“And proud of it.”
She tried to stir, fresh thoughts racing through her. “Who else knows I’m here?”
“No one. Just the doctor and he won’t talk.” Kourosh thrust a thumb back at himself. “He owes me.”
At last Evira gazed about her. They were in a single room which featured a partially boarded-up window not far from her perch. The room had only the assorted crates and a single battered chair for furniture. A large collection of American comic books was gathered on the floor with several selections pinned to the wall as a kind of wallpaper.
“You brought me here? By yourself?”
“We’re not that far from the factory. Just a few blocks.”
“You live here.”
“I live here,” the boy said, and lowered his face. Then it brightened. “It’s my home, better than lots have got, too.”
“You were in the factory when the soldiers came.”
Kourosh nodded.
“You saw what happened before I arrived?”
Another nod, then a sigh. “They sent me on an errand. I always come and go through the basement because there’s less chance of being seen. I had just come back when I heard the shooting. I could tell they weren’t our guns. I know the sounds.”
“But you didn’t run. You stayed.”
“Because I knew you were coming. I wanted to warn you, but I had to hide when more of the soldiers came. I hid in the basement, in the rafters.”
“Lucky for me …”
Kourosh smiled at her, and in that moment Evira saw him as the boy he should have been but in this world was not allowed to be. He was a creature of a society that no longer knew or understood youth and so refused to permit it.
“You should rest,” he told her.
“I’ve rested enough.”
“You must get your strength back.”
“Can you bring the others to me?”
Kourosh shrugged his small and weary shoulders. “There are no others.”
“But the underground …”
“The ones I know — rounded up, gone, or dead back at the factory.”
“The doctor?”
“I looked for him this morning. He’s gone too.”
Damn, Evira thought, I’m alone here….
“I know why you came,” Kourosh said suddenly. “You came to kill the animal Hassani and the underground was going to help you.”
Evira forced herself part way up through the pain.
“You don’t need them,” the boy continued. “I can help you. I know the city and I know where you can find him.”
“Where?”
“He’s moved into the royal palace that the Shah built in Niavarin. I can get you in there. I’ve got a way. When you’re ready.”
She found her shoulders slumping back to the tattered mattress in spite of her efforts to keep them upright. “That might be quite awhile.”
“You’re strong. I saw what you did in the factory basement. A few more days, that’s all.”
“With you taking care of me, I don’t doubt it.”
“I know how to change your bandages. The doctor, he showed me. I already changed them once while you were asleep.”
“Well,” she said, “if we’re going to be partners I’d better know more about you than your name.”
Evira forgot her pain while she listened to his story. Kourosh was an orphan, as she suspected. He had been born nearly twelve years before. There had been little good about his life at the start and things got rapidly worse. The war with Iraq took his father by conscription and returned him in a box. With no means of support, his mother placed seven-year-old Kourosh in a school supported by the Revolutionary Council, and it was from there just over two years later that he too was conscripted into the army.
With soldiers falling to Iraq at a frightening clip, the decision was made to utilize children on the front lines. Initially they were given some training and armed. But as armaments began to grow scarce, they were simply sent with clubs and sticks into Iraqi strongholds or used to clear mine fields. Each life lost by a boy meant one kept by a man who could thus continue fighting for the true Islamic destiny. The Revolutionary Council needed no further justifications because no one was pressing for any.
Kourosh was meant to die in one of the attack waves. They trimmed his hair short and dressed him like a soldier. Then he and the others were packed into trucks and transported west on a rain-swept day. Several of the trucks ran off the muddy roads and the boys were sent off to sit amongst the trees while the still-functional trucks were used to drag the others back on to the road. There were soldiers watching them, of course, but they couldn’t watch everybody. When the children were herded over to help push one of the trucks from a ditch, Kourosh escaped into the woods with several other boys.
For a time it was a great adventure. The boys were older than he and they let him tag along until they reached Tehran, where they were determined to become criminals and rob women of their money and groceries. Kourosh couldn’t accept that. Each woman they accosted reminded him of his mother, vague as she was in his memory, and he strayed from the others and eventually went out on his own. It had been years since he had been home, but he remembered his address and returned to it.
His mother wasn’t there. No one knew where she was.
Kourosh returned to the streets, and the streets became his only parents. He stole what he had to in order to eat. He found the empty room to which he later brought Evira and moved in. From spaces between the boards over his window he could see the plastics factory and thus observe who came and went there. Many a night he heard the faint rush of footsteps heading toward it and came to recognize the regulars who frequented the building. He judged they were counterrevolutionaries drawn from frustrated students, the heroes of the poor, and wished he were old enough to join them. In his imagination they became his friends and companions, the only ones he had.
One night, he noticed that a guard was lingering around the plastics building. When the guardsman departed, Kourosh didn’t hesitate at all. He rushed from his room across the street and through the door he had seen entered so many times. Inside he found the students in a large conference room. At first they regarded his rantings as a playful nuisance, but Kourosh got enough of their attention to convince them a raid was coming. All underground movements learn to move quickly and cover their tracks, and by the time the raid occurred less than an hour later all evidence of their presence had been erased. As a result, the boy became a fixture in their midst, asking nothing in return, though a few of the students kept him as clean as they could, kept him well fed, and endeavored to teach him English, using the comic books, he explained, as tools.
“You really think you can get me into the palace when Hassani is there?” she asked him when he was finished.
“I told you I could, didn’t I?”
“Then why don’t you tell me how. Let’s start with a map.”
The four old men sat at the shaded table in the backyard of the spacious home in the city of Hertzelia, the posh suburb a half hour outside of Tel Aviv. The two directly across from one another were huddled in deep concentration over a checkerboard with nearly the same number of black pieces remaining as red. The paler of the two, a gaunt man with three days stubble upon his cheeks, jumped a black with his red.
“King me!” he demanded triumphantly.
His slightly older opponent, a short pudgy man with only the remnants of his hair, humphed in response and slammed a captured red back into the game.
“Damn you, Abraham. You play meshuge.”
“Go ahead, damn me, Isaac. Damn me all you want. This time I’m winning.”