until he had to squint at the paper. It was a game of light and dark. At that moment the door opened and Homa came in with the girls. Standing by the desk, the kids watched, mesmerized by the light that shot from the paper onto their father’s face. Homa jumped up and down on the bed before she let herself flop down. She spoke nonstop for an hour. “Are you starting a new book? This one will be even better than the other ones.” Lying on her side, she propped up her head on her palm. “When the New Year comes, we should take a trip. No, two trips: one with the four of us, and one with my family. And this time you’re coming too.” She said they had to go skiing before the winter ended. And she told Ahmad what she had planned to do in a few years when the girls would be a little older. “I’m going to go to university.” She had contemplated it through and penned down her long-term plan. “I can’t be a housewife my whole life.” In the course of two or three years, she would decide what she wanted to study and prepare to take the entrance exam. Ahmad smiled and nodded. “And I can’t wait to read your new poems to my parents.”
In the middle of the night, Homa woke up feeling the sun had come up too early, then she saw Ahmad hunching over his desk, working, the shadow of his head stretching across the ceiling like a dark ghoul looming behind him. Ahmad turned his head, eyes half-closed, smiled at her, and turned back to his work. For five days and nights, Ahmad did not leave his desk and Homa slept in the girls’ room. He slipped each full sheet into the drawer, rubbed his eyes, and took out a new piece. The first day, Homa brought in food and water and took back the cold, untouched plate from Ahmad’s desk. He would not answer, as if he could not hear her. “You’ll go blind,” she said shaking him on the shoulder. She tried to pull him out of his chair, but with a swing of his strong, blacksmith’s arm Ahmad brushed her off like a bull’s tail a fly.
On the fifth day Ahmad was writing around dark-red spots on the page that, to his eyes, were ink black. When she opened the door and saw the red streaks on Ahmad’s cheeks, Homa screamed and ran to the phone.
The two days Ahmad spent at the hospital were filled with visits, short and unidirectional, from politicians of both sides, the progovernment and the factions critiquing the Shah. Mr. Zia came the first day.
“Listen to me, Ahmad,” Mr. Zia said, “I have some bad news for you. The New Iran Party will withdraw their support for you. My uncle won’t do much either. I don’t know why. Either they think they can’t get what they want or something else is going on.” He looked at Ahmad’s long face, a week-long beard on his cheeks, still on the white pillow, tilted up toward the ceiling with the white squares of bandage over his eyes. “Do you hear me?” Ahmad’s light nod was free of consternation. “I keep trying to get to the bottom of this. I promise I’ll do whatever I can for you. Even if you don’t want it, you can always count on my friendship. I promise you won’t see me anymore.”
In the dark, Ahmad listened to ten or fifteen voices one by one, on his left and right. To some he could not attach a face. One such voice was the deputy of the Ministry of Publications and Information who offered him a position. Ahmad listened in silence. “I am familiar with your literary endeavors. This is government, Mr. Torkash-Vand. This is where you can fly, if you already have wings that is, and I know for a fact that you do.” A sad, white light shone into the room from the blanket of snow that covered the flat roofs and the tops of walls outside. On a parked car, cat footprints drew a line from the roof to the hood, continued on the ground, and faded out in the snow over a flower bed. The deputy minister left his number on Ahmad’s bed. Some time passed in silence. Ahmad wished he could see the snow. He listened to the sounds of the hospital: the clicking of