Real Madrid

Winning or losing didn’t matter, they fought fiercely anyway. They brawled so much, with blood pouring from their noses and mouths and hands and feet, that they could have gone off and opened a blood bank. Their blood was all mixed together, the blood from one boy’s head smeared on the other’s bloody nose. They had become blood brothers. They had become a team. None of them imagined that after all the misery they had endured, Morteza and Abd wouldn’t show up. It would have been pure betrayal if they didn’t come. They had shouted their lungs out for each other; theirs wasn’t the kind of friendship where someone abandoned the others halfway through. Without those two, the team simply wasn’t a team.

Aqa-Jalali had gone to the riverside, smoking a cigarette. No one knew where Hammoud had found another metal can, but he was beating rhythm on it again. For the moment he was only singing a weak, sluggish “woe, oh woe, woe, woe,” but soon he would definitely start picking on one of the boys. Reza and Asghar clapped in a triple beat, and Hanif kept the main rhythm. The skeleton of a boat lay by the riverbank, and Shenoon was sitting on its bow, keeping lookout. In the darkness of the night, neither his long giraffe-like neck nor his long goalkeeper arms could be seen—only the whites of his eyes and his bright yellow Brazilian jersey. Bahram had put on his warm-up clothes and was stretching like a pro. He always warmed up an hour before the match, but he was a substitute; he never got to play. And even if he did, by the time they put him in, he had already exhausted himself from warming up too much to run at all.