to buy his own copy, tossed it onto the pile of permitted items.
“I got it,” Salman said from behind the glass.
“What? What did you get?”
“It’s just a bunch of poems about flowers and whatnot. It’s trash. But I think you already know what else it says.” Sara shook her head. “You’re lying,” Salman whispered. “Tell me.”
“You’ll be out in five years,” Sara said, pleading.
“I know that.” Salman leaned forward again, resting his elbows on the narrow ledge in front of him. “You think I’m a child? You think this is child’s play to me? You think I want to go back in that hell?” he lowered his voice and threw nervous looks around.
“Then what do you want to know it for?”
Salman sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest as if he did not have a good answer for the question. “Curiosity maybe,” he said. “I just want to know what on earth can come out of crappy poetry.”
Sara fell silent for a long moment. Salman could see the white hairs she had tried to hide by dying her hair, which had started to grow out. She put her little finger to her mouth and chewed on the nail for a few moments until she lifted her face and shook her head. “No, Salman, I can’t,” she said. “I can’t sleep knowing that you even know what you know now.” She got up from her chair. “Just throw the book out, please, if you care about me.” She left before the visit time was over.
Salman did not throw the book out. That evening he lay down in his bunk and started reading from the beginning. Two thirds into the book he came to a line that caught his attention. He sat up and read again. Two plus two is all I need. The sentence sounded familiar, fraught with memories of a day in the distant past when he was riding on Ahmad’s back, his feet burning with welts from Mulla’s cherry branches. Salman sat up. It took him less than two weeks before he could break the code, reading the second words of the second lines.
* * *
—
AHMAD WALKED TO HOMA’S DOOR every other week. She would let him into her rented apartment and make him tea while Ahmad looked around at what seemed like the bare minimum put together: two secondhand chairs and a small wooden table in the living room on an old rug, no photos on the walls, the windows without curtains. Homa brought out the teas. She would ask about Lalah and wait patiently for Ahmad to write, her legs crossed, her hands clasped in her lap, like a doctor waiting for her patient to finish undressing. The telltale signs of impermanence in the sad apartment gave Ahmad hope and brought him back the next time. Every time, Homa saw him to the door and sent him back out.
Months later, Homa’s name appeared in Ahmad’s poetry for the first time. Homa read the poem in Black and White, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. At his desk in Agha’s room, Ahmad wove her into his words for two years. One night, his heart crumpling like paper, in a rare moment of pure and sincere creativity, Ahmad wrote the poem that became the apex of his art. The poem started to emit a strong light by the first line. Midsecond line, a small flame fluttered from under the tip of Ahmad’s pen. He slapped the fire out and ran out of Agha’s room. The first metallic thing he found in the kitchen was a stainless-steel tea tray in the sink. As he scratched words on the back of the tray, the steel grew warmer and warmer until Ahmad could not hold the needle any longer. He wrapped the tray in a blanket and hurried out into the blowing snow, hugging it and enjoying the warmth it produced. At Oos Abbas’s forge, he put on welding glasses and the leather gloves they wore while working with hot metal. Using a nail, he finished the poem on a workbench at the back of the forge and watched how the tray gradually grew red hot on the last word of the poem. The red spot grew brighter. Molten steel dripped onto the table leaving a hole in the tray. He then tried the poem on an unfinished window frame with the same result. It was not a poem to ever be published. To bore a