The source of the sound was the tin channel of the cooler (air conditioner) and it made my heart tremble. Kamran jumped up and took refuge in a corner of the hallway. He looked petrified. He was staring at the window anxiously. It was the sound of a bird pecking.

"It is a pigeon son. It is pecking on the cooler on the roof."

He stared at my eyes: "A pigeon?"

"That gray bird that sits on our neighbor's wall. The one that sings when it is happy."

He leaned against the wall and went limp!

"It does not sit on the wall anymore. It does not sing anymore!"

"If it gets sunny, it will come again and it will sing again."

I looked at the black sky through the window. Yesterday's tornado had brought the clouds. The black hills were sitting on the peaks of the mountains of the northern part of the city. It did not rain, but it turned the day dark and gloomy like the evening. I leaned against a cushion and opened the book The Third Reich and gazed at the picture of the skeletons. My eyes fell on the dreadful eyes of the Fuhrer. The sound changed into something like tapping on a drum. It was my heart beating faster. A badly injured child was looking at me with a smile. Somebody was tapping on the roof. Maryam leaned against the kitchen door and pointed to the roof fearfully. Every sound made her tremble. I looked at her to make her talk. She had stopped talking since yesterday, when she saw that dreadfully wounded child.

I was reading The Third Reich, staring at a collective grave when the doors and windows started to shake. A sound like thunder burst, and Maryam screamed and ran to hug Kamran. In the rings of smoke and dust, I could only see the white of Maryam's eyes. I heard her scream: "He was just round the corner."

I opened the door. A gush of dust assaulted me in a wave-like fashion. I ran down the stairs. Everybody was running. The people, the walls, cars, nothing was in its own place. It was like everything had slowed down. The road had disappeared in the dust and smoke that blew over my face like a hurricane. While running I could hear the sirens of the ambulances. I hugged an old blood-covered man and picked him up. An ambulance was near the end of the alley. Its back door was open. I put the old man's trunk in the ambulance and pushed his feet. One of his legs separated and remained in my hands. The ambulance played its siren and left. I walked back dumbfounded. They had wrapped the child in a sheet and put it by the wall. The child's face was completely disfigured. The leg was still in my hand, bleeding. People were crowding around me. Maryam and Kamran made their way through the crowd. Kamran was looking at the child's face. Maryam was shaking. Somebody shouted, "Put the leg down…"

I put the bleeding leg next to the wounded child, took Maryam's and Kamran's hands and started to make my way through the crowd.

1. Taken from "More Naked than War," selection of short stories, collected by Hassan Asghari, Negah Sabz Publishing House, Tehran, 2001.