“We are here to invite you to our wedding,” Homa called from outside of the tree. “I have heard a lot of good things about you.” She cracked the tarp and stuck her head in. “Will you come, please?”
Agha looked at Ahmad and the girl for some time as if contemplating the invitation. “Festive news,” he finally said, his face opening like spring, “this calls for the light.” He produced from behind the samovar a lightbulb and a socket attached to a yellowish, white cable that reached into the tree through a small hole. “Mullah turns this on when he comes after the dark.” Ahmad went out to look.
Swallows circled the sky, gay in their erratic embrace of the dusk.
“Plug it in, boy,” Agha said from inside.
At the other end of the cable was a plug. High on the tree a half-broken outlet was screwed to the trunk. A thick black cable snaked out of the outlet up the tree, then away toward the wooden power pole behind the cob walls of the Orchard.
“Plug it in already.”
It was a rickety assemblage to transfer stolen power, primitive and unsafe.
“You go check on him,” Homa told Ahmad, taking the end of the cable from him. Ahmad went back inside, but he froze when he brushed aside the tarp. The old man had unscrewed the bulb and was waiting with his finger stuck in the socket. He looked at Ahmad with the pleading eyes of a kid who desires nothing more than for his mother to buy him the toy. The next morning, Ahmad wheelbarrowed Agha down the alleys and took him to Tehran on the first bus. Ahmad sat by Agha, who refused to talk or turn his head away from the window.
* * *
—
HE SAID HE WOULD NOT go to the wedding either, but when the day was near, Agha made Ahmad go back to Tajrish to fetch his purple tie from the hatstand. In Ahmad’s old room at Khan’s house, Agha sat on the edge of the bed, a short stool under his feet, as Pooran tied and retied his tie, holding the mirror in front of him until after the fourth try he was satisfied. “Can you ask Khan,” Agha whispered leaning forward, “to get me a wheelbarrow?” Pooran smiled and assured him she would. “Can I paint it purple, too?” he asked.
The ceremony was in midfall in an orchard west of Tehran where city services had not reached yet. Toward the back walls—where the well was—two mules trotted on a conveyor belt attached to a generator that produced the electricity for the wedding. The central building was decked with colored light bulbs like flickering fruit grown out of brick and mortar. Ensembles of musicians performed one after the other. With the Azeri music, Colonel Delldaar hit the floor and danced in his cap and uniform. Small and crumpled, but in his pressed, cream suit, Agha waved a cheerful handkerchief. Sitting cross-legged on an armchair next to the Great Uncle, with his wide tie coming down his neck and resting on his lap, he was too small for an adult and too wrinkled for a child. After a while watching the youths dance, Agha turned to the Great Uncle. “I want to get married, too,” he said, shouting to make his squeaky voice heard. The Great Uncle nodded as if only to be polite. “There’s a girl in the house,” Agha said, “I like her.” “Good,” the Great Uncle said, then turned his head back toward the circle of dancers. “Her name is Nana,” Agha said nodding to himself, as if approving his own decision.
Khan would not sit in his chair. He paced so much to make sure everything was carried out as planned that he would rest for three days after the wedding. The music excited the cantankerous Great Uncle, too. To the applause and gay whistles of the youth who stood clapping in a circle, he took his walking stick hanging from the back of his armchair and joined the Colonel in the Azeri dance. Holding his arms straight out to his sides, like a cross, his legs sprang up and down with slow moves that showed remnants of a harmonious dexterity of years long gone. He snatched Colonel Delldaar’s hat and donned it on his bald scalp with a soft whirl. “Now the groom!” Great Uncle called after a while. Cheers went up to the sky from the orchard when Ahmad entered the circle. The women