Sara, that baffling woman, had thrown him off again. That could not have been Ameer. Within a short moment, the nebulous picture evolved into detailed reality. The boy was not a boy. He was a man, with a beard and a black mustache in sharp contrast with his white, soft skin, standing with one hand in his pocket, the other nonchalantly swinging a blue cap. “Close your eyes, please.” When he could make out the details of the faces, Ahmad saw consternation on Sara’s and disinterest in the young man’s. He looked for his pen and pad, but Sara intervened. “Mr. Torkash-Vand, this is Ameer.” She looked at Ahmad as if secretly confessing to a wrong they both shared the blame for. The twelve-year-old boy looked twenty and Sara knew that.
“What’s wrong?” Ameer asked, turning to Sara, a suspicious look on his face.
“Nothing,” Sara said.
“He knows me?”
“No, honey,” Sara said, “that’s not what this is about.”
“It’s about the beard again?”
“No, Mr. Torkash-Vand’s eyes aren’t used to the light yet.”
Ahmad looked at them for a little while.
“I know what this is all about,” Ameer said. “Yes, I have a beard, so what?” He stormed out of the room and left the door half-open.
Ahmad picked up the gauze and put it back on his eyes—rolled at the edges, the tape would not stick well—and ran his fingers over them with extra pressure as he turned his back to Sara, lying on his side and pulling the blanket over him.
“He’s just a bit precocious, but nothing’s wrong with him.” Sara took a step toward the bed. “Please help me find Salman. He always looked up to you.” Ahmad did not move. He felt the bed depress under the weight of Sara. “Remember that Russian officer, Sergey?” Sara said, her voice near now. “You remember how my father dragged me out of the Orchard after people started gossiping about me and the Russian, don’t you? I don’t know if you know, but they talked about Khan and you, too. People talked about me and you alone in your room. But even then, when Salman was mad at you, he never spoke ill of you.” Ahmad listened in his darkness.
“Please help me find him, Ahmad.” He heard her get up from the bed, put her coat back on, and slide the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “And the boy is really okay, Ahmad,” she said after a little pause. “He’s just tired of the stares. He’s all I have.” Ahmad heard her heels tick away toward the door. Then the hinges squeaked, and, behind the closed door, the clicking receded into silence.
Homa came after visiting hours with a bowl of Ahmad’s favorite soup. Have my phonebook with you? Ahmad wrote. “No. Why?” Can you get it tomorrow? And messenger boy? “I’m not letting you open your eyes,” Homa said. “Work can wait.” It can’t. Short messages. Will write eyes closed.
In the dead of night, while Homa snored in her chair, Ahmad lay awake with his bandaged eyes closed thinking about Ameer.
22
O ONE KNEW HOW THE REVOLUTION BEGAN. Years later, long after the Shah had flown away and throngs of revolutionaries celebrated in the streets of Tehran, everyone searched their minds to find an event that marked the beginning. To the many religious, the day the tank rode into the cinema, Black Thursday, was the tipping point. The leftists went back to the incident a few years earlier when a group of armed Fadaee Guerillas attacked the Siahkal post by the Caspian Sea and killed three gendarmes with machine guns and hand grenades to free an arrested comrade. To Khan, it was always the cats.
By Black Thursday, Khan no longer harbored any doubt that the people in the streets, the leftists, the parliament, the government, the army, were all being driven by feline plots, but were gullible enough to believe themselves effective players in the game. He had improved his techniques when he found medieval mystic literature on the behaviors of animals and animates, and the calculations regarding good and evil. After Sergey’s death, he removed the partitioning curtain, emptied the basement of the cages, the vice, and the trash and turned the space into a small library. Shuffling heavily, he would bend one painful knee after the other down the four steps to the door that he no longer kept locked. With a shaky hand he leafed through the yellowed pages as he wheezed in the musty air.