Palimpsest
As if he has never known the mountains, the boundless winds or the calm of countless stars, Reza dissolves into the maculate city. Now accustomed to the heat and incessant motion of cockroaches and buggies and street sweeps, he sleeps peacefully in the filthy boarding house on Jamsheedi Street where the beds are stacked and full with cadets. For meals he eats charred tripe sold by the street vendors, who give it to him two for one and pour and pour his douge without solicitation. In the afternoons he makes his way to the rooftop tea houses on Abadaan Street, where he smokes the short cigarettes and listens to the men’s easy talk of war that rages among the Europeans, rising oil prices, the latest Egyptian belly dancer in town for a three-week stint at Hamedi Palace.
Another chai for our brave sarbaz!
The old men order tea for him until evening, when it is time for the long pipes that Reza and the men smoke down to the dottle and all conversation stops as they sprawl about the rooftop on cushions and rugs, lost in thoughts and afterthoughts, absorbing the dusk into their skin. At dark they smoke the short cigarettes again, fast and harsh now, and take tiny glasses of arak and sherbet and the talk turns to the shah’s latest window smashing, the best bath house boys or the effects of French cologne on lovemaking when applied just there. Reza waits until the night is black enough and then walks to the Armenian whorehouse where the door opens just a crack and soldiers slide in and out, one after the next. He sits patiently in the hyatt with the other cadets, all with shined shoes and shellacked hair, to make polite conversation about the madam’s tasty tea and the madam’s salty nuts and the madam’s lovely garden until the old lady blushes at their compliments and summons them to the back.
The hallway is an anticipation all its own. Reza has come to understand the city as sex and the bodies of these unclaimed women as his new landscapes: enigmas of flesh both powerful and barren. He slowly walks the eight-door distance between the hyatt and his bedroom and leans in without guile to spy at the rooms, peek after peek, and catch sight of the random pairs of men and women, in couplings at once animalistic and contrite, where the disheveled manflesh devours womanflesh that is already bored and resigned. Door after door he stands witness to the lure of the city and its sex: a system in constant equilibrium, the same parts give and take, deposits and withdrawals from the bank of secrets, ego, shame, pride, joy and crave. By the time Reza arrives at his own door he is eager for the exchange, eager to play the zero-sum game of fucking in rooms cavernous and dim where his soldier and shadow, cadet and orphan come to settle all accounts of fury and fear at their most naked, heavy and blank.
And so he delights in the whores, these sister orphans who meet and match him in this theater of desire and lies.
The girls are different each time and Reza proceeds like a well-trained actor, mechanical yet fluid, to perform each role in an order that arouses.
First the boy performs. He pushes them onto their backs to straddle them just above the stomach, where he grabs a breast in each hand and squeezes them like they belong to his milky maman, and shoves his stiff self between them again and again. After a series of strokes their faces reflect his own grimace and churn and the boy, the same baba’s son who feigned his bravery, grows frightened and runs offstage to make room for the soldier, gallant and furious, who turns them roughly onto their stomachs and enters from behind with aggression. When the friction slacks the soldier exits left to make clear the stage for the infant, Reza as a fresh babe, the third and final act, where he inserts himself, sink after sink, into cunts connected to wombs, trying desperately to climb back into the tunnel from which he was long ago born. It is here he finally drains himself of the half truths and secrets he carries, unrepentant, through the streets of the soiled city; here he finds friction enough; here home; here fucked, jolly and erased.
But on this palimpsest a little must be writ.
Some nights he tells the girls he is a colonel of the first degree. Some nights, a lieutenant.
Some nights, a battle-weary captain. The girls, of various bodies and one face, sigh and nod.
Spent and eager to invent himself, Reza tells them he is the master of the new nation and Iran will stand determined and tall in the face of barbarians on the fringe. The heathen Lur. The black-skinned Baluchs. The tight-eyed Turkomans. The dirty Kurds. The women suck and hold and cover him in ways he believes in and he gives long speeches in honor of himself: Reza the Great, Reza the Inheritor, Reza the Conqueror, Reza definitely-not-the-bird-boy-orphan-Kurd. Definitely-not.
They clean their bellies and backs of the creamy leftovers and he walks the room gesturing with his hand like an orating king.
I am the new man of this new nation!
Yes, sarbaz, whatever you say.
I have no history, no family, and could be king. Loyal as I am to Iran!
Oh yes, sarbaz. Mmmhmm.
I have never been frightened or sad or needlessly ashamed. What greatness is beyond my reach?
The whores turn over in bed and give him extra time without charge. They know he is an orphan boy (the scent of un-love has always passed easily between the orphan and whore) and are generous with their ears and bodies.
Mmmhmm. Boshee, sarbaz. There is no greatness beyond your reach . . .
Wrapped tightly in this new skin, convinced of his creation, Reza returns to the teahouse to tell the men of the campaigns he’s led and of his epic wile against the barbaric marauders, of how the fate of the whole new nation hangs from the thick thread of his heroism. He is a serious storyteller and takes the time to craft a new man, extravagant and heroic, from the assurance just conjured in the whorehouse bed.
The long beards of the teahouse clap for him and their prayer beads slap together like marbles. They pass their young son the ceramic pipe and rosewater sweets and are happy to have the oversexed nineteen-year-old in their midst. Reza smokes and smokes and sinks back into the deep cushions and lets the opium have him and, for the first time all night, lets his mind alone. An old man pulls a santir from a creaky wooden case and begins to play, and between Reza and the song there is no membrane. Its tune, intricate and lush, seeps into him and drips beyond all thought and all lies, beyond being itself; each singular note becomes a flagstone for Reza to follow on a path into memory opened by the smoke and sound.
He and his cousin are alone in a small forest at the foot of the Zagros. They are surrounded by all manner of life—butterflies, snakes, peacocks and foxes—but focus instead on a pile of bird bones and feathers. The two spend an afternoon assembling and reassembling the body of the bird. The santir plays. The grove is cool and quiet and they take their time, placing a bone here and a feather there to make wings, tail, little round ribs. They scour the forest floor for extra sticks and their bird grows until it is larger than intended and the boys must climb the first few branches of a tree to look down and admire their work. The santir plays. As they descend a flock of sparrows alights in the tree, hundreds of the little birds taking to branches and leaves with wind enough to scatter the body of the bird they just created, to upset the afternoon’s art. The boys return home, laughing and joking on the walk, their fossil already a memory in their minds.
The santir plays. Up and around and out, the notes take Reza to places he has never seen, riversides and plateaus and mountain tops. He is with his cousin and then alone and sometimes with his dog. He is high with imagination and pleasure and reaches out for the pipe that is passed again. The old men, who have caught a second wind, are tricksters now who joke with the sleepy soldier. Tell us, sarbaz, how thorny was it to capture a whole caravan of nomads?
Did their women smell like their sheep? We are city men . . . we do not know . . . our women smell like flowers all the time . . . heh heh heh.
You’re a bit young for a soldier . . . Did you single-handedly kill the khans or did your maman help?
Surely with all these glories soon you yourself will be more powerful than the shah?
Reza looks about. The san
tir is quiet and the room is noisy now with the laughter and coughs. In his delirium the walls are covered with enormous eyes, the faces of the old men are gone and all that is left in the room are eyes, wide and wet, that peer at him for answers. What ever fresh self he created in the aftermath of fucking is sullied now and Reza panics as he thinks: When was he brave? Has he ever killed a khan or won a battle or done any act not instigated by fear? Is the army of the shah a powerful thing in fact? Powerful enough to give an orphan a pair of boots to kick in the face of a child and powerful enough to give an orphan a gun he can use to take the scream from an unmarried girl. Yes, he wants to say. I have cried at the smell of sage and walked about craving that last suckle from my maman’s teat, but yes, of course, I am powerful enough to be your king. The opium swirls in his head, to mix the true and the false and to open the eyes of the old men until they are as white and sad as the moon. He stands and salutes them, just as he has been taught: with the sharp hand and the pop of the elbow. The room is silent now and all the eyes, pasted to the wall, faceless and enormous, blink back at him and cry.
It is dawn when he stumbles from the teahouse into the streets. He makes his way back to the filthy boardinghouse on Jamsheedi Street where the soldiers snore loudly in perfect rhythm. Reza paces the space between bunks until the walls stop shaking and the ceiling no longer spins and flips; only then can he sit at the edge of his bunk and begin to polish his boots, harshly and without break, until sunrise, when they shine back at him, a blinding black.
The Willing
Reza Pejman Khourdi?
—
Be seated.
—
Have you found quarters?
Yes, Agha, on Abadaan Street.
It says here that you are most recently arrived from the division stationed in Saqqez?
Yes, Agha.
How old are you?
Nineteen. I am told.
Stationed at Nevabad barracks since the age of seven, it says.
Yes, Agha.
Where were you born?
In the Zagros, Agha, outside of Kermanshah. I think.
—
—
I will assume, then, that you are a properly trained and properly loyal servant of the shahenshah, the most honored Reza Pahlavi, despite your Kurdish origins?
Yes, Agha.
As a child did you ever fight on behalf of your tribe against the shah or any of his divisions?
No, Agha. I was conscripted early on.
Are you aware that your own blood is responsible for our past weakness?
Yes, Agha.
They are in fact the very brigands who irritate and resist our great government in the name of heathen gods, those who pursue a felonious notion of sovereignty. It is their insurgence that is a direct insult to the respect and power your uniform affords you.
—
Are you repentant?
—
In his chair, the lieutenant swivels lazily in a hypnotizing back-and-forth. They sit in a room of sharp edges: the sharp edges of the desk; the edges of the map lining the wall, tan and green, labeled IRAN; the edges of three gilt frames that surround portraits of the shah, an angry man in each. Reza and the lieutenant sit under the three gazes—six eyes of manifest authority—that cut across the small room to overlap one another in a tight web in which the two subordinates are caught and held.
I understand that you were among the most zealous in the Saqqez campaign. Is this true?
I am in service to His Majesty.
And that they were Kurds, your own, of a tribe farther north, but still your own, yes?
—
How is it that a son can kill his own?
—
When they informed me of your prowess, degenerate and haphazard as it might have been, I was intrigued. How better, I thought, to pay re-pentances for your blood than with a lifelong commitment to a station in Kermanshah. Am I wrong to think this, Sarbaz Khourdi?
No, Agha, you are not wrong.
Am I wrong to think that you might have some delicate and steadfast abilities in combating your own people that could serve our purposes in the western region?
I am most willing in service to His Majesty.
Your time in Tehran is another nine months and then you shall be restationed to Kermanshah as a captain.
Yes, Agha.
That is all . . . eh, Khourdi, how are you finding our women in Tehran?
—
They are among the most sophisticated. French educated, uncovered, lovely, wouldn’t you agree?
Yes, Agha.
Think to take one for a wife. She will make for a good partner for you in the west, an example to the women of the town. I hear the Kurdish girls have the heavy hands and feet of men. Is that true, Sarbaz?
Yes, Agha.
Very well. Your badges and long coat can be retrieved from the commissary post and the tailor.
Merci, Agha. Thank you very, very much.
The promotion leaves Reza in a fine mood and he walks, with the folio of order forms under his arm, the roundabout way to the bazaar, moving through the neighborhood where the French and English and rich Tehranis live. The streets are busy with early afternoon traffic and he lets his gaze wander from storefront to storefront as women with uncovered hair shop for Western clothes. He sits on a stone slab outside of a hosiery store and watches them move in and out of the glass doors. He has never thought of them before—his eyes always trained on the crack in the whorehouse door—never considered their species of woman: closed mouthed, wide eyed, stilted off the ground with heeled shoes, hair curled tight and stiff like a helmet. They are clean and cold, not familiar to his sense of desire, and he knows not how and what to want of them. Reza recognizes them as replicas of his new self: the modern woman to match his modern man, with similar uniforms of pressed wool and sharp lines, clean necks and faces held up to the sun. The captain’s words come back to him. Think to take one for a wife. He leaves his seat in front of the hosiery store and makes his way to the tailor, who sews on his new captain badges and remarks:
Such a young man for such a high post—with a needle in his shoulder—these days . . . where did you say you are from again? . . .
A Matchmaker’s Daughter
Maman says the soldiers are bad for business.
Bastard sons, all of them. Ack-toph.
The Age of Orphans Page 12