The Septembers of Shiraz Read Online Free PDF

be added to your file.”
    Another guard takes hold of Isaac’s arm and drags him across the desolate courtyard. Isaac pictures the men inside the mosque, down on all fours facing Mecca, bodies bowing to the floor and rising again, prayers forming underneath their breaths. He had always been glad that he did not have to partake in this ritual, did not have to drop everything five times a day to pray. Now he wishes he could have stayed with the others—to kneel and rest his forehead on the cool prayer stone.
    When they reach his cell he asks for an aspirin and the guard agrees to bring him one. Alone again, he lets his body fall back on his mattress. The sour scent of blood reaches him from across the room, where Mehdi’s soiled bandages are piled up. He turns on his side, faces the wall, where someone has inscribed, “I have a bad feeling today. Allah-o-Akbar —God is great…” He has been captured for about twenty-four hours now. Today’s date, September 21, 1981. He would like to link to these numbers an event, concrete and retrievable. The one that emerges is nearly four decades old—the night he made love for the first time, to a girl named Irene McKinley.
    He was eighteen years old, and was working in Abadan,at the petroleum refinery. Every morning he would put on his trousers and starched white shirt, slip his feet into the leather oxfords that had made their way from the trash of the well-to-do villas of southern Abadan to the closets of the modest Khorramshahr port where he lived, and hop on the bicycle that would take him six miles south, to the center of the city where the refinery gurgled.
    On his way back in the early afternoon he would pedal through the city aimlessly, postponing as long as possible his return to his quarreling siblings and his unhappy mother, and to the void left by a father with an affinity for liquor. This is how he met Irene, on one of those nomadic afternoons, on the breezy September 21 of 1942. She was in a coffeehouse with a group of American soldiers, stationed with other Allies in Iran to transport supplies to Russia. The only woman in the coffeehouse, she drank tea while the soldiers swilled beers, though from time to time one of them would slide a glass toward her and she would take a sip. Isaac found her not beautiful but attractive, red hair tied back at the nape of her neck, ivory-white freckled skin exposed to the fading sun.
    As he entered the coffeehouse a dozen or so men were sipping tea, sugar cubes melting in their mouths as they jabbered. Two of them were playing backgammon, their forceful rolls of dice echoing in the carpetless room. Isaac liked seeing the fair-skinned Americans there, loud and lighthearted, tongues twirling as they spoke. He sat at his regular table by the window overlooking a row of old houses, but instead of his regular tea he ordered a shot of arrack. He felt fluid as hedrank it, the chipping teal-colored walls spinning in slow motion, so he ordered another, then a third. He felt everything around him—men, laughter, wooden tables, glimmering glasses, clattering plates, and the girl, the lovely girl with the red hair—blend into a single sensation, a tickling in his stomach, the happiness to be alive, and to be here, in this moment, waiting for the sun to give way to the coolness of the night, when nothing is seen and everything is possible.
    He offered to barter a bottle of arrack, which would cost him a few days’ salary, for an American military cap. Seeing the effect of the drink on Isaac the Americans found the deal worthy, and already lightened by several rounds of beer, they invited him to their table. Once seated among them he began telling jokes in his broken English. He had never told jokes before, did not know his memory could retain them. The men’s laughter gained volume after each punch line, and the girl’s smiles, flashed at him sporadically from across the table, fired his