This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Rabeah Ghaffari
First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-9482260-97
Jacket design by Donna Cheng
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950158
Printed in the United States of America
10987654321
For my father, Mohammad Bagher Ghaffari
Be the sun and all will see you.
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Contents
PARIS | March 20, 2012
Winter’s End 1978
Lunch
Siesta
Tea and Sunset
PARIS | II
The Town Square
The Mullah and the Murderer
A Symphony in Ruins
An Opium Dream
PARIS | III
Bibi and Akbar
The Sermon and the Soliloquy
Saba
Men
The Proposal Party
Drowning
Two Mothers
PARIS | IV
The University
Women
PARIS | V
The Son Rises
A Bed of Flowers
The Moon Ascending
PARIS | VI
PARIS
March 20, 2012
The morning of the solar eclipse began like any other. Rue de Belleville was already littered with pedestrians. Car horns rang out. Metal grill gates thrashed upward. Children whined as mothers dragged them to school. Pensioners, in no particular hurry, made their way to the park, greeting one another in slow motion, while young professionals rushed by in a beeline to the metro station.
The faces on those streets were a strange mix: Jews, West Africans, Chinese, and Maghrébins among many others, thrown together as though in some urban refugee camp. Shazdehpoor was no different. He was as displaced as them, and as anonymous—a single unseen thread in a haphazardly woven carpet. Only older, frailer, wearing a seersucker suit with fraying cuffs and faint sweat stains on the crisply ironed fabric.
He struggled through the crowds, dragging his handcart down the subway steps, shooing away anyone who got too close with his walking stick. The Line 2 train was approaching and he barely made it onto the last car. A young man stood and offered Shazdehpoor his seat. Surprised, Shazdehpoor wanted to thank him, not for the seat, but for his kindness. As so often happened lately, he was too slow. The young man had already turned away.
At the Place du Tertre, tourists swarmed past the artists and artisans—most of them immigrants. Senegalese teenagers hawked woven baskets and tribal jewelry. Tunisian women, babies tucked into their skirts, sold richly painted ceramics with intricate Islamic designs. All for a few euros, a coffee or less. For more than three decades Shazdehpoor had made his livelihood spelling out the names of passing strangers in Persian calligraphy. Each year was harder and harder. He unlocked his handcart and opened the chair and table. He wiped the sweat on his brow with his handkerchief, then arranged the stack of rag paper, inkpot, calligraphy pen, and sander.
A young woman soon approached. American. He dipped his pen in the inkpot and, with the trembling hand of an old man, looked up. “What is your name?” he said.
She leaned over. “Mo-ni-ca,” she said, slowly, as though he were deaf. He dipped his pen in the ink again and squeezed his arthritic fingers around it. Carefully, he began to write her name, from right to left, silently mouthing the equivalent letters in Persian. The roundness of meem flowing into the upward line of alef. Then the U-shaped noon straight into the half-moon yeh. Then he raised up the pen and began the triangular kaf, whose third point touched the last letter right before sweeping up into the final alef. The final touch of the dot over the noon and two dots beneath the yeh were done in calligraphic diamonds.
When he was finished, he shook sand over the paper and blew off the dust. The ink was quick drying but the elegant flourish impressed buyers. He rolled the paper and tied it with a ribbon, shyly accepting the three euros from Monica’s hand. Even now, taking money from people still shamed him.
The sound of shouting caught his attention. It was Madam Wu. A man was shaking the piece of paper she had handed him in her face. “Mein name ist Adam not Yadang!” he said.
She shook her head. “C’est ton nom en chinois!”
“Buchstabiere es wie A-D-A-M!” he said.
Madam Wu, a former Chinese literature teacher and professional calligraphist, purged from her homeland during the Cultural Revolution, had given up on explaining to customers the difference between logography and phonemic orthography. She stepped into the man, grabbed the paper from his hand, and ripped it into little pieces.
Shazdehpoor shook his head. He thought of his apartment. His radio. The cognac that awaited him at the end of the day, a cognac that he drank each night with great relief and ceremony.
A group of break-dancers with face paint and colorful clown wigs were setting up their boom box. Each week there were more and more street acts, all of them flashier, louder, and more youthful than his calligraphy. Gypsy children darted through the crowd today, selling plastic glasses for the eclipse this evening, long after Shazdehpoor would already be back in the cool, comforting isolation of his living room. For weeks, the eclipse was all anyone in Paris had spoken about, the first one visible in the city for thirty-three years.
“Three euros,” said the Gypsy girl. Her face was golden brown, her mouth smeared with dark familiar juice. He leaned in, smelling the ripe sticky perfume of the cherries she had eaten. Handful by handful. Stolen, perhaps, from the Marché de Belleville. Or scavenged from the discarded bruised lots behind the stands.
“Gilas,” he whispered with closed eyes.
She startled, and jumped back, alarmed by his foreign-sounding word, one she seemed to think was a curse. He was an old man to her, with a perfume of his own, that of brittle skin and sour breath and perhaps a little death. Off she fled. On the ground, the pair of glasses lay at his feet where she had dropped them. He had no need for glasses. Nor any need to join the crowds on the riverbank that evening. He had seen the sky go dark before, the shadows cast as the moon slowly swallowed the sun, until there was nothing left but a faint ring of fire in pitch black. He had stood in that darkness so total that nothing was visible outside his own mind. That was thirty years ago also, in another world, on the golden plains of Naishapur, in the orchard of his family. White snowy flowers clung to branches of the apple trees. Clusters of green cherries hung densely on the branches. In the breeze, there was the smell of pears and the droning of bees and the clean snap of cotton as the sofreh opened and his family gathered for lunch. It was spring, always spring, the sun ablaze overhead.
WINTER’S END 1978
The Mirdamad orchard was in the city of Naishapur, or “the new city of King Shapur,” in the northeast region of Khorasan, known as “the land where the sun rises.” The orchard had been in Bibi-Khanoom’s family for generations, built by her great-great-grandfather. He had purchased four hectares of arid land from the local government and worked with engineers to build aqueducts that brought water onto the land from the Binalud Mountains in the north. The orchard was surrounded by one continuous adobe wall with massive wooden doors on the southwest corner. Upon entering, you followed a pebbled path that ran adjacent to the western wall. The path was lined on either side
with trees and two narrow streams that led to the family living quarters. Most of the fruit trees were planted together in the southeast. There were various stone fruits such as plums, apricots, cherries, and sour cherries, and pome fruits such as apples and pears. The yearly harvest brought a steady income to the family coffers and supplied all the fruits for their own consumption, including preserves, jams, compotes, and dried fruit.
It was a good ten-minute walk to reach the end of the orchard, where you arrived at a fountain filled with red, gold, bronze, and black goldfish, and a large imposing black walnut tree. Up two steps lay the platform of the house. Along the northern wall was a small barn that housed a few goats and sheep along with a chicken coop. Next door was a storage room filled with grains, rice, spices, and all manner of staple foods. The northern wall, where the aqueducts entered the orchard underground, was covered in grapevines. On the south side of the house was a massive flower bed where rows of irises, tulips, and lilacs encircled a rosebush.
Bibi-Khanoom was the orchard’s sole keeper and lived in it with her husband, a retired judge, and their adopted ten-year-old son, Jafar, who never spoke. Now, in the final weeks of winter, the orchard was coming back to life after its hibernation. That morning’s light had melted the frost, and water dripped from the trees until there was nothing left but moist bark and branches. A slow-rising polyphony of birdsong and insect mating calls chirped and chirred through the greenery. Ants busily dug their subterranean dwellings. Birds gathered twigs for nests. Bees circled flower buds for nectar. And Bibi-Khanoom worked her way around the rooms, packing up the winter clothes and the blankets strewn over the southern wing of the house, where the family had spent the brutal cold months, as this wing had the most natural light. For the coming warm months, they needed the shade of the eastern wing, and it was Bibi-Khanoom who took charge of their relocation each year.
She made her way east through the vestibule and looked out the French doors. Mirza, her Afghan helper, had hung all the carpets from the spring quarters of the house. Furiously he beat them with a stick, dust billowing up in the sunlit air. Bibi-Khanoom pulled her chador over her mouth, breathing through the long, white, gauze-thin fabric.
“Mirza-jan,” she said—using the old familiar term of endearment. “Leave that for now. We have to start preparing lunch.”
Bibi-Khanoom’s husband had spent the morning sitting under his tree, which was the only tree that stood separate from the others in the orchard, the black walnut tree planted by Bibi-Khanoom’s great-great-grandfather just in front of the platform by the northern entrance of the house. The long heavy branches hung low, creating a canopy around the thick trunk at the base of which the roots bulged like veins on a hand, spreading outward and disappearing beneath the soil. The judge, as everyone called Bibi-Khanoom’s husband, had laid out his carpet at the base of the trunk, sitting in between two of these roots, as if they were the arms of a chair. He had discovered this spot on the day of his wedding. It shaded him in the summer and blanketed him in the winter. It was where he read his books, held his conversations, and contemplated his thoughts. It was also where he first kissed his wife.
Though ten years had passed since his retirement from his judicial post, colleagues and former pupils still stopped by the orchard to sit with him on his carpet under the tree and present the merits of their court cases over tea. Passing judgment on his fellow human beings had always weighed heavily on the judge. To spend the final chapters of his life leaning on a tree watching a bee pollinate a milk thistle filled him with a peace and stoicism that many mistook for coldness.
This particular day, a former colleague had sat with him for more than an hour, when a scorpion that lived beneath the nearby rosebush scuttled out from its resting place. It did this every day, at exactly the same time, but today it happened on a wounded bee that had fallen from the hive above. Immediately the scorpion snapped its telson into the bee, paralyzing it before nibbling off a piece of insect. The judge’s colleague continued to discuss his court case and how unsettled he was over its outcome. When the scorpion was finished with its meal, it turned and scampered back into its hole. The judge turned to his colleague, who had not noticed a thing, and said, “The laws of nature seem clear and without malice. Even in their arbitrary cruelty. While the laws of men seem vague and malicious. Even in their attempt at equity.”
Mirza brought a crate filled with vegetables into the kitchen from the winter storage bin in the west end of the house along with some meat from the freezer box and frozen eggplant slices that had already been fried. Bibi-Khanoom took the tray of eggplant. She chopped onions and fried them in a pot while Mirza washed the meat under lukewarm water, cut it into small cubes, and added them to the pot. Bibi-Khanoom then added the eggplant. They continued their preparation for lunch in silence, moving around each other with the ease and coordination that comes with years of repetition.
Once the dish was done, Bibi-Khanoom evaluated the task ahead. Two pots with different stews simmered on the stove, a large bowl of uncooked rice soaked in water and salt, fresh tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers lay on a chopping block ready to be made into salad, and bunches of tarragon, basil, mint, and cilantro lay drying in a sieve. She wiped her wet hands on a dishrag and turned to Mirza.
“We’ll need to have the fruit pickers start work sooner. It’s an early spring.”
“Yes, I will arrange it.”
“I think I will do sour cherry jam and pear compote. The rest can go to market.”
“And the grapes?”
Bibi-Khanoom knew exactly why he inquired about the fate of the grapes. They had the same delicate conversation every year.
“Will you be needing a crate or two for your medicinal juice?”
“Yes. It’s very helpful with sleeping problems.”
“Of course. For sleeping problems.” Bibi-Khanoom shook her head in mock disappointment. Mirza tried to suppress a smile.
Bibi-Khanoom was a devout Muslim whose lips had never touched alcohol, but she never minded when others did. She peeked into the vestibule. “Where is Jafar?”
“With the chickens.”
“Again?”
Inside the coop, Jafar circled around the dusty straw, following a particularly fluffy hen. He had a red ribbon in his hand and bent over, trying to catch her by the saddle. She picked up her pace and waddled faster in circles. He was a portly boy and breathed audibly from the exertion. The hen outmaneuvered him at every turn. He finally gave up and sat cross-legged in the center of the coop, his head in his hands. The chicken slowly waddled over. He smiled at her, reached into his pocket, and held out his hand full of seeds, dropping them on the ground. She hesitantly bobbed her head and pecked at the seeds. He wrapped the red ribbon around her neck and quickly tied it before she protested and flapped away. Off she waddled in circles, clucking protestations at the other hens like a brothel madam.
Bibi-Khanoom stood in the doorway of the coop holding her chador over her mouth and nose. She coughed and Jafar jumped to his feet, shame flushing through his face.
“Have you named her?” said Bibi-Khanoom.
Jafar nodded yes.
She looked at the hen and for a brief moment allowed herself to see it as Jafar saw it. The snow-white feathers, the sharp yellow beak, the satiny red ribbon. She almost resembled a wedding confection. Bibi-Khanoom looked at her little boy and put her hand on his head. “No harm will come to her. But you must stop naming them.”
He nodded in reluctant agreement.
“Now come inside and change your clothes. Everyone is on their way. Including Madjid.”
Jafar’s face lit up at the mention of Madjid. He followed his mother back into the house as his beautiful chicken went back to her seeds.
The first lunch guests to arrive were Bibi-Khanoom’s niece, Ghamar, her reluctant husband, Mohammad, and her willful daughter, Nasreen. Billows of dust rose as they hurried up the road—already arguing.
As they reached the orchard doors, Gham
ar pushed her husband out of the way. The two doors had two separate knockers. The one on the left was an ornate pewter plate with an oblong handle hanging from a hinge. It was for male visitors. The shape of the knocker created a deeper sound. The one on the right, for female visitors, had a delicate round handle hanging from the hinge of the plate that made a high-pitched snap. Ghamar grabbed the male knocker and started banging. Her husband winced.
Mirza immediately recognized Ghamar’s knock, not so much by its sound as by its ferociousness. He braced himself for her entrance by looking up to the sky and asking a god he did not believe in for his protection.
Ghamar burst through with Mohammad following behind, his eyes to the ground, and Nasreen already looking for her beloved Madjid.
“Keep up!” bellowed Ghamar.
A sparrow flitted off through a pear tree.
Ghamar was always the first one ready to go anywhere, as though she could never stand to be where she was.
Earlier that morning, she sat on the plastic-covered sofa, yelling until Mohammad finally took out worry beads, flicked through a few, then mustered the courage to leave his bedroom and face her.
Nasreen had remained at her vanity. She turned up the volume of her cassette player and continued to apply a mismatched array of makeup that she had collected from friends over the years. The dusty pink plastic Mary Kay lip palette case, a tube of Max Factor mascara with a comb wand, a pair of rusted tweezers, and an antique brass kohl holder. She sang along with the pop star Googoosh, “Help me, help me. Don’t let me stay and fester here. Help me, help me. Don’t let me kiss the lips of death here,” as she inspected her face from every angle possible.
No matter where Madjid sat in relation to her in the orchard, she made sure she would be flawless. She spied a rogue hair in her perfectly groomed brows, plucked it without remorse, then continued to sing. “In my veins instead of blood is the red poem of leaving.”
To Keep the Sun Alive Page 1