The Septembers of Shiraz Read Online Free

know anything about him?”
    â€œYou mean Ramin? He threw red paint on a mullah.”
    â€œIs that all? He is here for throwing paint?”
    â€œHis mother is a tudeh ,” Mehdi says. “So they’re assuming the boy is, too. They got the mother a couple of months ago. The father they killed about a year ago. And you? What is your crime?”
    â€œI don’t know yet,” Isaac says.
    Â 
    H E LIES AWAKE, notices a shoebox window high up on the wall, a sapphire sky wrapped around its black bars. The glass is broken, allowing a warm breeze to enter the cell. It’s a beautiful night, he realizes—calm, dark, moonless. He tries to sleep but cannot, sees fickle shapes in bright colors, the same kaleidoscopic monsters that would visit him in the dark as a boy, when the voice of his drunken father and the faint whines of his mother would reach him through the locked door of his bedroom. When he shuts his eyes he smells his wife’s orange blossom lotion, which she dabs on her face and hands every night. For a moment he thinks he sees her walking toward him, nightgown and all. He whispers goodnight to her, believes somehow that she hears it.

THREE
    I n the dark Farnaz traces the outlines of the furniture—the curving bedpost where Isaac’s striped pajama pants still hang, the half-moon of the alabaster table lamp by her bed, and the sandalwood Buddha, arms stretched toward the sky, a lotus blossom in his hands. Isaac’s reading glasses lie in wait on his night table, his magazine still open to an article he must not have finished. Last night she was annoyed with him for reading while she wanted to talk. She had come to bed, way past midnight, her head buzzing from the hours spent watching the news on television. She knew not to unload the latest riots on him; he did not want to hear it.
    â€œThey are moving Picasso’s Guernica from New York to Spain,” she said finally, this being the only topic from the day’s events to which she thought he might respond.
    â€œYes?” he said, without taking his eyes off his magazine.
    â€œApparently Picasso had specified in his will that thepainting could only be taken back to Spain once the country became a republic.”
    â€œWell, it’s not a republic,” he said. “It’s a constitutional monarchy.”
    â€œIt’s close enough. That’s what the shah wanted to do here. Of course, he was too late.” And as soon as she had said this, she knew she had lost him again. He did not want to discuss the failing health of his country, and she insisted, like a careless physician repeating a terminal diagnosis. My dear sir, she seemed to be saying. The cancer has spread. She reaches for his glasses now, and holds them, their metallic earpieces cold against her fingers.
    Since yesterday’s call from Isaac’s brother, Javad, who had heard about the arrest from a friend who had joined the Revolutionary Guards, the phone has not rung once. She thinks of Kourosh Nassiri, how she had seen his name among the list of executed in the paper. She had tried calling Isaac many times that day but he would not take her call; the secretary answered each time, saying Isaac was very busy and would it be all right if he called her back later? But he never called. When he came home that night, looking gray, he put down his briefcase, sat on the sofa, and sobbed. She sat next to him and cried with him. They never spoke of Kourosh Nassiri’s execution again.
    The dog, a black-furred German shepherd abandoned by Austrian diplomats who had left the country abruptly, gallops back and forth in the garden, howling at the wind. Farnaz wonders if Suzie has detected Isaac’s absence, sniffed her way into the void. The day their gardener Abbas broughther in, pleading that they adopt her, Farnaz had resisted the idea. And even as she saw the dog’s downcast eyes and smelled its musky fur, wet and disheveled from the