My Father's Notebook

by Kader Abdolah

  “Where is she?”

  “In the car. Turn off the light. I’ll go and get her and bring her here. Meanwhile, stoke up the fire. No, wait, don’t do that, we don’t want anyone to see smoke coming out of the chimney.”

  I switched off the light and went out to the car to get Jamileh. It was an exciting—and also terrifying—moment.

  I opened the rear door of the van. My hands were shaking. It was childish, I know, but I thought she’d leap out with her gun and say, “Lead the way, comrade!”

  But she didn’t.

  “Could you please get out now?” I whispered.

  She didn’t move.

  “Can you hear me?”

  She moaned. In sudden panic I pushed aside the carpets. She couldn’t sit up. I knelt beside her and felt her forehead. It was feverish.

  “How long have you been sick, comrade?”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said weakly.

  I had always thought of Jamileh as a tall woman with a powerful build, but she was small and thin. I threw my jacket around her, hoisted her onto my shoulder and walked to the shop. My father was waiting by the window. He came running out and helped me carry her inside.

  Together we stumbled through the darkness and laid her down on the carpet before the stove. My father rushed off to get her a glass of water.

  In the light of the glowing embers, Jamileh opened her eyes and looked at my father as he handed her the glass.

  “This is my father,” I said. “He’s a deaf-mute.”

  “I know,” she said and closed her eyes again.

  I shook her gently. “Are you all right, comrade?”

  “I’m just tired,” she whispered.

  “Shall I get her some pills?” my father signed.

  “Let’s wait and see.”

  Now that she was sick, the whole picture changed. I couldn’t leave her here with only my father to look after her.

  “Go on home, Father, like you always do. I’ll stay with her. Come back in the morning, with some milk.”

  My father had no choice but to do as I said. He went out, locked the door of the shop behind him and walked away. I stood at the window and watched him go. He had become old, small and thin.

  I stayed with Jamileh, terrified that she’d take a turn for the worse, that I’d have to bring her to the hospital, that everything would go wrong.

  I had to stop thinking these negative thoughts. Since this whole thing depended on me, I had to pull myself together, stay focused and wait it out.

  I walked through the dark shop to the lean-to. There, by the dim light of the moon, I shifted my father’s things around and cleared a space for Jamileh.

  Once that was done, I no longer felt so insecure. My father’s shop was the perfect place to hide. But now I needed to rest. I sat down by Jamileh and held her hand.

  Just before sunrise I heard the muezzin call:

  Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

  Ashhado an la ilaha illa Allah.

  Hayye ala as-salah.

  God is great. God is great.

  Testify that there is no God but God.

  Hurry to the prayers.

  I could hear people walking to the mosque. I got up and cautiously peeked out of the window. As usual, men and women were making their separate ways through the darkness to the mosque. I turned back to Jamileh and felt her forehead. The fever had gone down.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  She nodded. I heard my father’s cough. He opened the door and slipped inside with a bulging sack on his back.

  “Nobody saw me,” he signed in the moonlight. “Is she better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here—a pillow, blankets, milk, pills,” he signed. “I’m going to the mosque.”

  “I’ll move her to the lean-to. She’s better, but I’m planning to stay here until tomorrow evening. I’ll lock the door from the inside. When you come back, go and sit in your usual place and start working. If she’s completely recovered by tomorrow evening, I’ll leave. Don’t worry. She’s strong.”

  • • •

  Around noon, Jamileh opened her eyes and I was able to talk to her. I told her I could stay another day, but she didn’t think it was necessary.

  That evening I put her fate in my father’s hands and left.

  Meanwhile, back in Tehran, the party was spreading the news of Jamileh’s escape. There were flyers everywhere. It was seen as a stunning victory over the shah.

  During the night, sympathisers hung a banner from one of the buildings at the University of Tehran. It showed Jamileh as a strong goddess with a rifle slung over her shoulder.

  The police organised a massive search. Everyone followed the news broadcasts in tense expectation.

  I was working for a plumbing company at the time. I went to the shop as usual and worked like mad, hoping to make the time pass more quickly. I couldn’t keep my eyes off a black telephone mounted on the wall of the workshop. Every time it rang, my heart began to pound.

  On the third day, at around three o’clock, just as I was having my coffee break, the phone rang. I raced to pick it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, could I please speak to—”

  I immediately recognised Golden Bell’s voice.

  “Hi, it’s me. How are you?”

  “Fine. Father gave me this number. He wants to see you right away.”

  “OK, I’ll be there.”

  I cut the conversation short in case the secret police had tapped the phone.

  I’d written the number on a piece of paper and given it to my father. “If you need me urgently, give this number to Golden Bell—only Golden Bell—and tell her to call me from a public phone booth.”

  I drove off immediately. Something must have happened to Jamileh.

  On the outskirts of Senejan, I waited for half an hour until it got dark, then headed for the shop. My father wasn’t expecting me so soon. He jumped up and locked the door from the inside.

  “What’s wrong?” I signed.

  “She was getting better. Then yesterday her forehead felt hot again and she stopped eating. She’s still breathing, but she doesn’t open her eyes any more.”

  I went into the lean-to and looked at Jamileh in the dim candlelight. She was lying under the blankets, sweating. I knelt beside her and checked her pulse. “Comrade! Can you hear me?”

  She couldn’t hear me.

  “If we don’t take her to the hospital,” my father signed, “she’ll die.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “She smiled yesterday,” he went on. “I made her some soup on the stove. She held my hand. But when I brought a spoonful of soup to her lips, she suddenly fell asleep. You’ve got to take her to a hospital.”

  “I can’t,” I signed back.

  He panicked. “She’s going to die. I can tell. My mother felt hot, then all of a sudden she turned cold. She was dead. You’ve got to take Jamileh to a doctor.”

  It was the first time I’d ever seen him so upset.

  “My first wife, too. She was also hot, very hot, then suddenly cold.”

  “Take it easy. Calm down,” I gestured.

  But he didn’t. “You’ve got to drive her to the hospital, now!”

  I stood there helplessly.

  Suddenly my father had an idea. “Let’s take her to our house,” he signed.

  “What?”

  “I’ll carry her home. Then I’ll go and get a doctor.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t explain.”

  “Talk to Tina,” he signed.

  “Tina?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  I was going to have to share my secret with Tina. All the doors were closed, and Tina’s was the only one I could knock on.

  “OK,” I signed. “Go and get Tina.”

  I didn’t know how Tina would react, but I was sure the news would make her gasp. She had done her best to shield my sisters from my p
olitical activities. She wanted her daughters to find good husbands, leave home without a hitch, have children, buy a house and live happily ever after. And here I was, knocking on her door with the legendary Jamileh.

  Tina realised instantly that this was an emergency. I hadn’t seen her in more than a year, so I thought she’d start by moaning, “Where have you been, son, why haven’t you come to see us?” But she didn’t. I thought she’d hug me and exclaim, “My, how you’ve changed!” But she didn’t. She bustled into the dusky lean-to and shot me a quick glance. At first she didn’t recognise me. Then she saw Jamileh, stretched out on the ground. I briefly explained what was going on. She grasped the situation immediately.

  She was silent for a moment. Then another side of her came to the fore. Not the weak Tina, but the Tina described by Kazem Khan, the woman who cleared the snow from the roof and refused to let him in. To my great surprise, she knelt calmly beside Jamileh, took her hand and felt her stomach. Then she picked up a candle and peered more closely at her abdomen.

  “I’m taking her back to the house. Then I’ll go for a doctor.”

  “Tina,” I said, “she escaped from prison.”

  “But she needs a doctor.”

  “You’re right, but if the police … Oh, I see. Nobody knows who she is. You can simply—”

  “I’m going to take her home and say that she’s my niece, on a visit from Saffron Village.”

  Tina had found a simple solution to a difficult problem: Jamileh was sick, so Jamileh had to be examined by a doctor.

  She wrapped her in a chador. “Carry her over your shoulder,” she signed to my father.

  I helped him lift her.

  “Let’s go!” gestured Tina.

  She kissed my forehead. “Don’t look so sad. It’ll be all right!”

  I stood and watched until they vanished into the darkness. There was nothing more I could do.

  The Mahdi

  The man who reads leaves the well.

  Tina weeps.

  We might even go with the faithful to

  the holy city, where the mosques

  have golden domes.

  Jamileh stayed in my parents’ house for a month. For thirty-four days, to be exact. On the last night, Tina escorted her to the big mosque in the centre of town, where a taxi was waiting beneath an old tree to whisk her away.

  Tina had taken good care of her. In her autobiography, Jamileh described the month she spent with my family as a wonderful and safe period in her life. To protect people, she didn’t use real names in her book, except for Tina’s. “Though there are many I would like to thank by name, the safety of those individuals depends on my discretion. Even so, one person deserves my undying thanks: the courageous Aunt Tina.”

  Jamileh had stolen Tina’s heart and left behind a wealth of unforgettable memories. Tina couldn’t stop talking about Jamileh, who was unlike any woman she’d ever known. Tina had taken good care of her and cooked delicious meals, so Jamileh had even put on a little weight.

  “Jamileh sang and skipped around the garden,” Tina told me later. “At first it seemed a bit out of character, but actually it wasn’t. Sometimes she’d ask me questions …”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “About that country, that island. Quub or Qube, or something like that.”

  “You mean Cuba?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Jamileh asked me if I knew where Cuba was. I’d never heard of it. She told me about the lives of the people there. She said that they were healthy and that medicine was free, along with milk for children and old people’s homes—all free. She told me that women had lots of rights. For example, if a woman didn’t want her husband, she could kick him out of the house. She said that most of the bus drivers were women and that they even drove great big trucks. She was always talking about that man, what’s his name? The one with a cigar in his mouth and a rifle over his shoulder.”

  “Castro?”

  “Not him, the other one, the man with the beret.”

  “You mean Che Guevara?”

  “That’s the one. She told me about his adventures. How he fought and barely escaped with his life. And sometimes she told me jokes about the shah. You know, how even his soap was made of gold, and how he went to the bathroom with a clothespin over his nose rather than admit that he was making that awful smell. Oh, we had such good times when she was with us. She also got along well with your father.

  “He showed her his old pictures, the ones of him and Reza Shah standing by the rock with his pick-axe on his shoulder. And he told her his stories of the cuneiform relief and the time the villagers cleared a path through the mountains for the train.

  “Even though she didn’t understand our sign language, she listened patiently to your father. Sometimes she tried to answer in sign language, but she never really got the hang of it and we roared with laughter.”

  Tina could go on and on about Jamileh. There was no end to her reminiscences.

  After the clerics came to power, however, she saw Jamileh’s stay in a different light. She believed that it had destroyed the lives of her daughters.

  Regardless of Tina’s opinion, one thing was sure: Golden Bell thought of Jamileh as her role model. For thirty-four nights, she had shared a room with Jamileh. Her visit was a turning point in Golden Bell’s life.

  Before the revolution, Tina had the usual expectations. She dreamed that two normal, decent men would come and ask for her daughters’ hands in marriage. She didn’t include Golden Bell in her daydream, since she had no control over her youngest daughter anyway.

  Tina had always longed for the quiet life she’d never had. She dreamed of becoming a grandmother, of holding her grandchildren on her lap and telling them stories. Then Jamileh shattered her dreams.

  The two men Tina had been waiting for appeared. When they asked for her daughters’ hands in marriage, however, her daughters refused to marry such ordinary men. They longed for another kind of man. Tina wept.

  “What do you want? Who on earth are you waiting for? A Castro? A Che Guevara? A man with a cigar and a beret? God help me, I don’t deserve this.”

  Only after the revolution did the men her daughters were waiting for finally appear. They were hardly Castro or Che Guevara, though they did have Che Guevara posters above their beds. And while they didn’t smoke (cigars were too expensive anyway), they did stick an occasional cigarette in the corner of their mouths and talk about the revolution.

  Tina’s two oldest daughters didn’t go to jail, but their husbands were arrested and imprisoned by the secret police of the new regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran. When they were finally released a few years later, they were broken, both physically and mentally. It was years before they could function normally again.

  The revolution had begun. The masses had risen up against the shah. But it came from a totally unexpected direction.

  One night, when I was in my father’s shop, he said, “The man who reads is gone!”

  “Who?”

  “The holy man who sits in the sacred well and reads.”

  “Gone? What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

  Perhaps I should refresh your memory. The Shiites have been waiting nearly fourteen centuries for the Mahdi, the messiah figure who would relieve the world of its suffering and meanwhile waited in a well, reading books.

  Reza Shah had covered up the well. He wanted to strike a blow for modernisation and, at the same time, curb the power of spiritual leaders.

  But the mullahs refused to be suppressed. They stepped up their fiery resistance to the Pahlavi kingdom.

  My father was more interested in the Mahdi’s kingdom.

  “Someone smashed the stone that used to cover the well,” my father signed. “The sacred well is now open. The holy man is gone.”

  The well was located in a place of strategic importance: a military zone. Obviously, the fact that some religious fanatic had broken it open was not a coincidence. Something important was going on. Th
e mullahs were declaring war on the shah.

  “Do you know who smashed the stone?”

  “Allah,” he signed, pointing at the sky. “The Holy One himself. He wants to fix things. I’ve seen His footprints.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I was in Saffron Village. I climbed up the mountain with the villagers and saw, with my own eyes, the imprint of his bare feet in the rocks.”

  “Footprints in stone?”

  “Yes, you could see that he’d stepped out of the well and gone into the countryside. The villagers knelt and kissed his footprints. I kissed one of them, too. It smelled heavenly.”

  The holy man was free. One day the Mahdi, and not the leftist movement, would conquer the cities and overthrow the dictator. He had come to help the poor, lift up the weak, heal the sick and comfort the mothers who had lost their sons and daughters.

  “People cried,” my father continued, “and people laughed. They put the Holy Book on their heads, gathered at the foot of the mountain and turned to face Mecca. Then they split into groups and followed the footprints.”

  “Where did the footprints go?”

  “To the city with the big, golden-domed mosque. To the city where the women all wear black chadors, the one where so many imams live.”

  He meant Qom.

  So the Messiah had gone to Qom—the Vatican of the Shiites. I immediately drove back to Tehran.

  Akbar No Longer Wants

  to Be Deaf and Dumb

  Once more pilgrims journey to the sacred well.

  We go along with them.

  In the days when the holy city of Qom was in an uproar and believers flocked to it from every corner of the land, Tehran was undergoing a revolution of its own. Parties that had been suppressed for decades were springing back to life and letting their voices be heard. Everywhere you looked you saw flyers and posters, which had been distributed during the night and pasted on the walls.