Dawn did not arrive so much as it diluted the night, turning the quarter’s sharp angles and high tilework into a pale sketch. Simin kept to the seam between shadow and open light, where a face could be only another blur moving with purpose. The first carts came in with a complaint of wood and iron; their wheels found every rut and made a music of necessity. She matched her pace to that clatter, neither hurrying like one chased nor lingering like one lost, and let the cheap bundle at her shoulder swing with the same indifferent weight as any porter’s load.
She had trained her body to forget itself. Shoulders drawn in, chin not too high, stride measured: boyish without swagger. The felt cap itched where close-cropped hair failed to soften its edge. Her cloak, plain as dust, hid the angles of her shape, and her hands (always betrayers) were kept busy: one on the bundle’s knot, one worrying at a strip of cloth as if it were a tally string. The ink-stains on her fingers could pass for honest work in this place of contracts and counters; she held them openly, as if ashamed of nothing, as if she had never pressed wax into a seal to steal its mouth.
Ahead, the Qeysarieh gate waited like a throat. Beneath it, the arcades began to stir: a man shaking out a woven mat, another pouring water that darkened the stone in brief, clean crescents. A pair of guards stood with their spears angled toward the street, their silhouettes made taller by the thin light. Simin counted them without seeming to look, then counted the spaces beside them: where a boy could slip through if questioned, where he might be pulled back by the collar.
She listened for names, for the rasp of an order, for the laugh that meant leisure and therefore danger. Her own voice stayed folded behind her teeth, ready to be low, ready to be brief. In a city that recorded everything worth owning, she had learned to enter as one more line item: unremarkable, necessary, and easily overlooked: until the ink dried.
Under the arches the air held its own flavor, as if the city had been simmering spices and resentment through the dark hours and now exhaled. Saffron rode on old smoke from last night’s braziers; somewhere incense fought it and lost. Simin drew her breath in careful fractions, not from devotion to caution alone, but because a full inhale would invite the body to remember what it lacked. Hunger sat beneath her ribs like an unpaid debt, tightening whenever the scent of fresh bread drifted from a baker’s shuttered oven-mouth.
She let none of it show in her face. Boys went hungry without ceremony; exiles went hungry with a story attached, and stories were what the quarter collected.
Her fingers (those constant witnesses) carried their own perfume: sour ink, a trace of wax, the ghost of paper. She flexed them once, as if from honest cramps, and let the stains be seen. In this place a marked hand meant employment, errands, accounts; it meant a person who belonged to other people’s ledgers. Better that, she told herself, than a hand remembered by a court clerk, or by a guard with time to look twice.
She read the arcades the way her father’s clerks had read account books, with the same stern mercy: what was fixed, what could be moved, what would cost. Two guards stood where the morning narrowed into passage, palms held to a brazier’s small animal-heat, their spears resting like statements already written. Beyond them a knot of porters lounged and shifted, ropes over shoulders, faces turned toward any purse that might open; they were a waiting inventory of backs and silence. A few paces farther a shop shutter sat half-lifted: not enough for trade, enough for an eye. The man behind it did not call out prices; he watched the flow as if measuring which bodies belonged. Simin let his gaze pass over her as over a copper coin: seen, judged, and spent.
The Qeysarieh gate drew itself up in the thinning dark, a mouth of brick and shadow taking in the first errands of the day without a sound. Simin let the current carry her, not quick enough to look hunted, not slow enough to invite a question. She stayed where the arcade’s seam held, half light, half obscurity, so that shoulders, bundles, and breath could blur her into a miscounted number.
A cough snapped somewhere behind her. Her neck wanted to turn; she kept it still, as if the joints had been nailed by habit. Looking back was a confession. Instead she set her eyes on the seam where an alcove broke the arcade, measured the side-alley’s mouth, and counted her steps under her breath: even, even. One more body, nothing more.
She let her spine fold a fraction, not in surrender but in practice, the way a mule learns the low lintel of a stable. A young man, an errand-clerk, a porter’s scrap of a cousin, did not stand upright in Naqsh-e Jahan at dawn. Upright was for those with names that could be spoken loudly, for men who wore clean wool and carried nothing they could not afford to lose. Simin made herself narrow, a line of use rather than presence, and felt the familiar ache bloom between her shoulders as if it were an old friend who insisted on being greeted.
The cheap bundle in her arms helped. Its coarse cloth rasped her forearm; the twine cut a small groove into her palm. She adjusted her grip as she had watched boys do, quick, impatient, competent, turning the weight so it sat against the hip, so her elbow could angle outward without seeming delicate. Ink-stained fingers were too telling; she kept the worst of them curled in, nails bitten short, hands made work-rough by dirt rubbed in at the last water stop. Hunger made her movements sharp and economical; it also made her breath shallow, as if she could save herself by spending less air.
At the edge of her hearing the guards’ murmurs rose and fell, half swallowed by the crackle of the brazier. She did not look at them. Looking was an invitation, and invitations in a city under plague rules were answered with questions, with requests for papers, with the slow turning of a seal between thumb and forefinger while someone decided how much trouble you were worth.
A breeze threaded through the arcade and brought saffron smoke and the sour tang of vinegar from a doorstep wash. It carried, too, the stale sweetness of last night’s melon and the animal musk of packed bodies. Simin kept her head slightly bowed, felt cap shadowing the parts of her face that remembered being addressed as a daughter. She let her stride find the cadence of errands so that if anyone counted her, they would count her as one more burden-bearer passing through. Her eyes stayed on the ground ahead (mud, dropped melon rind, the hems of robes) anything but faces that might recognize what she used to be.
Her eyes stayed low as if the stones themselves were her ledger. Mud still held the imprint of last night’s sandals, soft at the edges where a broom had half-swept and given up. A dropped melon rind shone pale in the dim, its wetness catching the first thin light like a small wound. Along the arcade, hems moved past: wool darkened by dew, cotton patched at the knee, a strip of green silk that could afford to brush dust and not care. She read all of it the way she once read margins: who had eaten, who had hurried, who had slept on a shop threshold.
Faces were the danger. A face could carry an old name in the crease beside its mouth, could turn in surprise and make her childhood stand up in her bones. She let her lashes be a curtain and practiced seeing without meeting anyone: the angle of a beard in the corner of her vision, the swagger of a guard’s boot, the tremor in a porter’s hands that meant fever or fear. Even the call to prayer, lifting from tile and throat, she took as cover. Sound enough to hide the small betrayals of breath.
She let her feet decide the story. Not the loose drift of someone with coin to spend, not the skittering haste that made guards lift their heads, but the clean, clipped rhythm of duty like a line of figures added twice to be certain. A boy sent from a stall to a storeroom had no time for wonders, not even in a square built to shame other cities. She set her jaw as if she carried an order in her mouth and kept her shoulders squared just enough to look employed. At each arch she adjusted her pace by the traffic’s pulse, yielding without yielding, slipping into the thin seams between men and burden-animals where no one looked twice. Hunger urged her to run; fear taught her to arrive.
The bundle rode high under her arm, its dull weight pressing her ribs into steadiness, a rough-board shield and a ready excuse. When a stranger’s elbow grazed her in passing, heat flared up her neck; she cinched the twine until it bit, letting the pain instruct her. She folded tighter around the parcel, turning the jostle into a porter’s reflex, nothing tender, nothing offended.
She made her hands speak before her mouth ever could. She showed her palms, blunt, honest, empty, and then curled them, testing the air as if it were already a rope or a reed-pen, ready for whatever weight another man might thrust upon her. Fingers flexed, loosened, flexed again: the quiet grammar of errands and small obedience, useful enough to pass through like dust.
A smear of ink still lived in the crease of her thumb, as if the road itself had pressed its seal into her skin. She found it again without looking, the way the tongue finds a sore tooth. Thumb to forefinger, thumb to forefinger: worrying the mark as though it were a bead for prayer, though no prayer would change what ink had already written in the court books.
The city had trained her hands once: hold the reed-pen lightly, keep the wrist loose, let the figures march obediently across the page. Exile had re-trained them: carry weight without complaint, keep the nails short, let the knuckles roughen into a story no one questioned. Yet this stain betrayed the earlier schooling. Ink was a different kind of dirt. Too intimate, too clever. A porter came home with dust ground into the lines of his palm, with saffron or lampblack from a careless sack. Ink said: clerk, scribe, one of those boys who listened more than he spoke.
She turned her thumb under the rim of her sleeve and rubbed harder, drawing heat until the skin flushed. The stain did not lift; it thinned at the edges, blurred into the color of old bruises and street grime. She scraped at it with her nail, then stopped. Too much attention to too small a thing, the sort of fuss that made men glance and wonder what a boy had to hide. Instead she pressed the thumb into the coarse twine of the bundle and let the fibers bite, exchanging blackness for pain. Pain was honest. Pain belonged to labor.
A gust brought the breath of incense from some shuttered doorway, vinegar sharp behind it, and with it the remembered sting of ink and vinegar mixed in her father’s house to keep rats from the ledgers. She swallowed, tasting nothing but morning dryness, and kept rubbing until warmth spread along the joint and the remaining shadow might pass for any man’s grime earned in the arcades.
She slid her hands up into the sleeves of the plain qabā, hiding the telltale delicacy of her fingers and the ink’s last shadow as if the cloth were a sleeve of forgetfulness. Let the shoulders speak, she told herself: let bone and impatience answer for her. She made her body smaller in the way boys did not notice they were doing: chest flattened, chin tipped forward, weight pitched to the balls of the feet. Each step became an economy, not the measured glide taught in courtyards, but the brisk, almost careless stride of someone sent to fetch and return before the tea cooled.
Under the arcades the morning traffic thickened; sandals scuffed, animals snorted, a porter cursed softly at a snagged load. She kept her elbows close, not to guard her ribs as a woman would, but as if she begrudged the crowd any room. When she turned, she turned too late, a half-beat of rudeness: boys forgot to apologize. She trained her gaze to skim, not settle, and let her shoulders bump the world first, as though she expected it to make way.
In the narrow chamber behind her ribs, she ran her own inventory as if she were a shop with shutters half-drawn: what on her could be counted, weighed, found wanting. First, the pause (too deliberate, too hungry for meaning) when another face passed near. Men looked and forgot; they did not linger on the minute tilts of fear and greed around a mouth. She forced herself to glance as if by accident, to let suspicion be a brief itch rather than a hand held in public.
Then the hand itself: fingers that wanted to fall into the old shape of a pen, wrist too supple for hauling. She kept them curled, knuckles forward, as though always ready to grip twine.
And the eyes, her worst betrayal, rising to meet a stare without flinching, as if truth were owed her. She learned to look past, not through.
She let her mouth shape a greeting under her breath, as if addressing no one: a scrap of courtesy to test the mask. The sound came out roughened, pitched down into the chest where it could not easily betray its true register. It rasped against her own ears like a borrowed garment. Before it could rise, she clipped it short and covered the end with a small, workman’s cough.
She stepped under the arch and took up a pace meant for boys sent on errands. Neither hurrying nor loitering, a metronome of need. Her gaze fixed ahead as if the tilework and faces were only walls to pass. The bundle stayed clamped to her ribs, not cherished. With each footfall she repeated, like a prayer swallowed whole: let them see him, and let him be nothing worth remembering.
Incense smoke from guttering braziers and the first cookfires lay knee-high in the arcade, turning the dawn into a dulled veil that thinned faces at their edges and made the tiled vaults seem farther away than stone should allow. It carried saffron bread and wet wool, the faint sweetness of cardamom where a baker had been generous, and beneath it the sharp bite of ash that snagged at the back of Simin’s throat like an accusation. She kept her breath small. A deep inhale could turn to a cough, and a cough could invite the kind of attention that began with pity and ended with questions.
The haze moved with the smallest stirrings: a porter’s shoulder shouldering past, the flutter of a shop curtain, a broom drawing damp grit into a line. It gave everyone the same borrowed anonymity for a few heartbeats. Until they were close enough to see each other’s hands. Simin watched hands more than faces. A ring that caught the weak light and flashed like a seal. A thumb stained blue from indigo. A knuckle wrapped in cloth where the skin had cracked in winter. It was the hands that told her who could afford to linger, and who could afford to stop someone else.
Somewhere ahead, a water-seller’s call traveled low and careful, as if the plague might hear and take offense. In the same breath came the clack of shutters, wood against wood, and the scrape of a bar lifted from its socket. A man spat into the gutter and the spittle vanished into the smoke as though the morning swallowed it whole. The city was waking, but it woke like a household after bad news. She angled herself to the shaded side of the arcade where the tiles held last night’s cold. The chill pressed through her thin cloak and steadied her, sharpened her senses the way hunger did. In the veil of smoke she could imagine herself reduced to a simple errand-boy’s outline: cap, bundle, narrow shoulders. Nothing that warranted a second look.
She kept the bundle pinned to her ribs as if it were a second set of bones, the cheap cloth rasping at her forearm where ink had not yet worn off. In the haze she allowed herself the smallest advantage: to be partly unfinished to other eyes, an outline smudged by smoke and morning. She did not draw breath the way the body wished. Each inhale was measured and shaved down, taken through the nose and held just long enough to quiet the throat. The smoke tasted of saffron crusts and old charcoal; it clung to the tongue and made her mouth dry, which helped. Dryness discouraged speech.
Tile-shadow cooled the sweat along her spine, and the cold entered her like counsel. It tightened her shoulders into a boy’s narrowness and dulled the soft betrayals of scent and heat. Her soles found the damp grit and set down lightly, heel then toe, as if she had learned to move under a sleeping household. Smaller steps, smaller sound; the trick was not speed but absence. She let her eyes skim past faces and settle on thresholds, on where a man might stand to stop her, on where she could slip through without turning her head.
Along the arcade the first shutters answered one another, clack, groan, a reluctant wooden throat clearing, until the whole row seemed to be passing a cautious assent from latch to latch. Merchants did not throw their doors wide anymore; they eased them, feeling the morning’s temper, listening for the scrape of boots that meant a patrol, or the sudden hush that meant a rumor had teeth. A broom’s twiggy mouth worried at yesterday’s grit, dragging it into a thin, obedient line and feeding it to the gutter as if dust could be disciplined out of misfortune. Near a post, a man hawked and spat with a sharp, practiced flick, then muttered a warding phrase under his breath, half prayer, half habit, like spittle might bargain with illness before it learned his name.
Water-sellers drifted like pale ghosts along the arcade, goat-skins slung low against their hips, calling not as men cried wares in better seasons but in a softened cadence meant to soothe and not provoke. At one post a cup-boy rinsed his copper vessel with deliberate care, eyes flicking to each passerby before he dared to pour, as if water could be accused.
Near a brazier that coughed thin heat into the tiled shade, a porter held his palms over the coals, then pulled his scarf up to cover nose and mouth as if cloth could bar fate. His lips worked around a brief prayer, eyes fixed on the lane with the dull vigilance of those paid to notice sickness and theft alike. When his gaze slid past her, finding only a boy’s cap and burden, she spent the mercy at once, stepping on.
She let her eyes travel the arcade the way her father had taught her to read a ledger. Never staring at the sum, always taking the columns in the corner of sight, letting the mind add what the face must not betray. At each post stood two guards, paired like matched weights, their spears angled to the same degree, their belts buckled with the same official neatness. Yet their bodies argued with the symmetry. One leaned into the shade as if it belonged to him, heel hooked against the base of the post, chin tipped up in the small arrogance of a man certain the day held nothing that could touch him. His gaze wandered to tilework, to women hurrying past with veils drawn tighter than custom, to the slow smoke of the brazier. Anywhere but the hands and pockets that made the city dangerous.
The other guard watched as if hunger had taught him discipline. His eyes did not slide; they took. He counted bundles, measured the set of shoulders, marked who walked too fast and who tried to walk like they had nowhere to be. He looked for the places where a story frayed: a cap too new on a face too weathered, a porter’s back too straight, a clerk’s ink-stained fingers scrubbed raw. When he shifted his weight, it was not to rest but to keep the blood ready, as if he feared the moment of dullness more than any thief.
Simin felt that second gaze brush her like a cold fingertip and did what she had practiced in exile: she became smaller without shrinking, a boy who had learned obedience not from virtue but from necessity. She adjusted the cheap bundle on her shoulder with a porter’s impatient jerk, let her mouth settle into a sullen line, and kept her steps even. Neither hurried enough to announce guilt nor slow enough to invite inspection.
Beyond them a plague notice, pasted crooked on a wall, fluttered in a thin breeze, its black seal like an eye that never blinked. She did not look at it directly. She let it sit in her periphery, like a debt she meant to pay later. If she lived long enough to argue the account.
By a shuttered tea-house, beneath a signboard filmed with dust and old steam, three men held cups as if the weight of clay could excuse their idleness. The door behind them was barred; no kettle sang within. Yet they stood in the shadow where patrons used to argue over saffron sugar, speaking in breaths that barely troubled the air.
Their talk was not the bright, careless barter of the bazaar. It had the cautious texture of names not meant to be spoken aloud. One laughed once (too brief, too late) then let his mouth fall shut as his eyes moved, measuring the lane the way a butcher measures a carcass: not for beauty, but for use.
Simin watched without appearing to watch. A buyer’s hands betray him first; these men’s hands did not. Fingers stayed curled around cups gone cold, thumbs rubbing the rims as if rehearsing patience. When a spice-seller passed, they did not glance at his baskets. When a boy darted through with a tray of bread, none reached to bargain. Their attention was fixed instead on faces, on bundles, on the small stumbles of those trying to look ordinary.
In plague seasons, even loitering learned to wear a mask.
A patrol came unhurriedly along the arcade, not in the straight line of duty but in a slow drift that claimed leisure as authority. Their boots found the place where the plague notices had been pasted at dawn, and there their steps thickened, as if the stones remembered the dead. The paper still shone where glue had not yet dulled; the black seal sat heavy, a stamped mouth pronouncing orders without breath. One man lifted the edge with two fingers and let it fall, more careful than a reader. Testing tack, testing haste, testing whose hand had dared to post it so fresh. Another pretended to scan the lines while his eyes traveled instead over the passersby, searching for the flinch that confession makes. The wall, newly dressed in warnings, seemed to watch back.
She marked the ones who gave the plague signs a wide berth, as if ink itself carried contagion, and the ones who leaned in, lips moving once, then again, reading twice to be certain the order was meant for them. She noted who cut across the mouth of an alley with the dull certainty of habit, and who did it with a quick, obedient swerve, as though an unseen hand had pressed them into place.
Each detail entered her like figures taken down in a private hand: the way one gaze called another to attention, the hesitations that were not uncertainty but signal, the streets people avoided as if the stones themselves had been named. Routes chosen, routes refused: she tallied them until a pattern tightened, threads drawn toward certain doorways. In that tightening she felt, too, the flaws: a blind corner, a momentary crush, a gap wide enough for a boy.
She let the morning do what it always did in Isfahan. Erase the singular with the many. The first surge of porters came through like riverwater in rope harness and dust, shoulders bowed beneath bales that smelled of wool grease and stale saffron. She slipped between them and took on their pace, her cheap bundle hugged tight against her ribs as if it had weight enough to justify her hurry. A boy with a yoke of copper trays trotted past, ankles thin as reeds, the metal flashing with each step; behind him an old man muttered over a set of prayer-beads and kept muttering when he was jostled, as if the words were stitched into him.
Women moved in their own current, veils drawn, bargaining with a firmness that made the sellers’ voices soften into compliance. Their hands emerged briefly (braceleted, ink-marked, flour-dusted) then vanished again. Simin kept her eyes lowered in the manner of a junior clerk and let her lids do the counting: sleeves, sandals, the cut of a qabā, the telltale bulk of a hidden seal case at a belt. Hunger tugged once, sharp and private, but she swallowed it down with her breath and with the remembered discipline of being watched.
She made herself small in the lawful ways: shoulders angled away, stride measured, attention offered to no one in particular. The felt cap itched where sweat had dried; she resisted the urge to scratch, knowing how a careless hand could betray a woman’s habit of self-touch. When her throat tightened, she rehearsed the low register she had practiced on the road, short answers, a boy’s economy, and kept her mouth shut, because silence was a safer lie than any story.
To belong was not to be believed; it was to be overlooked. So she allowed elbows to brush her sleeve, allowed a shouted price to strike her like thrown grain, allowed the crowd’s shared purpose to carry her forward until even she could almost forget the name she had folded away.
Under the arcades she fixed her gaze on useful geometry, as if the city were a page ruled for sums. A half-open shutter made a thin, dark wedge in the bright lane; it promised a room beyond, or only a bolt waiting for a foolish hand. She measured its hinge-line, the gap between door and jamb, the place a shoulder could slip through without turning sidewise like a woman. Two stalls down, a guard stood with his spear angled across a passage in the lazy certainty of authority. Wood and iron making a simple cross that said not there. Yet the point did not quite touch the opposite wall; a man with nothing to lose could pass if he went first, and if the guard’s eyes were drawn by a quarrel over weights.
She took note of where shadows pooled, where tile-glitter turned to dust, where a rope of porters would compress the air into a momentary blindness. And always, she kept one small mercy in sight: the water-seller with his brass cup, his skin pouch sweating in the heat, his call rising and falling like a prayer. If hunger twisted her belly into sound, thirst could be purchased as cover. In a city that punished the wrong story, she trusted angles more than faces.
When speech became unavoidable, when a seller’s hand blocked her path, when a guard’s glance demanded a name, she paid out words as if from a hidden purse. Not lavish, not bright: small denominations, worn smooth by use. “Yes, aghā.” “No, by your leave.” “From the caravanserai.” She kept them flat and serviceable, the way a boy clerk would answer with no time to embroider. Her throat she held open with steady breath; her jaw she set as if chewing on a grievance. A flash of impatience, carefully chosen, did more than sweetness ever could: it made her seem ordinary, overworked, a youth already learning the city’s contempt for delay. Better to be thought rude than to be listened to.
Her ink-stained fingers would not consent to stillness. They worried the bundle’s knot, smoothed the frayed edge of her qabā, found an invented task at each breath, as if she had been sent on errands since childhood. She set her pace by other men’s heels, porters, apprentices, petitioners, letting their noise lend her a name. Never unaccompanied long enough for any gaze to keep her.
The square gathered itself into its old, practiced music: prices flung like pebbles, blessings stitched under breath, the soft rasp of sandals worrying at tile. Silk bales shifted; copper flashed; a donkey snorted and was answered with laughter too quick to be easy. Beneath it all ran a finer sound, the tremor of withheld coughs and watched doors, and she kept counting the gaps (between bodies, between glances) in case the cadence shattered.
A runner (barefoot, inkless, dye-stained to the wrists) cuts through the arcades at the Qeysarieh gate as if he’s another errand stitched into the bazaar’s cloth. The day has been scorched down to its essentials: sun on tile, smoke from incense braziers, the sharp sweetness of saffron and bruised pomegranate skins underfoot. Men call prices from shadowed stalls and draw their sleeves across their mouths when they cough; a mullah’s recitation rises and is swallowed by the clatter of copperwork. The boy moves in that noise like a needle through weave, not pushing, not pleading. Simply taking the gaps that open for those who know where to put their shoulders.
Simin has learned to watch for such seams. Hunger makes her eyes bright; exile makes them careful. Under her felt cap the close-cropped hair itches with sweat, and the plain qabā hangs on her narrowed posture like an apology. She keeps her hands occupied, one thumb worrying at a callus stained with old ink, the other touching the small hardness of a hairpin hidden in her sleeve, because still hands invite notice. At the gate the world is all thresholds: between mosque and market, between law and bargain, between the living and those marked by quarantine chalk. A guard’s gaze can turn a face into a verdict.
The runner’s wrists, blue-black with dye, speak of Khatereh’s storerooms: indigo and walnut husk, vat-work done fast and cheap. Yet there is no bundle on his back, no spindle of thread in his belt. He carries nothing, and that nothing is its own weight. He slips past a brazier where vinegar steams, past a seller of seals and reed pens whose tray glitters with small authority, and the crowd seems (just for a breath) to allow him passage as if he bears a private permit.
He comes near enough that Simin catches the sour-metal smell of fresh dye and sweat. His shoulder brushes hers with the practiced care of a pickpocket who has no interest in her purse. In the moment of contact something thin and folded, rough as cheap paper, finds its way into the shelter of her palm. The boy does not look back. He keeps walking as if the bazaar itself has sent him, as if errands can be invisible when the city is afraid.
Simin clocks him by habit, the way she has learned to read men before they read her. He wears the plainness of the bazaar like a borrowed cloak, but it does not sit easily on him. Porters’ children grow into their load, hips set, neck bent, breath trained to endure weight, and this boy carries nothing yet holds himself too straight, as if a stick has been laid along his spine and ordered not to break. Beggars learn the slack gaze that invites pity and dodges blame; his eyes are too awake, darting to faces, to belts, to the bright, indifferent line of guards where the arcade opens.
The cap is pulled low, yes, but not in the lazy way of one hiding from sun. It is tugged down with intention, shading brow and cheekbones from the quick arithmetic of strangers, as though a single remembered feature might be enough to call him by name. He moves with the economy of someone taught not to waste steps, not to be caught pausing. For a heartbeat Simin feels the old chill of being counted. Of knowing that in this city, even errands have handlers.
He adjusts his path to meet hers, not head-on but in the blind angle where bodies and baskets make a moving wall. Simin sees it as she would see a guard’s hand drift toward a baton: the slight correction of his heel, the way he lets a porter’s load hide him, the way he times his breath to the swell and ebb of the crowd. He is close enough that the edge of his sleeve grazes her qabā, close enough that a man’s laugh and a woman’s whispered prayer cover the small, purposeful sounds of cloth against cloth. She shifts half a step, too late, by design, and feels the city’s machinery click: contact, concealment, exchange, then nothing.
The bump lands light, practiced. Shoulder to shoulder, the kind that steals breath for a blink and steals something else if you let it. Simin lets her ribs soften as if yielding to accident, while her fingers close on what the jostle delivers: a folded scrap, coarse and warm from another hand. She keeps her face idle, her pulse loud.
He is gone before she can decide whether to follow, absorbed into the thick weave of trade: cumin and cardamom, raw indigo, the dry rasp of canvas over bolts. He does not glance back, as if the message were not weight but duty. Around Simin the crowd subtly edits itself: a donkey cart edging in, a guard’s shoulder blocking the clear line, a curtain of voices drawn like a screen.
Simin counts the touch the way she counts coins she cannot afford to lose: by feel first, by sound second, by the absence left behind. A true accident is clumsy. It apologizes with a startled breath, a muttered blessing, a hand that lingers in embarrassment. This brush carries none of that. It is smooth as oiled wood. Trained. The runner’s shoulder meets her just hard enough to make a story for any watching eyes, but not hard enough to anger; the contact happens in the narrow seam where two currents of bodies meet and cancel each other out. For a heartbeat she is pinned between a basket of bitter oranges and the coarse sleeve that has chosen her.
She does not flinch. A flinch is an admission. Under the felt cap the sweat along her hairline chills, but her face stays flat, boyish, disinterested; her mouth holds the line of someone with nothing to hide and nowhere urgent to be. She keeps her voice folded away in her throat, rehearsing silence the way she once rehearsed courtly phrases, careful, unhurried, wrong only if examined.
The city around her seems to listen, not with ears but with habits. Names of wares swell and fall; an old man hawks vinegar as if it were salvation; somewhere a child coughs and is shushed too quickly. Plague makes every throat sound like evidence. Paper makes every hand guilty. She feels, more than sees, the moment when a few heads turn and then turn away again, satisfied by the ordinary violence of commerce.
Her fingers, hidden by the drape of the qabā, close on the warmth left by another palm. The scrap is small, folded tight, its edges softened by being carried close. Merchant shorthand, she guesses at once: quick strokes meant to vanish into accounts, to pass as numbers if intercepted. The runner’s carelessness is a mask; the precision beneath it is the message’s true seal.
She lets the crowd carry her forward as if she has no will of her own, while inside her sleeve the thin weight settles into place, paper finding the hollow between cloth and skin; she keeps her shoulders loose, as if nothing has happened.
The thin weight continues to travel as she walks, sliding with each small shift of her arm until it settles along the bone, a private pressure that might have been nothing more than a tucked-in cuff or a stray coin. Paper, though, has its own insistence: it warms fast, holds heat like guilt, and makes the skin beneath it suddenly too aware of itself. The qabā’s sleeve, meant to hide a boy’s narrow wrist, becomes a corridor for secrecy. She lets it be.
She loosens her shoulders a fraction, allowing the cloth to swing as if she is merely another youth jostled by the bazaar’s appetite. Her posture stays careless, her step neither hurried nor hesitant. Hunger pinches at her belly; she lets that discomfort lend truth to her face. A man with empty pockets has no reason to clutch his arm.
Inside her, the old habit of counting returns measuring the message without giving it breath. She keeps the forearm relaxed, fingers slack, as though nothing has been delivered but sweat and dust. In Isfahan, survival often depends on how well one can carry what must not be seen.
She does not reach for the scrap, not yet. A boy’s hands are careless; a hunted woman’s are not. She leaves her palms hanging empty at her sides, fingers slightly curled as if from cold, as if from long walking, and lets the sleeve keep its secret. Her gaze skims the arcades the way a scribe skims a crowded page: not lingering, not confessing interest, but reading the margins. A porter pauses too long with a bale on his back and turns his head without moving his feet. Two guild lads shift to block and then to unblock the same narrow passage, rehearsing accident. A man at a spice stall smiles down into his own scales, smiling too steadily. Even those who refuse to look make themselves legible. Shoulders tightening, eyes fixed on tiles as if beauty could be a shield.
Somewhere close, the word wabā is not spoken so much as exhaled, and the air itself seems to tighten. A laugh dies halfway, a price is offered in a lower register, as if sound might summon fever. Men touch amulets beneath their shirts; women tuck sleeves over mouths. Plague turns piety into warding, and paper, seals, lists, names, teaches neighbors to suspect the hand that reaches.
She lets the bazaar’s tide take her as it will, past saffron heaps, past brass trays catching the sun, until the urge to bolt thins into something she can master. Between a stone pier and the scalloped mouth of an arcade, shadow gathers like a cloak. There, with her back half-turned, she can make a small, necessary adjustment without announcing it.
She set herself against the pillar as if it had always been her destination, letting the cold of its stone seep through the coarse cloth of her qabā and quiet the heat that had climbed her neck. The posture was one she had practiced into her bones: a boy who has been sent for rope or onions and is waiting out a scolding, a boy whose ribs do not dare swell with too much breath. She allowed her shoulders to loosen, not with relief but with the careful slack of someone killing time.
Her eyes dropped, lashes lowered as though she were studying dust and tile-grit, though she was still reading the world through the edges of her vision. Men passed close enough that their sleeves brushed the air beside her; the smell of sweat and cumin, wet wool, and vinegar from some cautious washer drifted by in layers. A string of prayer-beads clicked once, then was muffled in a fist. Somewhere under the arcade a broom rasped in a stubborn rhythm, an ordinary sound made sharp by how much else had been softened into whispers.
She kept her hands visible, empty, the way harmlessness was signaled here: palms relaxed, fingers slightly stained as any apprentice’s might be from ink and market grime. The cap’s felt brim cut the glare into a tolerable strip; beneath it she watched feet: boots that walked with purpose, sandals that shuffled, the quick soft step of someone who did not want to be counted. A guard’s metal point flashed at the far end of the passage and was gone again behind a curtain of bodies. A laugh rose and thinned, as if strangled by a thought of sickness.
Hunger tugged at her in small humiliations, saliva at the sight of flatbread, the ache of an empty stomach turning each scent into torment, but she held it as she held everything: inside, behind the mask.
She shifted her weight as if bored, as if the pillar were merely a place to lean, and with the movement let her sleeve fall so the hidden paper could slide, unnoticed, into the cradle of her palm.
The scrap unfolded against her palm like a small, reluctant wing. Her ink-stained thumb pressed the crease, worrying it flat in practiced motions, nothing eager, nothing furtive, only the habitual neatness of an errand-boy smoothing a tally before reporting it. The paper was cheap, fibrous, its edge rough where it had been torn from a larger sheet; it drank the sweat from her skin and clung. Under the slant of light that slipped between bodies and stone, the tight strokes of merchant shorthand began to resolve: hooks for numbers, broken lines for names, a curled sign that meant moved, a hard dot that warned sealed.
She read without moving her lips. Each symbol asked for its proper weight, and she gave it, as she had once weighed spices and lies. The runner’s hand was Khatereh’s house-hand. A draught lifted the corner of the scrap, fluttering it as if the bazaar itself wanted to snatch the words away, and she stilled it with the side of her finger, keeping her other hand empty and visible to passing eyes.
A name, pinched into shorthand, sat beside the blunt mark the merchants used when an account was closed for good. She knew it. Half from memory, half from the old taste of ink and fear: a clerk who had once copied petitions in a narrow, sunless room, who had kept his vowels neat and his margins cleaner than his conscience. For a breath she felt something like grief, but it was swallowed by calculation. A dead man left no hand to recognize hers, no voice to contradict a forged line, no witness to insist on sequence and seal. Yet death also loosened the locks: ledgers misplaced, keys passed to strangers, rooms opened in haste and then nailed shut. Her stomach dipped as if a stair had vanished beneath her foot, emptiness, opportunity, trap.
The second line struck with the dull certainty of a weight set on a scale: duplicates: not alley talk, not a hopeful exaggeration. Pages copied from the court registry, lifted out while plague orders made haste look like virtue, carried into a waqf storeroom where charity’s ledgers lay beside the state’s, and one iron bolt served both God and ink.
She folded the scrap down again, crease upon crease, until it was no more than a dry seed of paper. With two fingers she guided it under the seam of her sleeve, where stitched cloth could pretend to be only stitched cloth. Her mouth held the harmless emptiness of a boy counting coppers, while her thoughts counted sharper things: whose ring had turned that storeroom key, who would invoke waqf right as shield, and who grew fat when a door was sealed in God’s name.
The square did not change; she did. What had been color and heat became structure. The long arcades, with their painted vaults and dangling wares, narrowed in her mind into channels: places where a man could be carried forward by other bodies, or held in place by the smallest pause. Courtyards that yesterday had felt like relief (open sky, a cough of wind, the brief permission to breathe) tilted into choke points, each one with only so many exits, each one watched by someone who had learned to stand like a pillar and call it patience.
Even the incense braziers took on a second use. They were not only piety and plague superstition, not only the sweet burn meant to persuade the air itself into obedience. They marked borders. Smoke gathered where orders gathered. At the brazier’s edge, men in scarves stood too still, hands empty and yet not idle; their eyes did not wander like buyers’ eyes, did not soften at silk or flinch at prices. They watched for mismatched stories. The way a tongue stumbles over a neighborhood name, the way a belt knot is tied in a village fashion, the way a youth forgets to look bored.
She adjusted her gait to the current, letting her shoulders slope and her gaze fall to the level of sandals and spilled spices. A boy could be hungry without being suspicious. A boy could thread between a water-seller and a mule’s flank and be only another small necessity. Yet her thoughts moved above her, along rooflines and along the invisible lines of permission: where a guard would demand paper, where a waqf steward might answer questions with sanctimony, where an alley (half shuttered, half alive) would accept coin instead of seal.
She did not look back. Looking back was a confession. Instead she noted reflections in brass trays, in the slick eye of a blackened tile, in the brief mirror of water poured from a jug. The city’s beauty remained, but it had become a diagram, and she walked within it as if every step left ink.
She learned to count the cordons without lifting her chin. The air itself gave them away: vinegar soured on rags hung like exhausted flags; camphor and burned rue trying to bully sickness back into walls. At each turn there was a different music. No music at all, in truth, only the absence where sound ought to have been. A lane that should have shouted with hammering and quarrels lay muffled, as if its mouth had been stuffed with wool. Where a chain had been thrown across stone, it spoke when the wind touched it: a thin rattle, like a warning a man could pretend not to hear.
She let her eyes travel as a boy’s eyes might, over dates, over sandals, over the hems of cloaks, and kept the sharper reckoning behind her teeth. Some closures wore their reasons honestly: a soldier with a vinegar-wet scarf over his face, a chalk mark on a door, a bowl of ash and salt set to signal stay away. Others were too neat, too profitable. A gate barred not with sickness but with a clerk’s fresh knot of rope; a seal pressed on a storeroom that held more paper than plague. In those places, “health” sounded like a pretext spoken by men who could read account books.
A waqf seal, she understood now, was not only devotion made visible. Wax impressed with God’s claim and a steward’s neat authority. It was a second key that did not jingle in a pocket. Press it to a door and the door became holy; touch it to a bundle of papers and the bundle became untouchable except by the right hands. In the city’s mouth, waqf had always tasted of charity, lamps kept lit, bread set aside for the poor. But here, under plague and curfew, it could be a curtain drawn with legal fingers. Behind it, ledgers could sleep without witnesses; bodies could be counted as “quarantined” and vanish; a name could be shifted (as quietly as a coin) from one column into another, and the ink would insist it had always been so.
If the pages had truly been lifted out of the registry’s guarded room, then truth itself had been unpinned from its wall and set walking. A duplicate in a waqf storeroom could be handled like cloth: unfolded, measured, trimmed at the margins, its lines recopied in a steadier hand, its seal warmed and pressed again. One small substitution, and inheritance became rumor.
The thought would not stay a thought. It demanded hands and hinges: whose fingers turned the storeroom’s key, whose name could walk up in daylight and speak a waqf steward’s authority, whose boldness could warm wax and call it lawful. And behind that, the buyer (some hollow-bellied official hunting fees, or some smooth foreigner with a patron’s letter) ready to pay to leave only one “truth” breathing.
Simin folded the scrap again, not with the hurry of fear but with the tidiness of someone counting out a debt. Merchant shorthand vanished into a square no larger than a fingernail; the last angle of ink disappeared beneath the crease like a secret pressed into cloth. She slid it to the shelter of her thumb’s pad, where a coin would sit, and kept her hand half-closed, knuckles relaxed: nothing in it worth stealing, nothing in it worth asking about.
In the bright spill of the Qeysarieh gate the crowd shifted as if the earth itself breathed: porters shouldering bales, a mule balking at a puddle of rinse-water, a knot of soldiers making a narrow river that people learned to flow around. She let herself become one more current. Shoulders drawn in, spine shortened, chin neither proud nor bowed: she wore smallness the way a boy wears a borrowed coat, hoping the cut will persuade the eye before the mind begins to measure.
Hunger tightened her throat, made her swallow sound too loud in her own hearing. She kept her mouth set in that careless line she had practiced on roads and in courtyards: a youth’s impatience, a youth’s assumption that the world would not look too closely. Her voice, if she let it rise, could betray her; so she tested it silently, shaping words behind her teeth, tasting where the vowels rounded and where they could be made thin.
Her gaze traveled without lingering. A man by the tile-maker’s stall paused too long to be buying; his attention was not on wares but on passersby, as if waiting for a face to match a description that had been repeated into his ear. Two guards had shifted from the arcade’s shade to the open, their spears catching sun: an adjustment that looked like comfort but felt like netting. And, far down a lane that bent toward the waqf holdings, incense smoke curled from a brazier at a doorway: plague theater, or a warning that the door beyond had become “holy” to keep out the uninvited.
The scrap warmed under her thumb. Paper, ink, a dead clerk’s last reach. She let the thought settle like sediment and did not look back.
She stepped in at a spice-seller’s low table as if drawn by appetite rather than purpose. The trays lay open like little earths: turmeric the color of old gold, pepper like scattered ink, cumin seeds ridged and dull as dried riverbeds. She pinched a few between finger and thumb, careful not to let hunger make her greedy, and named it in the clipped, careless tone of a boy sent on errands. Half command, half yawn.
“Zīreh. Just a pinch.”
The word had to come out narrow. She listened to her own mouth as if to another man’s: the vowel’s roundness, the softness that would betray a woman raised to speak within walls. She rasped the last syllable, as apprentices did when dust and shouting had lived too long in their throats, and let her gaze slide away as if the cumin was all she knew.
The vendor’s eyes touched her and moved on, measuring only coin and time. Good. In his indifference was a kind of shelter. She breathed in the sharp, warm scent and let it sting her nose, letting that small sting anchor her face in a plausible impatience while her half-closed hand kept its paper secret.
Change clicked into her palm (small copper, honest weight) and she let her hand fall as if it held nothing but impatience. She did not choose a path; she surrendered to one. The bazaar’s foot-traffic took her up, jostled her shoulder, turned her without asking, and in that borrowed aimlessness she found room to watch.
Each lane that fed toward the waqf offices announced itself in quieter ways than signboards. She counted doorways by habit, not superstition. Four with fresh limewash, one with a new plank nailed across the latch. At thresholds, incense braziers kept their vigil: some burning with a wet, recent sweetness, smoke clinging low as if instructed; others sat cold and furred with ash, abandoned to fear or emptied by decree. Even the cats knew which entrances no longer offered scraps.
At the mouth of a side alley she let her step falter, as if weighing whether to buy thread or turn back. In that heartbeat she read the street’s grammar. A porter stood with empty hands and a gaze too awake, lingering where idleness would draw scolding. A scribe (cuffs dark with ink) watched faces, not paper. And two guards had exchanged shade and sun, newly placed, newly warned.
She let herself be carried along the brighter edges of the bazaar, where a man could loiter without seeming to loiter: beneath the arcades where every stall was a witness, past shop-fronts with their open mouths of light, never straying so far from the Qeysarieh gate’s shadow that she could not retreat into noise. Near enough to taste the waqf lanes, not near enough to be singled out for papers.
The stream of bodies, which a moment before had moved with the patient certainty of water finding its level, faltered as if a hand had pressed down upon it. From the Qeysarieh gate’s cool shadow, men in quilted coats and iron caps stepped out: not running, not shouting, but with the deliberate economy of those who have been told their quarry will come to them. Their palms rose, flat and unadorned, and the gesture did what blades could not: it made honest people stop.
They did not block the whole way at once. They took it in slices. One guard hooked an elbow around a porter’s load and turned him toward the wall as if rotating a jar to see its seal. Another reached, without permission or haste, for the mouth of a satchel that smelled of ink and vinegar; a clerk’s fingers hovered, then withdrew, suddenly mindful of contagion and authority in the same breath. Questions fell like small stones into the air, Where have you been? What office? Whose writ?. And each answer was tested not for truth but for the tremor of it.
Those with bundles were easiest. Cloth hides everything: stolen bread, copied pages, a fever’s rags. The guards pinched corners, prodded knots, demanded the owner’s name twice, as if repetition would unmask disguise. Those with ink-cases were worse. Ink meant paper, paper meant names, and names meant the court. A man with reed pens tucked behind his ear was pulled aside and made to open his case with hands held away from his face, his lips moving in a prayer that did not dare become complaint.
The bazaar answered with its own subtle violence. Shopkeepers leaned out to look and then, remembering the value of ignorance, leaned back in. Buyers pretended sudden fascination with cumin and brasswork. Somewhere a muezzin’s call slid along tile and air, thin as a thread; beneath it, the sound of a seal-stamp on wood, thak, thak, like a heart insisting on order.
Simin felt the press tighten, each shoulder a question pressed into her ribs. In the jolt and shuffle she caught, for the space of a blink, the glint of foreign-cut linen at the edge of sight. Someone standing too still for the crush, watching not the guards but the faces that feared them.
Simin slowed as the street slowed, folding herself into the collective obedience. She let her shoulders round beneath the plain qabā, let her chin dip, let her eyes take on that dull, hungry softness boys wore when they wished to be passed over like a pebble in a shoe. The posture was a lie she had practiced until it became muscle: small, unclaimed, unremarkable.
But behind the lowered lashes her mind worked its own arithmetic. One breath: the nearest arcade mouth, dark as a throat, where a man could vanish among hanging copper trays and the smell of lamp-oil. Two breaths: the spice-seller’s awning to the left, sagging under sacks of turmeric and dried lime; a sudden feigned sneeze there would excuse a stumble, a spill, a moment’s cover in yellow dust. Three: the narrow cut behind the moneychangers, where the air tasted of metal and old sweat and the stone passage ran like a secret vein toward the waqf lanes.
She measured the guards without seeming to look at them. Their hands were clean, their questions practiced. Clean hands meant they expected to touch papers. And paper, she thought, was always heavier than it looked.
A snatch of talk rode over shoulders and caps, passing mouth to mouth as easily as breath. “The office is sealed.” “The clerk is dead.” “By order.” The phrases were not shouted; they were traded, soft as coins, each one warmed by a different tongue. Simin felt them settle on her skin like ash. The folded scrap in her sleeve, once only a private nudge from Khatereh’s household, changed weight with each repeated syllable, as if the ink itself listened and grew heavier. What had been warning now sounded like proclamation: a bell rung in daylight, calling not worshippers but opportunists. Sealed meant time. Dead meant loose keys. By order meant whoever moved first would claim the story. And the paper.
Across the knot of bodies a stranger stood as if nailed to the stones: too composed for a crowd that swayed and breathed. Clean linen, a coat cut in a manner not born of Isfahan, and a courtesy worn like a talisman at the mouth. Their eyes did not dart; they weighed. They traveled face to face, paused, and (quiet as a tally-mark) rested on Simin, measuring her against a remembered line.
The gaze held the breadth of a heartbeat beyond courtesy, then slid away. Light as a veil, as if it had found the knot it sought and need not tug again. At that same instant the guards’ voices sharpened, questions narrowing from idle to particular, from “Where do you go?” to “Who sent you?” The rumor, she understood, was already walking ahead of her on other feet, and she was merely one hunter among many.
Simin swallows hard, the memory of that foreign gaze returning like a thumb pressed to the hollow of her throat, light, casual, and somehow certain. It had not been the stare of a bazaar boy counting coins, nor a court clerk weighing bribes, but something more patient: a look that wrote her down without ink.
The crowd thickens under the arcade where sunlight falls in chopped bands, bright as blades. Smoke from vinegar fires clings to wool and skin; saffron, sweat, damp leather. She keeps her shoulders slightly rounded, the felt cap pulled low, and lets her mouth settle into the careless line of a young man who has no secrets worth buying. Her fingers, stained from borrowed ink and the grit of travel, find the small knot of her purse and hold it: too tight. She loosens her grip. Hunger makes people clumsy; clumsiness makes a story.
A porter shoves past with a bale of cloth and curses the plague under his breath. Simin moves with the shove, not against it, slipping into the eddy it makes. There is easier work here than courts and registry seals: a belt-pouch unguarded in the press, a message folded into a sleeve for a copper. Safer, she tells herself, because a thief is expected to hide, but an exile must not exist at all.
She tests her voice silently, shaping a careless answer behind her teeth, the vowel-bend that makes her sound like a boy from the river wards. She listens for her own steps, for any footfall that keeps the same rhythm too long. Once, she thinks she hears it, a measured pace, unhurried in the crush, and her skin tightens beneath the coarse cloth.
Tomorrow, she bargains with herself. Tomorrow, when her belly is steadier, when the city’s eyes are not so sharp with fear. The deed will still be in its pigeonhole; paper waits better than flesh. She turns her face toward a spice-seller’s stall as if drawn by cinnamon, and in the mirrored brass of a hanging scale she tries to catch what is behind her without looking back.
A harsh voice cleaves the murmur struck out as if the air itself were a ledger to be balanced. Another, closer, demands papers. The call is not meant for her alone; it sweeps the arcade like a broom, catching hem and heel, merchant and porter, a boy with a tray of hot bread. Hands rise with folded slips and wax seals, fingers trembling not from guilt but from the city’s new habit of fear.
Simin lets the current carry her a half-step sideways, as though she has only been jostled. She keeps her gaze on the spice jars, cumin like ground earth, dried lime black as old bruises, while her attention hooks into the sound behind her. The questions shift from broad to pointed, the way a hawk’s circle tightens without haste. A pause, the scrape of a seal under a thumb, then a softer command that makes room for refusal: whose boy, from which quarter, why here now.
It is nothing, she tells herself. Yet the tone changes, barely, a thread pulled somewhere out of sight, and the whole weave of the crowd seems to draw tight around her ribs.
She answers with the clipped ease she has practiced, quick, almost impatient, as if questions are an insult to a man with errands, but her own voice reaches her ear like a stranger’s. Too measured. Too clean. Each syllable feels set down with care, the way she lays ink on paper when she is afraid of blotting. She names a quarter that is true enough to taste of dust, offers a master who cannot be easily found, and lets a small shrug stand in for honesty. Her throat aches with the work of keeping it low; breath wants to rise and soften, to round itself into the cadence of a woman speaking to be understood. She swallows that instinct like stale bread. The space between words grows dangerous.
In the crush of bodies the felt cap and plain qabā cease to be armor and become a costume, heat-slick against her skin. The seams she had trusted, stitched by a stranger’s hand, tightened by her own, seem to advertise themselves, begging for a curious finger, a guard’s grip, the careless snag of a passing load. Even her practiced slouch feels pinned on, brittle as dried paste.
She narrows herself as if the world will overlook what it cannot easily grasp. Eyes down, lashes lowered to the dust and the torn reed mats, she takes the measure of the arcade: the mouth of the lane, the nearest courtyard gate, the gap between a porter’s load and a pillar where a body could slip. Her pulse repeats, without mercy, that one misplaced syllable would unmask her into a name that can be seized.
She let the tide of shoulders and baskets ease her a half-step backward, where the arcade’s shade pooled and the air cooled by a hair. It was nothing. Only the ordinary give of a man making room for a porter, only the small discretion of someone who knew how quickly a street could turn into a net. Prudence, she told herself, and not the thin, animal fear that rose whenever the court lanes opened their mouths: those narrower passages where guards stood like punctuation, where a question could become a command.
From this angle she could watch without being watched, or so she tried to believe. The sun struck the square beyond in hard plates of light; tilework flared blue and white as if it could burn away contagion and gossip together. In the darker strip beneath the arches, incense smoke and sweat braided into one sour sweetness. Men argued over saffron, a boy darted between elbows with a tray of tea, a mule stamped and shook its bells as though it, too, wished to be elsewhere.
She set herself a smaller problem. A purse, loosely tied. A ring of keys at a belt that swung too far. A packet passed hand to hand with the casual carelessness of those who had never known their name could be rewritten by a clerk’s pen. These were risks a person could price: a bruised wrist, a shouted accusation, a sprint down a familiar alley. Court business had no such clean edges. It was not a single hand closing on her sleeve, but the slow tightening of record and rumor, seal and witness. Things that did not let go.
Tomorrow, she promised herself, as though tomorrow were a shop that kept honest hours. Tomorrow she would go nearer the Qeysarieh gate, nearer the storerooms and the waqf’s accounts, nearer the place where a dead clerk’s caution might still be useful. Tonight she would be a small man with a small hunger, and let the great machines of the city grind without her.
Even that promise tasted like ash.
Hunger needled her attention into something too sharp, too narrow. It was not the clean emptiness of a fast she could claim for piety, but the mean, persistent ache that made the world tilt toward bread and away from caution. Each time a sleeve brushed her, her fingers answered before her mind could weigh the cost. An involuntary twitch, a small greedy reach, the reflex of a body that had learned to steal first and explain itself later.
She hid her hands where the qabā swallowed them, rubbing thumb over forefinger until the tremor softened into friction. The ink-stains at her nails looked darker in the arcade’s shade, like a clerk’s proof of existence. She imagined those same fingers demanded by a seal, asked to sign a name that was not hers, held out for inspection by some bored official who would notice the wrong callus, the wrong softness, the wrong fear. A court errand required steadiness: a voice that would not thin on consonants, a story that did not snag when pulled.
Tonight her body was a traitor that could not keep such oaths. She chose, instead, the smaller sins. Work that asked only speed and silence, not composure.
The soles of her boots were near-betrayal, worn to a pleading thinness. Through them the city spoke too clearly: each pebble a bruise, each seam of stone a hard letter pressed into flesh. If she were forced to run, the clack of her steps would carry. Sharp on flagstone, too certain a music for a night that wanted quiet men. So she chose her paths like a liar chooses words. Not the clean, echoing crossings where a watchman’s head might turn at any irregular sound, but the forgiving routes: along reed mats, beside the spill of straw from a mule’s load, through lanes where mud still held the day’s damp and swallowed footsteps. Better a stumble into shadow than a straight sprint into notice.
She kept her thoughts on an invisible slate, as if the air itself were chalked with sums. Tonight’s account was plain: a crust bought with nimble fingers, a corner of floor where she could sleep with one eye open. Tomorrow’s ledger, if she stayed unseized, held the only larger line: another morning in which to hunt what had been taken, and not be hunted.
That sum, so cold it might have been minted, was the only comfort she allowed herself. While she still breathed, she could barter a smile, invent a name, offer a coin, shed a skin and leave it hanging on a nail for others to argue over. But if hands closed on her, she would be reduced to ink: a line entered, a seal pressed, a life filed. Paper does not plead.
She let herself be taken by the arcades as a leaf is taken by the Zayandeh’s slow pull. The bazaar here did not ask a man’s name before it accepted his shadow; it only demanded that he move as if he belonged to the stone and timber, as if the lanes had been built with his stride in mind. So she gave it what it wanted. Shoulders set a finger’s breadth wider than her own instinct, chin lowered in the manner of boys who learn early to look past faces and toward profit. The felt cap itched at her scalp where hair had been cut too close; the plain qabā hung in honest lines, hiding the betrayals of hip and waist.
The air was saffroned with dust and smoke, sweetened by crushed cardamom and the sour bite of vinegar laid out in bowls against sickness. Incense burned in cautious little fires at the mouths of shops, as if a prayer could be kept like a lamp. Under the arches, sellers called softly. Less song than habit, each voice careful not to draw the wrong ear. A shuttered teahouse sat like a missing tooth; beside it, a scribe’s stall still breathed, reed pens ticking, ink gleaming dark as pooled night.
She made her pace the crowd’s pace. Not too swift, which would invite question; not lingering, which would invite interest. When speech could not be avoided, a nod to a porter whose cart blocked the way, a clipped request for passage, she kept it low and brisk, consonants tightened, vowels shortened, the voice of a youth who had learned to save warmth for private rooms. Each word was measured for its weight, as if any extra softness might tip her into recognition.
And always she watched without seeming to. Where a guard’s gaze paused too long. Where a foreign coat moved against the grain of local cloth. Where men stood empty-handed yet listened as if every bargain were theirs. The bazaar comforted her with its old arithmetic, hands, pockets, openings, exits, yet even comfort could be a trap laid in familiar patterns. She held herself inside those patterns, and called it safety.
At the mouth of a narrow lane where brass trays caught the sun and flung it back like accusation, a man in a striped sash leaned too far over a bolt of cloth, arguing as if his voice could change its weave. His purse hung at his hip on a tired knot. Simin drifted behind him with the crowd’s patient press, shoulder grazing shoulder, a boy among men who had long ago stopped noticing boys. Her hand rose as if to steady herself against the jostle; two knuckles brushed the purse, found the slack, and made a small, private correction. The leather slid free into the shadow of her sleeve with the soft inevitability of a fig dropping ripe.
She did not flee. Flight would have been confession. She walked three paces more, turned as if drawn by the glitter of a coppersmith’s work, and only then let the purse settle into her palm.
Its weight was modest. She measured it once, not with hunger but with a quieter need: to feel that her fingers still answered her, that fear had not made them clumsy. In that small heft was a kind of prayer (proof of skill, proof of control) while the larger prayer, the deed, waited elsewhere like a judge behind a curtain.
At a spice-stall where turmeric lay in little hills like sunlit earth, the seller’s boy lifted his eyes and held them on Simin a breath too long. Not bold, not startled. Only the quick reckoning of someone who remembered the felt cap’s particular seam, the way it sat low as if to hide more than hair. When she asked for nothing and made to pass, he said the borrowed name under his breath, soft as a test.
Simin did not stiffen. She let her hand drift as if to scratch an itch at her sleeve and left a clipped copper in his palm, the coin’s edge biting skin for silence. With it she slid a folded note, creased small, ink dried hard. He closed his fingers without looking down and vanished with the easy obedience of boys taught to run messages like prayer: through courtyards she already knew how to watch, and how to pretend not to.
Between errands she fed herself like a man with no leisure: a torn round of bread still warm at the heart, and a cup of tea so thin it tasted of boiled leaves and caution. She chose a bench where the lane lay open like a ledger column (who entered, who lingered, who turned back) and kept her back to any mirror-bright brass that might return her own face from under the felt brim.
Before the sun could lean into late afternoon and make every crossing feel exposed, she found a porter with a back like a door and a face already forgetful from too many loads. She set a small bundle into his hands (nothing worth a second glance) and paid him twice: once for the carry, once for amnesia. Coin, silence, distance. The old arithmetic. Clean enough, she told herself, to live on.
She stopped where the arcade’s shadow pooled cool against the baked stone, as if shade itself could be purchased and carried. In the dimness her hunger eased into a sharper thing. Calculation. The court registry was not a place; it was a commodity, and like saffron it could be ruined by a careless breath. She priced it in her mind by risk, not by weight: the number of crossings between the bazaar’s living noise and a door that wore court dust like flour on a baker’s sleeve; the number of eyes between here and there that had been trained to see who walked as if they belonged.
One alley could be bought with a story (errand for a master, delivery for a guild) if she spoke it with the right boredom. Another demanded a token, a seal, the sort of small authority that did not chime like coin but gleamed when shown. She counted the checkpoints as a merchant counts measures: the arch where the incense fires were kept, their sweet smoke meant to cleanse but also to mark; the corner where a water-seller always set his jars and, with them, his attention; the narrow throat by the Qeysarieh gate where bodies slowed and a guard could read faces the way a scribe reads margins.
She tested her own disguise by the simple motions of a passerby. Shoulders lowered. Step shortened. A young man’s impatience without his swagger. She imagined the felt cap’s brim lifted by an officious finger (felt rasping skin) and forced herself not to touch it. A girl would have adjusted; a boy would have endured.
There were other costs, too, less visible. Quarantine ribbons nailed across doors like mourning cloth. Sudden silences where a tea-house should have breathed. The way men in clean linen stood too still at intersections, not selling anything, only watching, as if they waited to be paid in names.
Tomorrow, she told herself again. Tomorrow, when her stomach was less loud, when the city’s gaze had shifted. Yet even in the arcade shadow, the registry’s door seemed to lean toward her, impatient as fate.
In her mind the guards turned into accountants of flesh, tallying bodies the way merchants tally bolts of cloth. By touch, by weight, by the small deceit of appearances. Their fingers worried at paper edges, held them up to the light, breathed once on ink to see if it bled true. A seal was not merely wax but an oath; they pressed it, lifted it, and watched the fracture-lines as if listening for a false note in prayer. Even their courtesy had a method: the same questions asked in a different order, the same pause placed like a finger on a scale to make it tip.
She had passed such men before, wearing other stories. Still, she knew how quickly routine hardened into suspicion. A cap tilted a fraction too protectively. A voice rising to politeness where a boy’s indifference should have been. An honorific chosen half a step too carefully, as if she had learned it from women’s rooms rather than men’s courtyards. Then the question ceased being a question. It became a net, drawn with soft hands and tightened without anger.
The clerks were worse than guards, because their hands were clean and their mouths kind. They had learned to make fear sound like counsel, to tilt their heads as if listening for a man’s inconvenience while weighing, behind the lashes, the price of his life. Here a name could be lent like a copper bowl and returned dented; there a week of “health” could be purchased with a small correction of ink. One stroke, one softened date, and the quarantine rope moved to another door. They smiled as they did it, as if barter washed the act of blame. Simin could not read, in any face powdered with civility, whether he would keep faith for a fee or sell her whole story to buy one more breath for his own lungs.
Still, she rehearsed answers under her breath, as if recitation could buy safety: which stable-yard she had slept in, which uncle’s shop had sent her, what caravan-master would swear for her. Each line she filed, cross-filed, smoothed into a boy’s careless cadence. Yet every rehearsal reached the same brittle edge, one wrong honorific, one glance held too long, and the net would not only unmask her, it would rename her into the sort of prey that makes men bold.
She told herself prudence was a kind of piety: first bread, then courage. A boy with an empty belly made mistakes, and mistakes in this quarter were paid in names. Better, for tonight, to take the small work, an absent-minded merchant’s string of coins, a whispered errand between shutters, anything that kept her moving through lanes that asked only for quick hands, not wax and witness.
The deed kept returning to her mind the way a loose tooth does, tongue worrying it raw, not for pain, but for the insistence of it, the tiny certainty that something is wrong and will not be soothed by bread. She would be watching a porter heave bales of indigo into a shadowed doorway and, without warning, she would see instead a sheet of paper folded into quarters, the corner bruised where the seal had bitten. She would count the coins in her palm and feel, beneath their grime, the imagined ridge of stamped wax. Even the smell of ink from a scribe’s stall, sharp as vinegar in the heat, pulled her toward that registry room she had not yet dared to approach.
She tried to treat the thought like any other contraband: keep it hidden, shift it to the back of her mind, let it pass through checkpoints under a dull name. But it surfaced at every pause. When she lifted her hand to adjust the felt cap, her fingers found her own mouth, and she pressed her thumb hard to her lips as if she could hold the thought in place, as if pressure could keep it from speaking her true name aloud.
The city gave her a hundred small tasks that asked nothing of her but speed. A knot cut from a belt, a purse slid free in a jostle, a message carried through an arcade before the incense smoke could thin and reveal faces. Yet with each petty success she felt the larger loss accruing like interest: hours spent in safety, paid out from the only account she could not replenish. Somewhere behind plastered walls and courteous bows, clerks were thinning their shelves: burning what could implicate, selling what could feed, copying what could be used to make a stranger into a citizen and a citizen into a ghost.
She told herself paper did not run. Then she remembered that paper, here, could be made to move faster than feet: a seal lifted, a page replaced, a name erased with a wet thumb. And the deed, once gone, would not even leave bones.
She audited her own fear in the only tongue that had ever answered her without pity: the tongue of ledgers. Delay one day: preserve one face. She saw it as a clean column, a cautious credit. Lose one face: forfeit all papers. A harsh debit, but honest. The neatness of it almost soothed her. As if the city were a counting-house where every risk could be weighed and every loss foretold.
But the figures refused to stay obedient. The square was not ruled by arithmetic; it was ruled by appetite, by the sudden whim of a guard, by a cough that made men step back and then step in with knives. She tried to add terms the way Khatereh added waqf obligations: one night’s bread equals steadier hands; steadier hands equal fewer mistakes. Yet the sums grew soft at the edges, blurred by heat and hunger and the remembered snap of wax under a seal.
In her mind she stacked outcomes like coins, listening for the true ring. Too many sounded the same: safety bought with time, time spent as if it could not be stolen.
Beneath the tidy arithmetic she kept forcing upon herself, another account sounded: one she would not commit to paper, not even in the private dark of her skull. Clerks were not ledgers; they were lungs and skin. They fell to fever, fled at the rumor of it, or were carried out at dawn with their mouths bound in cloth, leaving keys in the wrong hands. Seals went missing as easily as breath: a signet slipped into a sleeve, a stamp-head traded for a pouch of rice, a wax cake softened, re-poured, made to speak a different truth. And when plague and profit walked together, offices grew righteous about “cleaning”. Shelves thinned, bundles culled, ash swept smooth. A page could vanish in the time it took to cross one courtyard.
She paused at a coppersmith’s stall where a sheet of blackened tin leaned like a blind mirror, and made herself look. Cap tugged lower; jaw set; shoulders drawn in as if to borrow another boy’s bones. Under her breath she tried a greeting, roughened it, swallowed the softness. The thought of the registry room pressed against her skin. Dry heat before a fever, warning without remedy.
Hunger spoke first, blunt as a hand on her throat. She shut the ledger-voice like a book too dangerous to leave open, and pretended paper had the patience of stone. Tomorrow, she told herself: tomorrow the ink would still be ink, the deed still sleeping under its seal. She turned instead into the safer current: work that paid at once, asked no lineage, demanded only nimble fingers and a forgettable face.
She let the afternoon take her the way floodwater takes a splinter: along the easy edges, where men’s sleeves brushed and no one looked long enough to remember a face. The square wore its splendor like a bruise: blue tiles blazing in the sun, and beneath them the mutter of trade dampened by sickness. At the corners incense smoldered in cracked bowls; vinegar-sour rags hung from doorframes, a poor curtain against an enemy that entered through breath.
Simin kept her body narrow, boyish, forgettable. Cap drawn low until the felt grazed her lashes; gaze trained on merchandise, never on eyes. In the press by a water-seller she found a pilgrim with a soft leather purse tied too loose, his attention pinned to a crier’s shouted notice about curfew and cordons. Her fingers moved as if to steady him, as if to apologize for the jostle: then withdrew with the weight of three coppers nested in her palm. The coins were warm from his skin. She did not look back. Looking back was how people learned to describe you.
A runner from the spice lane caught her by the sleeve, mistaking her for a boy he’d hired before. “Quick feet,” the man said, thrusting a parcel wrapped in blue cloth and string. The address was wrong: one caravanserai gate too far, one name too grand for the lane it pointed to. She read the knot, read the hand that had tied it, and turned without arguing. It was safer to correct a mistake than to explain it.
She crossed under the arcades where shopkeepers spoke from behind half-shuttered stalls, their voices thinned like broth. She delivered the parcel to a dyer’s apprentice who pretended not to know her and slid a small copper into her sleeve with practiced shame. For a second their fingers touched: a quick, human contact, then gone.
Bread came last, traded for two errands and a lie about her home district. The heel was stale, more crust than mercy. She ate too fast and felt it scrape down her throat without flavor, only the blunt relief of weight in her belly. Above her, pigeons wheeled over the square’s bright geometry, careless of contagion, careless of seals and names, careless of tomorrow.
Each errand she accepted fit her like borrowed clothing, serviceable, anonymous, easily shed. A purse lifted, a message carried, a parcel set down without question: small motions that asked nothing of her birth and offered nothing of her true name. No seals to press her thumb against; no clerk to weigh her face against a memory; no registry ink to betray her hand by its careful loops. The bazaar had its own grammar, coin, glance, nod, gone, and she could speak it without revealing her mother tongue.
She told herself this was prudence, the kind that keeps a body alive in a city where doors can close in a single afternoon. She counted her winnings like prayers: three coppers, a crust, a night purchased. Yet each gain tightened something unseen, as if she were sewing herself into a seam that narrowed with every stitch. The safer current had its own undertow. In avoiding the court’s shadow she moved closer to the alleys where shadows were ordinary, where men did not ask for papers because they preferred you without them.
“Tomorrow,” she repeated, tasting the word like a balm: and hearing, underneath it, the faint scrape of a bolt being drawn.
Toward evening the quarter changed its manners, as if the sun’s slant commanded new rules. The bright arcade-shadow cooled and thickened; at every corner small incense fires were fed until the smoke lay heavy, sweet at first and then cloying, trying to make prayer out of air. Doorways wore damp drapery, old sheets, strips of burlap, darkened by vinegar and hung like poor talismans. Men moved through the lanes with cloths tied over their mouths, the sharp sourness of it trailing behind them, and they shouted warnings in the same cadence as hawkers calling out pomegranates: keep distance, keep indoors, keep your breath to yourself. Their voices carried urgency, but also commerce. Fear offered hand to hand, as if it could be bought and owned.
She rerouted by habit, feet choosing their own scripture of turns: yet every familiar line of it broke. A passage that should have breathed into the spice lane was strangled with rope; fresh chalk, white as bone, ringed doorways and corners, warning of sickness, warning of seizure. Detours multiplied like bad debts. The crowd’s fear had a taste now, metallic, and each sideways glance felt like an accountant’s tally.
“Tomorrow,” she tells herself again, but the word lies flat in her mouth, no longer a promise: more like a stone set on a grave. From somewhere beyond the arcades a gate-bar dropped with a dull, final thud, and the sound traveled through her bones. Vinegar stung the back of her throat as if the city meant to pickle its living. The safety she had purchased with small thefts suddenly resembled a warrant delayed, not avoided.
Simin edged into a side passage to make herself small, letting two porters drift by with their loads held high as if height could keep rot away. Their faces were wrapped in cotton masks darkened at the mouth, and their sandals made a soft, urgent slap against the stones. Between them swung a cradle of bedding and bundled clothing. Household life reduced to knots of rope and quick breaths. One of the men’s eyes flicked over her felt cap and plain qabā, and he did not look twice; the mercy of being taken for a boy was a thin mercy, but it held.
The passage was narrow enough that the walls seemed to lean inward. Someone had washed the lower stones in wet-white lime, a crude cleanliness that caught the hard light and threw it back like glare off a blade. Near a door latch a fresh mark had been slapped on: a smear of pale paint and a bent sign, the kind that said sickness without naming it. Simin’s stomach tightened as if the mark had been pressed against her own skin. Her hunger, already sharp, turned queasy; she tasted vinegar in the air though no fire burned here, only the memory of one.
Behind the door, there could be a family counting coughs. Or nothing at all but the echo of bodies carried out at dawn, when the alleys were quiet and the city pretended not to hear.
She kept her gaze lowered the way she had trained it, respectful, unremarkable, and measured the street by what it hid. A smear of lime meant closure; closure meant papers; papers meant names examined, seals compared, histories called up from dusty drawers. And a drawer, once opened, could be emptied. In Isfahan now, the plague did not only take breath. It took time, it took routes, it took the little certainties that made a person legible.
Simin pressed her fingers briefly to the rough edge of the stone, grounding herself in its chill, and rehearsed, silently, the next line of her borrowed story until it sat in her mouth like a coin she might have to spend.
A shallow brazier crouched at the bend of the lane, more ceremony than cure. In it, a rag lay folded like a dead thing, soaked through with vinegar and set to smolder. The cloth did not flame; it merely sweated a thin gray breath that clung to the lime-washed stones and stung at every softness in the face. The fumes were meant to speak of vigilance (See, we are clean, we are guarded) yet they only made Simin’s eyes spill traitorous water and reddened the rims as if she had been weeping.
She blinked until the street wavered, then steadied herself on the familiar work: control. Shoulders lowered. Chin set at the angle of an unimportant apprentice. The next sentence of her borrowed life moved under her tongue, counted out with the care of a scribe measuring ink: where she came from, to whom she carried a message, why her hands were stained. Each word had to land without tremor. The vinegar made her throat raw, and rawness could sound like fear. She swallowed it down, letting the acrid air be mistaken for the reason her voice might catch.
From the cordon’s seam a figure broke formation, not with haste but with the clean decisiveness of someone for whom a line in the street was as changeable as a bandage. Boots set down square on the stones, heels untroubled by the vinegar-slick, and the men at the rope did not challenge them; they shifted without looking as if authority had already spoken. A medic’s satchel hung at the figure’s hip, swollen with hard shapes, jars, wrapped blades, folded cloth, its leather darkened where hands had worried it a hundred times. The strap, rubbed smooth by constant use, crossed a soldier’s chest. The posture was military, the purpose not. When the figure turned, Simin caught scarred forearms and the faint herb-smell that lived under the vinegar’s bite.
Nushin’s gaze traveled the lane with a practiced economy, as if the stones themselves were a diagram memorized in the dark: threshold, shadow, roofline, the narrow gap where a man might listen unseen. Then it fell to faces. It weighed pallor against dust, sweat against fear, the honest looseness of illness against the tightened composure of those who had rehearsed calm.
Without hurry they slid to intercept her, not blocking so much as choosing the place where passage would be questioned. The satchel swung close; vinegar, rue, and bruised mint crowded out the bazaar’s distant spice-smoke until Simin tasted nothing else. Nushin planted their boots with quiet certainty, and the lane tightened around that stance. An unannounced checkpoint conjured by authority alone.
Nushin’s gaze did not linger the way a curious stranger’s might. It moved with a clerk’s economy, line by line, taking inventory as if Simin’s body were a petition laid open on a desk: the shoulders held a fraction too tight, trained into narrowness; the chin set at an angle that shaded the tender truth of a throat; the cap pulled low, the plain qabā’s collar chosen for its dullness. In the brief space of that inspection Simin felt herself reduced to marks, ink, seam, breath.
Her hands betrayed more than her clothes. The fingers were stained to the nailbeds, as any scribe’s would be after a day of copying names meant to outlive their owners; yet they would not settle. They hovered and flexed, remembering other work. Wire and wax, the prying patience of a lock, the light theft of a purse in a crowd. She curled them into her sleeves, willing stillness into the joints, and listened to her own pulse knocking against her ribs as if it wanted out.
Down the lane, where vinegar had been flung in sour arcs and the walls wore chalked signs of sickness, two guards shifted their weight. Spear-butts scraped stone. Leather creaked. It was nothing, men easing boredom, a small correction of stance, but the sound cut through Simin like a blade finding an old seam. Her lungs, trained all morning to draw in quiet, stumbled once. The breath snagged in the hollow of her chest, and for a heartbeat her careful voice, her careful man’s posture, hovered on the edge of undoing.
Nushin’s eyes caught that stutter the way a hawk catches the twitch in dry grass. Not accusation. Recognition. The calm appraisal sharpened, then softened into something more dangerous than suspicion: certainty that fear had a shape, and that Simin knew too well how to wear it.
The lane’s noise fell away. In the narrowed air between them, Simin tasted rue and old blood, and understood she had been read.
“Name,” Nushin said: no louder than the scrape of a sandal, yet it carried the weight of a summons. The word was flat, efficient, the voice of a person to whom answers were not favors but requisitions. “Where from. Where to. Who sent you.”
They did not crowd her. They did not need to. Each question dropped in order, like seals impressed on wax: clean, irreversible, leaving no margin for ornament. Simin felt, absurdly, for her own ink-stained fingers, as if she might blot the moment and start again.
A cough sounded somewhere beyond the lane’s bend, wet, swallowed fast, followed by the hush of someone tugged indoors. Nushin’s eyes did not flick toward it. Their attention stayed with Simin, unblinking, as if the city’s sickness were only background noise and her small, careful body the true outbreak to be contained.
“Answer plain,” they added, almost mild, and the mildness was the sharper edge. “Do not waste breath. Breath is currency here.”
Simin drew hers in shallowly, shaping her throat around the man’s voice she wore, and found that even silence could be interrogated.
Simin gave the name she had practiced, the one that belonged to no one with bones, and let her tongue move through the rest with the humility expected of a boy in another man’s employ. A courier’s errand. A cousin of a carpet-merchant. A night’s lodging at the Shah’s own caravanserai, in the third courtyard where the muleteers slept and questions were drowned in snoring. Each phrase had been turned over so often it had lost its taste; it lay in her mouth like ash, dry and clinging.
Nushin did not contradict her. They only tipped their head, as though hearing past words to the thread that held them.
“Which gate did you enter by,” they asked, softly, “and whose seal was on the paper?”
The patrol rounded the bend with sour faces and the eager stiffness of men hunting a lesson to teach. Before their mouths could harden into orders, Nushin stepped half a pace into the lane’s throat, and something in the air submitted. From their fingers a small stamped sigil winked (dull metal, official as a wound) and their voice recited a quarantine clause by number, its phrasing so exact the guards faltered, rifling memory for the right to refuse.
The guards found their voices at last, muttered objections, a half-raised hand toward Simin’s shoulder, but Nushin cut through them as one cuts cloth. A clipped order, two fingers slicing the air, a name spoken that carried ink and consequence. They moved as if yanked by an unseen cord, shuffling aside, breaking their line. The lane opened (briefly) and the silence it left behind felt like a trap sprung and held.
Nushin’s gloved hand vanished into the medic’s satchel with the familiarity of habit, rummaging past the hard shapes of tools that did not belong to prayer. The leather yawned, exhaling a breath of vinegar that stung Simin’s eyes and made her throat remember hunger as if it were a sickness. When the hand emerged it held a bundle no larger than a man’s fist, bound tight with twine and a strip of linen, as neat as a soldier’s bandage. Through the cloth, leaves pressed their angles; something resinous had bled into the weave, darkening it.
They did not offer it the way one offers comfort. They put it into Simin’s palm with a firm, businesslike pressure, closing her fingers around it as if around a key. The bundle was cool despite the day’s heat, damp at the edges where the vinegar had seeped through, and its bitterness rose immediately. Simin’s first instinct was to draw her hand back, not from disgust but from the danger of accepting anything in a lane that could be remembered later as evidence.
“Hold it where they can smell it,” Nushin said, not quite looking at her. Their gaze tracked the lane’s mouth, the corners where men could appear and pretend surprise. “Let them believe you have been close to sickness. They will keep their hands to themselves.”
Simin nodded, letting the motion be small, boyish, obedient. Inside her sleeve her wrist trembled once and stilled. The bundle’s sting fought with the lane’s smoke and the sweet rot of refuse, cutting a clean line through it all. She thought, unwillingly, of her mother steeping herbs for winter fevers, and how that memory could still pierce her like a pin through cloth. Nushin’s fingers lingered a heartbeat on her knuckles, measuring grip, measuring resolve, then withdrew as quickly as they had come, as if mercy were something to be rationed.
Before Simin could find the shape of refusal, Nushin’s hand returned. Empty for a blink, then bearing a strip of paper so narrow it might have been torn from the margin of a ledger. It had been folded and refolded until the creases held like memory; the edges were thumb-darkened, softened by sweat and vinegar, and one corner wore a smear where ink had bled under haste. Not a court writ, nothing that sang with authority, but a small physician’s token, stamped in dull red, a modest seal that meant: this one runs on sanctioned errands, do not waste breath.
Nushin slid it against the cool bundle in Simin’s palm with the same practicality used to pack lint into a wound. The paper rasped her skin, dry as chaff, and she felt the absurd relief of it. How a thing so slight could become a door, if held at the correct angle.
She kept her face slack, her posture boy-tight and unremarkable, while inside her thoughts counted costs. A seal could open lanes. A seal could also mark her, if anyone cared to remember.
Nushin folded Simin’s fingers down over herb-bitter linen and the narrow strip of stamped paper, closing her hand as if sealing a wound. Their touch was brisk, impersonal. Yet exacting, the way a clerk’s thumb finds the true edge of a page. Then two quick taps landed on her knuckles, not quite reprimand, not quite blessing, each one a rule made audible.
“Listen,” Nushin murmured, eyes still on the lane. “Do not flash it like a bribe. Wait for the demand. Let them ask, let them puff themselves up: then give them this.”
A pause, and the second law, colder. “And the bundle. Only when they question you. Not as a banner. As proof you have been near sickness and survived it.”
In a low, clipped voice Nushin put her through it again and again: the name that would sit on the seal, the trade-boy’s patronymic, the errand’s destination spoken as if it were an inconvenience, not a lie. They made her mouth the title of a minor official (harmless, but weighty enough to satisfy a guard’s vanity) until each syllable lodged under her tongue like a memorized verse.
Nushin cut her off with two fingers lifted, a small, sharp gesture that halted sound as cleanly as a snapped thread. Their stare held no kindness and no cruelty. Only the hard arithmetic of survival. “When the wrong eyes linger,” they said, barely moving their mouth, “do not feed them.” Let the pause widen. Answer what is asked. Nothing more. Let every eager explanation wither before it reaches the air.
Nushin looked at her as if her skin were a page that could not lie. Not the quick glance of a passerby, not even the assessing stare of a guard hunting for softness, but the steady reading a medic gives a rash when deciding whether to burn the bedding. Their gaze moved with a practiced economy: the hollow at the base of her throat where hunger had sharpened bone, the tightness around the mouth from holding a voice in a borrowed register, the small abrasion at the thumb from too much paper and too little rest. They did not blink as if blinking might grant mercy.
Simin kept her shoulders narrowed, the way she had trained them in exile: take up less air, cast less shadow. She felt the old panic, the one that rose when someone saw too much too quickly. Men in the square looked at faces for beauty, for insult, for blood; clerks looked at them for lineage; but this one (this soldier-healer) looked for consequence. For what would happen next.
The questions hovered. She could feel them like a hand held just above the surface of water: What are you called when no one is listening? Who taught you to stand like that? Which door did you flee through, which seal condemned you? In Isfahan, questions were nets; even friendly ones could be knotted.
Nushin chose, instead, the clean cut of not knowing. Their mouth tightened once, not in restraint but in decision. Whatever her name, whatever gender she wore today like a cloak turned inside out, it did not alter the city’s arithmetic. Paper made truth here. A stamped line could turn a widow into a debtor, a merchant into a criminal, an exile into a ghost. It could also, if held at the correct angle to a man’s vanity, open a gate.
Simin understood, with a chill that did not come from the vinegar fumes, that Nushin was offering her something rarer than sympathy: the discipline of refusing to make her confess. In this lane where even breath could be counted as infection, they treated her not as a story, but as a person moving through a system that had already priced her life in ink.
Nushin tipped their chin toward the crude sign on the wall, a smear of lime and charcoal that meant shut your door, shut your mouth, and for a moment their authority looked less like uniform and more like a muscle held taut. The lane stank of vinegar and burned rue; even the sunlight seemed filtered through caution. “Do you think this is only for coughing?” they murmured, so low the words might have been breath. Their gaze slid past Simin, measuring the shuttered thresholds, the barred windows, the men posted at the corner with cloths tied over their faces.
“These closures make the city blind.” A faint, bitter click of the tongue. “When everyone is indoors and afraid to be named, afraid that naming will summon the sickness, papers can walk. A registry page can be ‘lost’ in a basket of rags. A seal can be scraped off and reapplied as if it were always meant for another hand.”
They did not soften it into metaphor. “It is convenient,” Nushin said, “to scrub an account while witnesses are quarantined like infected goods.”
Nushin’s voice fell until it was almost nothing, a sound pressed flat between their teeth. Anger lived in it, disciplined into usefulness. “They are purifying the ledgers,” they said, as if naming a fever. “Not cleansing: purifying.” A pause, the lane’s vinegar breath filling the gap. “A careful line through a name. A thumb rubbed over fresh ink until it blurs like a bruise. A seal warmed, lifted, and set down again on another page, as if God Himself had intended the transfer.” Their eyes flicked once toward the cordon, then back, steady. “At dawn, carts take out the dead and the bedding. By midday, the registers have been thinned the same way. Until there is no mark left to argue from. No proof a complaint ever belonged to a living mouth.”
Her belly seized and for an instant the lane tilted, vinegar and sun turning sharp as metal. The trap was not a gate or a guard; it was delay. If she waited for the city’s permission, the city would revise her into absence. Still she kept herself narrow, a shadow against the wall, and swallowed down the first hot, useless protest.
Simin let the offer settle between them like coin on a scale. Tested for weight, for true ring. She did not thank Nushin with softness; she gave the smallest nod a man might allow, the kind that neither begs nor boasts. Protection was not mercy, only an arrangement against the city’s appetite. She would take it as she took bread: quickly, without pretending it was a feast, while breath still counted as leverage.
Nushin halted her beneath the arcade’s deep shade, where the sun’s hard honesty broke against old brick and could not catch the minute betrayals of skin and breath. Their fingers closed on Simin’s sleeve. The contact was not tenderness; it was placement, like setting a jar where it would not shatter.
“Not a courier,” they murmured, gaze fixed outward on the lane as if speaking to the mortar joints. “An assistant. Assistants are invisible: until they panic.”
Simin kept her face arranged in its borrowed simplicity. The felt cap itched at her hairline; the cloth at her throat held the faint sour sting of vinegar that lived in every quarantined quarter now, a city trying to pickle itself against death. She did not look where Nushin looked. She let her eyes rest on the ordinary: a shutter with a prayer scratched into it, a smear of ash where incense had burned, a rope line sagging under the weight of ragged notices. If she stared too hard at the cordon, the cordon would stare back.
Nushin’s hand released her sleeve and hovered, correcting without touching, as if touch itself could be a kind of contagion. “When you speak, speak as if you are repeating,” they said. “When you carry a message, carry it as if you do not know its value.” Their voice was clipped, practical, but under it ran a current of something like impatience with the world’s foolishness. She tasted the impulse to argue: she had been a runner once, swift and sharp, trusted because she knew the alleys better than men who claimed them. But that life had ended the day she learned how quickly a name could be made to mean its opposite. Now she held her hands where they could be counted, fingers loose, nails trimmed short; she let her shoulders fold in, as if apology were a natural shape.
Across the lane, a guard’s sandals scraped; a cough cracked like dry paper. Nushin did not flinch. “You want to arrive,” they said, quieter still. “Not to be remembered on the way.”
Nushin set about her like a clerk setting a seal. A glance, then a correction: her shoulders drawn inward, not with shame but with usefulness, as if the world were a doorway she must pass through sideways. “Smaller,” their look seemed to say, and Simin obeyed; she let the qabā hang as it wished, let the cloth take credit for her bones. Her chin was nudged down by the merest motion of their fingers in the air, an instruction delivered without contact. With her head lowered, the cap’s brim made a modest horizon; it cut off the temptation to meet eyes too directly, to challenge.
They paced her steps against the alley’s uneven stones: shorter, less certain, a gait that belonged to boys who had not yet learned they could claim space. Confidence, here, was a flare in dry grass. Simin folded her anger into her ribs, pressed hunger flat beneath practiced breath, and repeated the posture until it felt inevitable. Plainness, she remembered, was not absence: it was a script, and she had always been good at copying hands.
At Nushin’s insistence, Simin lets her hands hang where the world can inventory them: open, empty, the fingers parted just enough to declare there is no blade nested in the palm, no purloined seal warming in the crease, no scrap of court paper sweating against skin. The gesture feels indecently intimate, as if she is asked to show the city her pulse. Nushin steps in close, their shadow cool on her wrists, and taps the back of her knuckles, once, twice, like a scribe counting lines, like a guard measuring patience. “Visible hands buy you a heartbeat,” they say, not unkindly. Simin swallows. A heartbeat is what searches require; a heartbeat is what panic spends. She practices spending neither.
Nushin tipped her felt cap a hair’s breadth, teaching the brim to throw a shadow that broke her features into something forgettable. “Not like a hawk,” their look warned, and they made her turn her head as a servant would, measured, deferential, never hunting. A folded notice slid into her sleeve as a trial. Simin kept her wrist quiet, letting paper ride along bone, refusing the telltale crinkle of haste, the blur of ink under sweat.
They edged toward the lane’s mouth where quarantine boards leaned like crude scripture, and Nushin began to count. No devotion in it, only arithmetic. Footfalls approached, receded; a pause, the soft barter of gossip; then the cordon’s vigilance sagged into habit. “Watch their bodies,” Nushin murmured. “Second man spits. First tugs his sash. That is your permit. Move: not swift. Lawful.”
Nushin caught her by the elbow a pace before the quarantine boards, as if stopping a mule from shying. The hold was not possessive; it was the sure, economical grasp of someone who had learned where bone lies beneath cloth and how quickly a body can turn into trouble. Simin let herself be checked, letting the small jolt of contact travel through her like a message: here is the line, here is the law, here is what they will claim if you cross wrong.
The boards themselves were rough planks nailed to posts, smeared with lime and fingered by too many hands. Notices fluttered where they had been pasted in haste: official script already blotted by damp, edges curling like dried leaves. Under the arcades beyond, incense smoke went up in nervous spirals; a mule snorted; somewhere a woman’s cough was swallowed by the stone and came back thin, embarrassed.
Nushin’s free hand slipped to their satchel and came out with a small vial sealed with wax. They did not look at it; their eyes stayed on the lane, on the men who watched the lane, on the small shifting theater of who pretended not to watch at all. The stopper came free with a soft, practiced twist. For an instant Simin saw the pale glint of liquid inside, ordinary as kitchen souring: then the air changed.
Vinegar rose between them sharp and clean, cutting through sweat, stale breath, and the sweet rot that haunted shuttered doors. It stung Simin’s nostrils and made her eyes want to water; she held the blink back, because even tears could be counted against her. The smell was command and absolution at once: what soldiers used to scrub blood, what households used to announce caution, what bodies wore when they wished to be read as already inspected.
“Stand,” Nushin said, low enough that it could have been the rustle of their sleeve. Their thumb pressed once, precise, into the inside of her arm, where a pulse could betray speed. Simin forced her breath into the slow measure of a servant waiting for errands, and kept her shoulders folded in, smaller than her hunger, smaller than her fear.
With two brisk strokes Nushin caught Simin’s hands as if to inspect them for sores, turning her wrists outward to the light where any guard might see. The vinegar went on cool and then (after a heartbeat) biting, sinking into the thin skin at the veins, raising a sting that wanted to make her flinch. Simin did not. She let her fingers hang as a boy’s would, loose with obedience, while Nushin’s thumb worked the sourness in with the economy of a medic who has scrubbed too much blood to waste motion.
Then their hand slid up, not tender, not intimate. Pure procedure. Two fingers hooked beneath the edge of her collar and pressed the damp along the hollow at her throat, where heat collects and breath betrays. It was a mark without ink: sharp on the nose, unmistakable in a crowded lane. The smell said service, said quarantine, said I have been handled by authority: and so, for a moment, it could keep “sneaking” from being written onto her face.
Nushin’s gaze dipped once to the satchel and returned, swift as a blade checked in its sheath. In that quick measure Simin felt herself accounted for: not her name (which she kept buried), but the discipline of her stillness, the way she held her jaw, the careful absence of impatience. Nushin approved of what could pass for a boy’s obedience; they distrusted what might be a liar’s craft.
“Listen,” they breathed, close enough that vinegar and words mingled. “The closures are not only for sickness.” Their fingers tightened on her wrist as if anchoring the truth there. “Clerks are being taken first. Sent away, found fevered, found gone. And when a clerk vanishes, his pages follow. A rope seals a lane; the same rope cleans a registry. Names wiped as easily as bodies carted out at dawn.”
Nushin’s thumb came up under the felt brim and corrected the angle of Simin’s cap. It was both disguise and discipline. Their mouth barely moved. “Stay useful,” they murmured, without softness. “Stay unnoticed.” Let the watching men suppose she carried vinegar, orders, lint for dressings. Anything that belonged to plague work, not to flight.
At the patrol’s counted pause Nushin shifted Simin by the elbow as if repositioning a novice orderly. A few clipped words fell like a stamped seal: vinegar to the marked doors, lint and water for the cordon. Then the healer’s palm struck her shoulder, brisk, public, unmistakably official, and the narrow passage swallowed her into smoke, ropes, and waiting eyes.
The cordon compressed the lane into a single throat. Rope sagged between posts slick with old handprints; nailed boards rose at either side like the ribs of a hurried coffin, forcing bodies to file one by one. Along the stones ran a strip of chalk-white ash where incense had been dragged in pious circles, as if smoke could bargain with breath. The air itself seemed portioned out. Vinegar sharpness from rags at men’s mouths, sweet resin, and beneath it the metallic sour of too many people kept too close.
Simin waited behind a porter who coughed into his sleeve without conviction, and a woman with her scarf pulled high enough to turn her eyes into a narrow letterbox. In the gap ahead, each traveler was made to pause, to turn, to be counted. A guard’s staff tapped shoulders. Not hard, but with the same authority as a seal pressed into warm wax. Another man, ink-stained at the fingertips, sat at a low board and wrote names in a ledger whose pages had been thumbed thin. He did not look up often. When he did, it was with the quick, tiring glance of someone who had learned to see only inconsistencies.
A boy went through first with a basket of flatbread; the guard pinched one loaf as “inspection,” tore it open with deliberate slowness, and let the crumbs fall into the ash. A merchant protested (softly, prudently) and was rewarded with a longer stare, the kind that invited the next bribe to present itself.
Simin kept her own gaze unambitious. She watched hands: where they reached, what they expected. She counted the beats between questions and answers, testing how much truth the gap would tolerate. To her left, a door was daubed with a crude sickness mark, paint already running in the sun; someone inside knocked once, then stopped, as if remembering the rules too late.
When her turn drew near, she let the satchel’s weight settle into her palm and breathed through the vinegar sting, teaching her face to hold still while the city measured her back.
She settled herself into the shape Nushin had drilled into her with brisk hands and briefer words: chin lowered as if forever reading a task, feet planted with the dull certainty of someone who belongs to errands, not arguments. Shoulders narrowed; elbows held close so no sleeve could betray a wrist too fine, no gesture too generous could invite scrutiny. Even the way she waited, weight balanced, gaze neither roaming nor pleading, was a kind of writing, the script of a working boy set down in bone.
The felt cap dimmed her brow and hid the line where close-cropped hair met skin; its itch was a small punishment she welcomed. The plain qabā hung straight, refusing to proclaim a family or a taste. She let it swallow her, let it make her a unit of cloth and purpose. Against her side the satchel knocked once with her heartbeat, heavy with bundled herbs tied in twine and the folded notice Nushin had pressed into her palm, its paper kept flat against her ribs as if warmth could soften ink into truth. She made of herself a message, not a person.
A brazier squatted near the rope, its belly red with coals; someone had doused it with vinegar so the heat threw up a wet, sharp steam threaded with bitter smoke. It licked at her eyes until they watered, and the prickle found the raw seams of her hands where old ink had worked itself into the creases like a second, guilty script. She did not rub at them. A hired boy did not fuss; he stood and bore it, because endurance was cheaper than bread and easier to prove than innocence. She let the sting read as obedience, not fragility, and kept her breath small, counted, tucked high in her chest so no cough would betray her throat. Even pain, she reminded herself, could be performed.
In the breath before the gap swallowed her, she took inventory the way she had once balanced columns: red wax seals pressed to the boards in uneven pride, nailheads bright enough to mean they were recent, the slight looseness where rope met post: soft places where a coin could disappear without ceremony. She mapped the angles of sight from the arcade behind and kept her eyes moving. Faces, lingered on, became snares.
When the line loosens and her moment arrives, she threads herself into the boarded funnel as if guided by habit, not hunger. She lifts the satchel with both hands (an offering, a tool) letting the bundled herbs show through the mouth and the twine bite into her fingers. Her shoulders remain tight to her ribs. The voice she keeps ready is the boy’s: low, serviceable, emptied of history, meant to pass.
Mehrdad stepped into the mouth of the alley and, by some soldier’s instinct for geometry, reduced it. The boards, the rope, the brazier’s sour steam. Everything that had seemed merely arranged now became a throat with his shoulders as its hard palate. The lantern in his fist swung once, a single pendulum stroke of authority. Its light glanced off the plain weave of her qabā, caught the stitched edge where she had mended it too neatly, then slid up to the felt cap and the close-cropped hair beneath. It paused there as if weighing whether such thrift belonged to youth or to someone hiding.
Then the light found her hands.
It was a poor light, but it did not need to be good to betray her; ink made its own shadow. The darkness at her fingertips (old stains ground into the grooves of skin, the kind that survived vinegar and fear) rose in the lantern’s glow as plainly as a seal pressed into wax. Simin kept the satchel steady and let her fingers curl around its strap as if to conceal nothing at all. A servant, she told herself, is always marked: by dye, by grease, by dust. Let ink be only another labor’s bruise.
Mehrdad’s eyes did not linger in one place; they moved in short, practiced cuts: cap, throat, satchel, wrists. The strap under his chin pulled his jaw into a permanent refusal. Behind him the alley breathed out muffled noise. Coughs smothered into cloth, the scrape of a shutter being forced closed, the thin insistence of incense burning for the living.
“You,” he said, and his voice had the flatness of repetition, as if the word had been used all day to mean a hundred different dangers. “Stop there.”
Simin stopped as though she had been waiting for permission. She lifted the satchel half a palm’s breadth, just enough to show the knotted bundles and folded papers inside, an offering without eagerness. Her gaze stayed on his lantern, not his face; staring at a man like him was a kind of challenge, and she had no coins to spend on pride.
At Mehrdad’s smallest motion the two men behind him shifted, as if pulled by the same cord. One stepped to the left where the alley’s boards met brick, boots finding purchase in the ash and grit; the other drifted right, nearer the brazier, so that its sour heat licked the hem of Simin’s qabā. They did not close in (no hands on her arms, no shouted accusation) but their spacing altered the world. The open mouth of the lane became a chute, a channel with shoulders for walls, and she was placed neatly at its center like a cart to be inspected.
Simin felt the geometry settle around her: the angle from which a lantern could see her jaw, the blind spot where a satchel might be opened, the distance to the rope if she were foolish enough to run. Hunger tightened her throat, and she swallowed it down as she had swallowed worse.
The guard on the right lifted his chin toward the shuttered lanes, thumb hooking back in a casual, practiced gesture. This way, if he decided, into the marked doors and the smell of vinegar and fear.
Mehrdad let his attention travel the way a clerk’s reed-pen travels a page: not wandering, but tallying. It rose from her boots, dust too even, as if she had kept to swept stone, to the set of her shoulders, trained to narrow, trained to vanish. His eyes paused at her hands again, where the ink had sunk into the whorls like a second skin, then at the satchel strap biting across her knuckles; he noted the small tension there, the careful strength of someone used to carrying more than herbs.
At last his gaze reached her face and stayed. Not long, only the length of a breath held and released, but long enough to invite a mistake. His voice remained level, neither threat nor kindness, as if softness were another form of negligence. Simin kept the boy’s expression in place, empty and useful, and did not blink first.
He began the litany without any blessing of politeness. “Where did you enter?” he asked, and before the answer could settle he cut it into smaller pieces. Which lane after the incense brazier?”: each phrase clipped and counted, paced like a drill. It seemed he listened not for truth, but for the hitch where a borrowed story catches in the throat.
When Simin gave her answers, Mehrdad offered no easing sign: no nod to let a lie pass, no frown to show it had failed. He only set another question into place, as inevitable as the next rung of a ladder. “Purpose,” he said, and the word fell without ornament. “Who sent you?” Fatigue dulled his tone, but not its edge; habit kept it honed.
Mehrdad’s scrutiny turned from flesh to things, as if objects, at least, could be made to confess. He did not snatch. He asked for the folded notice with two fingers extended, receiving it the way one takes a knife by the blunt side. Simin let it go with the boy’s practiced steadiness, though the paper seemed to retain the warmth of her palm like a telltale.
He lifted it toward the hard noon light, angling it until the thin sheet went almost translucent. The wax seal darkened in relief, its little hills and valleys catching brightness and shadow; the cordon’s sigil sat impressed like a bruise. His thumbnail worried the edge, not breaking it, only testing the bond the way a mason tests mortar. The wax gave a faint squeak. A thin flake lifted and clung to his nail; he watched it fall as if even that were evidence.
Then the ink. He held the page close enough that Simin saw the pores of his knuckles, the grit lodged under the nail. He did not read like a man seeking meaning; he read like a man seeking the hand behind the words. His eyes followed the clerk’s slant, the long tails of letters, the small economy where a tired scribe would save a stroke. He dragged his thumb across the margin where a hurried blot should have dried; the pad came away clean, and his gaze narrowed, measuring freshness by what did not move.
“Who wrote this?” he asked. Not loud, not baiting, but weighted, as if the name itself were a stamp that might fit or fail.
Before Simin could shape an answer, he shifted to the satchel. “Open it.” He watched her fingers, not the knot, as though fumbling were a dialect. When the flap fell back, the smell of vinegar and crushed herbs rose obediently, sharp, green, medicinal. Mehrdad leaned in once, a controlled inhale, and his expression changed by almost nothing: only the smallest easing at the confirmation that the scent was right, that the lie had been salted with knowledge.
“Say it,” Mehrdad ordered, as if words themselves were another seal to be checked. He did not ask for a confession; he demanded a map spoken into the air, where it could be weighed against the city he held in his head.
Simin let the boy’s voice come forward, quick, careful, pitched low enough to pass as unremarkable. She named the entry by the incense brazier, then the lane that ran behind the brass-smiths where the shutters stayed half-drawn even at noon. She gave the door that would open for the paper: not a name, but the sign: a lintel scored with old watermarks, a rope of garlic hung in defiance of perfume and prayer. She recited the ration-house where the ledger would swallow the notice, the clerk with the ink-stained thumb who wrote by habit more than by light.
Mehrdad listened with the stillness of a man at a gate in winter. His eyes did not soften at correctness; they sharpened at fluency. When she reached the alley turn that avoided the daubed thresholds, he shifted his weight, a small sound in the grit, waiting, always, for the place where a borrowed route breaks like cheap thread.
The satchel came next, as if the body and the story were merely preface. “Open it.” Simin slid the tie free with a deliberation that mimicked habit, not caution, and folded the flap back until the mouth gaped plain to the noon. She kept her shoulders squared in the boy’s posture, letting her wrists do the work: no tremor, no hurry that would read as guilt. Mehrdad bent close. His breath drew in, measured, the way a man tastes air for smoke. Vinegar bit first, clean and sharp; beneath it the muted dust of dried greens, and the darker bitterness of roots bruised for fever. For an instant the sting made Simin’s eyes water, and she welcomed it. Proof the satchel held honest discomfort, not sweet contraband.
Mehrdad did not rummage; he tested. Two fingers dipped among the packets, pressing through cloth to read what lay within (crumble of dried mint, weight of ground bark) then lifted a knot to see if it held under a soldier’s impatience. He turned a label sideways to catch the thread of the hand, watched how her thumb shielded the paper edges from vinegar-damp. Her hands, he decided, must remember before her mouth did.
Mehrdad was not appeased. He straightened as if the vinegar had stung his pride, and the question returned, pared to its cost. “Whose?” The word struck harder the second time, patron, master, the hand that would take blame if his suspicion proved inconvenient. Seals and herbs, he implied, purchased only the privilege of being claimed; an unclaimed boy was a stray to be culled.
Simin let Nushin’s instruction settle where fear liked to live. Chin tucked, eyes lowered just enough to be read as respectful, not furtive; shoulders squared in the way of boys made useful early: built to carry, to wait, to be spoken over. The cordon’s heat pressed through her felt cap, and sweat traced the line where hair had been cut too blunt to be fashionable. She kept her hands plain in sight, fingers ink-stained despite the vinegar, and made herself a ledger-entry: weight, purpose, destination. Nothing in excess.
“Whose?” Mehrdad asked again, and in the question lay the city’s true map: every step owned, every errand tethered to a name that could be hauled before a desk and punished in her place.
If she offered a patron, she would be inviting a hunt: either for the man himself, or for the lie that did not match the ink in some clerk’s memory. If she said she had none, she would be admitting she belonged to no protection but the open street.
She chose the third path Nushin had left her, narrow as a crack in a shut gate.
“Not mine,” she said, as if the matter bored her. The service-speech came out clipped and flattened, without ornament. “Orders. Quarantine notices and herbs. The seal is on the paper.” She nodded toward the folded writs, letting the authority sit where it belonged: on wax and script, not on her face.
Mehrdad’s eyes moved the way a knife tip moves, testing the grain. He looked for hunger’s pleading, for the flare of a temper that would betray breeding, for the small softening of vowels that would betray a woman. Simin held her breath low in her belly, the boy’s steadying trick, and kept her gaze trained on his belt buckle, not his eyes.
“Who gives the orders?” he pressed.
“A healer with the unit,” she said, not naming Nushin as a friend, only as a function. “I carry. I return by the same gap.” A dull certainty, hired-hand certainty: there is a bell, there is a path, there is work until the work ends. In that dullness she hid the sharpest thing she owned, hope, and its dangerous insistence.
His gaze did not rest on the seals or the knots now, but on her mouth, as if the truth might slip out between her teeth on a careless vowel. Simin felt the old, traitorous softness rise (home-speech, the lilt that belonged to women calling across courtyards) and crushed it before it reached her tongue. She scraped her voice against the back of her throat, made it drier, boyish with hunger and dust. Words came out shorter, shorn of courtesy, each one a tool handed over without flourish.
To give him less of her, she gave him more of the thing she carried. She thrust the satchel forward into the narrow space between them, so close that the vinegar’s sharp breath leapt up like a reprimand. The smell did what her face must not: it announced usefulness, sickness held at bay by harsh measures, a worker passing through filth for the city’s sake. Herbs rustled, mint and rue, bark ground fine, bundles tied tight with cheap string, and the damp cloth was cold where his fingers brushed it.
Let him believe in the stink, she thought. Let it persuade him there is nothing here but duty and disinfectant.
From the fold of her qabā, where cloth met rib and the body’s heat could be blamed for any quick movement, Simin drew out a bundle tied so tight it seemed more intention than herb. Thyme, dry as old paper; wormwood, bitter enough to make a man’s tongue distrust his own breath. She held it in her palm without flourish and extended it toward the guard with the same practiced inevitability she had seen in porters offering coins to gate-scribes. Neither bribe nor gift, only the small grease that kept a hinge from squealing.
“For the watch,” she said, the words plain, a boy’s economy. Every cordon had its due: vinegar for the air, prayer for the soul, and a share for the men who stood between. If they accepted it, they accepted a routine; and routine, she knew, dulled questions before they could turn sharp enough to cut.
Mehrdad answered with regulations, each one dropped like a stamped weight: back through the same gap, before the next bell; no lingering, no turning aside to doors marked and shuttered; no speech unless spoken to. Simin echoed him at once, steady as a clerk reading a tally, same gap, next bell, no detours, offering him the clean comfort of obedience he could hold in his hands.
Inside the cordon’s shadow she measured his demand like a ledger line: the bell’s narrow span, the alleys that could be shuttered without warning, the sudden authority of a red-daubed door. If the lane sealed, her promise would become a snare. She inclined her head once, no pleading, no pause, and let the role take her whole. Even the ache in her belly could pass as a worker’s honest emptiness.
Mehrdad did not retreat so much as he re-sorted himself, easing out of the crowd’s shove to stand where the rope could be law and not merely cord. Two fingers, thumb and forefinger, nails trimmed to a soldier’s blunt practicality, pinched it as though testing its honesty. He lifted it no higher than necessity required, an allowance measured in a breath: enough for a man’s cap to pass, not enough for a man’s pride.
Simin felt the movement before she saw it, the minute loosening in the air when a barrier becomes a doorway. She kept her weight centered, neither hurried nor hesitant, as if her body had long been trained to accept such judgments without protest. Yet his gaze held her fast, not rude, not lingering in the way of a leering man, but exacting. Like a scribe’s eye pausing over a seal that looks too fresh.
It was always the face that betrayed. Hands could be made coarse; voice could be thinned and flattened; even the stance could be taught to claim less softness. But a face carried its own history in the way it expected to be met. Mehrdad’s scrutiny seemed to search for that: for the reflex of a girl taught to look away too quickly, or of a boy taught to meet a blow with his chin lifted.
She gave him neither. Her eyes remained lowered, not in fear, but in the disciplined modesty of a minor helper who had learned the safest truth was to be forgettable. The ink on her wrist, still tacky, a small bruise of authority, throbbed with a warmth that was not pain so much as reminder: you are marked; you are counted; you can be reclaimed.
Behind Mehrdad the alley’s mouth yawned dimmer than the sunlit square, its stones smoked by incense and last week’s vinegar wash. A cough sounded, short, suppressed, as if even sickness feared to announce itself here. The rope rose, the narrow gap appeared, and Simin understood with a sudden clarity that passage was not granted once, but demanded at every step: with each breath that did not stumble, with each heartbeat that kept time with her borrowed name.
At Nushin’s brief motion, two fingers dipped toward the satchel as if weighing it, Simin let the lesson settle into her bones. She did not stride as she might have in a freer street; she took the practiced half-step of an underhand, always a fraction behind, as though the air itself belonged to the one ahead. The leather strap cut her collarbone; she welcomed the small hurt, because it gave her something plain to inhabit.
She brought the medic’s satchel forward, not as a shield but as an offering: vinegar bottle, folded notices, a bundle of dried rue and wormwood tied in twine. The smells rose sharp and clean, almost honest, stinging her nose and masking the sourness of her own hunger. Her gaze fell to the stones where incense ash had drifted like gray snow, and she kept her shoulders narrowed, elbows close, the posture of someone trained to make room for authority.
When a question might have been expected, she gave none. She made her voice disappear into the scrape of sandals and the soft clink of glass, letting silence do the work that pleading could not.
Mehrdad’s hand closed around her wrist with the clean certainty of habit, fingers firm where the pulse betrayed itself, as if he were taking measure of a thing meant to be counted. There was no flourish to the act, no sermon about contagion or law: only the quick economy of a man who had learned that hesitation invited argument. He brought his thumb down into the little pot at his belt, and the ink came up thick and bitter-smelling, black as pomegranate rind boiled too long. When he pressed it to her skin, it spread in a damp oval that drank the fine hairs and turned them to a single dark stain. The mark sat warm and heavy, less a doorway opened than a tether fastened, a note in some unseen ledger: admitted, watched, retrievable.
Simin flexed her inked hand once, twice, not from impatience but caution, holding her wrist away from her cloak so the damp authority would not bloom into a smudge. The stain would last, she judged the thickness, the tack, the bitter bite of it, through one wash, perhaps two, unless vinegar worried it. Until then it would be demanded like a password: by guards, by clerks, by any man who made a living from stopping others. And when the wrong eyes began to count her, she would have to pay, in coin or skin, to be unmarked.
The rope fell again with a dry hiss, and behind her the rough boards met like a verdict. Wood on wood, a blunt finality that cut off the square’s hard sunlight. The cries of sellers and the clap of hooves dulled to a sealed murmur, as if heard through clay. Ahead, the alley tightened between blank walls; each doorway, each lintel, held itself like a mouth about to ask her name.
Nushin did not look back to see whether she kept pace; they moved as if the alley had already been measured and found safe enough to waste no glance on. Simin let her shoulders fold inward, the practiced modesty of a boy made smaller by work, and followed the medic’s satchel with its sharp breath of vinegar and crushed leaves. The lane they turned into was a seam between the city’s bright face and its underside: the arcades behind them still held the echo of commerce, but here the light lay thin and gray, caught between high walls and shutters drawn tight.
Shopfronts that should have been open to morning trade were barred from within. Wooden planks crossed doors like ribs, wedged hard into iron rings. Through the cracks she could smell stale oil, old wool, the ghost of cardamom that no hand had dared to scoop. Above several lintels, fresh chalk made swift signs, hooks, circles, a slanting line like a blade, too simple to be prayer and too public to be private. Red, too, in finger-smeared daubs: not the careful stamp of an official seal but the urgent mark of a neighbor who wanted the world warned off. Some doors bore both, layered like arguments.
Simin’s eyes ran over them the way they ran over ledgers: here, permitted; there, refused; farther on, a house already taken into account by the sickness. In one recessed doorway, a strip of cloth hung from a nail, stiff with dried dye: an announcement, perhaps, or a plea. A clay bowl sat upside down at the threshold as though even the poor could afford a gesture of closure. No laughter threaded these walls. Only the scrape of sandals somewhere ahead, a hurried cough swallowed, and the faint rustle of paper pinned under a stone: official notice or denunciation, she could not tell.
Nushin lifted a hand once, curt, directing her gaze away from a doorway where the plaster had been scratched clean, as if someone had tried to erase the warning and failed. Simin lowered her eyes obediently, but she noted it all, storing each mark and silence as proof that in this quarter, entry was no longer a matter of coin alone.
At each bend of the lane, a shallow bowl squatted in the dust cradling coals that refused to die. Someone had fed them frankincense and bitter rue; the resin sweated, caught, and rose in a thin, stubborn ribbon that crept beneath the arches and along the base of the walls. The smoke did not lift like honest kitchen steam. It hugged the ground as if instructed, as if the city itself wished to bind its own breath and keep it from straying into the wrong lungs.
Simin drew air the way she handled ink: sparingly, with care for what might stain. The fumes pricked her throat, turned her tongue dry, and made her newly aware of the small sounds a body makes when it lives, swallowing, a rasp at the back of the nose, the soft betrayal of a cough. She pressed her lips together, tasting ash and sweetness, and thought of seals impressed into wax: one careless exhale, and you were marked.
In a niche where a lamp should have burned, the ember-glow watched her pass, patient as an official.
Two men came toward them from the gray throat of the lane, each with a wooden bucket that knocked his knee and sent vinegar water slapping against the staves. Their sleeves were bound high with twine, forearms bare and shining, the manner of butchers at work, though no carcass lay before them. Only stone and thresholds. They moved with a practiced economy: dip, lift, fling. The liquid struck doorsteps and cobbles in wide arcs, leaving dark crescents that stung the air clean for a heartbeat before the sourness settled again.
One of them glanced up as he threw, not at Simin but above her, as if measuring the presence of unseen eyes. The other muttered a phrase like a charm, too loud to be private. Remedy, yes: yet also a ritual performed for any seal that might be listening.
Notices stood in for the absent banners. Thick sheets pasted straight onto cool tile, their edges furred with flour glue and dust. The script was the rigid hand of clerks: curfews, permitted lanes, lists of names that could be summoned or shut away. From the bottom, wax seals dangled on cords and tapped softly in the draft, each stamped emblem a small weight, promising order with the same mouth it promised punishment.
Simin read the lane as she read accounts in a dim caravanserai: not the numbers, but their silences. Which shutters were barred from fear, which from order; which thresholds had been washed and which merely shown to have been washed; where a cord’s knot sat fresh, where a seal had been touched too often. Here, permission outspent coin, and sickness served as reason, and as instrument.
Simin slipped into the storeroom’s threshold where the arcade’s shade pooled, arranging her body with the careless claim of a messenger who had been sent too often to be impressed by doors. She let her shoulders fold inward, not in meekness but in the habit of taking up less air, and she set one foot over the worn stone lip as if the place belonged to a ledger and her name was written somewhere inside it. The felt cap, coarse, honest-looking, threw a short darkness over her brow. Under it her eyes kept their sharpness, measuring the hinge pins, the grain of the wooden jamb, the place where a guard’s hand might rest if a guard had nothing else to do.
Her fingers, stained with ink that no amount of sand ever truly scoured away, stayed hidden, tucked up into the sleeves of the plain qabā cloak like stolen goods. In this quarter, clean hands and soft knuckles meant a household boy; rough hands meant labor; ink meant questions. She could carry the posture of a boy, the clipped impatience, the quick glance that pretended not to see. Yet her hands would betray the life she had lived, the letters she could not unlearn.
Beyond her, the courtyard moved in slow, ordinary loops: porters with their backs bowed under bales, a water-seller calling out, a man coughing into his elbow and drawing the attention of no one and everyone. Smoke from an incense brazier drifted past the lintel, meant to sweeten the air against sickness, and it brought with it the faint sting of vinegar. Somewhere a clerk’s reed pen scratched, a sound as thin as a rumor. Simin held herself between that sound and the lock as if waiting were her only business, as if the door’s metal did not have a language she intended to read.
She kept her breathing shallow, training her throat to a lower register in case a greeting fell on her like a hand. Any sudden “boy, ” from behind would demand a voice that did not belong to her. Any pause too long at this door would invite a gaze that lingered. In Isfahan, even shade had eyes.
She let her hand drift into her sleeve as if to scratch an itch at the wrist, nothing more. The pellet of wax lay there like a swallowed secret (dull, patient) until she cupped it in her palm and breathed once, twice, the damp warmth of her breath softening it without shine. Beneath the qabā’s hem, she pressed it to the inside of her wrist where her pulse lived, where heat could be blamed on blood and not intent. She kept the motion slow enough to be laziness, the fidget of a boy waiting on another man’s time; fast enough that the wax would not turn stubborn again and betray her with a crack.
Her eyes stayed outward, fixed on the courtyard’s small theater: a porter shifting a rope across his shoulder, a bundle of dyed cloth bleeding color in the sun, a guard’s bored turn of the head. She watched the traffic the way a courier watched for his master’s sign, and counted the intervals between footsteps, between coughs, between glances that might snag. The wax softened; her wrist cooled. She chose her moment the way one chooses a word in court, lightly, as if it had always been waiting there.
She shifted a fraction, letting the fall of her qabā and the angle of her hip become a screen, so that the lock lay in a pocket of shadow no idle passerby would bother to peer into. The wax, now obedient, met the mouth of the keyhole with a dull kiss. She pressed with the pad of her thumb, then steadied the rim with a thumbnail kept short like any working boy’s: no delicate crescent to invite comment. Cold metal resisted, then yielded its language: wards and grooves biting their private geometry into the warmed surface. Simin did not hurry. She counted the thud of her heart as if it were a metronome given by God, one, two, three, then lifted in a single clean motion. No twist, no second touch, no smear to confess her intent.
Footsteps scraped somewhere beyond the arcades, the sound dragged slow over stone as if the day itself were tired of moving. Simin stilled. The wax disappeared into her fist, knuckles tightening around its soft treachery, while her throat practiced in secret: shorter answers, flatter vowels, a boy’s impatience shaved clean of tenderness. She prepared a greeting that would not quaver, would not cut too bright with fear.
She let the wax sink back into the sleeve’s dark seam and showed the world what it expected: empty hands, nothing stolen, nothing made. Her shoulders slackened into the sulk of an errand boy kept waiting past his patience. She scuffed her sandal against the stone, raising a thin complaint of dust, and stared at the door as if judging some negligent servant within, waiting, only waiting.
A porter came out of the arcade’s dim throat and stopped as if a rope had gone tight around his ankles. His hands, freshly dipped, shone wet in the sun; vinegar clung to his skin with the sharpness of a scold, and the smell rose between them: cleanliness made weapon, plague-sense made ritual. He held a wash-bucket at his hip, the rim nicked and polished by too many days of scrubbing fear off thresholds.
His eyes did not go first to Simin’s face. They traveled the line of her shoulders, the plain fall of her qabā, the cap pressed down on close-cropped hair, and then, quick as a thief’s glance, returned to the door. He measured the distance between her and the storeroom as one measures a load against a mule’s back: too near, too patient, too watchful for a boy with nothing but time to waste. His nostrils flared, not only at vinegar but at suspicion, as if scent could name intent.
Behind him, the bazaar breathed in short, guarded draughts. A shutter banged and was immediately stilled. Somewhere a brazier coughed incense into the lane; saffron and smoke lay over the tilework like a veil meant to soften the city’s hard outline. The porter’s stance widened, blocking the easy path away. He was not a guard, but plague had given every man a little authority and a reason to use it.
“Waiting?” he said at last, and even the single word carried the weight of rules newly minted. His accent pinned him to a quarter by the river; his tone belonged to the square, where eyes were trained to report.
Simin kept her own gaze dull, the way an errand boy’s would be when faced with yet another man who thought he could demand explanations from anyone smaller. Still, she felt the porter’s look hook at details: the steadiness of her hands, the lack of fidgeting, the unnatural care with which she had chosen her shadow. His fingers tightened on the bucket handle. The vinegar sheen on his palms caught the light, bright, accusing, while he waited for her to give him a story worth believing.
Simin spoke before his silence could turn into a net. She let her mouth sharpen, let impatience stand in for innocence, the way boys in the lanes learned to do when older men tested them for sport.
“Waiting? I’ve been waiting since the morning call,” she said, and made a small, contemptuous gesture at the mouth of the arcade. “They close a lane because someone coughs, then open it because a clerk’s cousin needs passage, and by the time a man has walked the long way round the square his receipt has been eaten by a shutter or a wind-gust: or by the scribe himself, God knows.” She tugged at the edge of her qabā as if the cloth were the cause of her anger. “And then it’s the runner they seize by the collar. ‘Where is the seal, boy? Why is the ink faint, boy?’ as if my hands make ink, as if my feet command gates.”
She allowed hunger into her voice, not pleading, only sour. “Two days a loaf costs like a small sin. Let them keep counting keys and coughing vinegar if it pleases them: only don’t tell me the delays are mine.”
The vinegar-bright challenge in the porter’s face eased, settling into something older and more communal: the sourness of a man made to obey rules he had not written. He gave a grunt that might have been agreement or fatigue. “New ways,” he muttered, shifting the bucket to his other hip. “They make us show papers twice now, at the courtyard mouth, at the lane, like we grow a second name between one threshold and the next.” His eyes slid past her again, as if to assure himself the door had not moved in her absence. Then, still cautious, he asked in the tone of one checking a knot, “So. Who are you waiting on, boy? Which master keeps you cooling your heels like this?”
Simin let a familiar injustice rise to her tongue: small enough to be believable, sharp enough to sting. She complained of tallies that vanished between one counting and the next; of a merchant’s clerk who stared through her as if she were smoke and then found her name only when it suited him; of copper held back “until the books are straight.” She spat the words like grit, keeping her annoyance aimed at men, not at locks.
Half convinced now, and pleased with his own usefulness, the porter leaned closer and lowered his voice as if the air itself carried ears. “It isn’t only the cordons,” he said. “Since the sickness, that waqf clerk (Hajj Karim) has taken to counting keys like prayer-beads. One latch, one question. If you pause, he pauses you back, and an errand turns to an inquest.”
A slice of shade, cooler than the sun deserved, slid across the porter’s knotted hands. Simin felt it before she saw its source: the way men’s attention subtly re-tilted when authority approached wearing neither uniform nor beard. Footsteps, measured and unhurried, sounded on the baked lane stones: not the scuff of a servant, not the swagger of a guard, but the economical pace of someone who had long ago learned the cost of being delayed.
The woman who entered the narrow light might have been any respectable widow at a glance: a sober scarf drawn close and pinned as if grief itself were a fastening, a plain mantle that did not invite comment. Yet she carried, tucked under one arm, an accounts-book with a corner rubbed soft from use, and the porter’s shoulders tightened the way they did when a scale weight was set down. Her hands bore the faint, honest stains of dye and ink: marks that could not be scrubbed away with perfume or claims.
She did not offer Simin the courtesy of first recognition. That omission was a kind of gift, as deliberate as averted eyes in a women’s quarter; it kept Simin in the safe category of function, not person. Her gaze rested instead on the porter, calm and appraising, as if he were an item to be tallied: one bucket, one tongue, one possible trouble.
For a breath the lane held its sounds: some far-off hammering in the arcades, the dry scrape of a broom, a cough quickly smothered. Simin’s hunger made the air sharp with imagined bread, but something steadier rose beneath it: the sense of a door quietly opening.
The widow adjusted her grip on the ledger. The spine creaked like an old joint. Her expression did not harden; it did not need to. She simply stood where the shade fell, and in that narrow strip of coolness the porter seemed, all at once, less certain of his questions and more mindful of whose time he was stealing.
She addressed him with the unhurried exactness of a woman who had paid too many fees to let a porter invent another. “You’ve been lingering,” she said, as if noting a weight on a scale. “If it is because Hajj Karim has begun rattling keys and reciting his ‘new health orders’ as though he himself wrote them, you may put that fear down. His office can seal an alley; it cannot seize my deliveries without cause.”
The porter’s mouth worked, searching for the right humility. She did not press; she merely made room for his answer to fail.
“I ask only,” she went on, her tone light enough to pass for courtesy, “whether you mean to repeat this delay to Ustad Rahim of the dyers’ guild, and explain why a simple bundle for a waqf storeroom became an interrogation in the open street. He is already sour from closures and lost vats. He does not grow sweeter when men waste daylight.”
The porter glanced toward the arcades as if the guild head might materialize from brick and shadow. His hands loosened around the rope. In the pause she had created, his questions thinned into obedience.
Without pause, as if the matter had been settled long before Simin was born, the widow let her gaze fall on him at last, briefly, professionally, the way a buyer looks at a bolt of cloth to judge its weave. She did not ask his name; she gave him one to wear. “This is Hasan,” she said, and the syllables landed like a cap pulled low over the brow. “A runner in my employ. In these closures, speed is dearer than silk.” She turned a fraction, placing her shoulder between him and the porter’s curiosity, and continued in the same even tone: “I send him between my storerooms so my household need not cross sealed lanes and invite questions. If you require a story, take that one. It is ordinary. It keeps everyone fed.”
From within her mantle she drew out proofs as one might draw out thread: not fine enough to boast of, only strong enough to hold. A folded scrap bore the blunt red bite of her estate seal; beside it a narrow list of goods marched in neat merchant shorthand. She let the porter see just long enough to feel himself admitted into order, then shut it with a thumb’s quiet finality, ledger-closed.
Khatereh tipped her chin, a small command disguised as convenience, and Simin fell in at her elbow. “We go the usual way,” she said, with the studied boredom of habit. Through a dyer’s side court, past vats that steam like low clouds. There was a back room above them, a pallet, a bolt on the door. “Sleep there. Learn the errands. Let the waqf man tire of asking.”
In the dye-seller’s courtyard, where the air tasted of wet indigo and boiled pomegranate rind, Khatereh paused mid-instruction with the smallest hitch of breath. Because someone had entered as if they belonged there. No call from the threshold, no hesitation at the puddled stones; only measured footsteps, clean-soled, choosing their path between vats and coiled ropes as if the place were already mapped in their mind.
Simin kept his head lowered, fingers tucked into his sleeves the way boys did when they wished to look empty-handed. The felt cap itched where sweat had dried. Above, cloth strips hung like flayed banners, darkening in slow drips; each drop struck the basin with a sound too deliberate for comfort. The porters in the far corner did not look up, but their shoulders tightened as if they had been trained to feel a gaze even when their eyes stayed on their work.
The newcomer’s coat was cut strangely under a Persian sash. Foreign restraint dressed in local obedience. Linen that had been washed recently, a collar that sat crisp against the throat. Their face held a practiced calm, the mouth already set into courtesy before any true recognition could form. That was what pricked Simin: not the clothes, not the accent that sat like a pebble under the tongue, but the readiness. A person who entered with words prepared had come for more than dye.
Khatereh’s hand, still lifted from pointing out the stair that led to the hidden room, lowered to rest on the edge of a vat. The motion was casual; the knuckles whitening were not. She did not step back, but she shifted half a pace so her body eclipsed Simin from an easy line of sight, the way she might shelter a ledger from rain.
Simin felt the familiar tightening in his throat, the rehearsed voice waiting behind his teeth. He measured the courtyard as he had measured alleys: the single gate, the ladder to the roof, the wet stones that would betray a hurried step. And he watched, from the shade of Khatereh’s shoulder, as the stranger’s eyes took them in, lightly, politely, like a hand testing a lock without turning it.
Parvaneh’s hands rose, palms together, the gesture exact. Neither too courtly for a dye-yard nor too familiar for a widow. “Khānom Khatereh,” they said, and in the name laid a softness that acknowledged the scarf pinned tight at her throat, the absence beside her that everyone in the bazaar learned to count. Condolence, but not the kind that lingered; it passed like a coin across a counter, clean and meant to be accepted.
“I have heard your accounts are as orderly as prayer-lines,” Parvaneh went on, their lightly roughened accent catching on the sibilants. Praise, offered as if it were merely a repetition of common knowledge: so that refusing it would seem vanity. Their gaze dipped to Khatereh’s ink-stained fingers, to the careful way she held herself, and Simin felt the compliment’s edge: a reminder that competence had witnesses.
Then, with the same courtesy, a small inquiry was placed between them like a cup of tea. “And your health, in this season? May God keep fever from your household.” The plague was invoked gently, as though out of piety; yet the words loosened the ground, making room for questions to come.
Parvaneh’s attention, having paid its proper dues to Khatereh, drifted with unhurried certainty to the shadow behind her. It did not snap like suspicion; it settled, as a merchant’s glance settles on a bolt of cloth: counting threads, estimating weight, noting where the dye has taken unevenly. The smile remained in place, courteous as a seal impressed on wax, while the eyes did their work: the felt cap’s edge, the way the qabā hung across narrow shoulders, the careful hiding of wrists that might betray softness. Simin felt that gaze pass over his hands and linger, measuring the cleanliness of nails, the faint ink that even hunger could not scrub away. He tightened his posture into boyish thrift, as if smaller were safer.
The questions arrived as lightly as blessings, each one fitted to the last so that refusal would sound like guilt. Where had he slept. Name the caravanserai, the courtyard, which stair creaked underfoot. Who had stamped his travel paper, and what shade of ink bled at the edge of the seal. When the arcades shuttered, which alley did he favor, and for what reason.
Khatereh answered as one who kept keys and quarrels in the same pocket. A route was named (arcades, then the spice lane, then the caravanserai with the cracked blue lintel) and a purpose: a boy sent to fetch receipts and thread, nothing more dangerous than numbers. Simin let her words stand, adding only what was necessary, clipped as ledger marks. Parvaneh listened, head inclined, and the pauses between their nods did the questioning.
Simin watched the quarter teach its lessons in the space of a few paces. At the mouth of an alley, a cord of guards had appeared as if pulled from the earth: men with cloth wrapped over their mouths, spear-butts planted, eyes reddened by smoke and sleeplessness. They did not study faces the way Parvaneh had. They studied hands and the small objects those hands offered: a strip of paper crisp as new bread, a token of worked copper catching the light, a seal whose edge did not feather where cheap ink bled.
A man with a pilgrim’s dust still on his hem tried to answer with calm and an open stare. The guard scarcely listened. The paper was unfolded, tilted, sniffed, held up to the hard sun as though truth lived in the fibers. Another, better fed, produced a folded writ and a coin pressed into the guard’s palm with the ease of habit; suspicion slid away from him as water slides off oiled cloth. The gate of bodies opened. The poor man was turned back with a gesture that pretended it was mercy.
So that was the city’s new logic, sharpened by plague and profit: not the steadiness of one’s gaze, but the steadiness of one’s seal. Names could be doubted; a good impression could not, at least not by those who had no leisure to doubt it. Simin felt the old instinct (to meet scrutiny with the honest weight of her eyes) rise and be quietly set aside like an unnecessary tool.
She adjusted without showing the adjustment. Let Khatereh speak first, as if her certainty were itself a stamped permit; let her widow’s authority, so accepted it had become a kind of document, stand between Simin and the hunger of questions. When Simin did answer, it would be in the language the guards understood: dates, courtyards, the dull details that could be checked and therefore need not be checked.
And beneath that, another calculation: if paper was now the city’s breath, then any throat could be closed by the right mark in the wrong ledger. She kept her hands still, ink-stained and ordinary, and listened for where seals were bought, where wax was warmed, where a story could be pressed into official shape.
In the back room of Khatereh’s house, where daylight came in thin, disciplined slats through a lattice, Simin sat as a hired pen might sit: shoulders rounded, cap brim shading her brow, the qabā pulled close to make her seem smaller than her hands. The air smelled of wool, old dye, and the vinegar bowl set by the door against sickness. Khatereh’s household moved beyond the curtain in soft, purposeful steps; no one lingered long enough to look.
The waqf ledger lay open like a prayer-book: columns ruled straight as judgment. Simin copied what she was shown, line after line, her reed pen obedient, her eyes lowered with the meekness expected of a boy paid by the page. But her fingers read more than they wrote. Merchant shorthand, those quick slashes and pinched loops, unfolded under her touch into rents gathered from endowment shops, “charity” paid out to the poor in sums too neat to be true, and the small hooked marks that did not accuse yet always accompanied a thinning of coin. The page never named a thief. It did not have to. The ink itself made a habit of omission.
The numbers began to arrange themselves into a second Isfahan, clearer than any map a stranger might buy. In the rent column, certain payments bunched like grapes around a single storeroom named only by its measure and its proximity to the Qeysarieh gate. Too frequent, too carefully rounded, as if the room were less a room than a throat through which goods and papers passed. Elsewhere a clerk’s name returned again and again, each appearance followed by the same narrow mark of shorthand; then, abruptly, the name was struck through with a heavier hand, the ink darker, the line drawn with a haste that felt like fear made visible. In the margin, a small note (almost polite) tied “health cordon” expenses to a sudden shift of custody, as though sickness itself had been entered as a lawful witness.
Hunger worried at her patience, but she turned the gnawing into a kind of method. She made a ritual of delay: lifting the reed to a whetstone, blowing the grit away, blotting a line as if ink were precious, asking for the dullest clarifications: this rent or that, this measure or that. Each small courtesy bought her a heartbeat to linger over the crooked sums without seeming to chase them.
By dusk her page of scrawls had become a small grammar: the marks that meant waqf holiness, invoked like a shield, and the quieter strokes that translated to taken, shifted, made clean by a phrase of charity. She did not keep the paper. She let the pattern sink behind her eyes, where no search could find it, and understood, with a dry calm, that in Isfahan a man won by seals.
A patrol drifted down the bazaar lanes at the hour when light thinned and merchants began to think in bolts and bars. It was not the kind of arrival that cracked the air with shouted orders. They came as if they belonged to the evening itself: three in front, two behind, one man lingering sideways with the laziness of someone meant to be noticed. Their boots found the same stones every night, yet tonight they placed their feet with care, as if the street had acquired a pulse.
Simin kept her shoulders narrow beneath the plain qabā, felt cap pulled low, and let her gaze wander the way a young clerk’s would. Interested in everything, attached to nothing. The smell of vinegar and burnt rue hung in pockets, but it was the patrol that changed the lane. Porters, who moments ago had pushed through bodies like water through reeds, began to slow. A bundle shifted on a back; a rope was retied that did not need retightening. Men who had been loud with jokes lowered their mouths to murmurs, saving breath for answers.
At the mouth of a caravanserai courtyard the patrol stopped as though by habit. The gatekeeper, who usually made a show of complaining about dust and fees, folded his hands and waited to be told what he already knew. One soldier leaned on his spear and said something clipped. Nothing a man could seize and argue with. “Not tonight.” “Orders.” “Go around.” The words were small, but they struck like a palm to the chest.
A mule balked, its bell chiming once, and the porter holding its lead looked from face to face, searching for a reason he could carry. None was offered. Bundles remained on shoulders; the weight did not lessen simply because a threshold had become forbidden. Men turned back in a slow, resentful tide, careful not to call attention to themselves by showing anger.
Simin watched the refusal spread along the lane, invisible as smoke. She had learned, in exile, that an unspoken order was the hardest kind to break: it left no ink to steal, no seal to counterfeit: only routes that closed as quietly as a mouth.
Near the Qeysarieh gate the notice board had been one more scab of paper on plaster, smudged by passing sleeves, its corners worrying loose in the noon heat. Now it held itself with new authority. A strip of fresh paste shone damp at the edges, and the seal at the bottom (red, round, pressed deep) looked wet enough to stain a thumb. Above it, one line had been added in a hand too careful to belong to the same tired clerk: the letters stood upright, their tails trimmed, the ink still fat and dark as a bruise.
Men who would have glanced and laughed under their breath stopped as if a rope had tightened across their chests. They read once, then again, counting the words like coin. A spice-seller’s wife drew her veil closer and turned her face away, as though the board were a mirror that could accuse. Two porters, shoulders squared under loads, shifted their feet and chose silence over the small mercy of complaint.
Simin did not step nearer than she must. She let her eyes skim, the way a boy’s might, quick, incurious, while something inside her tallied the fresh seal, the new hand, the sudden discipline of strangers not looking at one another.
In a scribe’s stall set back beneath the arcade, where gum arabic sweetened the dust and reed pens lay like small bones, the clerk who had watched her all afternoon as if weighing her in his palm now turned suddenly bright. The change was too quick to be kindness. He rose, smiling with his whole mouth, and reached up to pull down a ledger she had not asked to see, thumping it open as though the pages were eager to confess. “For your convenience,” he said, and his courtesy rang thin, like a coin struck on stone. He asked her name, once, then again with a different emphasis, his eyes flicking to her throat, her hands, the way she stood. Court phrases spilled from him in perfect order, each blessing and submission shaped as if for someone listening beyond the stall’s cloth curtain.
She passed the side door she had marked in her mind by a chipped turquoise tile, and her hunger for it rose like a reflex. The lock did not resist; it turned with a groomed ease, as if a careful hand had visited it at dawn. New oil shone at the bolt’s mouth. The doorkeeper’s eyes caught on her felt cap, then on her jaw, a breath too long: taught attention, not idle.
At the mouth of an alley that ought to have swallowed her whole, a checkpoint gathered itself as if conjured by breath: one guard perched on a low stool, one upright with his spear like a mark in the street. Their eyes did not count faces; they measured gait, the set of a shoulder, the hesitation of a hand. When someone murmured Parvaneh’s name, the men’s hardness eased, as if a latch had lifted, and Simin felt the city’s hidden gears take hold.
Simin drifts beneath the arcade’s long shade with a porter’s practiced slouch, shoulders rounded as if the air itself were a load. The felt cap sits low on her close-cropped hair; its rough edge scratches her brow whenever she tilts her head too quickly. Hunger gnaws with a private insistence, but she lets it show only as irritation: the look of a boy kept waiting by a merchant’s delay, not a woman returned to her own city like a thief to a locked door.
She keeps her hands where any idle eye can count them. Ink-dark smudges stain the pads of her fingers, honest dirt for a dishonest purpose. In her right hand she worries a cheap account slip, its paper soft from too much folding, as if she has been sent to haggle over lentils or lamp oil. The gesture steadies her breathing. It also gives her a reason to stand still; men who linger without paper are either looking for trouble or hiding it.
Above her, the archways hold coolness the way a clay jar holds water, yet the air is not clean. Saffron smoke from plague fires threads through the bazaar and catches in her throat; somewhere close, vinegar stings. Someone washing hands too often, or too late. A shuttered tea-house door is marked with a chalk line; a beggar sleeps against it as if the warning were a blessing.
Simin measures the flow of bodies as she was taught to measure ledgers: who pays, who watches, who is paid to watch. Two guards at the mouth of an alley pretend to listen to a copper-smith’s complaint while their eyes sweep the crowd in a slow net. A scribe’s apprentice steps out, sees the guards, steps back in again, and the motion tells her more than speech. Even the pigeons seem cautious, lifting in brief, nervous bursts.
She does not look for Parvaneh directly. Instead she looks for the wake they leave: heads turning a fraction, conversation thinning, a doorkeeper’s spine straightening as if a seal has been shown. When that subtle tide begins to pull, Simin shifts her weight, lets impatience crease her face, and follows at a distance that could be mistaken for accident.
Parvaneh crossed the caravanserai courtyard as a well-cut knife crosses cloth. Without effort, with intent. Their foreign coat, tailored too closely at the shoulders for local taste, was half domesticated by a Persian sash knotted with studied care; the linen beneath was too clean for a place where mule sweat and lamp soot lived in the stones. They did not call for attention. They did not need to. Their pace held the quiet certainty of one who has already paid, already been promised.
Simin watched the way bodies answered them. A porter shifted his load to the other shoulder as if remembering a rule; a young clerk, ink on his lip, swallowed the end of a question and let it die. Even the men who prided themselves on not yielding, broad-chested guild hands with rings like small shields, moved a half-step aside, the smallest concession, and then another, until a path existed where there had been only crowd.
Parvaneh’s smile touched no one. Their gaze did: weighing faces, counting exits, noting which doors were newly latched and which pretended not to be. In that measured glide there was no hurry, but there was momentum, and the courtyard made room as though the agreement had been signed long ago.
At every threshold Parvaneh lets paper speak before any tongue may. The folded letter is produced from within the foreign-cut coat with the grace of a prayer-bead slipped through fingers: shown, not offered; displayed for the length of a breath, then withdrawn as if even ink must not linger in common air. Simin catches a flash of a seal (dark red, impressed deep) before a courteous palm covers it, protecting its authority from greedy eyes. A doorkeeper who had been stubborn as a bolt suddenly remembers softness; his shoulders unknit, his gaze drops, and his hand finds the bar without being asked. Wood scrapes; iron yields. No complaint, no bargain spoken aloud: only the smallest nod, and passage is granted as if it were always owed.
Parvaneh’s courtesy worked like a net cast gently: a clerk was beckoned from the blessed shade, another eased from behind a bolt of dyed cloth with a laugh that did not reach his eyes. A thumb brushed coin into a palm; a promise, perhaps, into an ear. The questions came wrapped in concern (about illness, about absences) yet Simin heard the hidden ledgering: names set in order, dates pinned down, who had fled, who had died.
Nushin kept a single pace behind, close enough to catch Simin if her shoulders betrayed her, distant enough to look like no one’s companion. Their gaze slid past Parvaneh to the rim of the courtyard: to the idle men who were not idle, to the boy with a tray who lingered too long, to the doorway where talk thinned. Together they mapped the gentle force of Parvaneh’s passing. Each small pause tightening the air like drawn thread.
Parvaneh drifted across the caravanserai courtyard as if borne on the thin current of courtesy itself, never hurrying, never loitering. Always arriving precisely where the city’s nerves were already laid bare. Their foreign-cut coat moved cleanly among dust-stained cloaks and sweat-darkened turbans, and the linen at their wrists stayed pale, as if even grime deferred to the patronage stitched into that letter.
Simin watched the wake left behind. It was not the obvious wake of a quarrel or a shouted command. Nothing so vulgar. It was the quieter thing: spaces that had once been slack drawing tight, as if a cord had been pulled from some hidden hand. A post at the mouth of a lane, yesterday held by one guard whose boredom had been as wide as the street, now held two men standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Their spears were not planted to bar passage; they were angled, polite as a bow, narrowing the lane by inches until a body must choose how to pass: close enough for cloth to brush wood, close enough for a glance to count buttons, to read the tremor of a wrist.
A seller of vinegar-soaked herbs had been permitted to keep his brazier near the arch; now he was nudged back into the sun, his smoke thinned, his small protection revoked. Even the porters seemed to sense it. They shifted their loads from one shoulder to the other and fell into a more orderly line, as if disorder might be taken as contagion. A boy with a tray of tea halted where he had always darted through; he waited for a nod that did not come, then chose the longer path.
What struck Simin most was the manner of it: no raised voice, no visible punishment. Merely an addition of one more man, one more spear, one more pair of eyes. Enough to change the measure of the courtyard. Parvaneh did not need to look back. The city was learning to anticipate their questions by tightening its own doors, and each tightening made the next question easier to ask.
Simin let herself drift toward the narrowed mouth of the lane as if she had nothing but time and an empty stomach. She loosened her shoulders, allowed the plain qabā to swing, let the felt cap sit a touch crooked. An imitation of a porter’s carelessness, the sort that invited no questions because it promised no answers. Her steps fell uneven on purpose. She even hummed, barely, a market tune she remembered from childhood, and hated the way the sound caught against her own throat in its borrowed pitch.
The first guard watched faces, the old manner: an idle sweep that could be fooled by confidence. The second did not waste his gaze on brows and mouths. He looked lower, to where a disguise betrayed itself. Hands first: whether they carried ink-stains, whether they knew where to rest, whether they fidgeted like women taught to hide their fingers. Then hems and seams, the fall of cloth, the way a cloak sat over hips, the scuff of a shoe that had not learned a man’s stride. His eyes snagged on Simin’s left hand when it curled too neatly at her side.
She felt the tug of that attention as surely as if a hook had caught her sleeve, and she kept walking, because stopping would have confessed what her careful saunter tried to deny.
Under the bazaar arcade the light fell in striped bars, and in their intervals the registry alcove waited like a mouth half-open. Simin had measured the distance to its lattice twice, counting heartbeats between footfalls, when a curtain (newer cloth, too clean) was swung across the opening with abrupt care. A boy no older than twelve dragged a small brazier into place; vinegar and bitter herbs bit the air, and he announced, too loudly, “Fumigation,” as if the word itself were a seal.
Inside, the scribe did not protest, did not plead for business. He merely reached for the wooden lattice and let it drop with a practiced thud. A key flashed in his hand, turned once, twice, fast as a man repeating a prayer he no longer believes.
Simin let the crowd carry her a half-step closer, close enough that the lattice’s shadow fell across her knuckles. The clerk’s fingertips came into view between the slats: black smudges not yet dried, ink shining wet in the creases as if it still remembered the stamp. One pad was rubbed raw, a bright soreness against brown skin: too much pressing, too many seals demanded within a single, breathless hour.
The pattern did not announce itself; it tightened. Wherever Parvaneh paused with that courteous tilt of head, asking after fevers, pressing a coin into a frightened palm, something nearby hardened into a knot: an extra spear at a corner, a shop-lattice drawn as if by a single command, a clerk’s hand still glossy with fresh ink. Each small kindness set a boundary. Simin and Nushin, resisting and yet compelled, found their feet steered toward the waqf storeroom’s unseen pull by the Qeysarieh gate.
Nushin caught Simin by the elbow with the impersonal certainty of someone used to moving bodies out of harm’s way. They drew her beneath an arcade pillar where the sun could not pick out the fine down at her jaw, where the smell of warm brick and old pigeon droppings overlaid the sharper sting of vinegar. For a moment Simin let her shoulders sag into the shade, as if she were merely another errand-runner pausing to breathe.
“You feel it,” Nushin said, not a question. Their voice stayed low, swallowed by the murmur of bargaining and the rasp of brooms on stone. “This quarter is not closing like panic. It is closing like a fish-trap.”
Simin kept her gaze angled toward the waqf lane, toward the narrow throat that led to the storerooms near the gate. Men passed with bundles on their backs; a donkey’s bell chimed, bright and indifferent. She counted, without moving her lips: the archway, the side-alley, the turn that would hide a run; the places where a cap might be torn away by a careless shoulder.
Nushin’s hand lifted, two fingers indicating, not pointing. “Guards where no one lingers: at a fountain, at a bread oven, at the mouth of an alley that leads nowhere. They aren’t watching for thieves. They’re watching for someone who watches.” A pause, their breath thin. “And the ropes. Have you seen how clean the knots are? Quarantine in truth is done with haste. Here the cords are measured, tied at the same height, the same turn. Someone taught them.”
Simin’s eyes narrowed. She had seen rope in true fear: flung across doorways, looped around anything that would hold, ends frayed by trembling hands. Today’s rope lay like writing: deliberate, legible.
“The clerks,” Nushin went on. “Two of them. A narrow-faced man with a mole by his left nostril. A younger one who keeps wiping ink from his thumb. I saw them at the registry alcove yesterday, and again at the grain inspection by the river gate. Clerks don’t travel in pairs, not unless they are being carried. Paper and seal passed hand to hand like contraband.”
Simin’s throat tightened, hunger sharpening into irritation. “If they’re moving writs,” she murmured, careful to make her voice boy-flat, “then the writs have a destination.”
“And if you snatch at one too soon,” Nushin said, “you teach the net what kind of fish you are.” Their eyes, steady as a surgeon’s, held hers. “We are close. But closeness is when people make foolish, fast prayers.”
Simin let the words settle like dust. Even as she listened, her mind traced exits and counted the intervals between men in helmets; hope, stubborn as a weed between stones, pressed up against caution and found no easy place to root.
At the spice-seller’s stall the air thickened with cumin and dried lime, with saffron held in small glass like captured light. Simin stood as any errand-boy might, hands clasped, eyes lowered, while her attention moved in sharper angles. Between two baskets of cardamom a folded paper appeared, passed not openly but as if it were a pinch of pepper, the courier’s sleeve brushing the merchant’s wrist.
She saw the telltale sheen at the edge where the ink had not yet surrendered to air. A seal, newly pressed: the raised rim still tacky, catching a stray seed husk that clung like a witness. Her fingers remembered their own education: wax warmed in the hollow of the palm, a hairpin’s point to lift without tearing, a quick press against softness, then nothing but an empty hand and a face that had never looked twice.
“One impression,” she breathed, scarcely shaping the words, letting them fall into the stall’s noise. “Not the whole writ: only the mouth of it. A seal tells you which throat is speaking. If the authority is borrowed, it must be borrowed from someone with a name, and names are the only map that does not move.”
Nushin’s hand closed on her wrist the instant Simin’s fingers began to slip between the baskets. The grip was quick, clinical thumb finding the pulse as if to measure her and restrain her in the same motion. Simin did not look up; she let her lashes stay lowered, the obedient errand-boy’s mask, while her tendons pulled against the hold.
“Not like this,” Nushin breathed. “A seal is only a stamp of breath. Without the lungs behind it, it proves nothing.”
“It proves a mouth,” Simin answered, voice kept thin, careful. “And mouths have names.”
“A name is useless if you cannot show the hands that carry it,” Nushin said. “You steal one mark in daylight and the chain simply changes links.”
Simin’s jaw tightened. “Waiting is a luxury for the unpursued. The chain tightens whether we watch it or not.”
Simin let the bitterness rise only as far as her tongue would allow. “You call it caution,” she murmured, “because patience lets you hold the world still between your fingers.” Nushin’s gaze did not flicker. “And you call it necessity,” they returned, “because speed makes you feel untouchable.” Under the open arcade their shoulders drew tight, careful not to gesture: one wrong reach, one stolen impression in this light, and her disguise would become a rumor that walked.
Forced to choose, they made a compromise that felt like a bruise. Nushin slipped away toward the cordon. Eyes on the guard’s next turn, fingers reading the quarantine ropes and their knots as if they were prayer-beads. Simin stayed with the living ink: clerks’ sleeves smudged dark, nails bitten, wrists bearing the faint red ring of seals. They parted on a look that was not consent but arithmetic.
Simin took the side lane as if it had been assigned to her by some impatient master. No haste in her feet, only an obedient quickness, the kind that belonged to boys sent to fetch ink or carry folded petitions. Under the felt cap her scalp prickled with sweat. She kept her shoulders angled, narrowing herself to the line of shadow cast by the caravanserai wall, and let her gaze rest on the ground as though the stones required study. The lane smelled of damp straw and old citrus peel, of mule breath and the bitter ash of a brazier dying in a corner. Above, a wooden balcony sagged with sleeping mats; a string of onions hung like a charm against hunger.
Parvaneh moved ahead with the ease of one who expected doors to open. Not a rush only that measured pace that turned the city into a ledger: stop, speak, receive; move, watch, remember. Simin caught the edge of their foreign-cut coat when the crowd thinned, then lost it again behind a cart piled with unglazed pots. She counted doorways by habit, one with a chipped turquoise tile, one with a lintel darkened by smoke, marking the lane like columns in a book she might need to recite later under interrogation.
She listened more than she looked. The city’s voices tangled here: porters swearing under load, a donkey’s thin complaint, a clerk calling prices to a scribe. Beneath it, she sought that lightly accented Persian, the careful courtesy that made threats sound like favors. Once, she thought she heard it, an “āqā-ye aziz” pitched too smoothly, and her stomach tightened, not with fear alone but with the old, sour knowledge of being named by strangers.
A guard’s shout from the main arcade made her spine remember to be loose. She let her hands hang idle at her sides, fingers ink-stained and empty. Every step was a choice between speed and invisibility; she chose invisibility and paid for it in distance.
A knot of porters surged from a courtyard mouth as if loosed by a whip, shoulders bent under the wet weight of barrels bound in rope. The staves knocked and complained; liquid answered with a hollow slosh that sounded like laughter too close to the ear. Vinegar breathed out of every seam. Sharp enough to sting the eyes, sharp enough to bite through the lane’s damp straw smell and the sweeter rot of citrus peel. Men shouted warnings that were not warnings so much as permission to be trampled.
Simin had no right to look hurried. She turned her body sideways, making herself narrow as a seam, chin dipped, as though deference, not pursuit, had taught her to yield. A barrel brushed her cloak; the cloth drank a cold spray. For a heartbeat she was pinned between rough wool and sweating backs, between the press of labor and the court’s unseen attention beyond the arcade.
So she let the crowd take her. She allowed her feet to move when theirs moved, to stop when they stopped, carried along without the telltale push of desire. Her lungs filled with sour air; her hunger clenched, mistaken by her body for need.
In the crush, Parvaneh’s cleanliness was the first lie to die. A flash of white linen at the wrist, too bright for this lane of damp straw and sweat, appeared near a stall where ledgers lay stacked like brick, their corners dog-eared and thumb-blackened. Simin fixed it in her mind the way she fixed sums: cuff, foreign seam, the calm hand that never flinched from contact. Then the porters’ bodies shifted, a tide of rope and shoulder and vinegar-stung breath, and that small pale sign was smudged out. Not gone by speed, but by the lane’s own cooperation: men leaning to block sightlines, a cart’s wheel turning just so, a hanging mat swaying across her view. The corridor learned, in an instant, how to conceal a predator.
Simin sought the lost thread not by chasing cloth but by reading the crowd’s obediences: which porter’s shoulder angled aside, which shopkeeper’s hand paused on a latch, which doorway made a sudden, courteous retreat as if yielding to rank. Each glance, however, threatened to unmake her. Too sharp a look, too quick a turn of head. Panic rose metallic on her tongue. She swallowed it, and chose stillness over spectacle.
A boy-errand, small as a question, slid past with a satchel slapping his hip and his sleeve “accidentally” catching her elbow. His mouth never turned toward her, yet his whisper found the hollow beneath her cap. He gave her a name that was not hers. Too sure, too smooth, as if rehearsed for coin. Simin’s belly sank. Someone had sketched “the young clerk” in words, and the bazaar was already reciting the portrait.
Simin did not run. Running declared innocence or guilt too loudly, and either could be purchased. She let her feet choose with the old mathematics of hunger and fear: not the widest lane, not the one where a patrol might enjoy the sport of stopping a breathless youth, but a narrow seam between plaster walls where the sun fell away as if ashamed. Her shoulder brushed damp brick; a thread of grime took to her sleeve. Ahead, the alley kinked, and with that single turn the bazaar’s clamor thinned. Coin-talk turning to a muffled pulse, like sound heard through folded cloth.
She slowed as she neared the tea-house, because even refuge could be watched. Its signboard hung crooked, the paint blistered by summers, and the shutters, once thrown open for chessboards and gossip, were now barred with timber blackened at the ends from old fires. A strip of cloth had been nailed across the crack where light might leak, a crude quarantine more for show than safety. On the threshold a brazier glowed under a crust of ash, and incense burned with a medicinal insistence, as if fragrance could bargain with sickness. The smoke did not rise cleanly. It crawled. It sought the lane, took the alley’s angles in its mouth, and thickened there until faces became suggestions and the edges of men blurred into one another.
Simin stepped into the tea-house’s shallow recess, behind a stack of empty water jars and a heap of reed mats bound for no guest. The smoke made her eyes smart; it also did its work, roughening the air so voices broke and softened, turning a name into a cough, a question into a harmless scrape of throat. She tested her own breath, kept it shallow. Under the felt cap her cropped hair pricked with sweat; ink-stains on her fingers suddenly seemed too vivid, like a confession.
From this shadow, she could watch without seeming to. The alley mouth stayed visible as a pale slit, and beyond it the world continued to rearrange itself each sound dulled, each shape untrustworthy. She held her posture small, young, male, and waited for the city to decide whether it had truly seen her.
Nushin came in with the economy of a soldier who has learned that haste is a kind of noise. Their shoulders did not heave, yet the hollow at the throat worked once, twice: swallowing the last of the alley’s run. Vinegar and crushed rue clung to them, sharper than the incense, as if they carried their own quarantine.
They knelt beside Simin without greeting, keeping their body angled to hide hands from the lane. From the medic’s satchel, beneath lint and a coil of bandage, they drew out folded papers that were too clean to belong to the street: notices copied in a steady clerk’s hand, orders with margins crowded by corrections, each sheet marked by a red or black stamp. Nushin spread them on the packed earth between water jars, smoothing creases with scarred fingers.
A gust worried the shutter crack. Before it could lift a corner and flash official ink to any watching eye, Nushin set a river-stone on the stack, deliberate as sealing a wound. Their voice, when it came, was low and spare. “These are the closures,” they said. “Not where sickness is: where profit moves.”
With an ink-stained thumbnail Simin began to make sense of the city by reducing it to dust and line. She scratched a crooked grid between the jars, lanes narrowing where she knew the arcades pinched, widening where courtyards opened like mouths. Each mark cost her a breath; each pause was listening. She set small circles where Parvaneh’s courteous “help” had been offered: at a clerk’s stall, at a money-changer’s bench, at the side-door of a caravanserai where a man with good ink had asked too many gentle questions. Beside them she notched the places that had gone quiet: shutters drawn without mourning, ledgers missing, a scribe’s stool left as if its owner had stood up and never returned. Then, with the tip of her nail, she scored heavier lines: new seals on old doors, fresh wax where old wood should have remembered.
Nushin’s knuckle came down, once, twice, on the same cluster of marks, as if to bruise sense into the dust. The closures did not scatter at random; they draped themselves, patient and deliberate, across lanes where silk and coin changed hands. Each notice wore a waqf name like clean linen over a wound. And always the same clerkly cadence whenever whispered talk of registry copies surfaced.
Simin dragged her ink-stained nail through the dust, joining circle to circle until the scattered rumors became one unbroken thread. It ran, stubborn as a vein, toward the Qeysarieh side of the square. She did not allow her mouth to shape the thought. She let it settle instead into her shoulders, into the modest angle of a boy avoiding notice: the waqf storeroom was the hand that gathered these pages, and the place Parvaneh’s questions were trained to reach.
The call to prayer did not arrive as sound alone; it came as an instruction that traveled the underside of the arcades, gathering loose talk and scattering it. The square, moments before a woven rug of bargaining voices, loosened its knots. Hands that had been weighing saffron and counting walnuts folded away as if ashamed to be seen; shutters fell halfway, leaving slits of watchful dark. A man with a tray of glass cups stopped his clinking, and even the pigeons seemed to take their circles higher, reluctant to skim so close to men turning their faces toward God.
Simin kept her eyes lowered in the manner expected of a boy with errands, letting the crowd’s obedience move her without choice. She felt the press of bodies like the press of a seal then, at a breath’s opportunity, yielded to the edge of it. Nushin shifted with her as if they shared a single shadow. No signal passed between them beyond the smallest adjustment of shoulders; speech would have made them a story, and stories were what the city was buying.
The Qeysarieh approach narrowed, the air cooling as sun gave way to brick and tile. Commerce did not end so much as change its face: from the open pride of stalls to the quiet economy of corridors, where goods were kept behind latticed doors and names mattered more than coin. Here the scent of spice thinned, replaced by metal filings and old wool; the floor stones held yesterday’s damp.
A pair of boys ran past carrying a wrapped bundle, their laughter clipped short by a stern glance from an elder. Somewhere deeper a chain rattled, and the sound made Simin’s stomach tighten. Not with hunger, but with the knowledge of how easily a lock could become a sentence. She measured the gaps between hanging rugs, the angles where a man could stand unseen, the points where a watcher might pretend to admire a blade of damascened steel. The corridor’s quiet was not empty. It was attentive.
Ahead, the waqf storeroom announced itself not with a signboard or a lamp, but with small aggressions meant for those who knew how to read them. Fresh lime had been smeared along the threshold in a chalky, careless band: white against the old brick, too bright to be piety, too thick to be habit. It looked less like cleansing than like a line drawn across the ground: do not cross, and if you do, leave proof behind. Simin’s eyes, trained to measure ink and omission, marked where the lime had flaked under a heel and where it still lay unbroken, as if the floor itself kept account of obedience.
The air changed a few steps before the door. It carried vinegar’s hard sting, the kind poured not for comfort but for command, and beneath it the dry taste of dust shaken from neglected corners. Someone had fussed here recently (scrubbed, aired, swept) yet the effort had the wrong urgency, like a clerk correcting a page after the seal was already set. Simin swallowed, and her throat tightened at the thought of bodies passing in and out, disinfected into invisibility.
The door’s fittings were too proud for a waqf lock-up that ought to disappear among a hundred forgotten thresholds. A padlock hung there newly born, brass still raw, its face bright as fresh dinar, set dead center where any passing glance must touch it. The hasp’s iron was newer than the brick around it, and the nails had been driven in with impatience: crescent dents, splintered wood, small burrs of metal left like filings after a bad cut. Simin let her eyes take inventory as her body pretended to drift. The scratches about the keyhole were not age but rehearsal, as if someone had tested the bite of tools and imagined hands like hers. Delay, she thought. Not defense: time bought with noise.
Two men lounged as if the corridor itself had offered them comfort, yet nothing in their bodies agreed with leisure. Their feet were planted for endurance, not ease; their hands hung ready, empty of goods, full of purpose. One kept his face to the lane, letting his eyes count every passerby; the other watched him watching. As Simin drifted by, their gaze slid over felt cap and qabā like a merchant’s palm testing weave, then snagged, too long, on her ink-stained fingers.
Nushin did not grant the loungers the dignity of recognition. Their gaze stayed loose, almost indifferent, as a healer’s hand might hover over a brow: feeling for heat without pressing. In that practiced neglect Simin heard warning. Lime, lock, the men’s purchased quiet: the city had moved its boundary. Here ink ceased to be harmless. A record could be bait, and any step forward a tightening mesh.
Curfew bells began to argue with the last calls of the bazaar, each note struck too hard, as if metal could frighten sickness back into the dark. Beneath the arcades, merchants moved with the quick reverence of men closing a shrine: shutters thudded down in rippling waves, bolts slid home, ropes rasped, and the bright disorder of day folded into narrow, obedient seams. Incense burned in shallow bowls set at thresholds, cheap frankincense and something harsher that caught at the throat, while brazier-smoke and saffron-sweet steam from the last tea kettles thickened the air, a fevered perfume meant to mask fear.
Simin held her breath in measured sips. Hunger made her lightheaded in a way she refused to show; she let it pass through her limbs like a dull tremor, nothing more. The felt cap pressed hot against her close-cropped scalp. Under its brim her gaze stayed lowered, not in humility but in economy: look only as much as a young clerk would, counting paving stones, counting doorways, counting which men lingered too long at corners with nothing to sell. Her plain qabā cloak hung correctly from her shoulders. Too correct, she thought, and made herself let it slouch. A boy’s posture: narrow, contained, apologetic to walls.
She moved as the patterned shadow moved, letting the lattice of brick and tile break her outline into harmless pieces. The square’s grandeur was still there but it wore a shroud of rules. Somewhere a guard shouted a warning and the reply was the hurried clatter of sandals. A mule brayed, then was silenced; even animals were taught curfew.
At the mouth of the waqf lane the world tightened. The smell changed from spice and sweat to lime dust and vinegar, as if the alley had been washed to the bone. Simin’s fingers, ink-stained and sore from travel, flexed inside her sleeves around the small comforts of wire and hairpin. She did not touch them yet. She waited for the moment when the city’s attention blinked: when the last honest eyes turned home, and the watchmen’s eyes had not yet learned where to look.
Nushin did not step fully into the lane, as if even their shadow might be counted by the wrong eyes. They were a pause at the alley’s mouth: lean figure half-merged with dusk, vinegar-sour air clinging to the satchel at their hip. One hand hovered near its flap, ready for bandage or blade; the other rose, two fingers lifted with a soldier’s economy: clear, for a breath, no more.
Simin took that breath as if it were coin and she must spend it in silence. She crossed quickly, boots finding (‘finding’ was too generous) the uneven stones without hurry in her shoulders. Lime sacks hunched against the wall like pale bodies wrapped for burial, their dust brightening in the last light. The gutter alongside them had been scrubbed raw; vinegar and refuse made a sting that reached behind her eyes, an honest warning dressed as cleanliness.
She stopped where she meant to stop, as if any young errand-clerk might pause to read a door. The storeroom’s plank was unpainted, its iron studs dulled, its frame plain enough to be forgotten: until you knew what lived behind such humility, and why men with seals loved plain doors best.
The lock was old, yes, but it had not been permitted the laziness of age. Someone had oiled it once upon a time with care, and its resistance was the quiet pride of a door that kept what it was told to keep. Simin slid the wire in as if threading a needle in a draught. Her ear went close, close enough to taste iron, and she listened for the small honest sounds that could be coaxed into falsehood: the faint scrape, the soft click like a bead striking another bead. Pressure, ease, a pause; then again, as steady as counting under her breath. With her left palm she braced the plank, denying it any complaint. Her wrists ached with travel and emptiness. She swallowed the ache as she had learned to swallow indignities, cleanly, without letting it show.
Lantern-light arrived first, bobbing like a cautious heartbeat, and its amber spill licked the lime sacks and scrubbed gutter into wavering gold. Then the boots, too quick, too sure for any drowsy round, struck stone in a rhythm that meant purpose, not duty. At the lane’s mouth Nushin’s stillness sharpened, counting men by sound. Simin held the lock on the edge of surrender, half-open, between a betraying click and a vanished chance.
Orders came in clipped parcels followed by the rehearsed blessing of “health compliance,” as if plague were a ledger entry to be balanced by noise. Spear-butts kissed stone with impatient taps. And through that official chant ran another thread: Parvaneh’s calm, foreign-bent Persian, smoothing their intent into counsel, where a waqf man hid keys, which hinge betrayed recent use, while Simin took the door’s last yielding and let night swallow her.
In the vinegar-stung dark the air seemed already spoken for, thick with sourness and the ghost of hands that had wiped plague from thresholds. Simin pressed her back to a tower of glazed jars, their bellies cool through her qabā, and held herself as narrow as a ledger’s margin. Somewhere above, a rat worried at straw with patient teeth; somewhere nearer, the storeroom’s own timbers creaked as if remembering weight.
Outside, the courtyard took on men the way a basin takes water: first a trickle, then a rising, deliberate presence. Footsteps entered and arranged themselves. There was no hurry in them, only the measured confidence of those who believed the night belonged to their order. Spear shafts rasped against stone and against one another, a dry music that set her skin listening. A lantern was set down; its light bled under the door in a thin, accusing line and found the cracks in the plaster like a finger tracing faults.
The phrases came next, half-chanted, half-recited, familiar as prayer but stripped of mercy: mention of health, of ordinance, of duty before God and Shah. Words polished by repetition turned inspection into ceremony, and ceremony into permission. Simin had heard such language in the bazaar when guild heads bowed and spoke of fairness; she had heard it in court corridors when clerks made theft sound like accounting. Here, it made a search sound like cleansing.
She pictured the men without seeing them: belts, seals, the set of shoulders under quilted coats damp with night air. Her own hands wanted to become clever again, wire, pin, wax, but there was no lock left to sweet-talk from within. She could only be still and count, making numbers of noises: two spears, three men, a superior whose heel struck harder to announce rank. And threaded among the official cadences was a softer guidance, composed and intent, as though the courtyard itself had acquired a mind that knew where to look. Simin kept her breathing shallow, her tongue pressed to her teeth, and waited for the first demand that would require her to become someone else.
She drew one measured breath through her nose and let it scour her throat. Dust from old paper, vinegar from panicked scrubbing, the faint sweetness of spoiled dates. Then she set her jaw as she had seen junior clerks do when petitioners lingered too long. The sound she meant to make was not hers. It belonged to a thin young man with ink on his cuffs and a grievance against interruption.
In the dark she shaped it silently first, moving the words against her palate like coins tested for bite. Short phrases. A clipped blessing. The weary impatience of someone who counts other men’s days for a living. She dropped her voice, not by force but by habit, shoulders squared, chest kept small, until it sat in that lower place where masculinity was taken for granted and therefore not examined.
Fear wanted to lift her pitch, to pull breath into a flutter. She answered it with irritation, practiced and petty: as if the true crime tonight were being disturbed over worthless waqf receipts. Her fingers found the bundle’s string and worried it once, steadying themselves, so that when the door gave, her first sound would be annoyance, not pleading.
Parvaneh’s voice (courteous, faintly foreign at the edges) slipped between the guards’ rougher consonants as if it belonged to the inspection itself. It praised their diligence, offered small deferential phrases, then set down guidance with the ease of someone naming household rooms: the hinge that sang too sweetly, the corner where dust lay thin, the shelf whose jars were turned wrong. Each suggestion arrived wrapped in politeness, and yet its weight was a knife laid gently on skin.
In Simin’s head the words became routes. If they looked there first, they would come here next; if they counted jars, they would end at the paper chests; if they asked for keys, the waqf man would fumble and buy Parvaneh time. She listened as one listens to a lock, hearing not sound but intention.
Her hands, taught by alleys and desk-edges, worked without waiting for her eyes. She slipped the copied registry leaves into a bundle of stale waqf receipts, their corners dog-eared and harmless, then pressed the mouth shut with a smear of wax warmed between finger and thumb. The cord she drew tight again, smoothing its twist until it lay as if never troubled, though her pulse beat loud at the inked veins of her wrists.
It was not the idea of chains that chilled her: iron was honest, at least, and a cell had walls you could measure. What she feared was sound: one softened consonant that carried too much tenderness, one breath drawn too neatly, the old reflex of making herself small. In that instant her borrowed boyhood would slip, and their eyes (trained on seals and faces alike) would fix her in place.
The hairpin turned beneath her thumbnail with the familiar sting of metal biting skin. Simin kept her wrist loose, as if she were merely worrying a knot in a cord, not coaxing a forbidden latch into surrender. The lock resisted with the dull, intimate stubbornness of old brass; it had known other hands, clerks with oil on their fingertips, waqf men with rings, boys sent to fetch ledgers, each leaving behind a trace of impatience in the worn groove. She listened for its temper the way she listened for footsteps: not with her ears alone, but with the careful hush behind her ribs.
A last pressure made the inner pin lift. The lock yielded with a sound so modest it should have been swallowed by the night, yet in the emptied lane it rang like a coin dropped on stone. Her breath caught. For an instant she was back in exile, counting risks by noise: a hinge’s complaint, a dog’s sudden bark, the soft scrape that could become a sentence.
The storeroom door relaxed inward a finger’s width. A thin draught slipped out, carrying dust and the dry, sweet rot of old paper, ink that had long ago given up its sharpness, and the faint sourness of glue. It was a breath from a sealed throat. The darkness inside was thick, layered: sacks piled against chests, jars squatting along shelves, bundles tied with string whose ends frayed like neglected beards. Somewhere within, mice shifted, and the sound was like a pen scratching once and stopping.
She did not push further. Even that finger’s width felt like exposure. Her hand stayed on the edge of the door, holding it in its reluctant pause, ready to close it again without a tremor if a shadow moved wrong. She set her jaw into the plain, unthinking line a boy might wear and willed her shoulders to remain broad, careless, entitled to space. The dust on her fingertips was grey as ash; she rubbed it lightly against her cloak, making herself tidy, making herself ordinary.
Lantern-light flowered at the threshold as if the night itself had been pierced and made to bleed gold. It slid in through the seam she had opened, first a thin blade, then a widening wash, finding the nap of her felt cap and lifting one pale fiber until it shone treacherously. Dust rose in the sudden warmth and drifted like incense, each mote a witness. Simin held her foot half-laid, half-withdrawn, poised above the worn stone, and let it settle without a scrape, as softly as a page returning to a stack.
She did not turn her head. A man who belonged here would not flinch at light; he would own it, as he owned his shadow. She drew her shoulders into the square, careless set she had practiced in mirrors of dark water. Wide enough to suggest youth, narrow enough not to invite touch. Her chin tipped up a breath, not in defiance but in the mild impatience of a minor clerk delayed by other men’s zeal.
Inside her mouth, she shaped dryness into calm. If she swallowed, it would sound loud. If she breathed too shallow, it would sound like fear. So she breathed as boys did: as if hunger were the only ache worth mentioning.
Outside, boots scraped and settled into a disciplined stillness, the kind that belonged to men who had been taught to stop together and to make that stopping heard. A voice, close enough that its breath seemed to touch the wood, called for the door to be opened “for compliance,” enunciating the word as one might press a seal into warm wax, slow, decisive, leaving no room for argument once the mark had been made. The lantern’s chain clinked; light swayed across the jamb and the plaster, nosing at every gap as if it expected to find wet ink and catch it shining. Shadows of helmets and shoulders broke and re-formed on the stones. Behind them, another voice (calm, careful) murmured directions, like a reader guiding a finger down a line.
Simin kept her fingers on the latch as if it were hers by right, as if she had come to check a tally and been interrupted by officious men. No sudden withdrawal, no eager entry: nothing that would translate into guilt. In the same beat her thoughts ran the walls: the lane already filled with bodies, the courtyard gate shut for night, and beyond this door only stacked shelves and brittle bundles. Paper enough to smother her.
She let a measured breath leave her through her nose, as if annoyance, not terror, had tightened her throat. The voice she summoned was narrower, pitched to a boy’s impatience; she felt it sit behind her teeth, light and quick. With the latch still under her thumb, she pushed the door wide, letting it complain for her, and stepped into the lantern’s reach as though called to account. Spine straight, hands idle, every muscle held in obedient stillness.
Parvaneh’s voice did not enter like a shout; it arrived the way perfume did in winter, borne on other people’s breath and lingering in corners. Courteous, unhurried, it addressed Mehrdad as if they shared the same inkstand and duty. “It is nothing,” it said, as one offering ease. “Only. When they burn vinegar and rue for the fumigation, the clerks grow superstitious about smoke. They do not leave paper where it can be licked by damp air. They tuck it where their hands know best, without thinking.”
Simin kept her gaze on the lantern’s metal rim and not on the faces behind it. In the slant of light she saw the grain of the door, the seam where wood met plaster, and the smallest tremor of dust shaken loose by boots. Parvaneh went on, precise as a ledger entry, naming habits as if they were neutral facts. “Under the lowest shelf, wrapped in old receipts. In the hollows behind jars. Inside a cloth bundle of spoiled accounts: anything no sane man would bother to unfold. They say, ‘If it looks worthless, it will be spared.’”
A small scrape of armor answered. The lantern swung higher, obedient to a hand Simin could not see, and the light prowled: up the stacks, into the gaps between bundles, along the clay mouths of storage pots. Parvaneh’s tone remained mild, almost apologetic. “And in the hems of a cloak, if there is one. In a cap. Boys do it. Men do it. Fear makes everyone the same.”
Simin felt the words like fingers searching her seams. The disguise she wore (felt cap, plain qabā) suddenly seemed made of paper itself, ready to catch fire at a breath. She let her shoulders settle into the bored slump of a junior clerk interrupted after dark, and she kept her hands loose at her sides, as if there were nothing in the room she wished to shield.
Outside, Parvaneh added, softly triumphant in its helpfulness, “They are creatures of habit. Follow the habit, and you will find what they thought to hide.”
Lantern-light shouldered its way into the storeroom ahead of the men, a blunt, bobbing authority that made the dust shine and the air look thick. It swung in a slow arc, grazing the spines of account-books browned by handling, catching on the knots of twine around bundled papers, flashing pale on the bellies of clay jars stacked like patient animals along the wall. Shadows jumped and settled; every shelf seemed to rearrange itself under that moving glare.
Simin shifted one step to the side, exactly enough to yield without retreating. She let irritation take the lead on her face. An exhausted clerk’s affront at being disturbed for a matter already tallied and signed. Her chin lifted, not in challenge, but in the small, habitual pride of a boy entrusted with keys and blamed for any missing seal. The felt cap sat low; the plain qabā fell straight, hiding the lines she could not afford to show.
She kept her hands visible, empty, fingers ink-stained in honest ways, as though the only theft here was of her time. Her eyes moved with the lantern’s swing, not to follow its search, but to appear resigned to it.
Mehrdad’s questions came like stamps struck in inkless haste. Who had given leave for a night entry; under whose waqf the room was held; why the bar had not been set before the call to closure. His foreign consonants made each inquiry harder, as if he meant to chisel the truth out of plaster. Simin kept her eyes level, neither humble nor bold, and let the clerk’s language answer for her. “By the steward’s memorandum, aghā,” she said, and named a seal she had seen often enough on rent notices; “for the endowment’s stores, as written; the bar was lifted for fumigation and inspection, and will be set when the list is complete.” Impatience sharpened her tone, boyish, tidy, so it sounded like obedience wearing a thin, familiar scowl.
Parvaneh, still mild, offered places with the certainty of one who had paid for knowledge: under shelf-bricks, inside ledger covers, beneath the cold bellies of weighing stones. Simin’s fingers did not falter. She lifted a mound of worthless receipts as though sorting “contaminated paper” for burning, separating sheets with neat impatience, her gaze skimming dust and twine. Never resting on the true cache, never confessing it by care.
She counted the lantern’s swing by breath, letting its bright oval pass and return like the pendulum of a court clock. When the men’s eyes followed it toward a far shelf, she eased the copied pages into the deepest fold of petty tallies, fingers working as if from habit rather than fear. A brisk clerk’s slap flattened the bundle. She lifted it into the light, offering it up.
The latch yielded with a small, coughing sound, as if the iron itself had caught the city’s sickness and dared not speak louder. Simin slid through the crack and drew it back with a care that looked, from the right angle, like habit rather than caution. In the dark, she stood a moment to let the room accept her. Dust and old paper, stale hemp, the sour trace of vinegar from recent “cleansing.” Then she straightened, not like a thief who has won entry, but like a minor functionary who has been trapped there by other men’s negligence.
She squared her shoulders until the qabā hung as it ought on a young man’s frame. Chin up. Enough to suggest annoyance, never enough to invite challenge. The felt cap sat low, its brim an obedient shadow; beneath it her cropped hair pricked at her scalp, a reminder of the bargain she had made with the city. She set her mouth into the thin line she had seen on junior clerks when petitioners pressed too close: not fear, not pride, only the dry impatience of someone paid to count and copy and be interrupted.
In her mind she rehearsed the cadence. Short phrases, clipped respect, the weary precision of formulae repeated until meaning wore away. A boy made old by ink, a hand trained to move faster than thought. If questioned, she would answer as if the answer were obvious and the question a waste: steward’s memorandum, waqf stores, fumigation list, tally complete. She tasted the words before she spoke them, letting them sit on her tongue like plain bread.
Her fingers, ink-stained even now, found their sure work in the dark: the edge of a shelf, the knot of twine, the corner where paper was kept to be forgotten. Panic would have made her careful in the wrong way. Soft-footed, breath-held, pleading with the air. Instead she let a small, controlled exhale pass as a clerk’s sigh, and began to move with the unhurried exactness of someone who expected to be seen and expected, too, to be obeyed.
Lantern-light prowled like an animal across the storeroom’s spine of shelves, nosing at twine, catching the gilt-bleached corners of ledger stacks, then sliding on as if disappointed. Outside, voices thickened (boots scuffed on brick, a man clearing his throat with official boredom) and the air itself seemed to wait for the next command. Simin did not hurry. She learned the lantern’s rhythm, the slow sweep and the brief blindness when the flame turned its back, and she moved only in that narrow mercy.
Her hand went up, sure as if summoned by a routine order, and drew down a sheaf from the nearest pile: quarantine tallies, petty market receipts, lists of vinegar and lime, names half-smeared by damp. The papers were soft with grease at their edges, smelling faintly of cumin and sweat, important-looking in the way that fools the unlettered and comforts the vigilant. Ink blots, hurried numerals, a seal pressed too lightly. Enough to suggest diligence, never enough to invite true reading.
She held them so the light could lick their surfaces and find nothing worth biting. The voices drew closer, and she let the bundle rustle with the mild irritation of a young clerk interrupted mid-count.
She made the dangerous pages vanish by making them dull. Not hidden with drama, not stuffed in haste, but eased into the thickest fold of the tallies as though they were merely another nuisance that would have to be carried upstairs later. The corner of the copied sheet met the corner of a vinegar receipt; the lines lay obediently with the rest, aligned to the same impatient precision. Her fingers wanted to betray her but she denied them the luxury. Tap to square the stack. Thumb to crease. Palm to press the air out of it. A clerk’s gestures, learned in hunger and long hours, wrote their own lie across her fear. By the time the twine bit down, the bundle had the weight and look of routine.
When the bolt scraped back and the door swung inward, Simin was already poised beneath the shelves’ shadow, the papers lifted at her chest as if she had been waiting to be relieved of them. Her face tightened into the small, habitual displeasure of a boy kept late for other men’s regulations. “The records,” she said, in a young clerk’s leveled monotone: courteous enough to blunt suspicion, bored enough to discourage questions.
To seal the lie, she treated it as a task to be delivered, not a treasure to be guarded: twine drawn from her sleeve, wound with economy, the knot cinched until it sang against the paper. She gave the bundle a dry, impatient slap, ink, sums, and nuisance, making its bulk proclaim tedium. In that heaviness the copied pages disappeared, and routine became a breastplate.
Lantern-light found the fissure first, a thin blade of gold that cut the storeroom’s stale dark and woke the dust into glittering motes. The door struck the jamb with a blunt, official confidence; sound went ahead of bodies, as if authority itself entered before the men did. Simin let her shoulders give a fraction (no more than the startled shift of someone interrupted at honest work) then turned from the shelves with the quick economy she had practiced in alleys and borrowed rooms. Chin up. Feet set. Not defiant, not meek: simply placed.
She made her face a small complaint. Boys in offices complained as naturally as they breathed; no one thought to call it fear. The cap’s brim kept her eyes half-shadowed, and she used that shade to measure the new shapes at the threshold: boots with street dust, the hard line of a helmet strap, the pale bloom of a quarantine scarf knotted too neatly to be a porter’s. She did not look at the lantern too long. Staring at light was for guilty men and lovers.
“Is it inspection again?” she asked, voice clipped into the narrow register she had trained, the consonants brisk, the vowels swallowed as though she had been doing sums since dawn and had no patience left to perform surprise. She reached for a reed pen on the low table with the offended reflex of a clerk. Already pretending she had been counting, already implying an interrupted column that would now have to be re-checked because soldiers liked to breathe over ink.
The room smelled of vinegar and old paper, of mouse droppings and camphor sachets gone dry. Her fingers steadied themselves by arranging what did not matter: a stopper pushed back into an inkwell, a wax seal stamp turned so its face showed, harmless as a spoon. Let their eyes take the hinges, the shelves, the bundles tied in identical twine. Let them see the plainness and grow bored.
Behind the men came another presence like cool water poured into hot sand: a voice, courteous, lightly accented, asking after “health compliance” with the softness of someone who enjoyed questions. Simin kept her gaze on the nearest guard’s belt buckle and let her irritation do the work of innocence. “If you’re looking for contraband,” she said, as if contraband were merely another delay, “it will be in the courtyards, not among waqf receipts.”
Mehrdad did not step fully over the threshold at first; he let the lantern do it for him. The light crawled across the table, paused on the damp thumbprint of seal-clay, lingered at the inkwells as if ink itself might confess, then climbed to the hinges where fresh scratches spoke of recent hands. His gaze followed with a soldier’s thrift: nothing wasted, nothing trusted.
Simin gave him no stillness to pin suspicion upon. “These are waqf endowment inventories,” she said, and before the word could sour into a question on any tongue she had already produced the next truth-shaped thing. “Fumigation notes: vinegar washes recorded by day, sir. The manager insists on a line for every shuttered door.” Her finger tapped a margin where dates marched in obedient ink.
A guard grunted at a blank space.
“The signature?” Simin’s reply arrived too fast to seem rehearsed, quick as a clerk’s annoyance. “Hajji Rahmat wrote it: before he took fever. We’ve been waiting on a replacement seal; the old one cracked in the heat.” She lifted the stamp as if offering it for inspection, cooperation served so briskly it wore the mask of duty.
Outside the storeroom, Nushin listened as a man listens for the change in wind before a fire takes: counting the scrape of boots on brick, the pause where a squad’s impatience turns to attention. They let the sound travel, then stole it away, stepping back into a doorway’s shadow so the lane seemed briefly emptied, too quiet to be trusted. A moment later came the small disturbance they had planted with care: a quarrel sparked at the corner where a fresh quarantine notice hung, paper snapping, voices rising into that particular pitch of righteous fear. A wet cough followed enough to make shoulders turn and mouths tighten behind scarves. Mehrdad’s men kept themselves half-outward, as if the street were the greater threat, their lantern and bodies guarding the threshold rather than pressing inward.
Parvaneh’s calm suggestions entered with the men, clinging to them like attar: under the grain sacks, at the ledgers whose bindings looked too new, inside the chest that seemed, by chance, “interesting.” Simin nodded as if grateful for guidance. She even helped, hauling forward the worst of it first: damp waqf tallies, ink-blurred receipts, petty lists of “gifts,” all the city’s small corruptions: so tedious, so complete, the room became merely work.
Mehrdad’s patience drew tight, a leather strap pulled one notch too far. Simin answered with the small cruelty of clerks: she fetched the twine-bound bundle, slapped it onto the table so dust leapt, and said, low and brisk, that these were the night figures. Take them, if you must. Eyes settled greedily on the fattest, safest papers. In that borrowed pause, she edged past, not fleeing. Merely dismissed.
Mehrdad’s men worried at the twine-bound bundle as though it were a nest of scorpions. Their fingers, blunt, ink-smudging, impatient, picked at knots, loosened them, retied them to prove diligence. One counted under his breath, tapping each folio with a nail; another held the packet up to the light, as if thin paper would confess its origin when thinned further by sun. The air tasted of incense and hot dust; somewhere beyond the arcade a brazier crackled, fed too eagerly, and a cough answered it in the hollow way of a shuttered tea-house.
Simin let them perform. She arranged her face into the bored contempt of a young clerk delayed by lesser men, lids drooping, mouth set with the faintest sting of offense. Hunger made her hollow, but she kept her breathing shallow and even, the way she had learned to breathe when a stranger’s hand hovered too close to her belt. Her felt cap itched at the brow where sweat dried and tightened. She did not look at the bundle. Not directly. She looked past it, toward the tiled shadow beneath the arch, toward the curve of a merchant’s scales hanging idle, toward anything that suggested she had nothing to lose.
Mehrdad stood a step back, watching the watchers. His strap cut a pale line into his jaw; his eyes moved from seal to twine to Simin’s hands and back again, seeking the smallest tremor that would justify hard work. “Careful,” he said, and it was not kindness, only a warning that care would be demanded later as proof.
The clerk beside them (thin as a reed, sleeves frayed at the cuffs) kept licking his lips, as if tasting fear to see if it was real. He cleared his throat, then thought better of speech. The bundle lay open now, pages fanned, edges fluttering with every passing draft of bodies.
Simin held her posture, indignant, unhurried, while her mind counted different things: angles, elbows, the moment a gaze would be dragged away by the theater of authority. The papers did not matter as paper. They mattered as names. Names that could be moved, erased, resettled like households during quarantine.
A junior guard, too young for his beard to hide his eagerness, found the red wax disk at last and cracked it with a sharp, satisfying twist. The seal broke with a dry pop like a pomegranate splitting, and he lifted the pieces high between thumb and forefinger, holding them to the sun so the impressed emblem flared and then dulled. It was a small thing, no bigger than a coin, yet the gesture made it huge. Eyes that had been scattered along the arcaded lane gathered as if pulled by a hook: Mehrdad’s narrowed, the reed-thin clerk’s startled and hungry, even the bystanders’ brief, illicit curiosity peering from behind sleeves and veils.
The talk shifted at once. Not what lay written, not which names lay bound in twine, but whose wax had been permitted to harden there; whose mark could command shutters to close, gates to swing, men to be taken. The clerk began to protest in a thin, formal cadence, “That seal is, ” and swallowed the rest when Mehrdad’s gaze cut across him. The junior guard shook the broken disk again, triumphant, as if authority were something that could be rattled. In the heat-thick air, law felt less like a rule than a hand on a throat.
The crowd thickened as if summoned by the broken wax, shoulders brushing, sleeves fanning hot air into hotter. Simin let herself be nudged, a young man’s irritability in her stance, and turned half aside as though yielding space to rank. In that brief, sanctioned disorder, her hands became forgettable. She lifted one palm in a gesture of impatience while the other slid to the edge of the open folios. Ink had lived under her nails too long to fear it now. By touch alone she read what mattered: the different weight of paper, the faint drag where a hurried clerk’s reed pen had bitten, the cramped, tight hand that copied in secret. Her fingertip found the line (her family’s name yoked to a court entry) and held it as if it were a pulse.
In the same practiced motion that had once skimmed coin-purses from a press of shoulders, she folded the true leaves along an old crease already softened by handling. The paper slid under the qabā’s cuff and into her sleeve, guided by wrist and knuckle, not by sight. She pinned it to her forearm with the quiet clamp of her elbow. No glance down, no hitch in breath.
She returned the decoy as one returns a ledger to its shelf. Let it be bait; let it be proof enough for men who mistook neatness for truth. A guard seized it with a satisfied grunt, and Simin breathed out, mild with dismissal, as though the burden had been transferred.
She moved as if she had been sent, by a master, by a shop, by a man with a seal-ring and impatience, to fetch what the moment required. It was an old kind of safety, this borrowing of purpose. Shoulders rounded a fraction, not from servility but from the habit of making her frame smaller; chin lowered so her eyes could travel without seeming to look. A young clerk hurrying through the bazaar did not meet faces. He met doorways, corners, the backs of heads. Simin gave the crowd that same useful blankness.
The press chose her path and she let it, yielding to the shove of a porter’s load as though annoyed, not afraid; turning with a merchant’s elbow as though her place in the street had been paid for in advance. The sleeve where the pages lay began to feel like a second skin (too warm, too present) yet she kept her arm loose, swinging in the careless rhythm of men who have nothing hidden but coin. Inside her, her pulse argued, quick and unreasonable, proposing flight in every heartbeat. To run would be to confess. She walked.
A shout rose behind her, some official name, some curse, and the sound touched her spine like cold water. She did not flinch. She let herself be delayed by a knot of boys chasing spilled chickpeas, clicked her tongue in scolding irritation, and stepped over the rolling legumes with the bored precision of someone who had done it a hundred times. The city was full of such small obstacles now: incense fires at doorways, rags soaked in vinegar, the sudden narrowing of an alley where a quarantine rope had been tied and then cut. All of it was cover; all of it was trap.
Her mouth held the taste of dust and last night’s bread. She kept it closed, jaw set in the uncomplaining line she had practiced, and trusted the crowd’s indifference. The way Isfahan could swallow a person whole if they wore the right silhouette. Each turn she took was a choice made to look like no choice at all, until the arcades loosened and the alley-mouth offered its thin seam of quiet.
At the alley-mouth the city’s voice falls away as if a door has been pulled to; what remains is the scrape of a broom somewhere, the soft complaint of a pigeon, the distant iron cough of a shutter. Simin takes the gift of space the way the hungry take bread. One full breath, then another, drawn through her nose so it does not sound like relief. To gulp would be to announce fear; fear, in this quarter, was a scent.
Her sleeve pulls slightly with the weight pinned along her forearm. Not heavy, not even thick. Only made immense by consequence. She keeps the arm loose, letting it hang with the lazy indifference of a boy sent on errands. Her shoulders settle into their borrowed shape. The cap’s felt edge scratches her temple when she tilts her head, listening without seeming to.
Sunlight reaches here in a narrow blade between walls, catching motes of dust and the bluish thread of incense that drifts from the next lane. She lets the air fill her lungs again, and does not let it show on her face.
A boy slipped through the seam of quiet as water slips through reeds, his tray held high, the cups mismatched as a poor man’s teeth. One was chipped at the lip; the fracture had been smeared with old tea-darkness. Simin let him come close enough to be ordinary. She did not look down at her own palm when she paid: coins passed by feel, like any errand-runner counting another man’s money. Her face held the mild contempt of a junior clerk interrupted from his route, a boy too important for street hawkers and too low to refuse them.
The tea was pale as rinsed saffron, more hot than strong. She took it in a single, impatient swallow. A drop leapt, stung her tongue, and the sharpness pinned her mind in place: here, now, walk.
The heat in her palm became a prop, a thing to scold and dismiss. She let her nostrils flare in a clerk’s small disgust, sniffed as if the street’s stink offended her, and turned her wrist a fraction so the cuff could shadow the faint ink-blots at her fingers. Meanwhile her other hand stayed careless and firm, keeping the sleeve’s secret pressed to bone, unmoving.
She lets the alley spill her out into the square’s slow river, where men brush past with bales and prayers and the arcades keep everyone moving. Smoke from incense-fires clings to her throat; the tea’s thin tannin lingers like a reminder of hunger. She holds her mouth in a clerk’s flat line, her gaze dutiful and uncurious. The lawful mask of one who carries nothing but errands.
Under the felt cap’s shadow she let her eyes flick once, no more, across the copied pages, as if confirming a caravan tally, as if the ink meant nothing beyond weights and measures. The paper smelled of damp starch and handling, the corners soft from too many anxious fingers. Her thumb held the bundle steady against the seam of her sleeve, and she read by the narrowest allowance of light.
The phrasing snagged her mind. Not names first, nor the familiar lattice of dates and witnesses, but the soft-mouthed justifications set like seals: for health, for isolation, by order of cordon. Mercy in the grammar, righteousness in the margins. The kind of language that a man could speak with clean hands while another man’s doors were being bricked up.
She caught herself swallowing. Hunger made everything sharp: her own pulse, the dust on the air, the faint scrape of the page against her skin. A clerk’s hand had copied this, yet the hand was not singular: here, the practiced roundness of court formulae; there, a quicker, narrower slant, as if someone had leaned in afterward and tightened the meaning. Fresh ink, darker than the rest, sat atop older strokes like a shadow laid deliberately.
Her gaze slid to a line that should have been ordinary (property and kinship, the web that held a family in place) and found it disturbed, rewritten in the smallest ways: a title altered, a neighborhood reclassified, a witness’s name softened into a patronymic that could belong to anyone. The city’s familiar order was being rubbed down and revarnished while people lay fevered behind shutters.
She forced her eyes away before the act of reading could become a gesture that invited notice. Around her the square went on with its careful life (steps, bargains, prayers) yet the words in her sleeve made a colder music. They had the sound of doors closing gently, of chains disguised as ribbons.
The clauses did not stop at forbidding travel. They reached further, with a soft authority that pretended to be care. Held in safekeeping: as if a threshold could be lifted like a sick child and carried away. Sealed for cleansing. As if a shop’s lock, turned by a guard’s hand, were only soap and prayer. Placed under temporary custody, temporary, the word that made robbery sound like stewardship, and made the stolen man grateful for being spared outright ruin.
She felt, with a clarity that tasted of metal, the hidden hinge in the language. It was not plague that moved the city’s doors and keys; it was the sentence that followed plague, the sentence that gave permission. Each phrase had its customary witness, its pious flourish, its obedient mention of cordon and mercy, yet behind it lay the simple appetite of the registry: to reassign, to inventory, to empty. Quarantine was not only a wall. It was a hand sliding into a pocket with the law’s sleeve pulled neatly over the wrist.
Along the margins, the past refused to vanish. Beneath the newer strokes, older entries bled through like bruises under a thin veil. Faint numbers, a seal’s half-moon, a witness-name bitten short and left to heal crooked. A second hand had crept in where no hand should fit, threading itself between lines with a confidence that was not courtly but acquisitive: dates tightened by a day, a month swapped, a place-name nudged from one quarter to another as if neighborhoods were coins. Here an alias was laid beside a man’s given name, gentle as a blessing, and there a kinship term was altered so that a household collapsed into a footnote. Then the footnote (fed and fattened by additions) rose into accusation, the quiet grammar of record turned sharp enough to cut.
The ink’s sheen caught like oil on water: too fresh for a page meant to be “copied,” too eager to declare itself. The shorthand in the margins mimicked bazaar marks, yet the strokes were a hair too stiff, the abbreviations borrowed and misused, merchant quickness jammed into a clerk’s piety. She felt an outsider’s hand in it: efficient, unpatient, laying new meaning down fast while the city kept its eyes on incense smoke and blamed the air.
Names were not kept here so much as traded. A man could be thinned to absence by a neat “transfer,” then restored, if coin and favor allowed, through “verification” that sounded like mercy and tasted like toll. Simin kept her breathing measured, her face slack with practiced indifference, while the understanding struck clean: the city’s fever had opened a bazaar in identities, and the law ran the stalls.
Nushin slid in beside her as the lane pinched tight between a shuttered spice-shop and a wall slick with limewash. Their pace adjusted without ceremony, Simin’s shortened, careful steps mirrored so precisely that, at a distance, they would read as one errand, one sanctioned thread moving through a snagged weave: a medic in service, ushering some pale young scribe out of the press of plague and petty authority.
The city’s precautions had made even the air feel supervised. At the mouth of the alley a brazier smoked with rue and bitter peel, and the smoke clung to tongues and eyelashes. A boy with a bell passed, calling the hour in a voice made hoarse by fear; farther off, a muezzin’s chant rose and fell against the hard geometry of tiles. Between those steady sounds, the small noises were sharp: sandals scuffing, a cough caught too late, the click of a seal-stamp from behind a half-open lattice where paperwork still bred.
Simin kept her chin lowered, as a modest youth would, and let the felt cap’s brim shade the treacherous honesty of her eyes. Her sleeve lay heavy against her forearm, weight where no honest cloth should carry weight. Each time she shifted her hand, the hidden pages seemed to warm, as if the ink itself still had blood in it.
Nushin did not speak. They did not need to. Their medic’s satchel swung with the authority of vinegar and herbs, its smell cutting through the sweetness of the bazaar and the sourness of anxiety. A knot of men stood ahead where the lane widened: a guard’s spear, a porter’s pole, the rigid angle of someone paid to notice. Simin felt the old instinct flare: count exits, count breaths, count the cost of being seen.
Nushin’s elbow brushed hers, light, exact, the way one checks a pulse without turning a head. The contact said, hold your story steady. Simin let her shoulders slump a fraction, the practiced fatigue of a clerk dragged from ledgers by illness. She let her mouth part as if for a complaint, then swallowed it. Complaint was a luxury; silence was a permit.
Together they moved, not hurried, not lingering: just inevitable, like official business that no one wished to touch too closely.
Without turning their head, Nushin altered the line of their stride as if avoiding a puddle of limewash. It was nothing a watcher could name. Only a shoulder eased forward, a half-step stolen, the medic’s satchel swung wider with the ordinary impatience of someone who had seen too many fevers. Yet that small adjustment placed their body between Simin and the arcades where men loitered in the shade, pretending to admire tilework while their eyes hunted stories.
The satchel’s leather corner struck Simin’s hip, not hard, but with purpose: a nudge that corrected her angle, that reminded her where her hidden weight sat and how cloth could betray it if she let her arm drift. The smell of vinegar rose as the flap shifted, sharp enough to sting the back of the throat, sharp enough to make any onlooker think of quarantines and orders and the sort of work no one wanted to obstruct.
Simin let the bump read as clumsiness. She tightened her fingers around her sleeve-seam, and kept walking as if she belonged to the city’s sanctioned hurry.
A murmur reached her without lip or jaw. Air pressed thinly through teeth, a sound that could be mistaken for the medic’s own measured breath. “Head down,” it said, and then, softer still, as if addressed to the vinegar-soaked cloth in their satchel rather than to her: “Let them see vinegar, not fear.”
Simin obeyed as she had obeyed in exile, in hunger, in every doorway where a woman’s face was an invitation to questions. She lowered her gaze to the grit and crushed peel underfoot, let the cap’s brim do its honest work, and loosened her mouth into the dull slackness of someone half-sick. Fear, if it rose, must rise inward, like incense behind closed shutters. Outside she offered only the sour authority of quarantine, clean, pungent, unquestioned.
Nushin’s hand came to rest at Simin’s elbow with the ordinary assurance of a healer who has touched too many bodies to be shy of them. The thumb found the hidden beat beneath her skin, counted once, twice, while the remaining fingers held her steady as if she might sway. In that measured pressure lived instruction: turn here, let this man pass first, let your breath lag: now.
Simin replied in the only tongue that could not be overheard. Her sleeve, loosening as if from fatigue, drifted across Nushin’s wrist. An absent-minded brush to any eye. Beneath that small veil her fingers worked: a folded scrap, creased to a merchant’s neatness, slipped into her cuff and vanished. It was consent, it was readiness, a vow made of cloth and pulse: when the opening came, she would move.
The scrap against her skin did not feel like stolen paper. It felt like a stone set in the hem of her sleeve. Deliberate ballast. She had chosen its weight, and because it was chosen it did not drag her down; it steadied her.
She counted her breaths as she once counted bolts of cloth laid out in her father’s shop: not with reverence, but with a trader’s hard affection for numbers that did not lie. In (hold) out. In, hold, out. Each measure kept her from glancing up too quickly, from letting her eyes betray the shape of what she carried. The vinegar stung her throat; the street’s smoke and saffron caught in the back of her tongue. Somewhere a man coughed, wet and angry, and guards answered with the scrape of spear-butts on stone. Sound became inventory: what could summon attention, what could disguise it.
Panic used to arrive like a spilled inkwell: blackness running across every line, ruining the account before it was written. Now it came as a familiar ache at the ribs, sharp enough to warn her, no longer broad enough to drown her. She set it in its place the way she set sums beneath headings.
Cost: if the sleeve were searched, the copied registry pages would condemn her faster than any face. Benefit: proof that names could be moved like goods, seals like coin; proof enough to unmake the story that had unmade her. Exit: Nushin’s shoulder ahead, the angle of the arcade, the narrow lane where incense smoke thickened and men turned their heads away as if the air itself were contagious.
Even her hunger became a kind of clarity. The city tightened around her in closures and cordons, in the cough-rattle of shutters, in the small cruelty of men who believed order was virtue. Yet within those constraints she felt, with a start that was almost grief, a different kind of freedom: the freedom of a person who stops begging fate for mercy and begins, quietly, to bargain with it.
She kept her hands lax, her posture slight, her face blank with the mild vacancy expected of a sickly boy. Inside, the columns stood straight.
She lifted one hand as if only to shield her eyes from the hard glare that bounced off tile and whitewashed stone, and with that same motion tugged her felt cap lower. The close-cropped hair beneath it prickled with sweat; she let the discomfort teach her steadiness. A boy did not fuss. A boy did not soften his shoulders to invite gentleness. She drew the qabā tighter across her chest, then loosened it a finger’s breadth so the cloth would fall in the plain lines expected of a courier or an apprentice: nothing worth stopping, nothing worth remembering.
For so long she had worn this shape like a prayer: look past me, let the world be merciful. Now she wore it like a seal impressed by her own hand. She did not ask the city’s eyes to spare her; she arranged what they would take in at a glance. A slight stoop to suggest fatigue. A brief, respectful dip of the chin for authority. The gaze lifted only in measured portions, as if she had no right to stare at domes and palaces.
Inside the disguise, her mind stayed upright, choosing.
In the press of bodies and incense-smoke, she tested the street the way she had once tested a stubborn lock: not by force, but by listening. A glance that slid away meant safety; a glance that returned and stayed was a finger on the latch. Sandals scuffed behind her. Too steady for a man merely wandering, too patient for a man merely late. A cough burst wet and ragged, then another answered, dry and clipped; she learned the rhythm the way she learned sums, separating illness from signal. Even the sellers’ cries had seams: one phrase repeated too precisely, as if spoken for someone else’s benefit. Suspicion, that old blade turned inward, shifted in her grasp and became an instrument: a thin pick, a measured pressure, a choice of which door not to open.
She rehearsed the next lie as she walked, shaping it in her mouth without moving her lips: a name common enough to vanish into the bazaar’s noise, a destination that sounded dutiful, a reason that could not be argued with: medicine for an uncle, a message for a master, a summons she could not refuse. Beneath the fear, something steadier took root: the plain assumption of another breath, another exchange, another price to set.
When the gap opens, no wider than a breath between two shoulders, no louder than a clerk’s pause, she does not let her blood turn to water. She steps into it. Her hand goes where it must with the thrift of a trader measuring cloth: one touch, one lift, one smooth surrender of weight. Not prayer, not panic: only the steady conviction that a balanced ledger is made by the hand that does not tremble.
The air changes first: a thin whistle, then another answering it, the calls spacing themselves into something rehearsed rather than panicked. The sound rides along the arcades as if the tilework itself has learned to speak. Simin keeps her head down and her pace even, but her fingers (still ink-smudged from the work) curl tight inside her sleeve as she listens. Ink and paper have a scent when they are newly handled, a bitter sweetness beneath the vinegar-smoke of plague fires; she fears that someone with the right kind of attention might smell it on her, might read her as easily as a stamped line.
She lets her shoulders stay narrow, the way a young man learns to make room for older men without seeming to yield. Her felt cap sits low, shadowing brows she will not lift. A donkey brays in irritation; a child laughs too loudly and is hushed; the common noise of the bazaar tries to go on, but it has begun to edge itself into channels, like water guided by unseen hands. It is not the cries of sellers that trouble her (those can be bought, beaten, ignored) but the pauses between them, the small silences where a signal can nest.
At a corner where the lane meets the broader mouth of the square, two men shift their stance with the same timing, as if they share a rope pulled tight somewhere out of sight. One pretends to adjust his sash; the other pretends to examine a bolt of cloth. Their eyes do not cling to her face, too obvious, but to her path, measuring where she will be in a dozen steps. Simin counts those steps with the calm of habit. She lets her breath scrape once in her throat, a controlled cough, the sort that excuses haste and discourages closeness. No one wants a stranger’s breath near their own these days; fear is a border guard as effective as any spear.
She angles toward a spice-stall where cumin and dried lime heap like dull coins, and in the blur of scent and passing elbows she tests the crowd’s give. The sleeve that hides her prize presses warm against her wrist. She does not look back. She listens for the next whistle, and the one after, and in their measured answering she hears a net being drawn closed.
Voices carried new words with old confidence, seal the lane, hold the crossings, as if plague had not changed the grammar of command. The orders moved ahead of the men who would enforce them, slipping along brick and tile, and Simin felt the city’s breadth contract by degrees. Gates were spoken of like ledgers already closed: sums settled, lines drawn, no appeal permitted once the ink dried.
Porters, who a day ago would have shouldered through any knot of bodies for a copper, began to angle their loads away from the open arcades, seeking walls and side passages as though the air itself might indict them. A man with baskets of pomegranates turned abruptly and pretended to argue with his mule, buying time with noise. Shopkeepers drew their half-doors down without fully shutting then watched the street through the narrow slits with eyes that did not wish to be seen seeing. Even the spice-sellers tamped their measures flat, as if to hide abundance.
Simin kept her stride measured. A tightened city made every step count, and every pause could be made to look like guilt.
Two guards stepped into the mouth of the alley that had been empty a blink before, as if they had grown out of its shadow. They did not hurry. They did not need to. One held his spear like a walking-stick, the other let his hand rest near the strap of his helmet; their ease was the true threat, the confidence of men who had already been given permission to stop the world. Foot traffic bent toward them in reluctant lines, a narrow throat formed from shoulders and bundles. No one was dragged away: yet. They simply looked, weighing each traveler with the same appraising patience merchants used on bolts of silk: eyes on hands, on sleeves, on the set of a jaw, as though a body might be opened and searched for profit. Simin felt that gaze like fingers.
A passerby, breath muffled behind a scarf knotted too tight, let the word fall as if it were nothing and Simin felt it strike under her ribs. Not the usual plague-caution, not the petty zeal of a lone sergeant, but a net drawn by practiced hands. Her earlier slip had reached a desk, a seal, a patron’s temper; the remedy, as always, was to make the city smaller.
She shifted her weight, softened her chest, and let her shoulders fold into the narrow patience of a boy taught to take up little room. The crowd became her cloak; within its heat she could make small, exact adjustments, sleeve, cap, breath, without inviting notice. Yet the sum inside her came out clean: if they were closing exits, stillness was confession. Safety now lay where sound was thickest.
Simin let the bazaar’s pulse take her as if she had always belonged to it. Drawn forward by the press of shoulders, the tug of bargaining voices, the quick flash of copper scales. She kept her chin tucked, her gaze lowered to the hem of her plain qabā, and wore on her mouth the small, practiced boredom of a junior clerk sent to fetch and carry. Hunger made the smells cruel: toasted cumin and scorched sugar, rosewater breathing from a sweet-seller’s tray, the sharp green bite of dried limes split open like wounds. She refused each temptation with the same discipline she used to hold her shoulders narrow, her steps short, her hands idle.
Above the arcades, the light came down in hard slices between awnings, catching on tile and brass and the thin veil of smoke from incense fires meant to keep sickness away. Men in quilted coats threaded through the crowd, and for an instant her mind tried to name them. Guard? porter? hired arm?: but names were traps; better to count movements. One stopped too often, letting others pass him while his eyes did not shop. Another held his left hand close as if protecting something under his sash.
At a spice stall the crowd thinned, not by chance but by a small choreography: a donkey balking, a child darting, a woman’s basket tipped so that dried petals scattered and people lifted their feet in annoyance. Simin read the opening as she would read a ledger’s margin note: an invitation written in someone else’s hand.
She slid into it. A step sideways, then another, as neat as a coin palmed from a sleeve. Her shoulder brushed burlap sacks, warm from the sun; her fingers caught a stray thread and she let it go at once, careful not to leave herself behind. For a heartbeat she was hidden by hanging strings of peppers and the crimson drape of sumac in a shallow bowl, and the sound of the bazaar shifted: less open square, more throat of passage.
She did not look back. Looking back was how faces were learned. Instead she watched the shadow-lines on the ground, the feet that paused where they should have flowed, and moved before the pause could harden into a hand on her sleeve.
Nushin kept half a step behind her, close enough that Simin could feel their steadiness the way one feels a wall in darkness. The medic’s satchel was hugged to their ribs, its leather damp with vinegar; the sharp clean sting of it rose each time they jostled, as if sickness itself might be held at bay by scent and habit. To anyone watching, Nushin was only what they claimed to be: an errand-runner for the fevered, a soldier sent where others would not go.
Their mouth scarcely moved when they spoke. “Do not take comfort in empty lanes,” came the murmur, threaded through the market-noise as lightly as a clerk’s aside. “The ones that look kind are the ones they close first.”
Simin did not answer. She carried the words like a weight balanced on her tongue, careful not to let them tilt her gait. The side-passages were tempting. But she had seen how order worked in Isfahan: the straightest path was always the trap, and the quietest street the easiest to seal with a rope and a seal-stamp.
Nushin’s gaze flicked once, measuring the flow, the pauses, the men who stood too still. “They are watching for fear,” they added, almost tenderly. “So do not look afraid.”
At the next junction the lanes offered themselves like choices in a court riddle: one narrow and mercifully empty, its stones rinsed with vinegar and fear; the other brimming, loud as a wedding, already swallowing men whole. Simin let her feet decide in favor of the noise. She angled toward the Qeysarieh mouth where the bazaar thickened and the air turned metallic, tainted by the clean bite of coin. Scales chiming, brass weights clacking, ink-pots uncorked and stoppered in a rhythm like prayer. Here a stumble could be mistaken for haste, a quick glance for calculation; here stories changed hands as readily as silver. She kept her eyes on the moving backs, on turbans and caps as anonymous as stones in a riverbed, and trusted the roar to cover what silence would betray.
She let her stride soften, then quicken, until it matched the swing of two apprentice porters ahead. Boys with raw shoulders and a shared impatience, moving as if the crowd were a door to be pushed through. In their wake she found a borrowed cadence. When bodies compressed, she slipped crosswise, invisible in the moment of complaint and jostle. Nushin copied it at once, squared and steady, close enough to pass for the hand that kept a difficult patient from bolting.
She did not name it, not to Nushin, not even in the privacy of her own mind, but the thought set like ink: those copied registry pages, if they still breathed under dust and waqf locks, were not merely refuge. They were leverage, proof, a knife laid flat. Running away would only prolong the hunt. So she ran toward the danger’s center, and Nushin matched her without question.
Behind them the quarter tightened by degrees, as if the city were drawing a cord through its own flesh. It began with a change in the sound: not the ordinary hawkers’ cries or the quarrel of prices, but clipped, trained syllables that rode the vaulted arcade and returned from the brick like echoes of a drill-yard. Orders passed mouth to mouth, brisk as coins slid across a counter. Somewhere a whistle cut through the bazaar’s breath, and men turned their faces the way birds turn toward a shadow.
Simin felt the first pinch not on her arms, but in the crowd’s gait. The flow that had carried her forward turned hesitant, then braided into narrower channels. Shopkeepers, quick to survive, began to half-close their shutters without the full, honest gesture of closing: just enough to make an alcove of darkness, just enough to watch. A brazier of incense smoked harder at a doorway; vinegar stung the air where someone had lately scrubbed stones, and now the wetness gleamed like warning.
At each alley mouth, paper appeared: small rectangles slapped onto plaster and wood, damp paste shining at the edges. Seals pressed into them like bruises. The papers were nothing by themselves; it was what they implied that tightened the throat. This lane counted. That courtyard counted. The city’s own passages were being turned into ledgers, each entry requiring a body to match it.
Simin glimpsed a soldier’s shoulder through a gap between men, the lamellar catching light; then another, posted where there had been only a spice-seller yesterday. The guards were not running. They did not need to. They moved the way a net moves when hands draw it in. Even the strangers did their part: rough-faced men without uniform, asking questions too softly, lingering too long at thresholds as if measuring a boy’s height against a rumor. Simin kept her head slightly bowed, as a young clerk would, and tasted iron behind her teeth where fear wanted to speak.
A checkpoint had budded in the arcade’s throat, grown from nothing more than foot-traffic and impatience. Two soldiers stood where yesterday a brazier-seller had squatted; their boots were planted wide as if the stones themselves might run. Between them a clerk hunched over a low board, reed-pen poised, his fingers dark with ink. A small lamp was held down and forward, its flame shielded by a palm, so the light skimmed the wet lines and made each fresh stroke shine like a slick of oil.
One by one the stream of bodies was pinched into singles. “Name.” The word fell without anger, only use. “From where. To where. For what.” The questions were simple enough to be cruel. A man with saffron on his cuffs fumbled his tongue and was made to begin again. A pilgrim’s wooden rosary clicked too fast in his fist; the soldier’s hand drifted, almost lazily, to the sword-hilt, thumb resting on the guard as if to remind the air of consequences.
Those who answered were waved through with a flick, as if stamped. Those who hesitated were kept in the lamplight a breath longer, until their faces showed every seam.
Simin read the pattern in what was not said. Between “Name” and “From where,” there was always a measured pause, a space set aside for a lie to trip over its own hem. They were not weighing faces alone; they were weighing the seams of a story, listening for the faint drag of rehearsal, for a breath taken too early, for the wrong honorific placed like a coin of the wrong mint. The clerk’s pen hovered, expectant, as if the air itself must be entered into a book.
She let her gaze go flat, the obedient dullness of a boy who has spent his life under other men’s questions. Yet her mind counted openings: a spice-lane to the left that bent toward a caravanserai court; a half-shuttered textile shop with a back door; the shadowed niche behind a brazier where two bodies could vanish for a heartbeat.
Under the same brick vaulting, another kind of search uncoiled, quieter than orders. Men with no guild-mark on their sleeves and no soldier’s dust on their boots leaned into the stream as if they belonged to it. Their questions were almost friendly. “The young scribe: have you seen him?” A small coin flashed, disappeared. No office was named, no seal shown; only the patience of hired need.
The two pursuers’ nets began to knot together. A guard’s gaze, dull with fatigue and sharpened by duty, snagged on Simin a fraction too long: then slid past and returned, as if tasting doubt. At the same moment one of the unmarked men drifted toward the same junction, idle as a shopper. Simin felt the street narrow inside her ribs: one wrong turn would hand her to law, or to silence.
A new length of rope had appeared where yesterday there had been only open brick and the easy spill of bodies beneath the arcade. It lay across the mouth like a fresh wound stitched too quickly. Fibers rough, twisted hard, pulled taut from column to column. From it hung small tags of paper, each dabbed with red wax and stamped with a sigil that meant health and obedience, though the wax was still too bright, too soft at the edges, as if the seal had been pressed in haste by a hand that did not expect argument.
Simin checked herself mid-stride. The habit of moving as a boy, shoulders narrow, eyes lowered, no unnecessary turning of the head, saved her from the sharpness of an obvious startle. She let her foot fall as if she had merely misjudged the crowd, and she swallowed the reflex to look back. Hunger made her lightheaded; fear made her precise.
This rope had not been here in the morning. She had passed this arcade mouth with a bundle under her arm and the usual calculus of shadows: a slipway behind the coppersmiths, a trough of cool air where the vaulting dipped, a corner where a porter could be bribed to block sight for the span of a breath. Now the line cut straight through that private map, erasing it with a single official gesture. The city was redrawing itself, not with ink, but with cord and wax: movable borders that could be tightened to catch one person and loosened again before anyone complained.
On the near side of the rope, a thin-faced boy with a stick stood as if appointed to be brave. His eyes skittered over turbans and caps, over sandals and boot leather, not knowing what he was meant to see. Behind him, a brazier smoked; the air tasted faintly of vinegar and scorched herbs. A man in a quilted vest rested one hand on the rope as though he owned it. He watched the stream with a patient, almost curious stillness.
Simin’s mind ran through alternatives and found each one newly exposed. To step up and question the change would be to speak too much; to press through without pause would be to invite hands. She let herself drift with the bodies, as if the rope were only a nuisance in a day full of nuisances, while inside her the old route folded shut like a paper boat in rain.
She let the rope decide for her, yielding as if obedient, then slipping at the last instant into the spice lane where her feet remembered cool brick and kinder shadows. For a breath she thought she had regained the old pattern. Then heat licked low across the stones.
A fumigation fire rolled along the ground in a slow, deliberate wave, fed with damp straw and fistfuls of pepper husks. Smoke thickened in the vaulting, turning saffron light to a bruised brown. It bit her eyes and laid a harsh taste on her tongue: vinegar sharp as a reprimand, incense sweetened to disguise rot, pepper that clawed at the throat until men coughed into their sleeves and women pressed scarves hard over their mouths.
The crowd recoiled, then obeyed, herded into a single narrow file between shuttered stalls. Shoulders brushed; there was no room to turn a face aside, no space to linger in a doorway and vanish. Ahead, silhouettes moved like puppets through haze, each head forced forward beneath the same gaze. Shapes stood at the lane’s mouth (one a guard’s straight-backed certainty, another too still to be honest) watching the line pass as if counting beads. Simin kept her chin tucked, and breathed as shallowly as theft.
Pressed forward by other bodies seeking air, Simin let the line carry her until a familiar seam in the brickwork appeared. An old side cut her feet knew without asking her mind. She slipped into it with the practiced modesty of a boy yielding space, heart counting the beats between glances. The lane should have narrowed, cooled, offered a pocket of shadow where a man could become no one.
Instead it ended in raw timber and commerce: crates stacked chest-high, their rope handles frayed, their lids stamped with half-smeared merchant marks; a shutter of planks nailed across the back wall at a slant, so new the sap still bled pale at the edges. No dust lay on it. Someone had built this in a hurry, not to store goods, but to stop a person.
She halted as if only puzzled, and felt the trap settle around her like a closing hand.
The detour spat her into a cross-aisle washed in merciless daylight, where dust had nowhere to soften the glare and every motion cast a witness. Above, along the roofline, figures shifted, too high for honest trade, dark heads against tile and sky. At the far arch a guard stood angled just so, turning the bazaar into one long corridor of sight. The city had been re-threaded to display what it meant to take.
Behind her, two rhythms worried the air: the soft, hungry drag of hired feet that pretended not to march, and the clean beat of patrol boots that did. They braided, closing the gap. Simin let her pace fall into the bazaar’s ordinary impatience, buying a moment to listen. She chose by echo (vaulted turns that swallowed sound, low passages that carried it) feeling the lanes angle her like a hand on a shoulder unless she cut free.
In the crush where shoulders became walls and breath belonged to whoever could steal it, Simin looked for patterns the way she once looked for ink-blots. Small betrayals of intention. A porter pushed past with an empty tray held high, swearing at invisible thieves; another bent to retie a sandal that did not need tying. Ordinary theatre. Then, for the span of a blink, a familiar cadence threaded through it: a shoulder dipping not from fatigue but from choice, the practiced submission of someone making room while taking measure.
Khatereh did not turn her head. She did not lift a hand. The signal was in a rope-end: frayed hemp that should have hung dead, yet flicked once against the porter’s hip as if brushed by chance. It was the estate’s language, born of storerooms and counting-houses where speech could be bought. Follow, it said, and also: I have moved the board beneath your feet.
Simin’s stomach tightened with the other message that always rode Khatereh’s help, risk, paid forward. She let her gaze slide over the porter’s load as a boy would, appraising without insolence. Between the crates she caught a glimpse of Khatereh’s widow’s scarf, pinned severe as a seal, vanishing behind a column.
The roofline figures shifted again. Somewhere behind, the patient drag of hired soles found a faster tempo; somewhere ahead, patrol boots held their clean certainty. A hero’s gesture, calling out, breaking toward Khatereh, making a scene, would have snapped her disguise like a brittle reed. It would have turned Khatereh’s careful misplacement into evidence.
So Simin answered with nothing a watcher could accuse: a minute shake of her head, scarcely more than the settling of a cap, the refusal of a bargain offered too dearly. Her mouth stayed closed; her jaw did not soften into gratitude. She made her face blank as a ledger margin.
No heroics, she willed into that small motion. Only misdirection. Only the kind of mercy that does not look like mercy until after.
At the next turn the lane narrowed under a low arch, where carts scraped stone and every jolt translated itself into noise. The porter ahead hitched his load to clear a puddle of rinsed vinegar and ash. Simin came close enough to smell the stale bread through the cloth, close enough to feel her own mouth flood.
Her fingers found a loose cord and a splintered peg at the cart’s side, and she gave them the smallest betrayal a careful hand could manage: not a cut, not a theft, only a snag timed to the next lurch. The bundle slid as if by accident, a quiet surrender of gravity, and struck the street with a dull, humiliating thud. Cloth split. Wrapped rounds of bread rolled into dust; dried dates scattered like dark beads, instantly studded with grit.
There was no single cry. Only the quick intake of many throats. Hands appeared from sleeves and from nothing. A boy dove, an old man’s knuckles flashed, a woman’s veil dipped and rose. The porter spun, swearing at the world, and in the swearing he forgot to look up, forgot to count. Questions would come later, to the wrong mouths, in the wrong order. Simin kept her face flat and let the false trail become, for a moment, mercifully true.
For a breath the lane forgot its two pursuing rhythms. The dropped bread became an argument with elbows: porters shouting over one another, bystanders stooping with sudden piety for spilled food, a small knot tightening and loosening as hands darted and withdrew. The sound was not panic, only hunger dressed as indignation. Simin turned with the crowd’s turn, letting her shoulders angle as if annoyed at the delay. She slipped sideways where a column threw a long shade and a low service passage yawned between shutters, her cap brim down, her chin tucked as boys learn to do when they do not wish to be noticed. The boyish gait held, but her gut twisted hard at the cost of that thud: Khatereh’s calculus made flesh, and eaten.
Ahead the passage pinched to a throat beneath hanging lanterns, where light would fix faces like ink on paper. Nushin’s hand went to their satchel without hesitation. The stopper came free; vinegar ran out in a clear, ruthless spill, darkening cloth and stone. They bent into it, coughing (deep, deliberate) then spoke cleanly into the air: “Fever. Swollen glands. Don’t touch.” The tone carried command, not fear.
The nearest faces pulled back as if the very word fever had weight. A guard half-lifted his sleeve to his mouth, then stopped, eyes flicking to the wet stones, to Nushin’s grim certainty, to his own hands. Behind him the unbadged men faltered, not brave enough to be first through a throat of sour air. Simin used their pause like a door left unlatched, and passed.
Simin learned the city’s new rules not from proclamations but from sound. A wooden bar driven home had a particular note. Oak on iron, a dull, satisfied thunk that traveled along plastered walls. A bell rung twice, not for prayer, but for warning: a lane sealed, a courtyard closed, a mouth of the bazaar stitched shut. These noises arrived in sequence, a rough music keeping time with her breath. She counted them without moving her lips, as if tallying bolts of cloth in a merchant’s stall, and let the count decide her feet.
Too fast and she would become a story: a boy running, a boy hunted. Too slow and she would become an offering, paused beneath an arch while hands found her sleeve and asked for papers with the casual cruelty of bored men. So she chose the pace she had practiced in exile. Brisk with purpose, shoulders slightly forward, eyes lowered but not vacant. An errand-boy’s urgency, not a fugitive’s panic.
Her hunger made a thin animal inside her, eager to bolt at every shout. She pressed it down the way she pressed down her voice, keeping it in the chest where it could sound smaller. When a gate clattered somewhere to the north, she did not turn her head. When a watchman called, his words lost in the layered murmur of bargaining and prayer, she let the sound pass through her as through a lattice.
At each junction she read the air the way she read ink: the tug of bodies toward open routes, the sudden thinning where a cordon had been laid, the faint drift of incense meant to sweeten fear. Overhead, pigeons burst from a ledge in a gray scatter; below, a cat threaded between feet and vanished. Even the animals knew what had narrowed.
A shadow slipped across the lip of a side alley. Men without uniform, moving with the confidence of hired certainty. Simin’s spine stayed loose. She adjusted her cap brim a fraction, as if irritated by sun, and altered her course by a hand’s width, taking the line that kept her in the stream of ordinary travelers. Another bar thudded shut behind them. The city was closing like a fist, and she was still, for the moment, a small coin riding the current.
Nushin caught Simin by the sleeve (not a grab that betrayed urgency, but the firm, practiced guidance of one who had dragged the wounded out of crushes before) and drew her into a slit of passage between dye-stalls. Here the air was harsher than smoke: vinegar-water had been flung in broad, devotional arcs to “cleanse” the stones, and the wetness made the ground shine like a newly inked page. Purple runoff bled from a vat’s lip, bruising the gutters; scraps of wool lay like torn clouds against the wall.
The reek did its work. Men who might have pressed in after them balked, coughing into sleeves, faces twisting with that superstitious disgust that plague had taught the city. Simin held her breath until her ribs ached, tasting sourness behind her teeth, and kept her eyes on Nushin’s back as if following an elder through a market errand.
But the lane narrowed on itself, a corridor of shutters and hanging skeins, and every branching turn looked like an answer that could become a trap. A wrong choice would end in a locked door, a dropped bar, a dead-end no wider than an outstretched arm.
At the mouth of the main arcade the light changed, becoming harsh and official. Torches pinned against the tiled pier threw their wavering glare across a fresh line of men in mail and quilted coats. They had tightened the passage with rope and spear-shafts, turning commerce into a narrow throat. Hands were held out as if for alms, then turned and inspected: the quick, humiliating check for the day’s ink stamp. Belts were lifted, pouches tapped, travel tokens demanded with a clerk’s impatience.
Simin saw it all in the space of a breath and did not let her feet hurry. She let her shoulders fall into a boy’s careless fatigue, swallowed the sharp pull of hunger, and turned as if remembering an errand (nothing more) before her face could settle fully in their light.
They slid into the caravanserai’s inner vein where pack-sweat and old straw dulled the smell of vinegar, and Nushin found a servant’s stair half-hidden behind stacked crates. The steps complained softly under their weight. On the roofline, domed storerooms rose like pale backs; laundry snapped on lines, a poor flag of ordinary life. Below, men in plain coats moved two by two, not hunting with shouts, only counting doors the way fishermen count a tightening net.
Simin let the roofline carry them away from the obvious mouths of passage. The shorter ways were already choking with ropes and hands held out for stamps, with voices that demanded a name to pin to a face. She chose instead the longer spill toward the outer arcades, where shadow and piled refuse made a kind of cover. Each turn cost minutes. Minutes the city was quietly locking shut.
The arcades thinned, as if the bazaar itself had drawn its ribs in and refused another breath. Sound fell away (no singing of coppersmiths, no shouted weights of saffron) only the hush of sandals on stone and, somewhere deeper, the timid cough of a shuttered house. Underfoot the flagstones shone with a damp that was not rain: old wash-water flung from buckets, spilt brine from a pickle-seller’s jar, the sour rinse of vinegar dragged along thresholds in the name of health. It made each step uncertain, and Simin kept her weight on the outer edges of her soles the way she had learned on river stones, so the slick would not betray her with a sudden skid.
Doors that should have been open to the night’s last commerce were sealed, their wooden lattices drawn tight, the seams pasted with strips of paper bearing hurried prayers or a magistrate’s scrawl. In the cracks above the shutters, she saw eyes and then did not; watchers who wanted both safety and a story to trade. The air was threaded with smoke, incense, yes, but not the rich kind offered at shrines. This was thin, economical, a ribbon laid along certain thresholds like a chalk line. It marked the lane that had been “cleansed,” which meant only that officials had passed through it with bowls of embers and loud assurances, leaving the poor to breathe whatever they could afford.
Beyond that ribbon, the next alley tasted stale, abandoned to its own damp and fear. The tiled walls, usually so quick with reflected lamp-glow, seemed to drink light rather than return it. Simin’s hunger made the incense nauseating; it called up kitchens she did not have the right to enter, bread she could not buy without showing her face too long. She kept her gaze lowered as a boy would yet counted everything: the narrowings where two men could block a passage, the side doors unbarred for servants, the places where a rope could appear between one heartbeat and the next.
Somewhere ahead, she felt more than heard the change in the air: a pressure, a gathering of intent, as if the stone itself were waiting to ask for her name.
Ahead the lane ceased pretending to be merely a lane. Out of the pooled dark it arranged itself into an apparatus: rope drawn taut between two posts as if the city had tied a knot across its own throat; a trestle-table pushed sideways to force bodies into single file; a smear of paper notices pasted to the wall where tile had flaked, their ink already sweating in the night air. Lanterns hung too low so their light climbed faces from below, catching the underside of brows, the soft places under caps, the damp shine at a lip. Each flame wagged on its hook with the breath of passing men, and the shadows leapt with it, turning a calm mouth into a sneer, a harmless blink into furtive guilt.
Two guards sat with inkpads and a blunt reed pen, their fingers black to the knuckle as if they had been digging in soot. A third stood to one side, not writing. Watching the hands that reached for pockets, the small hesitations where lies are born. Beyond them, a line of travelers waited without speaking, like patients outside a physician’s door.
Simin let her eyes fall, not in shame but in craft, the way porters did when a man of authority might be looking for a reason to make them speak. She made her shoulders slack, poured a thin contempt into her posture: as if this pause were only another nuisance between one errand and the next. Beneath the plain qabā, her fingers found the hard rim of the false seal tucked against her ribs, and she pressed it once, to remind herself it was real enough to cut skin. She shaped her breath to a boy’s impatience, kept her mouth closed so her careful voice would not rise and betray its carefulness.
Behind her, Nushin stayed half a step back, neither too close to seem protective nor too far to look like a stranger. An ordinary companion, placing her in a frame so unremarkable it might pass unseen.
The men at the table did not have a hunter’s heat. They had the quiet of clerks and cordon-keepers, the leisure of those backed by walls and rules. Ink lay uncovered, glossy as fresh blood in the lantern-light; the reed pen waited between two stained fingers. Here, pursuit became a ledger. A spoken name, a pressed seal. Enough to make a life stop.
With the last mercy of shadow spent, the street offered no kindly wrong turn. Only the rope, the table, the waiting ink. Simin counted in heartbeats: three paces to the guards’ knuckles, two to the lantern-pool where faces were unmade and remade. Her gaze marked a frayed place in the cord, a stone lip that might catch a boot. Stopping, she knew, was the true snare: where a borrowed name must not tremble.
Lantern-glow turned the rope line into a shallow stage, and everyone made of themselves a mask. Cloths were tied over mouths and noses, damp at the edges; eyes watched from above them with the blank steadiness of people who had counted too many fevers. Spearpoints caught the pale fire and held it in thin, wavering needles. Beside the gate a brazier burned vinegar and bitter herbs until the air itself seemed pickled: sharp enough to sting the back of the throat, sharp enough to make you believe it could cauterize rumor as well as sickness.
Simin kept to the angle of shadow where the rope sagged between posts, as if darkness were another garment she could pull close. The felt cap sat low on her cropped hair; the plain qabā hung straight on her small frame, and she forced her shoulders into the careless squareness of a youth who had never learned to fold inward. Hunger had made her light-headed in the long hours before dawn, but it also made her careful; the body’s need tightened her thoughts into a narrow, workable thread.
The guards moved in small, efficient gestures. Hands that had learned to touch as little as possible. A jar of sand stood open for wetting seals, and the clerk’s pad lay ready, its pages darkened with other men’s names. Somewhere behind the rope, a mule shifted and coughed; somewhere farther back, a woman’s low prayer rose and fell, muffled by her scarf. The city waited on the other side, magnificent and indifferent, as if its tiled domes and painted arches could not be reached by breath alone.
Simin tasted vinegar on the wind and thought of ink: how both could preserve, how both could ruin. Her fingers, stained from old habit, curled into her sleeves. She did not look too long at any face. She counted routes without turning her head. The alley that bent toward the Qeysarieh, the side gate that would be closed, the open mouth of the cordon that could become a noose if anyone asked for her voice.
Mehrdad moved as though the rope and the gate had been built for his body alone. He placed himself in the pinch of the passage, where the posts stood closest and the lantern’s reach made every edge unforgiving, and he did it with the unhurried certainty of a man who had already decided where trouble would appear. His boots found purchase on the uneven stones; his weight settled, braced to resist a surge. The tight strap under his jaw pulled his beard flat, turning his face into something carved, serviceable, not beautiful.
Simin felt the space alter around him. The crossing narrowed, not by measure but by intention, until it resembled a throat: one swallow away from closing. His shoulders squared toward them, shutting out the rest of the line; the guards behind him adjusted with him, their spearpoints angling like ribs. He did not need to lift his voice to command. His stillness did it for him, and the quiet in his gaze fixed on Simin’s cap brim as if he were reading the outline of a lie.
For a moment she wondered, with a cold, practical dread, whether someone had described her walk.
He drew from his belt a small writing pad wrapped in oiled cloth, the kind a man might carry for rations and fines, and with it a blunt reed pen whose split tip shone wetly in the lantern’s heat. The ink had already blackened it; there would be no pause for mixing, no mercy of delay. He did not raise his voice. Instead he lifted two fingers, crooked, economical, and beckoned them forward as one might summon a mule by its halter, certain of the animal’s understanding. The gesture made the rope line feel less like a boundary than a judgment seat. A guard stepped half a pace to his flank, sand jar at the ready, and the quiet around the crossing thickened, waiting to be written into.
“Papers. Route. Purpose.” The words drop like coin on stone. Mehrdad’s gaze tallies her as if she were cargo: the felt cap’s shadow, the plain fall of the qabā, the ink in the creases of her fingers, the stubborn angle of her jaw that might betray a softer life. Behind him, two men slide, quiet as shutters, sealing the nearest gaps by habit.
The circle draws itself smaller by patient degrees. The rope that was slack a breath ago is tugged tight; a lantern is tilted so its flame licks light up beneath men’s brows, turning eyes into hard hollows and sweat into confession. Simin keeps her chest shallow, counting her inhales. Here, even silence is recorded: any hesitation a nod toward hands in pockets, toward a search.
Parvaneh moved first, not hurried, not hesitant. An ease that suggested the rope line had been drawn for their passage. They stepped into the lantern’s spill and let it dress them: clean linen at the throat, the foreign-cut coat held close by a Persian sash, hands ungloved despite the night’s bite. Their bow was exact, neither too deep to seem guilty nor too shallow to seem contemptuous, a measured offering of the body to order.
From within the coat a letter appeared as if conjured from the very fold of courtesy. Parvaneh held it between two fingers kept unmarked by dye or ink, nails trimmed, skin pale where others in the quarter were browned by sun and trade. The ribbon around it lay flat and unwrinkled, as though it had not been thumbed in anxious pockets or sweated against a palm. The seal caught the lantern-light and gave it back as a dull bruise of authority. Parvaneh did not push it forward like a bribe. They displayed it, patient, the way one shows a token at a shrine: not for the guard to doubt, but for him to recognize what doubting would cost.
Simin felt the air change. The guards’ attention, which had pinned her like a hand at the collar, slid a fraction toward the letter, toward the possibility of simpler obedience. Even Mehrdad’s eyes, trained on seams and stories, made a small involuntary journey to the wax. Parvaneh watched that journey and smiled without warmth, their gaze steady as a ledger line.
They angled the page so the lantern could see without the rope line being crossed. It was a small courtesy, and it was also a claim: that the space belonged to them already. Simin kept her face still, the cap’s shadow hiding the pulse at her temple, and tasted vinegar from some unseen brazier meant to ward sickness. In that sharpness she understood Parvaneh’s aim. How a clean seal could become a shield broad enough to hide a lie, and how quickly a man on duty could be taught to call submission “procedure.”
Without granting Simin so much as the courtesy of a glance, Parvaneh addressed the guard as if they had rehearsed his title in the mirror of a hundred thresholds. “Sarbāz-bāshī,” they said softly, and let the syllables rest on Mehrdad’s duty like a hand on a sword hilt. Their voice carried that lightly foreign edge that made politeness sound purchased, yet each phrase was fitted to local law.
“It is a merchant matter,” they continued, as though the bazaar itself had sent them: bales delayed, contracts waiting, men hungry in courtyards where shutters were nailed for health. “Urgent passage, by the permitted lanes. We have kept to the plague-safe route, as the notices require.” The words came in a neat chain each link offering Mehrdad a way to be strict without being slow.
They lifted the sealed letter a finger’s breadth higher, not thrusting it, merely letting its weight speak. “If there are questions, you may put them to the seal.” In that, Simin heard the trap: to ask more would be to refuse authority, and refusal had a price.
Mehrdad’s eyes moved in short, efficient cuts: from the wax bruise of the seal to the knuckles that held Simin’s bundle, back again. The lantern found what daylight had not forgiven. Ink ground into the creases of her fingers, the roughness of travel, a faint line of dust at the wrist where a sleeve had ridden up. Not a court man’s hands. Not even a prosperous clerk’s. Hands that had begged doors open and closed them quickly.
His mouth tightened, not in suspicion alone but in fatigue: the kind that welcomes any authority that will carry the burden of decision. The letter offered him a clean ending, accept, mark, dismiss. Yet his thumb hovered, unwilling to commit without tasting the paper’s truth, as if simplicity itself had become another forgery.
Parvaneh shifted as if by accident, a half-step that let their shoulder catch the lantern’s path and leave Simin in its shadow. Their courtesy did the work of a wall. “He is newly come,” Parvaneh said, lightly apologetic, giving Simin boyhood without asking for it, and need with it. Need pressed into a tidy phrase. They spoke on, certain, translating an unoffered silence into agreement.
The trap tightened with the quiet certainty of a gate bar sliding home. If Parvaneh’s fingers closed on the letter, they would not only hold wax and paper: they would hold the shape of truth that Mehrdad was allowed to see. If Simin remained a dutiful shadow, she would become mere freight, a bundle with legs. Yet speech was a blade: draw it, and her buried voice might flash bright enough to ruin her.
Simin felt the knot form first under her ribs, a hard twist that made the hunger in her belly turn sharp and wrong. Parvaneh’s hand, clean nails, a ring that caught the lantern and returned it politely, floated toward the papers with the unhurried certainty of someone accustomed to being obeyed. It was not a snatch; it was worse. A taking that would be described later as assistance, as propriety, as mercy for a trembling youth who did not know his way through official hands.
The air at the cordon gate smelled of damp rope and last night’s smoke, of vinegar splashed too often on stones that could not be scrubbed clean of fear. Behind Mehrdad the men shifted, armor creaking in small complaints, their breath clouding in the lantern’s cone. Simin counted those sounds the way she counted coins: three steps of impatience, the soft click of a spear-butt resettled, the faint scrape of wax against paper as Mehrdad’s thumb tested the seal once more. The moment had weight; it wanted to fall toward the simplest end.
She had lived by the boy’s rasp since the first mile back toward Isfahan, had worn it like coarse cloth. To lose it, even for a heartbeat, was to open a seam in her disguise wide enough for a whole life to spill out. Yet Parvaneh’s fingers, hovering now a hair’s breadth from the letter, were already writing a new ledger entry: unnamed youth, goods, compliance. A line that would not be erased.
She drew one breath. Not the deep, betraying sort that lifts the chest and summons attention, but a small, controlled sip of dawn air, as if she were tasting it for poison. In that breath she let the street-cobbled voice slide away, the practiced hoarseness loosened like a bandage. Her throat remembered what it had been taught: how to make a sound that belonged to rooms with carpets and rules, to men who never asked twice.
Her lips parted before Parvaneh’s hand could close, and the first syllable came out steadied by old discipline rather than fear.
When she spoke, the sound that left her was not the boy’s roughened street-bark but something drawn tight and fine, as if she had passed it through a reed. It carried no plea in it. It carried arrangement. The syllables fell with the paced certainty of ink marks made in columns: neither hurried nor hesitant, each stress set where a clerk would set it so that meaning could not be argued later. She began with the old opening, neither prayer nor greeting, but the quiet hinge of procedure, words that assumed a desk between speaker and listener, assumed a seal waiting to be obeyed. She did not name an office, did not claim a patron; she did something subtler. She spoke as one who knew the order in which authority liked to be addressed.
The effect was immediate, like a cloth drawn over a brazier: the space cooled. To interrupt her would have been to confess ignorance. Even Parvaneh’s poised courtesy found no edge to slip under. Mehrdad’s attention, trained to hunt deceit in smudged wax, caught instead on the shape of her certainty, and held.
She recited the registry phrasing as if her tongue had once been trained by margins and red thread: petition set down first, then witness named, then the confirmation that bound the whole to a ledger and made it unarguable. The words were old, worn smooth by use, yet in her mouth they regained their proper weight, each clause laid in its exact order like tiles that admit no crookedness. At the hinge between lines she slowed, barely, only enough for a practiced ear, and touched a single connective, the small word that belonged farther down, after the clerk’s second notation. It sat there, wrong as a coin of the right metal but the wrong face. She let it stand, uncorrected, and the silence after it was her accusation: someone had copied in haste, and haste left tracks.
She did not touch the paper. With hands kept still at her sides, she addressed Mehrdad as if he were already bound to duty: would he turn the seal toward the lantern’s mouth, and read the date, plainly, for the record. When he complied, she lifted her chin a fraction (no more than a scribe indicating a line) toward the rim where wax bit through a stroke of ink still wet-glossed, not yet married to the page.
In the thin, dawn-gray wash, the lie finally showed its seams. The scribal hand, careful, familiar in its flourishes, belonged to one man; the wax beneath it carried a date from another morning altogether, a court day that had not yet reached this sheet. The two would not marry. Parvaneh’s practiced account faltered on that small faultline, requiring a correction they could not offer without confessing the paper had been fetched, not earned.
Simin felt it: not in thought, but in the small betrayals of the body. The cordon gate waited like a judge that did not speak, and her careful quiet, so long a shelter, suddenly hung on her like a borrowed cloak in rain: heavy, conspicuous, unable to keep out what it once turned aside. A boy could be mute and be overlooked; a boy at a checkpoint, under lantern light and hungry scrutiny, became a riddle that invited solving.
She had been offering her face, until then, the way the poor offer palms: emptied of argument, asking for mercy to be mistaken for fairness. It had worked in alleys and tea-houses, in the soft wars of bargaining where pity was a coin. Here pity only sharpened Mehrdad’s suspicion, made his gaze linger on her mouth as if expecting it to give itself away.
So she gathered herself the way she had once gathered loose pages against a wind. She straightened. The movement was plain, almost rude in its certainty; she shifted her weight onto both feet, not poised to flee but placed, as if the stones belonged to her and would remain beneath her even if men shouted. Her shoulders widened under the qabā. Her hands (those ink-stained hands she had kept meekly still) settled with intention, fingers relaxed as though they rested on an invisible desk.
She stopped pleading with her eyes. She let her gaze meet Mehrdad’s without softness, as one clerk meets another across an office threshold: not challenging, simply refusing to be diminished by his uniform. The sound of the city, muffled by dawn and sickness, seemed to draw back; there was only the lantern hiss and the faint scrape of wax against parchment in Parvaneh’s grip.
When she spoke at last, she did not dress the words in apology. She drew on a memory of order, of margins ruled straight, of seal and signature placed where law insisted they belong, and used it like a weapon that did not glitter. “If the paper is to be read,” she said, voice held measured, “let it be read as it should be.”
She inclined her head toward the document in Parvaneh’s hand, not with hunger, but with the sober impatience of someone accustomed to texts being mishandled. “Bring it nearer,” she said, and the words held the shape of instruction, not appeal. She did not reach for it. She made Mehrdad do the reaching: made his authority serve precision.
In the lantern’s weak circle she studied the page as if it were a ledger line that refused to balance. “A registry copy of this kind,” she went on, “does not stand on a seal alone. First the clerk’s formula, with the day named in full. Then the registrar’s attestation, set beneath, not beside, so the ink and the judgment touch. Then the witness marks, two at least, one from the waqf office if the property is held under endowment.” Her voice remained careful, pitched to a male steadiness, yet the cadence was courtly, older than her disguise.
She turned her gaze, briefly, to Parvaneh, as if inviting correction that could not safely be given. “Where are those hands,” she asked, “and where is the chain of custody written, as the law requires?”
With an ink-stained fingertip she touched the margin where wax had kissed paper and failed to let go cleanly. The lantern made the flaw plain: a shallow bruise of red-brown, feathered like a spill, where the heat of haste had driven the pigment into the fibers. “Here,” she said, and did not soften it with a boy’s deference. “A careful clerk dusts this place first so the seal lifts without dragging its own color.” Her nail traced the faint smear that hooked toward the registrar’s line, the direction of a thumb pressed too hard, too soon. “And he lifts from the far edge, not straight up, not when the wax is still breathing.” She let the page speak, and watched whose eyes flinched.
She let the words come as if she were reading them from a clean margin, each one placed to leave no room for heat. “In the Name of God Most High; let what is copied be known by its order: the date in full, the clerk’s hand named, the registrar’s witness beneath, then the seal, then the witnesses.” Not accusation: procedure. A doorway Mehrdad could step through without losing face.
She did not press him with blame; she set a rule before him and let it stand like a measuring-rod. “A fault of hand,” she said, as one might note a miscopied sum, “not a fault of your watch. If the seal has dragged, the cure is not anger, but verification.” Give it to the scribe’s desk, to the waqf log, to daylight: let Mehrdad keep his sternness, and, by using it, discern whose fingers guided it.
Parvaneh’s smile did not crack; it widened, as if generosity were their native tongue. They angled their body half a step between Simin and the guard-lantern, a courteous shield offered to a boy who had spoken out of turn. “This youth has been on the road,” they said, voice smooth with sleep and certainty. “Permit me to set the matter in order. Confusion is a common companion at cordons.”
Mehrdad did not accept the offered order. He kept the paper lifted in the lantern’s small sun, letting the seal’s imperfect edge cast its thin shadow, and his gaze moved from the wax to Parvaneh’s mouth as if listening could be another kind of inspection. Simin felt, in the pause, the weight of her own earlier words returning like a thrown stone: verification, not anger. He had taken the stone in his palm and found it useful.
“In order, then,” Mehrdad said, clipped, not unkind. “Name the issuing clerk. Speak the date as it stands. Then tell me whose hands carried it from desk to gate. Cleanly.”
Parvaneh dipped their head, as if pleased to be consulted. “It was issued by. “: by Ḥājji Karim’s man, in the registry chamber near the Qeysarieh. On the, ” They offered a day, then a month, then added the year with a flourish, and their fingers made a small motion, counting beads that were not there. “Handled first by the registrar’s assistant, then by my interpreter, then by myself.”
Mehrdad’s thumb remained on the paper’s margin. “Which assistant. The registrar has more than one.” His voice was the same as before; only the question had sharpened.
Parvaneh’s eyes flicked (quick as a bird’s glance at a snare) toward Simin, then back to the guard. “The elder one,” they said. “The. “The deputy, rather. You know the man.”
Mehrdad waited, letting the silence require a proper name. The air between them smelled of cold metal and smoke, and Simin kept her posture small while her attention went wide, measuring what Parvaneh chose to omit.
The first of Parvaneh’s answers fell into Mehrdad’s hand like a coin of the proper weight: plausible, neatly struck, and offered without tremor. Simin felt the guard’s shoulders ease by the width of a thread. But the second answer arrived as though it had been fetched from a distant room. Half a breath late, the syllables rubbed thin by haste. A small delay only; yet at gates and court desks, delays were where falsehood lived.
Then the third reply shifted. Parvaneh named a title, registrar, deputy, assistant, and in the same moment amended it, too quickly, as if correcting a ledger before anyone could see the erasure. Their courtesy remained, but it tightened at the edges, the way a sash is pulled hard to keep a garment from slipping. Precision, asked for plainly, seemed to offend them; their smile held, but the patience under it thinned.
Simin kept her gaze lowered, counting the little fractures: the swallowed honorific, the borrowed familiarity, “you know the man”, where a name should have been. In the lantern-light she watched Mehrdad’s eyes narrow, not in anger, but in the careful way of a man beginning to suspect he has been addressed as a tool.
Mehrdad asked for it again, slowly, and without mercy. “As you spoke it. Word for word.” He held the permit nearer the lantern’s flame, turning it until the wax caught light and showed its slight slump, until the ink’s darkness thickened where a careful hand should have lifted. He murmured, not to them but to the paper, the expected opening, those courtly courtesies that always arrived like steps in a prayer, then looked up to see whether Parvaneh’s tongue would match.
Parvaneh’s palms opened in appeal. “A noble sir, the hour is wrong for such fineness. The papers are urgent; the city, ” They tried to place urgency between scrutiny and result, as if haste were itself a seal.
Mehrdad did not move. “Again.”
Each repetition frayed. A clerk became a deputy; a room became a corridor; the stated date slid by a day as lightly as a coin palmed away. The more Parvaneh pressed for release, the less their account held its shape.
Under Mehrdad’s insistence, the story began to show its seams. Parvaneh spoke of a route that would have met the eastern cordon, not this gate, and of a permit that, if true, should have carried the small witness-mark of the waqf clerk. Their purpose shifted as their breath shortened: delivery, then safekeeping, then mere inspection. Motive changed; memory does not.
Mehrdad’s stance set like a gate-bar dropped into place. It was not the boy before him he braced against, but the unseen hand that would steer his duty. “No,” he said, and kept the papers with two fingers on the seal as if it might burn. He motioned Parvaneh back from the cordon line and recited procedure, names, witnesses, countermarks, each clause a wall no courtesy could climb.
Simin took the word No as she might take a stone set into a riverbed: not comfort, but purchase. The refusal was not mercy; it was an opening in the mechanism, a place where the teeth had not yet closed. She held herself in that pause. Her hands remained where lantern-light could drink them in. Empty palms, fingers spread a little, as though she were offering nothing more dangerous than obedience. The borrowed qabā hung straight from shoulders trained, these past weeks, to make a narrower claim on air. Beneath it her ribs ached with the thin, dull insistence of hunger, and her knees shook once, betraying what the face must not. She steadied her stance as a porter steadies a load: by shifting weight, by breathing shallow, by refusing to look down.
The gate’s breath came cold off the stone. Somewhere behind the cordon a brazier hissed at damp kindling, and the smell of vinegar, plague’s cheap incense, caught in her throat. She let it scratch. A cough would be read as sickness; sickness would be read as excuse; excuse would be read as guilt. Better to be merely tired, merely young, merely too insignificant to contain deceit.
Mehrdad’s attention stayed on the paper, but his body watched them both. Simin watched him back with the careful disrespect of one who knows the limits of a uniform: the tight strap under his jaw, the sleepless red at the edge of his eyes, the manner of a man whose fairness is another name for fear of blame. She did not stare at Parvaneh; she allowed the other’s polished patience to exist at the edge of sight, like a knife kept sheathed but ready.
If she reached for the permit, she would be struck. If she pleaded, she would be weighed and found wanting. So she did neither. She simply stood as if she had always belonged to lines and questions, as if being halted before dawn were a familiar rite. And in the silence she gathered what had not been taken from her, breath, posture, and the knowledge that procedure, once invoked, could be made to protect as much as to trap.
Procedure, she understood, was not a net cast over the guilty; it was a lattice of named things, and names could be held like nails. Simin lifted her chin the smallest degree, as boys did when trying to borrow a man’s certainty, and let her mouth shape the older syllables she had hoarded in silence. Her voice, kept narrow, rubbed down to roughness for weeks, turned, by will alone, into a measured court cadence, neither urgent nor humble. Not a plea. A petition.
“May the seal be inspected under lantern,” she said, as if requesting a formality already granted. “Let it be matched to the register of issuances, and the witness-mark to the waqf clerk’s hand, and let the chain of custody be spoken: from which desk, by whose reed-pen, in which day’s entry.” Each clause fell into place like prayer-beads, one after another, leaving no space for improvisation.
She did not look at Parvaneh; she addressed Mehrdad’s duty, not his mood. “If this is an emergency pass,” she added softly, “it bears the continuity note. Otherwise it is only paper dressed as authority.”
Parvaneh’s smile held for a breath too long, then thinned, as if the courtly phrasing had reached beneath linen and foreign-cut cloth to touch the ribs. They answered readily, too readily, and in the readiness a seam showed. A date offered with a merchant’s ease did not sit with the last quarantine decree, which had shut this very lane two mornings earlier; a “patron’s latitude” was named in the wrong measure, the sort granted for caravans, not for persons moving under cordon. They spoke of a gate order that Mehrdad had not yet cited, as though rehearsed from another mouth, another post.
Simin heard it all as numbers heard through a wall: not loud, but unmistakably miscounted. She kept her face mild, boyish, and waited for Mehrdad’s attention to snag on the same threads.
Mehrdad’s jaw worked once, as if he were chewing down an impulse to strike or to yield. Then he chose the only thing a man like him could safely choose: the rule itself. “No passage,” he said, and called for ink and a board. A note of detention, not an arrest; a witness-mark, not a rumor. He made the seal sit on the paper in daylight’s promise, and with that small scratch of record he pulled the documents from Parvaneh’s easy reach and tied every next step to a name.
The air beyond the cordon tasted of ash and cold water, and yet it was air she could claim. Simin stepped through with her shoulders still drawn in the old habit, her cap low, her sleeves thin over hunger-sharp wrists; but something in her gait had altered. Truth, when forced into proper shapes, could be carried like a tool. In her breast, pages pressed warm against skin (proof, and a method) enough to meet the next scrutiny and place each name where it would bite.
Daylight returned her as a creditor returns to a familiar house: without ceremony, with the account already running in her head. The plain qabā clung where sweat had dried and loosened where her hunger had hollowed her; beneath it her ribs felt like the slats of a shuttered stall. She kept the felt cap low, as if shielding her eyes from glare, though what she feared was recognition. A young man could squint at the sun and be forgiven; a woman peering too carefully drew its own net of questions.
Naqsh-e Jahan received her with its old splendor and its new cautions. Tilework flashed, blue like water that could not be drunk, and the air carried saffron, smoke, and the sour bite of vinegar where shopkeepers had washed their thresholds against sickness. A brazier smoked near an arcade pillar, fed with peels and herbs; above it a scrap of cloth hung as a warning mark, and the lane beyond was half-shuttered, as if the city blinked around a wound.
She let the square’s noise re-teach her pace. She measured her stride to the flow of porters and boys with trays, to the steady lope of a mule dragging a cart of ceramics. Too swift and she would look hunted; too slow and she would become an object for idle eyes. Her hands stayed where they should, one resting near the sash, the other empty and loose, though habit kept wanting to hide a stolen thing in her sleeve.
Every sound arrived sharpened by hunger: the clink of brass weights, the snap of a merchant’s abacus, the cough that made a circle of bodies step away. A court guard’s voice lifted near the bazaar mouth, and Simin felt her throat tighten in anticipation of being addressed; she swallowed it down, remembering to hold her jaw in the blunt angle of a boy. She passed beneath the arcades as though she had always done so, as though exile were merely a long errand, and listened, under bargaining and prayer, for the thin, dangerous silence that meant someone was listening back.
At each threshold she performed belonging the way a scribe performs a signature: with practiced strokes that looked careless only to those who had never needed them. A nod, neither deferent nor bold, to the water-seller with the leather bag; a brief touch of fingers to her brow as if wiping sweat; two small coins counted into the right palm and passed without her left hand hovering to bargain. When the muezzin’s call unspooled over the square, she let a blessing fall from her mouth at the exact moment other men did, not a heartbeat late, not too devout. The city heard tone as keenly as it heard words.
She kept her eyes busy on honest things while she watched herself from the corners of other people’s objects. In a copper tray set out for polishing, her own cap and sharp cheek flashed and vanished; in a pane of oiled glass, the moving crowd became a smudged procession. She looked for the wrong kind of stillness: a figure whose distance never changed, a pause that echoed her pause, a head that turned when she turned as if pulled by the same string.
The quarter had tightened like a tourniquet since she last walked it. Ropes, knotted to iron rings and doorposts, drew harsh borders across alleys that had once breathed into one another; scraps of red cloth and chalked marks warned of houses sealed for “health.” From half-open thresholds came the hiss of vinegar poured over stones, and brazier-smoke rolled low, carrying bitter herbs that could not sweeten fear. At a cordon a guard’s gaze traveled faces as if skin were a document, lingering on eyes, on the set of a mouth, before he glanced at any seal.
Simin took the city by its seams. Behind a row of stalls she slipped into a service passage sour with damp straw, then through a courtyard where porters shouted over bales, their argument loud enough to hide one careful step, one quiet turn of the shoulder.
Near the Qeysarieh gate the crowd thickened. And with it, a familiar kind of danger. A man stood too unbothered at the edge of traffic, fingers worrying a strand of beads as his eyes counted bodies, not wares. Simin let her gaze slide past him. She priced dyed thread, complained softly, doubled back beneath a caravanserai arch, then spilled out again among apprentices arguing over a bolt of cloth, her turning made to look like profit, not fear.
Where the arcades began to thin and the street narrowed toward Khatereh’s holdings, Simin let her pace slacken until it matched the quarter’s wary pulse. She tasted the air and listened for the second set of steps that did not belong to her. Satisfied by absence more than sound, she slid her hand beneath her qabā to the hidden fold, feeling the oiled paper’s warm insistence against her skin, then turned into a doorway that offered nothing to the eye and everything to the practiced.
In the back room, the air was worked into layers: the sweet rot of indigo and madder trapped in wool, the sharp lift of vinegar rising from a shallow basin where a cloth floated like a pale tongue, and beneath it all the human warmth of a place kept shut against watchful streets. Bolts of fabric were stacked to the ceiling in disciplined towers: sober browns and widow’s blacks, bright silks folded away as if color itself were indecent in a season of sickness. A single lamp made the dyes on the shelves look bruised.
Simin stood where the shadow was kindest. She unfastened her qabā slowly, so no suddenness would betray a fastened heart. The buttons were plain horn, polished by use; she touched each as if counting prayer-beads, letting the gesture belong to the young man she pretended to be. Her fingers bore ink at the cuticles that washing could not persuade away. If they shook, it was only the faint tremor of hunger and days without honest sleep, nothing that would turn a room into a tribunal.
She slipped two fingers beneath the inner seam stitched against her ribs. The seam she had reinforced herself, with thread stolen from a tailor’s basket and waxed to resist sweat. The packet came free with a soft, grudging sound, as though the garment objected to being emptied. Oiled paper, folded tight and tied with a single hair-thin cord, held its shape like a secret taught to stay small.
She laid it on the table and pressed her palm over it, flattening it as one might calm a bird that had struck a window. The oil had taken the warmth of her skin; it felt alive, too aware. In the next room there was a faint clink, weights, perhaps, or Khatereh’s ledger being set down with deliberate care, and the sound landed in Simin’s chest like a reminder: everything here could be measured, even mercy.
Only when her breath had found its quieter rhythm did she draw back her hand and begin to work at the knot.
She opened the bundle as a clerk might open a seal that could ruin him. No tearing, no haste, the cord eased loose and set aside as if it too might be called to testify. The oiled paper unfolded with a faint sigh. Inside lay the pages she had bled her sleep into: copies taken in borrowed lamplight, so thin they held the lamp’s glow through them like skin held up to sun. Their edges were not clean. Sweat had worried at the corners; thumbprints had softened certain strokes where the ink should have stood crisp and proud. She could see, in the smudges, the nights she had pressed too hard, the moments she had listened for footsteps and kept writing anyway.
The script was not one voice. It began in the court’s measured throat then slipped, when no one was watching, into the quick angles of merchants: abbreviations, numbers hooked like fish, a mark for “paid” that could pass for a flourish. In the margins, small wounds of meaning: waqf notations in another hand, a ledger cross-reference, a date scraped and corrected. One clerk’s certainty overwritten by another’s fear.
She did not shove the bundle toward Khatereh as if contraband might burn the table. Instead Simin anchored the first sheet beneath two ink-stained fingers, claiming it the way a scribe claims a line before another hand can alter it, and began to guide her through the marks as through a narrow lane. “This is not the record you fear,” she said, voice kept careful and low. “It is the copy that survived the fear.”
Her nail hovered over the seal’s impression: a lion’s curve cut a hair too deep, the tiniest overbite where a knife had skidded: fatigue made visible. Then she traced the breathless crowding of lines, the spacing tightened where a replacement had been rushed to fill a dead man’s absence. At the word for endowment, she showed how a true court hand binds its letters; at quarantine, how the same binding falters when the writer is imitating more than writing.
Khatereh tested her without malice: she drew a later sheet as one draws a lot, and set questions like weights upon a scale. Simin let each fall and balanced them, unruffled. These dates counted by court moons, these by market weeks; this name hidden behind an honorific like a veil; here the waqf man’s meddling, bleeding through where ink was too fresh to tell the truth. When Nushin leaned close, Simin turned the page to their hunger: the quarantine writ borrowing its tongue from ration orders, seals that should have slept in one drawer turning up, the same week, in districts that did not touch.
Only when the reading was finished did she permit the act of giving. She split the leaves as one portions medicine: two bundles, two cords, two hiding-places named in a voice stripped of comfort: one under a dye-jar’s false bottom, one in a roof-beam wrapped in oilcloth. “Show this to the guild-head, not his cousin,” she said. “Never to a clerk who smiles. If questioned: I carry accounts for a widow.”
Khatereh took the first bundle as if accepting a guest’s coat. Without ceremony, without the smallest pause to ask which door it had come through. Yet her fingers did not close on it with the carelessness of habit. She let it settle into her palm and measured it there, the way she would measure coin by feel when a moneylender’s eyes were too eager. Paper had a weight beyond its reed-fibers: the weight of whose name could be lifted from a life, whose roof could be reclassified as “empty” by a single line.
For an instant her thumb pressed along the cord, testing the knot. Not a child’s clumsy twist, not a porter’s rough loop: something learned in rooms where one keeps two records, one for God and one for men. The gesture was small, almost domestic, and it betrayed her; her gaze flicked up, quick as a needle pricking cloth, and landed not on Simin’s face but on Simin’s hands.
Ink lived there like an old bruise. It was ground into the soft crescents beneath the nails, darkened in the seams of the knuckles where washing never quite reached, and the fingertips bore that faint shine of wax and oil a careful thief of locks learns to leave behind. Hands like that had held a reed pen long enough to make the bone honest; they had also held doors that did not want to open.
Simin offered the packet level, neither furtive nor pleading. The steadiness was its own kind of defiance: a receipt presented for an owed payment, not contraband passed under a table. Her shoulders remained drawn in, the young man’s posture she wore like a cloak, and her voice (when she added the last instruction, only a syllable or two) did not climb, did not soften, did not ask to be believed.
Khatereh’s mouth tightened, not in suspicion but in recognition of a discipline she had seen in widows and in clerks who survived purges. She tucked the bundle into her sleeve with practiced modesty, as if it were nothing more than a list of bales, and in that motion the room grew narrower, safer: and more dangerous.
Nushin took the second bundle the way they took a pulse: two fingers, no flourish, attention narrowed to what mattered. They did not read for story. They skimmed for hemorrhage: ink that bled beyond its lines, dates that clustered too neatly, seals pressed with a hand that trembled or one that knew its own authority. A healer’s economy governed even paper; the page was a body, the phrases its fever, the margins its bruises.
They loosened the cord, lifted the top leaf, and their thumb paused on a formula that should have belonged to a ration notice, not a quarantine writ. Another line carried a clerk’s habit of abbreviating honorifics, the sort of laziness that only appears when a man believes his work will never be questioned. Nushin’s eyes moved in small, decisive jumps, counting, comparing, discarding.
Simin spoke over their shoulder. Short instructions, each cut clean: which gate to avoid, which alley now watched, which name could be spoken and which must be swallowed. Nushin listened, and again and again their gaze snagged on the same consistencies: breath kept even, shoulders drawn inward as if to pass beneath notice, a voice that would not break into panic even when it named raids and cordons.
A hush opened between them, thin as a knife-blade, while Khatereh laid the leaves beside the lamp and Nushin wound the cord back into obedience. In that measured interval Simin felt the old habits, whimpering gratitude, the reflex to shrink, slide away like a discarded veil. She did not offer her innocence as alms. She did not bow her head to the danger she had brought into the room.
Instead she counted hazards as if reciting a market price: which guard had begun taking bribes in copper rather than cloth, which alley near the Qeysarieh now smelled of vinegar and informants, how a quarantine seal could be copied but not the hand that applied it. She named what would happen if the pages were moved too soon, and what would happen if they were not moved at all. Then she stopped. She waited, steady, as though partnership were the natural shape of things, and refusal merely another kind of answer.
Khatereh did not ask about the seals or the dates. Her question slid sideways, quiet as a blade drawn under cloth. “Who taught you to set a clerk’s hand so cleanly?” Simin’s throat worked once; the answer came level, trimmed to its bones, an apprenticeship, a desk, long hours copying petitions, no name, no city. Not fear, but choice. Khatereh’s gaze warmed, not kindly: recalculating.
Nushin said nothing of what their eyes had learned, yet their body answered: a half-step nearer, a shoulder turned to block the doorway’s sightline, not to trap but to shelter. The shift was small, unmistakable as a hand laid over a candle’s flame. Simin accepted it without thanks. The felt cap, the lowered voice. No longer a hiding place, but a deliberate leverage, like a seal-ring or a pick.
Khatereh’s hands moved as if she were counting bolts of cloth by touch. She did not reach for the pages again; she reached for what could be spent to keep them alive. “There is a room,” she said, and the words landed with the weight of keys rather than comfort. “Above my dyer’s shop off the lane that runs behind the spice-arcade. The stair is narrow; the door opens inward; the window looks onto nothing worth watching. Men come and go there with baskets and stained fingers. No one asks why a young clerk keeps odd hours.”
She glanced at Simin’s cap, at the careful set of her shoulders. A merchant’s assessment, not a woman’s pity. “A porter, too. Javad. He owes my husband’s estate, and he hates owing. He will carry what I tell him to carry, and he will not open the bundle. If he is stopped, he will say it is alum and indigo; he will smell like it, because I will make sure of that.”
From the fold of her scarf she drew a thin strip of paper, already creased where it had been handled and hidden. No seal showed. Only a name written with the plain authority of someone who had been answered before. “And this,” she said, setting it down as one sets down a weight on a scale. “A mouth-name. Not a patron’s letter (those rot quickly) but a name that a gate-captain recognizes, spoken in the right tone at the right hour. Use it once, perhaps twice, and then never again.”
Simin watched the inventory assemble itself: room, man, name. Each item was a doorway and a noose.
Khatereh’s gaze did not soften. “These are not gifts. They are protections I can afford only if the danger stays bounded. If your quarrel brings the guards into my courtyard, if your plague-scented papers draw a quarantine seal onto my shops, my household will starve on your truth. Keep your trouble off my estate.” She paused. “And in return, you will sleep where I tell you, move when I say, and leave no trace that points back to me.”
Nushin’s reply did not rise to argument; it settled, precise as a bandage laid over a wound. They crouched and drew with two vinegar-stained fingers upon the packed-earth floor, as if dust could hold a city’s rules. A line for the square’s bright throat, then a blunt curve away from it: alleys that smelled of dye and stale water, where the cordons were thinner because the officials preferred not to be seen there. A gap marked with a tap of nail: the hour after the second call to prayer when a medic’s satchel, if it reeks properly of herbs and sour cloth, is waved through without hands searching for contraband. Another tap, harder: a checkpoint where the captain counts bodies more than papers, and can be made to look toward the river by the right shout, the right urgency, the right kind of fear.
Then Nushin stilled. Their hand remained on the floor a breath too long, making the pause its own seal. “You will not run errands to prove courage,” they said, voice low enough to be mistaken for prayer. “You will not go alone. You will not improvise at a gate and make me choose between a lie and blood.”
Simin set the bundle down between them as if it were bread and poison both. The pages were not one story but many, stitched together by the stubborn sameness of ink: the same clerk’s hurried tail on certain letters, the same impressed border where a seal had bitten too deep, the same date repeated in two offices that swore they kept separate calendars. She did not ask them to trust her; she gave them work. “Look,” she said, and fell silent again, letting the paper speak in the only tongue the court truly respected.
Khatereh’s thumb traced margins the way she would test cloth for fraud, finding where a hand had trembled, where a line had been ruled and then corrected. Nushin angled the sheets toward the light, catching the ghost of sigils, health writs, registry marks, aligning like wounds that had been dressed to look accidental. The ugliness was orderly. That was what made it dangerous.
Something in the room rebalanced, not into warmth but into accounting. Suspicion did not vanish; it was priced. Each of them now held a portion the others could not replace, and that made betrayal less temptation than weapon. Their speech shed comfort and took on clauses: what would be hidden, what would be shown, which names would be spoken, and what would be done if any one of them was seized.
They struck terms without calling it trust. Khatereh would rinse their movements through commerce: porters’ tallies, bale-seals, a widow’s errands that no clerk wished to question. Nushin would rinse their presence through necessity: a medic’s satchel, a sanctioned knock at a cordon, the authority of sickness. Simin would rinse truth through repetition: copies nested in ledgers, dates cross-lit against each other, her own face held steady behind the borrowed boy.
Khatereh cleared a space on the low table as if she were preparing to measure cloth for a buyer who lied with his smile. The lamp was turned down; the room accepted shadow the way a courtroom accepted silence. She spread the copied pages in a fan, flattening each curl with the side of her palm. Paper made a softer sound than silk, but she treated it with the same suspicion. Watching how the fibers took the light, how the ink sat on the surface or sank, how a margin had been shaved too close as though someone had hurried to make truth fit an allotted shape.
“This one travels,” she said at last, tapping a sheet where a seal’s bite had left a bruised border. “Not in a man’s sleeve. Too obvious.” Her finger moved, decisive, along the line of a clerk’s hand. “This one stays near me, because if I am questioned I can turn it into ordinary complaint: an estate matter, a widow’s inconvenience. And these…” She gathered two pages together, not tearing them, not even creasing them, yet the gesture held a sentence of erasure. “These must vanish into plain sight. Into accounts. Into repetition.”
Nushin watched without comment, but the medic’s gaze counted exits, counted who would die if a page went missing. Simin kept her hands folded in her lap, the boy’s posture practiced, throat tight with the old hunger that was not only for food. She listened as if listening were a form of obedience that could be traded for safety.
Khatereh began to assign each sheet a future: which would be recopied in a tidier hand, which would be smeared with harmless arithmetic and tucked among bale tallies, which would be carried only as a memory. The plan had the clean cruelty of good bookkeeping.
“Now,” Khatereh said, and did not soften it, “you will tell it back to me.”
Simin repeated the order. Once, and again, until her tongue no longer stumbled on sequence. Until hiding became a route her mind could walk in darkness, even if her body was shaken awake to run.
One bundle, Khatereh decided, must be hidden where piety itself built shelves and forgot what it stacked. Not in her house, not in any man’s sleeve, but in the waqf’s own paper-belly. Among the endowment tallies that fed lamps and bread, the dull columns of rent, oil, repairs, and prayer-mats. She had Simin re-copy the page in a clerk’s calm, obedient hand, the sort that never rose in anger, never dipped in haste: straight lines, patient spacing, the very look of harmlessness. Then Khatereh took needle and thread as if mending a hem, and stitched the sheet between two months of figures, where the ink’s odor was old and respectable and every margin had already learned to keep secrets.
Simin watched the way a thief watches locks: not for beauty, but for weakness. The genius was not only concealment, but direction. Khatereh would arrange its “discovery” like a chore: a minor dispute over skimming, a complaint lodged at the right desk, a ledger fetched in public and read in private by the kind of auditor who knew that monotony was often a mask. Only such a reader would look twice at bland arithmetic. And find a scandal breathing beneath it.
The second set did not go to ground in holiness but in trade, where paper was meant to be handled until it became dull. Khatereh wrapped the copies in a nest of receipts, oil, dye, lamp-wick, barley, each signed in ink that meant nothing beyond its small necessity. She brushed warm wax along the fold, not to make it sacred, only to make it annoying: a seal that would take time to break, time a man feared to spend when others watched. Then she bound the packet with inventory string and slid it into the mouth of her accounts ledger, where sums marched like soldiers and swallowed contraband.
On the page above, she altered a single entry so that any greedy hand, seeing profit, would keep the bundle intact for proof rather than rip it open in impatience.
Nushin would not carry the most perilous names in ink at all. They drew them up into the safer vault of the skull, stripping each to its hard parts: a date that matched a cordon order, a seal’s flaw, a clerk’s habitual flourish, a property line that shifted whenever sickness was announced. A chain of cues, spare as a ration. Enough to speak at a hearing or a gate, and still leave the originals unbetrayed.
Simin mouthed the steps like a prayer learned in hiding: petition, witness, seal, not in any proud order but in the one the clerks’ hands would accept when the ink-well was low and the hall distracted. They named their levers softly. One scribe could be trapped by his own neatness; one gate-guard delayed by impeccable salutations; one lie would fail when the same datum surfaced thrice, unbidden, in separate books.
Dusk did not fall in Isfahan so much as it was negotiated: light lingering on the blue ribs of the domes, then being pressed back, step by step, by shadow from the arcades. The square held its splendor the way a patient holds breath. Tiles caught the last sun and returned it, thin as coin-gleam, while below them the day’s heat loosened its grip and the air turned sharp with preparations. Vinegar dashed on thresholds, bowls of smoldering rue, little brass pots set to hiss and spit at the feet of doorways.
The incense did not sweeten anything; it scored the throat. It braided itself with market dust and with the sour breath of animals, with the last cries of hawkers who had learned to sell quickly, before speech itself became a risk. Late buyers moved with a tension that made even ordinary gestures look furtive: a hand weighing dates, another slipping a copper into a palm, a third wiping sweat as if sweat were evidence. Above them, pigeons cut the cooling air in tight circles, unsettled by the shifting of shutters and the sudden hard clack of latches.
Then the calls began. First one voice, then another taking it up like a refrain that belonged to the city more than to any man. Not a shout, not anger; measured words with the calm authority of habit. Curfew. Gates. The hour when a street could change its nature without changing its stones. People listened without appearing to listen. Faces stayed angled toward goods, toward doorways, toward the familiar geometry of the square, and yet every body turned slightly inward, counting the distance to home as if to a well.
The beauty of Naqsh-e Jahan became a clock-face at that hour, its hands made of shadow. Each moment was a small tightening. Each shopfront, lowering its wooden lid, sounded like an eyelid closing over a watching eye.
Simin touched the rim of her felt cap as if merely steadying it against the evening draft, but the motion was a private correction: hair tucked, ears half-shadowed, the last softness of her face denied. She drew her shoulders in, letting the qabā cloak hang straighter, and made her stance economical: the way boys stood when they had learned early that attention was a tax. Hunger hollowed her middle and travel had left dust at the seams of her sleeves, yet she kept her mouth set in the small, indifferent line of a minor clerk who has nothing to sell but time.
Under her arm lay a bundle wrapped in coarse cloth, tied with a strip of twine rubbed smooth by reuse. It rode against her ribs like a second heartbeat. It might have been cloth bought on credit, a merchant’s thin ledger, a gift for a cousin; it might have been nothing at all. That ambiguity was its only protection, and she held it with the careless firmness of habit.
She let her pace be borrowed from the stream of traders spilling out from the arcades, neither hurrying nor lingering, eyes lowered to wares, then lifted briefly to measure gaps, corners, the quiet angles where a watcher would stand. Her voice, when she murmured a courtesy to pass, stayed low enough to be mistaken for any young man’s.
At a corner where the Qeysarieh gate threw a long, cooling shadow, Simin let the current of bodies take her, turning as if to avoid a mule’s swinging pannier. Khatereh emerged from the same tide: no announcement, only the sober fall of her scarf and the clean certainty of her hands. They did not face one another. Simin’s elbow brushed Khatereh’s sleeve; in the small shelter between their cloaks, a single copied page slid from coarse cloth to waiting palm, the exchange as unremarkable as passing a receipt for dyed thread. Khatereh’s fingers closed, dry and decisive, and the paper vanished into the inner fold at her waist. Her porter, broad-backed and expressionless, drifted half a step outward, becoming suddenly the only thing a curious eye could see.
A few steps on, the sharp reek of vinegar and crushed herbs reached her first, as if the air itself announced a medic before any uniform did. Nushin crossed in the opposite stream, satchel swinging low; its worn leather brushed Simin’s cloak with practiced accident. Her fingers slipped to the outer seam and found the second sheet, folded small, hidden like a stitch. No greeting. Only Nushin’s level glance: divided proof, made stubborn.
As the first shutters dropped, wood on wood (an unceremonious finality) Simin loosened her grip on her own urgency and wore the hour like everyone else. A youth obeying curfew, nothing more: head bowed, bundle hugged close, steps kept modest. The rules still cinched the city like a tourniquet, yet she felt the difference: what she carried had already been divided, slipped into other lives, made common enough to endure.