My Uncle Napoleon

by Iraj Pezeshkzad

  The relatives were all gathered together speaking to one another in low voices. My mother and aunts were very on edge, and the men were trying to calm them down. I went closer to see if there was anything new to be learned.

  The latest news was that the doctors had said if he lasted until the evening it might be possible to save him. One of the doctors said in a puzzled way that during the one period in which he had regained consciousness for a few moments, he had repeated the names “St. Helena” and “Les Invalides” a few times, in among other words that were incomprehensible.

  Finally I saw Asadollah Mirza in a corner by himself. I went over to him. “Uncle Asadollah, how do you think it’ll turn out? I mean the doctors said that if by evening . . .”

  Asadollah Mirza said in a low voice, “Yes, that’s how it is . . . you’re quite right . . . you’ve put your finger on it.”

  “I’ve put my finger on it?”

  At that moment I realized, from the faint smile on his face and from his gaze which looked past my ear at something, that he was not paying any attention to me. I looked in the direction he was looking. A young nurse, who was making a show of arranging drugs and medicines on a table, was busy exchanging smiles and glances with him; she had entirely captured his lordship’s attention.

  I waited for a moment until the nurse went into a room. Asadollah Mirza was at liberty again and I could talk to him. “Uncle Asadollah, do you think Dear Uncle’s in any danger?”

  “It’s with God now, lad. There’s nothing we can do except pray.”

  “Uncle Asadollah, do you think . . . I mean, I want to ask you something . . .”

  “Say on, lad. Ask away.”

  “I want to ask . . . when you said to Mash Qasem to bring uncle colonel but not to bring the children, were you thinking of me?”

  “Moment, I don’t follow. How would I be thinking of you?”

  “I thought you didn’t want Layli and Puri to be here in case Dear Uncle suddenly regained consciousness and sent for the notary, as he’d planned, and had Puri and Layli married.”

  Asadollah Mirza looked at me for a moment. A strange sadness welled up in his eyes. He pressed my head against his shoulder and after a few moments of silence said, “Everyone’s here, nothing’s going to be done by you and me staying here . . . let’s go and have lunch at my house.”

  “I can’t come . . . I have to stay here.”

  “Why should you be here? . . . Are you a physician, or an expert on oxygen?” Then he suddenly stared at the end of the hospital corridor. He seized my hand and pulled me up. “Let’s get out of here . . . there’s a bad smell spreading . . . look, Mrs. Farrokh Laqa’s coming.” Then, dragging me behind him, he said to my father as we passed, “I’m taking this boy home . . . what’s the point of his staying here? We’ll go and come back in the afternoon.”

  My father and mother welcomed the suggestion.

  For the whole way home Asadollah Mirza talked of one thing and another. It was obvious he wanted to distract me from thinking about Dear Uncle and the things that had happened that day.

  When we entered the living room of his house he went straight to the sideboard and brought out a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  “Have a glass . . . we’re really tired and worn out today. We deserve this glass.”

  Then, by insisting, he made me drink a second glass.

  “But that was a really nice hospital . . . the next time I’m feeling sick I’m certainly going there . . . Did you see what nice pretty cuddly nurses they have . . . you know that line by Sa’di:

  ‘There was a doctor once in Merv whose slender height

  Shone like a cypress in the gardens of delight.’

  Do you know it or not?”

  “Uncle Asadollah, to be honest I don’t feel like this kind of talk.”

  “Then drink another glass till you do feel like it . . . For goodness sake! . . . I said drink! . . . Bravo!”

  Then he threw himself down on the sofa and went on with what he had been saying, “Once upon a time I was like you, too . . . very sensitive . . . very melancholy . . . but time changed me . . . a person’s body is formed in the workshop of his mother’s body, but a person’s soul in the workshop of the world . . . have you heard about my former wife?”

  “No, Uncle Asadollah . . . I mean, I knew you had married someone and then later divorced her.”

  “As simple as that, was it? I married a woman and then divorced her? Well, sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Not now, Uncle Asadollah.”

  “Moment, then you have to drink another glass.”

  “No. I’m not feeling too good . . . just tell me about it.“

  “I was seventeen or eighteen when I fell in love . . . I fell in love with a distant relative . . . in fact she was the granddaughter of the uncle of that Farrokh Laqa who’s always dressed in black . . . the girl wanted me, too . . . you know how you’ve no control over who you fall in love with when you’re a child, when you’re young . . . mothers and fathers make their children fall in love . . . from the first day they’re always joking and drumming into the children’s ears ‘you’re my little son-in-law,’ ‘you’re my little daughter-in-law’ . . . until one day you get to the age when you fall in love and you find you’ve fallen for your father’s ‘little daughter-in-law!’ . . . and I fell for my father’s little daughter-in-law. But when the fathers found out they gave us a very hard time. Her father had found her a richer husband than I was. And my father had found a richer bride . . . not that she was really rich. By the standards of that time the difference in income from land rent between us was about two hundred tomans a year. We put up with so many blows and curses that finally they let us marry one another. That day I felt I had set foot in heaven . . . for all of two years not even the thought of another woman crossed my mind. It was as if in all the world there were no other woman except my wife . . . this world and the next and sleeping and waking and the past and the future and everything were contained in this one woman . . . And apparently my wife felt this way about me, for a year; but gradually I changed in her eyes . . . I can’t be bothered to describe the process of transformation, but in the second year, when I hurried home from the office, the reason as far as she could see was that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. If I didn’t look at other women it was because I didn’t have the guts to . . .”

  Asadollah Mirza poured himself another glass of wine and went on, “Tell me, do you remember asking me at various times who this photograph is of?” Asadollah Mirza pointed at a photograph, which had been for years on the stove in his living room, of an Arab wearing a kaffiyeh on his head.

  “Yes, I remember. You mean that friend of yours, Uncle Asadollah?”

  “Moment, moment. I always told you he was one of my old friends, but in fact he’s not my friend, he’s my savior.”

  “Your savior?”

  “Yes, because one fine morning my wife ran off with this lout of an Arab. Then I divorced her and she became the wife of this Mr. Abdolqader Baghdadi.”

  “Uncle Asadollah, this Arab stole your wife and then you framed his photograph and put it on top of the stove in your house?”

  “You’re still a child, you don’t understand. If you were drowning in the ocean and then at the last minute—when you were suffering unspeakable torments and your soul was being torn from your body—a whale were to save you, in your eyes that whale would be as beautiful as Jeanette McDonald. And this ugly Abdolqader is the whale who became Jeanette McDonald in my eyes.”

  “Uncle Asadollah, in my opinion putting his picture on the stove is a bit . . .”

  Asadollah Mirza interrupted me, “Moment, wait for a few years and then tell me your opinion . . . let me just explain what Abdolqader was like. The difference between me and Abdolqader was that I spoke to my wife
with refinement and he spoke to her coarsely and violently, I took a shower once a day and he took one once a month, I didn’t even eat spring onions and he ate onions and garlic and radishes by the kilo, I read her poetry by Sa’di and he belched at her . . . and so in my wife’s eyes I was stupid and he was clever, I was an idiot and he was intelligent. I was coarse and he was refined . . . But apparently he was a very good traveller . . . he was certainly good at travelling . . . he always had one foot here and one foot in San Francisco or Los Angeles.”

  I stared at the framed picture of the Arab on the stove and Asadollah Mirza went on talking. I no longer heard what he was saying or understood what he was driving at. Eventually I interrupted him, “Uncle Asadollah, why are you telling me this?”

  “To make you see things a little more clearly. To make you understand a little sooner things that eventually you’re going to have to understand whether you want to or not.”

  “You mean you want to say that Layli . . .”

  He cut me off, “No, I’ve no such intention, but I want to say that if it happens that one day they give Layli to Puri, you haven’t lost so much . . . if one fine day she’s going to leave you for the sake of some Abdolkhaleq Mosuli or other, then it’s all the better that they give her to Puri in the first place.”

  “Uncle Asadollah, Uncle Asadollah . . . you don’t know how much I love Layli! You were in love, too, but my love . . .”

  “Your love is greater than all other loves . . . of course, there’s no doubt of that . . .”

  “But if Dear Uncle’s plan is put into practice, or if he gets better and they want to . . .”

  Asadollah Mirza interrupted me, “They want to send for the notary, then you’ll do away with yourself . . . I know that . . . The plan was nearly put into practice when they brought the notary over.”

  “What, Uncle Asadollah? Dear Uncle had the notary over?”

  “Yes, but it was for something else . . . yesterday evening, when you were sick, they brought the notary to the house . . . the notary and Seyed Abolqasem . . . Dear Uncle was looking after five thousand tomans Mash Qasem had saved and for that they’ve sold Mash Qasem forty or fifty thousand meters of land out in the middle of God-knows-where, land which isn’t worth one tenth of a qeran a meter and they’ve sold it to him for one qeran a meter . . . I only learned about all this last night. Mash Qasem came by and he was like a stuck pig he was so angry. But the poor devil was so afraid that Dear Uncle would get annoyed and his health would deteriorate that he’d agreed to it, and then . . .”

  “Uncle Asadollah, if he had brought the notary to the house, then why didn’t he settle the matter of Layli and Puri as well?”

  Asadollah Mirza was silent for some moments. I stared uneasily at his mouth. He muttered, “He settled that matter, too.”

  And he placed his hand over mine.

  I don’t know for how long I stayed there, bewildered and unable to move. My mind wasn’t working properly. As if a needle were stuck in a record his words repeated themselves in my ears, without my properly understanding what they meant.

  Later, I went over those moments for many long nights and days and was able to reconstruct the scene for myself.

  Asadollah Mirza described to me how, the previous night, Dear Uncle had secretly summoned Layli and Puri and uncle colonel, and how, after making tragic and terrible speeches, he had persuaded them to agree to honor the last wish of a condemned and dying man.

  The result of this was that that night Layli and Puri, before God and before the law, had formally become husband and wife.

  In all the many times I have gone over this scene in my mind, what is not clear to me is my own reaction to this news. The one thing that has stayed in my mind is that for a moment my eyes stared at the hands of Asadollah Mirza’s old clock, which was on the stove next to the picture of Abdolqader Baghdadi. It was a quarter to three in the afternoon. And this time made me remember the beginning of my love, which had started at a quarter to three one Friday the thirteenth of August.

  On the evening of that day I once again succumbed to a violent fever. This time my high fever lasted for a few days and was so extreme that I have no proper memory of that period. Even the weeping and mourning for Dear Uncle’s death, which happened the evening of that same day, left no clear impression on me. On the third day of my illness, at Asadollah Mirza’s insistence, they took me to the hospital. No doctor was able to diagnose my illness. Dr. Naser al-Hokama stood by his original diagnosis of typhoid; the doctors in the hospital didn’t agree with this diagnosis, but they themselves couldn’t give a correct diagnosis either. More than anyone else it was Asadollah Mirza who cared about me. Later I also learned that when I was ready to go home from the hospital, he persuaded Dear Uncle’s wife to take the children to her brother’s house in Esfahan, and since he had been given a government posting in Beirut, he also persuaded my father to agree that I should go to Beirut with him and that after I had convalesced I should continue my education there.

  It was the middle of summer when I went to Beirut with Asadollah Mirza. I was there until the end of the war. After the war I went from Beirut to France. And after many long years, during which I continued to bear the burden of my disappointed love, I returned to Tehran.

  EPILOGUE

  THE STORY OF MY LOVE, and what love put me through, has come to an end, but perhaps I should make some further mention of the people in my family and the heroes of this tale.

  Later I realized that Layli accepted the disappointment much more easily than I had done. Of course it took some time before she and Puri began their life together. Apparently Dr. Naser al-Hokama’s cure went forward at a slow pace. But when I returned they were the proud parents of three girls, all of whom, fortunately for Puri’s reputation, were the image of their father. They lived in the house in the garden with uncle colonel, who had retired with the rank of major; they were the last inhabitants of the remaining part of the garden.

  Of this story’s other heroes I’ll mention first what happened to the most fortunate of them, Cadet Officer Ghiasabadi and Qamar. The cadet officer managed Qamar’s inheritance so shrewdly that he gradually became a rich man. Four or five years after I returned from abroad, he took his children to America to continue their education there. After Aziz al-Saltaneh had died, since Qamar couldn’t bear to be so far away from her children, she and her husband went to America and I think they are now living in California.

  After Aziz al-Saltaneh’s death, Dustali Khan married again, and from what I have heard his new wife leads him such a dance that every day he blesses the memory of Aziz al-Saltaneh a thousand times over.

  One day a few years ago, in among my late father’s papers, I found Dear Uncle Napoleon’s letter to Adolf Hitler, on which my father had written as a joking footnote, “Filed due to the death of the recipient.” I saw Asadollah Mirza for the last time at Dr. Naser al-Hokama’s funeral, and, though he was by then more than sixty years old, he looked no more than fifty. He had insinuated himself into the midst of the group of women who were there and was enjoying himself so thoroughly with the young females of the family that he didn’t pay much attention to me; he merely said, “Poor Mrs. Farrokh Laqa, how desperately she wanted to be present at Dr. Naser al-Hokama’s funeral, but she didn’t last long enough.”

  “Uncle Asadollah, I wanted to say something to you.”

  “Moment, if it’s not urgent can we talk about it later . . . if you get the chance drop by my house and we’ll sit and drink a glass together . . .”

  Then he ran over to a middle-aged woman and her daughter. “Wonderful to see you . . . I’ve missed you so much . . . Good heavens, Shahla my dear, how you’ve grown. Please fix an evening when you can come to my house with dear Shahla . . . will you come and see your uncle, Shahla? . . . What a lovely girl she is and no mistake.”

  Out of all this group, each
of whom in turn had been accused of being a lackey and a spy of the English, there was only one real spy and that was the Indian Brigadier Maharat Khan, who had passed on news of the movements of the English to the Germans, and who was arrested by the English before the end of the war.

  Mash Qasem seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and from a year after Dear Uncle’s death no one in the family had any news of him. The event seemed to have affected him so much that he didn’t want to see any member of the family, or else, as some in the family said, he had died grieving for Dear Uncle. A long time after Dear Uncle died I learned that on his last day in the hospital he had regained consciousness for only a moment, and when he saw Mash Qasem at his bedside, a faint smile came to his lips. Mash Qasem, and those who were very close to him, heard him say “Bertrand, you will come with me!” and for a while Mash Qasem was upset thinking that “Bertrand” was some kind of a demon. Then, to reassure him, Asadollah Mirza spent hours telling him the story of how Marshal Bertrand had accompanied Napoleon into exile on St. Helena.

  I think it must have been in 1966 that I went for a holiday trip to a small provincial town. On the first evening I went in search of a friend I had known abroad when I was at college and who was now a doctor. After our years apart, he showed himself to be extremely pleased to see me. He was dressed in clothes for going out. He said he had been invited to a friend’s house, and as there would be a great number of people there, he could take me along with him.

  We entered a large and very beautiful garden; on one side the instruments of an Iranian musical ensemble were laid out on the grass, and in another corner a Western band was playing and the young people were dancing. There were about a hundred and fifty guests. The party was being held to say goodbye to a son of the family who was leaving to continue his education in America. It was a very warm, friendly gathering and the family were extremely kind and hospitable. Two or three people stayed with me the whole time so that I wouldn’t feel left out.