bed and the window. What the photo did not show was that behind Lalah, in the short time while Majeed looked into his camera with one eye closed, instructing everyone to huddle more closely, Homa touched Ahmad’s pinkie with the tip of her forefinger as if cautiously testing a pot handle, until the camera clicked and saved that moment from oblivion.
* * *
—
THE NEXT AFTERNOON HOMA GINGERLY entered the room where Leyla was sleeping and bent over to watch the swaddled newborn in a calm sleep by his mother, trying to figure out who he had taken after. His eyebrows were high and his face open and inviting. He had Ahmad’s eyes and lips; in his forehead she saw traces of herself. She kissed Leyla on the forehead and turned up the heater before she left the room. Slipping into Pooran’s black galoshes, Homa crossed the yard and knocked on Ahmad’s door, turning the handle knowing that she would not hear a “come in.” Standing by the barred window, through which came a soft, white light, Ahmad was plucking dead leaves from his begonia on the sill. He had started to keep plants indoors in the years after Homa had left him, which Homa had learned from the girls who went to visit her in her apartment. Ahmad turned to her with a calm in his face that made Homa wish someone could snap a photo of him at that moment, so she could keep that frame on the table in her room.
“Ahmad, I want us to get back together,” she said, as if making a plea, as if it was the only thing that would warm her heart in that cold world.
Ahmad looked at her: brimming with a mature beauty, her cheeks rosy from the winds, and her tied hair tucked under her short-brimmed hat. Then he looked within himself and found a cornucopia of memories with that woman, the most vivid from the beginning when she came to that café with her chaperone to hear Ahmad’s poems. Bad memories were in his heart, like from the days when Leyla was gone, and Homa was a ghost, looking at him as if he was the devil incarnate. He went from memory to memory and from feeling to feeling, but no matter how deep he plowed, he was unable to find passion for her, even remnants of a lost one. He was surprised. He had not expected that moment would come. For the last years, every time he had gone to her door to silently plead her to come back, he had expected she would finally say yes, or something vague that would be a ray of hope for him. But she had so determinedly rejected him every time. Now his heart was empty. He shook his head.
The way Homa’s lips trembled for a few seconds, unable to utter a word, keeping her dark eyes fixed on Ahmad, with the door half-open behind her, with her galoshes still on, chunks of the ice and snow that clung to them starting to melt and slide down onto the doormat, that was how Ahmad would remember Homa in the future when years later, he asked himself, Did I make a mistake somewhere along the way?
27
N THE MONTH THAT IT TOOK the mason and his workers to make the new room for Behrooz, Ahmad readied himself for the Shiraz Art Festival which during the past seven years had turned into one of the most important summer arts events in the world. As well as the vanguards of performing and literary arts, tourists came for skiing. With the snow amassed for years, they had made slopes at the edge of the city, the core of which was hardened ice. With the hope of boosting the economy, the government had equipped the resorts with chair lifts and restaurants to attract worldwide tourists who looked to escape the summer heat. But the routes to get there were mainly closed. Roads were icy if not blocked, trains got stuck on the way for hours and days, and flying was limited to a handful of days in the year when black clouds were not rumbling and storms of infernal powers were not shaking the skies.
When the festival season came, though, the thousand-kilometer road from Tehran to Shiraz was plowed for the transportation of the guests and the queen, who supported and supervised the ceremony in person. The year before, Maestro Shahnaz had, for the sixth year in a