boy. Then he would fall asleep.
17
LTHOUGH HE HAD JOINED JAMAAL’S GANG for mercenary reasons, Ahmad now realized that he had continued not for money alone, but for the bonds that fighting abreast of one another had tied between the four of them—and also for the fight itself, the thrill of dodging a kick and then landing a punch, the panting, the racing of his heart. One last time, he wrote to Homa at night.
Jamaal understood. “You’re becoming a father soon.” At his last fight, Ahmad attacked with a religious devotion and single-handedly took four men, one with a machete. It’s okay, it’s over, he mouthed to Homa who looked at the wound on his arm with horror. But it was not okay. The open wound would not close. In a few days infection built up like a small painful pillow and Ahmad could not leave the bed. Homa called a cab. The driver slung Ahmad onto his shoulder like a sack of wheat and lay him on the back seat, then pulled him onto his shoulder again at Khan’s door and, with the guidance of Pooran, took him inside and put him on the bed in his old room. Agha had crouched as far into the corner of the bed as he could before the driver dropped Ahmad down. He looked at Ahmad’s pale face as if he could not believe the young, healthy man who had wheelbarrowed him down the Tajrish alleys was lying there with eyes closed and mouth half-open, panting as if his body anticipated a fever. The doctor came to the house, but was unable to treat the wound. The next week, he recommended amputation. “Or it will kill him.” Ahmad was losing weight by the hour. His eyes sunk into his tired, sweaty face. He was so pale it was as if blood had congealed in his veins. Colonel Delldaar suggested they take him to France, to knowledgeable physicians who were also equipped with the latest developments in medicine.
The first thing Pooran did when she heard the word amputation was write a letter to Nana Shamsi who was out of town. Come soon, Mother, I need you. She went to the Abdol-Azīm Shrine in Rey. The Smoky Machine she had taken with her children and husband years before had been put out of service; instead there were buses. After kissing the old wooden doors, she entered the big courtyard and bowed toward the domed building. Inside, she inched ahead through the many chador-clad women to touch the gold- and silver-plated shrine. “I want you to give me my boy back,” she whispered. But she was too distressed to wait for the dead saint to grant her wish. She took the bus back from the shrine to an herbal physician some neighbors had told her about. She boiled crushed lavender, saffron, and rotten turnips and poured the foul-smelling elixir into Ahmad’s half-open mouth.
Agha had panicked from the first day they brought Ahmad in. He evacuated Ahmad’s room, which he had settled in since they brought him to the capital, and moved to the living room, shouting with alarm from time to time so someone would take him to check on Ahmad, although he could not bear to be taken into the room. In Pooran’s arms or on Khan’s back, he would cover his face with his hands and steal a look at his favorite boy through his fingers and soon turn his face away. He could not sleep at night. As if stricken by the sheer weight of an imminent death for the first time, Agha, who had seen countless people die during his innumerable years, would cry out Khan’s name in the middle of the night. “Go check on the kid,” he instructed an exhausted Khan, with bloodshot eyes wide-open, gesticulating toward Ahmad’s room, “I can’t hear him breathe.” Khan assured Agha that Ahmad would survive. “Do something,” Pooran begged Khan. Like a maniac, she went from one neighbor to the next, from one acquaintance to the other, and asked if anyone knew of any cure.
Seyf Zarrabi, the owner of the neighborhood fabric shop, sent word that his father once had an infectious leg when he was young. A doctor from a neighboring village had cured the infection with an ointment, the recipe of which he had given Seyf. “I’d go far for my dear customers,” Seyf told Pooran in his shop, “miles more for an esteemed lady such as yourself.” He ran his palm