oil, Zeeba or Ahmad would carry back home. He sat in the kitchen with a tray full of lentils to be winnowed from chaff and small pebbles. He would wipe at the windows with a rag. All that, he did while fighting pain and drowsiness. Sleep came to him as erratically as a leopard pouncing over its prey. He hung his head and fell asleep in the oil line, sitting on his tin can until someone tapped him on the shoulder and told him to move ahead. He fell asleep at the kitchen table, the lentils unready, the lunch delayed. He left the windows dirtier, with spots of dust smudged across in curves. On his bed, in his room, he cried himself to sleep under the blanket. He spent much of his time in the basement, on a wicker chair padded with thin mats, warming his hands over the oil heater and watching Ahmad fidget with things. Soon he would doze off.
It was during one of Khan’s naps that Ahmad finally attached the camera to the cassette player, but his expectation turned to exasperation when he held a page of his poetry in front of the lens, yet nothing came out of the player except persistent silence. He experimented with other texts: a newspaper, a page from a book, and different handwritten notes before he replaced the video with a photo camera. After the picture was snapped, the film would roll into the cassette player to be processed like an audio tape. To no avail. Ahmad held his head between his hands and rethought his process. In front of him, sitting in the wicker chair in suit and tie, Khan’s head hung over his chest, his freckled scalp reflecting the yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Ahmad had the eye. He had the mouth. What was missing was the brain, something with which to translate image to sound. Reluctantly accepting that it would not be ready for the festival that year, Ahmad left his mindless machine on the table and promised himself that he would go back the following year with his machine complete. He packed his suitcase and took the train to the city of Shiraz, ten hours across a white landscape, sometimes circumscribed with distant hills or low mountains and other times free and unending like the ocean.
On the second day of the festival, the troupe Le Troisième performed a new piece, a dance and play combination with two men and two women, including choreographed abstractions of repeated sex. The actresses’ dresses, thin as fog and barely covering anything underneath, attracted more attention than anything else: the minimalist set, the lighting, the actors in leather pants, or the two cats dyed crimson red that played so harmoniously one had to wonder how they had been trained. Ahmad knew that was no negligible matter. An uneasy feeling told him that the cats were not only there as part of the show but rather, for the first time, he was seeing them make a mark on history. What those two little red animals could achieve by lithely placing one paw in front of the other, weaving between the legs of the actors, and leaping from one shoulder to the branches of the makeshift tree was something Ahmad could not fathom as he watched. Indignant, and offended by the indecency of the show, a group of protesters, clad in shrouds, set off from the religious city of Qom for Tehran. It was a three-day walk in snow, but they had set out with rage.
The festival was canceled and Ahmad boarded the train for Tehran without even having his poems read by someone else. In his compartment, the man sitting in front of him put his transistor radio on the shaky folding tray, and they heard that the Shiraz Art Festival was canceled not for that year only, but for good. When he arrived home, before he went to his room, Ahmad left his suitcase in the snow and went down to the basement. Khan was there, sleeping on the chair as if he had not woken since Ahmad left. Ahmad picked up the hammer and smashed his apparatuses to bits that could be held between a thumb and forefinger. Khan was startled awake and looked around for a few moments. Ahmad wanted to tell him something, but the old man’s eyes were too bad to read in the dim light of that basement. From now on, he wrote on a