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energetic pumping of the machine’s hand crank by their gymnastics teacher. The girls with cashmere coats had special exercise shoes, but everyone else just wore regular shoes to exercise.
    Even more than their cashmere coats, Lili coveted the patent-leather dress shoes of the rich girls at her school. Khanoom had always bought Lili’s shoes, and she usually chose a brown leather pair nearly identical to her own. They were presented to Lili once a year at No Rooz, the Persian New Year, along with a party frock and newly stitched underclothes. She’d never quite grasped the ugliness of her shoes until the day she first fixed her eyes on the shiny dress shoes at the School of Virtue. Lili begged and pleaded until at last Khanoom agreed to take her to the bazaar to search for her own pair of patent-leather shoes.
    “A hen’s milk or man’s life”—it was said that anything could be bought at the bazaar. Lit only by gas lamps and candles, the marketplace was dim even in the middle of the day. Gripping her grandmother’s hand, Lili walked through the entrance, past the turquoise domes of Shah’s Mosque, and on toward the teeming belly of themarket. Together they threaded their way past stall after stall, past the goldsmiths and silversmiths, carpet-sellers, livestock, donkeys, beggars, castabouts, tricksters, and thieves who made their homes within the bazaar’s narrow passages.
    Khanoom and Lili walked on until at last she spied the shoes she wanted. Graced with tiny bows at the front, they were shiny and did not have even a single scuff on the bottoms. Best of all they were red, a bright tomato red she’d never even seen any of the girls wearing at school. The shoes were too tight by at least a size, but she had wanted them anyway, and would wear them until blisters bloomed on all her toes and her heels grew thick with calluses.
    On the day Khanoom bought the red shoes, they celebrated with a lunch at Shamshiri, the bazaar’s kabob restaurant. They retreated to the back corner, away from the passersby, so that Khanoom could enjoy her meal without troubling too much about her chador sliding off her head now and again. Stomachs rumbling in anticipation, they waited for the server, whom they privately called Mr. Kabobi. Over six feet tall, with a luxurious mustache that curled up at the ends, Mr. Kabobi could shove the meat from as many as three skewers onto their platter between two of his thick fingers. That day Mr. Kabobi appeared, as ever, with a smock smeared with grease and streaks of blood. Khanoom ordered four foot-long skewers, two for each of them, and even in the dark back room of the kabobi the meat still glistened with butter and the rice looked glorious with its orange and yellow swirls of saffron. It was the best kabob in all the city, and Lili, with her new red shoes already on her feet, ate with relish.
    In the afternoons she was forbidden to play in the alleys close to the house, but the next day after school she lingered there to show off her pretty new red shoes. All at once a boy came running, shouting out that he’d just seen her father in the streets, just a block away from Avenue Moniriyeh. She ran into the house and hid herselfamong the pile of mattresses in the basement. One of the children had squealed on her, and when Sohrab found her that day he beat her so severely that she went to bed with a fever that would not be cured by even ten cups of her grandmother’s sugared tea.
    Fever or no fever, Kobra or no Kobra, Lili never missed the hammam . Once a week the women of Khanoom’s house bundled their towels, copper bowls, sweets, and fresh clothes into large embroidered cloths, then walked together to the low limestone building that housed the quarter’s communal baths. They splashed themselves with cold water from the fountain early each morning, before the first prayers of the day, but the hammam was their only full bath of the week and therefore also a holiday.
    From her bundle Khanoom