up against of a sea of thousands. Bobbing signs with the face of Ayatollah Khomeini. Allahu Akbar. God is great. Death to the Shah. Death to America. God is Great.
“I am not the hero of my life.”
Arshan sighs. It is time. Time to remember, to confess. Time to repent.
Arshan is swimming upstream. He’s fighting to ride the wave of people taking to the main boulevard. The chanting consumes him, like plasma he has to carve through with his limbs. Above the zombielike shuffling of the crowd, Arshan thinks he hears the boots of soldiers. And helicopters. There is a knot in his stomach the size of a pomegranate.
As the marchers coalesce onto the main street, Arshan pauses at the curb, holding on to a lamp post and stepping onto a car’s bumper to get his bearings. He was right. Soldiers are advancing from the opposite direction. He has a front-row seat to see what happens when the two factions collide.
Arshan realizes he is holding his breath, which hisses from his lips at the first wave of gunfire. The front wave of people is picked off like soda cans. The rest of the thousands duck or scurry off to the sides, causing the car under Arshan’s feet to sway and shake as if in an earthquake.
Arshan tries to maintain his position. He scans the faces that are streaming past like rats fleeing the sea.
When the soldiers fire another round, the screams unite into a collective shriek and the herd stampedes.
Arshan is shoved to the ground, landing atop a teenage boy. He grabs the kid by his jaw and peers into his face, hoping. But it’s not his Reza. The boy’s hands and face are bloody and as he returns Arshan’s panicked look, he melts in Arshan’s hands, from a strapping teenager into a terrified child. Arshan takes his collar and drags him out of the street. He hides behind the car and turns his attention back to the boulevard.
More and more people are mowed down by the soldiers. Men try to shield their comrades only to fall helplessly to the ground. Boys slip in the blood of their best friends. Even as they try to run away, men are shot in the back.
At Arshan’s side, an old man clutches his clothes and sobs in disbelief.
Arshan still sees no sign of his son. He doesn’t recognize anyone, any of Reza’s friends or fellow students. Maybe he went home. Maybe his fear sent him home.
And then he sees it.
On the ground, beneath the horde of soldier’s boots. A green jacket.
A strangled sound escapes Arshan’s lips. The old man next to him seems to sense what’s about to happen.
Arshan makes to dart into the street, but the old man grabs his shirt with surprising tenacity. The soldiers continue to advance, trampling triumphantly over the dead bodies in their path.
Arshan watches, frozen, as a soldier approaches Reza’s body. He puts out his hands as he watches the soldier, not much more than a boy himself, raise his weapon.
The soldier fires into his son’s chest, sending Reza’s body flailing like a narwhale harpooned on the deck of a ship.
Arshan turns and buries his face in the old man’s breast. Now the father is the child, learning too late the dark side of fate.
CHAPTER
44
NO ONE’S NOTICING THE SUNSET THIS TIME. THE silence is broken by a flick of Jesse’s lighter and the crackling of cigarette paper. She takes a deep puff and inhales slowly, almost as if she will speak. But there is nothing to say to a parent who has lost a child.
“Maliheh became somebody else. She buried inside of herself and whispered all her thoughts to gestating Mina. Maybe that’s why Mina was born with all the wisdom of a woman. She absorbed the profundity of a mother’s heartbreak. My family intervened. They arranged our move to the United States through a cousin in Washington. Maliheh said she didn’t care if we went to the bottom of the ocean. America would do.”
Arshan sits forward, rests his elbows on his knees and scratches his beard with both hands. He sighs with utter exhaustion. “So that is how we came to America. My family gave us money until I found a job. When she was eight months’ pregnant, Maliheh was in a highway car accident with my cousin. My cousin lived. Mina was born by emergency cesarean. But Maliheh died in the hospital before I could get there. They told me it was a miracle that my