Zeinab put her chador on and left her apartment early in the morning. She had a lot to do that day. In the alley black flags were hanging above the doorways of several houses, signaling that someone in the household had been killed in the wretched war. At the mouth of the alley a hejleh was set up, a bunch of tiny bulbs lit inside its glass case and an enlarged photograph of a young man pasted on its front. Gholam Bozorgmeh, 16. Martyred on September 1983 in the holy war, fighting the evil Saddam Hussein and his ally, the Great Satan, America, was written in red ink beneath the photograph. Tears gathered in Zeinab’s eyes. Even though Tehran was not the direct target of Iraq’s attack reminders of it were visible everywhere she turned. Ali, her son, was 16 now and about to be drafted. Will I be able to get him exempted from it, was the question on her mind.

It had been wonderful last night to lie under the mosquito netting on the roof, seeing a trembling light that made her feel God was showing a bit of himself to her. That had excited her so much that she had sat up and stared for a long time at the moon, hoping for more signs. The sky was dazzling with all the stars, large and clear...

On Ghanat Abad Avenue there was another hejleh right next to the beet stall. The vendor in the stall was shouting, “I have the best, the sweetest beets in Tehran, they taste like sugar.” The vendor is so oblivious of the hejleh, Zeinab thought indignantly. But then she thought, that is one way to deal with the ever present tragedy.

She walked rapidly towards the bus station. She bought a ticket and got on the bus going to Ghom. She sat by the window and looked out but her mind was filled with images of herself going from office to office until she had gotten an appointment with Ayatollah Moghadessi about Ali, then the meeting they had in a mosque.

“Don’t you want your son to give himself up to the holy cause? If he’s martyred his soul will go directly to heaven.” He was a young man but his long dark beard and somber way of talking made him seem old for his age. “All the sins either one of you might have committed will be forgiven by God. What is the brief, wretched life we lead on this earth, compared to the blissful eternity in heaven?”

“Ayatollah Moghadessi, he’s my only son. My husband divorced me but my son chose to live with me. I have no one else in the world. All I can find is doing some cleaning for rich people but that’s only enough to pay our rent. My son works long hours at a gas station when his last class in high school is over.”

“Do you have proof that he’s your only son?”

“I can get proof,” she stammered. “Before him I gave birth to two other boys but they both died when they were children.” The pain of those losses were rushing back.

“Well then, take their dead certificates and your divorce document to War-Related Matters office,” the Ayatollah said, waving his hand, letting her know that she should leave now.

Am I going to be able to get proof today from the man in the morgue? Who knows I he is still there or if they keep records of all the dead people who pass through the morgue? The cemetery where they were buried was demolished by a bomb, their birth certificates were lost in a move from where she lived with her husband to her present place.

“I’m running away from my husband,” Zeinab heard the woman sitting in the seat in front of her to another woman next to her. “He’s frightening, the way he goes into a rage and starts throwing things at me.”

I was so frightened of my husband, Zeinab thought. He had taken her only daughter, Nasrin from her, forbidden visits, At least her son had come to her. The most joyous times of my life were when I was pregnant, she thought. The feeling she had then was like looking at the moon last night and being aware of God. Nasrin was a precocious baby, began to walk and talk early. On hot days she put her in a plastic pool and Nasrin splashed around or pushed the ball floating on its surface. Ali was a lively and happy, affectionate child, smiled easily, and with his eyes followed her around as if he didn’t want her out of his sight.

She got off the bus in Ghom and after she had walked a few blocks she recalled where the mortuary was. She started in its direction. The trees were teeming with cars racing by and pedestrians going in and out of shops.

The mortuary was a grim looking house on a quiet, rather deserted street. She walked several times on the door and waited. The houses on the street were in bad state, some of their roofs and windows shattered. She heard footsteps from the inside and an old man appeared at the door.

“Yes,” he said. He had yellowish, crooked teeth.

“I have to talk to you about two of my children, I brought here.”

“When was it?”

“It was years ago...” 

He was about to shut the door on her. She pleaded, “Please it’s very important. I have lost the death certificates... do you keep record...”

“Khanoom Jaan, do you know how many thousands of dead people are brought here?”

“Can I come in and talk to you?”

Reluctantly he let her inside. Through an open door she saw coffins lying around. There was a raised pool in the corner with several faucets and next to it a cemented platform. They washed the bodies on the platform before wrapping them in cloths and putting them in coffins to be taken away to the cemetery. She began to shudder-- she could see so vividly the small bodies of her children being washed on that hard and cold platform.

He led her into a room with few wooden benches in it and they sat down.

“Khanoom Jaan, can you refresh my memory?

“What can I tell you?Mohsen was five years old. He got malaria. I had my little niece with me when I came here. She got frightened and cried and clung to me. I remember a fly was buzzing around the air. You told my niece that the fly was the soul of her cousin. She was so happy to hear that; she stopped crying. Do you remember?”

He scratched his head, coughed and didn’t say anything.

She told him about her other son, Javad, getting killed when an ice cream truck came into the driveway and hit him. She added, “I have one son now and now they are going to draft him unless I can prove that I have no other sons who can support me. I’m divorced and my ex-husband doesn’t send us any money. I can’t even track him down. Will you write a letter that my sons were buried by you.  May God pay you back. I can pay you some toomans.” She fumbled in her purse and found the hundred tooman bill which she had received for some housework she had done. She needed it for her next month’s rent but she could see him opening up to the idea and so she handed the bill to him.

He went to the table in a corner and sat on a chair behind it. He began to write a letter and in a moment he gave it to her.

“This is to indicate that Mohsen and...” He had written down both of her sons names, had dated and signed the letter.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said, putting the letter in her purse and getting up.

As she headed towards the bus she felt a weight had been lifted off her chest.

In the morning she decided to go to the War-Related-Matters office and submit the letter and her divorce documents. Then she waited in the reception area along with other men and women. Everyone looked anxious. From their conversation she gathered that some of the men were there to enlist, some of the women to collect compensations because they had lost a son or husband to the war and they had no way to support themselves. Zeinab was anxious too, aware of hot and cold flashes on her skin. It was clearly going to be hours of waiting. She was just an insignificant figure in the eyes of the law, one among many others like her. The woman sitting next to her said, “I don’t know what’s happening to my son. I haven’t heard from him for weeks and there are no reports on him. I haven’t been able to find out anything about him.”

A name was called and the woman jumped to her feet. “That’s me,” she said and wandered to an office.

Finally, hours later, Zeinab was called in. The man sitting behind the desk was short, bald and bearded. His eyes had a cold gleam in them.

“Yes,” he said curtly.

Zeinab fumbled in her purse and took out the divorce document and the envelope with the letter the morgue man had written. She handed them to the official. “I had the honor to meet with Ayatollah Moghadessi. He instructed me to bring these documents here.”

“Your name?”

“Zeinab Abbasi.”

He looked through the document and the letter, while her heart thumped with anxiety.

“We’ll send you a letter with our decision,” he said so neutrally that she couldn’t assess what he was going to do.

Zeinab sat with Ali on the rug she had spread by the pool of the courtyard. She could understand why people always said he looked so much like her. They both had large hazel eyes, high foreheads, curly brown hair. Ali had once told her, “Mother, I’ so glad I don’t look like my father.” They were similar in other ways too. After returning home from a long day at school and then at the gas station he stayed up late and studied. He wanted to go for a higher education, do something with himself. She wanted that for him too, something she had wished for herself and never fulfilled. Instead she had been forced to quit high school to marry a man arranged for her by her parents.

They sipped on glasses of sharbat and she told him about her attempts to get him exempted. One of the women living in the row of rooms opposite the ones she and Ali shared had watered the plants and splashed water on the brick ground to cool it off and the air was fresh and fragment. Gold fish tumbled in the pool.

“What does it all mean, one day and then another passing?” Ali said in his philosophical way of talking.

“Isn’t it good enough for the two of us being alive and sitting here together?”

He said something strange. “Free your body, free your soul, die and be born again.”

Her mind drifted to her main concern, that the letter from the War-Related Matters Office hadn’t arrived. Maybe it is better not to know, she thought. Have a little more time to hope.

A few of the tenants who shared the courtyard came out and sat on the other side of the pool. “Only beggars benefit from this war, going from one wake to another and getting some food,” one of the women said to another.

The other woman said ruefully, “I have a job now, sewing buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms.”

A muezzin’s voice calling people to prayers, Allah O Akbar, rose above the conversation. Then he added, “Gather your courage and fight on, we’re near victory.”

“I’m cowardly,” Ali said. “I should go and fight.”

“Please,” Zeinab said. 

There was a knock on the door. Ali went to the door and returned with an envelope in his hand. He gave it to his mother. “It’s for you from the War-Related Matters office.”

Her hand shook as she opened it. She could feel Ali’s gaze on her, could hear her own hart beat. Among all the word on it she could only see, “Not exempted.” She felt a painful stirring inside her. Was God really a just God? Did he exist or he was an invention? Or else why would he take away my son? It was like she was falling into a large bottomless ravine.

Then she looked at the letter again and among all the words she saw, “Exempted.” She had a feeling she was in a dream, drifting through a maze of rooms, coming upon a familiar turn or looking out from behind a lacy curtain at a view, at events whose meaning was not quite clear to her.