The mullah sat with Mahmoodreza’s father and male family members. He rhythmically flipped his worry beads and spoke quietly into the ear of the dead young man’s father. Then he stood and turned to the congregation. Everyone hushed as he walked up to the platform, climbed the seven steps of the mambar, and sat, looking down on the mourners.
Without warning, he began to speak in a quiet, almost private tone, not looking up from his worry beads.
“Three days ago,” he said, letting the words ring out in the mosque. “Three days ago I sat inside a prison cell with a young man facing his death. I am a believer as you all are. I know, as you know, that he is in Paradise, where we all hope to one day be. I know this as you know. I rejoice in this as you do. But three days ago, I sat before a conscious man, facing the most difficult task in his short life. You can only truly know what a man is made of when he faces the greatest adversity of his life. Who is he? What does he believe? And does he have the will to give his final breath for that principle?”
He stopped flicking his worry beads and looked up at the congregation, his eyes shining. “Three days ago I sat in a prison cell across from this young man and he answered all of these questions for me. We sat there in the silence of prayer. The guards came to his cell and tapped on the bars. He opened his eyes and looked out his small window and began to speak: ‘God has given us a beautiful world,’ he said. ‘God has given us a sun so that we may see and a moon so that we may contemplate, an earth to stand upon, a sky to look to, fire to keep us warm in the cold, and water to cool us in the heat. God is truly great.’ Then he stood up and turned to face me. ‘I stand before you a man condemned to death,’ he said. ‘I have nothing left in this world. There are those here who do not believe; those here who desecrate this gift of life that we are given. Those who force us to abandon our dignity and faith. We struggle against them. We perish in the fight. And yet I say that the greatest struggle of all is the one against myself.’ He embraced me and was led by the guards to the courtyard. He stood on a barrel with a noose around his neck and the final words he spoke, before the barrel was kicked from beneath his feet, were ‘Allahu Akbar.’”
The cleric put the tail of his aba to his face and began to weep.
A slowly rising tide of “Allahu Akbar” began to swell across the mosque. Louder and louder, the chant was repeated, and Madjid felt himself sinking where he sat. The sheer force of the voices, the emotion of solidarity took his breath away. The mullah looked out into the crowd. His tears had dried and his face looked triumphant. Madjid stared at this man he had known all his life and did not recognize him. He stood up and ran for the door, stumbling as he put on his shoes.
Outside, he walked away from the mosque, not looking back. He did not know where he was going, he knew only from where he wanted to escape. He walked without rest until he reached the sand dunes, and in the silence of the wind, he slowed his pace and felt, finally, calmer. Mahmoodreza’s final thoughts ran through his brain. The war within. The hardest battle of all.
The distant sound of goat bells blew in the wind. Crows cawed high in the sky. He watched the sun begin to set, bringing with it a slight chill. He missed Nasreen. He needed her, even if he didn’t understand why.
He began to run toward her house. Wildly. Almost losing his way.
Still breathing heavily, he snuck into the garden. The light was on in her father’s tailor shop and she was sitting by the window, weaving lace. Weaving lace, she told him, was like meditation. As he got closer, he could hear her humming.
He watched her for a while in the dark, his thoughts falling away as he focused on the tension in her delicate fingers, her soft skin the color of raw milk. What else was there but this? What use were lofty ideas in a world run by hypocrites and murderers? The touch of her hand was the truest thing he knew.
Madjid tapped softly on the window, but still he startled her. She jumped from her seat and ran to open the door. “Where have you been?” she said. “Your father was very worried when you didn’t show up for lunch. Everyone was very worried.”
She crossed her arms. Then let out a sigh. “I was worried.”
He stared at her, smiling at her show of concern.
She leaned in and whispered softly, “What is it? Are you all right?”
“Marry me,” he said.
She put her fingers on his lips.
“Marry me,” he said as he moved her hand and laid it over his heart.
SABA
Madjid’s mother, Saba, had died four years earlier. Madjid was fourteen at the time and Jamsheed sixteen. Jamsheed disappeared immediately after the burial, leaving Shazdehpoor and Madjid alone.
During the mourning rituals that followed, the father and son walked like ghosts through the house. The shared living spaces began to fall into disarray. Dishes piled up in the sink and unwashed clothes lay about collecting dust. Each retreated—Shazdehpoor to his radio and Madjid to his books. Shazdehpoor could not bear to sleep in the room he had shared with his wife. He took to sleeping in his salon, emerging only to take meals with his son in silence, meals brought in by the women of the town.
After the rituals had ended, Bibi-Khanoom and Ghamar descended upon the Shazdehpoor household like Bolshevik street sweepers with Nasreen and Jafar in tow. They sent the father and son off to the orchard and set upon cleaning.
Bibi-Khanoom took command of the kitchen, emptying the cupboards and refrigerator, wiping down the shelves and rearranging the items. She added pickled eggplants, peach compote, and sour cherry jam to their pantry. Jafar stood near her, motionless, staring at her. She finally gave him a bag of marinated sour cherries and sent him off. Beneath the kitchen sink she saw a plastic basin protruding. She pulled it out. Inside were pieces of moldy hard bread. She emptied the basin and washed it out.
Saba had always kept that basin beneath the sink. She filled it up throughout the week with leftover bread from the family’s breakfast. On Fridays at noon, she emptied it into a bag and placed it outside the backyard door with a bottle of milk. Someone whom she never saw, someone in need, took the offering and soaked the dried bread in milk for a hearty meal—always returning the empty washed milk bottle to the door. Saba had died on a Thursday night and the basin, which no one knew about save her, remained untouched, the bread growing thick with mold. Only the stranger who came to the door that Friday and found nothing on the doorstep realized what had happened.
Ghamar tore through the house, sucking her teeth and muttering under her breath. Clothes were strewn everywhere, beds unmade, tea-stained cups and pistachio shells in all the corners. When she finally stopped stomping and stood still, she did a full visual sweep of the living room and said to herself, “Men. One should sooner let a dog into her home.”
She rolled up her sleeves and got to work, collecting the garbage in a bag and making a pile of clothes by the washing machine in the hall that led to the backyard. She saw one of Saba’s house-dresses on the floor. She picked it up and held it over her face as she wept.
Jafar stood in the living room doorway staring at her while he ate his sour cherries, the tartness of which made his left eye twitch. He spat the pits into his hand and put them in his pocket. She stopped for a moment and stared back at him, wiping her tears.
He held out his bag of sour cherries to her and smiled, his fat cheeks dimpling. She took a handful and pinched his cheek.
Nasreen quietly made a beeline for Madjid’s room. She had never been inside it before. It was musty and cluttered, littered with newspaper clippings and dirty clothes. She walked around studying his books, the only things in the room with any semblance of order. She did not know any of the titles or covers. She ran her hand over a pile of clothes in the corner of the room, picking up a shirt and holding it to her face as she inhaled. It smelled of soap and sweat. And him. Masculine. Grassy.
To her surprise, she liked it. She smelled it again and held the shirt to her and sat on his bed. Who was Madjid? She had known him all his life, and
still he was a mystery to her. On his desk there lay a notebook. She opened it. She did not so much read what he had written as study his handwriting, running her fingers over the letters and words. Some passages were cramped and furiously written. Some bore a carefully flourished, almost calligraphic precision. She did not notice the shift in perspective as the pages progressed. The distant “them” gave way to the collective “we,” the lament of “you” to the inner “I.”
At the back were drawings. Ballpoint-pen sketches of men exercising in zoorkhanehs, lifting heavy meels and chains. They were two-dimensional. A novice trying to arrest bodies in motion. Several pages were of the sand dunes, done in pencil and charcoal. These were more assured and seemed in line with the hand that had made them. On one page there were cubist-style drawings of women’s breasts in thick black ink. No head or torso, just nippled breasts, of varying shapes and sizes, suspended in white space, cartoonish and grotesque. She laughed out loud and quickly covered her mouth so as not to be heard by her mother. Covering the entire page was another drawing in thick black ink. Her smile disappeared as she stared at it, trying to make out what it was. It was four black curved lines like two sets of parentheses, a black slit in the center and, at the bottom where the curved lines met, a jagged line cut through them, like a tear, red and violent, with short horizontal black lines running through it like stitches on a wound. The brutality of the drawing frightened her. She quickly flipped past the page.
There were fragmented scribbles and random sketches and finally, tucked in the back, was a photograph of Madjid’s mother. It had to have been taken when Saba was no more than fifteen. The picture was pearly black and white. Saba’s hair was perfectly coiffed, her hands folded demurely. She gazed just beneath the camera’s eye, as to avoid being looked at. The likeness of her face to Madjid’s startled Nasreen. In all the years that she had known this family, she had never noticed her. Only in death had she truly seen her. Behind the photograph, on the page, she saw that Madjid had written a letter to his mother dated the day after her burial. Nasreen walked over to the door, closed it quietly, and began to read.
Maman-jan,
It is unusually warm today and very sunny for this time of year. I woke before father and made breakfast as best I could. I tried very hard to remember how you prepared it. It will take some getting used to but I am sure it will work itself out.
It is amazing how resourceful men can be when they are hungry.
Your son,
Madjid
She flipped the page and there was another letter, and another and another. Each day the boy had written a letter to his mother. They were all cordial, brief, and matter of fact, describing the days as they had passed. He told his mother of her funeral and the mourning rituals on the third, seventh, and fortieth days. He told her who had attended and gave a list of the food brought to the house and by whom, with a critical review of the dishes. The only signs of emotion in them were the occasional smudges of ink from what might have been the boy’s tears. But there was not a word to attest to his sadness. The letters stopped on the fortieth day with a short, polite farewell, signed in his full name, Madjid Shazdehpoor.
Up to this point, she had known Madjid only from a distance. He had struck her as a serious, cold, and fidgety boy. In fact, it had always been in Jamsheed’s presence that she blushed. Jamsheed was the charming one who flirted with her, at times making her uncomfortable. At family gatherings, he would always go out of his way to compliment her dress or shoes, coming too close to her arm or body. But not Madjid. He kept to himself and would cast down his eyes when he spoke to her, and then only brought up subjects such as the hierarchy of ants or Khayyam’s philosophical theory of mathematical order. She smelled his shirt one more time.
From the hallway, her mother was calling her name. She jumped up and dropped the shirt. “What are you doing?” said Ghamar, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “Go get the broom from the hallway closet. Start in the living room.”
Nasreen marched down the hall.
“While you are sweeping Madjid’s room,” said her mother, “make sure you leave the door open.”
Ghamar threw the shirt back onto the pile of dirty laundry, then made her way to the master bedroom. Bibi-Khanoom was already there, sitting on the floor surrounded by a pile of Saba’s clothes and chadors that she had pulled out of her closet. Ghamar could see that she had been crying and sat down next to her. She started to fold the clothes and make piles of shirts, skirts, and chadors. She spoke in a brisk, almost happy tone as she said, “What are we to do with all of these? I can tell you one thing. I have a long list of women that will never get their hands on sweet Saba’s silks. Especially Sekeneh. That woman is a beast. I would sooner burn these than let her get those greasy fat fingers on them. She would probably sell them, anyway. Oh, and that ignorant smile of hers. What kind of a woman smiles when she’s missing three teeth? I think she’s a Gypsy. She says she’s from Mash’had but no one from Mash’had would smile with missing teeth, not even children of first cousins.”
Ghamar’s brash diatribe comforted Bibi-Khanoom. Ghamar always knew how to pull her from the darkest depths, back up to the surface where it was safe.
“And Bibi-jan, that little boy of yours is very strange. Did you know he puts the cherry pits in his pockets?”
“Yes, but it seems to comfort him.”
The two women laughed as they continued to put Saba’s life away and the Shazdehpoor house in order.
MEN
In the orchard, Madjid crouched by a tree watching an ant colony. He was reading a book on the social structures of animals. He flipped to the chapter about ants, then watched the soldiers march out of the hole in perfect formation. Each carried a tiny bit of dirt in its mandibles, which it deposited next to the entrance, only to turn around without resting and return to the hole to bring up more. He had read this book several times and knew that the queen ant lived inside that hole. She had mated with a male that died as soon as it had inseminated her, detached her wings, and started this entire colony. She was not the head of the colony, just another member of the society. Each insect played its part in the service of all. The egalitarian quality of the ant hierarchy fascinated him. The more Madjid looked at nature, the more excited he was to be in the world. He could hear his father calling his name. He reluctantly closed his book and went to join the men.
Shazdehpoor sat with Akbar-Agha and Mohammad under his tree, taking tea in silence. Knowing Ghamar would be occupied all day with Bibi-Khanoom and the kids at Shazdehpoor’s house, Mohammad had closed his shop early, humming, hardly able to contain his glee at this short window of freedom.
Akbar-Agha smiled as he sipped his tea and with a knowing nod to Mohammad said, “So, Shazdehpoor, our wives have thrown you out of your home.”
“Yes, sir. We didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
Mohammad let out a sigh and said, “Are you under the impression that we have ever had one?”
The three men laughed. Madjid paid no mind to them as he buried his head in his book.
Wind blew through the orchard, shaking the trees, along with the scent of pears and plums. Crickets chirred. Bees droned. Finches called and starlings darted from tree to tree, fleeing the threatening cawing of crows. So constant was this melodic drama in the orchard that it faded into the background, unheard.
The three men looked at one another. It was as though they were students in a classroom the teacher had just walked out of. A devilish grin formed on Akbar-Agha’s face as he sprang from his seat and went straight to the kitchen, where Mirza was busy washing vegetables. “Mirza-jan,” he said. “We need some yogurt and cucumbers.”
Mirza’s face lit up as he joined in the conspiracy. “Yes, sir!”
Akbar-Agha sifted through the cupboards, taking out a jar of pistachios and inspecting them. They were roasted. He turned to Mirza and said, “Do we have any raw ones?”
“Yes, sir!”
Mi
rza grabbed a bag of raw pistachios from the cupboard beneath the sink and dumped them in a bowl. He continued to peel the cucumbers, dicing and adding them to the yogurt, which he then salted, peppered, and covered in dried mint, mixing it all together. With the two bowls in hand, he headed out to the deck.
Akbar-Agha stood at the counter, rolling up his sleeves. He took a bowl of ground lamb out of the refrigerator. He grated a raw onion into the bowl, his eyes reddening, and added turmeric and salt. With his hand, he churned the mixture, then dipped the hand in warm water before taking a handful, rolling it into a ball, and gently slapping it onto a flat skewer as he sculpted it around the metal spear, creating wedges in the meat with his thumb.
When he’d made several dozen skewers, he carried them out to the deck, where Mirza was already fanning the coals in the fire pit with a corrugated piece of cardboard. “Gentlemen,” said Akbar-Agha, “follow me.”
Madjid, Mohammad, and Shazdehpoor followed Akbar-Agha to his bedroom, where he gave each of them a pair of pantaloons.
The men gathered around a small sofreh on the deck, free to move comfortably in the loose cotton pants. Mohammad lay on his side, languidly flicking his worry beads. Shazdehpoor leaned back on his elbows and tilted his head up to the sun. He stretched his spindly legs and relished the freedom of the pantaloons. Madjid sat next to Akbar-Agha and copied his stance—one knee up, his elbow resting on it.
Akbar-Agha noticed and said with a smile, “What were you doing over by the pear tree?”
Madjid blushed. “I was just watching an ant colony. They seem to have a very harmonious existence.”
“They engage in warfare, you know?”
“Really?”
“Their tactics are very similar to our own species. I have a book by Maeterlinck on the life of an ant that I will give you.”
Madjid’s conversations with Akbar-Agha were very different from the ones he had with the mullah. Akbar-Agha always answered his questions with new subjects to explore or study.
To Keep the Sun Alive Page 11