by Ali Araghi
I have kept our home like it was.
Homa looked at the paper for a few moments. She took a tissue from a nearby table and dabbed at her eyes before tears slid down her mascaraed eyelashes. Then she lifted her face and looked at Ahmad, unable to say a word. Ahmad could not interpret the look on her face. Finally Homa’s lips quivered and a tear came down, leaving a dark trail on her cheek. “I found someone else, Ahmad.”
Ahmad turned around and strode outside to lose himself in the craze of the wedding. In the neighbor’s yard, he filled cup after cup with the bitter fluid. He danced with his daughters in the circle of guests and the few tears that fell on his tie everyone thought were of happiness. Then he held his son-in-law’s hand and motioned for more upbeat music. Although banal and sloppily put together, the words of the song churned in his head, seeking but failing to find a way out. He danced with Reza and cajoled some of the other guests onto the floor. Fingers snapped, hips gyrated, foreheads beaded with sweat. Ahmad pushed through the circle of dancers to Khan and careened his wheelchair into the middle, whirling the old man around on the back wheels. Khan waved his cane in the air and twitched his mustache by pouting his lips. He whooped and clapped his hands and when Ahmad turned to take him back, he threw his hand up and shouted, “No, no! More, more!”
When his wet shirt stuck to his body, Ahmad sat at an empty table, wiped his neck and forehead, and watched: a young man danced as if he was doing jumping jacks, boys and girls kept bouncing up and down on the floor, people were in conversation across the garden, a lascivious, old man tried to flirt with a girl in her twenties, and two naughty little boys plucked from the walls the little bright poems and shoved them into their pockets, from which rays of light shone. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around to find a man standing by his side. It took Ahmad’s tired eyes a few seconds to focus on the bearded face and recognize his old friend in a smart, white suit and trimmed hair combed back.
“The whole neighborhood has been talking about the wedding of the poet’s daughter,” Salman said in answer to Ahmad’s questioning looks. “Word gets around, my friend.” He pulled out a chair and sat down. “I missed you, brother.”
Ahmad slung his arm around Salman’s neck. Sitting at that metal table, surrounded by oohs and aahs from the dance floor, the two men scoured at the rust on their friendship, trying to find the person they once knew under the changed skin and sharp face bones. Should I ask about those years? Ahmad wrote. “It’s a happy day today,” Salman said sitting back, smiling a cheerful smile. “Why waste it on sad things?” Ahmad drank from his cup and nodded. “Let me tell you about the good things.” It was then that Ahmad found out the Air Force Arsenal attack had been carried out with his poem.
“If the movement ever gets anywhere,” Salman said, “you can claim being no small part of it.”
Ahmad pulled his arm away. And if it doesn’t? Ahmad wrote on his notepad. And if they find out it was me?
“You don’t trust me,” Salman said, “and you have all the right. I messed up once. But you saved me from that hell. This time, they won’t get their hands even on my dead body.”
Does anyone else know?
“Two or three comrades, yes, but I’d trust them with my life. And they don’t know who wrote it.”
Ahmad stared at Salman for some time, as if pondering something that could be written in a book with the word sorrow in its title. Then he wrote on his notepad. I’m a terrible person. I put you in prison. “That’s water under the bridge, Ahmad.” Salman tried to console him. He put his hand on Ahmad’s thigh, but Ahmad was now crying. I put you in prison, he wrote again. I took your youth. He lifted his head and stared into Salman’s face as if he was not seeing him. Then he wrote again. I’m despicable. “What happened would have happened without you, too. You were an excuse, you were nothing.” Salman did not know if his words meant anything to Ahmad, who looked at him with his lips pressed together and his head sorrowfully shaking. After long moments filled with music and happy sounds, Ahmad nodded his head and wrote: I think you’re right. Salman was relieved, but Ahmad continued: I’m nothing. His shoulders shook with a new bout of crying. “That’s not what I mean,” Salman drew closer and threw an arm around Ahmad’s neck, but before he could say anything else, Ahmad lifted his head, with a look that showed he had found a great answer to an unsolvable problem. I know, he wrote, you have to slap me. “What?” Salman read with a frown. Ahmad got to his feet and held his face out, leaning forward a little. “Sit down,” Salman said. With his hand mimicking a slap in the air, Ahmad urged Salman to hit him. “I’m not slapping you, Ahmad.” Ahmad took a step toward Salman and leaned forward. His red tie hung from his head as if his head was caught in an upside-down noose. Salman rose from his chair and took a step backward. “I’m not slapping you, Ahmad,” he said a little louder. He was getting nervous. Slap me, Ahmad mouthed as if shouting, taking another step forward and making Salman retreat, then he bowed his head and started crying again. This time Salman did not comfort him. He took another step back and buttoned his suit. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said, his voice calm again. “You can’t have everything you want.” He turned around and walked toward the dance floor. Pulling two wads from his pocket, he showered the couple with crisp ten-toman bills and left.
* * *
—
A HEAVY SADNESS DESCENDED UPON the house after the wedding. For a few days, there was some activity as the workers tore down the arch with sledgehammers and fixed the wall where they had ripped it open. Then they took down the tarps and the scaffolding. Pooran looked at the yard and found it smaller. Soon a fine layer of snow covered the hoez, the yard, and the flower beds. Even without going up to Lalah’s room on the roof, Pooran felt the weight of that emptiness. “Come sit with me?” Pooran asked Khan who was resting in his bed. She helped him to his side and into his wheelchair. She pushed him to the living room and parked him by an armchair. Then she turned the radio on and sat. A light music played.
“What would we do, Khan, if Ahmad left us?”
“He won’t. He’s not that kind of a son. I know him.”
Pooran reached out and placed her hand on Khan’s arm. Khan smiled.
* * *
—
THREE MONTHS AFTER LALAH’S WEDDING, they came for Ahmad. When he opened his locker in the morning, a note fell onto the floor. He picked it up. It was bad handwriting, not naturally so, but as if intentionally.
The principal found out about the absences you’ve been ignoring. He ratted you out last evening. They’re coming today.
Ahmad looked around to see if anyone in the teacher’s room had noticed him. He tried to close his locker. Books and papers fell and made a loud echoing noise. Throwing hasty looks to his right and left, he picked them up and stuffed them into the locker and tried to close the door, but something else was keeping it from closing. He stopped trying, picked up his bag, and walked out of the teacher’s room. The books and papers fell again behind him. He rushed across the yard and motioned to the janitor, who guarded the gate, that he would be back shortly. A few minutes later, he sat in the Peykan. His hand was shaking. He fumbled with the bunch of keys before he could turn on the engine, and became a fugitive until the end of the Revolution.
Later he heard that agents had raided three classes and taken the teachers with them. He withdrew from his account what was left of his salary and drove toward Oos Abbas’s forge. The neighborhood had changed. New shops had opened: a pharmacy, an electric shop, a bank. Some buildings had been renovated, others had popped up where before there was nothing. The street was crowded. When he got to where the forge had been, Ahmad found instead a dairy shop. Inside were large fridge display counters with white buckets of yogurt, yellow lumps of butter, and small containers of cream. He thought he had made a mistake. He walked up and down the sidewalk and looked into the shops again, but the forge was gone. Finally, he entered the dairy sh
op, his note ready in his hand. The man behind the counter told him Oos Abbas had died two years earlier. His family had sold the shop and returned to their hometown, Isfahan, to buy a house. Ahmad nodded a thank you and left. He spent a few nights at a cheap inn in East Tehran and looked for work, but found none. At the end of a week, he bought a shovel.
With the little that he earned, he found a basement room that belonged to a mechanic. Oos Saeed the Mechanic was short, wore his belt under his hanging belly, and looked for his cracked glasses on his tools table to read Ahmad’s notes. The stairs down to Ahmad’s room were at the back of the mechanic’s shop, the greasy black floor and walls of which reminded Ahmad of the forge. Every morning, Oos Saeed offered Ahmad tea before he set off for the streets. In the evening, if Oos Saeed had gone home already, Ahmad would open the small door installed in the larger metal gate and step alone into the dark garage. The days he was back earlier, he would sit and watch the mechanic work. “Pass the seven-inch wrench,” Oos Saeed would sometimes ask. “It seems like you’d have a lot to say if you had a tongue,” he said once, his head invisible in the engine of a car. “By the way,” he said another day, “why don’t you leave that nice car of yours inside when we’re free. And we’re free many nights. You’ll delay the rust and keep cats away.” Ahmad motioned for him to say more. “They crawl under cars, and into the engine. It’s warm after you kill the engine. They curl up there for the night.”
When a short while later General Akbar Oveisi, the chief of the gendarmerie, died in the mountains of the North, Ahmad asked the mechanic if the cats could tamper with the engine or some other part. The general’s car had veered off the road and tumbled down a valley. The mechanic was not sure. “What I know is you don’t want cat’s blood on your car when you start it in the morning,” he said. “It’s a bad omen.” The government blamed the event on the saboteurs and the announcement was made on the radio: the assembly of more than ten people was forbidden. Two days later Ahmad found a flyer in the garage. Ayatollah Khomeini had made a speech. The flyer was poorly made, the smudgy letters ran into one another.
They want to scare us. They want to separate us. They want to stifle the people’s movement. They want us at home so they can do their arresting and killing without a concern. I tell you that is what they want. I say this is a ploy. This is a plot. Heed not to the plot. Take to the streets. The regime has no legitimacy. The people have the legitimacy.
* * *
—
AND THEY DID. IT STARTED from the square that later was called the Square of the Eight. Within two hours a police station was attacked. The noncommissioned officers escaped. Rocks shattered the windows, a car was set on fire, and the three guns and some ammunition were snatched from the cabinets and drawers before army reinforcement arrived. Someone from among the protesters fired a shot and the commander ordered the soldiers to fire back. Everyone scattered; everyone except eight young bodies left with holes in them.
At a safe distance Ahmad jumped up into the back of a pickup truck by the street and witnessed the commotion. For the first time in thirteen years, he found himself at a rally. Fear of losing his legislative seat and dread of the intelligence system even after his resignation had kept him away from the streets. Now he was a runaway with no job and a shovel in his hand. He would not be able to read his poetry in front of people again. His name would not be published at the bottom of a magazine page, but on blacklists.
Ahmad looked around for cats. If they were helping the movement, or if they, and not people, were the cause of the movement, as Khan thought, they would be near. At first, Ahmad saw them here and there, apparently not doing anything helpful: sitting in trees, walking on top of walls, lying under parked cars, and running in less crowded patches of the streets. Busy barricading the streets, filling sacks with dirt, and breaking into government buildings, people did not seem to heed those everyday appearances and Ahmad, too, did not intend to be a bystander and only watch anymore. He jumped down from the truck and joined the crowd. Although he did not walk too far ahead, he chanted the slogans with the people in his head and felt he understood the occasional need to pick up a rock from the flower bed and hurl it at those khaki uniforms in the distance.
At some point, as he was walking ahead among the crowd, Ahmad heard noises from behind and saw that heads turned back and people hurried aside, as if to clear the way for something coming from behind. “Move over, move over,” a voice shouted. Ahmad turned and saw a wheel of fire rolling toward him in the middle of the street, shooting red flames that raged so high the snow could not put them out. He ran to the sidewalk. There were shouts and cries from all over. It was a tire, not a small one, but that of an eighteen-wheeler or a lorry. As it rolled past him, Ahmad saw for an instant an orange cat inside, running as if for its life and rolling the tire forward toward the rows of soldiers. Together with the crowd, Ahmad returned to the street in the wake of the tire and watched how the cat split open the uniform-wearers, too, with that hellish fire. It was then that he opened his mouth to shout the slogans with everyone, even though no sound came out.
* * *
—
“HELLO?” POORAN SAID HALTINGLY INTO the phone. “Hello?”
Knock.
“Ahmad, is that you?”
Knock.
“How are you, my son?”
Knock.
“Are you taking care of yourself?”
Knock.
“Do you have enough money?”
Knock.
“We are good, too. Majeed was here this morning. He brought bread and some fruit. He’s a good boy. I haven’t been to Leyla’s in a week. I’m going this Friday. I don’t know what to bring for Behrooz. The other day he called and said, ‘Grandma, come play with me.’ I said, ‘I’ll come this Friday.’ He said, ‘Bring Aunt Zeeba, too.’ He’s such a sweet boy. I’m taking Khan, too. Otherwise Zeeba has to stay home to take care of him. Poor girl. She never complains. I said, ‘Khan, you need to come, you need to get out, it’s good for you and Zeeba.’ He grunted and growled, but it wasn’t like he meant it. He nags a little, you know, but I’ll take him…Ahmad…Are you there?”
Knock.
“Are you going to be at this number for a little while?”
Knock knock.
“Will you send me a new number again when you can?”
Knock…
“Ahmad.”
Knock…
“Are you coming home?…”
“Are you?”
Knock knock.
* * *
—
SO OLD AND WEARY WAS the sound of Pooran’s voice over the phone that if it were not for the news that came out toward the end of summer, Ahmad would have returned home to care for her. A fuel train heading for Tehran from the refineries in the South had been derailed. The tank cars blazed for three days before the snowstorm came to help. A week after the fire was out, some newspapers reported that the investigators had found poetic scrawls on the remnants of the tracks. They had no doubt that the incident had been an act of sabotage. A passenger train was derailed a week later, killing twenty people. A bank was robbed, the bars melted off security doors, the hinges on the vault an amorphous lump of metal on the floor.
Ahmad’s poem was going around in the hands of how many people, he did not know. His only hope was that the regime would not learn his name and Salman would be safe from danger. Whatever it was, it would end. It was less than a year and half until the day Khan had predicted as the culmination of the Revolution. That was not a long time. Ahmad could lay low in the dark and damp basement of Oos Saeed waiting for the cats and people to do whatever they were doing. Or he could take shelter among the people who filled the streets, the unnamed thousands bound by their shared desire for things to be otherwise. In that havoc of bodies running replete with hope and fear, Ahmad was a nobody. He had already made his choice. The day they wrapp
ed ropes and cables around the equestrian statue of the Shah and pulled it down, Ahmad was among the people yanking.
31
AKING UP FOR HER LOSS OF EYESIGHT, Zeeba’s ears had grown so keen she could hear what lovers whispered to each other in bed three houses away. Soon after Nana Shamsi brought her to Khan’s house, she learned to recognize the footsteps of each member of the family. From the sound of breathing in the room below, Zeeba could tell if Pooran was sleeping on her back or her side. If someone was eating downstairs, she could tell who it was and what they were chewing. So the night she heard the footsteps on the roof, crunching on the blanket of snow, she did not panic. It was Ahmad coming back. Zeeba heard him climb up a short parapet and jump lightly onto the roof of the adjoining building. She had missed the sound of his breathing, the way he put his feet on the ground with determination, heel first, even now that he was sneaking on the roofs of houses in the dead of the night. She listened to the alarm clock ticking by the side of her mattress on the floor. It sounded like a quarter to three. Finally the footsteps reached Khan’s house, jumping over onto the new room, Behrooz’s room, then creaking down the metal stairs to the roof of the main building. Then came the creaking of the elevator, the hum of the motor, and shortly after, Ahmad stood in the veranda, opened the door, and went in.
He sat at the telephone table in the hall and waited for the morning. A faint light came in from the yard; the snow had light in it as if saved from its descent through the sky. In fourteen years no night had passed in absolute dark. Hours went by in silence until a dampened call for prayer sounded from a mosque somewhere in the night. Not long after, a door creaked open and Ahmad saw his mother step out of her room. Halfway toward the kitchen, she stopped, paused for a second, and turned on the light.
