again. Khan raised his hand to throw his snowball, but suddenly froze in place. He received two or three more shots from Agha, but did not seem to mind. He did not remember having seen Agha as happy as he was now. Where had the old man found the force to throw snowballs so hard?
“I’ll be back,” Khan said hurrying into the house. He picked up the phone and called the doctor. A quarter of an hour passed before the bell rang. Agha was still playing when Khan opened the front door to the fedoraed, big-nosed man holding a brown leather bag in his hand. Standing tall over him in his trench coat, the doctor observed Agha in the large tray, happy in his warm clothes.
“Hello, Doctor?” Agha stretched his hand.
“How are you feeling today?” the doctor asked, shaking Agha’s hand, careful not to break the bones.
“Superb. I had forgotten what this was like.”
The certainty in Agha’s answer did not reassure the man. “Are you feeling any pain?” Agha shook his head. “Anywhere?” The tone of the question made Agha stop fidgeting. The joyous glow in his face faded as he looked up, intently shaking his head. The doctor put his bag down in the snow. “It’s okay, Agha,” he said as he knelt down. “Just give me your hand.”
Khan took a step forward and watched the doctor push up Agha’s sleeve and take his pulse. A few seconds passed. The doctor moved the tips of his fingers ever slightly on Agha’s wrist and looked up as if he were trying to see a bird that soared high up in the clouds. Finally, he straightened Agha’s sleeve and tucked it back into the glove. Then he got to his feet.
“Doctor?” Khan asked.
“I’m sorry, Khan.” He picked up his bag. “He giveth life and He taketh it away.” He tipped his hat. “Give my condolences to Pooran Khanum.”
The doctor left without brushing off the snow from his knees or the bottom of his brown bag. In the tin tray, Agha sat smaller than ever, his head bowed. Khan knelt down with difficulty. A tear dropped from Agha’s face onto the front of his coat. “Khan, I’m dead?” His voice was a high-pitched whisper. Khan put his hand on Agha’s shoulder. “You are more than alive to me.” Pain howled in Khan’s left knee like a wounded boar. Gingerly, he sat himself in the empty half of the tray, the two men’s legs stretched out over the edge, their heels pressed into the snow. Agha sniffed and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coat. “This was not supposed to happen.” Agha rested his head on Khan’s arm. Scattered flakes started to come down softly. Khan put his arm around Agha’s small figure and pulled him close.
When Pooran opened the door, the first thing she saw was the two old men sitting in a tray in the yard, the younger holding the older like a father and his son. What Khan told her about how Agha wanted to play in the snow was at odds with the paleness she saw on the small man’s face, with his leaden look and downcast eyes. After helping Khan up, she took Agha to his room and brought him hot, herbal tea. Agha’s silence was nothing new to her. The refusal to communicate, which she saw as hereditary in the family, left no question or suspicion in her, but only a familiar frustration. The day they went to visit Ahmad in the hospital, when Ahmad asked “is he okay?” she had thrown a sideways look at Khan knowing that Ahmad could not see. Before they left, Khan took advantage of a short time Pooran left the room and whispered his prognostication into Ahmad’s ear: “A revolution. In fifteen years.”
Will it succeed? Ahmad wrote.
“That’s not something I can tell, but the cats are doing their best.”
Pooran came back into the room with a big glass of carrot juice in her hand, the traditional remedy for eye maladies. The next night, when Homa slept in the chair beside Ahmad’s bed, Pooran put on her olive dress and draped her chador over her head. She sneaked out of the house and stood, twenty minutes later, in the shadows in front of Seyf Zarrabi’s shop. Of all the feeble street lights, only the one across from the fabric shop had a broken bulb hanging on a wire. Seyf had flung a piece of stone at it. City officials had