Little Stones

by Abbasian Asymmetric Strategy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Gholamreza Ranjbar lit the oven at four, as he had lit it every morning for twenty-six years, and while the flame took hold under the bed of stones he sat on a flour sack by the door and did the count.

The count was simple. Yesterday he had baked four hundred and ten loaves of sangak and sold four hundred and two. The eight left over had gone to the mosque on Khaniabad Street at closing. In the week before the missiles began he had baked six hundred and forty, and run out by ten.

He did not write these numbers down. He did not need to. A baker in south Tehran knows his street the way a shepherd knows his flock, by the gaps, and the gaps that spring of 1367 had a shape he could feel without looking: the Mirzaei family, who took six loaves every morning, had not come for nine days; the two sisters from the alley behind the bathhouse had stopped coming the morning after the rocket on Shush; the clerk from the bank had come every day until Thursday, then not.

Two hundred and thirty loaves, gone from the street. Twelve hundred people, perhaps, if you counted by the bread. They went every evening in buses and the backs of pickups, out to Karaj and Varamin and the villages in the hills, to sleep where Baghdad did not aim. Some came back in the morning to work. Every week fewer came back.

Nasir came in at half past four, rubbing his hands. He was from Herat, twenty-two, and had worked the dough for Ranjbar for three years with his sleeves rolled to the shoulder and a cigarette behind his ear that he never lit inside. He looked at the oven, at the stones beginning to tick in the heat, and then at the stacked sacks.

"Four hundred again, Ostad?"

"Four hundred."

Nasir nodded and began. He did not ask why not three hundred and eighty, which was what yesterday had earned, and Ranjbar did not explain. You bake for the street you want in the morning, not the one you had the night before. Everybody in the trade knew that, and in a war it was the whole of the trade.

---

The rockets were not like the aeroplanes of the early years. With the aeroplanes there had been the siren and the voice on the radio — Attention! Attention! The signal you are now hearing is the red alert — and time to go down to a basement and sit with the neighbours and listen to the anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of the ministries. With the rockets there was nothing. The thing came up out of Iraq, went up out of the air altogether, and came down on the city faster than its own sound. First the blast, then the rumble of its coming, arriving late like a man running after a bus that has gone. The siren on the radio came last of all, when it came, and by then there was nothing to do but count the windows.

They could not aim. Everybody understood that within a week. A rocket from Baghdad meant for the oil ministry fell in a schoolyard in Naziabad; another meant for God knows what took the front off a row of shops in Javadieh, where nobody had any secrets worth a rocket. Five or six a day, some days. The newspapers printed the dead in columns.

Ranjbar, kneading on the board at five in the morning in his undershirt, had thought about it for some time, the way he thought about the price of fuel oil, and had come to a conclusion that he kept to himself for a long time, because it was the kind of conclusion that makes a man sound proud.

A rocket cannot hit a bakery. It is too stupid. But it does not need to. Every one that falls anywhere puts out a hundred ovens in the minds of the people who hear it, because the baker thinks of his children, and the customer thinks of hers, and the street empties, and then the oven goes out by itself. The rocket is not aimed at the bakery. It is aimed at the queue.

So the queue was what he counted.

---

His wife Ashraf left on the eighth day after Nowruz, with their daughter Mahin and a suitcase tied with cord. Her brother had a house above Damavand, in a village where the snow was still lying in the shade of the walls, and he had sent word with a cousin that there was room.

She stood in the door of the bakery in her chador with the suitcase at her feet. The pickup was waiting at the end of the alley with its engine running.

"Come at least at night," she said. "Nasir can bake in the morning without you. Come up on the last bus and come down on the first."

"The first bus gets in at seven. The oven is lit at four."

"Then let it be lit at seven."

He wiped his hands on his apron. "If I light it at seven, the people who come at six find it cold, and tomorrow they do not come at six, and the next day they do not come. Then I am a baker who lights his oven at seven for nobody."

"You are a stubborn man."

"I am a baker."

Mahin was twelve and wanted to see the snow, and could not keep her face sad enough for the occasion. Ranjbar gave her a loaf still hot from the wall, and she held it against her chest in both arms the way she had held it when she was four, and picked a pebble off its underside with her fingernail and threw it into the gutter. Then they were gone, and the pickup's noise went down Khaniabad Street towards the Shush roundabout, and there was a space in the bakery that the oven's heat did not quite fill.

---

Haj Mahmoud Tavakkoli had the other sangak oven, two streets over on Mokhtari, and had been Ranjbar's rival for twenty years in the way that men who do the same thing on neighbouring streets are rivals: politely, without forgiveness, and with deep respect. When the bread at Tavakkoli's was better, Ranjbar's customers said so. When it was worse they said that too, louder.

He came to the bakery on a Monday, a little after ten, when the morning queue was gone and Nasir was scraping the board. He had a set of keys in his hand.

"I'm taking them to Qazvin," he said. "My wife's people. My boy has his exams next month, and he can't study, he jumps every time a door slams. The doctor says it's nerves."

"Of course."

"I have eleven sacks in the storeroom. The quota for this month. If they sit there till I'm back, the weevils will have them." He held out the keys. "Bake them. Give me the money when I come back, or don't. I won't count."

Ranjbar did not take the keys at once.

"You'll come back?"

"When it stops. It'll stop. They can't keep throwing these things for ever, they cost money even in Baghdad." Tavakkoli shrugged. "And you? Your wife has gone, I heard."

"My wife has gone."

"And you stay."

"Somebody stays." Ranjbar took the keys at last and put them in his apron pocket, where they hung heavy against his thigh. "They don't need to hit the oven, Haj Mahmoud. They only need us to put it out ourselves. So."

Tavakkoli looked at him for a while with an expression that Ranjbar did not care to read. Then he nodded, and touched his hand to his chest, and went.

The next morning Ranjbar baked four hundred and sixty. He sold four hundred and fifty-one. Some of Tavakkoli's people had come over the two streets in the dark and stood in his queue looking at his oven as if it had done them a wrong. One old man tasted the first bite on the step, considered it, and said it was too salty. Ranjbar said nothing. He took it as a sign that the old man would be back.

---

It came on the night of the third Wednesday of Farvardin, a little after one.

Ranjbar was asleep on the cot in the storeroom, where he had slept since Ashraf left, because the house was too quiet and the bakery at least smelled of something. He was not woken by the noise. He was woken by the floor, which lifted under the cot and dropped it, and by the window over the street, which came in all at once in a single sheet and broke on the tiles like a tray of glasses. After that came the noise, the long tearing roar of the thing's arrival, coming in behind the blast as they always did, and then, absurdly, a car alarm, and dogs, and somewhere a woman screaming one name over and over.

He went out in his undershirt and his bare feet and cut his foot on the glass and did not notice until later.

It was not on Khaniabad. It was three streets south, behind the bathhouse, in the alley where the two sisters used to live, and there was nothing left of the house in the middle of the alley but a heap with a smell of plaster dust and gas and burned cloth, and the houses on either side open to the night like dolls' houses, with a bed hanging on the edge of an upper floor. Men were already on the heap with their hands, and more were coming, in pyjamas, in coats over pyjamas. Somebody had a torch. Somebody was shouting for everybody to be quiet, so they could listen.

Ranjbar dug with the others until it was light. He did not think about the oven at all. Nasir was there too, he saw at some point, in the torchlight on the far side of the heap, with his arms grey to the shoulder, passing bricks down a line of men who did not know his name. They took out an old man alive, and later a girl of seven or eight, alive, and later two who were not. Nobody knew whether the two sisters had been in the house. Somebody said they had gone to Varamin a month before. Somebody said they had come back.

At half past three the Red Crescent came, and men from the municipality with a bulldozer they could not get down the alley, and Ranjbar found that he was standing at the edge of the crowd with nothing in his hands.

He looked at the sky over the rooftops. It was still black, but thinning in the east.

He went back to the bakery.

---

The oven had been banked for the night, and it was still warm. The stones held heat a long time; that was what stones were for. He swept the glass off the floor into a heap by the wall and wrapped his foot in a clean flour cloth and lit the burner, and while the flame took he sat down on a sack by the door, the way he always did, to count.

There was no number to count. The night's trough had been set at ten, as every night, for four hundred and sixty, and ten o'clock meant nothing now. At ten o'clock there had been a house behind the bathhouse.

He thought: half the street will go today. Whoever was still sleeping here will take the evening bus and not come down again. You can feel a rocket in a district for a week. He thought he should bake half the trough and throw the rest to the pigeons. He thought it was madness to bake at all, with the window gone and the dust still hanging over the alley, and nobody with any sense out in the street at dawn waiting for bread like a target. He thought of Ashraf above Damavand, in the snow, and Mahin with her loaf.

He stood up, cut open two more of Tavakkoli's sacks, and began to mix the second trough.

Nasir came in at a quarter to five. He had washed his arms at the bathhouse tap but the dust was in his hair and his eyebrows and he looked like an old man. He looked at the empty sacks that had been brought over from Mokhtari, at the second trough working under its cloth beside the first, and he did not ask how many. He took the cigarette from behind his ear, looked at it, put it back, and began on the board.

They did not speak. There was nothing to say that the dough could not say better. Nasir stretched each one on the curved board in long pulls, thin as cloth, and swung it on the paddle on to the stones, and Ranjbar dimpled it with his fingers in the old pattern and drew it out when the edges went dark and hung it on the nails of the wall. The bakery filled with the smell, and the smell went out through the place where the window had been and down the street.

At six the first one came: Khanum Ahmadi from the end of the alley, who was eighty and deaf and behaved as if there had been no rocket at all. She took her two loaves and paid and went. Then a boy for his family, sent with a sack. Then a man Ranjbar did not know, in a coat over pyjamas, who said nothing, only stood there with the bread in his arms and looked at it.

Then there was a queue. It went past the bathhouse door. Then it went round the corner.

Some of them he knew and some he did not. Some had plaster in their hair, and some had come from Mokhtari, two streets over, and some, he understood later, had come from behind the bathhouse, from the houses that were still standing on either side of the heap, with their front walls open and their furniture visible to anybody walking by. A woman asked for twelve, for the men who were still digging. He gave her fourteen and did not take money for them. Nasir looked at him and went on working.

By eight they were on Tavakkoli's third sack. By ten they were on the fifth. The radio on the shelf said that a rocket had fallen in the south of the capital in the night and that the enemy would be answered, and then it played a song, and nobody in the queue listened.

At a quarter to eleven he took down the last loaf from the wall. He had baked seven hundred and twelve. He had sold, or given, seven hundred and twelve.

He did not say the number aloud. He would not have said it to Tavakkoli, or to Ashraf, or to the man on the radio. It was not a thing you could say without it sounding like something it was not. It was only a count of bread.

A girl was standing at the counter with her mother, waiting for the last loaf, which was the one in his hands. She was about Mahin's age. He gave it to her, and she held it against her chest with both arms, and then, as the mother counted coins out on to the zinc, the girl turned the loaf over and began to pick the little stones off its underside, one at a time, with her thumbnail, and drop them on to the pavement among the glass.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Strategiae Asymmetricae Abbasiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Abbasian Asymmetric Strategy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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