by Parisa Reza
When he reaches Shermiran Road, which climbs straight up toward the mountain, Bahram can feel the cooler wind caressing his shaven head and sneaking inside his white shirt, which starts to flutter. Bahram has six white shirts, one for each school day. Two are from last year and are too small; another two are too big and he has to roll up their sleeves. The remaining two are the right size, and he is wearing one of these today. Good peasant that she is, Talla does no ironing; in fact, she does not even have an iron. Once she has washed the shirts, she pulls them in every direction before laying them out flat, and they end up looking pretty good. Bahram changes his shirt every day like boys from good families. His mother adds a touch of powdered lapis lazuli to the washing water, giving it a pronounced azure color, and a vague echo of this blue is left on his white shirts after they have been rinsed.
His pants, on the other hand, are too short, only reaching his ankles, and they have been mended a dozen times. But the worst of it are his shoes—they are so tight that he never has a chance to stop thinking about them. In this dusty terrain, the only thing that counts is an immaculate white shirt.
For a moment Bahram closes his eyes and savors the gentle breeze. He has a lot on his mind. He is about to finish sixth grade, the last year of primary school. At the start of the next academic year, he will be in high school, but there is no high school in Gholhak. He either has to stop his schooling or head north to Tadjrish or south to Tehran.
Bahram does not intend to stop his studies, but how will this work? His family has no car and no horse-drawn cart. The nearest school is in Tadjrish, in the foothills of the mountains. It would be almost impossible to travel that far on foot twice a day, perhaps even four times if he includes the lunch break. And then he needs to think about the winter, which is harsh in Shemiran, the snow and the cold. There is a bus to Tadjrish, but you can never tell what time it will come through town. In spite of all this, Bahram would do it, he would get up early and make do with no lunch, but the problem is Talla. She has decreed that she will not let her only son go so far away, even if this means he must stop attending school. Meanwhile Sardar wants only one thing, for his son to do everything he himself has not done in life, everything he did not want to do. Sardar, who has always chosen to stand apart from the crowd, who never believed in the advantages of moving up the social scale, is well aware he must not impose these ideas of his on his son. Bahram is from here; whatever happens he must not be a peasant all his life. In Ghamsar everyone was the same; even though Sardar was from one of the more influential families, the discrepancy was not particularly striking. But here the parameters are different and he knows that if his son does not change his social standing he will suffer for it. But Sardar’s concept of society is not sufficiently developed for him to grasp the difference between graduating school after sixth grade and going further. He feels that what Bahram has achieved in school so far is already quite something and if the boy stopped now it would do nothing to hamper his own ambitions for his son.
Bahram crosses Shermiran Road and turns into Deh Street. He stops outside the school, closes his eyes again, and briefly savors the soft feeling of the wind once more. When he opens his eyes, he sees the plaque with the big, bold words “Djam School,” and he suddenly has a brilliant idea: “Oh my, why did no one think of this before!”
Over the last month he and Ghassem and Siavosh have been knocking on doors to find a solution; they have talked to Gholhak’s dignitaries to get them to open a seventh grade class at the school. They even went to see the wife of Amidi-e Nouri, the big newspaper director. She is a charitable woman, happy to speak to anyone, and she listened to them kindly. But she told them she could not open all the doors. In fact, no one has succeeded in opening this particular door.
Bahram cannot see Ghassem in the schoolyard.
“I have to find him, I have to find him, the bell is about to go . . . ”
They have done their research, found names and addresses, and introduced themselves in wealthier households. Sometimes they were turned away on the spot by the caretaker; other times they were shown in and they managed to say a few words to the master. To no effect. And yet it was Reza Shah who encouraged their love for their country, their duty to their nation which they would perform through knowledge. It was Reza Shah who wanted to educate an elite, so surely he could not encourage them to dream one minute and summarily abandon them the next.
Bahram sees Ghassem at last and runs over to him.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it: We’re going to go and see Djam himself, the man the school is named after. He’ll give us our new class. We’ll go see him this evening. He lives somewhere around here.”
The bell rings and the students stand in lines. The headmaster comes out of the building and inspects his pupils. As he does every morning, he walks with his hands behind his back, scrutinizing each child. He knows every pupil’s first name but always uses their family name, and he always shouts: “Hosseini, take your hands out of your pockets,” or, “Akbarzadeh, why do you look like a street beggar?”
The children instantly stand to attention, backs stiff, chins held high, with their eyes on the horizon, their arms by their sides, and the palms of their hands pressed to their thighs. This fifteen minutes every morning is a nightmare for them: Anyone who dares utter a word or step out of line provokes the headmaster’s anger and risks falak. When the inspection is over the children sing the national anthem then chant, “Long live our country, long live the Shah!” and they can at last go to their classrooms.
At noon Bahram goes home for lunch. Talla is sitting waiting for him in the garden. Sardar does not come home in the middle of the day; he takes bread, cheese, and some fruit when he sets off in the morning. Talla has already spread the cloth on the ground in the garden, and has laid out two plates, two spoons, two glasses, and some bread. And a pan is simmering on the fire.
As soon as Bahram arrives she gets up to draw water from the well and hands a glass to Bahram, who downs the cold water in one. This well water is incredibly cold even though it is forty degrees outside.
Talla serves him meat and carrots with a tomato sauce. Bahram eats it with a soft thin flatbread that his mother collects every day before the call to prayer at noon so that it is fresh for lunch. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Bahram eats as fast as he can. When he has had enough his mother makes him some tea. He wishes he could have a nap but it would make him late for school. He spends another two hours at school in the afternoon, then comes home for his nap under the mulberry tree, in the coolest spot in the garden.
Bahram is woken by his father’s footsteps—is it that late? He jumps out of bed.
“I have to go.”
“Go where?” Sardar asks.
“To see Djam for the new class.”
“Djam!”
“Yes, Djam. The school’s named after him, isn’t it, so he’ll definitely do something.”
“Do you know who Djam is? He’s Minister of Court!”
Djam was indeed Minister of Court, among other things. But before that, in the Qajar era, Mahmud Djam, who learned French at a Jesuit school, had been a translator in Tabriz. He came to Tehran and started working at the Ministry of Finance, gradually climbing through the hierarchy and taking on different jobs until he ended up at the top of the pyramid and became Reza Shah’s prime minister in 1314. He was Prime Minister when the veil was banned. He resigned that position in 1318 and became Minister of Court. After Reza Shah left he was appointed as the Iranian ambassador to Egypt, and later became a minister again, then an ambassador, then a senator . . .
Sardar does not know exactly what position Djam currently holds, but “Minister of Court” is the title he remembers. Like all Gholhakis, he knows little about power, but knows something about the members of parliament who have properties in Gholhak. And Djam is a prince among princes, the highest-ranking of Gholhak’s dignitaries. And the only thing
any of the locals remember about him is that he is Minister of Court, because in their view this is the most fascinating position of all those in power. Sometimes he seems still more mysterious than the Shah himself because he needs to know not only all of the Shah’s secrets but plenty of other secrets to which the Shah is not privy.
And Bahram wants to go and see Djam! Sardar will have to put him off the idea because, without a shadow of a doubt, he would be greeted with nothing but crushing humiliation if he went to knock on such an elevated door.
“He doesn’t have time for peasants like us.”
“If that’s true, then why’s the school named after him?”
“He may not have asked for it to be. Maybe it was called Djam because he had a house here. They won’t even let you through the door.”
“Well, we’re going and we’ll see what happens.”
“Do you at least know how to address a minister? You have to say . . . ” Sardar has forgotten, or never knew, gets confused between the king and a minister. “You say: Your most distinguished Majesty, the honorable Minister Djam.”
Bahram puts on his shoes, but his mother asks him to wait. She goes over to the well and hauls up the pail of fruit, chooses a peach and four apricots, wraps them in a piece of cloth, and hands them to him, telling him to eat them on the way. Bahram takes the fruit in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. He gulps it down so quickly that the water runs out of his mouth, down his neck, and all the way to his navel, then he empties the rest over his head and sets off at a run. At the end of the unnamed pathway, Bahram turns around and comes back home, he’s forgotten his jacket: You can’t visit a minister without a jacket. Talla forgot to recite a surah from the Koran and to blow on his face, so she keeps him back a moment longer.
On Thursdays school ends at lunchtime. Back home, Talla has already spread out the tablecloth. Today she has made bread herself, delicious little rolls that are crusty on top and doughy in the middle. Sardar will be happy: “It’s like bread from the village.” Bahram wolfs his food down and then lies on the ground next to the cloth.
“I mustn’t go to sleep. If I fall asleep, wake me up when you’ve finished doing the dishes.”
Talla fills a bowl with water from the pond, wets the plates and glasses, scrubs them with a handful of dirt from the yard, then rinses everything out. The pond water is murky, not safe to drink, and she uses it only for washing. She rinses the tableware a second time with fresh well water. Then she wraps the remaining bread in a big napkin, winding it around several times, otherwise the heat and the dry air will turn it hard before the evening.
She waits a few minutes before saying, “Bahram jan, Bahram jan, get up, my son.” He is fast asleep. “Bahram jan, Bahram agha . . . ” He does not react. She leaves him to sleep and lies down beside him under the mulberry tree. She is tired but must not fall asleep, she needs to wake Bahram. In the meantime she turns toward him and studies him in profile. Then she puts her arm around his head and hugs him to her. Bahram’s head is buried between her breasts and this wakes him. He leaps to his feet and curses at Talla, then hurries upstairs and comes straight back down with his jacket on. His mother follows him to the door, reciting a surah from the Koran and blowing on his face.
Bahram runs over to Telephone-khaneh Street, and waits for Ghassem under the old plane tree. It is forty degrees in the shade and Bahram sweats in his wool jacket. It is siesta time, and there is not a soul to be seen. They have to go to Djam’s house at four o’clock, they have been granted an audience. Bahram does not have a watch, but there is bound to be someone to tell them the time.
Ghassem strolls up to him nonchalantly.
“Where the hell have you been? What if it’s already four?”
“But four o’clock must be later than siesta time.”
“Okay, well, let’s go. We need to get Siavosh,” Bahram says, setting off at a run.
“Bahram!” Ghassem cries. “It’s too hot to run.”
Bahram slows to a walk and picks up pebbles, which he aims at the trunks of trees on the other side of the street.
Sweat beads on their shaven heads, running over their foreheads and dripping from their eyelashes. Bahram wipes it away with the sleeve of his jacket. Ghassem is not wearing a jacket; the one from his school uniform has been patched too many times to be worn in front of Djam, so he is wearing the smart shirt he and his older brother share for important occasions. It is a little too big for him. There are seven children in his family: four boys and three girls. The two older girls are already married, the third is engaged to a cousin and is waiting until she is sixteen to be married. Of the four boys, Ghassem is second in age. His father used to be a coachman, he drove a horse-drawn cart taking goods to Shemiran: bricks, wood, rice . . . The horse and cart were his own. As he himself admitted, he treated his horses better than his own children. But competition from cars ruined his business, and he now works at the Iran Cement factory to the west of Gholhak. He is a cheerful man with no regrets. Times change and so does he. Ghassem’s mother is pregnant with her eighth child and his father is happy, every child is a gift. Next year he will get work for his eldest son at the factory with him. The boy is among the first cohort to go through Djam School, just like Ghassem, they are in the same class. Their father is proud of his sons; they have learned to read. The older boy will finish school this year, after graduating sixth grade, and will work at the factory like his father. Eldest sons take the same job as their fathers; the others have to find something for themselves. Ghassem’s father believes in education. He is delighted to see his son dashing around trying to secure another class for his school, even though deep down he does not really believe it will happen. That does not stop him having the wildest dreams of one day seeing his son become a civil servant. He need only graduate ninth grade . . . so he lets him go along with Bahram on this adventure. You never know!
Siavosh joins them. He is the son of a local administrator; his father works at Gholhak’s town council. He is from an educated family from Kerman. His grandfather was a mullah and a supporter of the constitutional revolution. They are one of Gholhak’s respectable families, but they have no wealth. If a seventh grade class is not established in Gholhak, his father will send him to high school whatever the cost. Their family ambition dictates that Siavosh should go on to higher education. And anyway, his father has no intention of festering in Gholhak’s council offices; he is waiting for an opening at the ministry.
What time is it? None of the passersby they meet has a watch.
Bahram has an idea.
“Let’s go to the police station,” he says and runs off.
But Ghassem is thirsty and says, “We’re going to the mosque first for a drink.”
There is a blind man sitting by a bucket of water in the courtyard of Gholhak’s mosque. They ask him for some water and the blind man says, “Drink and pray.”
They each drink a ladleful of water and set off again.
“Pray,” Ghassem reminds them. And pray they do.
There is no one outside the police station. Two uniformed officers in peaked caps are sweltering in the shade of the inner courtyard.
“What time is it please, Agha?”
“It’s siesta time!”
“The actual time, please, two o’clock, three?” he pleads.
“Why do you want to know the time, little man?”
“We have an appointment.”
“An appointment?” the policeman laughs.
“Please.” Bahram is close to tears.
“I don’t have a watch. Go ask in the office.”
Bahram runs over and finds a policeman sitting at a desk. His hat is not on his head but on the desk.
“Salam, Agha.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know what time it is, please?”
“Have you come to the police station to know t
he time?”
“The men outside told me to come ask you.”
Siavosh has followed Bahram into the office, and now joins in: “Good afternoon, lieutenant. Please could you tell us the time?”
The policeman gives a self-important smile. He is flattered: He is not a lieutenant, just an under officer. He stands up, takes his watch from the pocket of his pants, and flips it open.
“It’s three twenty-five.”
“Thank you, Agha,” says Bahram.
“Thank you, lieutenant!” says Siavosh.
“Thank you, lieutenant!” Bahram repeats.
Bahram comes out of the office and throws a “thank you, Agha lieutenants!” at the policemen, then he takes Ghassem’s arm and starts running again.
“So what time is it?” asks one of the policemen.
“Three twenty-five,” Bahram cries, already far away.
“Stop running,” Ghassem complains. “What’s three twenty-five compared to four o’clock?”
“It’s earlier.”
“Yes, but how much earlier? Earlier earlier or just earlier?”
“I don’t know but we’re going now.”
At the entrance to the grounds Bahram strikes the knocker three times.
“Coming, coming,” the caretaker replies straightaway as if he has been waiting for them.
“Salam, Agha.”
“Salam, boys, come in.”
A magnificent, extensive garden like a rose garden fit for a prince. The house is not visible at first but appears at a turn in the driveway, appropriately elegant with its two upper floors and its balconies and balustrades draped with jasmine. The caretaker takes them onto a path that cuts across to the back door of the house. They go down five steps and enter a remarkably cool room with a vaulted ceiling. An old man sits cross-legged on a worn carpet, with his back against the wall. Bahram thinks this old man was probably meant to open the door.