car. When they were saying goodbye to the small crowd, shaking hands and hugging, the voice of Khan came. Khan had not said it, but it was his voice, from the past, words that had lived in those mountains for twenty years now. “These bloods are on your hands, Mulla.” Hollow and cold, clear and alive, the voice came sweeping through the alleys and wandered away. If the cemetery had not been covered, like the Orchard, with snow, Khan would have visited Mulla’s grave.
Majeed started the car. Men from the village helped push the vehicle out of the snow and a few moments later they were on the road back to Tehran. To Ahmad’s left, Agha’s absence sat on the backseat bright and buoyant. Majeed turned on the headlights. It was getting dark and there was still a long way until the Revolution. In that situation the opening line of a new poem came to Ahmad. Something told him they were the words to start a great fire.
24
ALAH MADE MOLOTOV COCKTAILS, without her parents knowing. She was a fifteen-year-old beauty and she could see that in the mirror. Her wavy hair was a dark walnut color, like her sister’s, but Lalah alone spent a long time in front of the mirror combing. Whatever empty bottles she could lay hands on she wrapped in rags and tucked away at the bottom of her bag. After school, Lalah walked with Shireen to her basement where they stashed their bottles, half-filled them with petrol and engine oil, and ripped wicks off old clothes. That much Lalah could do, but she was not daring enough for the rest. It was Shireen who passed the bottles to the boys.
Shireen’s widowed mother had no authority over her. Every month or two Shireen’s uncle drove his eighteen-wheeler back to the city, sat her down, tried to talk some sense into her, and then beat her with his belt. After he closed the door behind him, Shireen was back in the basement and then out on the streets passing bottles and spray-painting slogans. “He’s kind in the heart,” Shireen told Lalah. “He brings me these plants, too, when he comes, but, boy, is he strong.” When working in the basement, the girls talked about which boy Shireen would meet. They were a group of four that Lalah had seen from a distance at two rare daytime rendezvous. She liked Ebi, the smaller one with the large ball of curly hair and sideburns that widened down to his earlobes. He could be a singer. “But he’s shorter than you,” Shireen said the first time Lalah admitted this. Shireen was into the older one in the group, “the man,” as Lalah called him. He was much older than the other three, in his fifties maybe. He combed his pepper-salt hair into a side part. His name was Ameer.
The transfer of the explosives had to take place under the cover of the night and that was when Lalah had to be home. Her father wanted her back before dark. “He’s become timid since he quit,” she told Shireen one day, sitting at her vanity trying on her lipstick. She remembered the day Ahmad resigned from the parliament, when he came home and took his wife and children to the park. “He does that when he feels guilty,” she said into the mirror, “he rounds us up and takes us out.” Leaning close to the mirror and pressing her cherry lips together, she remembered the day: the park was covered in snow. Flying back and forth on the metal seat of the swing that stung her bottom, Lalah could see her parents talk, her father sitting on a bench, her mother standing, not able to bear the coldness of the green-painted concrete. Leyla was walking around the white playground, kicking snow. Lalah knew something was not right, and her parents were trying to make it seem as if everything was under control. Kicking her feet, she made the swing go faster, but she was not enjoying it. They went to a restaurant and afterward had saffron ice cream with pieces of pistachio and chunks of hard cream. From that day on Ahmad worked at home. Within a year, he finished the collection of poetry he had begun with bloody eyes. He refused a second call from the Ministry of Publications and Information. It was shortly after that when Homa found Haji on a snowy day.
* * *
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IN HIS MONTH-LONG DETAINMENT, THE prayerwright