her. It was too late now. After he motorized the elevator, Reza had come to the house a few more times. He was the first person Pooran called the day Khan’s wheelchair broke, when the left back wheel locked one morning and refused to budge at Zeeba’s pushing.
The next week Pooran called again and two hours later, Reza opened the trunk of his Nova to take out the tricycle Pooran had wanted, a gift for Leyla’s son, Behrooz. Never, from the very beginning, had Reza paid a visit without a tiny bouquet of flowers, even though fourteen years of winter had turned roses into items of luxury. Pooran made him stay for lunch or dinner. Ahmad drank tea with him and Khan found in him a backgammon rival. Reza had become part of the family even before Lalah could make any decisions. Everything had dragged on longer than its ideal course: Ebi had waited too long to propose; Lalah herself had failed to know her heart’s desire in time; the winter had lingered and lingered and lingered.
“I talked to my parents,” Ebi said on the other end of the receiver the next time in the booth. “My mother will call your grandmother as soon as I ask her. When do you think is best?”
At that moment, Lalah felt how lucky she had been years before when she stood on the other side of the door. She was never alone, she was free of concern, unfamiliar with the pain inside that yellow cubicle of iron and glass. She missed her sister. She missed her childhood. Overwhelmed, she did the thing she thought herself incapable of doing and told Ebi she had a suitor, someone her family approved of, someone well-off. A long silence fell. Seconds became minutes, minutes as long as hours.
“Are they making you marry him?” Ebi was confused.
Once again she had taken too long to hang up and now she was facing an even more difficult question: how could she be such a two-timing fraud? After she walked out of the telephone booth that snowy summer, Lalah never heard Ebi’s voice again. But even when there was not a strand of black hair left on her head, images of protests on TV or in the papers, anywhere in the world, reminded her of the boy who had held her hand and lead her panting along Tehran’s alleys, away from arrest and bullets. She could never again bear to take part in a demonstration herself, even during the last months of the Revolution when things happened that no one could have foreseen, when seven columns of smoke rose up from the city to the sky. Not even when the Shah flew away and Ayatollah Khomeini returned: the day the winter ended.
Years later, her own daughter graduated from high school and went, without her knowing, to a fortune-teller to see if she would pass the university entrance test. Lalah scolded her daughter, but later visited the old woman herself to find out whether she knew how to take love out of one’s heart. “Just whisper his name into this.” The fortune-teller held out an old tin can, dented on the side, like the ones canned tomato paste came in. “I can hold my ears if you want, but I already know his name.” Lalah looked into the can, but decided she wanted that small love in the corner of her heart to remain.
30
ALAH’S ENGAGEMENT TO REZA was arranged for the fall and the wedding for a year after. It was during that year that the Air Force Arsenal was conquered. Intelligence had not been able to determine what kind of tool was used to melt the fence, but speculated it had to be some kind of oxy-fuel torch. The unending curfew that was announced did not help the government. Soon, Down with the Shah! appeared among the spray-painted slogans on the walls. Until then no one had dared say anything about the king himself.
Even when the power cuts began, Khan defended the royalty with more and more conviction. Focused on Lalah’s imminent wedding, Ahmad would not answer the sarcastic remarks and bitter words that Khan threw at him from his wheelchair. With his thick glasses on, Khan shook the newspaper in Ahmad’s direction when he came home from work. There was not a day that the country was calm.
“Look what your felines have done this time? And you keep them warm in your room. In my house. I’ll kill them myself.