Back on Karada Street that night I drank copiously to her, to Zahra.

She had made a promise. If I managed to take her away from this land, she’d always, always bake us fresh bread. I would not grieve for her again, not like tonight. There were other martyrs on the way.

7

The domes shimmered on the canvases. I had never seen Miss Homa’s meticulous brushwork so kinetic. She’d pushed past seventy many years ago and I would have thought time would have eventually caught up to her. Time instead seemed to have turned on her afterburners. Back in the day she had picked lovers like grapes. Yet she never married. Always stayed “Miss Homa,” even during the darkest days of the revolution when she could barely afford her electric bill. Hers hadn’t been a rescue from obscurity but a chance at a second coming. It had been, like so much else with art, a matter of timing. Timing and profit. Now the world wanted her. People bid absurdly for the painted domes that just a few years ago no one would look twice at. They came to her door. Invited her, to no avail, to hideously wasteful parties in a country where every five minutes, on the dot, I would watch another hungry face stick their head in the corner dump by my synagogue.

Those domes were divine things—mosque interiors of earth color and turquoise. Her ancient house, right off Sheikh Hadi Street, a fifteen-minute walk from my own place, was built around a shallow pool. They didn’t make them like this anymore. This was old Tehran. Away from the soulless cubes of the nouveau riche north of the city. She could afford to live anywhere now but she stayed put, faithful to the house that had been handed down to her by her ancestors.

She came into the living room carrying a tray of tea and pastries. It was raining and just before coming here I had finally finished reading through the war diaries of the martyr Moalem in Syria. Moalem’s last sentence: God willing, death will be as perfect as a glove. I remembered the two of us in the red house. Moalem shelving his angry prostate and his wheezing chest for those minutes so he could defend nothing and no one, shouting for me to clock my rounds. How did one have a death as “perfect” as a glove?

Miss Homa had something to say about that. That was the reason I was here.

“You will take me with you over there next time. It is where I wish to die.”

“But you may not die, Miss Homa. You may live yet for a long time. Imagine all the amazing art you’ll produce.”

She looked at me with a mixture of pity and annoyance. “Art?”

“Yes, it’s what you do, after all.”