My Father's Notebook

by Kader Abdolah

  I couldn’t stop thinking about his dream. It had a kind of beauty, a kind of challenge that appealed to me. The sea had become inaccessible to us both.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Louis said.

  “I’m thinking of the sea. Of your sea, behind the dunes. It’s a shame you won’t be able to see it from your bed. It would be a real boon to an invalid.”

  “That’s a nice way to put it.”

  I carried a chair over to the window and stood on it.

  “I think I can see the sea,” I said. “At any rate, I see a kind of blanket of blue stretching to the horizon. If you raise the bed a few feet, you’ll have the sea right here in this room.”

  “That’s funny. No one ever thought to bring the sea here by hopping up on a chair.”

  “Do you want to try it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “What time of day did you used to walk through the dunes to the sea?”

  “It’s been so long I can’t remember. Around dusk, I think.”

  “Shall we try it tonight?”

  “Try what?”

  “Going down to the sea together through the dunes, as soon as it starts to get dark.”

  “You’re crazy,” Louis laughed.

  “No, I’m not. I know how to do it. I’ve had a lot of training.”

  “Training? What kind of training?”

  “It’s a long story. I used to be active in an underground movement and we spent a lot of time in the mountains. The Cuban revolution was our shining example. We hoped to swoop down from the mountains one day with thousands of sympathisers, like Castro, and conquer the cities and overthrow the shah. We trained hard for that great day. We learned how to carry dead or wounded comrades through the mountains, but we never got a chance to put our training to use. Trust me, I know how to support a man who can barely walk. I can get you up and down those dunes.”

  He didn’t answer. He stared at me, then at the dunes.

  “We’ll go down to the sea on foot. Once we’re there, we’ll think of a way to get back.”

  As evening fell and the grass rippled in the wind, Louis put his left arm on my right shoulder and we began our journey to the sea. He quickly lost his daring. His atrophied muscles wouldn’t cooperate. I changed position and offered him my other shoulder, but that didn’t help, either.

  “You see, it won’t work,” he sighed.

  I showed him how to position his left arm so that I bore most of the weight. I thought he could hobble along like a comrade who’d lost his right leg, but still had enough strength to walk on his left.

  “This ought to do the trick,” I said.

  It didn’t. I remembered what our instructors had said. Our wounded comrades needed to believe they would reach their goal. Our job was to make them think about the city we were going to conquer, rather than their wounds. To think about the dictator we were about to overthrow, rather than the remaining miles.

  “I’ve got a story for you, Louis,” I said.

  “OK, go ahead and tell me.”

  “I’m working on a book.”

  “A book?”

  “Yes, I’m writing a book. A novel. In Dutch.”

  “In Dutch? That’s interesting. What’s it about?”

  “It’s about my father. Let me explain. My father kept a diary his entire life. He’d jot down a sentence, or a paragraph, or sometimes an entire page. But it’s a strange book.”

  “What’s so strange about it?”

  “I can’t read it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he wrote it in an unknown language—a kind of cuneiform that he invented himself. I look at a passage, then try to read it and transcribe it. No, ‘transcribe’ isn’t the right word. I try to translate it into Dutch.”

  “Translate it when you can’t even read it yourself?”

  “I’ll let you read the book when I’m finished.”

  And as we talked, we reached the third dune.

  It was dark, but I saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

  Between the third and seventh dunes I told him what I’d written so far.

  “Let’s sit down for a bit,” said Louis.

  It started to rain, a light drizzle.

  “You said you sometimes blame yourself for using your father for your own ends,” Louis said. “I don’t know the details, but if I’d been in your position, I think I’d have done the same thing. Did he, in fact, do what you asked?”

  “Yes, that’s what hurts me so much now.”

  Gradually, I let Louis depend more on his own legs than on my shoulder. I wanted him to feel his old route beneath his feet. It was probably not very sensible, since he might seriously damage his leg muscles, but all I could think of was his dream. Suddenly I realised that I was doing the same thing to Louis that I had done to my father.

  It was wrong of me to force him. It was wrong of me to do his thinking for him. So, I put my arm around his waist and let him lean on me again.

  Now we were getting somewhere. I began to tell him the rest of the story.

  “You used to work in Iran, Louis, so you know that our border with the former Soviet Union was more than 1,200 miles long. It was heavily guarded. We were afraid to go anywhere near the border—we’d have been arrested on the spot. My father, on the other hand, could come and go as he pleased. Everybody knew him. The gendarmes took no notice of him, so he could roam as freely as a mountain goat. He went wherever he liked. We knew that a revolution was at hand and we believed that the shah would be overthrown within a few years. We had a lot of contacts with the Soviet Union, but our communication had to be routed through Europe, mostly through East Germany, which was quite a long detour. We needed a quicker route. The party wanted to be able to send messages to the Soviet Union and get an immediate reply. We needed someone who could get up to the border and back. Someone like my father.”

  “Did he know that it was dangerous? That he could be sentenced to death if he were caught?”

  “No, not really. I explained that it was dangerous and that he could be arrested. But he couldn’t fully comprehend the danger.”

  “What exactly did he do for you—for the party?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. I was just supposed to give him a package and make sure he understood who he had to deliver it to. I would hide classified documents in his long black coat. He’d put it on and leave. Someone would be waiting for him at the border in another long black coat and they’d trade coats.”

  “That was cruel.”

  “I agree. Very cruel.”

  “Did you stop to think what would happen to him if he got caught?”

  “Yes. You can see the danger, but you’re so close to it that you’re … well, blind. You’ve been mesmerised by the dream. You have a totally different mindset, so you see things in a different perspective. To be honest, I thought my father probably would be caught. I assumed they’d torture him to find out who his contacts were, but I knew he wouldn’t cooperate. I explained that he couldn’t tell anyone about his contacts. I told him that the only sign language he was allowed to use was: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “That was very unfair,” Louis said. “Hey, did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The sea. We’re halfway there. You can always hear the waves from here when there’s a strong surf.”

  I held my breath so I could hear it, too. But the sound of the surf was drowned out by the rain.

  The wind blew even harder, flattening the grass. A wet moon peeked out from behind a cloud, then disappeared again.

  Louis resumed the conversation. “The border area was heavily patrolled, so why was your father never arrested?”

  “Have you ever heard of Mahdi, the twelfth imam?”

  “No.”

  “You must have heard about him when you lived in Iran. He’s a messiah figure. People believe he’s hiding in a water well near Saffron Village and that one day he’ll
come out and relieve the world of its suffering. The well doesn’t ring any bells, either?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

  “That’s probably because you worked in the southern part of the country, where people aren’t as religious. The sacred well is located in a remote spot on Saffron Mountain, not far from my father’s village. My father thought of this well as the centre of the universe. As an earthly symbol of God. I’m not religious, or even vaguely superstitious, but I can’t help thinking that my father’s belief in Mahdi was what saved him.”

  Louis laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  Now I, too, heard the sea. Louis’s hand trembled on my shoulder.

  “Two more dunes and we’ll be able to see it,” he said.

  “Can you keep going?” I asked.

  “I can, though I’m sure you’re exhausted from having to drag me all this way.”

  “Yes, but I’m making up for lost time.”

  “What lost time?”

  “All those months and years of training in the mountains with my comrades so we could conquer a city.”

  “Oh, everyone’s lost that kind of time. It isn’t really lost. Ultimately it all adds up to life’s experience.”

  “The sea!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Can you see it?”

  I couldn’t make it out in the dark. It was still Louis’s sea, not mine.

  I held on to him and let him stare at the sea in silence. I noticed that he could no longer stand without assistance.

  “Four more dunes to go!” Louis said. “We’ll get there!”

  The grass was wet and I was afraid he’d slip. I was so busy concentrating on where to put my feet that I didn’t hear the sea. When we came to the last dune, he said, “My legs are numb.”

  “Maybe we should sit down and rest for a while,” I said.

  We sat for fifteen minutes. Then I helped him get up again.

  “This time we’re going to make it,” said Louis.

  We set off.

  The sea was still new to me, unlike the desert.

  Louis felt at home on wet sand; I felt at home on dry sand. The sea, the dunes, the grass, and the rain belonged to him, but the night belonged to me.

  “When I’ve finished my book,” I said to Louis, “I will no longer be living for my father, but for myself.”

  Just then I heard a woman’s voice, shouting from the darkness behind the dunes: “Daddy, D-a-a-a-d-dy!”

  “Over here,” Louis called excitedly.

  The silhouette of a young woman in a hat suddenly appeared on the moonlit top of the last dune.

  “Daddy, how on earth did you get here?”

  I looked at her. She grabbed her hat to keep the wind from blowing it away. The rain beat down on her.

  She knelt by her father.

  I heard her crying, then Louis pointed at me. She stood up.

  There was another gust of wind. She grabbed her hat again and looked out towards the sea, to the place where I was standing.

  Jamileh

  The story brings us to Jamileh.

  Jamileh needs a hiding place.

  One of the most important orders the party gave me was to provide a hiding place for Jamileh.

  It was a huge responsibility. If I bungled the job, I’d never be able to redeem myself. If I couldn’t guarantee Jamileh’s safety, it would be a disaster, not only for the party but for my family as well.

  Jamileh—the legendary resistance fighter whose heroic deeds were known to one and all—was more precious than gold. Her fate was in my hands. I would have to hide her so well that the shah’s secret police would never find her.

  No one ever thought the party could get her out of Ewin Prison, the shah’s most notorious jail. To this day no one knows how she escaped from that hellhole. It’s believed that she had help from an officer who had secret contacts with the party.

  Before her arrest, Jamileh had been in a shoot-out. Seven leading members of the party had been killed, but Jamileh went on fighting. All of Tehran held its breath. She kept dozens of policemen at bay, until she ran out of ammunition. Then she swallowed a suicide pill. The secret police were determined to take her alive. They immediately pumped her stomach and flew her by helicopter to a military hospital.

  At the same time, the shah was appearing on TV almost every night with a big smile on his face. He swore up and down in interviews that his secret police had wiped out the leftist movement once and for all. No party member or party sympathiser dared to make a move.

  But now Jamileh had escaped. By liberating her from prison, the party had demonstrated that it was alive and well, and stronger than ever.

  I was informed that I had an appointment with Homayun. (By the way, he was arrested after the revolution and executed on the personal orders of Khomeini.)

  Homayun met me in the basement of a glass factory. He told me that Jamileh had been liberated from Ewin. Despite this earthshaking news, he spoke calmly, as if it were an everyday event, and that helped me rein in my excitement. “This is strictly confidential,” he said. “No one else must know. The operation has been successful so far, but it’s not over. We haven’t issued an announcement yet and the police haven’t said anything about the escape, either. We’re planning to smuggle Jamileh across the border, but we need to hide her in a safe place for at least a week until we’ve made the arrangements. What about your father’s shop?”

  I could feel the tension in my neck and shoulders. This was a turning point in my life. The movement needed my help. I was being given a chance to determine the outcome of a singular episode in the history of the resistance. I knew the escape had been shrouded in mystery. I knew it was a fairy tale that would be handed down to later generations. I wanted that fairy tale to be told. But if anything went wrong, if the secret police dragged her out of my father’s shop, it would be the end—for her, for me and for my father.

  Fairy tales are not subject to the same laws as normal life. I had to think fast, give an immediate reply and instantly go into action.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

  At nine o’clock that evening, I parked my car in a deserted garage outside of Tehran, on the road to Isfahan. I slipped behind the wheel of a red van that had been waiting for me and drove off.

  My heart was pounding in my ears. For a moment, I couldn’t concentrate. I’d never been so scared in my life. Then a truck honked and I snapped out of my daze, regained my self-control and realised that I was driving a van and that Jamileh was hiding in the back, lying beneath a couple of rolled-up carpets.

  Jamileh was a pseudonym. Nobody knew what she looked like. During the revolution, Jamileh published her autobiography, in which she revealed that she’d been tortured and raped in prison. Her jailers had hoped to break her will, to make her betray her comrades. But time after time she’d shouted, “Down with the shah!”

  Ten minutes ago she’d been a character in a fairy tale. Now I could see her in my rear-view mirror and talk to her.

  “Hello, comrade,” I called softly, looking in the mirror. There was no reply.

  “Comrade! Are you all right?” I said a bit louder.

  No answer. I thought she’d fallen asleep, so I drove on in silence.

  My father and I had an agreement. He was supposed to stay in his shop until midnight. When the clock struck twelve, he could turn out the light and go home.

  The stores were usually open until nine, but my father liked to stay in his shop until late at night. Everyone thought it was perfectly normal. He had a storeroom, a kind of lean-to at the back of his shop, where Jamileh would be safe. It had a window that looked out over the river and the mountains. In an emergency, she could escape through the window.

  “Comrade! Can you hear me?” I called again. In my mirror I saw something move beneath the carpets, but there was no sound.

  I reached Senejan at a quarter to twelve. At five to twelve I
saw that the light was still on in the window of my father’s shop. I parked the car, switched off the lights and whispered, “We’re here. Stay where you are, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I walked to the shop. My father had fallen asleep beside his stove. I gently touched his shoulder. He woke with a start and immediately sat up.

  “Don’t get up,” I quickly signed. “I have something important, very important, to tell you. I have someone with me. A young woman. We have to give her a place to stay, for a week maybe, or even ten days. Listen carefully: no one must know she’s here. If the police find out, s he’ll be arrested, and if she’s arrested, s he’ll be killed. Do you understand?”

  How could he understand such a condensed version of a long story told to him in the middle of the night?

  “Who is she?” he signed.

  “A friend. And I think she has a—”

  I hesitated, wondering if I should tell him that she had a gun. I decided not to.

  “What do you want me to do?” my father signed.

  “Hide her here, in your shop.”

  “In my shop? How? Where?”

  “In the lean-to.”

  “That’s impossible, it’s a mess and—”

  “Give her an oil lamp and a book. Buy her a newspaper … or no, not a newspaper. Forget that. Nobody must know she’s here.”

  “What if she has to go to the bathroom?”

  “Give her a bucket.”

  “A bucket? I can’t give a bucket to a woman.”

  I’d chosen the path of least resistance: my father’s shop. Actually, there’d been no alternative. The party had been in such a rush to get her out of Tehran that I hadn’t had a chance to think things through. Besides, I didn’t know of a better place.

  “She’s no ordinary woman,” I said to him. “She won’t mind using a bucket. Stop looking at me like that. Give her a book to read and everything will be all right.”