by Ali Araghi
The day she cut her hair and dressed in Shireen’s father’s old clothes to hit the streets, she kept her eyes peeled for Ebi’s hair that hovered above his head like a fuzzy black cloud topped with a layer of white. It was not difficult to find him; a dozen marchers ahead, his hair bobbed as he punched the air with the slogans. Lalah was not sure what she would tell him, but she elbowed her way through men. As opposed to Ameer, who had not recognized Shireen in her boy’s clothes, Ebi called her by the name the moment he saw her. “Lalah, what are you doing here?” he said. “It’s dangerous.”
“If you think I can’t run, try me,” Lalah said, then turned her face ahead and chanted the antigovernment slogan, checking Ebi from the corner of her eye. Her heart was on fire from Ebi’s lingering look on her. After a few moments, Ebi said, with the poise becoming of a leader, “When the running begins, don’t leave my side.” And it was thus that the Revolution became synonymous with passion and excitement for both Lalah and Shireen, a meeting place with destiny, a rendezvous with fervor and danger. During telephone calls, in back-alley meetings, and while taking determined steps in the streets, Lalah felt the gradual change in Ebi, as if he had actually come to believe in her existence. The running that Ebi had mentioned the first day happened a few weeks later, after shots were heard somewhere in the front. The crowd started to scatter. Ebi and Lalah ran onto a smaller street and it was in the course of that run that Ebi took Lalah’s gloved hand for the first time, pulling her after him amazingly fast, faster than Lalah had thought he could run. After a few turns right and left into streets and alleys, they slowed to a stroll, but Ebi refused to let go. Encouraged, Lalah participated in every protest Ebi went to. She pulled her hat down over her forehead and hiked her neck scarf up to cover her lips when she rode the bus or as they stopped at the beet-seller’s hand cart, to buy steaming lentil soup.
One afternoon Ebi asked her on the phone if she wanted to go out to dinner on Friday, and she said yes, and he said, “You know you won’t need to hide yourself, right?” When she stepped out of the telephone booth, she wished she had a little sister waiting for her, someone to run and shout and laugh with, someone to throw snowballs at.
On Friday, she neatly packed her clothes in her bag and told Pooran she was going to Shireen’s. She changed in the basement, balanced her hand mirror on top of an oil tin to make up her face. When she was ready, she stepped back and looked at herself in the small mirror, turning right and left to check how she looked. Shireen came in with a plant in a pot the size of a cup. A cluster of leaves—almost oval—grew out like a loose, opened cabbage. The green leaves had grayish fur and dark-red edges. “I bet this one is meat eater,” Lalah said.
“You’ve got to give the boy something.” Shireen held out the pot ignoring Lalah’s joke.
Out in the street, Lalah saw Ebi’s car already parked in front of the newsstand. He never made anyone wait. She walked a little slower than normal, keeping her head down at the slippery path in the snow, giving Ebi enough time to look at her green dress with red and orange plaid. Inside the car, she pulled the panda plant out of her purse and gave it to Ebi.
Over the next months, Lalah saw Ebi in cafés and restaurants as the girl she was, and a few times among the crowds as the boy she was not. But each time, she felt the bonds that attached them together grow stronger and tauter. Courteous and polite, Ebi remained within the bounds of social decorum and moral propriety, until the day they were walking in a park when he said, “I think it’s time for us to take the next step.” With cans in their coat pockets, they were waiting for the dark to spray-paint slogans. Lalah agreed; without armed resistance, the movement would be doomed to defeat.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Ebi said, a smile on his face. His next words created so much joy in Lalah that no matter how much she tried later, she could not remember the rest of the night, where they went and what slogans they spray-painted. In six months, he would have his family make the arrangements and ask her hand for marriage. Lalah could not wait to see Ebi and his parents in Khan’s house, like the five other men she had rejected. He would sit in the armchair in the living room with his knees pressed together and hands in his lap, all quiet, not knowing what to do. It was the restless excitement of the promised day that gave her the strength to bear her sister’s departure after Mr. Zia took Leyla and his son with him.
With the little Behrooz gone, Pooran was back to her routines, the blandness of which Lalah could taste in the foods she cooked. Her grandmother’s dry coughs, once less noticeable over the laughs and cries of the baby, now reverberated in the house, day and night, ticking off time like an irregular clock.
“My last wish is to see you in a bride’s gown,” she told Lalah and two weeks later a new suitor knocked on the door. From behind the lace curtain of her room, Lalah spied on the family as they stepped out of a blue Chevrolet into the yard. There was nothing special in that one either, except that he was the tallest who had come to propose. In a beige suit and red tie, he walked behind his parents, his black hair slicked back, a box of sweets and a bouquet of flowers in his hands. But something about him felt good, maybe the look he took around at the dry trees, as if appreciating the beauty they once had brought to the yard.
When the two families had talked for some time and before Lalah was asked to bring in the tea, she threw a furtive glance at the man through the half-open door and was disturbed about the amiable charm she saw in the stranger’s face and the disinterest she sought, but failed to find, in her heart. On the contrary, she wanted to learn more about him. She did not reject him right after they left.
“I need time to think,” she told Pooran, who hurried to her after seeing off the guests.
The next day in the booth, Lalah asked Ebi if he could start the ceremonies sooner. “Like any act of resistance,” he said on his end, “a marriage has to be approached cautiously. Or it’ll blow.”
* * *
—
LIKE HIS POLITICAL CAREER, AHMAD’S endeavors in publishing were doomed to fail. Shortly after the third issue of his magazine was out, the government cracked down on the publications that it deemed detrimental to the social order. Twenty-seven newspapers and journals were shuttered, including Ahmad’s and Black and White. At the ministry, Ahmad did not succeed in meeting with the colonel in charge of publications, the post he was offered in his hospital bed years before. He walked home with snow on his hair and shoulders, in debt to his daughter and others. His brown leather bag in his hand and his head bent, he opened the front door, shuffled across the yard, and went into his room. A mourning dove landed on a persimmon branch shaking a flutter of snow down into the hoez that was now a large mound of white.
Soon, Pooran opened the house door and stepped onto the veranda in the dark-green coat she wore for quick trips around the garden. She descended the steps carefully and went toward Agha’s room on the pathways Majeed shoveled every morning in the knee-high snow. She opened the door and saw Ahmad lying on his back on the floor, arms and legs sprawled. He had not taken any of his clothes off. His neck scarf lay on the rug like it had frozen while fluttering in the wind. Ahmad did not open his eyes at the sound of the door opening, nor at the chill that blew in over his face, nor even when Pooran called his name. He just mouthed.
“You’re not a failure,” Pooran answered. “You just failed in this. You will try again.” He could hear that special rasp that age gives to an old voice.
Ahmad mouthed.
“Yes, you will,” she said, now fully a captain, ready to bark orders. “You are a good poet. Now look at me.”
So exhausted was his soul that Ahmad felt even opening his eyes was too taxing.
“I said look at me,” Pooran said, this time louder. Ahmad opened his eyes. “You made mistakes in the past, but there is time to set things right.” Pooran coughed between her sentences. She was starting to shrink the way old women did. Her gray hair had lost it
s luster. She kept it short now. He saw the beginning of her end in the dark-green bulge of the veins in her hands. And yet she stood above him, urging him to his feet, reassuring him that what lay ahead was not only attainable, but worthwhile.
Pooran was not surprised when Ahmad stayed in his room for three days. “They all do that,” she told Lalah after the girl came back from Ahmad’s room with the tray of food untouched. “When we first came to the city, Khan disappeared for ages. I’ll tell you that story some time.” She paused for a moment. “So, should I cut fabric for my beautiful bride?”
Bearing the burden of her irreconcilable feelings for the two young men was difficult enough for Lalah. Pooran’s high hopes made things even harder. That evening, she went to Shireen’s.
Lalah thought she could smell the alcohol from behind the door, before Shireen’s mother opened it. The woman’s eyes looked past Lalah into distant worlds as she put her finger on her lips and told Lalah, in a whisper, that Shireen was asleep. “But come on in,” she said motioning with two hands as if inviting her in on a secret. In her small room, Shireen was lying under the blanket. The open curtains revealed a broken pane covered with cardboard and taped over with wide, opaque khaki tape. “Hey,” Leyla whispered lest Shireen was really sleeping. Shireen stuck her head out with a helpless look on her face, eyes swollen and red like two ripe cherries.
“What’s wrong?” Lalah seated herself on the edge of the bed.
“I want to keep it,” Shireen said in as low a whisper as she could. Then she buried her face into her pillow and stifled her cry.
Lalah put her hand on Shireen’s head, bent over, and asked in a hushed voice, “Keep what?” When Shireen’s whole body convulsed with sobs, Lalah got her answer. She could hear Shireen’s mother snore outside. After another fight with Shireen a few days earlier, the woman had threatened to call Uncle if Shireen stayed out even a minute after the curfew. “I’ll leave you forever if he touches me one more time,” Shireen had yelled in her mother’s face before she stormed out. Not sure what else to do, Shireen’s mother had picked up the phone and dialed her brother’s number. He was on his way.
“Is it Ameer’s?” Lalah asked.
Shireen could not answer. Lalah hugged her friend from behind, resting her head on Shireen’s back, her hand caressing the long curly hair that cascaded over her shoulders onto the pillow. “Waves of ecstasy and euphoria,” Ameer had called them. Shireen was mature enough not to fall for vacuous praise. Some other essence of youth was in the man that contradicted his appearance. Beneath his sixty-year-old creases, a thirty-year-old vigor was trapped, but still palpable, and compatible with his own childlike account of being a prince under a spell. Shireen had asked more than a few times how old he was. Every time, he told his story of a witch who had expanded the neck of the hourglass that measured his life. The grains of sand trickled down not one by one, but two at a time. Only true love could save him from his ever-nearing end. And love was what he demanded of her.
“Amusing,” Shireen had said the first time Ameer told her the story. “But this is not how you approach girls these days, grandpa.”
A short while later, when the opportunity had arisen for her to steal a look at Ameer’s driver’s license in his absence, she found that the date of birth printed on the card confirmed his story. She decided that was a ruse, a false document. But she could not ignore the vitality with which he lived either: the way he ran as fast as any twenty-year-old when the warning shots were fired, the way he treated himself with caviar, lamb kebab, and sheep’s brain and tongue, and the way he sweated through the heavy shoveling work. One early afternoon, at the famous Naderi Café, where big writers and wrestlers and sometimes actors and actresses had hung out for years, Ameer had finished his rice and stew and sat back with his hands crossed on his chest.
“What kind of a princess are you, tell me,” Ameer asked, “who doesn’t care about her prince being trapped in the claws of death?”
Unlike the previous times when she ignored his buffoonery with a smile, Shireen leaned toward him, put her elbows on the table, and said in a soft, low voice, “May you find the elixir of life in your quest for love.”
Two hours after the dark, Ameer had bought a ticket from the small booth at the bus stop and got on the bus after leaving his shovel at home. The door buzzed open soon after he rang the bell. Inside candle flames outlined a path through the dark of the apartment into a room that smelled of Shireen.
“Where is your mother?” Four candles burning on a ledge in the wall above the bed shed a dim but warm light on Shireen. Lying on her side under the blanket, she was watching Ameer.
“How many demons did you slay,” she whispered, “to get to this chamber, Prince Ameer?”
“Oh, I’ve come a long a way, your highness,” he answered. “Allow me to tell you my dark tale.” He closed the door behind him and invited the darkness.
When, a few weeks later, she told him she was pregnant, Ameer took the news without surprise.
“Good,” he said, “His name should be Ameer.”
* * *
—
THAT WAS WHAT HE SAID to the other women, too: to his fiancée, to Goli, and to another girl he got to know later. Only Shireen and Goli were pregnant. With the other two, he had only fantasized about a child of his own name. He stopped seeing Shireen. She had been a nice girl, but would not have understood what it meant to have two days of one’s life go by with each day. He planned to send her money and other things she, or in the coming years, the child, could use, for as long as he lived.
Of the girls he had been with, Goli was the only one he had not left yet. When her baby was born, the madame held the little pink creature in her arms and said, “This is the first baby this home has seen,” smiling a golden-toothed smile at the newborn. She gave Goli three months to rest and recuperate. The madame had the small storage room downstairs cleaned and prepared for Goli and exempted her from work. Although friendly and helpful to her face, the other girls in the house were jealous of the way Madame treated Goli without trying to hide or justify her discrimination. A pregnant girl dies in the street, that was the number one rule of the house. With those extra three months, Madame would be paying for Goli for a whole year without work. Some of the girls said it was not the madame paying, but the old man, Ameer, who put his hand into his pocket. He visited the mother and son every week, and never empty-handed. He scooped the boy into his arms and rocked him, patting his small back, listening to his gurgling and murmuring. Goli would watch the father of her child walk into the room with snow on his shoulders, step out and come back with the fruit washed, open the box of sweets, or unfold a blouse he had bought for her.
“Once a week,” she said with genuine calm, “we’re like a family. We’re all together. We’re happy.” She smiled.
Although temporary and fleeting, although evanescent and untrustworthy, the presence of that man warmed her heart. What never left her mind were her mother’s words when she taught little Goli to accept and appreciate the little, imperfect happinesses of her life and not lust for what she could not have. She wanted Ameer, but she did not take him for granted. “Will you come again?” she would ask at the door, brushing his hair with her hand and making sure his collar was straight. After he assured her that he would, she told herself she would never see him again. She asked him to leave his other girls and take her with him, but she never said it as if she really meant it, rather as a passing remark when Ameer was playing with the baby or with her, and many times when he was putting on his shoes to leave. Hope was her deadliest enemy and she was wary not to fall for its temptations.
One evening, after she pinched a piece of thread off of Ameer’s coat and saw him off, Goli knocked on the madame’s door. “Will you let me leave?” she asked standing in front of the large desk. “I want to raise my boy in a home. I want to make him a home.”
“With what money, h
oney?” the madame asked.
“I’ll work.”
“That’s what you are doing here, my flower.” The madame got up from her chair and patted Goli on the cheek. “After all I did for you, this is how you treat me? Without you, this house will be without a rose.” The madame said that with the authority of someone who had Goli’s birth certificate locked up in a safe, but with such honesty that Goli believed she actually liked her.
“Will you marry me?” she asked Ameer the next time she saw him. Ameer’s response was the promise of more money in her bank account. “Will you help me run away, then?”
Ameer looked up from the baby at Goli on the loveseat pulling up her knee-high red stockings to prepare for the night. “There’s snow and wretchedness outside,” Ameer answered. “Either will kill a baby. Plus if you are not here, how can I find you?”
Although he did not take Goli very seriously, when he left that night, Ameer went to the madame. He drank the tea that she poured him and paid extra for the night. He slapped a few more bills into the woman’s hand before saying goodbye. “This is for keeping an eye on the both of them,” he said. When Ameer came back the next week, Goli had escaped with her baby. Ameer was sure she would soon be back. The madame’s men would find her wandering in the streets nearby or in some park as she tried to find a place for the night. But Goli never returned.
