street, away from the demonstration, and out of sight. Salman walked back to the main street, and having heard word that the gendarmes had opened fire a few streets away, hurried in that direction, but by the time he arrived, the wounded had been carried away. He had not witnessed the shooting firsthand that day, but he did see the bending of street signs and breaking of phone booths. He did see a young bearded man, mad with rage, hurl a rock through a sweets shop window and he was there when some men set fire to a school, and so he tried to understand what it was that Ahmad had talked about in his speech. For a few days after the incident, Salman thought about whether the brutality of the regime warranted violent reactions, but when a week later, dissidents were arrested in scores, he came home, pulled from under a pile of newspapers and magazines the paper with the news of Ahmad’s speech, and held a lit match to Ahmad’s photo.
In Mashdee’s grocery, Salman asked for rice. “Good rice is hard to find these days. I hope, I’ll have some soon.”
Stories circulated about the SAVAK’s tortures: bleeding welts on soles, metal beds with arm and ankle straps, electric shocks, and specially designed pliers to pull out nails. Salman now obsessively kept his hand on the pill in his pocket as he walked. Soon he even went to bed and woke up feeling for it through the fabric of the pouch as if his life depended on that little, blue capsule.
The day he was arrested, he had just stepped out of Mashdee’s store with eggs and tomatoes for dinner. They had talked about this and that as Salman fixed Mashdee’s fan that sat on the counter and refused to work faster than a windmill. Salman had his phase tester screwdriver clipped to his shirt pocket. That little screwdriver won 80 percent of his daily bread. He could cut wire with any knife and strip it with matchstick flame, but the phase-tester screwdriver was as indispensable as his thumb. Salman had known, since Mashdee never talked about rice, that the time to fight back had not come. When Salman was done with the fan, Mashdee plugged it in and turned it on—speed one—and the air blew away a newspaper from the counter. Salman did not accept the money Mashdee slid on the counter, and Mashdee said, in return, “Don’t even think about it,” when Salman fished coins out of his suit pocket to pay for the eggs and tomatoes. A bond more personal than that of a shared goal had started to form between him and the aged man.
Right outside of the shop a car pulled over. Holding a piece of paper in his hand, a man stuck his head out of the window and asked Salman if he could help him with the address. Salman had barely read the first words on the paper when he heard the back doors of the car open and felt someone grab his collar from behind. In a burst of force that erupted deep within, Salman managed to yank himself free and dodge the hands of the agent who had opened the front door and sprung out of the seat. Salman caught a glimpse of the holstered pistol under the agent’s flapping jacket. He sprinted away on the sidewalk as fast as his legs could take him. He knew he could outrun them. At the same time, he was making the plan of his escape: he would dart across to the opposite sidewalk and run against the traffic. He could lose them in the serpentine streets and alleys he had come to know like the back of his hand. For a fraction of a second before he had crossed the street, Salman’s mind wandered back to another sprinting years before through a thick fog toward his friend’s house. Now he was running to save his own life exactly because of the friend he had dearly loved. He pitied himself.
Then Salman was rolling on the ground. For the rest of his life, and no matter how he tried to remember, he never learned that he had simply tripped on a piece of rock on the sidewalk. If there was a right time for the pill, it was then. First he did not realize what kept him from putting his hand into his pocket, but when he lifted his hand, he saw his forearm had