My Father's Notebook

by Kader Abdolah

In one of those stores there was a well-known carpet-mender named Behzad ibn Shamsololama. He had pure magic in his fingers. He also happened to be the man waiting for Aga Akbar at the station in Isfahan.

  After twenty-three hours the train finally reached its destination.

  Aga Akbar got out.

  “When you get off the train,” his uncle had told him, “don’t go anywhere. Wait right there until an old man with glasses and a cane comes to get you.”

  And that’s what must have happened, because years later a black-and-white photograph of a bespectacled man with a cane stood on the mantel in Aga Akbar’s living room. If you examined the picture closely, you could see faint traces of the word “Isfahan” on the wall behind him.

  Aga Akbar lived in Isfahan for a year and a half. He worked from sunrise to sunset in the workshop at the rear of the store. When the store closed, he went to his sleeping place on the roof.

  Isfahan made a lasting impression on him. In the years that followed he never missed an opportunity to broach the subject. If he happened to see an Isfahan carpet, he would say, “Look, this carpet comes from Isfahan. Have you ever been there?”

  Or he would talk about the mosques. He would point up at the sky to describe the blue tiles of the Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque. A dome located defiantly opposite the dome of the universe.

  To express his admiration for the ancient Jomah Mosque, he would pick up a brick, then drop it. This was his way of saying that the tiles used in the mosque had come from heaven.

  When he talked about the bazaar, he would put his hand over his mouth and look around in astonishment. What he meant was that the magic carpets unfurled by the shopkeepers made your jaw drop in amazement.

  But how could he explain Isfahan in his simple sign language? Nobody understood what he was trying to say. He needed a son, an Ishmael, to turn his words into a language people could understand.

  “What else did you do in Isfahan? I mean, in the evenings and on the Fridays you had off? Tell me what you did when you weren’t mending rugs.”

  “On Fridays I went to the mosque to pray. There were lots of people.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “I stayed there until it got dark.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I went up to the roof to look at the sky.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “When?”

  “On the other nights? What did you do on the other nights?”

  “I looked.”

  “What do you mean? Did you spend every evening on the roof looking at the sky?”

  “You see, here in my chest, on the left side, I felt something. I don’t know what, a kind of pain. No, not a pain. Something else. A feeling … how can I explain it? I wanted to go home.”

  And at last he was allowed to go home.

  “I got sick. I couldn’t mend carpets anymore. My head hurt. I used the wrong threads. Green instead of blue. That was bad. I went to the old man, laid my forehead on the back of his hand and wept.”

  The old man brought Akbar to the station and sent him home. After a long trip the train stopped in the middle of the night at the station on Saffron Mountain. The conductor tapped Akbar’s shoulder to let him know he’d reached his stop. He got out and climbed up the mountain to begin a new life.

  He started to go home, then suddenly took another path. After an hour of walking up steep mountains and down into deep valleys, he arrived at the house of the prostitute.

  He knocked on her door. She didn’t open it. She was afraid it might be a drunk. He knocked again. Still she wouldn’t open the door. He called to her, “Aayaa yayayaya aaayaya ya ya aya aya ya.”

  “Is that you, Akbar?” she called from above. She opened the door, threw her arms around him and led him inside. He spent the night with her and all of the next day. Only when evening came did he finally go home.

  The next morning Aga Akbar stood in the town square and talked to the men about Isfahan. They stared at his fingers. The dyes that had discoloured his fingertips were very different from the ones they used. Isfahan’s blue had taken on the colour of its sky, its yellow had been borrowed from its ancient stones and its green was not at all like the grassy green of Saffron Mountain. Everyone realised that Akbar had learned new techniques, that he’d picked up Isfahan’s styles.

  Later he applied these techniques to his business. People now welcomed him into their homes more than ever.

  Had an ember fallen on your rug? No problem, Aga Akbar will mend it, he’ll work his magic and make the hole disappear. Had a rat gnawed its way through the bride’s dowry carpet? Don’t worry, don’t cry, we’ll go and get Aga Akbar!

  People received him in their homes as if he were an aristocrat. He behaved like a true craftsman, a man who was proud of his work. He never went anywhere without his leather satchel, the one he’d brought with him from Isfahan. He rode with it slung over his shoulder. When he went into someone’s house, he tucked it under his arm, exactly as old Shamsololama had always done, threw back his shoulders and gestured, “Where’s the carpet?”

  One time Ishmael asked Kazem Khan, “Why did you make my father learn that particular craft?”

  “You see, my boy, carpet-weaving wasn’t actually a suitable occupation for us. Even the women in our household didn’t weave. It was the kind of thing that ordinary villagers did, farmers who had nothing else to do on long winter nights. I thought it would be the right job for him, but I soon realised it would make him miserable. He had to be free, he had to be able to get away. He wasn’t the kind of man who could spend years working on a single rug. He needed a job that could be done in a few hours, so that he could just get up and leave. That’s how I hit upon the idea of having him become a carpet-mender. It’s not boring work. In fact, it’s quite interesting. You have to use your head. You have to be an artist. Do you know what I mean? And I knew that your father had an artistic mind.”

  “An artistic mind?”

  “Yes, that of an artist, or a designer, or a … How can I explain it? People didn’t think in such terms in those days. You were supposed to work, weave, mow, plough, earn a living. What would you have done if you’d been in my position? Carpet-mending, my boy, that was the best kind of work he could do. There’s always a damaged carpet somewhere. He got to travel all over the place. It allowed him to earn a living and to express himself as an artist: to weave, dye, embellish and design. He could work his thoughts into the carpet.

  “Your father was an illiterate, deaf-mute poet. I’ve told you that before. He needed to channel his thoughts into something, whether it was a cuneiform notebook or a hole in a carpet.”

  • • •

  And so, with his notebook in his pocket and his satchel on his back, Akbar rode from one village to another.

  No one knew when he wrote in his notebook, or what he wrote about. He and his notebook were inseparable. It had become part of him, like his heart, which went on beating though no one paid any attention to that, either. Only Ishmael knew when his father was writing in his notebook. He knew that his father needed to write about the things he didn’t understand or wasn’t able to explain in sign language. Inaccessible, incomprehensible, intangible things that suddenly struck him and caused him to stare helplessly, or to stand transfixed, or to sit down and ponder. Death, for example, or the moon, or the rain, or the sacred well, or love, that indescribable process going on in your heart. Or else incidents that had marked him for life. One of these incidents had taken place when he rode into the village of Sawoj-Bolagh.

  Aga Akbar often told the story to Ishmael, who had a vague idea of what it was about. But he still couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened.

  One time, when he was about ten or twelve, his father took him along on one of his walks.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Hurry up,” his father signed. “A friend of mine lives up there. He can tell you the story. He knows all about it.”

  “Which story?”

>   “The story about my military service. You know the one I mean. Hurry up, the faster you walk the sooner we’ll get there.”

  To tell you the truth, Ishmael didn’t really want to climb the mountain. After an hour and a half, they reached a village, but Akbar kept going. Darkness was falling and the villagers were starting to light their lanterns.

  “Now where are we going?” Ishmael moaned.

  “Hurry up. We’re going to that farm. Can you see it? Over there, where that light is.”

  Akbar hadn’t realised that the climb might be too difficult for Ishmael. That a city boy might not be as good a hiker as a village boy.

  “Hurry up! We’re nearly there!”

  After walking uphill for another half an hour, they finally reached the farm, which was guarded by a big, black, barking dog.

  A farmer came to meet them with an oil lamp in his hand.

  “Who’s there?”

  Aga Akbar began shouting in his deaf-mute voice: “Aka, Aka, Akba, Akba, Is, Isma, Isma.”

  “Is that you, Akbar? Salaam aleikum! Hello, young man, what’s your name? Come this way. Stop barking, dog, shoo! Come in.”

  The dog disappeared into the darkness. They went inside.

  “So, you’re Aga Akbar’s son, Ishmael. Allah, Allah, that’s good. I knew Aga Akbar had a son, but I didn’t know he had such a bright, decent-looking boy. It’s an honour to welcome you to my humble farm. Come on in, my boy. Yes, this is a real honour.”

  He called to his wife, “Where are you? Come and look who’s here!”

  The farmer’s wife came in. She looked in surprise at Aga Akbar, who had thrown his arm around Ishmael’s shoulder.

  “So, that’s your son?” she signed. “Allah, Allah, who could have imagined that Aga Akbar would have such a fine son?”

  She planted a kiss on Ishmael’s forehead.

  “Welcome, my boy. We never had children, so you’re like a son. Welcome to our humble abode. Make yourself at home. We’re friends of your father. Go on into the living room and sit down on that rug over there.”

  A while later the farmer’s wife came in with a big brass tray of food on her head.

  They ate and talked about the past. Ishmael didn’t need to interpret, since the three adults all understood each other. Then it was time for Ishmael to ask the farmer about his father’s story.

  “Haven’t you heard that one before, my boy? Oh, of course not, how could you if I never told it to you?”

  Aga Akbar kept his eyes on the farmer’s mouth and followed every word of the story, as if he could actually hear it being told. “Do you know who Reza Khan is?” the farmer began. “Reza Shah? Have you ever heard of him? Or read anything about him?”

  “Of course. There’s a picture of him in our schoolbook. A man in a military tunic with a field marshal’s baton under his arm.”

  “That’s the one! Allah, today’s children. They know everything! Yes, he was the father of our present shah. Before Reza Khan, we didn’t have compulsory military service. When he became shah, he ordered all young men to serve in the military for two years. But we didn’t want to go. Who would work the soil and plough the fields and mow the hay? After two years, we wouldn’t have a farm to come home to. So, whenever we saw a gendarme, we ran and hid on a roof or in a haystack.

  “Sometimes, though, dozens of gendarmes swept down on the village and seized all the young men.

  “Can you believe that, my boy? They just grabbed you, pushed you into a truck and took you away. And two years went by before you saw your family again. He was hard as nails, that Reza Shah.”

  “Did you get picked up by the gendarmes?”

  “Yes, they found me and beat me up. One day a truck pulled into the village and gendarmes hopped out. The young men made a run for it, scattering in all directions. They hid up on the roofs, down in the wells, up in the trees, you name it. Soon there wasn’t a single young man to be seen in the entire village. The gendarmes started shooting in the air. Just then your father rode into the town square on his horse, on his way to a customer.”

  “Where were you? I thought you said you were hiding.”

  “Clever boy! You’re a good listener. I was lying on the roof of the mosque and watching the whole thing from there.”

  Aga Akbar laughed.

  “Do you remember?” the farmer signed to him. “Akbar, do you remember when the gendarmes starting shooting in the air and … no, of course not, you couldn’t hear the shots.”

  “No, I didn’t hear the shots,” Aga Akbar signed to Ishmael.

  “Anyway, he rode into the square, sitting straight and tall in the saddle. Then he noticed a couple of gendarmes with rifles. He stopped and looked at them for a moment, then calmly rode on. ‘Stop!’ yelled one of the gendarmes. But Akbar didn’t hear him. ‘Stop, I said!’ There was no one in the square to tell the gendarme that Aga Akbar was a deaf-mute. ‘Stop!’ the gendarme yelled for the third time. ‘Stop, or I’ll shoot.’ Allah, what a moment. I lay on the roof and watched.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, I had a tough decision to make. Actually, it wasn’t all that tough. All I had to do was stand up and say, ‘Stop! Don’t shoot.’”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course I did. I stood up then and there, put my hands in the air and shouted, ‘He’s deaf! Don’t shoot, he’s deaf!’”

  “And then?”

  “The gendarme pointed his gun at me and yelled, ‘Get down here!’”

  “And my father?”

  “He hadn’t heard a thing. He didn’t realise what was happening, so he just went on.”

  “Now the gendarme was after me. ‘Jump!’ he yelled. And I had to jump down from that high roof. Did you happen to notice the mosque in our town square?”

  “No, we didn’t come through your village.”

  “Well, it has a high roof. I jumped from it. The heel of my right foot still acts up from time to time. Anyway, the gendarmes tied my hands together with a rope and shoved me into the truck. Then they went after your father. They didn’t believe he was a deaf-mute.”

  “Why not?”

  “They just didn’t. Your father was sitting up so straight and tall in the saddle and riding with such self-confidence that they had a hard time believing he couldn’t hear or talk.”

  “And so they arrested him?”

  “Yes. They grabbed the horse’s reins and beat your father up. Then they tied his hands behind his back and threw him into the truck next to me. And that’s how I wound up spending two years in the military.”

  “And my father?”

  “It’s a long story. Let’s have some tea first.”

  The farmer’s wife came in with a cup of tea for Aga Akbar and her husband, and some hot cinnamon rolls for Ishmael.

  “Haven’t you heard this story before?” she asked.

  “Not really. My father’s tried to tell it to me many times, but I had no idea it went like this.”

  “I must have heard it a hundred times. Your father used to visit us often, and the moment those two men sat down, they started in again on the gendarmes and the military service.”

  The farmer drank his tea and continued his story.

  “I swore up and down that Akbar was a deaf-mute. But the gendarmes wouldn’t listen. They took us to the army barracks in the city. The thing was, all kinds of people were trying to avoid the draft by pretending to be deaf and dumb, or blind. Some of the draftees even chopped off their forefingers so they couldn’t shoot a rifle. The gendarmes thought your father was faking it, so they locked him up.”

  “In a prison cell?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d my father do?”

  “I don’t know. He probably didn’t have the faintest idea what was happening.”

  “Why not? He must have been able to work it out. Didn’t he know what military service was?”

  “I don’t think so. I wasn’t really sure myself. The whole idea scared me, it scared
us all. The girls in the village wept when we left. They thought we’d never come back.”

  “Why’d they put him in a cell?”

  “They always locked up the men pretending to be deafmutes. They didn’t give them anything to eat or drink. After a while the men opened their mouths and begged, ‘Water, water! Please, I’m thirsty! Can you hear me? I’m not a deafmute. Water, please!’

  “I was afraid that Akbar would get dehydrated. I had to do something.”

  “Couldn’t you have reported it to the general or one of the officers?” Ishmael asked.

  “No, they wouldn’t talk to the likes of me. Besides, I wouldn’t have dared. I’d never lived anywhere but in our village. I’d never been to the city before. I’d never even seen an officer or a general.

  “Then things went from bad to worse. They found a book, a strange little book, in the pocket of your father’s coat.”

  “What kind of book?” Ishmael asked.

  “How would I know? I didn’t even know your father had a book. Anyway, the gendarmes got together to discuss it: What is it? How did this man get hold of a book written in cuneiform?

  “Things were looking bad. I was called into the office. The chief gendarme asked me, ‘Do you know anything about this book?’

  “‘Me? No.’

  “I looked at it. I didn’t know how to read, but I flipped through it and saw that it wasn’t an ordinary book. It was written in a funny kind of writing. Hundreds of little wedges and spikes that looked like they’d been drawn by a child.

  “They brought your father into the office. He’d lost a lot of weight. He was nothing but skin and bones. ‘What’s this?’ they asked.

  “‘It’s mine,’ he signed.

  “‘How did you get hold of it?’

  “Me, Akbar, I wrote it,’” he signed.

  “‘You? You wrote this book?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘What did you write about?’

  “‘The things in my head,’ he signed.

  “The gendarmes didn’t understand him and they certainly didn’t believe him.”

  “And you? Did you believe him?”