“There are thousands of lockers.” The whistling began, and picked up in intensity. The cable became invisible, Baraheni’s arm a gray blur. “What is the number?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have the key?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to us now.”
“It’s in my house.”
“The residence was razed by fire,” Ashfar said. “A convenient excuse for not being able to turn it over.”
“I kept it in a cookie tin in the kitchen. You’ll find it there, if the ruins haven’t been picked clean.”
Ashfar placed a hand on Baraheni’s shoulder, and the cable materialized, flickering in the harsh light. As the whistling died, it slipped from Baraheni’s grasp and flew into a corner.
Maryam strained to make eye contact with Darius. “I had to,” she pleaded. “… they would have gotten it out of me sooner or later. “She began to sob. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t—”
“Had I known you were a woman susceptible to reason, much of the unpleasantness that preceded your admissions could have been avoided.” Ashfar glanced triumphantly at Darius, who had gotten up from the chair and was looking toward the doorway, where Bijan stood watching them.
“It is about time,” Bijan said. “Men will be sent to guard the fire scene until a search can be started at dawn.” He moved to the bed where Maryam was crying softly into the pillow, and untied her feet and hands. “Pray that nothing there has been touched. You see how it will go for you should you be lying.”
Maryam focused again on Darius, whose cold stare offered nothing. He did not acknowledge her when she came across the room to him, and she wrapped his arms around her shoulders and buried her face in his chest.
“Such behavior in a couple not united in marriage is immoral and may lead to stiff penalties.” Bijan leered at them, immensely pleased with himself. He returned to the corridor, and Darius heard him giving orders to round up a crew for the Old Karaj Road.
Ashfar’s body was rocked by great peals of laughter, which Baraheni seized on and amplified. “It must be love,” he said to Maryam.
“What are you talking about?”
“That is Bijan’s way of showing affection. He wants you for his seegah before it is decided what to do with you. He says it is unhealthy for a woman your age not to have regular sexual relations because the natural flow of hormones will back up into your glands. The greater tragedy, the one he will not allow, is for you to go to your grave a virgin. He will do you the great favor of permitting you to become his temporary wife.”
Ashfar was laughing so hard he was having difficulty getting out the words. “Darius, have you learned the best place in Evin to obtain vodka? We would like to celebrate Maryam’s betrothal.”
Darius waltzed her around so that his back was to them. He took her hand from his shoulder, and slipped a sharp sliver of clear glass from his pocket against the palm.
“What’s this? A diamond? I’m flattered,” she said, “but as you heard I’m already spoken for.” She opened her hand, but Darius caught the glass and curled her fingers around it.
“More valuable than any diamond,” he whispered. “A key.”
How long he had been a corpse he didn’t know. He lay on a gurney inside the tiny hospital with his suit folded under the linen shroud that was all he wore. His shoes made inconspicuous bulges against his hips. Several hours more went by before he heard wailing in the corridor. He raised himself on his elbows to see what the commotion was about, and then, remembering he was a dead man, lay back again.
The lights went on, and it was all he could do to keep from shading his eyes with his hand. Several women were at the door, but the cries were Nahid’s.
Rubber wheels skidded on the bare floor, and his gurney was bumped by another. Kashfi was talking over the women’s voices, his adolescent drone a poor instrument of condolence. The death of her cellmate, he told Nahid, was God’s will. The girl would have none of it, though, and berated herself for not taking better care of her only friend in Evin. Darius brought shallow draughts of air into the top of his lungs, and tried not to break a sweat under the hot lights till the guards took Nahid back to her cell.
Kashfi’s hand was on his shoulder. Opening his eyes, he saw Maryam motionless on the gurney next to his with her right arm dangling over the edge. Redness gushed from inside her wrist and branched into separate streams along her fingers. Her cheeks were pure white; even her hair seemed to have leached color onto the floor. She sat up slowly, staring at her wrist in wonder that it belonged to her.
“Who told you to open your arm like this?” Kashfi asked. “Just to show some blood would have been enough.”
“I wanted to be convincing.”
“You’ve convinced me. A few minutes more, and you could have bled to death.” Kashfi began sewing her arm with a needle and black thread. “Why did you cut so deep? Why cut along the vein like you meant it, instead of across?”
“The guards are jaded by gore. They wouldn’t have taken notice of anything less.”
“Maryam is a true daughter of Iran, an expert at fabrication,” Darius said. “She dissembles more persuasively than the worst murderers.”
“How do you know when I’m lying?” She sprayed a few drops of her blood onto his gurney. “Are these lies?”
“You’ve lost all feeling for the truth.”
“Shhh.” Kashfi cut the thread and knotted it. “The dead aren’t entitled to make so much noise.” He flung a shroud into Maryam’s lap. “Take off your chador, and get into this, quick,” he said, and shut off the light.
Darius filled his eyes with the image of a ghost in a frenzied striptease. Maryam was back on the gurney when the lights came on again, smoothing the folded chador against her body beneath the shroud. Devoid of color she was the loveliest corpse he had seen, an advertisement for the grave.
“The truck leaves for Behesht-e-Zahra in the hour before sunrise.” Kashfi slipped off Maryam’s rubber prison sandals and gave them to her to hide. “It does not make any stops en route. Get off the first time you feel it slow down. The cemetery is crowded at all hours these days. You don’t know what you may encounter there.” He shook Darius’s hand. “Good luck,” he said, and then went back to Maryam, and removed two silver rings from her fingers. “Find a place for these, too,” he said to her, “unless you want the grave diggers all over you.”
Maryam’s gurney was wheeled into the corridor. Darius lay with his eyes closed and his hands folded across his heart, perfecting his attitude of death. Soon Kashfi came for him, and he was placed beside Maryam. A rough bandage chafed his wrist, and her warm hand nestled into his. Had anyone asked he would have said that indeed he must have died because already he was in heaven, a place of fantastic expectation where nothing was as it seemed to be, and falsehood was legal tender.
D
ESCENDING FROM THE HEIGHTS
of Evin, Darius shook harder with every lost meter of elevation—an inversion of physical law he explained away with the theory that absolute zero emanates from the grave. His shroud was paper thin; it afforded no protection from the wind that poured under the canvas top of the Bedford truck. The mound of bodies on which he was riding shifted as the truck careened around a corner, and a clammy crevasse opened up and swallowed him.
He touched bottom holding his breath, and began clawing his way back to the top. A moan rose from the knot of corpses, and he swept the blackness for Maryam. The hand he grabbed was ice cold and scabrous. He threw it down and searched for warm flesh, pulled Maryam close and clung to her, bobbing in a putrifying sea.
The squeal of brakes announced a sudden stop. The load pressed forward, and a body tumbled between them, a woman still wet with blood that was not quite cold. Maryam gagged as Darius freed them from her embrace.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
In the dark he heard her retching. The truck banked sharply, and he braced against the weight of their traveling companions as it speeded up again on an unpaved surface.
“How far till we’re there?”
“I don’t know where we are,” he told her. “We must have taken a detour.”
Through a tear in the canvas he looked out into a starry void in orbit around a van’s single taillight. The roadbed was paved in crushed rock and dirt. Other than the van disappearing in a gray smokescreen theirs was the only vehicle on it.
“Better get dressed now,” he said.
Maryam slipped on her chador over the shroud. With no place to stand Darius struggled into his pants. One leg was on when his shoes slid away, and he tunneled through the bodies to retrieve them. Maryam held his jacket behind his back, and guided his hands into the sleeves.
The dry heat of the southern slums billowed under the canvas, but neither of them could stop shivering. The truck lurched over an obstacle in the road, and as it slowed they crouched behind the tailgate. Orange traffic pylons glowed in a sodium vapor haze as a young Guardsman peeked inside, laughing nervously. A voice that otherwise was indistinct clearly pronounced the word “
Advance
.”
Darius was certain they were entering Behesht-e-Zahra via the long avenue that led past the tomb of the Imam and the sections where the martyrs of the Revolution were buried. They turned twice more into the furthest corner of the cemetery, a potter’s field where Evin disposed of martyrs to private causes.
A cement mixer was parked beside a trench from which the sun seemed to have risen out of the pebbly ground. Laborers molded of the same sandy compound lining the bottom of the excavation used long-handled hoes to prepare it to be filled and sealed.
Darius was clambering over the tailgate when the truck squeezed between the pit and a hill of turned earth, and the driver left the engine running and went around to the back. With Maryam he retreated into the mass of corpses, which had reassembled as an exclusive club that now barred them admittance. The driver held his fingers over his nose as he lowered the tailgate and glanced distastefully at his cargo. He was younger than Maryam, with the desert tan and strong white teeth of a peasant who was still new to urban living. Darius took Maryam’s hand and together they came forward. The driver froze, and his skin turned as glossy as anyone’s in the truck. His knees moved up and down, but his feet were stuck to the ground. Delivering himself of a girlish shriek, he ran to the gang of cement workers, and Darius saw him gesticulating wildly as he led a charge to hallowed ground.
Darius lowered himself slowly from the tailgate. The light slap of the ground against his toes was as painful as a session on the whipping bed. Maryam sprinted for the cemetery wall with Darius several steps behind. He boosted her over the waterstained bricks, and pulled himself up after her, and they kept running till they lost themselves in the twisted lanes around Bijan’s house.
“Where can we go?” Maryam asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that we’re free.”
“It was too easy,” Darius said. “It worries me.”
“Easy? I hope I never have to go through anything so easy again. When you relax, that’s when
I’ll
worry.”
“Worry now. Worry for Kashfi, when they find out we’re gone.”
Streetlights drew them to a main thoroughfare, an avenue of shuttered food stalls and small shops. A muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer at a corner mosque, and they crossed to the other side and kept to the shadows away from the men straggling to services. A cruise cab stopped for them unasked. The driver brought them north past the railroad station following Darius’s instructions for avoiding the Komiteh roadblocks. The upholstery reeked of tobacco smoke and spoiled fruit. Maryam rolled down the windows, and fumigated the interior with fresh air.
“Shabbaz Avenue,” Darius said, and stone worry beads dangling from the mirror clacked rhythmically as the cab swung east. Darius looked out at street sweepers maneuvering wide brooms along sidewalks buried in trash. From the old power plant he called the turns to a gray brick wall crumbling under years of neglect. In the dying garden surrounding a traditional home a birdhouse hung in the yellow canopy of a plane tree. “Stop here,” he said.
“The fare is two thousand rials,” the driver said.
Darius opened the door. “My money is inside the house.”
“Pay me right now.” The driver reached over the seat, and pulled the door shut. “Pay me, or I will call the police.”
Maryam scoured her chador, and tossed a silver ring into the front.
“This is worth tens of thousands,” the driver said. “How can I make change?”
“Give us what you have,” Maryam said.
The driver emptied his change maker, and raced away laughing. A finch had come out of the birdhouse, and Maryam paused in the garden to hear him sing to the early morning sun.
“Whose place is this?” she asked.
“A friend’s.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“Completely.”
Maryam peered inside a window. “It doesn’t look like anyone is home.”
Through the streaked glass Darius saw tracks in the carpeting made by the cart from the morgue. He went into the garden for a dead branch, and smashed the door pane closest to the knob. Stale, arid air rushed out as though an ancient tomb had been violated. Maryam hurried inside ahead of him to explore all the rooms, and soon he heard water rumbling against the bottom of a metal tub.
“You wouldn’t expect to find a bathtub in an old home like this,” she said to him.
“Mehta was full of surprises.”
The bedroom closet contained three or four suits that might fit him, shoes to wear over several pairs of socks. In a cardboard crate brittle with age were several shapeless dresses among a dozen black chadors. He tossed a flowery chemise with puffed sleeves at Maryam. Draping it against her body she made it youthful and exotic, but as he nodded his approval she let it drop to the floor.
“I lied,” she said. “To Ashfar. There’s no locker, no key. It was just something to get them to leave us alone.”
“Why tell me now?”
“So you understand.”
“The mycotoxins are nothing to me anymore.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m holding out on you. That I ever did. If I’d known where they were, I’d have told him when he had you on the whipping bed.”