“Get stuffed!” Again Lochart hammered on the door. “Sharazad!” Meshang whirled on Zarah. “Go and get some Green Bands! Go on, get some Green Bands! They’ll throw this madman out!”
“But, Meshang, isn’t it dangerous to involve them in ou - ” “Get them!”
Lochart’s temper snapped. His shoulder went into the door. It shuddered but did not give so he raised his foot, slammed his heel against the lock. The lock shattered and the door burst open. “Get Green Bands!” Meshang shrieked. “Don’t you understand they’re on our side now, we’re reinstated…” Then he rushed through the door too. Blankly he also saw the room was empty, bed empty, bathroom empty, nowhere else she could be. Both he and Lochart turned on Jari who stood at the doorway, staring with disbelief, Zarah cautiously behind her in the hall. “Where is she?” Meshang shouted.
“I don’t know, Excellency, she never left here, my room is next door and I’m a light sleeper…” Jari howled as Meshang belted her across the mouth, the blow sending her reeling onto her hands and knees.
“Where’s she gone?”
“I don’t know, Excellency, I thought she was in be - ” She shrieked as Meshang’s toe went into her side. “By God, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know!”
Lochart was at the French doors. They opened easily, already unlatched. At once he went out onto the balcony, down the stairs, and to the back door. He came back slowly, in turmoil. Meshang and Zarah watched him from the balcony. “The back door was unlocked. She must’ve gone out this way.” “Gone where?” Meshang was flushed with rage, and Zarah turned on Jari who was still on her hands and knees in the bedroom, moaning and weeping with fear and pain. “Shut up you dog or I’ll whip you. Jari! If you don’t know where she’s gone, where do you think she’s gone?”
“I… I don’t know, Highness,” the old woman sobbed. “Thinkkk!” Zarah shrieked and slapped her. Jari howled. “I don’t knowwww! She’s been strange all day, Excellencies, strange, she sent me away this afternoon and went off by herself and I met her near seven o’clock and we came back together but she said nothing, nothing, nothing…” “By God, why didn’t you tell me?” Meshang shouted. “What was there to tell, Excellency? Please don’t kick me again, please!”
Meshang groped for a chair. The violent pendulum from total terror when the mullah and Green Bands were announced to total euphoria at his reprieve and reinstatement to fury finding Lochart here and Sharazad gone had momentarily unhinged him. His mouth moved but there was no sound and he saw Lochart questioning Jari but could not understand the words.
When he had rushed back into the dining room to stutter the God-given news there had been rejoicing, Zarah had wept with happiness and embraced him and so did the women, and the men had warmly wrung his hand. All except Daranoush. Daranoush was no longer there. He had fled. Out the back door. “He’s gone?”
“Like a bag full of fart!” someone called out. Everyone had started laughing, their private relief that they were no longer in any immediate danger of guilt by association, together with Meshang’s totally unexpected rocket back to wealth and power, making them light-headed. Someone had shouted, “You really can’t have Daranoush the Daring as a brother-in-law, Meshang!”
“No, no, by God,” he remembered saying, quaffing a glass of champagne. “How could you trust such a man?”
“Not even with a bucket of piss! By the Prophet, I’ve always thought Dirty Daranoush overcharged for his services. The bazaar should rescind his contract!”
Another cheer and general agreement and Meshang had drunk a second glass of champagne, gloating over the glorious new possibilities opened up before him: the new contract for the bazaar’s waste which he as the injured party would of course have, a new syndicate to finance the government under his guidance and greater profit, new associations with more important ministers than Ali Kia - where is that son of a dog? - new deals in the oil fields, monopolies to maneuver, a new match for Sharazad, so easy now for who would not want to be part of his family, the bazaari family? No need now to pay out a usurious dowry I agreed to only under duress. All my property back, the estates on the Caspian shores, streets of houses in Jaleh, apartments in the northern suburbs, lands and orchards and fields and villages, all of it back.
Then the servant destroying his elation, whispering that Lochart had returned, was already in his house, already upstairs. Rushing upstairs, and now helplessly watching the man he hated so much questioning Jari, Zarah listening as intently.
With an effort he concentrated. Jari was saying between sobs, “… I’m not sure, Excellency, she… she only… she only told me the young man that saved her life at the first Women’s Protest was a university student.” “Did she ever meet him alone?”
“Oh, no, Excellency, no, as I said we met him at the march and he asked us to take coffee to recover,” Jari said. She was petrified of being caught in the lie but more petrified of telling what had really happened. God protect us, she prayed. Where has she gone, where?
“What was his name, Jari?”
“I don’t know, Excellencies, it might have been Ibrahim or … or Ishmael, I don’t know. I already told you, he had no importance.”
Lochart’s head was pounding. No clue, nothing. Where would she have gone? To a friend’s? To the university? Another protest march? Don’t forget the rumors in the market about university students rioting again, more explosions expected tonight, more marches and countermarches, Green Bands versus the leftists, but all non- imam-sponsored marches forbidden by the Komiteh and the Komiteh’s patience ended. “Jari, you must have some idea, some way of helping us!”
Meshang said gutturally, “Whip her, she knows!”
“I don’t I don’t…” Jari wailed.
“Shut up, Jari!” Lochart turned on Meshang, his face pale and violence absolute. “I don’t know where she’s gone but I know the why: you forced the divorce, and I swear by the Lord God if she comes to harm, any harm, you will pay!”
Meshang blustered, “You left her, you left her penniless, you abandoned her and you’re divorced, yo - ”
“Remember, you will pay! And if you bar me from this house whenever I come back or she comes back, by God, be that on your head too!” On the edge of madness, Lochart stalked toward the French doors.
Zarah said quickly, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know … I… To the university. Perhaps she’s gone to join another march though why she’d run off to do that…” Lochart could not bring himself to articulate his real terror: that her revolt was so extreme that her mind was unhinged and she would kill herself - oh, not suicide, but how many times in the past had she said, “Never worry about me, Tommy. I am a Believer, I always try to do God’s work and so long as I die doing God’s work with God’s name on my lips I will go to Paradise.”
But what about our child-to-be? A mother wouldn’t, couldn’t, could she, someone like Sharazad?
The room was very still. For an eternity he stood there. Then, all at once, his being swept him into new waters. In a strange clear voice he said, “Bear witness for me: I attest that there is no other God but God and Mohammed is the Prophet of God… I attest that there is no other God but God and Mohammed is the Prophet of God…” and the third and last time. Now it was done. He was at peace with himself. He saw them staring at him. Stunned. Meshang broke the silence, no longer in anger. “Allah-u Akbar! Welcome. But saying the Shahada is not enough, not by itself.”
“I know. But it is the beginning.”
They watched him vanish into the night, all of them spellbound that they had witnessed a soul being saved, an unbeliever transmuted into a Believer, so unexpectedly. All of them were filled with joy, degrees of joy. “God is Great!”
Zarah murmured, “Meshang, doesn’t this change everything?” “Yes, yes and no. But now he will go to Paradise. As God wants.” Suddenly he was very tired. His eyes went to Jari, and she began to tremble again. “Jari,” he said with the same calm, “you are going to be whipped until you tell me all the truth or you are in hell. Come along, Zarah, we mustn’t forget our guests.”
“And Sharazad?”
“As God wills.”
* NEAR THE UNIVERSITY: 9:48 P.M. Sharazad turned into the main road where Green Bands and their supporters were collecting. Thousands of them. The vast majority were men. All armed. Mullahs marshaled them, exorting them to maintain discipline, not to fire on the leftists until they were fired upon, to try to persuade them
