radio in and turned the knob until every corner of both rooms were filled with human voice. Ahmad turned the volume down when he came home. He motioned to remind her the landlady had warned them, albeit timidly, that the sound was troubling. Homa then became garrulous. She told him the minutest details of her day. Her shopping, her knitting, her preparing the food, all she had heard on the radio, the book she had read, and her visits to her father’s house. She went as often as she could, seeking her premarriage life in which things were familiar. The silence and loneliness exhausted her to the extent that her mother’s snides became tolerable. The family trip to her father’s villa by the sea in the North was what Homa looked forward to the most, the two-week trip the family took every summer.
A week before the trip, Homa could talk of nothing else. She described the villa in detail. A two-story white house with a gable roof and working fireplace, and a view of the sea. She would sit Ahmad down on the narrow mats they had spread on the rug at the foot of the wall and plan how they would build a fire on the beach, put potatoes in it, and watch the waves wash over the sand. She brought a leather suitcase from her parents’ and started carefully folding her clothes, unfolding to straighten out a few last creases and refolding before putting them in. She pulled three books from the bookcase and placed them on the clothes, topping them all with her sandals. Two days before the trip, she closed the lid and buckled the straps.
One evening Khan knocked on the door. “Give me one last chance to prove the cat story is true,” he told Ahmad when Homa was down in the yard washing tea glasses in the kitchen. Khan leaned forward to put a hand on his grandson’s knee with a gentleness that revealed a humility coming from earnestness. “Something big is happening. I know the exact streets. Come with me and I’ll show you. It should be any day now. My maps match what Sergey says.” It was the ardor with which Khan had thrown the wedding, the meticulousness with which he had bought himself the new black suit and a pair of patent leather shoes, and the fastidious way in which he had folded his square pocket that had left no doubt in Ahmad’s heart that Khan loved him beyond what he believed in or objected to. That was why on that evening, he decided to give his grandfather another chance.
When Ahmad handed her the paper, Homa fell silent for a long while. She read the note and pouted the way she did when she was deep in thought.
“You can’t tell me why?”
Ahmad shook his head and saw disappointment in her eyes. I’m sorry, he mouthed.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground playing with the edge of her skirt, Homa was silent for a long time. “You know my mother will say so many things about you,” she said, raising her eyes to Ahmad, “but if you can’t even tell me why you can’t come with me, you must have a good reason.” She was not angry. She got to her feet and straightened her skirt. “But I’m going without you.”
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS AFTER HOMA had gone, Oos Abbas was drinking tea in his chair when Salman walked into the forge holding a little boy’s hand. It was Sara’s boy. Salman had promised to take care of him for a few days while she was away with her husband in another city to meet a doctor, but an emergency Tudeh Party meeting had been called. “Things are touch and go,” Salman said in a hushed voice. “They couldn’t have waited a day; they set the meeting for tonight. I have to be there.” With his wavy, brown hair, the boy looked up at Ahmad, a lively glint in his eyes. Once again Sara had come out of the blue into Ahmad’s life—this time through that little boy—from a past still alive in memory: from the days of simple words and childhood games; from that confused night when Raana did not come; from that other night when Raana did come, when Sara was absent, but her presence was gossamer over the surface of the painted walls, light as air, gliding as shadow. Ahmad shook his head. “It’s important, Ahmad,” Salman said. “Just for