into the boiling water. Mixed with salt and whatever spice was left in the jars, the small pieces of fabric turned into a murky liquid. “Come, kids,” she said as she went to her children with two steaming plates, “Eggplant stew.” Later, before she threw out the reeking concoction, she realized that the few bites the children had managed to swallow were cuts from the collar. With that clue and with the help of other women, hats were being cooked and served all over the neighborhood within two weeks.
Before long and for reasons unknown to the people, the government denounced the practice as black art and a hoarse voice on the radio forbade any transformation of headgear into food. The hat cooks withdrew behind closed doors and into sealed basements. Ignoring orders from the authorities, the hungry bagged their hats and searched their houses for any threadbare dusty headwear that might have been lying forgotten at the bottom of a chest or wardrobe. Through “mediums,” who circulated neighborhoods, the bags of hats were delivered to the clandestine cooks. For every five or six wearable hats, depending on the size, the mediums returned four edible ones, sometimes steaming hot, but more often cooled by the winds that howled along the streets.
Some said the ban had been the work of Russians; empty stomachs did not know the definition of resistance or see the occupiers’ sparkling boots and rifles. Besides, those who sat in the big government chairs had no leverage or competence to detect or do anything about hats. When a door-to-door search for cookhouses began in the original neighborhood and some were arrested, the cooking went on a hiatus for weeks before the remaining cooks split up and resumed their work, now scattered around the city. For a little while there seemed to be a respite from the pangs of hunger, at least in certain parts. But soon people ran out of extra hats and were left with the one they wore outside which they could not afford to eat.
Boys and young men started filching hats from pedestrians’ heads and disappearing into circuitous alleys fast as the wind. They first targeted the middle-aged and older men whom they were sure to outrun. Embarrassed and furious, the bare-headed man would rush home or to some closed place so he would not be seen hatless in public. To discourage theft, clothes shops moved their hats to the back. The hat shops got raided and robbed so often that the business was no longer safe. Hatters worked with their doors closed and the corrugated tin shutters drawn all the way down as if the shop were closed. Customers would have to pound on the shutters. The hatter interrogated them about the purpose of their visit, and only after the customer slipped the money in under the shutters would the hatter unlock them, lift them up only as much as necessary, and pass the new or repaired hat out.
Soon everyone was concerned about their hats. They became wary when they saw someone approaching them. Expecting a sudden attack from any passerby, people would put their hand on their hat while carefully eyeing the approaching person. Years later, after the Russians had long left Iran and the famine was over, when the account of the hat-eaters had joined the myriads of forgotten events in history, tipping one’s hat had become a form of greeting, although few knew the gesture’s origin in bitter suspicion and hunger.
This complicated Ahmad’s searches for Khan. People looked at every teenage boy on the street as a possible flincher. As people avoided him, his daily walks were reduced to chasing girls on the street and in shops.
* * *
—
FOR MONTHS, KHAN WOULD GET dressed a few hours after the sun had set, shove his hand into a sack, and head for the rundown bar. Before the winter chills turned the water into a block of ice, he had the hoez drained. The drainer man collected all the floating twigs and leaves, but soon more fell from the tree into the bottom and turned into a dark, tangled mesh and that was what Khan thought of when he looked at his long-unshaved beard that had started to overshadow the twirls of his mustache.
“I’m going to see my grandson, tomorrow,” he told the barman, “right after school.”
“Good.”
“Did I tell you he studied French?”
“With Sergey.”
“Right, right.” Khan took a sip from his glass. “But Ara, you never told me how you lost your earlobe.”