at seeing the old man. When the wheel stopped at the end of the round and Majeed came forward to pick him up, Khan tilted his head. “Can I go again?” He rode in the sun that sifted through the green leaves of trees and smiled even more. Late that evening, he rang his bell again.
“I want to see my grandson,” he said to Pooran. The red alert sounded and the whole time the two women waited in the basement, Zeeba could hear Khan through the walls, ringing the bell in his bed.
* * *
—
AHMAD WAS WATCHING A GAME of soccer between young inmates when thunder rumbled in the east. Nothing was in the sky but the yellow disk of the sun pinned to the interminable blue. For a moment, they thought a new type of air raid was underway. Someone said the enemy had bought invisible bombers. Someone else said the new bombers flew so high the eye could not see them. But a few minutes later, a tiny patch of cloud appeared, flying very low, barely higher than the coils of barbed wire along the walls. The game stopped. The guards in the towers and the inmates in the yard watched the cloud slow when it approached the spot where Ahmad was squatting against the wall with Comrade Comrade, a friend in his forties, about ten years younger than Ahmad, with a Stalin mustache. Then it rained. First a few drops and then a shower poured on the two men like a vertical river. Drained into water that puddled on the asphalt, the cloud vanished. Ahmad turned to Comrade Comrade, equally drenched by his side, and mouthed something the man failed to understand.
“What is it, old man?”
Ahmad put his dripping forehead on his friend’s wet shoulder and sobbed a silent sob.
“What is it?” Comrade asked again. Ahmad walked to the nearest dry wall, and wrote with his wet finger,
Khan has died.
33
HMAD WAS RELEASED one year before the end of the war that took eight years to come to no result other than hundreds of thousands of new Iranian and Iraqi graves. Half the faces of the family that waited to welcome him in front of the prison gates were unfamiliar. Those he had known had developed an alien air, the others were new but had the looks of the people who used to come to his readings with a smile that said, I know you so you should know me. The women and girls wore long-sleeve, dark manteaux that came down to their ankles. Pooran was in her usual black chador. Ahmad’s grandson, Behrooz, was a tall thirteen-year old boy. Maryam’s husband had white hair on his temples. A little girl stood by Majeed and Zeeba’s side who looked like a round hazelnut in head cover.
Ahmad sat in the front seat of Mr. Zia’s car, his mother, Pooran; his daughter Leyla; and his grandson Behrooz in the back. The rest of the cars followed and the convoy passed through streets that were also now alien. There were cars everywhere, and only a rare, single bicycle dodging between. All women were covered from head to toe. Horns honked. Windows were crossed with wide tape, some with X’s, others with a + as well as an X. All of that sparkled, a strange new city under a generous sun.
It took Ahmad five years before he managed to start work at a publication house as the poetry editor. In prison he had tried to write, lying in his bed in the dark, but the light that came from the page was so dim that it could not lead him anywhere. He thought he was losing it. Two years before his release, the light died: he wrote a word, there was a flutter, and then darkness. At the publishing house he could barely stand the trends among young poets, the play on words, poetry that pointed to its own poemness, language for the sake of language. His own books were still in the bookstores, selling more than any other poet, but not as many as the years before the Revolution. Fewer people bought books. Fewer people read poetry. Ahmad wanted to create something urgent, something that burned. He wanted to see the light again. He went to his old wardrobe and took out the poems that he had etched on trays. He unwrapped the towels and put his finger on the metal. They were still warm, but in a dull way. He copied the poems out on cardboard. They did not burn. He copied the poems on paper. The words sat on the page, inert.
At his seventieth birthday, the University of Tehran celebrated Ahmad Torkash-Vand’s fifty-five years of literary accomplishment in a hall with a lit stage and rows of seats upholstered with red velvet. Four guests talked about his work and life, then Ahmad stepped onto the stage and mouthed as someone read from his most recent work. Ahmad looked out at the audience, his daughters and Maryam with their families in the front rows; colleagues, men and women of words here and there; and many he did not know, whose faces in the unlit back rows he could not make out without his eyeglasses. Men were in suit and pants, the younger ones in shirts, and the students in T-shirts and jeans. Women, still covered in manteaux, with scarves or shawls covering their hair, wore less dreary colors than when Ahmad had first come out of the prison: brown, olive, cream, navy. All sat in their seats listening carefully and clapping enthusiastically. As his eyes flit from face to face, he thought he saw someone familiar. He took his glasses out of his breast pocket and looked again. But he was mistaken. It was not Homa.
Ahmad lived for six more years and died two autumns before unrest broke out once more in the country. I don’t know if he would have blamed the cats for the batons that went up and came down again, for the clicks of handcuffs, or for the young bodies that were dragged on the asphalt by their legs. He scooped spoonfuls of his lunch on scrap paper and stepped outside of the publisher’s building to feed Rosie, the furry, gray street cat with a pink nose who reclined on the concrete edge of the flower bed in the sun. The cats were no longer fighting. They shared the streets and alleys with people. They ate trash without fear. They took naps on park benches. They traipsed around, the flaneurs of the city. Never did Ahmad ever see them fly again, or use their fangs and claws for a purpose.
When Ahmad wrote to his secretary about his decision to publish his previously unpublishable poems, she was more than eager to type them up for him. In the evening, she opened Ahmad’s wardrobe and stood with arms akimbo in front of stacks of old trays before she started hauling them by the armful down the elevator and dropping them into the trunk of her car with a loud clatter. Three days later, the bell rang and there at the door, she pulled a bunch of papers out of her purse. When the sun was setting behind Ahmad’s windows, as the orange stretched over the city with no ends, Ahmad sat at his desk and looked at the neat stack of poems in front of him that once set fire to any paper. Outside, the crows cawed misery as they circled in the sky.
Sitting in his chair, fingers drumming nonstop on the armrest, Ahmad looked for a long time. There were only three crows left flying in the sky when Ahmad’s fingers stopped their unrestful rhythm. He pulled the drawer open and took out a piece of paper. He uncapped his pen and started to copy out his poem of the Revolution. Curve after graceful curve formed, word after slow word. No flame sputtered from the tip of his pen. The paper did not turn brown. Not even a faint light blinked under the letters. Then he came to the last word. He paused for a few seconds before he put the pen back on the paper and wrote.
In the last of the daylight Ahmad looked at the poem. Homa’s name, which had burned holes in steel, sat on his desk drab and docile. Twirling his pen between his thumb and forefinger, Ahmad realized that the words were of the past, impotent, extinguished, and nullified. Once true and fiery at the core, they were now just lore.