in every corner of Tajrish, it had also traveled to villages as far as three hours away. That sentence never died. It lived in the Alborz mountains for years, going from gorge to summit, from peak to ravine. The inhabitants of Tajrish heard it every time it returned to their village, even after those who were children at the time of the Russian Invasion had children of their own, even when Tehran grew so large that the whole of Tajrish became no more than a neighborhood of the megacity, when the metal din buried every other voice except the sentence Khan had cried into the night.
* * *
—
WHEN AHMAD SAW THE CAPITAL that day, the orchards of Tajrish seemed to him to have been the promised paradise. The large city was a maze of narrow streets and alleys flanked by connecting buildings. Tehran lay close to the mountains, but had an open sky. There was nowhere to escape from the sun that blazed on the ground and walls. An occasional plane tree, elm, or cypress sprouted on the edges of sidewalks, but until he saw a bony, middle-aged man on a ladder picking leaves from a white mulberry tree and shoving them into his mouth, Ahmad could not imagine why the lower branches were all bare as winter. In the trees, only crows had nested. Other birds, even those that did not migrate, had flown away. Without birds, the city was as bizzare as a face without eyebrows. Tehran was a city of fading glory and growing horror. A combination of cars, buses, bicycles, passersby, and horse-drawn carriages wandered the streets in such a way that it seemed they had forgotten the goal of their movement. Where the streets crossed, four-faced lights stood in the middle changing from green to yellow to red. Glorious mansions of the royalty and rich and large government buildings stuck a head up here and there, but Tehran was a city of two-story buildings: lying low, dry, and warm. More straight lines everywhere, more cubes. Roofs were flat, some gable. There were many stores with wooden doors and windows, but food was scarce. Groceries were almost empty. Bakers sat on low wooden stools in front of their shops under the awning that flapped in the spring breeze. Hunger was visible on faces, like sadness.
As soon as a Russian truck roared in the distance, emaciated bodies swarmed onto the sides of the street, snatching anything edible a soldier might throw at them. Their shrunken bodies inside their loose clothes made Ahmad feel embarrassed of his full stomach. The first time he saw an apple tossed to a group of men, he immediately recognized the fruit: it came from Khan’s orchards. If he had seen it in his hand, he could even have said which tree it came from. They were now called Russian apples instead of Damavand apples, as if they came from the country beyond the Caspian Sea, and not from the soil at the foot of the mountains he could see from the streets of Tehran. Later he would learn how Khan had managed to trade apples for food for the village before Sergey announced independence and people were killed in retaliation.
* * *
—
AT FIRST HIGH SCHOOLS WOULD not accept Ahmad since he did not have a formal education. But in the famine-stricken city there was no ceiling to what money could attain. Ahmad did not even want to go to school. In their apartment that felt no larger than a room of the Orchard house, he mouthed to his mother in the kitchen that he wanted to enter the army. But the next week Khan arrived from Tajrish and knocked on the door, and a few hours later, at the office of the principal, a clerk penned down Ahmad’s name in the register.
Ahmad’s first year was spent devising ways to avoid ridicule and practicing how to ignore the boys who walked up to him in the yard opening and closing their mouths like fish. Just as he had in Mulla Ali’s small village classroom, Ahmad shone as the best student in the class. He excelled in math, physics, and chemistry as well as in history and geography. That made him the object of more bullying from the start and the first day the teacher announced the math quiz grades out loud at the end of the class, Ahmad’s A made him more nervous than happy. A few hours later, wedged into the gutter