herd of sheep left. As long as grass grows from the earth there will be a few drops of milk to drink.”
“I can’t send my grandson back to the village,” Khan said. “He has to finish high school. Although he isn’t doing well.”
“I sent my boys to school for three, four years. They kept ganging up on the other kids. Until I had it up to here and one day I sat them down and said, you went to school, you for three years, you for four years, and you’re not the school type. Tomorrow morning you’re going to work at the kebab shop in the bazaar and you’re going to help the ice seller. Just like that: off to work. You’re lucky you have a grandson, sir. Boys are easy.”
Back in his house, Khan brought a chair out into the yard and sat in front of the hoez wrapping himself tight in his wool coat. Twigs and dead leaves from the overarching persimmon tree sat on the surface of the water. He looked around at his house. It was still new and strange. His yard was large, but compared to the orchards he had lived and worked in, it was no more than a coop, a stable, a sheep pen with a house on one side and three walls on the other. Behind two of the walls were the neighbors’ yards. The third had the alley behind it. It was just a house in a row of houses, in a good neighborhood, but one of many.
Two hours before midnight, Khan stuck his hand into one of the sacks and shoved a fistful of bills into his coat pocket. Half an hour later, he pulled one out, tossed it over the counter, and said, “Vodka.” When at two in the morning he was told to leave, he pulled out another bill and slapped it on the counter. “Maybe,” Khan said to the barman, “you think you can control this place, this table, this ‘shop’ of yours, but can you control the roaches that scurry in the corners of this ‘shop’ of yours, too? Can you keep them from climbing up your squat toilet and creeping everywhere? All you can do is open that door and shout, ‘It’s time,’ and close that door behind you and leave and be happy that you’re the master of your destiny and walk in the cold and be happy that you locked that door of yours. You hold your fate in your hand very well. Dexterously if you will. And the fate of others. Well done. Clap clap clap. Clap for him.”
Khan was still clapping when the barman caught up with him outside and gave him his Astrakhan that he had left on the coatrack.
“The roaches,” he said, “they come out in the summer, sir. I can’t do anything about them.” He patted Khan on the back and helped his hand find the sleeve of his coat.
“What’s your name?” Khan asked but did not wait to hear the Armenian barman. He turned around and walked away, his hat in his hand, forgetting to put it on all the way to his house.
* * *
—
WHEN THE FAMINE WORSENED, MARYAM started paying her mother. The afternoon Pooran found the rolled bills in her purse, something crumbled inside her. She had fed that girl for twenty years, since she was a little wiggling bundle of blankets. As long as Pooran remembered, maids, gardeners, and servants had worked for her, both in the Orchard and in her father’s house. All that was gone. She rerolled the bills in her hand and slipped them into her purse. Neither mother nor daughter ever mentioned it. Tacitly turned into her daughter’s maid, Pooran went to Maryam’s house every day and helped with the boy and the housework. But the happiness she found in her heart at being with her daughter and her grandson did not dwindle even when she felt less welcome than before in her daughter’s house. There were days when no one answered the door. Pooran used her spare key and found Majeed in a room, playing on his own. She took his hand and walked to the kitchen, reminding herself that the boy had a roof over his head, food to pass down the gullet, and a grandmother who loved him.
Feeding Majeed reminded her of the time she nursed her own children, when Maryam burped only with a lullaby and when Ahmad would not get off her breast at