Pooran tried to calm Homa down and make Ahmad let go. She had never seen Ahmad’s face so red. He motioned for everyone to leave the room with such fury in his eyes that no one spoke a word. A short while later, he came out too and locked Homa in, ignoring her banging on the door.
In the following days, Ahmad wrote notes apologizing for the troubles he had caused, for his failures and shortcomings, but she refused to read them. To his inevitable question of why she had decided to leave, Homa had unconvincing and unspecific answers: “I just can’t anymore”; “I’m tired.” Ahmad would kiss her dead face, as if kissing a tree. I love you, he mouthed, Please, stay with me, he mouthed, but she looked away. Finally Ahmad would grab her lower jaw in his hand, turn her head to face him, and see his mouth form the words I love you and there is no way I’m letting you leave me.
Homa stayed locked in Agha’s room with the key safe in Ahmad’s pocket. In Ahmad’s mind was a tempest. Without conjuring them, thoughts appeared of how Homa would try to run away when he was not watching. A week had passed when one morning Ahmad stood on the veranda and imagined an escape path from Agha’s window into the yard, up the walls, and down into the alley. The next day, he went out and came back with Oos Abbas and the same welder he had bought some thirteen years before. The passage of time showed in the machine’s dents and scratches and flaked paint, just as in the wrinkles on the blacksmith’s face and in the slight slouch of his back. They talked as the old man welded bars across the window. Before he left, he shook Ahmad’s hand. “I don’t know what you’re keeping in that room, my boy, but something tells me you’re making the wrong decision again.”
For a month, Ahmad did not let Homa out of his sight. At night, he locked the door from inside before climbing onto his side of the bed, now with the permanent view of Homa’s back. When she had to be out in the yard or the house during the day, Ahmad left the door open to keep a nervous eye on the front door. He could not concentrate. Paper after paper he crumpled up and threw out. He turned his head toward the door and trembled with the cold wind that howled in and the snowflakes that landed on his writing and melted on his face. Soon he would get up and find Homa in the house. He would sit on the floor in the corridor outside of the kitchen, in the living room outside of Pooran’s room, outside every door his wife was behind. Homa took all this without resistance or complaint, without showing the slightest intention of flight. When locked in Agha’s room, she delved into her textbooks and read as if there was nowhere she wanted to be but inside the heart and kidney and stomach, within the rib cage. Three days a week, she walked with Ahmad to the bus stop and took the double-decker to the university. She would walk with him to her class and come out two hours later to find him standing in the corridor, like a naughty boy who had been expelled by his teacher, awaiting his fate at the principal’s office. Sometimes she would find him gesturing to a group of students who had recognized the big poet. But as soon as she stepped out, he cut the conversation and left the eager youths without waving goodbye. Across the snowy campus they walked toward the street that, in ten years, after the Revolution, would be named Revolution Street. A few new bookstores had recently opened next to the older ones.
Then one day, when Homa was deep into her textbook, Ahmad opened the door and came in, dressed in a long, dark raincoat and a black fedora. He stood in front of her and without a word or any significant gesture, pulled the key to the room out of his pocket, put it on the desk, and left. From behind the barred window, Homa watched him cross the yard, open the front door, and step out without turning around to take a second look at the house. The door closed with a clank. No one saw Ahmad leave but Homa. It was a cloudy afternoon.
25
MEER’S