The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  Book II

  Nehavand Barracks and the

  Town of Saqqez, Persia,

  soon to be Iran—1929

  Nevermore the Boy

  The garrison is secreted between two long mountain lines, deep in a vale, continuous and immense. Whatever elements pass into and out of the green basin do so under the jurisdiction of the stone stacks: what sun there is shines briefly between midday and one when it passes in a quick arc from one peak to another; what wind blows hard and direct, strong enough through the corridor to knock off caps and disturb card games. Even the rain falls straight and hard as if pulled, string after watery string, by the greedy hands of the buried dead. The one road in serves doubly as the road out.

  He is caught in the captain’s favor and stays each night in the officer barracks, where he washes the old man’s feet with rosewater and powders them over and under with lilac talc. In this year he is a steadfast favorite for taking the beatings and caresses and develops an ever-growing fondness for touch such that he starts to hold still his head for the slap, open wide his mouth for the suck and keep stiff his whole self when the captain’s pistol presses into his temple in a game that makes the Armenian whore laugh. And he is a diligent pet boy to hold that same pistol to the neck of the Armenian whore as the captain labors above and behind her with the enthusiasm of a donkey.

  In his new life he is a cautious boy and hides behind the wide hips of the whore until the captain goes to sleep. Her back is pale and covered in a thin layer of hair and he pushes himself up to her and closes his eyes to imagine Maman on the other side, her breast and face and fingers. The whore helps and pushes her back and ass into him and the boy burrows down in her warmth. When the old man is finally snoring the boy crawls over her big body and curls his tiny body into her belly and breast and takes one enormous teat in his two small hands and holds it to suck at the dry nipple, to imagine and delight. He keeps at this the whole night, the whore asleep before him and the captain snoring behind him and his orphan heart beating steadily between the two, happily awake for this fantasy of Maman and Baba and love all night.

  At dawn the captain stirs and the dream ends. The boy releases the body of the whore and moves quietly to the cot on the floor where he is supposed to sleep. In the first hours of the morning the captain and the whore stir and he cannot help but cry. Pushed off the bed, away from the heat of their bodies and the friction of their fucking, the boy is more than alone, he is without, and he shivers until dawn, when he wakes the captain and begs for his command. The captain murmurs orders in his half sleep: Eh, Kurd boy. Find my boots. Bring the chai. Scratch the bottom of my back. And the boy gobbles them up, delicious as cherries, and marches about from task to task, certain of his place in the world. Like this, day after day for the first year, he is shorn of the boy from before and cannot remember the pieces of that other life—heartbeat, sapling, cold carp—so that even the mother tongue grows sticky on his lips and he answers to all calls with the crisp Farsi: Yes yes yes.

  Another year passes and he becomes a good boy in it, still nameless and orphaned and so preferred because he is an idiot Kurd who runs to the warm deep pleasure of command like a happy dog.

  The pipes, on your knees to light them.

  Lay out the motaqs.

  Embrace me here and here, yes, there, hold me tighter, you mountain ape, until sleep comes, my darling, darling boy.

  And he is ordered about to do and do and do and the boy does, jubilant to be at beck and call. He serves captain, lieutenant, colonel and sergeant, who crave his green eyes and his soft face free of hair and his hands that are not yet rough, who cling to him in boredom and battle chaos alike as he is the choice boy: fatherless and motherless, so pitied and treated to fat from the stew, sweet lumps of sugar, necklaces of copper bullets; so spoiled. Easily and every day he is loved of a necessity (theirs and his) in slaps and suckles all the same; a love for the daylight world (in calls and commands) and then a love at night (in clutches and embraces) held close as a pet; a village girl; a much missed mother, cousin, sister.

  Afterward, sleep comes to the orphan boy, deep, terrifying and plagued by dreams that spread through him like greedy tendrils of a zealous vine. The boy finds little rest. Of the varieties of night tortures he prefers most the dreams of song and drum and men gathered in his baba’s divan. And though the dream leaves an ache behind, the boy would prefer this reminiscence to the more common nightmare of his village as it is plundered, the fields set on fire, the granary ablaze, the pens burning with the skin and hair and eyes and hearts of animals that he loved as pets.

  In these dreams the men who cling to him in their sleep are always the culprits. They are monstrosities unto themselves; their noses running with thick, vile mucus and hands far larger than their grimacing faces. They march through his Kurd village and take the women and stuff them heartily into their monster mouths. The girl cousins are snapped three at a time and some of the oldest aunts are spat out and stepped on. The boy runs about, miniature at their feet, trying to distract them with offers of chai and massages, and even kisses where they want them most, Anything, Agha, just put down your bludgeon . . . The monsters move through his village, unaffected by the pleas of the boy with the size and stature of a flea, and come to sit around a fire they feed with his baba’s instruments, clean out their teeth and belch. Kurds are a bit too salty; next time, with rice.

  The boy wakes to an insanity in which he is unable to separate dream from actual day. He rushes about the camp, set and determined like a maniac, to serve the soldiers whatever they ask, to take their insults and demands and keep them calm to spare his village and its women, youngest cousins and oldest aunts and maman alike. They are the long-lost faces of a home he can only conjure now in tortured dreams.

  For two years the orphan is stuck in this service, mindless and numbing, until finally the inexorable hardening occurs. Without any effort the body of the boy changes, with flesh less ample for the grab and smack, indecorous bristle to cover the face and all over a general roughening of what was once supple and soft. Thirteen years now, the boy grows inches in months and the commanders shrink in his presence. Soon he is their size, if not more, and they do not touch him or even speak to him, as he has grown handsome and strong and full with a pureblood they cannot claim. The boy is relieved of his darling days and, like a chick to the nest, tossed in the passel with the rest; a plebe in the great army of the shah. The cycle of home dreams comes to an end and the boy sleeps on a dusty cot and dreams nothing but black and occasionally of birds as his body pushes out of the skin that held his maman’s son.

  He is given a uniform of his own to match the uniform of the commanders he so admires. A jacket of dark beige with buttons to cinch tightly in the front, epaulets that snap at the shoulders and a collar he turns up to make his neck look strong. The pants are similar in color, sharp-creased down the front, with wires that loop from the hip to the knee on the outer edges of his thigh. His boots are tall and stiff and he vaguely recalls wanting them from a time before. They have more eyelets than he can count and he wears them underneath the wraparound spats that fit the narrow pant leg into the boot and boot into the spat, everything taut and slim like the shin of a horse. He is keen to insert, tighten, wrap; eager to appear well fitted by this new uniform, this second skin of the men who are now his men, that he will wear in one form or another until the day of his burial. This first uniform is impermeable, an armor of thick Russian wool to defend the young boy, not yet man, no longer son. He wears it around the barracks that afternoon. His skeleton pulses forward in the casing and his shadow is a wide, fearsome thing and he is happy with the wholehearted suffocation, the elated excision of the boy beneath.

  And so: born at the age of eleven, to the Honorable Shah Reza Pahlavi.

  And so named: Reza Khourdi

  Age: Approximately 12–14 (undocumented tribal stock)

  Eyes: Green

  Other: Birth mole on right cheek (apricot shaped) The
attaché from the Ministry of the Interior in charge of new citizens is tired. A seemingly endless stream of unnamed orphaned cadets stood before him today, sad eyed and too small for their uniforms, and naming them has made the old man sleepy. The first name is easy; it is the first name of the Most Imperial Majesty Shahenshah Reza Pahlavi I, and with it the boys join the low ranks of same-names, an instant empire of agnates born to the new nation. The second name is simple protocol as well, regional, with reference to the tribe of origin, in an effort to demystify the sacred identity and fold it in with the other tidbits of the bureaucracy and state. The attaché lifts his head from the sloppy floral script that deems all of this so and lets his tired eyes fall on the cadet in front of him. The orphan boy does not look away. He is handsome and his soldier suit is a good neat fit. The attaché stares dreamily at the cadet’s tile-green eyes. They are clean through to the black pupil, and bright, and the attaché recalls a girl, two rooftops over from his Tehran home, who hung laundry each morning on invisible lines stretched across the sky while children screamed at her, Parvaneh! Parvaneh! and she ignored them to reach upward to the pigeons and the clouds. The attaché dips the pen in the ink again and for no reason he gives the boy a third name. The closest he can get to Parvaneh is a name that means “heartbroken,” but it will do.

  Name: Reza Pejman Khourdi

  And now again he is created, this time in thirds: a third homage to a false king; a third memory of another’s delight; a third genesis of people erased.

  And nevermore was he the boy.

  Never again was he the boy that was.

  What remained—the heartbeat, the smell of sutured sapling, the river’s cold caught carp—all evanesced to a paradise above where these ghosts of his last life gathered to look down and watch the orphan boy pass his first year in the company of strange men.

  Eagerly Reza awaits his first summons. He has yet to hear his name called and is careful to listen for it in the constant shouts and screams of the barracks.

  Reza Pejman Khourdi! To the photograph station!

  Reza (heretofore and hereafter) runs to the call. He climbs the same stool as the rest of the cadets, looks ahead like the rest, slumps first and is instructed to sit still like the rest, to suffer a moment of flash blindness—a darkness with neither inside nor outside, yesterday nor tomorrow, an obscurity complete where Reza waits, collared like a wild animal, stunned and captured—like the rest.

  Sameskins

  He is ordered to a barracks already full of boys of a similar age, each with his own cot and trunk and, like him, tucked neatly into a uniform, identical but for eye color, boot size and heart’s desire. For the first days Reza moves through their company and wonders if they are all as he is, if they too are orphans who stood beside their baba’s death silently shouting, or have slept behind the captain’s whore and sucked the dry teat, or even if they are happy, like him, to find a barracks full of sameskins, brethren, as good as cousins he cannot remember and brothers he never had.

  There are few conversations as the boys in the barracks are re-familied and re-clanned, instructed to gather every morning, noon and night as soldiers for the shah. They wake to the same pistol fire, eat the same long fold of lavash, piss into the same stinking trough. Together they mingle their blood, pus, semen and spit together in a soldier sauce that melds the many into the one body and the one mind and one memory until origin is of no consequence. They are boys, conscripts, vassals of the not-yet-nation, and at night they amass in the dank barracks and sit supplicant before a framed portrait of the shah to chant the six-minute paean to the painted likeness.

  God praise the Persian nation, and God protect His Most Honorable Majesty, the King of Kings, Shahenshah Pahlavi. The first.

  And the young citizens tuck themselves into cots that loll like cradles and sleep beneath the watchful eyes of their gladsome sovereign. Before he dreams Reza imagines himself walking from bed to bed to hug and kiss each boy of his new family, as they are equals to him, motherless and bound.

  In the mornings they take military duty lessons from a captain with a body that spreads like a circle from his shoulder to his knees. He explains the march. It must be a strong file, organized and straight. All following the same orders from the masterful shah. The sun rises behind the captain as he walks beside the boys with a crop as they start their clumsy ramble across the courtyard. The captain shouts. Keep step! Ya Ali! You want the toe of your boot in the asshole in front of you. Yes! Higher! Faster! You look as foolish as a flock of geese! The captain goes on, all morning long, with comparisons that keep him laughing his hearty, tearful laugh. The cadets too would laugh if it were not for the constant snap of the hard leather stick for every foot too low or shout too soft. They move from one exercise—climbing the stone walls at the end of the valley, fending off attackers while on horse-back, proper salutes for the shah—to the next, and the captain keeps a jolly rhythm with his heavy wand and a small silver piece he blows with his mouth that screams louder than any bird Reza has ever heard.

  They spend the afternoons with a silent, immaculately attired colonel. He arranges them in a straight line and paces back and forth to gently inspect their uniforms, the lace and polish of their boots, and, for some, the trim of their new moustaches. He takes his time with certain boys, slowly caressing the line of their jaw—No hair yet?—or running his fingers up the inseam of their pants: You still have to fill these trousers out . . . we cannot have skinny soldiers marching about for the shah. At Reza the colonel stops to inspect his collar and runs a gentle finger inside and outside the topmost buttons of his jacket and shirt, tracing the line of his Adam’s apple. Reza can feel the colonel’s breath on his neck and hear his deep inhale in his ears as the old man buries his face in his shoulder. Very nice fold, Khourdi. Very nice.

  In the early evenings they gather in an airless room to take history lessons from a sergeant with impatient hands.

  First, of course, there was nothing: the Persian plateau, a few shrubs, maybe a bird or two. The Persian and Mede tribes migrated, as they were nomads, as they were lawless and took of a land that belonged to whoever stood on its stones and laid the groundwork for 559 when Cyrus the Great established the empire of Persia, known for compassion and love of law. Ahead now. Five twenty-nine b.c., the heathen of Babylonia surrender peacefully to Cyrus and Cyrus dies a victor and a hero. Ahead again. Darius the Great rises in his wake to build the Royal Road that makes possible significant and continuous contact between East and West, a contact that is our blessing and our curse.

  He goes on, rapidly, blithely, shaking his hands as if to dry them. Underneath their desks the boys mimick him by flapping their hands and everyone is red in the face from stifled laughter.

  Ahead now. Two forty-eight b.c. Parthians defeat the Greek Seleucid Empire. Sassanids follow them with some paintings of flowers and the abacus and astrology, etc., etc. Five seventy-four, the Prophet Mohammed is born.

  He stops for a moment. The cadets straighten their faces into serious masks.

  Let us pause and note that our great empire, enormous and victorious against the Romans and the Byzantine conquerors, succumbs like a village whore to Arab tribesmen armed with little more than asinine faith. Let us pause and note.

  The cadets take no notes, as they have no pencils or paper. But it is not the worst of times. We live relatively well under one caliphate or another and remain notorious in our advances in poetry, letters, astronomy, mathematics, theology and calligraphy, on and on, until the great Genghis Khan sacks the caliphate in 1226 and Marco Polo himself bemoans our ill fortune at the hands of the Mongol beasts. Ahead now; 1501, and we are Persia again, to stand against the encroaching Ottomans, Russians and Indians who see us as the key, the nexus, the crossroads, and we have more poetry, algebra, la, la, la, and relative peace.

  He gestures his hands in a flurry as if to whip the air into a cream. A boy sitting next to Reza pulls his penis from the buttons of his pants and begins to stroke it in a
mocking flurry and Reza’s eyes spill with sweet tears of amusement.

  Ahead again, on and on, until 1795, the Qajars come to power, a dynasty weak and irresponsible that empties the treasury for their luxury-loving endeavors and our once mighty and proud Persia is forced to offer concessions all around: our tobacco to Russia, our coal to England, our gold all over, wherever, to whomever. And we are a raped whore, sniveling on the outside and torn apart on the inside by barbaric tribes.

  The boy next to Reza feigns ecstasy, and Reza clutches the back of a chair and the sweat pours as he stifles his laughs.

  Yes, boys. We were so weak. So weak! Our proud Persia was a broken butterfly. From outside the hungry pillaging of English and French and from inside the lawless brigands of Kurd, Baluch, Azerbaijani and Turkoman maraud the countryside and steal from the wealthy cities, taking women and girls as they desire, what ever gold, whatever flocks, and they are bestial heathens, the whole lot of them, given to blood and greed. Not a knife or fork among the bunch and nothing of the civilized decorum or sophistication that characterize our old Persian cities of Shiraz, Tehran, Esfahan and Mashhad.