penetrated through the flaking layers of paint and plaster to observe the bricks and mortar underneath. When only one date was left, he had obtained the faculty to see beyond solid objects.
He stepped out into the street on the forty-first day and witnessed that the curtain had been pulled. The contents of pockets, what happened behind closed doors, and what people tried to hide from others were all clear to him as day. His joints creaked as he placed one painful step after the other toward the small mosque in the bazaar, hands deep in his pockets. The water that slid down his arm seemed to freeze the blood in his bulging veins, but he saw the red fluid flowing up the dark tubes. He saw his beating heart. He saw that he was fine.
More people were waiting for the prayer than forty days before. Like in Tajrish, hunger and misery had made the rows in the mosque longer. Lank and haggard, too skinny for his raincoat, Khan no longer stood out from the rest of the congregation. Like them he dwelled in the proximity of death, but in a different manner: he resurrected from it, they very close to be devoured by it. Anxious in the head and serene at heart, Khan positioned himself right behind the imam in the first row just like he was used to, the closest person to the leader of the prayer, connected to God by the shortest possible link. His most prudent spot. From the moment the prayer began, Khan gave his heart and soul to it. He closed his eyes to see better, to not be distracted by the two men who walked and laughed in the street behind the walls of the mosque. His whole body became one large eye, his ears alert to hunt for the faintest sign from Him. Hunger had opened an inner void that buzzed with need. The first prayer ended. The second prayer followed. Both regular praises of the Creator, but without Him doing anything but listening, without sending down a message.
“There is no God,” Khan muttered to himself as he shuffled out into the dark corridors of the bazaar that snaked out and away from the mosque.
Contrary to what he might have expected, that realization did not dishearten him. Not only were his hopes not extinguished, but a fire was kindled within him. Burning in oxymoronic feelings of despair of the heavens and zeal for life, he set up a banquet of scrumptious foods and sweet-smelling drinks and gorged on chicken and kebab and all the succulent fruits that money could buy in the times of famine. His vision shortened with every bite he forced down his gorged gullet into his contracted stomach. The last thing he saw beyond his walls was his neighbor’s bedroom. Whistling to herself and combing her hair, the woman looked at something out the window from behind the curtain and smiled a calm smile. Then Khan was back in his room surrounded by unremitting walls, bare and insignificant, telling of nothing. And suddenly he realized it all, he found the answer he had been looking for: there would be no sign; that was the sign. If there was no God, no sign would ever come. If there was one, Him sending no message was His way of delegating the responsibility of Khan’s life to him. Fate was put in his own hands. Either way, he had a lot to do and much to fight for; protecting his family, saving people from hunger, and liberating his vulnerable country suffering in the hands of the occupiers. Even if he could not do all of that single-handedly, he had to try.
He took the ladder from the basement and walked out to the hoez. Rain and cold had turned the bills into a frozen slab that cracked when he set foot on it. Squatting on top of his money, he hacked at it with the broken spade and thawed out the chunks in the house. For a week, the house was carpeted with dirty wet bills. Then he shaved his beard, oiled the tips of his mustache, and knocked on Pooran’s door.
“Pack up,” he said when she opened. “You’re going to a real house.”
She stared at the unfamiliar face of the stranger with the voice of Khan for a long while, studying the sunken cheeks, the dark circles under the eyes, and the unkempt eyebrows, before she let him in and threw herself in