A motorcade of armored Mercedes was not an unusual sight in certain quarters of the city. In the working-class neighborhood of Molavi it stood out like a circus train. People stopped on the sidewalks and stared. Hamedi looked back through bulletproof glass and saw a distantly familiar place. The street was little different from a thousand others in south Tehran. In a long-settled victory of pragmatism over style, endless strings of tan tenements were crammed shoulder to shoulder, their earthen walls seeming to lean on one another like rows of dominos whose fall had been interrupted. He saw wires for electrical and phone service strung overhead like so much spaghetti, and from the main lines illegal shunts snaked brazenly through windows up and down the street. The scents were as ever, the urban tang of people and the stench of refuse, all cut by cinnamon and saffron drifting from kitchen windows.

Hamedi studied each face that passed, looking for any that seemed familiar. Mohammed, his best friend from grade school, or Simin Marzieh, the first girl he had ever kissed. He was sure they were here somewhere—assuming they were still alive. Hamedi had escaped these circumstances, but he was a rare exception. He did not delude himself that it was a matter of having worked harder to get ahead. Hamedi was the one inside the armored Mercedes because he could multiply six-digit numbers in his head at the age of five, and because he had earned his PhD in particle physics at the age of twenty-two. Hamedi had been given a gift from God, and he had not wasted it.

He craned his neck as they turned onto his old street, and soon he saw the building. It was a five-story affair, a weary testament to the color beige baked hard by fifty summers. Then he saw his mother. She was there at the threshold of her first-floor unit, sweeping the front step as he’d seen her do a thousand times. This was her never-ending crusade against the dust and wind, one that she would never win, and probably didn’t care to. “It is the battle that is important,” she would say. Even from a distance, Hamedi thought she looked different from when he’d last seen her, the back more bowed and the hair a lighter gray. The sharp olive eyes, however, he knew would be unchanged.

“Park across the street,” he ordered.

The driver nodded, and a bulky man in the passenger seat murmured something toward his collar. There were six more men in the other cars. The last time Hamedi had come here, a year ago, he’d been alone. That, he knew with certainty, was something that would never happen again.

The cars eased to a stop across the street from his old home. When Hamedi got out, the two men from his car followed and fell in step. “I don’t suppose I could ask you to stay here,” he said.