worked as the editor of a tabloid that published photos of actresses and soccer players on its covers. He did not like it, but it was an easy job. It paid.
Ahmad and Zeeba put Khan into his wheelchair every morning before dawn according to his instructions. With the knocking of the girl on his door, Ahmad woke up and dragged his feet in the snow to Khan’s room, eyes barely open, nodding to Zeeba’s “good morning!” and admiring her punctuality and perseverance. They would roll Khan first to his side and then to a sitting position. Hugging him tight, chest to chest, Ahmad lifted Khan and put him in the chair before going back to bed. Like a child on a bike, gliding out of one room and into the other, smiling at everyone, the old man rolled around the house until late in the evening. He had regained his freedom to move without depending on others, and the joy was too great to harness. Ahmad found a broken door in the trash and made a ramp from the veranda down into the yard. On days when no one was home to push him back up the door, Ahmad would return from teaching to find Khan stuck in the yard. He brushed the snow from his grandfather’s lap and Astrakhan hat and then took him in, waiting for someone to return before he left for the tabloid office.
Three weeks before the end of calendar winter, Khan heard the honking of a car horn from behind the front door. Horns blasted every day in the alley to warn the children who played outside and the men who threw shovelfuls down from the roofs. But the car honked a second time, a third. Khan called Zeeba, but Pooran came out of the house and crossed the yard. In the street, Ahmad stuck his head out the window of a new beige Peykan with a smile that she’d last seen on his face the day when he expected Homa’s return. The car’s wipers scraped clean the flakes that landed on the windshield. Shortly thereafter, Khan was in the front seat and the rest of the house in the back: Lalah and Zeeba flanking Pooran on either side. They rode along the streets and watched the excitement of the new year: cars crowding the streets, people shopping for new clothes, women wiping windows, men on ladders hanging clean curtains, and red tubs of goldfish in store windows for the Haft Seen tables. They drove by the police cars and army Jeeps parked in major squares. They went to the Sawee Park and watched the animals in its small public zoo. Lalah and Zeeba took turns pushing Khan’s wheelchair up and down the pathways. With a sisterly patience, Lalah described the park to the blind girl, the tall pine trees white with snow, the peacock with barely any feathers on his tail, the sickly bear sitting on its hind quarters in his dark and small cage, the handful of ducks waddling and quacking in a modest pond frozen solid, but for a small hole the keeper cracked open every morning, and the one rabbit chomping on a lettuce leaf. On their way back, Lalah hugged her father’s neck from the back seat.
The car was an investment, a tool Ahmad needed for his third job. After he left the tabloid office, he worked as an unofficial taxi driver, driving around the city to pick up passengers who waited on the side of the street. He worked until minutes before the curfew, and so he was not home the day his mother found the kittens.
The spring cleaning had started two weeks before the New Year. Anything not washable had to be swept or scoured or wiped or rinsed, from top to bottom: first the four rooms on the roof, then the house proper, then Agha’s room in the yard, and finally, the basement. Pooran heard the weak meowing before she saw them in a corner by the bookcase: three black-and-white kittens that could barely walk. One with a white tail was more adventurous; it braved a few wobbly steps ahead looking around and glancing at the big woman standing with her arms akimbo. The other two looked up as if not sure whether to be afraid. The white tail took a few steps toward Pooran. Ahmad must have left the door ajar, she thought. She had seen that many times, since she was a child, cats delivering