with important things, that you don’t have time to think about her. But what’s going to happen is you’ll write crappy poems and no one will ever read them and all of a sudden you look in the mirror and see a forty-year-old man who still thinks about that one stolen kiss on a night that refuses to leave your memory.” He broke a lump of the cheese and rubbed it on a piece of bread with his stubby thumb. “Now come eat.”
Three weeks later, Ahmad’s first poem was published, proving Oos Abbas wrong. On a Thursday, after he was done at the forge, Ahmad started for the Pit and, as he did every week, bought the Young Iran magazine on his way. He leafed through and suddenly stopped walking. His ghazal was somewhere in the middle of the magazine below an ad for the Westinghouse fridge. He read it from top to bottom over and over again, tasting each word and letter. People passed by him looking over at what he had in his hand. By the time he got to the Pit panting, the fight had already started. He elbowed his way through the crowd and jumped in, but before he could stop thinking about his poem, someone heavy was sitting on his chest.
“What’s this?” Oos Abbas asked the next day, refusing to take the trampled magazine, ripped across the middle, that Ahmad held out to him. Ahmad turned the pages and wiped some dirt off of his poem. “That’s yours?” Ahmad nodded. Oos Abbas took the magazine and lowered his big round head as he looked at the page. “Well, I can’t read,” he said giving the magazine back, “but even if it is, you know one swallow doesn’t summer make, does it?”
* * *
—
BY THE TIME HE FINISHED high school, Ahmad had published fifteen poems in newspapers and journals under the pen name Silent Fist, which Oos Abbas found “as interesting as this horseshoe.” The poems became popular among an offshoot of the Tudeh Party that worked in favor of the nationalization of oil. In a letter that came to the forge, they asked him for poems to publish in the special issue of their magazine, Rebel, for the anniversary of Marx’s birth. His hidden identity added appeal to his sophistication as well as intensity to the denunciations. But a critique of Rebel soon called the proponents of the oil movement “ignoramus traitors,” and Silent Fist a “vacuous voice of vanity whose ideology fails to surpass the communism of the Tudeh Party high school brochures, a dimwit whose discordant words enjoy no more than the mystery of anonymity.”
Although he never joined the party, Ahmad had read the pamphlets and was aware of its growing influence in schools and universities as well as in factories. He believed his path to the heights of greatness went through politics, that he would not create lasting poetry worthy of attention if he did not engage himself with the same issues that busied men in the royal palace, government, and parliament. He devised metaphors in his poems that were read as references to the oil movement and the party. The summer after he graduated, his first political essay came out in which he lamented what he called the prevalent ignorance of ordinary people—those who worked the lands and those who worked the machines—that had caused the suffocating atmosphere, general poverty, and the corruption of those in power:
In a society where the labor is rendered impotent by superstition and ignorance, how can we expect to succeed in severing the hands of those who loot our God-given treasures?
The essay was published in Rebel and was read and referred to in some political circles. Lying on his sleeping mat at night, with his hands locked behind his head, Ahmad asked himself if he was a vacuous voice of vanity. The sound of someone practicing the violin came from the apartment upstairs. It was a man in his thirties. He always started an hour before midnight. The discordant notes inspired Ahmad to sit at his small desk. He opened the magazine and turned the pages to his essay. He looked at it for a few moments, then closed it and started to write another.
* * *
—
FALL CAME CALM AND TENDER. It dissipated the unbearable heat and brought Mosaddegh and the National Front a season closer to victory. Composed and charismatic, the old man who had gotten into parliament as Tehran’s number one representative walked with