snapped in the middle, as if he had grown an extra elbow. Where was the pain of the broken bones then? Why hadn’t he heard the cracking of the radius? He tried to slide his left hand into his right pocket. The pill slipped out of his pinch a few times. Rolling onto his side to reach deeper, he saw the agents closing in. Sounds mixed in his head. His own panting, the approaching footsteps, the indistinguishable murmur of people crowding to watch the scene. The pill was between his thumb and forefinger. He paused for half a second. Less than that. Could he endure the pain and still live? Spend two, five, ten years behind the bars, but come out one day and walk in the fall again. He would eat ice cream. He would jump in the water. How painful could pain be? But they would not let him off the hook until he had given them all the information to arrest the others: Mashdee, Hooshang, Sara, even though she was not an active member anymore, others who he had never even met. Young boys and girls like him, who might have children of their own. What would happen to Ameer?
They would not let Salman off the hook. That was what he was most afraid of. The literal hook. Word was around about the hook house, a concrete room with no windows, down in the horrid mazes of some unknown building, where meat hooks dangled from the ceiling, reserved for the tight-lipped to contemplate on the upside down of the world with impaled ankles. That was it. He popped the pill into his mouth, but before he could swallow, they were on top of him. They turned him over. Two hands jerked his jaws open. A third reached into his mouth. Salman tried to swallow, but the fingers that slid down his throat made him retch. He tasted dust and iron and the pill came back out with greenish-yellow bile.
Once in the back of the car, Salman was blindfolded. He screamed as handcuffs made broken bone grate against broken bone. All along the ride, which seemed never-ending though he later found was very short, Salman repeated: “Not the hook, not the hook. His name is Mashdee. Not the hook.”
* * *
—
KHAN HAD BEEN THERE, TOO, seen it all. With the accuracy of a mathematician, he had predicted the exact day the streets were going to explode. Pooran had blocked his way at the door the night before the tank went through the wall of the theater. The weight of the years was visible in the old man’s face. Despite his efforts to shave his cheeks smooth, wax and twirl the ends of his gray mustache, and dress in a clean, pressed suit every day with his new Astrakhan, despite his evident hope to fight time, Khan had become what he had resisted his entire life: an old man. He walked slower and put more of his weight on his cane. The dull pains in his knees were now as real as the leaves of the trees in his garden, as certain as the dirt in the flower bed.
“You must get some rest sometime,” Pooran said with a disappointed concern, knowing Khan would do what he had dressed up for. She stepped aside when Khan reached for the door with a smile for an answer. Like the rest of them, like Agha and Nosser, like her own Ahmad, in Khan’s veins ran the secretive blood. But he had something the others lacked. An elegant charm that demanded respect, an equanimity that seeped even through anxiety and fear, even through absurdity. Sometimes Pooran felt that she had looked at Khan more as her own father than Nosser’s, not just after she became a widow, but since the very day she met her father-in-law.
That night Khan positioned himself on the street that his charts showed would see the opening scene. The patrol Jeeps passed, but either did not see him or were not threatened by an old man dozing off on the steps of a red brick building, his cane across his lap. The stores opened like every day: first the bakeries, then the coffeehouses and lamb-brains shops. The grocers whispered the name of God as they drove their keys into the padlocks. A few hours after the sun was in the morning sky, people started gathering, first as passersby. A military bus arrived. Conscript soldiers jumped down and blocked traffic.