proud to admit to the humiliation either to Khan or to anyone else. From that night on, every week or two, Nosser spent a night in the stable, his loose pants puffed with the soft, slimy mush.
Nosser seemed to be growing up much faster than the other kids. With a sparse, fine mustache under his nose, he looked fifteen at eleven. When he was fourteen, he vanished from Tajrish. He walked four hours to Tehran and volunteered to do his military service. “A goat chewed it,” he said when they asked for his birth certificate.
“You have a big brother?” the officer asked. “Go get his. I need some papers here.” Nosser shook his head. The officer eyed him over for a moment, then slipped him a piece of paper. “ ‘I testify that I’m eighteen years of age,’ write and sign.”
After serving near the border of Turkey for two years, Nosser returned to Tajrish one day when men were loading a cart with apple crates. Without a word, he picked up a crate and joined in. A little boy dashed off to tell Khan. The cart was not yet half full when Khan came striding through the trees. Nosser stood straight, as if at attention, until Khan stopped in front of him inspecting his son’s khaki uniform, his black boots caked with mud, and his face that looked more mature than he would have guessed: Nosser’s beard, although trimmed, was full, his skin showed the tan that came with sweating work, and his nose had grown twice in size. He stepped forward and opened his arms, but before he could embrace his son, Nosser said, “Father, I have a wife now.” Khan dropped his arms and squinted his eyes. “Her name is Pooran.” Nosser’s voice was starting to tremble. “And she’s pregnant.” Khan’s eyebrows raised. Nosser welled up, but he still held his head high, casting down his eyes to avoid his father’s, staring instead at his pressed suit and pants and sumac tie. Those moments when Khan twirled the tip of his mustache, a frown hovering above his inquisitive eyes, Nosser imagined himself ostracized from his paternal house, wandering the streets of the capital with his pregnant wife.
“I won’t forgive you,” Khan said, “the next time you leave your wife alone. Why aren’t you with her?”
Although Iran was officially neutral when World War II broke out, Nosser enlisted in Reza Shah’s army and went away again. This Ahmad remembered. He must have been eight, and his sister Maryam eleven. Before Nosser left, there was a ceremony in the mosque. Mulla Ali said prayers in a circle of villagers so Nosser would have a safe journey, shook Nosser’s hand, and lowered his turbaned head to hug him goodbye. In their room Pooran pulled away from Nosser and averted his goodbye kiss. “They’re waiting for you,” she said picking up Nosser’s bag from the floor. Looking into his surprised eyes, she relented. “I owe you a kiss.” Out front in the Orchard, Nosser bent and kissed Khan’s hand before getting into the Ford V8 his father had ordered for him for the occasion. Ahmad and a pack of neighborhood kids ran after the fern-green car in the cloud of dust that the tires stirred and stopped only after the vehicle distanced itself from them on the Shemiron Road, the road that snaked from the foot of the mountains to the capital. Ahmad’s father was gone for a year and a half. He returned with a broken soul.
* * *
—
IT WAS SIX MONTHS NOW since Nosser returned. At first, he had locked himself in his room for ten days. Every day or two he would eat half of the food Pooran prepared and placed at his door in a tray. After the tenth day he opened the door and tried to resume his normal life. He talked less. He bought a hunting rifle and started trekking the mountains in his army boots and pants, coming back every other day with a rabbit that Pooran refused to touch. “Go ahead and do what you want,” Pooran said, “but I’m not doing this and I’m not letting my daughter do this either.” She believed hunting would bring misfortune to a household. It was big enough calamity that her husband killed animals that were meant to be killed by other animals only; she would not have them skinned and cooked in her house. This she announced with such determination that Nosser never again brought game home.