HMAD WAS A TEN-YEAR-OLD BOY when he was a ten-year-old boy. Never would he have thought, as he played tag with his childhood friends in the village of Tajrish, that he would one day watch his best friend’s father bite off a dead cat’s ear. Ahmad could not have foreseen that he would one day work in a forge, pounding white-hot iron with a heavy hammer. His childhood imagination could never have pictured the trains that sped through tunnels under the big city, in which one grasped for a hanging strap. In short, Ahmad Torkash-Vand could not have fathomed that the fog that shrouded the village that early summer morning would change the course of their history.
On Ahmad’s sister’s wedding day, the morning fog descended the mountains as if some god had summoned it from the far seas. Many in the village had been in preparations since the marriage was announced by Ahmad’s father one month before. On the Day of the Fog, as it would later be called by those who decided to stay, a knocking woke Ahmad from his sleep. The sound traveled, jerky and anxious, from the front door, across the yard, into the house, along the hallway, and into Ahmad’s bedroom. For a few seconds he thought he had heard the rap in his dreams. His eyes were closing again when the repeated pounding yanked him out of sleep. He sat up remembering his sister’s wedding. His mother had told him the night before that she would leave for the Orchard with the women from the neighboring houses shortly after dawn to prepare for the ceremony. She had asked him to let the chickens out of the coop, scatter some feed, and not forget to get them back in before leaving for the Orchard. That was his only chore for the morning.
The house was quiet. “Mom!” Ahmad called out toward his closed door. He sprang up from his sleeping pad on the floor to look out the window. Behind the white lace curtain, a fog had fallen so dense he could barely make out anything in the courtyard. With its chain-link fence lost in white, the coop was no more than the ghost of a large cage with blurry wooden posts. The blue hoez that reflected the overhanging elm branches in its calm water every morning had dimmed into an unidentifiable dark patch. Ahmad heard the nervous knocking again and this time Salman’s voice came with it: “Ahmaaaad!” Ahmad was not unfamiliar with Salman’s banging on the door, which often meant play time out in the dirt alleys or outside the village on the mountain trails, shooting pebbles at sparrows with slingshots. But his friend had never come so early in the morning, when it was time to prepare fresh meat for the customers and he had to lend a hand at the butchery. In response to Salman’s shout, the rooster, Ahmad’s favorite in the coop, cried out a hoarse ghoo-ghooli-ghoo-ghoooooo.
“Coming,” Ahmad shouted as he stepped onto the wide veranda that overlooked the courtyard. The fog was the thickest Ahmad had ever walked into. If he had not already known where the hoez, the flower beds, the coop, and the cauldrons were, he would have lost his way in the limbo of the large yard. “Ahmad, hurry! It’s your father.” Suddenly the fog seeped into Ahmad’s chest. From the pile of shoes and slippers, he threw on the first pair he could find, ran down the four steps into the courtyard, and sprinted to the front door. Salman was restlessly shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Worry shot from his eyes. Without a word, he started running. Ahmad ran after him, along alleys in which fog flowed like a river toward a white sea. In front of him, Salman was a ghost, only half-visible, partially dissolved. Ahmad had to exert himself to catch up with his swift-footed friend lest the fog eat him altogether. He kicked off his slippers. The only sounds were their steps on the ground, and their panting. The rest of the world had gone. Ahmad tried to think what might have happened to his father. He followed Salman around a corner and came to the open area in front of the mosque where a murmuring crowd had gathered. The people close to the entrance were more visible while the ones on the periphery blended into white.
“Here comes his son,” someone shouted. The people Ahmad could see turned their heads toward