number again when you can?”
Knock…
“Ahmad.”
Knock…
“Are you coming home?…”
“Are you?”
Knock knock.
* * *
—
SO OLD AND WEARY WAS the sound of Pooran’s voice over the phone that if it were not for the news that came out toward the end of summer, Ahmad would have returned home to care for her. A fuel train heading for Tehran from the refineries in the South had been derailed. The tank cars blazed for three days before the snowstorm came to help. A week after the fire was out, some newspapers reported that the investigators had found poetic scrawls on the remnants of the tracks. They had no doubt that the incident had been an act of sabotage. A passenger train was derailed a week later, killing twenty people. A bank was robbed, the bars melted off security doors, the hinges on the vault an amorphous lump of metal on the floor.
Ahmad’s poem was going around in the hands of how many people, he did not know. His only hope was that the regime would not learn his name and Salman would be safe from danger. Whatever it was, it would end. It was less than a year and half until the day Khan had predicted as the culmination of the Revolution. That was not a long time. Ahmad could lay low in the dark and damp basement of Oos Saeed waiting for the cats and people to do whatever they were doing. Or he could take shelter among the people who filled the streets, the unnamed thousands bound by their shared desire for things to be otherwise. In that havoc of bodies running replete with hope and fear, Ahmad was a nobody. He had already made his choice. The day they wrapped ropes and cables around the equestrian statue of the Shah and pulled it down, Ahmad was among the people yanking.
31
AKING UP FOR HER LOSS OF EYESIGHT, Zeeba’s ears had grown so keen she could hear what lovers whispered to each other in bed three houses away. Soon after Nana Shamsi brought her to Khan’s house, she learned to recognize the footsteps of each member of the family. From the sound of breathing in the room below, Zeeba could tell if Pooran was sleeping on her back or her side. If someone was eating downstairs, she could tell who it was and what they were chewing. So the night she heard the footsteps on the roof, crunching on the blanket of snow, she did not panic. It was Ahmad coming back. Zeeba heard him climb up a short parapet and jump lightly onto the roof of the adjoining building. She had missed the sound of his breathing, the way he put his feet on the ground with determination, heel first, even now that he was sneaking on the roofs of houses in the dead of the night. She listened to the alarm clock ticking by the side of her mattress on the floor. It sounded like a quarter to three. Finally the footsteps reached Khan’s house, jumping over onto the new room, Behrooz’s room, then creaking down the metal stairs to the roof of the main building. Then came the creaking of the elevator, the hum of the motor, and shortly after, Ahmad stood in the veranda, opened the door, and went in.
He sat at the telephone table in the hall and waited for the morning. A faint light came in from the yard; the snow had light in it as if saved from its descent through the sky. In fourteen years no night had passed in absolute dark. Hours went by in silence until a dampened call for prayer sounded from a mosque somewhere in the night. Not long after, a door creaked open and Ahmad saw his mother step out of her room. Halfway toward the kitchen, she stopped, paused for a second, and turned on the light.
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” she said to Ahmad as if she had been expecting to find her son sitting in the hall at that early hour. “You look hungry.”
The lines in her face were more pronounced than Ahmad remembered. She walked slowly, and it seemed she exerted herself to stay standing. The slouch in her back had grown more pronounced, making her a smaller mother than the he had last seen, as if she was starting to shrink to nothing.
Khan had lost the power in his arms. Lying in his bed, he turned to Ahmad and smiled. “Now that the family is together