Reza holds the gun and he is happy and thinks carefully: Where will I keep it? In my trunk. No. Beneath my cot. No. Under my pillow would be best. Yes, beneath my head, in case, because . . . he clears his throat.
Aghas—
He must clear his throat again.
I have heard some of the city boys speak of their fathers’ opinions of the shah. They say he cannot read. They say he is a peasant’s son. They say . . . about a puppet . . .
There is a loud clap in the room and the guns on the table jump. The colonel has landed all four legs of his chair fully on the floor. The sound reverberates and the captain shifts his weight from one leg to another.
Pffft. It’s not the city boys we’re interested in. What do the conscripts say? You are a tribe boy just like them. They must say something in your presence?
The other conscripts are quiet (the Farsi far from their lips) and sad in their stares, pulled apart as if they have been cut from their organism of origin and something inside of them waits to die. They do not bother to slander, much less to speak, and from those boys Reza has only heard the whine of the thin Baluch brother and the jovial sleep talk of his thick twin. He places the pistol down on the table and shakes his head; it is a prize he cannot win.
No, I’ve heard nothing from the conscripts, they say nothing and nothing against the shah.
The colonel sighs and tells the captain to pick a gun, and turns to Reza.
Come, let’s go outside.
The courtyard is empty of students and officials. Aside from the low hoot of a few owls in the nearby pines and the dribble of the fountain, it is silent. Though it is not yet night, the valley is almost dark. There is luminescence enough for Reza to see the outlines of the two figures before him, the round colonel, who smokes with a jaunty gesture, and the captain, who swings a rifle in front of him like a weighted pendulum. They are at a distance, in the dusk, and Reza can’t make out the features of their faces, just their shapes, the cigarette and the ticking gun, and instantly he is nervous. Nervous to remember that here at the darkening of days just like this one, deep in the crevice of rock, deeper still in an anonymous desert, deep without witness, the courtyard has once or twice filled with cries. Locked in the blind barracks, the cadets have all heard them: shouts and screams of conscripts and disobedient city boys, taken from their bunks and brought by bored sergeants and lieutenants out into the near night and returned to the cots with bruises and burns on their arms and backs, sometimes gashes on the soles of their feet, sometimes no visible marks at all. The colonel and captain continue their conversation and Reza, suspicious of his selection, steps to a far corner to count the owls by their hoots (two? ten? twenty?). He focuses on the night’s oncoming cold, the inevitability of the stars in the sliver of sky above him, and wonders who among the boys and commanders, sky and stars, will come to save a bleeding orphan, just shot. Reza distances himself from the dream of the gun. The captain walks toward him with a French rifle extended.
Come test the gun, Khourdi. You want to test the gun, now don’t you? It’s for you to try.
Reza leaps and the colonel laughs.
Into the air, boy, fire into the air. Pretend you are shooting one of those fine birds we serve for your dinner.
Reza fits the gun into his chest and aims up and a surge of relief and exasperation washes through him as he points into the night. He will only remember the first shot and the heavy flap of owls’ wings through the air. He fires the gun again, which fires into him, again (a ram into his chest that will leave a bruise), and he fires again and the shot echoes through the valley, up through the mountains into the sky as if to shatter the already shattered stars, and leaves behind a wake of solid sound. He is all the while deaf and distracted from the colonel and the captain and their questions and he loads and fires and loads and fires and forgets everything he has remembered: his father, the barracks boys (who are now awake and wondering), the land and the shah, the cries and carp, the hoots of the owls, now silent, maybe now shot. When Reza is emptied and there are no night noises, just the sharp erasing ring in his ears, and he is positive that life cannot be without this jolting limb, they ask him again. And now? And it is suddenly simple; a lie grows from his gut, a fabrication so fertile that it stems through him with an urgent haste.
The Baluch twin, sir, not the one with the cut ear—the colonel nods gravely—the other brother. I have heard him speak of his father’s arsenal and his tribe’s recent defeat of the shah’s forces in the south. He said it was an easy victory and that the British will assist them in their fight for independence. He talks of rebellion against this Iran, he says it is the Baluch who are more powerful, who will last on the land.
Reza is surprised how quickly it comes from his mouth, like a bullet from the barrel; the lie is a sure thing. They take him to the munitions room, where guns and artillery are kept, and they open and close boxes of bronze and steel bullets and give him permission to linger and look as long as he likes. Then they are gone and he is in a room full of destiny, full of the tools to upset the cycles of nature and the hearts of men, full of weapons to have and hold and hurt and harm. He runs his fingers along and through the lot of them and rearranges them in piles by color and length and make, touches and touches again until his fingers are numb and he is tired, drained of what ever hero’s hope he had kept close.
The City Cadet
Mahdar, Aziz-eh-man:
Mahdar dearest, my support for eternity, first angel of my eyes, first warm breath in my lungs, first soft kiss to my newborn face, I see the beauty of the whole world through you. In the name of Allah the most merciful and compassionate, I hope that countless blessings fall on you and Baba and Shireen and Aava and (may God bless her departed soul) Maman Bozorg.
I am well, Maman-joun, healthy and arrived at the training encampment in the desert where everything is as it should be and in its place.
I beg a million apologies for not writing earlier, but here we are very busy. Just yesterday the commanders kept us awake until dawn piling stones and then unpiling them and piling them again and we sweated in the dark night like animals but the commanders tell us again and again the work of making a great Persia will demand thick arms all around. We spend some afternoons in class, where the sergeant tells us of Persia and uses maps to show us what Persia looks like. It is a big green thing and every day there are new lines around it and he says this is our proud empire, and then tomorrow it is another shape and he corrects himself and says, No, this is our proud empire. One day a cadet from Shiraz asked what the blue parts were at the top and the bottom of the map. The sergeant said they were the Caspian Sea and the Persian Sea and the cadet asked what is a sea? The sergeant said that the sea is the sea and he could not say more. When I come home, Maman, and we take our chai underneath the chandelier in the living room, I will listen carefully as you explain to me the sea, as I am sure you know it.
Mostly we study the magnificence of our great shah. Agha Reza Pahlavi. The king of kings. He is great enough to be God himself (but you should pray for him anyway when you go to the mosque this Friday, after all your regular prayers and after the prayers for my arms to get thicker). He is the son of a million kings before him, did you know that?
The barracks are full of boys like me, city boys with fathers who took us to the military recruitment centers and passed us along for this great duty. We are the good, clean boys. There are dirty boys too—tribe boys, Maman, and they are all as different from each other as they are from us. Some of them have dark skin like Mustaffa the Egyptian ice seller (the one who scares you with his big black-and-white eyes), some of them have thin eyes like slits and there are even some tribe boys with yellow hair and blue eyes or green eyes like Aava’s English dolls. You would not like them, they can not read or write and are all the time naughty and sad. The commanders must beat them often and we are ordered to beat them too (and I hit the black-skinned one extra hard for you, Mahdar-eh-man).
There is one tribe bo
y, a Kurd, who sleeps two cots away from me who speaks our Farsi well enough. Maybe that is why the commanders favor him the most, because they gave him his own gun already. The boys here say he is a traitor for it. They say he told the captain and colonel that the Baluch boy who slept under his bunk was against our great shah and that his dirty tribe family plotted against our king all day and all night. The Baluch boy was taken out into the courtyard in the middle of the night. We all listened for the sound of screams (sometimes they take boys who have been disobedient from their bunks at night, they punish them in the courtyard with hits and slaps just like you punish Ava and I in the hyatt after we fight too much) but there were none. Just the sound of the camion motor. The next morning the boy was gone. Now all the tribe boys are even quieter and the Kurd takes tea in the tent with the colonel and we city boys are mad. He lied for a gun, Maman! And now the commanders like him best. You told me lying was a bad thing, but for the Qurd boy, it is like a prize. When I return and we have our chai let us discuss this too, Mahdar-eh-man, this and the sea.
I am well and fine so do not stretch your heart to worry for me. Even if there is only a little sunlight, it is beautiful here. Hawks and ravens and white-feathered birds fly everywhere. At night there are owls and bats. Since we only have the pigeon in Tehran, I have drawn pictures of the valley birds for you to see, Mahdar-eh-man, because the Tehran pigeon is a dreary bird.
Your devoted son, the light of your eyes,
Jamsheed Ehaladan
Orphan Age
Spring comes quietly to the valley; the season is warm winded and the mountain walls blush with small blossoms. The garrison graduates on a clear day, in a ceremony of rifle fire and empty-eyed pledges. On the afternoon of that same day they leave for their first assignment and march away from the barracks shoulder to shoulder in lines of three, out of the deep Nehavand valley into the wide flats. They walk for a night and a day along the Gaveh and Uzam rivers, toward the base of the Zagros. They walk and pass scattered outcroppings of life, clans and tribes hobbling around pasture and stream and vadose well. Boy sentries rush to catch sight of the columns and run back to their baba, uncle and brother to describe the indescribable sight.
They come like a herd of the gypsy, but no women, children . . .
Their animals make this noise: gjeeee! And this noise: bruuuueee!
They have wagons, yes, yes, like ours, but with no horses! Everything is smoke and sound!
The men listen to the fantastic gibberish and follow the boys to watch the spectacle. The garrison is a sight to behold, neither natural nor ordinary, and what the village men know of fear they sense in that moment’s view. Before them, an unending intimation of force: soldiers on horse back, in the beds of sputtering trucks or tucked in the hot iron enclosures of the tanks that roll, heavy and dismal, along the desert floor. They watch as the army of stiff caps affixed with chevrons of bronze and carved with the insignia of the new state, a lion wrestling the sharp rays of the sun, slowly passes them by. The village men mutter to their wild-eyed sons.
It’s nothing. Turn away. Go inside.
See him, in the file, one amid many and together with the rest. He wears an olive-green uniform of wool under which the sweat is constant and ever seeping. The stiff shako sits obediently on his head as he himself sits obediently on the leather-saddled horse. See how he rides in their line of beast and man, machine and rank, all linked by the invisible ideations of conquer (we will) and country (Iran) and king (the most noble and high shahenshah!), and other sundry details mastered day after dark day in the shadowed valley barracks.
Now he is fifteen. Though they are not his fifteen years (not the number of years from his mother’s desiccated womb when the cord was cut and cherished and hung to dry, oiled with lard, wrapped around her wrist for good luck, the best of luck), not the years of the moon’s rotation, the earth’s spin around the sun or even the count of seasons where the land is fecund and then fallow. They are pen-and-ink years, years of formal assessments—size, shape and skill—years of inventory and identification. It is an orphan age, as declared by the spurious new lyweds Baba Shah and Maman Iran. It is their fifteen years. For this specious upbringing he should loathe and fear them, these false forefathers and artificial brethren, but it is too late; the fontanel is nearly formed, ossified into a solid, stiff knot at the base of the neck, where boys are soft with memory and possibility and men are hard with hate and fear. Here, Reza melds into a man for them, a named and aged member of the impartial, clangorous congregation. Look, how high his head. Look, how stiff his neck. See him proud and straight amidst them, brother to brother as horse is to horse. See him move, young and dead, in a slow amble beneath the morning sun, easy with the trust of the blind, trust of the duteous, trust of the nervous new soldier. See the broad horizon open before him, ivory clouds dotted and spread.
And so the mass moves. Through the night and into the dawn of the second day and not a cadet grows tired and not a cadet complains. The desert holds them, warm and windless, as they march from one end of the horizon to the other. On the afternoon of the second day mountains rise up out of the land like a gesture of God and the garrison is instructed to dismount the horses, trucks and tanks and set up camp. Some, like Reza, enjoy the vista run through with clean wind and circled about by enormous stone statues, open and real like a forgotten home. When given the order to halt, these cadets are sad to stop the march; so tranquil is the perambulatory pull of the land.
The garrison bivouacs on the flats at the base of the mountain town Saqqez. The city spreads above them, a mass of whitewashed houses and cyan minarets, angles and arcs that goad up the hoary vertical rise. On the low slopes there are fields, irrigated orchards of indistinguishable trees and a pasture speckled with small, still flocks.
The sight of the town captivates Reza for reasons he cannot discern and he makes his way up the slope for a closer look. The fields are steeped in a familiar manner, long and thin, sown with rice and eggplants, zucchini and tomatoes. He comes close to the orchards and without looking carefully knows their arrangement: plum, apricot, pomegranate and mulberry. Water-hungry trees closest to the stream. Even closer he knows, without touching, the soft wool of the sheep and the curved smooth horn of the ram under his hands. He knows how they are penned and paired in numbers to spawn in the spring and he cannot explain how he knows all this, senses it through his bones, and so he walks back to the men, the lopsided smile of fascination and wonder spread unevenly across his face.
The cadets are jovial in their preparations. They are ordered about to build and assemble and collect. By dusk they are settled and the encampment is a stationary mass, a small city unto itself, where cadets sit by fires to shine their boots and guns and tinker with the British brass instruments they are to play upon their entry into town. They talk to rile in themselves bravery enough to carry out the shah’s unexplained desires, which they have now memorized and made their own. Captains and lieutenants walk from fire to fire and question the gathered groups.
Sarbaz!
Yes, Agha!
We have come to Saqqez.
Yes, Agha!
Why have we come to Saqqez?
To infiltrate the renowned hideout of infamous and renegade Kurdish commanders Simko and Dizli, who are aligned with the blasphemous Kurdish quest for independence that weakens our great nation! Leaves us humiliated! Susceptible to invasion and attack!
Aufareen, Sarbaz. Tomorrow we will march.
Reza is a good man in his garrison. He claps loud and laughs hard and the captain’s approvals warm him and the fires warm him and the shouts in his head warm him most. He sits in a circle of cadets who keep a wary distance from him, unsure of his loyalties, but make no mention of the Kurd donkey or the donkey Kurd as their hearts are swollen and restless with the fear common in boys. Night deepens and the young untested cadets work to believe that all is well in the battalion, all is well under the pointed new moon and clever winking stars. And all is in fact the m
ost well in the houses of Saqqez, where women with bunches of smoking sage bless the backs of their men and boys as they disappear, packed and prepared, into the dark mountains. Calm wives and daughters walk from room to room, house to house, stable to pen, mosque to granary, and consecrate their tall town, to bless every pebble, egg, living daughter and disappeared son for the night being and the morning to come, to seek out the protection of the mountain gods against this close new threat.
On this first night a sharp wind blows down the slopes of the Zagros in a furious gust that sparks the cadet fires, takes hats from heads and cigarettes from lips. The wind carries the smell of sage and the scent burns through Reza’s nose, up each nostril like a charge of flame, and explodes in his head, and everything that has been solidified in the orphan months, the barracks months, dissolves into a dust that fills his head and throat, heart and lungs with a sudden sickness. In a panic, Reza runs to the ditches he just dug to cough and spit, to vomit and vomit again until his mouth froths and stomach empties. He stumbles through the darkness but cannot escape the smell of burnt sage—the smell of a mother calling her children home. The cadets and commanders laugh at what they think is his naked fear and laugh harder to hide theirs, and Reza wipes his watery eyes and coughs to excise the smell and the sudden memories of his mother’s soft hand on his crying face. He remembers now.
The Age of Orphans Page 9