“Will you promise me you come home right after school from now on?”
Ahmad thought for a moment and then shook his head.
Walking around after school became his ritual.
Having lost hope of Khan’s return, Pooran trusted her daughter with the secret, hoping her son-in-law could somehow help with the search. When weeks went by with no good news, Ahmad noticed his mother spent her time rearranging the furniture around the apartment and washing anything she could lay her hands on. She had started doing more chores at Maryam’s, sweeping the rugs, mopping the floors and stairs with wet rags, and doing the laundry in a tin tub. Pooran came home exhausted, barely managing to cook dinner or do anything but rest and knit for the winter. But the more Khan’s absence carried on, the brighter a fire burned within her. She would do the dishes and cook dinner, then pile the laundry in the tub and dust the furniture. Late in the evening, when everything in the apartment was clean, she would rewash the glasses and silverware. Before she laid her mattress on the floor, she would take out a piece of clothing from her wardrobe—a skirt, a dress, or a blouse kept for a large party, one she had not worn in a long time—wash it, and hang it carefully on the clothesline in her room. In the morning, she would iron and smooth it back on the hanger. In her chest, she kept cuts of fabric. She took them out and placed fresh mothballs in their folds. Her favorite was light cream with large crimson flowers among waves of green leaves. That was for a very special occasion.
Despite her concern about her son’s meanderings, Pooran did not recognize, in the midst of her engagement with fabric and water, that Ahmad was smelling new smells, his insides churned by fresh feelings. In his daily street-walkings, his eyes lingered on the girls and women. Many were draped in chadors, black or white with floral motifs, with an edge fluttering in the breeze sometimes. But like a hawk, he spotted the others, in coats and skirts, blouses and pants, heels clicking on the sidewalk, the more well-off in cafés, those riding in horse-drawn carriages, those who ventured out in dresses if the weather was lenient. He roamed about Bob Homayoon Street’s two cafés where many Russian soldiers brought their ladies. Officers and high-ranking government officials stepped out of their cars with their dates for the evening. In light-gray suit and pants with his blue tie tucked into his vest, a whiff of a mustache above his lips and hair combed to one side, Ahmad watched them all.
* * *
—
TOWARD THE BEGINNING OF WINTER, the last shriveled leaves detached themselves from branches and with that withered the hopes of the poorest of the poor who had survived the fall by chewing on what could be found of leaves and grass. But soon word came that a group in a neighborhood south of Tehran had found a way of fighting the famine by eating hats. Someone had devised a recipe to transform the wearable texture of a hat into edible fibers. The inventor was a woman who had lost a baby to hunger. After nine months of undernourished pregnancy, her breasts had stopped giving milk three weeks after her girl was born. For a short while she took the swaddled girl from door to door to nursing mothers, imploring for a drop which they barely had for their own babies. After she buried her daughter, she decided to save her other two children at any cost. She went to her mosque mulla, then to a soothsayer. What she received would fill many an ear, but no stomach. Back in her home, after she found her pigeon and cat and mouse traps empty, she put a pot on the stove and began cooking. Boiled tree trunk was not edible. A dirt soup never became anything other than muddy hot water. Her children had stopped crying from hunger. Sitting on the floor, they played with their marbles as if they had accepted the futility of their situation.
She ran back to the kitchen and refilled the pot with water. She opened the wardrobe and went through the clothes and finally pulled out a small brown suit she had set aside for when her boy would be big enough to fit in it. A pair of sharp scissors sliced the suit