Blood, Ahmad had become one of the most well-known poets in the country.
In what would otherwise have been summer, the burial garden of Hafez, a fourteenth-century poet, was shoveled clean. Six concentric steps climbed to a circular platform, upon which a dome, supported by eight high, marble columns, protected the centuries-old gravestone from the snow. Before this monument, seats were lined up in ascending rows. The shovelers kicked the trunks and shook the snow off the branches that arched over the arena. Flags were hoisted up poles and for ten days pioneers of avant-garde art and the paragons of traditional national literature and music stepped onto the stage in front of the audience and the two rickety cameras that sent hesitant pictures to television sets around the country. Ahmad was scheduled on day three. Before him, a traditional music ensemble performed, sitting on the steps of the old poet’s tomb and among them, Ahmad recognized Maestro Shahnaz. When, in the middle of a piece, the members of the group turned their heads toward the maestro and he started his solo, Ahmad saw how, like years before at his wedding, the trees budded in knobs of blossoms and shoots. Before the maestro was done, the stage and audience were covered in petals, one of which fell into Ahmad’s open book. He picked it up and looked at it: varying shades of pink, delicate, and real. He brought it to his nose, smelled it, and kept it as a souvenir.
After Ahmad’s reading came the first of a series of plays that would unfold in the course of seven years by Le Troisième, a French troupe that acted in French. The ménage à trois that the male and the two female actors depicted on the stage for two hours was incomprehensible for those who watched it on flickering screens. It was the first time Ahmad was hearing real French spoken and he understood every word of it. All the entries of Sergey’s dictionnaire snapped out of their alphabetical order in his head and rearranged themselves into the chagrin of one woman, the ambition of the other, and the whirling emotions on the stage. The three actors kissing one another goodnight in a shared bed was an outlandishly bizarre scene, the tingling guilt of which stoked the fire of religious indignations. Once again, the man who flew in from beyond the clouds with Ayatollah Khomeini’s speeches came carrying three new tapes in his bag and took a taxi, bound for the Hitachi tape recorder and the three microphones that awaited him in the basement.
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WHEN AHMAD RETURNED HOME FROM the festival, Homa welcomed him with a piece of paper in her hand and a beaming face. She had been accepted to the school of nursing at the University of Tehran. Her first semester would start with the beginning of fall. “Who knows. One day I may become a doctor and set your voice right myself.” To celebrate, Ahmad and the girls made her a cake. Homa watched them work in the kitchen. The would-be high schooler, Leyla, was tall enough now to reach the top shelf, her long skirt no longer reached her ankles. Lalah was an inexhaustible hand to Leyla, hurrying to the fridge to fetch things. Her tongue stuck out from between her lips as she concentrated to properly crack eggs or stir the batter. To Homa’s surprise, Ahmad looked at home in the apron. He did not even clean his hands with the apron as she would have guessed, but used the proper kitchen towels.
Before school started, they went on another trip to Homa’s parents’ villa where the trio of bakers made a bigger cake to celebrate. Homa’s uncles, aunts, and cousins were all there, along with the cousin who chaperoned Homa on those first days at the café. After lunch, the men sat at a table drinking Colonel Delldaar’s homemade vodka and playing cards. “Whatever happened to that friend of yours?” Colonel Delldaar asked Ahmad. “I wish I could have done something for you.”
With a sense of premonition in his father-in-law’s interest, Ahmad brushed the matter off. He suspected that by asking for news about Salman, he had placed himself in a vulnerable position. If he had stayed in politics, it could have been a threat for his career, but even now he did not want to be on the blacklist of the intelligence service. His poetry was enough to make him fit for any label, from agitator to