by Zoha Kazemi
A book lies horizontally on the top shelf that looks familiar to Tirad’s eye. He picks it up and moves his hands over the blue, hard cover of the book. This is the last fiction book he had read and was transferred to this cabin many years ago. This book, unlike other things in the cabin is not covered with dust, as if someone had dusted recently. The book name is carved on the hard cover but the golden paint of the title has now completely faded out. Tirad had always favoured Alyosha more than the other Karamazov brothers. But he loved Ivan as well, walking with him in his imaginations on the town alleys that he couldn’t recall its name. The court that had condemned Dmitri had awed him. It was Hurmaz who had brought ‘Brothers Karamazov’ to the forbidden library. Tirad had kept asking questions about Father Zosima, his orthodox beliefs, the demons that hung on the shoulders of the sinners, about ‘sin’, murder and most of all the stench of Father Zosima’s corpse who wanted Alyosha to leave the monastery before his death. He would imagine himself as being Alyosha and would think of the Saviour Ship as the monastery and in his mind, he would sit Hurmaz in Father Zosima’s place. He would identify his peers that were unkind to him with Smerdyakov and Dmitri specially Mart who was more alike to Smerdyakov than others. But he couldn’t find anyone that would resemble Ivan’s character. He imitated Alyosha, falling in and out of love. He would look at the maids of the Ship and imagine them as Liza but none of them looked like her, they didn’t have long puff like skirts and fine, gentle manners. The maids like Lealy would cover their bodies with a dirty, old rag cloth and had no secrets to hide like Liza. Tirad had wished he had been born many years earlier before the Great Fog, he had regretted that since he had learned to read. But he knew such regret and ingratitude may bring about the anger of the sea. He would then cleanse himself of all his fantasies and foul desires in the Spawn-Scorching ceremonies, getting rid of all his obscene and fulsome thoughts.
Tirad goes through the book, turns some pages and takes in the smell of the old thin papers. He wants to take the book out and read it again, enjoying it word by word. But the pages seem to have arched as if something is placed between the papers. Tirad slowly opens the book from where it is swollen. There are some handwritten papers between the book pages. He takes them out and sits back on the stool again. He shines his torch light on the four small papers. The first three are written with the same handwriting and the last with a different one. He separates them and puts them side by side on the table. He reads the individual handwritten page first ‘Exile Sentence from the Saviour Ship’ with Lady Parsana’s name written as the exiled person. Tirad is shocked and his hands are shaking. He starts reading the short text. It is written that Parsana is exiled from the Saviour Ship due to disobedience of the Saviour Rules. The Sentence is signed by Ariad and Hami. But how is this possible? He had never heard such a thing! Parsana and Ariad were the legendary couple who had raised the Saviour and had been with him until their death. He had never heard anyone being exiled from the Ship. There is no mentioning of the Saviour and he hadn’t signed it.
The other three pages are written by Lady Parsana. They seem to have been part of her Narratives, titled in the same way. But apparently, they have been omitted in all the copies made from Parsana Narratives. The title ‘Saviour’s Prophecies’ takes him by surprise. All these years living on the Saviour Ship, having read and heard all the Saviour Narratives many times, he had never heard the Saviour giving prophecies! His Marvels about finding the islands is still wondrous to all, but prophecies? He hurriedly reads through the lines, to find Parsana’s exile cause. But Parsana has given an account of his time alone with the Saviour. The dialogue is intimate as if two friends are conversing. She asks him why they are not allowed to kill the giant fish. Tirad is surprised to read such a trivial question that the Saviour had answered to many times before, the same answer: that men will come back after death in the form of men or large fish. Hadn’t this answer convinced Parsana? Why had she asked him the same question again? Perhaps such over questionings had been the cause of her exile.
Parsana quotes the Saviour’s answer: “Within two to three eras, there will no longer be a difference between us and the fish. We shall all become one; our women shall the nurse the infant fish and the female fish shall breastfeed our babies under the water.” Parsana has asked for more explanation. But the Saviour has said: “My explanation is not understandable to you. These words are for our descendants who shall one day face this phenomenon.” She has asked about the preventive actions and the Saviour has once again referred her to his Rules, saying that such Rules are to be obeyed by all who live on the sea. This questions and answers go on for three pages.
Tirad distances himself from the table. Straightens his back and wipes his eyes with the back of his hands, unawares of the dust that has resided on them. His eyes soar as the dust gets into them and he can hardly keep his eyes open. He knows that Hurmaz had put these papers between the book pages on purpose. He knew Tirad would open ‘Brothers Karamazov’. He must have wanted Tirad to find them; no one else would open this book. He still doesn’t understand what this so-called prophecy has to do with Parsana’s exile and with the case of the dead pregnant women. But if they weren’t relevant, Hurmaz wouldn’t have put them for Tirad to find. Or maybe there was no intention behind this; it was all an irrelevant coincidence. Why did he not give them to Tirad that same day when he gave the reports of the dead pregnant women? Tirad puts the four pages in the blue covered book and closes it. His eyes are soaring and tears keep coming out of them. He is careful not to wipe the tears with his hands; he has to wash them first.
He feels confused. He wants to stay and look a little more. How is it possible that such important pages of Parsana Narratives were forbidden? Had she really been exiled? To where? Or perhaps this sentence was never carried out and to avoid any further confusion, it was concealed. He had believed in Parsana’s ultimate purity all these years, but he doesn’t know how he feels about it. He feels soar and sick in his stomach and wants to find out all the omitted narratives, if there are any more! He must open the silver box; the rest must be in there. But he is not feeling well, coughs, soaring stomach and tears are making him lose his mind. He still has the forbidden library key. He can come back again tomorrow morning. He takes the silver box and the book with him, but he hesitates. Puts the box back on the table and takes the book. He closes and locks the cabin door behind him. He hesitates again, wanting to go back and bring the box out. But he hears a voice. Someone is coming out of the common library cabin, shining a torch light in the corridor. Tirad hurries up to the staircase before he is seen with the forbidden blue book.
Chapter 11
The narratives of Hami, Ariad and Parsana begin after the Great Fog. They don’t give any account of the disasters that lead to it. But people have been orally passing along the tales and oral sayings on the sea means forgetting many events and replacing them with occult tales and extravagant myths. Everyone would agree on that but there is no true univalent source to confirm or deny the stories. No one knew which Ship residents or people of which island had best kept in their memories the accounts of the past and had protected the historical happenings with less distortion, as they were passed along one generation to the next. The most ambiguous part of the accounts is the duration of the occurrences. Some people believed that there was ten years of earthquakes and tsunamis, ten years of draught followed by ten years of rain that ended with the Great Fog. While some say the whole disaster, starting from the earthquakes and the droughts to the Great Fog, happened in less than a year. The only part that is similar in all the tales is the sequence of the events. Continuous formidable earthquakes had flattened the mountains. The earth had opened devouring the towns and the cities. The fallen cities buried the corpses of animals and humans in their ruins and the next earthquake vanished them all altogether. The moors had split open and the shores would rise with one landslide and go under the water with the next. All the telecommunication and air transport syste
ms had gone down within one week of the earthquake. Governments didn’t have the power and resources to help the devastated survivors. People had been plundering and sabotaging the remaining cities, turning them into ravaged ruins. The epidemic sicknesses due to water and electricity cuts had spread, filling up what had remained of the hospitals and clinics. People fled from one city to the next until there were no more places to go to and they didn’t feel safe anywhere. They hid themselves between the ruins of the once great cities, in the ravaged jungles, moors and farms, awaiting their death. But they knew there was no hiding. The ground beneath them could shake under their feet any moment, open up a hole and take them in. Reconstruction was useless. They just had to stay alive until they could. And those who stayed alive, had finally stood on the stable ground, but what they had inherited was vast wastelands.
It was impossible to get anything out of the dry lands. There was no rain and the drought continued for months and years, taking the lives of millions of people and animals due to hunger and thirst. As the icebergs began to melt, the sea level rose, drowning the islands and the coastlines. The rainfall seemed promising after many years of drought. People had celebrated this blessing and had hoped to take back their lives after the earth was reborn. But the rain didn’t seem to end, bringing with it cold breezes, moist and more new sicknesses and washing away their last hope for survivor.
The drowning of the Earth was inevitable. The coastal cities, if not already destroyed by the earthquakes, were the first victims of the great tsunamis and floods. Smaller island countries like Japan and England that were already mostly underwater, didn’t get the chance of flee to the ships, drowning in the first days of the flood. The only countries able to send their survivors to the ships and submarines before the flooding were those in the mid continents. The more distant from the oceans, the more they had time to equip their ships and save lives. But the sea-land border was on move and had made it difficult to locate the ships and transfer the goods and people. The few survivors of higher ground cities had taken themselves to the ships and taken whatever essentialities they could with them: food, clothes, livestock etc. Only a few ships had been filled with unnecessary things like books, electrical equipment, pictures, paintings and some statues.
The Saviour Ship was one of the later, driven from the heights of what was once the Alborz Mountains to Tehran. The Alborz Mountains had flattened during the earthquakes, filling the Caspian Sea from north. But Tehran, being on the south side of Alborz had survived the quakes only to be ravaged by those who had fled there from the destroyed northern cities. There was nothing left of the city. The chaos and ravage of the drought years had left behind a city filled with rotten corpses. But the minor thoughtful survivors had transferred whatever they could from the national library to a small ship that had later become known as the Saviour Ship. The books were useless to the starving plunders hence the library was one of the few untouched places. The last people had gathered whatever they could from their heritage, embarking them on three ships: one filled with books, one with the valuables from the jewellery and Ancient Iran museums and another with engineering tools and equipment. The two later ships were not found after the Great Fog and their shipwreck was confirmed twenty years later when the first diving trips started.
No one knew how long the rain and storms would continue. The cold and pneumonia had taken more lives on the ships. Those on smaller ships had run out of supplies within a year after the rain started, many dying of hunger and thirst like those who lost their lives in the drought. After the Great Fog, many ships were found covered with the bodies of those who had died of sickness and starvation. Some advanced ships of northern America had used space travel technologies, putting their passenger to sleep under anaesthetics only to wake up three to six months later, facing all the dreads of the nonstop rains. They were less immune to pneumonia and had only saved more food, delaying their death out of hunger.
The most occult tales are those about the cannibalism on the ships. It was not uncommon on the drought time and had surfaced again on the ships. There were stories of children who had eaten their mothers and fathers and tales of men and women of the ships eating their own children. People would disappear and some became stronger every day, without being affected by the famine on the ship. After the Great Fog, some ships were found with the half eaten corpses, cut out legs and arms lying around and passengers with wild blood-filled eyes that proved the cannibalism. The ship-searchers would immediately kill those who would attack them, craving for human flesh since nothing else satisfied their hunger. They had even killed a boy who had mysteriously survived the Great Fog and had eaten three men and two women all by himself, being the sole survivor of the ship. The boy had attacked them like a wild animal, ripping off one of the ship-searchers’ arm and had attempted to cut the jugular veins of another one, when he was killed from behind by the third ship-searcher.
The ship-searchers had spread out on the sea after the Great Fall, looking for other survivors, food, tools and equipment and to figure out the geography of the new world and locate themselves. The earthquakes and the droughts had wiped out around sixty percent of the world population and the death toll of the long rain was incomparable to that of the Great Fog. The end of the rain had once again brought promises of a new era, but the survivors of the storms were taken unawares by a phenomenon that they didn’t expect. The water that had covered the earth started evaporating, creating a pervasive thick fog that spread all over the sea. People, who had survived famine and thirst, now had to face the lack of breathing air. If hunger killed after a few days and thirst after two, it only took a few minutes to die without breathable air, saturated by water.
The submarines had the upper hand, but there were no submarines in the Tehran area, and the lucky survivors of the capital city had taken shelter in the ships. The passengers of the ships that were not equipped with oxygen masks didn’t live to see a next day. Seldom ships with enough oxygen masks had survived the whole twelve days of the Great Fog by using the masks, isolating and air proofing the closed areas and reducing all motion. The anaesthetics had come to help this time; once under anaesthesia, a person would breathe less, needing little air to survive. But not many were keen to be put to sleep. Death was only a few minutes away and as the rain had continued longer than expected, no one knew how long the fog would last. It could have gone on for months and some people scared of running out of oxygen while put to sleep resisted the idea and some preferred it, thinking it as being less painful: suffocating while unconscious. Most of all, it was a trust issue. Who could guarantee that after someone went down; the others didn’t take his or her oxygen mask, leaving them to suffocate? But as the fog continued, they had ran out of choices. Each family had chosen one member to stay awake and look after those who had been put to sleep. As the fog started to thin, people who had finally lived out all the disasters, woke up their family members to the first beautiful sunrise in a clear sky in so many years.
Parsana and Ariad were a couple who lived on one of the fully equipped ships and had woken up to a new world, a world where horizon was once more visible. The horizon separated the sea and the sky, there were no more water coming down or evaporating up to the sky anymore. One could say at which point the water level settled and from there the breathable air dwelled. But the victims of the Great Fog were numerous among their ships. Some masks had been ruptured or ran out of oxygen and some couldn’t bear the long anaesthesia and they hadn’t lived to see the new horizon. Ariad and Parsana who were on the ship of Iran authorities had finally started their life together. Some say they were in love before the rain and some believe they had met and fall for each other on the ship and some believe that they never met until after the Great Fog when search parties were formed. There are no sayings about the matter in the written Narratives of Hami, Parsana and Ariad.