About the author
Shokoofeh Azar was born in Iran in 1972, just 7 years before the Islamic revolution. Despite spending most of her childhood and early career in a relatively hostile environment for independent writing, Shokoofeh’s early interest in writing and art was sparked by her father who was an Iranian intellectual, author and poet. She studied literature at high school and university, later working as a journalist for an independent newspaper for 14 years.
As well as having numerous short stories, reports, interviews and articles published in the Iranian media, her other publications include two collections of short stories; one children’s book; and a Companion in Writing and Editing Essays in the Persian Literary Encyclopedia, which won the prize for The Best Book in Iran in 1997.
In 2004, Shokoofeh became the first Iranian woman to backpack and hitchhike along the Silk Road: from Iran to Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan and India. Reports and photos of this 3-month journey were published in the media to great acclaim.
In 2010, with independent reporting increasingly coming under threat, Shokoofeh was forced to leave Iran, and was accepted as a political refugee by Australia in 2011. She continues her writing and is also gaining a reputation as an artist, with a number of successful exhibitions in Perth, where she lives with her daughter.
Published by Wild Dingo Press
Melbourne, Australia
[email protected]
www.wilddingopress.com.au
First published by Wild Dingo Press 2017
Text copyright © Shokoofeh Azar
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners and the publisher of this book.
Cover design: Debra Billson
Paintings by Shokoofeh Azar used for cover design: 1. The Poetry Night; 2. Two Birds; 3. Red Bird and Moon
Translator: Adrien Kijek
Editor: Catherine Lewis
Typesetting: Midland Typesetters, Australia
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publications Data
Azar, Shokoofeh, author.The enlightenment of the greengage tree / Shokoofeh Azar.
ISBN: 9780987381309 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780987381316 (ebook)
Magic realism (Literature) Families—Iran—Fiction. Islam and civil society—Fiction. Iran—History—Revolution, 1979—Fiction. Iran—History—1979–1997—Fiction.
Dedicated to all those I know: dead and alive.
I would like to thank my father for teaching me to fly in the sky of literature freely. I owe a debt of gratitude to my mother, without whose support I would not be living in the free country of Australia, able to write without censorship.
I am profoundly grateful to the Australian people for accepting me into this safe and democratic country where I have the freedom to write this book, a liberty denied me in my homeland of Iran.
1
Beeta says that Mum attained enlightenment at exactly 2:35 p.m. on August 18, 1988, atop the grove’s tallest greengage plum tree on a hill overlooking all fifty-three village houses, to the sound of the scrubbing of pots and pans, which pulled the grove out of its lethargy every afternoon. At that very moment, blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, Sohrab was hanged. He was hanged without trial, and unaware he would be buried en masse with hundreds of other political prisoners early the next morning in a long pit in the deserts south of Tehran, without any indication or marker lest years later a relative would come and tap a pebble on a headstone and murmur there is no god but God.1
Beeta says Mum came down from the tallest greengage tree and, without looking at Beeta who was filling her skirt with sour greengages, walked towards the forest saying, “This whole thing is not at all as I’d thought”. Beeta wanted Mum to explain, but Mum, as though mesmerised like someone with forest fever—what I call forest melancholia—walked with a steady step and hollow gaze into the forest to climb up the tallest oak where she sat on its highest bough for three days and three nights in the sun, rain, moonlight, and fog, looking with bewilderment at the life she was seeing for the first time.
Just as Mum reached the highest branch, perched to view her own life, the complex lives of family both distant and near, the events of that big five-bedroom house in that five-hectare grove, Razan, Tehran, Iran and then suddenly the whole planet and universe, Beeta ran to the house and announced that though still harbouring a mania for fireflies, Mum also now had a mania for heights! At first none of us took her new infatuation seriously, but when midnight had come and gone and there was still no sign of her, first I, then Dad, then Beeta carrying a lantern, went and sat down under the tree. We lit a fire upon which we placed a zinc kettle so the fragrance of our smoked tea would fill the Jurassic-age Hyrcanian forest—the last of its kind—and lure Mum down. The fragrance of the northern-smoked tea reached Mum’s nostrils as she was traversing the Milky Way, watching the stars and planets spinning and orbiting with astonishing order, every rotation of which split open a space in which scientists hopelessly searched for a sign of God. From up there, perched on star dust, gazing down at an Earth no bigger than a tiny speck, she came to the same conclusion she had reached that day at precisely 2:35 p.m: it’s not worth it, life isn’t what she had thought. Life is precisely that which she and others were prodigiously killing—the moment itself. A moment carrying in its womb the past and future; just like lines on the palm of one’s hand, in the leaf of a tree, or in her husband, Hushang’s eyes.
Around five o’clock the next morning, Dad, Beeta and I woke up in the thick morning fog to see the last foxes returning to their dens after hunting Razan’s chickens and roosters, and to feel the wings of the hoopoe just inches away. Mum had once again returned to the highest bough from her peregrinations and passage of the planets and cities, villages, islands, and tribes, in time to hear the song of thousands and thousands of sparrows, and to see a hedgehog curl up and roll down the forest slope because Dad had moved. We all took our places at the same time; us around the fire, Mum up in the tree, Sohrab in the pit alongside hundreds of other corpses. After all, the executioners were so overwhelmed by the mass executions, they had been unable to bury the bodies in time as planned. But they had been the lucky ones. In the following days, the number of people executed increased so much that corpses piled high in the prison back yard and began to stink, and Evin’s ants, flies, crows, and cats, who hadn’t had such a feast since the prison was built, licked, sucked and picked at them greedily. Juvenile political prisoners were given the good fortune to be pardoned by the Imam if they fired the final shot that would put the condemned out of their misery. With bruised faces, trembling hands, and pants soaked with urine, hundreds of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, whose only crime had been participating in a party meeting, reading banned pamphlets, or distributing flyers in the street, fired the last shot into faces that were sometimes still watching them with twitching pupils.
It was mayhem, and the executioners were so overwhelmed by the stench of loathsome death that filled the hall that they would go sporadically mad and be transferred directly to a military asylum, only to vanish or be killed months later. From July 29, 1988, when the first series of executions of the People’s Mujaheddin and communist prisoners began, until mid-September of the same year when more than five thousand people in Tehran, Karaj and other cities were hanged or shot by firing squad, only three provincial soldiers disobe
yed firing orders. Their bodies, along with those executed, became eternal hosts to three lead bullets. Midway through the second month, of the dozens of refrigerator-lorry drivers, whose job had been to haul bodies to the remote desert outside the city, four also ended up in the asylum. The stench of putrefied bodies had so clogged their nostrils, they thought it emanated from them wherever they went, and gave them away. They suspected their wives could smell it, too, but didn’t let on, out of pity or fear. They were frightened of the apprehensive looks they received when standing in the long line for food ration coupons, bread, or pasteur-ised milk. One of them thought the black crows gathering in ever greater numbers around the corpse-filled trenches were stalking him. He thought the stench of his own body had brought the crows to break him: now sitting on house walls, perched on the power poles, and flying above the city. In the smaller cities, two members of a firing squad, whose job had been to execute political prisoners in the desert outside the city, were shot in the back as they ran away from their duties. Meanwhile, due to their ‘excellence in carrying out duties’, hundreds of executioners and putrefied-corpse transporters were promoted to become Revolutionary Guards, interrogators, mayors, retribution executors and prison wardens.
When Dad called out with his cheery morning voice that it was time for tea with kondak2 bread, he was sure Mum wasn’t going to forget her latest craze. That’s why he added hastily, “If there is one thing we inherited from our forefathers it’s this mania; a mania for new things. For impossible things”. Then gradually the morning fog got thicker and thicker, blurring out the three of us, with our lantern, fire and teakettle; and allowing Mum another opportunity to travel through a world that contained a planet which, despite all its vastness and countries and religions and books and wars and revolutions and executions and births and this oak tree, she had just realised was nothing but a minuscule speck in the universe.
At the age of forty-four, Mum suddenly became old. Her hair turned grey and Beeta, who was the first one in the house to see her in three days, yelled, “An old woman just arrived!” When Dad and I ran to see her, Mum had positioned herself on the living-room couch and was filing her left thumb nail with mysterious calm.
Mum’s three-day enlightenment in the tree suddenly gave me an idea. Mum had just begun filing her right thumbnail when I gathered all my books from the bookcase. Smiling at all of them, I told them that if something went missing from the house, to know it was I who had taken it. Then, to an astonished look from Beeta, Mum’s otherworldly stare, and Dad’s usual smirk, without a backward glance, I went to Dad’s workroom and grabbed what I needed: a hammer, nails, saw and twine. It took five days to build my treehouse the way I wanted, that is, where it couldn’t be seen, at the highest point of the tallest oak tree in the forest—the same tree that, until an hour ago, was the site of Mum’s ascension. It had a window facing the sunrise and a door facing its setting, with a small balcony facing the house, and a rope railing. A big tarp covered the roof and all the branches, so that on rainy days and nights it would produce the same sound I had loved all thirteen years of my life; a tarp that every summer, prior to Sohrab’s arrest, was spread out over the wooden shelves and cellar floor for silkworm production. There the worms spent a full two weeks eating mulberry leaves till, dreaming of butterflies, they spun their cocoons and then, unbeknownst to them, were drowned and boiled in a big vat. From their cocoons, white silk threads would be spun that only some of Isfahan, Naiin and Kashan’s3 wealthy carpet sellers could afford. Instead, they gave this silk thread to destitute carpet weavers who couldn’t leave their dank basements for even a minute during the day to greet the sun. They only knew one thing: how to weave silkworm dreams.
Sitting on the green sofa across from Mum and looking at her absently filing her nail, Dad thought that although he, a skilled tar4 player, was the source of the family’s silkworm production and indisputable heir of the ability to interact with supernatural creatures, he had never been fortunate enough to see Mum in flight.
*
When Dad saw Mum for the first time heading down to Darband,5 she was barely seventeen and in the throes of an impossible love; a love that, for the first and last time, allowed her to soar over Nasser Khosro Street, over passers-by and second-hand booksellers. Just six months before meeting Dad, she had had another, significantly more exhilarating encounter, but one without a future. It was so exhilarating that from then on, and for the rest of her life, she heaved sighs like no other. They were long and deep and as concealed as possible, but not to the extent that in all those years, Dad hadn’t noticed. At twenty-five, Dad fell so intensely in love with Mum—Roza—and at first sight, that at the end of that very same day, a night among Darband’s foggy nights, he married her, in a daze and in the presence of a passing mullah who, fearful of dark spectres and fog, was muttering prayers as he rushed, oil lamp in hand, down the slope. Having received his twenty Tomans and a tip, the mullah didn’t even linger long enough to behold the young couple’s passionate first kiss. Dad placed a dogwood berry in Mum’s mouth and said, “Let’s go and introduce you to my family”.
Despite all of Mum and Dad’s strange qualities, my favourite family member is my father’s little brother, Khosro. As I was building my treehouse I recalled that he was able to turn any task into a mystical ritual. The second of three children, each born three years apart, he had proven himself to be the most befitting heir to the family mania. He spent a year in prison under Mohammad Reza Shah, two years under Khomeini; married, divorced; spent three years in self-imposed exile at home to study seventy-nine volumes of Indian and East Asian mysticism and learn Sanskrit. After spending three days and nights lying in an empty grave in a Tibetan cemetery reading the Vedas, he levitated one metre above the ground while practising Osho meditation; and lived for a month in a wooden boat in the middle of a Siberian lake, as instructed by a shaman.
While weaving a branch in and out of the others to form a wall for my treehouse and thinking about Uncle Khosro’s craziness, I was overcome by a moment of despair—thinking there was nothing new and different left in the world for me to do. We had to wait for Uncle Khosro because in any case it was he who was the most likely to understand Mum. He was an experienced searcher, the exact opposite of me and us. We were just beginning.
As I was building my treehouse and thinking about all Uncle Khosro had done, and Mum’s unexpected enlightenment and ascension atop the greengage and oak trees, a surprise summer rain began to fall that continued for three days and three nights. It would have turned me into a scaly, reptilian creature that feeds on algae, rotten fruit and moss if Beeta, like a fallen angel with her orange umbrella and pleated sky-blue skirt, hadn’t appeared, to take me back into the house. At sunset on the fifth day, in the silence of the grove and awaiting the arrival of Uncle Khosro, or news of Sohrab, my treehouse was completed.
* * *
1In the Iranian culture it is common to tap a small stone against the headstone and say “there is no god but God”. The tapping is to wake the spirit of the dead to hear the recital of this phrase.
2A type of sweet bread eaten in Mazandaran.
3Iranian cities famous for their fine carpets.
4A type of Iranian stringed instrument.
5A recreational area in the mountains north of Tehran.
2
They say you are always waiting for someone, but when that person finally arrives it’s not who you were expecting. Turan, my forty-something-year-old aunt, and her six grown and half-grown children are panting their way up the hill to the grove. They don’t see me watching them from the window in my little forest house, hidden in the thick oak foliage. Very young, at seventeen or eighteen, Aunt Turan married a forty-year-old man from an established Esfehani family and proceeded to give birth to baby after baby. Now at least fifty kilos overweight, she’s hauling herself up the hill like a snorting animal. Her six lazy, imbecile children are huffing along behind her like a pulsating train, hanging off one another
and making faces, breaking branches and eating fruit behind her. Like a six-headed monster they ascend the hill and ravage the grove in a fraction of a second. Beeta, sitting as usual under one of the greengage trees, sees them and runs towards them yelling, both in greeting and to warn the residents of the house of the arrival of the aunt everyone prayed would soon leave.
Mum and Dad each emerged from a different corner of the five-bedroom house, Mum immediately thinking of the seven extra mouths to feed, and Dad that he needed to lock his workroom door. Beeta thought about where to hide her pink leotard and ballet slippers, and I that I should conceal the rest of my things in the house. From the three local workers dragging up their heavy suitcases, it was clear the grove would be under their control for the foreseeable future. Before even reaching the house, the children had left a trail of destruction in their wake, while Aunt Turan, scolding them under her breath, endeavoured to enter their hosts’ house, honour intact. Before even crossing the full length of the yard, Aunt Turan had shared, with much bravado, the news from the big Tehran clan, completely unconscious of the fact that, with Sohrab’s arrest, these endless updates didn’t interest Mum and Dad in the least.
Shahriyar, Dad’s second cousin on his father’s side, who had a PhD in economics and was expelled from university for his socialist leanings during the cultural revolution and now drives a long-haul taxi between Tehran and Esfahan had, as usual, had an accident, that had instantly killed his four passengers. This was the fifth time that Death had been loitering around Dad’s second cousin but from whom he had escaped unscathed. Aunt Turan reported that once, after this accident, upon reaching Esfahan, Shahriyar noticed one of his passengers didn’t get out. He looked at him inquiringly in the rearview mirror. As soon as Shahriyar saw the cold, quiet face of the man in black he recognised him. That is why, without a word, he simply re-loaded and drove back to Tehran. In the middle of the night, once all his passengers had left and the man in black was still sitting there, Shahriyar looked at him in the mirror and said, “Sir, I see I’ve reached the end of my line!” He held his car key out towards the man. The man in black said, “I see you know who I am!” According to Aunt Turan, Shahriyar told the man he spent so much time thinking about him from morning to night that he had recognised him as soon as he had set eyes upon him.
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Page 1