the stairs two at a time, briefly explained the situation to Homa in a note, and ran out of the house after Salman.
As they got closer to the main street, the din of the demonstrators reached him. Before they turned onto Lalahzar Street, Ahmad could make out the Death to Mosaddegh! and Long live the Shah! slogans from the confusion of shouts and cries. Thugs streamed along Lalahzar Street waving clubs and machetes. Most of the stores were closed. The ones open, either caught by surprise or underestimating the gravity of the situation, had their windows smashed. Fruit rolled on the sidewalk and got squished under leather soles. A car rode alongside the demonstrators laden with men riding inside and on the roof, like a metal porcupine with human spines. One man held a framed portrait of a decorated young Shah in a uniform. Negligibly small groups of Mosaddegh supporters were being beaten as the sticks and clubs rose in the sky and paused for a short moment at their apex before swooshing back down. Many escaped and many watched from behind windows, cracked doors, or farther away on the sidewalks.
Ahmad ran past Café Lalahzar and saw in a glance the broken chairs and tables, and the shards. Many a nervous evening he had sat in those chairs trying to look confident when the young woman two tables away turned her eyes on him. Following Salman, he darted through the crowd on the sidewalks and, after a few turns into narrower streets and alleys, slowed to a stride. A small group of people were gathered in front of Mash Akbar’s butchery watching the laat Asghar Rostam and his three novices drag Salman’s father out. Asghar Rostam was one of the most feared laats, who wore his long scars across his face as his badge of honor and boasted how he had stabbed the One-Eyed Reza in the left eye. They had thrown Salman’s father on the ground out front and circled him in their black suits and fedoras like three crows. Asghar Rostam accused him of lying, of fraud, and of selling meat that would send the eater to hell. Two of his novices went inside the shop and came back out grinning, carrying two dead cats each on their shoulders as proof of the man’s culpability. Their eyes closed, the cats lay as if peaceful and content on the shoulders of the novices.
Among the crowd, as the novices dropped the cats on the ground in front of Mash Akbar, Ahmad was wondering how the dead cats had ended up in the butchery. “You are a godless piece of shit just like your communist son,” Asghar Rostam shouted at Mash Akbar. Ahmad looked around. Salman was gone. Saliva drooled from the lips of tongue-tied Mash Akbar kneeling at the foot of the laat. Asghar Rostam picked up a rock and hurled it through the window. “Feed him the cat,” cried someone in the crowd. The grin that appeared on his face showed the laat had liked the idea. He picked one of the dead cats from the ground. Two of his novices held Mash Akbar as Asghar Rostam shoved the lifeless animal in the butcher’s face. Mash Akbar sobbed with clenched teeth. In vain Ahmad looked around for Salman. The thugs in the crowd whistled and waved their sticks and fists. Asghar Rostam’s jackknife flashed open. “Someone’s losing an ear today,” he shouted, pointing the knife in Mash Akbar’s face. “Is it going to be the cat or you?” Then suddenly, with the ferocity of a ravenous wolf, Salman’s father tore off the cat’s ear in one bite. He chewed with saliva dribbling from his mouth onto his shirt. The thugs roared.
The shots were fired at that moment.
Asghar Rostam’s pierced body dropped on the street and the panicked crowd dispersed. The bullets that Salman fired from the roof of the house across from his father’s butchery marked the beginning of a long period during which the Tudeh Party saw its demise. The Shah’s intelligence service cracked down on the party, hunting out its members in clandestine branches of the army and top government positions. The prisons, with the passing years, became places of savage torture of the sort that engendered dread and rage. The bullets that pierced the laat’s body that day blazed at their core with flames of a revolution.
In the confusion that ensued, Ahmad rushed to Mash Akbar, put his strong arms under his unconscious body, and lifted