There was a hand on Jamsheed’s shoulder.
“Follow me,” said a voice. It was a voice he knew, but not until they were inside the building did he dare look up. It was the mullah who had saved him. Tears welled up in his eyes and his body now began to shake so violently that his knees buckled. He landed at his great-uncle’s feet and tried to make the shaking stop but it wouldn’t. He lay there, his arms wrapped around himself.
The next day, Jamsheed woke up with the sun shining on his face through lace curtains. He recognized neither the bedroom nor the window by his bed. His clothes were wet, as if he’d urinated on himself, but the smell was wrong and his hair was also wet. It was sweat all over his body, sweat burning in his eyes. When he sat up, sharp pains shot through his body, down to his bones. Then came the shivers and more sweating. He was frightened and could not tell what was causing what and how to stop it. He began to cry and called out for anyone, someone to help him.
The cleric slowly opened the door and walked over to him with a small tray of tea and sugar cubes. He said nothing to the young man, but sat on the side of the bed, placing the tray on the nightstand. He filled the glass of tea almost to the top with sugar cubes and stirred until they melted and turned the tea the consistency of syrup. Jamsheed lay there, trying to limit the involuntary fits of his body. The mullah brought the tea glass close to his face and nodded to encourage the young man to drink.
The sugar and heat moved down Jamsheed’s throat and coated his stomach, warming his body. His great-uncle refilled the glass from the teapot on the tray and added more cubes. He held it once again to Jamsheed’s lips. As the young man drank, the mullah began to speak in a quiet, uninflected tone. “You must be aware that the pain will continue for some days. Your heart will beat rapidly and the sweating will get worse. You will have trouble while sleeping and trouble when awake. This is the price you must pay for the indignities you have subjected your body and spirit to. But know this, it will pass. It will pass.”
Jamsheed drank his tea and listened to his great-uncle and felt tears running down his cheeks. He kept repeating to himself, “It will pass, it will pass.” The cleric stood to leave, but Jamsheed grabbed his hand. “Please don’t leave me,” he said.
“I will be right back.”
The mullah left the door wide open and came back with his worry beads and Koran. He sat on the floor pillows by the bed, opening the Koran on the bookstand. He began to rock back and forth, holding his beads in his left hand and turning pages with his right. He read in an almost inaudible whisper. Jamsheed felt his eyelids grow heavy and flutter closed.
He sat up suddenly with a gasp. The room was pitch black. His heart pounced in his chest and he was drenched in sweat. “Are you there?” he said, his voice raw and afraid.
“Yes,” said the cleric, as calmly as before.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Not long, a few hours.”
Jamsheed’s eyes began to acclimate themselves. He made out the shape of his great-uncle leaning against the wall with one knee propped up, worry beads dangling from his hand. He was still reading the Koran but now from memory.
“I dreamt,” Jamsheed said. “I never dream.”
“One always dreams. It is just that one does not always remember.”
“I don’t know where I was. It was sunny, almost unbearably so. There were trees and rocks everywhere and I was thirsty. So thirsty. My tongue felt as if it was covered in sand and I could hear a waterfall, very close by. I started to walk toward the sound. It got louder and louder but I couldn’t find it. I pushed through the foliage, the sound of water rushing nearer and nearer, but at the end of the path I tried, there were only trees. My throat was on fire from the thirst. I kept going, but the waterfall was never there. The ground started to shake, and I could still hear the water but now it was rumbling and rushing toward me, breaking the trees and swallowing me. That is when I awoke—catching my breath as I drowned.”
TWO MOTHERS
Dusk was setting on the quiet, narrow street where Akbar-Agha stopped to rap on a door. He could hear the clanking of silverware and dishes inside the neighboring houses: the clear then suddenly muted voices of women going in and out of kitchens carrying platters of food, the squeals of children leaping from their seats and running around the sofrehs, being chastised by mothers and ordered to sit down again. He heard laughter from one home, arguing from another, silent feasting from yet another.
His brother opened the door, still wearing his aba and holding his worry beads. They nodded to each other. Akbar-Agha took off his shoes on the doormat and leaned down slightly to kiss his brother on both cheeks. The physical difference between them was startling. If one did not know they were brothers, one would have never guessed. They did not have the same mother. Akbar’s mother had been his father’s second wife, whom his father had married when Habib was two years old.
Their father, known to them only by the honorific title Haj-Agha, had been an ambitious young man of little means who worked his way into a fortune by taking Habib’s mother as his first wife. She was the oldest and dowdiest daughter of a patrician family who gladly gave her up, despite Haj-Agha’s lowly station. To his surprise, she was an excellent cook and housekeeper. Because of this, Haj-Agha endured her presence for the first three years of their marriage, even after she produced a son and daughter who glaringly resembled her. On the fourth year, after complaining that she could not produce more children, which was true due to the lack of physical contact between them, he demanded a new wife. Her family was scandal-shy and he was able to force her to sign a legally binding letter of consent.
The second wife was a younger woman from a modest village family. She was an exceptionally tall, slender woman with bright green eyes and light brown hair. Haj-Agha was taken by her beauty, and with the means from his first wife’s family was able to procure the second wife without much wrangling. Akbar’s mother came into the home and the first wife, initially devastated by the event, could not help but be dazzled by her rival. It was an envy so strong that, over time, it metamorphosed into adoration.
Delicate and graceful, the second wife had no domestic skills to speak of and the first wife, known within the family as Haj-Khanoom, took it upon herself to shoulder all the responsibilities of the house, especially since the second wife, known as Simin-Khanoom, was already with child in the first month of marriage.
Akbar’s birth was difficult and permanently injured Simin-Khanoom’s back. Despite her stature as the first wife, Haj-Khanoom upended the household order and waited on her day and night. Washing sheets, tending to the garden, and scrubbing floors left her hands wrinkled. Folds of skin puckered across her knuckles. Crow’s feet formed on her eyes. Her legs grew thick and muscular from repeated squatting to lift children and basins. She soon resembled a charwoman.
In response, Haj-Agha doted on Simin and her young son, Akbar, practically ignoring Haj-Khanoom and her children, Habib and Zahra. Even nursing exhausted Simin-Khanoom. When her monthly feminine bleeding returned, it wouldn’t stop and the doctors in town were unable to find the cause or cure. She became anemic and bedridden and more frail than before. Her hip bones jutted out from beneath the piles of blankets on the bed and her skin paled to an almost bluish translucence, which for Haj-Agha only added to her allure. He sat each evening by her side, entranced by her matted blond hair and glistening green eyes.
Though Haj-Khanoom ran the household and reared the three children, her own offspring were not allowed in Simin-Khanoom’s room when Haj-Agha appeared. Each morning, Haj-Khanoom made a special wildflower-infused tea that she held up to Simin’s lips and urged her to drink. She wiped her face with a washcloth doused in cucumber water. She changed the menstrual cloth in Simin’s undergarments, each time easing the tension and embarrassment of her sister-wife, saying, “Shhhh. It’s all right. Don’t be ashamed. It’s natural.”
Still Simin’s pain in her womb began to get worse. The bleeding increased a
nd she moaned constantly. Haj-Khanoom gave her more tea to calm her.
One afternoon, Haj-Agha came home early from his gold souk in the town square and found his first wife in the kitchen, steeping her wildflower concoction. He looked at it suspiciously. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Making tea for Simin-Khanoom.”
“What is in it?”
“Dried starflowers. It calms her.”
He grabbed the tea, smelled it, then quickly scooped out the wilted flower petals and inspected them. “No more of this,” he said. “Regular tea is fine.”
Later, Haj-Agha carried his little son Akbar into his mother’s room and sat him down on her bed. She stared at him with her wide pain-filled eyes, their color shifting from green to blue to a strange, cool gold. Akbar was frightened. He called out to Haj-Khanoom.
On the doctor’s next visit, Haj-Agha showed him the canister of dried starflower petals. The doctor was shocked and said, “Do not, under any circumstances, give this to her. This flower is a blood thinner.”
Haj-Agha went into a rage. He accused Haj-Khanoom of trying to kill Simin and forbade her to go into Simin’s room alone. He recruited her own son, Habib, to spy on her, which Habib gladly did in order to impress a father who otherwise ignored him.
Simin-Khanoom slowly bled to death and died one year later. Akbar was not yet two years old. From that day forth, Haj-Agha turned to stone, showing any human affection only when in Akbar’s presence or when recalling Simin’s unearthly beauty and kindness. Every day he found some way to compare her graces to his first wife’s clumsy, unsightly failures, and within a few years Haj-Khanoom was more than happy to leave this earth herself, leaving behind her eight-year-old son, Habib, her seven-year-old daughter, Zahra, and her six-year-old stepson, Akbar, who loved her as the only mother he had ever known. She whispered her final words into Akbar’s ear: “I didn’t know about the starflowers.”
Haj-Agha clung to Akbar, focusing all of his attention on the boy, lavishing him with gifts and luxurious clothes. He funded his education and moved him into the brightest room in the house, replete with books and fine furnishings. Over and over he lectured the boy on the importance of money and station. But secretly, Akbar remained unconvinced. Watching his father turn his sister into the new housemaid and his brother into an invisible squatter, he felt nothing but guilt. His countless attempts to share with his siblings failed. Both accused him of pity.
Standing in his childhood living room—where he had played and studied—Akbar felt overwhelmed by the past. The house was no longer his or his father’s. It was Habib’s home. He noticed a plate of bread, cheese, and herbs on a small sofreh on the floor. “I have interrupted your dinner.”
“Not at all,” said Habib, then served tea in silence.
Akbar cooled his tea by pouring it into the saucer. “Many lifetimes have passed through these doors,” he said. “So many mistakes. So many regrets.”
Habib just stared at his brother and continued flicking his worry beads, the sound resonating through the silence.
“It was kind of you to take Jamsheed in and see him through this illness. Shazdehpoor gave up on him a long time ago. It isn’t right. We’re all family.”
“I would walk any man toward the right path.”
Akbar felt himself smarting. “And those who do not wish to follow this path?”
“Are lost.”
They fell silent again.
There was a knock at the door and the cleric stood up to answer it. Akbar could hear the sounds of male voices greeting his brother. When Habib returned, three young clerics followed behind him. “This is my younger brother, Akbar-Agha,” he said. “He used to be a judge.”
The three young men, in their crisp seminarian uniforms and white turbans, nodded their respects to the former judge and did not move. The cleric stared at his brother, devoid of any expression. Akbar realized that he had interrupted a meeting. The tea and food had been for the young clerics. He suddenly felt foolish and out of place. He immediately stood and walked toward the door. He stopped to give a general farewell but no one was looking at him. He walked to the foyer and put on his shoes. No one came to see him off. He stood there for a minute and could hear his brother offering tea and sustenance to the men, holding court as he spoke of the day’s events and of events in the days to come.
Akbar stood on the narrow street looking at the houses, their lights still burning. He could hear the sounds of televisions, radios, and murmurs as the families settled in for the night. It was like any other night on this street, the street where he was born. In the window of his old home, the curtains were drawn and he could see the shadows of the three young clerics sitting and listening intently to their elder. He saw Jamsheed’s shadow come into the living room and join their circle. There was nothing more to be done.
He started homeward on foot, along the narrow alleyways leading into the town square, past the roasted-beet vendors handing their newspaper-wrapped cones of steaming treats to their customers, past the storytellers holding court for their rapt listeners.
When he reached the orchard, he slammed the door shut behind him and hurried up the path to the house. His wife had left the living room lights on for him.
He took off his shoes in the vestibule and went straight into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He had to get ahold of himself. It is one thing to know that everything ends. It is another to experience that ending. The ring of the telephone startled him. He ran to pick up the receiver and before he could even say a word, he heard the frightened, shaking voice of Shazdehpoor say, “My boy is lost.”
PARIS
IV
Shazdehpoor stood on his street corner, holding his bags of groceries, watching a young Parisian mother kneel before her child. She was wiping chocolate off his face with a tissue, reprimanding him in a playful tone. Shazdehpoor had no recollection of his own mother. She had died giving birth to him and there were no pictures of her. He knew only that she was his uncle Habib’s full sister and his uncle Akbar’s half sister. Shazdehpoor had spent his youth in his father’s house in Mash’had. Once his father remarried and started a new family, he was sent away to boarding school. Only Akbar ever spoke to him about his mother and how difficult life had been for her growing up in their household. “Your mother walked me to school every day,” he said. “She fed me and bathed me and made sure I knew my lessons. If anyone at school bothered me, she jumped in to protect me. My life was better because of her, and I know she would have done the same for you. Never think for one moment that she wanted to leave you. And never think that you were the cause of her death.”
Shazdehpoor opened the door to his apartment. He placed his walking stick in the umbrella stand. He took his groceries to the kitchenette and put them away, folding the plastic bags and shoving them into another plastic bag under the counter. He lit the burner under his samovar.
It was early afternoon and light still poured into the studio from the French doors. He took off his seersucker jacket and trousers, laid them on his bed, and wiped off the residue from his outing with a lint brush. He hung the suit carefully on its hanger, pulled the plastic cover over it, and put it back into the closet. For the first time in thirty years, he took out his Persian pantaloons and put them on with his buttoned-down shirttail hanging out.
It was siesta time, even though it had been years since he had taken an afternoon nap. He placed his tea service at the ready on a small table. He poured himself a glass and watched the steam rise as music from the radio wafted through the air. He did not know which piece but he knew Mozart when he heard it—light and airy, joyous, and realized with such depth.
The announcer’s soothing voice identified it as the Sonata no. 16 in C major. The news followed: The incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, and candidate François Hollande were neck to neck in the presidential polls. A wave of terrorist attacks across Iraq had killed 50 people and injured 240. A 7.4-magnitude earthquake had struck the Mexican states of Guerrer
o and Oaxaca. And, of course, the eclipse was due to take place in a few hours. Do not look at the sun, the radio advised. Even if you don’t feel it, you’ll damage your retinas. Shazdehpoor winced and turned off the radio.
The club chair in which he sat was a knockoff he had purchased years before at the puces. Unlike his real club chair back home, the wine-red fabric had not aged with character. The imitation red leather was worn and tattered in spots. He watched the steam rise from his tea. Then gave up.
A bottle of cognac stood on the small desk in the entranceway with a snifter next to it. He popped off the stopper and laid the snifter on its side, pouring himself a proper measure to the brim. Only then did he open the drawer and take out a floral carved wooden box.
Everything in his stark apartment was not his and not to his liking—only what he could afford. The small bed was really nothing more than a glorified cot. The faux club chair. The banker’s lamp with a plastic shade on a nightstand piled with unfinished translations of classical Persian texts that could never truly be translated and for which he was never commissioned, and unpublished articles he had written: “Iran’s Post-Revolutionary Cinema: Renaissance or Repression?” and “Aviary Aspirations: The Significance of Bird Flight in Persian Mythology.” Now that his rug was with Trianant, the wooden box on his lap contained his only real possession. He opened its hinged top.
Inside there were no photographs. All of them had been lost or destroyed by the authorities. All that was left were the letters, aged and delicate, the last thing he wanted to remember. But this was the painful truth about memory, you didn’t get to choose what you got to forget. Most of the letters were on paper from loose-leaf school notebooks, the edges frayed, the ink slightly smudged in parts. The handwriting ranged from furious and jagged to fluid and measured. He ran his fingers over the first letter in the pile.
To Keep the Sun Alive Page 14