“Show some identification,” the Guardsman said.
Maryam said, “Let us through. It’s late, and we need to find a hotel. We can’t waste all night here.”
“Neither can we. After we have examined your papers, we will be glad to let you on your way.”
Darius’s hand settled on the Browning. The men with the G-3s were no more an impediment than the flimsy wood of the semaphore. As the gun slid from his pocket, a voice declared, “I know them,” and Darius strained to see into the oat field, where the helicopter was cooling its engine, the rotor pinwheeling in the wind.
Three men had emerged from the Huey. One of them, clad in fatigues and black military boots, walked up to the barricade with the stiff, forceful gait of an athlete gone to seed but still to be reckoned with. Darius didn’t recognize him as Baraheni until he strode into the light.
In his hurry to get at the car Baraheni pushed the Guardsman out of the way. “Did you really, in your fondest dream, believe we would let you near the border?” he said to Darius. “We have been following you in the air since before you entered Azerbaijan.”
“We came this far,” Darius answered. “Who is to say how far our luck would take us?”
“Luck was all you had, and already you have used up every bit of it. We are better prepared.” Baraheni snatched the light from the Guardsman, and shined it into the Paycon. “Where are the mycotoxins?”
“What makes you think we found them?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence. You would not leave Iran without them. We know how tenacious you are. In your way, you are also a fanatic. That is why we put obstacles in your path, so you would look that much harder.”
More Guardsmen came out of the shed to surround the car on three sides, and then Ashfar broke through the circle and bore into Darius with his gaze. “We know you have them,” he said. “Where are they?”
Darius eyed the knapsack between his heels.
Ashfar could not help but smile. “Personally, I would have kept them in the trunk. What if, God forbid, you had an accident?”
“Hand them over.” Baraheni tugged at the driver’s door. “Open it, and then step out. You, too,” he said to Maryam.
As Darius hoisted the bag onto the seat, Baraheni reached inside the car. Reflexively—his hand two steps ahead of his brain, which subsequently would be asked permission for what he was about to do—Darius grabbed him by the hair, and rolled the window under the big man’s chin.
Baraheni shouted, “Fuck your—”
Darius whipped out the Browning, and stuffed the barrel into Baraheni’s mouth. The Guardsmen leveled their weapons and looked toward Ashfar, who said nothing as Darius tromped on the gas. The Paycon lurched ahead with the suddenness of a desert animal, but none of the grace, dragging Baraheni along with it.
Maryam covered her head in her arms as the semaphore splintered against the windshield. “You can’t believe we’ll outrun them.”
She glanced back at the barricade. The Guardsmen were still waiting for instructions; some had pointed their guns toward the ground. Bijan stepped into the light with a finger aimed at the highway, and a ragged fusillade spurred the car faster. Maryam pressed her chin against her knees as another volley rang out, and then slowly she raised her head. “Look at him.”
Baraheni’s snub features had gone waxen, and were melting into his face. The back of his head flapped like a loose door in the wind before flying off as the Paycon picked up speed. Darius withdrew the gun, and the big man’s mouth snapped shut, and then it sagged. Blood exploded into the car from both nostrils, as though an artery had been sectioned through them. Darius grabbed the window crank, but couldn’t budge it.
“Steer,” he said.
“I can’t drive.”
He wrapped her fingers around the wheel. He pushed the glass down into the door with his left hand, while trying to work Baraheni’s head out through the enlarged opening. The crank still did not move, then twirled uselessly as he forced it with both hands.
A flatbed truck rounded a curve riding the center stripe, and the rear end swung into their lane. Darius took back the wheel and angled the Paycon to the right. A long load of scrap metal flying a red rag flag clipped the body dragging from his door. The Paycon caromed onto the weedy shoulder, a dry breeze sweeping the front seat over the jagged glass where Baraheni had been.
The lights in his mirror brightened while the car plodded through the tall brush. Two vehicles—possibly more—had left the checkpoint after them. Their pursuers slowed as they came alongside the truck, and a short distance beyond it they stopped. Darius saw men on the pavement. They walked six abreast, then crouched in a circle as the lights became pinpoints and then went out.
The Paycon’s high beams flushed mulberry trees from the night in tidy groves behind mud-brick walls. A hairpin turn coming up without warning threw Maryam against him. She said, “Oooh,” as the breath was jarred out of her, but made no comment, her silence questioning his hurry when there was no place to go. He held the Paycon at high speed for ten minutes, and just as his nerves had started to lose their edge, and Maryam was saying, “They’ve stopped following us,” the highway was bathed in bright light.
“What’s that?” Maryam lowered her window, and poked her head outside.
The eggbeater sound of the helicopter was everywhere. Darius pulled her in as gunfire raked the blacktop. He kicked harder at the gas, but his foot was already on the floor. The Huey dropped to treetop level, daring them to enter the splash of light it claimed for its own. Darius veered onto the distant shoulder as more rifle fire rained down. The helicopter floated away to position itself three hundred meters ahead. A bus was approaching in the left lane, and Darius came back onto the pavement and timed their entry into the light so that the Paycon was side by side with it. The Huey held fire, then bounded off to set up another ambush.
The farmland confined them to an asphalt corridor. Beyond the distant shoulder the mulberry trees stretched on indefinitely; but outside Maryam’s window they gave way to an almond orchard surrounded by a tumbledown wall. Darius cut his lights, and the Paycon left the pavement through a gap in the brick, which it widened with its fenders. The helicopter hovered over the grove like a gargantuan dragonfly rustling the leaves with the beat of its wings, inscribing circles in the green-black canopy that encompassed a smaller area around the car with each pass. Then it banked sharply, and settled on the highway, and Guardsmen in full battle dress jumped out.
Edging through the trees, Darius did not let the speedometer needle much above five. The powdery earth afforded little traction to the light car, which spun its wheels in frustration. The grove was larger than he had anticipated, the almond trees yielding to walnuts and then a stand of immature chestnuts before the Paycon crashed through the ruins of another wall into neat grain fields pampered like garden plots. Darius estimated they had traveled two kilometers when he felt a hard surface again, and they came out onto a rutted lane of crushed rock.
“Which way?” Maryam asked.
Darius flashed his lights. In a pasture across the lane a donkey was tethered to a wagon without wheels. Darius got out of the car murmuring softly to the animal, which ignored him as it browsed on brown grass.
“What are you doing there?” Maryam said.
Darius stroked the animal’s coat, and scratched behind the ears. “We’d blend into the countryside lots easier with a donkey.”
“I don’t want to blend in.” Maryam said. “I want to get out.”
He untied the animal, and tugged at the rope. The donkey did not move. He slapped its rump and the donkey stepped back without raising its head from the grass.
“Apparently, he thinks he’ll be safer without us,” Maryam said.
The donkey was nibbling between Darius’s feet as a farm truck jolted to a halt not five meters away. One headlamp was not aimed properly. Like a wandering eye it probed the man in the patchy field. Someone called out to him in Azerbaijani, and Maryam r
esponded in the same language.
“What did he say?” Darius asked her.
“We don’t belong here. I told him to mind his own business, but he’s not going to leave till he has a better answer.” She cocked her head while the man said several more words. “He wants to know what we want in this field.”
“Tell him privacy. Tell him we had some, and we’d like it back.”
Maryam spoke slowly, her accent apparent to Darius though he had a few words of the language at best. During a prolonged silence, as she squinted at the truck unsure that anything she had said had gotten across, the men began laughing, a lunatic howl that went on so long Darius began to search the blank sky for a full moon. Gradually the hysterics subsided, one of the men coming to his senses ahead of his companions. When the old man talked to them again the humor was gone from his voice.
“Now what does he want?” Darius asked.
“He says he knows what we’re doing here,” Maryam said, “what we’re really doing.”
The farm truck clattered up to the Paycon, and Darius saw that it was a Ford, at least forty years old, with running boards eaten through with rust and a spare tire in the fender well. The old man at the wheel was wearing a karakul hat and a double-breasted suit with wide stripes that had been in fashion when the truck was new. Beside him were two men, considerably younger, although not so young that they were not showing some gray. The shallow lines in their forehead and cheeks were a blueprint for the old man’s scowl; well before they were forty, Darius thought, they would weather into exact copies of him. One of them addressed Darius in a mixture of Farsi and Arabic that was as good as Maryam’s Azerbaijani.
“There is a Komiteh roadblock on the highway not seventy kilometers ahead. If you would like, my father will be glad to take you around it. It is on the way to where we live.”
“I wouldn’t go anywhere with them,” Maryam whispered to Darius.
“We don’t have a choice,” he said. “Thank the old man, and tell him we’ll be glad to give him some money.”
“… He won’t take anything.” Maryam translated the reply “He says it’s his privilege to help anyone who wants to leave Iran.”
“Ask him if there have been many.”
Maryam spoke haltingly to the old man, who laughed again in his lunatic way.
“Not nearly enough,” his son answered, and lit a cigarette from a wood match.
Under the dust Maryam saw that the truck once had been blue, but was now a colorless amalgam of primer and body putty. The passenger door opened for her. The old man’s sons carried their weight in their hips and thighs, and were broad across the shoulders, a full load by themselves. She looked at Darius, who went back to the Paycon for the knapsack, and then led her around to the rear of the truck. Two dusty dogs lunged at them, spraying hot slobber as they were brought up short at the end of a heavy chain.
“There is no need for you to ride outside,” one of the younger men said. “We will make room.”
He hopped into the back with the dogs, and Maryam slithered onto the seat beside his brother. Darius squeezed in after her as the truck lurched forward on sagging springs. The old man ground through the gears, sending oily fumes inside the cabin, but the truck did not seem to gather speed. Maryam began to cough. With every bump her head grazed the ceiling. A hand brushed her leg, slid deliberately along her thigh, and settled close to her lap. The fingers, which did not stop moving, felt like worms.
The old man started up a rapid patter from which she could extract only an occasional phrase. The son closest to him said in Farsi, “We have a farm not far from Khvoy. We went into Tabriz to have work done on our truck, and to visit friends. We see refugees in this part of the mountains all the time, and help them however we can. We are Iranian Azerbaijanis. One day, if God wills it, we will unite with our brothers in Azerbaijan, and our nation will be restored. In the meantime, this is what we do.”
Maryam nodded at the man, but he had not been speaking to her.
“This road doesn’t bypass any checkpoints,” Darius said to him. “Komiteh checkpoints are positioned on main highways to catch the traffic from feeder roads like this one.”
“You are correct,” the gray-haired man answered curtly. “Still, there is no need to be concerned. The checkpoint is two hours away. When we get there, it should be almost light. We will time our arrival for the moment of morning prayer, and while the guards are otherwise occupied, that is when we will pass through.”
“This is the way you always do it?”
The gray-haired man mumbled a few words to his father, and both men shrugged. “It will be the first time,” he said, “but it is a good idea just the same, don’t you think?”
The truck was moving so slowly that Darius was of the opinion they would make better time on foot. He glanced toward the speedometer, but the dashboard gauges all had been torn out. After an hour they passed a Shahsavan encampment in a pasture backed up against the mountains, several dozen round tents of black goat hair arranged in no particular order, and everywhere the great, bleating flocks the Shahsavans followed to the summer grazing lands in the high valleys.
A washout sent them far into a meadow, which returned to a section of the road that was axle-deep in water. The lane declined as it swung around a shrine with a green tile dome toward a cemetery in which the graves were designated by low lines of mud bricks that did not violate the religious edict that burial markers must not throw a shadow. Then they were on pavement again, and Darius saw the lights of the checkpoint. The old man laughed, and said something to his sons, who also laughed, and Darius began to wonder how great a bounty the government was paying in Azerbaijan for illegal refugees.
Darius counted more than twenty Guardsmen inspecting the traffic in both directions. A bus stopped ahead of them at the barricade, and when the door opened for the Guardsmen a sheep scampered off followed by a boy in baggy trousers. As the truck proceeded toward the adjacent bay, Darius noticed the first streaks of pink in the eastern sky. The Guardsmen spotted them, too, and turned their backs on the highway to kneel in the direction of the rising sun.
The old man did not ease up on the accelerator, but waved to the Guardsman who looked up at him in anger for disturbing his prayer. The truck shuddered as it roared away from the checkpoint, the wheel vibrating in the old man’s hand. He laughed some more, and said something to his son in the middle, who told Darius:
“This is how we will do it all the time from now on.”
Twenty kilometers between exits, at a place that seemed to have been chosen on a whim, the truck turned off into the hills and climbed a stone track to a poplar oasis, a muddy village hard by a stream that nurtured a few slender, silver trees. No one was about, except for a man coming down the main street on the back of a dispirited mule, and on foot alongside him a woman in a vest of red brocade and an ankle-length skirt worn over bright, pajamalike pants. The old man hailed the couple, and the woman gave him a long strip of the dimpled bread called naan sangak. He broke off a piece for himself, then passed the warm loaf to his sons. Darius pulled out several pebbles that had attached to the dough while it was being baked on a bed of stones, and shared what was left with Maryam.
The street branched off into a welter of twisting paths lined with puddled clay structures. An old woman came out of a two-story building, and looked Maryam up and down before saying something that made all the men laugh. When his sons had gone inside with her, their father brought Darius and Maryam to a shanty with a green door that crashed against the frame with every breath of wind.
“Stay here,” he said. “Stay till night.”
The single room behind the green door was black with the smoke from a crumbling fireplace. Disconnected patches of sunlight were projected through gaps in the wattle roof. Maryam lifted a dented teapot to her ear, and then spilled out a liter of rusty water. Ragged quilts of Kurdish design were balled up on the floor near a mound of goat droppings. Darius found matches, and ignited some k
har bushes left over from an earlier blaze, and soon sooty flames threw warmth into the area immediately in front of the fireplace.
“What do we do now?” Maryam said.
“We sleep. The Zagros are full of bandits; and the army patrols for illegals along with the Revolutionary Guards. It’s safer traveling after dark. We can start for the border then.”
“How will we get there without a car?”
The door creaked open, and the old woman came in with a tray that she set down on the quilt. There was more of the dimpled bread, glasses of tea, yogurt, and pungent goat cheese, fresh yellow cherries, and red-and-green peaches. The woman stood looking at them for a very long time, and was laughing again as she backed outside. Moments later, she returned with a bottle containing an amber fluid. Darius lifted the cork, and sniffing sweet date wine, smiled at the woman in appreciation.
“How—there aren’t any roads.”
“On foot,” he said. “There’s no other way.”
Through a chink in the clay Maryam looked out at the featureless mountains. Her teeth were chattering, and she stamped her feet on the floor. Darius spread the quilt close to the fireplace, offered her the first taste of the wine.
“You’re not opposed to alcohol?”
She took a long drink, and kept her hand on his wrist when he snatched away the bottle. “I’m freezing,” she announced. “Would you mind very much holding me in your arms?”
She sat between his knees, leaning toward the fire. He rubbed her shoulders, then clasped his hands together in her lap. The shaking of her body reminded him of a bird trying unsuccessfully to achieve flight. When he reached for the wine again, she wrapped his arms tightly around her. “Like this, please,” she said.
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