There was a little sparrow that was stuck on their porch somehow, having fallen or gotten lost or something, and the boy of nine, whose name was Babak Ghanbari, walked up to it. Something was wrong when a bird did not fly away when he walked up to it, and he called to his father, who was inside reading the newspaper.
When his father came outside, the bird flew up to the corner of the glass porch roof. It flew belaboredly, like it took all it had to get up there. The father saw that it was in bad shape.
“There is nothing that we can do for it,” he said, and he turned and went inside.
Babak looked up at the bird and he guessed that he knew there was nothing they could do for it while it was up there. He thought that he would come back in a while and see if it was on the ground again.
When he went inside, his father said, “Not only is there nothing that we can do for it, there is nothing we can do for the millions of hungry people in the world.”
The boy burst into tears, and ran to his room out of shame and misery.
The mother saw it and as she watched it, she thought of how her own father used to make her two brothers wrestle when they were kids. The younger one would end up crying and her father would have a satisfied smile when he finally stopped them.
The father was not smiling now, but she knew that one of the things he felt about the boy’s tears was that they were beautiful. It was not the only thing he felt about them, but it was one of them. Her husband did not drink or gamble the way her two brothers did, but it meant that when something did come out of him, it came out with greater force than even he knew. Even when that thing was love, it came out with such force that it could look like something else, especially to a little boy.
Out of respect, she did not go to the boy’s room right away. He would not have stopped her if she had, but he would have done what he always did, which was to turn to the millions of hungry people in the world, of whom he had very much been one when he was a boy in Iran.
She went to the porch and she saw the little sparrow up in the corner. It looked lost and helpless. She went inside and took a piece of bread.
“Put this out on the porch,” she said.
The father took the bread and walked out to the porch. He did it the same way he went to work every morning.
If they were in Iran, the mother thought, he would not have thought that all his feeling should come out to the boy. He would not have thought that it should all come out at once. It would have been spread out over a day. It would have been spread out over songs and poems and the sounds in the street. In America the boy was going to be his best friend. But he was still going to have to wait before the boy was old enough to do the things a friend could do.
At least he was close to knowing that he was looking for a friend, she thought. Her own father had not known that he was looking for a friend when he’d made her two brothers wrestle each other.
She went to the boy’s room and asked him to look out the window.
“Your father put a piece of bread outside. If it comes down, we can try to help it.”
The boy had stopped crying. “Are there millions of hungry people in the world?”
“Yes.”
“Is there nothing we can do about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there is something you can do about it. Your father is very sad about it because he has been counting them longer than you have. He has been counting them from the time he was your age.”
The boy felt very sorry for his father. He imagined his father feeling the way he felt every day for all the years that he was older by. But he did not know how else a father was supposed to be. His father did not know how to throw a baseball, but that was not his job as much as the millions of hungry people in the world were.
In the other room the father was thinking that he was going to have to come up with some rules for reading the newspaper. It was either going to have to be early in the morning or by himself or somehow without any interruption. He did not have the songs and poems and the sounds in the street, but he had the newspaper, and he knew how to read the newspaper in a way that he remembered the songs and poems and sounds in the street of everywhere where the people were hungry. It was just that when somebody caught him in the middle of that, all that came out was the furiousness of hunger.
As a boy he had seen the end of hunger, but as a man it had gotten much harder to see it. As a boy he had thought that by the time he was old enough to have a son himself, it would be in a world without hunger.
The father went out to the porch. The little sparrow was up in the corner. It was struggling, turning its head in every direction while its body was still. It used up all its strength to fly up there when I came outside, he thought. It was scared of me.
It was all right to be feared, he thought, but not by sparrows. It was all right to be feared because hunger was fear, and in not accepting hunger, he was not accepting fear. If someone chose to look at his lack of fear with their own, that was their choice. But it was not all right for that fear to be felt by sparrows.
The father took a few pieces of bread and held them up to the little sparrow in the corner of the roof. If it is going to die, he thought, at least it will have received some human kindness in its last moments. He held the crumbs up to the bird and it was still moving its head in every direction, but a little slower now, and thoughtfully.
Babak and his mother watched from inside. His mother felt glad about Iran, like it was never going to be very far away from them in America. They were going to find ways to have it with them. And Babak watched his father and felt absolutely certain that by the time he was through with living, nobody was going to be hungry, not people and not birds either.�
