the alley with some other boys, looked at the sky and ran inside to ask his mother and grandmother where the sound had come from. Neither Maryam nor Pooran knew. They were busy with housework and Majeed’s younger sister, Parveen. The boy climbed down to the basement. Khan did not know either. “But let’s find out,” he said to the boy, smiling playfully and pushing on the armrests to raise himself from the chair. Majeed’s large eyes sparkled.
Out in the streets Khan soon learned about what had happened from the first shopkeeper who was standing out front chatting with a customer. Half an hour later he followed the seven-year-old around a corner and the vast expanse of the Cannon Square opened up in front of them, surrounded on four sides with government establishments. Gathering in the middle, in the large rectangular area with patches of greens and a few lonely trees, a great number of people cheered around the Marble Cannon.
“It’s something like that they’re firing,” Khan said to the boy, “farther out of the city.” A small group shouted half-hearted slogans against Mosaddegh in a corner where three nosed buses waited for passengers. From the windows of the long two-story building of the Ministry of Telegraph and Telephone, men looked down at the square. Many stood around watching on the sidewalks and many walked along indifferent to the news. Then Khan had an idea. “You want to play a game?” he asked Majeed. “It’s called count the kitties.” Excited, the boy listened to Khan’s careful instructions and watched his papa crouch down to tie his undone shoelace. “You should learn to tie your own shoes. You’re going to school soon.” Majeed looked down with hands in his small pants pockets. “Thanks, Papa,” he said and ran off out of sight. Khan sat on a doorstep and talked to a grocer. An hour or two later, the boy came back to report the number and Khan bought him some dried sour cherries and a rooster candy. On a hand-drawn map of the city, Khan marked the number of cats in each district as he and his great-grandson walked street by street, then back again to the same areas for new counts. The women of the house were happy about the changes they witnessed: Khan had come out of his obsessive illusions and become outgoing. He took the kid out for walks whenever Maryam paid a visit, which gave them more time for her younger girl.
Every passing day added a few more dots to Khan’s maps. “You see this?” he would show the map to Sergey. “These are your friends, see? Now you want to tell me what they’re up to?” The cat cowered in the corner of the cage not taking his eyes from Khan. But Khan could not sit idly until Sergey acknowledged the question. He studied his charts and drawings at night to find the pattern of the cats spreading across the city. Soon a problem presented itself: he could count the cats, but he had no knowledge of the way the felines moved from one point to another. If he could gain that knowledge, he would be able to test his hypothesis that shortly after the cats migrated to an area, things would go wrong there—that there was a relation between the cats’ activities and havoc.
One night he made a trap by balancing the rim of a heavy pot upside down on a short Y-shaped stick to which he tied a string. He placed some lamb fat under the pot and waited in his basement, holding the other end of the thread in his hand, squinting through a window into the night. Two hours later he pulled. The pot dropped with a loud clatter. Inside, the cat growled and hissed and clawed at the copper vessel. With a foot on the pot, Khan wound some rags around his hand and forearm before he lifted the rim and reached for the frightened animal. By the time he managed to throw the cat into a gunnysack, his sleeve was torn and his wrist was bleeding. All night the sack swung on a peg on the wall behind the curtain, jerking back and forth from time to time.
“I need your iron,” Khan told Pooran after breakfast the next morning. Back in his basement, he tonged glowing-red coal into the iron, then from behind the curtain, he took the squirming sack off the peg and put it on the table. With