He sat in the chair with his hands pressed below his chin. Was it something about the room, the books, the North Atlantic light out the windows (mussel blue now); or was it the sudden death of his niece that brought back all those endless autumn afternoons—grief-stricken, alone—when he retreated to the library in Remsfjord? He’d been underground in Tehran for so long, hiding, that it frightened him to walk openly through the streets of Remsfjord, and the library was the only place in town he felt safe, tucked away, hidden among the stacks. No one bothered him there, and he could find a bit of news about Iran in the international papers. The library was the only place he felt remotely at home, among books, even though the books were composed in a completely foreign language.

Pars was the one who’d had to phone his sister in Shiraz. He who had to tell her the news about the crash, who heard, on the other end of the line, the shriek, the silence, the clattering phone, and then his brother-in-law picking up the receiver, saying, “What, what, what?” They’d wept over the phone. They’d howled. And this particular death—so shocking, so out the of blue—brought back all the other deaths of his years of exile: his brother (in the war), his cousin (in jail), his mother (old age), all the other party members of Edalat (assassinated). Each one he’d found out about over the phone, a midnight call from Shiraz or Tehran, the same howling over the trunk line, as if the phone were a conch shell: hollow, oceanic. Hold it up to your ear and hear: despair. He grew to hate the phone those years. Good news always traveled in letters, the bad by phone (for it was too expensive to call the States otherwise). He’d howled too on those nights, while the lights burned across the San Francisco Bay, and he wished he could go back there, if only for an hour, halfway across the world, to Tehran, and now Shiraz, to comfort his sister, to do his duty, to mourn. For he’d been unable to mourn properly all these years for everyone who’d died; unable to do so in public, with his family, at the graveside or in the home of the deceased. Always he was elsewhere, a cruel trick of geography. But returning to Iran meant he might be thrown in jail—or worse. For the last sixteen years, he’d had to meet his family overseas; they couldn’t get American visas. So they met once every few years in Berlin or Stockholm or Amsterdam, where they all gathered in a friend’s apartment for a week and sat on the floor and wept and laughed and ate the food his mother (now his sister or sisters-in-law) had prepared for days back in Tehran.