looked at the notepad and said, “We’re past our years of adventure.” She closed the door behind Ahmad, but she knew he was too obstinate to quit. Her not taking action could be more dangerous for her brother, because now she had given the rein to Ahmad. Sleep evaded her. Yielding to anxiety after only five days, she picked up the phone and called Ahmad’s house. No one answered. She called Khan’s house. Pooran did not know where Ahmad was and that frightened Sara more. She counted down the three days until the next visiting Thursday and told Salman about Ahmad’s visit. Salman fell silent for some time. Then he leaned toward the glass and lowered his voice to an almost inaudible volume. “What was it?”
Sara shook her head.
“You don’t trust me?” he said leaning back into his chair.
Within four days after he first broached the idea to Sara, Ahmad had written over two hundred pages of poor-quality poetry in praise of nature and a nebulou
s ethereal beloved. With the help of Dr. Afshar, he printed and bound the poems into the semblance of a published book and sent it in. The prison inspector leafed through the book in his room. He liked some of them, and making a mental note to buy his own copy, tossed it onto the pile of permitted items.
“I got it,” Salman said from behind the glass.
“What? What did you get?”
“It’s just a bunch of poems about flowers and whatnot. It’s trash. But I think you already know what else it says.” Sara shook her head. “You’re lying,” Salman whispered. “Tell me.”
“You’ll be out in five years,” Sara said, pleading.
“I know that.” Salman leaned forward again, resting his elbows on the narrow ledge in front of him. “You think I’m a child? You think this is child’s play to me? You think I want to go back in that hell?” he lowered his voice and threw nervous looks around.
“Then what do you want to know it for?”
Salman sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest as if he did not have a good answer for the question. “Curiosity maybe,” he said. “I just want to know what on earth can come out of crappy poetry.”
Sara fell silent for a long moment. Salman could see the white hairs she had tried to hide by dying her hair, which had started to grow out. She put her little finger to her mouth and chewed on the nail for a few moments until she lifted her face and shook her head. “No, Salman, I can’t,” she said. “I can’t sleep knowing that you even know what you know now.” She got up from her chair. “Just throw the book out, please, if you care about me.” She left before the visit time was over.
Salman did not throw the book out. That evening he lay down in his bunk and started reading from the beginning. Two thirds into the book he came to a line that caught his attention. He sat up and read again. Two plus two is all I need. The sentence sounded familiar, fraught with memories of a day in the distant past when he was riding on Ahmad’s back, his feet burning with welts from Mulla’s cherry branches. Salman sat up. It took him less than two weeks before he could break the code, reading the second words of the second lines.
* * *
—
AHMAD WALKED TO HOMA’S DOOR every other week. She would let him into her rented apartment and make him tea while Ahmad looked around at what seemed like the bare minimum put together: two secondhand chairs and a small wooden table in the living room on an old rug, no photos on the walls, the windows without curtains. Homa brought out the teas. She would ask about Lalah and wait patiently for Ahmad to write, her legs crossed, her hands clasped in her lap, like a doctor waiting for her patient to finish undressing. The telltale signs of impermanence in the sad apartment gave Ahmad hope and brought him back the next time. Every time, Homa saw him to the door and sent him back out.
Months later, Homa’s name appeared in Ahmad’s poetry for the first time. Homa read the poem in Black and White, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. At his desk in Agha’s room, Ahmad wove her into his words for two years. One night, his heart crumpling like paper, in a rare moment of pure and sincere creativity, Ahmad wrote the poem that became the apex of his art. The poem started to emit a strong light by the first line. Midsecond line, a small flame fluttered from under the tip of Ahmad’s pen. He slapped the fire out and ran out of Agha’s room. The first metallic thing he found in the kitchen was a stainless-steel tea tray in the sink. As he scratched words on the back of the tray, the steel grew warmer and warmer until Ahmad could not hold the needle any longer. He wrapped the tray in a blanket and hurried out into the blowing snow, hugging it and enjoying the warmth it produced. At Oos Abbas’s forge, he put on welding glasses and the leather gloves they wore while working with hot metal. Using a nail, he finished the poem on a workbench at the back of the forge and watched how the tray gradually grew red hot on the last word of the poem. The red spot grew brighter. Molten steel dripped onto the table leaving a hole in the tray. He then tried the poem on an unfinished window frame with the same result. It was not a poem to ever be published. To bore a hole in metal, all Salman had to do was etch the words together one after the other.
Salman did not believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. He burned a newspaper page with the sixth word before his suspicion gave way to amazement. Alone in his cell, on his turn to clean, he scratched the poem on the inside of the foot of his bed with a fork. By the time he stood up and straightened the prongs with the handle of another fork, the foot of the bed was already glowing. The corner of the bunk sank as the metal grew soft. After it cooled, the leg was a little shorter than the other three, metal hardened into an amorphous clump at the bottom. His calm was disturbed. He lay in bed at night, listening to his fellow inmates’ tossing and turning, Big Boback snoring like a Mack truck, picturing five more years of sleeping in that bunk and staring at the bars above him that kept Big Boback from falling on him and ending his life. Then he would start picturing a break where he would burn all the gates open one after the other, but every time, a failure followed. He would be shot on the spot, or taken away and executed without trial. That would be the blessed way to go. The torture room flashed in his head, dispersing ambitions and inviting sleep into his eyes.
For a month, he was gripped by pangs of temptation. In her perfect glory, the illusion of freedom danced on the walls of his cell, in the putrid squat bathrooms, in the tension and stupor of the yard, and on the high brick walls topped with barbed wire and interrupted here and there with towers on which guards idled with rifles hanging from their backs. For the most part, he used the poem to keep warm. He wrote the first four words on his palms and covered the light with his gloves. Back inside, he spat into his fist and scrubbed the ink off with his thumb.
* * *
—
NEWS FROM OUTSIDE SWEPT THROUGH the prison like plague. Each week would bring an isolated protest in one city, an incident in another. The day the Abadan Refinery workers went on a strike, the government refused to respond at first, but before the end of the third day, the workers were back with doubled wages. They were condemned by the inmates as duplicitous sellouts. The prisoners agreed, though, that the cracks in the edifice of the system were becoming visible.
What crushed the people was the long lines for oil that started to form before the sun came out. In front of small, smelly oil shops with closed shutters and secure padlocks, the old and young kept their twenty-liter tin containers by their feet in the snow until the seller opened. There was always a shortage, no telling how many in the line would get a drop in their containers. “The snow has crippled the country,” the Prime Minister announced to reporters. To unblock roads, the officials started to assign shoveling duties to anyone who worked for the government. Clerical employees had to shovel for at least four hours a day. The plan failed soon after it was implemented. Once out on the streets, most stole into cafés and bars and the work of the conscientious few was soon made null by the piles that the shovelers on the roofs dumped down into streets.
The government changed. The new Prime Minister, a four-star general and not a believer in leniency, announced that any civic disruption would be severely confronted. But despite the reinforced police, things did not calm down. Shortly after the general had taken office, many oil shops did not get their expected daily quota. Some of the tankers transferring oil from the south had not reached Tehran. Rumors followed that the general was buying more arms and ammunition for action against the people. The police that were deployed could not dispel the protesting crowd in one of the squares where the equestrian statue of the Shah’s father stood on a tall pedestal. People hurled rocks and broke Jeep windshields and a nose. Shots were fired into the air. The protesters escaped into the streets that veined off of the square, but not before a Molotov cocktail flew through the broken window of a bank.
“Banks are not safe anymore,” Ameer told Goli. “You should close your account.” Goli put her finger on her lips. The madame could
be listening. Goli had no place to keep anything safe.
“Can you take me away from here?” she asked as she knelt in front of Ameer to unbuckle his belt.
“No.” Ameer caressed her hair, dyed yellow as he liked it, and tied in a ponytail.
“Leave that other girl,” Goli asked in a playful way, as if it might turn Ameer on.
“You know I love you,” Ameer said into her deep brown eyes that looked up into his, “but I can’t leave any of you. I don’t have time for fidelity.” Ameer’s marriage had been planned for later that year. His fiancée was beautiful, already divorced once. The youngest daughter of a well-off family, she had never gone to school but was a masterful cook and dexterous on the sewing machine.
“What if I told the girl’s family about me and ruined your life?” Goli asked, her eyes locked into his, a smile on her thin lips. “What if I bit this off?”
Ameer ran his palm on her cheek and neck. “You won’t do either,” he said. “Because you love me. And because you pity me.”
Goli pulled his pants all the way down. Creaseless and clean, his clothes smelled of fresh laundry. The smell of his cologne always entered the room before him. Ameer was a lover of good food and good women, which he told Goli once were the best medicine to delay the senility that was already catching up with him.
