My Father's Notebook

by Kader Abdolah

  Nasreddin stops an old man. “Please, brother, what’s got into that young man?”

  “He’s in love. We’ve all come to watch, so we can learn what love is.”

  My father took me to the square every evening. The woman in the hat usually arrived later on and the three of us would go sit on a bench, with me in the middle, to act as their interpreter.

  Who was she? How had they met? I had no idea.

  My poor father had trouble concentrating on his work. He sewed wrong numbers on the carpets and created chaos in the account books and warehouses. One of the employees dropped by to warn Tina: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but if he doesn’t snap out of it, he’ll be fired.”

  He didn’t snap out of it and he was fired.

  He was absent-minded at home, too. He stared out of the window, or tried to find a quiet place where he could write in his notebook. Tina warned the family, “Help! Akbar has fallen into disgrace!”

  As a Persian, you don’t actually need to have been in love yourself. You can read about it in Persian stories, in Persian myths and even in the Koran. Like every Persian, Tina must have known the story of the sheikh and the tarsa (Christian).

  The sheikh, an elderly Sufi leader, sets out on foot for Mecca, together with thousands of his followers. Months go by. Then, in one of those foreign cities, the sheikh sees a beautiful tarsa in the bazaar and immediately falls in love with her. It couldn’t get any worse—to be headed for Mecca and to fall in love with a Christian! The sheikh abandons his plan and sets off, barefoot, in search of the beautiful tarsa. The entire Muslim world is horrified. “The sheikh has fallen into disgrace!” they cry.

  My father and I had donned our ties again. We were sitting on a bench in the square, beside the woman in the hat, when suddenly, off in the distance, I thought I saw two of our horses. How could that be? How could the horses we left behind in Saffron Village now be trotting towards the square? Then I recognised our wagon and, moments later, heard the voice of my oldest aunt as she talked to my other aunts and uncles.

  The horses stopped in the glow of a nearby streetlamp.

  My oldest aunt got out and marched over to my father. She grabbed hold of his tie and dragged him over to the wagon, like a cow.

  My aunts held him down, while my uncles undid my father’s red tie and tossed it to the ground. Then my oldest aunt bustled over, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me over to the wagon, too. “A fine job you did, my boy!” she exclaimed. “A fine job of looking after your father!”

  We all got in and the horses trotted off.

  I could hear my father crying. I couldn’t see him very well, however, since he was sitting behind my aunts, with his head bowed and his hands over his face.

  I looked back at the square. The woman was still there, standing in the lamplight and clutching her hat as if there were a strong wind. She watched us go.

  The next day my aunts and uncles loaded our belongings into the wagon and took us to another city—Senejan. I have no idea how they did it, but the arrangements had already been made. We had a flat and my father had a job in a textile mill.

  He spent all day walking up and down a row of looms and reconnecting broken threads. He wasn’t allowed to move away from the machines, not even for a minute.

  • • •

  I no longer saw my father in the daylight hours, since he left home before sunrise and got back after sunset. Tina immediately gave him his dinner. He ate in silence, sat for a while, held his daughters in his lap, drank one last cup of tea and went to bed.

  When I think back to him at that time, I always picture him asleep.

  Sometimes he didn’t even bother to take off his work clothes. He’d lie down for a short rest, then fall into a deep sleep from which we couldn’t wake him.

  “Ishmael, pull the covers up over your father,” Tina used to say. Another memory from that time. I knew I was supposed to cover him up, but I always waited for Tina to ask me. Maybe that’s why this particular phrase has stuck in my memory.

  The woman in the hat had arrived to split my father’s life in two. She ended one phase of his life and ushered in another. Otherwise she had nothing to do with us and we had nothing to do with her. She came, did her job, and left.

  Aga Akbar had once been a highly respected carpet-mender, who had galloped on his horse from one village to another with his head held high. His hair had been black and his white teeth had glowed in the dark. After our move to Senejan, his hair turned grey and he looked ill. All he did was work, work, work.

  I leaf through my father’s notebook with hopes of finding out more about that time. Since the pages don’t have numbers, I pencil them in on the lower right-hand corner of every page. On page 134 I see a few tiny sketches. I assume they represent the phases of the moon: a new moon, a quarter moon, a half moon, a three-quarter moon, a full moon, and then suddenly a dark moon and a red moon.

  He clung to a habit he’d acquired during the first period of his life: no matter where he was or where he went, he always came home by full moon. When night fell and everyone was asleep, he would set the ladder against the wall and climb up onto the roof. He’d sit on our roof, stare at the moon and hum.

  Hum?

  What on earth could he hum if he didn’t know any lyrics or melodies? If he didn’t know the songs of the lovesick medieval poet Baba Taher and had never heard this famous Sufi leader’s love poems?

  His enchantment with the full moon was a throwback to his life in Isfahan. The nights there had been full of stars. The moon had hung above the magical mosques like a heavenly lamp.

  If you stood in Naqsh-e-Jahan Square on a clear night, you could pluck the moon right out of the sky. It’s what the ancient Persian poets did with their poetry.

  Aga Akbar was mesmerised by the sky. During the lonely nights, he would steal up to the roof of the Jomah Mosque, sit down, lean back against the dome, wrap his arms around his knees and stare into the night. The night brought him closer to the inexplicable, to Allah, to love. Perhaps the best way to describe this is to quote two verses of a very long, old song:

  Az nayestan ta ma-ra be-b’ridand

  dar nafir-am mard o zan nalidand

  sineh khwah-am sharheh sharheh az firaq

  ta be-goy-am sharh-e dard-e ishtiyaq.

  Every Persian knows this song, or at least these two verses. You hum them when you’re in love. Even though Aga Akbar had never heard the words, he would still hum that song.

  It’s about a reed that stood in a field of reeds. Someone cut it down to make a flute. The reed then laments:

  From the moment I was cut down they all

  Played me and poured out their longings.

  I seek an aching heart, torn by loneliness,

  So I can pour out my own painful yearnings.

  One time I borrowed a projector. When the full moon rose that night and my father was about to lean the ladder against the wall and climb up on the roof, I tugged his sleeve: “Come, there’s something I want you to see.”

  He didn’t want to come with me, he wanted to see his moon.

  “Listen, you don’t have to go up on the roof. I have a moon for you, right in your own living room.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “The moon,” I signed. “I’ve put the moon into that machine. Especially for you. Come look!”

  He smiled, the usual bland smile he wore whenever he didn’t understand something. I pulled up a chair for him and closed the curtains.

  “Sit down!” I signed and turned off the light.

  He hesitantly sat down and stared at the blank screen.

  I switched on the projector. First there were some words in English, then suddenly a young man. My father didn’t react, just sat quietly and watched. Gradually a quarter moon appeared, then a half moon and finally a full moon. He turned around, looking for me behind the projector.

  This wasn’t the moon of Isfahan, but the moon of the United States. An inaccessible moon in
a dark blue sky. After that the screen filled with a picture of Apollo 11.

  • • •

  Was my father able to make the connection between the moon and the spacecraft?

  A few minutes later Apollo 11 landed, and for the first time man set foot on the moon. I turned off the projector and the moon vanished. My father sat in his chair with his hands on his thighs, almost as if he were praying. I didn’t switch on the light, but let him sit in the darkness for a while. I looked at my aging father. All I could see of him was his silhouette and the moonlit glow of his grey hair.

  Mossadegh

  Since Aga Akbar wrote nothing about

  an important period in Iran’s history,

  I have to get that information

  from another source.

  Yesterday I took a quick look at the first part of this book. That’s when I noticed that an important period in the political life of my country was missing.

  How could Aga Akbar write about an event if he didn’t even know it had taken place?

  I’d prefer not to discuss politics in this book, but sometimes it can’t be helped. I have to include the highlights, for the simple reason that the most important changes in Akbar’s life were the result of radical changes in the country’s political agenda.

  My father’s move to the city, for example, was prompted by a major shift in Iranian politics: the CIA-backed coup that restored the young shah to the throne.

  I had to say something about Mossadegh, but where would I find the necessary historical facts?

  Though the university library undoubtedly had enough material, I didn’t want an overly historical approach that would make me stray too far from my father’s notebook. I wanted to sketch a clear portrait of Mossadegh, in a few simple lines. But how could I do that?

  Then it occurred to me to phone Igor.

  “Good morning, Igor. It’s Ishmael.”

  “Good morning, Ishmael. What can I do for you so early in the morning?”

  “Early? It’s not that early. You usually get up at six-thirty. Don’t tell me you’re still in bed?”

  “Today I am, for a change. I don’t feel like getting up. Chalk it up to old age. That means no newspapers, no pens and no writing pads for me today. So, tell me, what can I do for you?”

  “Nothing much. Just one question, which you don’t need to answer right away. I’ll drop by later on. I’d like to know something about Mossadegh.”

  “Mossadagh? Refresh my memory … where or who is Mossadagh?”

  “No, Mossadegh. You must have come across his name be-fore—the prime minister of Iran after the fall of Reza Khan Pahlavi …”

  Igor, a former journalist, is a friend of mine. He used to live in Amsterdam, in an old house on a canal. It was so full of books and records that he had no room for more, so when he retired, he decided to sell his small house and move to the peace and quiet of the polder.

  The first time I met him was on the day he moved. It was hot and I was out running. Opposite the dyke, just past the new cemetery, was a beautiful house with a lovely view of the sea. It had been empty for a while, but now there was a moving van parked outside. An old man in a hat was pointing at dozens of book boxes and admonishing the movers. “Gently, please. Be careful … those are my files!”

  Suddenly he began to shout, “Oh, God, they’re ruining my books!”

  I stopped and watched for a while. Fascinating, an old man in a hat with so many boxes of books.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked me. “Help me! I’ve got to let my cats out.”

  I helped him carry a huge box containing seven miaowing cats into the house. We’ve been friends ever since.

  Igor lives alone with his seven cats. For the last fifty years he’s spent every morning cutting “important” articles out of the newspaper—with the same old scissors—and filing them in his archives, which consist of hundreds of files.

  I was certain he had a file on Mossadegh. The question was whether I could find it.

  I went over to his house. As usual, he didn’t come down to open the front door. Instead, he stuck his head out of the window to see who was there, then tugged on a rope that ran from the top of the stairs to the door.

  “You could buy yourself an electronic door opener, you know,” I called up to him. “It beats having to use a rope.” I say that every time I come for a visit.

  “Phooey! Come on up, young man!”

  The moment I walked in, seven cats started crawling up my arms and legs.

  “Are you sick, Igor? Were you really in bed or—”

  “Anyone who’s got out of bed every morning at six-thirty for the past fifty years also gets up every morning at six-thirty to die. Come in, I’m not sick and I’m not in bed, either. I’m just old, that’s all. But, uh … you wanted to know something about Mossadegh. Why Mossadegh, all of a sudden?”

  I was about to explain why I needed the information, but as usual he went on talking. Besides, I hadn’t told him about the notebook. I knew I’d have to tell him some day, but I didn’t yet dare.

  “You know,” he said, “I became addicted to newspapers at a very young age. When I was about ten, I read about a statesman in your country who wept when he was forced to resign. You probably know your history better than I do, but what I do know is that he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which, by the way, seemed to me a very sensible thing to do.

  “Help yourself to some coffee, my boy. I’ve put out a nice cup for you, one that comes from the Middle East. I bought it at a flea market. No, wait, at a rummage sale in Amsterdam. Anyway, the coffee tastes better in that cup.

  “That man, that Mossadegh … I don’t know all that much about him. I have a file, though I’m not sure where it is. The shah wanted to get rid of him, I think, and threw him in jail. I don’t know if Mossadegh always wept in public, or if that was the only time. We didn’t have television in those days, but movie theatres used to show a newsreel before the movie began. Mossadegh’s tears struck me as a breath of fresh air. At last, a statesman who showed his emotions in public.

  “In the post-war years the Netherlands had a greatly respected prime minister by the name of Willem Drees. Still, you never saw him laugh, much less cry. He might have shed an occasional tear in the privacy of his own home, but the general public didn’t know that. Dutch men aren’t supposed to show their emotions, they’re supposed to suppress their tears.

  “What did I tell you? The coffee does taste better in that cup! Have a biscuit, the biscuit tin’s over there, by the … oh, I forgot, I hid it from the cats. They like to bat it around, and the biscuits get broken. I might have stuck it behind those files …

  “It’s OK to cry at a funeral, that’s acceptable. As for me, I cry whenever I feel like it. Come to think of it, I don’t know whether I got that from my mother or from Mossadegh … Anyway, the shah didn’t have Mossadegh killed. Wasn’t that nice of him? I had a pretty low opinion of the shah in those days, because he was a friend of our prince Bernhard. You know who Prince Bernhard is, don’t you? The husband of our former Queen Juliana and the father of our present Queen Beatrix. He’s known for keeping bad company. My analyses are often based on emotions, so the way I looked at it, the shah was bad and Mossadegh was good. Now, where’s that biscuit tin?”

  Igor had nothing more to say about Mossadegh, but he did point me in the general direction of the clippings.

  I sat on the floor for a couple of hours, poring over his files. And this is what I found:

  From 1921 to 1925 Mossadegh served as minister of justice, then of finance and finally of foreign affairs. He was elected to Parliament in 1944. He founded the National Front Party in 1950 and became prime minister in 1951, at which point he nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The country was plunged into a direct conflict with Great Britain. Mossadegh was forced to resign in 1952, but was reinstated three months later, as a result of popular riots. He promptly curtailed the power of the shah—
the son of Reza Khan—and began to lean heavily on the support of leftist factions. The shah fled the country. Backed by the United States, however, he returned. The national government fell and Mossadegh was arrested.

  When Churchill learned that Mossadegh had been placed under permanent house arrest, he raised his glass and said, “He was mad … a dangerous man.”

  Mossadegh was far from “dangerous”. He was our pride and joy.

  Thousands of his followers were arrested. Many of them were executed and hundreds fled the country. The majority of the refugees were members of a left-wing Russian-oriented party that was opposed to the shah as well as to American interference.

  Because of its popularity, the party had assumed it would soon be in power. Its adherents had been dissatisfied with Mossadegh, because they believed he made too many concessions to the imperialists. So, when the shah returned to power, they failed to support Mossadegh until it was too late. When he fell, the party fell apart. Some of its followers were executed, some went underground and some escaped.

  Many of them fled to Saffron Mountain, in hope of crossing the border into the Soviet Union. It wasn’t all that easy. Gendarmes chased them from one mountain to another in their American-made jeeps. Hungry and desperate, they sought refuge among the villagers.

  My father probably didn’t know the first thing about Communism, but he did know something about people on the run.

  Once, when he and I were in Saffron Village, he took me to our almond grove. He thrust a hunk of bread into my hands, tiptoed through the trees and hid behind a tree trunk.