They waited for night, for the twang of the sitar, the thump of the daq and the scent of opium to slip out from the crack in the den door, before they went into Maman’s room. Afsaneh, Parvin and I couldn’t sleep and so we stood in the dark spaces between bedrooms and watched three women walk around our mother’s room with panther steps and thieving eyes. They emptied closet and dresser indiscriminately and occasionally one would pause on a pair of pants, a heeled shoe, a silk stocking, and try it on. At the dressing table they smelled the glass bottles of perfume, inspected the tubes of lipstick, marked up the backs of their hands with the imported sticks of black and brown kohl. We tried, my sisters and I, stuck in that dark silent space, not to laugh as they masked their faces with colors and lines that pushed their lips forward and sank their eyes. I watched them stare into the oval mirror at the unfamiliar painted versions of themselves, and my chest stretched tight with stifled laughter until finally they spit insolently on the edges of their shawls and wiped their faces clean.
Alongside the mirror our mother had tacked up three images, two magazine cutouts and a photograph. In one, Princess Fawzia, Reza shah’s first wife, at a ball masque, stands to pose with a starlet’s smile. The other was a snapshot of Soraya, the shah’s second wife, on a ski trip; the royal couple pose at the top of an alpine mountain, small pins of the flag of Iran tacked to both their lapels, and smile broadly behind sunglasses. The women removed the magazine cutouts and tucked them in hidden pockets, next to the tubes of cosmetics and tiny bottles of perfume.
They left our photograph stuck to the wall. In it Maman sits by the bank of a stone-bottomed stream while the seven of us circle around her: Naasi on her lap, me at her knee, Parvin and Hooshang at her shoulder, Ali and Afsaneh behind her, Hameed a bit off to the side. The village women didn’t touch the photo as theirs was an incomplete and judicious scouring, much like how I imagine the mind selects memories—leaving some up and taking some down. In the dark of that night I snuck into that abandoned bedroom and took the picture down in a sort of child’s cleaning. It still floats around among the seven of us in copies and reproductions, each a bit more dim, each farther from the true feeling of her kept in that dark room.
Our uncles arrived from Tehran unannounced and we did not recognize the family in them. Hooshang, who had grown mean and defensive in those first few weeks and months, noticed them first and mistook them, with their narrow suits and timepieces and oiled hair, as traveling salesmen and rudely told them to leave. They smiled at him and asked, Hooshang, jounam, how are you going to ask your uncles to leave? Eh, he’s just like Meena described in her letters, quite the hardheaded Kurd, eh? They singled us out with precision: and you must be, and you must be, and you must be. It was a strange feeling, to be touched and talked to by these foreign men, and to this day I remember how easily I bypassed fear and suspicion when they cupped my face and called my name.
I imagine the two uncles leaving Tehran on new trains, ending up on old roads, soliciting rides on the backs of mules, camels, military and cargo trucks, shouting politely at drivers and herders, Kermanshah? Kermanshah? They made their uncharted way across the desert and through the crevices of the Zagros, taking tea in the dirty cups and keeping our baba’s stern face at the forefront of their mind. They must have taken some looks as they moved through. Two men, a doctor and a chemist, European educated, suited and softly shod. Fueled by the steam of an adamant rectitude they must not have returned the curious stares and I imagine their steps bounced jauntily at the thought of imposing justice for their sister’s murder: the accusations, the trial they would demand, the somber walk to the courthouse or the jail, the magistrate’s even face as he considered the severity of the claims before him. And I imagine their steps did slacken a bit, churning down through the heel, at the memory of their own willingness to marry their sister off to the unknown man at the end of Abadaan Street, the opium-smoking soldier who sat on the rooftop, on the patio, in their divan, and said very little. They were not so ready to admit how badly they wanted to empty the house of their shamefully beautiful sister, to take the money for her bride price, to be rid of her. If they had those thoughts I am sure the mountains around them doubled in height and the mules carrying their bags groaned at the weight of such human hypocrisy. But maybe they forgot the details of the past and marched proudly, like the city men they were, into mountains that would quickly make boys of them again.
They greeted us and waited for our somewhat aggrieved baba to emerge from the house. Wordlessly he took the two men in his arms, kissing both cheeks of both faces and crying. It was the first time since our maman’s death that we saw any emotion on our father’s face, and I can still remember how it frightened me; his stiff skin was suddenly contorted and pulsing and monstrous. He shuffled the uncles into the den, where men had sat for days with crossed legs endlessly smoking cigarettes and pipes. He made space for them, the best spaces, next to him and gave them plates of warm food, dark tea and Russian cigarettes. He asked of Tehran, of Abadaan Street, of news of the city, politics and the shah. He wanted to know if the city was a modern place yet, made of glass and steel, he wanted to know if in its center Iran existed as the place the shah’s father had promised. He passed them pipe after pipe, and by nighttime it was all they could do, these two uncles from Tehran, to sit and smoke, accept condolences on their dead sister, give condolences on his dead wife and revel in the music of duduk and sitar that filled the room, their blood and bones.
They stayed for three days, sequestered in the den, sated with food and smoke and our father’s breathless storytelling. Bit by bit they wandered out into the afternoon. One of them, the doctor I think, walked the house, looking for remnants of Maman. Naasi and I told him, when he asked, that they had been carried out, pocketed, burned. Burned, he repeated. We nodded. They walked the courtyard, into and out of the shed and around the garden. On the third day they walked to Kermanshah. To see the town, to meet the Kurds. What fascinating people, these Kurds, we are interested in the Kurds. It is not often we get to leave Tehran to see this new Iran of ours. And Baba let them go, insisting that Hooshang and Hameed accompany them as guides, and the four set off in the direction of town, the two nephews in front, kicking stones ahead of themselves.
We waited at the end of our drive, brothers and sisters alike, and watched for their return that afternoon. The sun had just dropped, but it was a determined day and thick orange beams filtered out from the spaces between western mountain peaks, covering the slope behind our house in stripes of sunset and shadow. We spotted them, figures moving toward us through the panels of dark and light, the two city men briskly ahead and our brothers barely keeping pace. I think we must have been waiting for gifts, because I remember the disappointment when they walked through the gate, past the line of us without so much as a hello, and stomped up the drive to the house. The uncles reemerged calmly escorting our father out of his own door into the courtyard, because some things are easier to do outdoors. Maybe the brisk air called to their cultivated sense of justice; maybe they couldn’t accuse a man of murder in his own house, with family and friends so tightly around.
They spoke as if the coming night itself was judge and the steel-gray mountains a somber jury. Carefully the two brothers laid out their evidence. Baba dropped his cigarette, pushed it into the ground with his toe and lit another. They read to him directly from the piece of paper. Cyanide 27 percent. Arsenic 9 percent. Benzene 19 percent. Carbon tetrachloride 12 percent. Bleach 4 percent. The contents of her blood as autopsied in Kermanshah, as it was exhumed from the still-tidy grave. The uncles stood proudly in the dark silence. The two men stood sure in their stronghold of doctor’s reports and dead woman’s claims that Baba’s guilt was as obvious to the world as the small fire he held in his hand. With a false humility they nodded yes and yes, of course when Baba asked if they would be kind enough to accompany him to the jail in town.
The jail was a new addition to the town. Criminals in Kermanshah came few and f
ar between and justice itself was an intimate transaction with sentences dealt in dens, fields and off the branches of trees in silent orchards. At that point the one-room cell had yet to hold a human soul (though it held mules when the rain turned to hail). He took the uncles to the cinder-block building and introduced them to the gendarme on duty, a young boy of seventeen or eighteen who, thinking these suited men were part of some tour or inspection, easily returned our father’s affectionate embrace, answered dutifully, Yes, Captain, yes, Captain, yes, sir, locked my father in the cell and went to find the magistrate. An accusation needed recording. The magistrate laughed loudly at the sight of our baba, his longtime hunting partner and his superior, sitting on a wooden bench in the town’s one jail cell, and jovially took down the uncles’ statements, teasing Baba all the while. Vayvayvay, you say she was full of poison? Reza, do you hear that, your own wife full of poison. Didn’t you think to suck it out? Heheheh.
Even though we heard this story, the story of Baba’s night in jail, in many versions for many months after his return, there is no accounting for the emptiness the two uncles must have felt at the sight of Baba locked and laughing in the jail cell. They spent the night in a rooming house where I imagine they sat nervously and waited for the sun to come up. Our father stayed up to play backgammon with the gendarme (who, I heard, was promoted to lieutenant soon after) until word came that the two brothers had left town. He released himself and drove home to recount the hilarity of his evening to the men waiting in the divan and to all of us listening at the door. We never saw our uncles again and all of their accusations of murder slipped out of the mountains as mysteriously as they did.
Our father was a man who liked to sit in the dark. That night when the room was cleared of well-fed, sleepy guests, we snuck in and sat behind him as the light disappeared from the air. In darkness he was assured and comfortable in the same way an animal might be. We watched him, lying on his side, propped up on one elbow, at an angle to the floor. He sat still far longer than we could and emitted such fearlessness and such certainty; on these evenings he became myth to us. We feared him—this man who rarely spoke, whose angled profile mimicked the barren mountain range out the window, who breathed at the steady clip of a confident animal—and there was a comfort in our fear. As children we knew, like we knew in all the moments of our abandoning and all our moments of exile, that this presence, even and imperceptible, would always hold closer to the cold elements around him—the air, the stones, the smoke, the high invisible sky—than to the flesh of any child or wife.
Book V
The Dirges of Old Man
Khourdi, Taqibustan—1979
The Stone Throne
From the vantage of the perch the land spreads before him, infinite and serene. He is a lonely old man, a left alone man, determined every day to make his way here to sit on a jut of granite shaped in the form of a seat, nearly in the cut of a throne. It is a good place to be. A good place to smoke. A good place to sing the dirges of old man Khourdi.
From habit, he first feels out the flesh of his face. This is it in the end, the leaden cheeks, the chin, the eye sockets filled with gelatin and tears, the macula dark and ever despairing. Today, same as yesterday, no guarantee for tomorrow. Then he surveys the land before him: beige beneath the blue with a spine of smoke that reaches across from east to west. It is a peasant fire, a Kurd fire to burn the fields so they may lay fallow, to burn the fields so they may again grow. The wind blows from east to west in a soft caress that hits the old man behind the ears and between the fingers and spreads the distant smoke along in a line to connect sky and earth, a translucent haze that mixes the two: part ash, part atmosphere, part dirt. It is an offering in Reza’s honor, fire to immolate the sins of one who is neither son nor father and so un-belonging, loveless and trapped in a delirium: weightless, cordless, divine. He cannot help but inhale the air and search for birds; a falcon flies far off, then two hawks, then nothing. The old man sits on his perch, to turn to stone, to turn to dust, to turn his eyes upon the ruin-strewn land and weep, or not.
Old Man Khourdi
I am a spectacle at your gardens, shah oh shah.
Though your father, the first shah, my namesake, made a motion to regale the new in its ancient history, you are a prodigal son to make a circus of it, to plant gardens around my caves. With little else to do, and still in service to you, I come and perform. And the visitors all cry, Look! The captain has come, with his big-beaked bird! They smile and salute and admire the bird out of obligation before returning to their vending, corn roasting, music box grinding and humble hawking. The bird and I walk on, among your French-styled flowerbeds, the planted magnolias and rows of holly bush, their blossoms drained of color and wilted in this desert spring, and we admire their silent, mute deaths. Look how lovely the peony, the snapdragon and bent-neck hydrangea. The falcon, my devoted peregrine, my love doll with the hooded head, claws my arm in cordial agreement. Yes, oh yes, delicious flowers, the whole withered lot.
We are such good guests at your gardens, shah oh shah, the captain and his tethered falcon, who is aroused, of course, by the scents of sumac and cooked meats, the sounds of small children and the clack of foreign tongues. I can see it in the blunt jerks of his neck and the sharp pincers that open and close on my sleeve: he is a bird eager for flight, for an escape from these unfamiliar fairgrounds, the glory circus of these disgraced ruins. But he is a smart bird, trained in association and memory, a bird who knows from the time before and the time before that what is expected of him and what is declined. I don’t assume his patience though, military man that I am; I assume nothing and keep a firm hold on the leather line attached to his neck and hooded head. Such is our suffocation, shah oh shah, such is our fear of flight.
And so we walk through your gardens hand in tenuous talon, I dressed in my military suit and the bird in his black blinding cap. They used to be my gardens, shah oh shah, before they were gardens at all. Here is where I came for my first blinding, here to these caves of father and child and hero and dead. I rode in on the back of a cart and out on my own horse. I sat in my baba’s lap and took in his sweat and song and love and let myself become a man among them. In your reign the story is the same: bristled boars hang upside down and the armies of the vanquished lie still and dead under the feet of the victors and I was a boy in their presence and I am certain they know me still. Yes, here, in these very caves, I was taught to hate you, shah oh shah, and the state that you devised to harness our freedom. But do not take the insult personally, for as the stone story tells, we Kurds have always taken issue with the powers that pass by us.
Now visitors pace among the rocks and into and out of caves wearing ornaments of hats and linens, leather boots and scarves, journals and sketchbooks, sunglasses, always ah ha! this and splendid! that, and they are impressed, shah oh shah, by this false history you have so expertly excavated for them. Your storybook Persia is carved into plaques that explain and sudden signage that celebrates and they are filled with delight. But as I walk I wonder, how did you get the stones to shine so? All the moss scrubbed away and the dust cleaned off? Even dark-eyed Mithra looks polished. Are those marbles that sparkle in the eyeholes of his smashed and stolen face? History must rise for you only, shah oh shah. We walk to the lake and when I catch the reflection of myself in the waters it is for me to laugh because I am a comedy among your foreign visitors: a stern-faced army captain walking a bird like a weapon from cave to cave, carving to carving, silent as a statue.
Those are my days.
I spend my afternoons alone at the stone perch.
Remembering.
They are about her like bees, shah oh shah. Look at her—now bent over, now straight—her arms wet to the elbows with wash. My children run back and forth, to grab the dripping shirts, the flattened pants, the soiled kitchen rags, and hang them on the line, these servile children, darting to and fro in a swarm, their maman in the midst to watch with easy majesty over the eager child state. T
hey sing back to her, aleph, beh, ceh, al-ef, be-eh, ssse-eh, and from here you can watch them push sound out from those sparrow lungs, right up and out of those little gendarme throats, watch as she calls to them with instructions, Now again, aleph, beh, ceh . . . The obedient echoes buzz in my ear, an un-swattable fly, and my gut rolls with nausea. Just a bit of tasty tar to push down the bile, soften the sharp buzz, keep the scene of them all at a blurred distance. It is for me to sit on the porch and smoke and squint at the sight of the swarm, to watch her wring and snap, wring and snap, like the state at my neck.
Yes yes yes, shah oh shah, I have followed the orders, I have taken the old men into their fields and given proper warnings all around. I have used a map, spelled out the words of edicts for their illiterate minds, explained the idea of it, this end of the Kurds, the Lurs, the Turkomans, this initiation into our Iran. They did ask, the old tribesmen with their half-toothed mouths, they wanted to know, What is this Iran? Who is this Iran? I say it is nothing. I tell them it is an idea, made up on paper, a mark on a map, a nothing. But they’ve seen the trucks and the soldiers and their guns, they’ve seen me in my suit with my gun and they know it’s not nothing. Still they ask, Who is this Iran? We are Quordie. You, under that suit, you are Quordie, your father was Quordie too, so who is this Iran and what can it ask from us? The explanations exhaust me, these old men harder than the ground, born over and over again to the same mountains, the same streams and rocks, so I lie to them and say: It’s nothing, open your gates and guards to the soldiers when they ask, and there will be no harm. Send your children to the school in town, and there will be no harm. Bow obediently when you see me pass and there will be no harm.
The Age of Orphans Page 21