When Aunt Turan noticed that, for the first time, something she had said had sparked Mum and Dad’s interest, she cut herself off spitefully and, still walking, said, “Well, I’ll keep it short … Shahriyar thought Death had come to take his soul, but in fact he had only come to tell him not to despair; he wasn’t going to bother him”.
Crossing the yard and panting under her one-hundred-and-twenty kilos, Aunt Turan said that since that had happened, nobody in the family would get in the car with Shahriyar, even for a second, because it was clear he’d made a deal with Azrael, the Angel of Death. She said his wife and child had left him because they thought he was cursed and were fearful also that the neighbours’ reproach might extend to them as well. But even then, he didn’t pay any attention, saying Death is different with everyone.
Aunt Turan related the story correctly but was unaware of many details. For instance, she didn’t know that, upon seeing that the man didn’t leave the taxi, Shahriyar, who had moved from depression to alcohol after the purging of the university, hit the accelerator and set off towards Shahran Heights, from where Tehran’s lights sparkled like diamonds. Then, once he had made sure no one was around, he pulled out two shot glasses and a flask of liquor from under his seat and, still seated behind the wheel with the stranger in the back, he filled both, handed one to the stranger and said, “To what is written and cannot be rewritten!” Before the stranger could open his mouth, Shahriyar drank two shots, turned to him and said, “Now I’m totally ready, sir!” Impressed with Shahriyar’s magnanimity, Death drank his glass and listened as Shahriyar said, “I always wanted to die in this exact spot, with Tehran in all of its filth and beauty, at my feet.” After a pause, he continued, “The other reason I always liked coming up here was to find the house of the woman I loved from among all the others”. Then laughing loudly, he said, “But after years of watching the lights go on and off and thinking about love, I realised there were no women in my life that I loved”.
But Death, who truly had come to take Shahriyar’s soul, said to himself that he would let this man enjoy his last moments. That’s why he asked Shahriyar to give him another shot of the liquor. Hearing this, Shahriyar laughed, got out of the car and pulled a four-litre jug of bootleg liquor from its hiding place by the spare wheel in the boot. Without saying a word, they clinked their glasses and proceeded to drink to one another’s health, repeatedly, until they were blind drunk. Afterwards they ran towards the mountains in the dark, stripped naked, danced, sang, and spun their underwear around on their fingers. As Tehran, with all its mullahs and rich people and Hezbollahis and prostitutes and political prisoners and lovers and homeless people and poets, drifted off to sleep at their feet, they spread their legs slightly and began to urinate over it. Then they compared their members, laughed, and were so inebriated they fell to the ground right there and fell into a deep slumber. Several hours later when dawn’s cool breeze gave them goosebumps, they awoke with a start. Despite the astringent taste of liquor still making his head spin, Death admitted that never in his life had he had so much fun. He then told Shahriyar that they should get back to the city and, as he was getting out at Shemiran Square, paying his fare despite Shahriyar’s insistence otherwise, he said that Shahriyar needn’t worry about death anymore! Still drunk, he staggered away down Shariati Street in the fresh morning light, laughing out loud and touching his member which he had realised was much smaller than Shahriyar’s.
Now having lit a cigarette, Aunt Turan began talking about Shokoofeh, her first cousin once removed, whose fiancé, Shahram, had left her and gone to America. One day Shokoofeh fell asleep and woke up three days later, inquiring fearfully, “Where’s Shahram?” When she realised she had slept for three days and three nights and had forgotten her fiancé had left her ages ago, she became frightened. Falling asleep that very night, she didn’t wake up for a month and when she did, again she inquired fearfully, “Where is Shahram?”. This time when she realised she had been asleep for a whole month and that her memory had become even shorter, she was afraid to sleep, so to stay awake, she cut her finger with a knife and rubbed salt into her eyes every night. However, after days of not sleeping, she fell asleep one night. Now it’s been six months and sixteen days, and she still hasn’t woken up to then, fearfully, ask, “Where’s Shahram?”
Mum and Dad let out a sigh of pity for this first cousin once removed and, taking Aunt Turan by the shoulder, led her beneath the ceiling fan in the living room that was pushing the hot, midday summer air from side to side. It didn’t cool. Utterly motionless, the air mourned the ominous and silent events of that accursed summer, the likes of which existed in neither conscious nor unconscious memories of any of the family’s living members. Even Uncle Khosro, who in those days did nothing but read history books to identify historical correlations in family events and write in the family tree, did not come across even a single line in any of the books covering the last two hundred years, of a massacre like the one that happened that year.
After that event, and since our five-member family had moved from Tehran to this five-hectare grove in a distant village in Mazandaran, Aunt Turan was the first family member to make her way to us. Nobody knew or dared ask, “How?” because then she would immediately say, “If we’re not welcome, we’ll leave”. However, it didn’t take long for all of us to realise what she was up to, although by then it was already too late. Two weeks after their surprise arrival on a hot sunny day, Aunt Turan went swimming with her six children in a small pond in the middle of the forest and suddenly vanished, before our eyes.
In our family, it was Beeta who loved swimming and who was in the water with them, but when, in the blink of an eye the water and all seven of them disappeared into thin air, Beeta found herself flopping around in the slimy muck on the bottom of the pond, her face and body covered in mud, opening and closing her mouth in bewilderment like a tiny fish dying in the slime mouthing, “Water … water … water …”.
That was the day I finally saw everyone frightened by one of the strange things that occurred in the family. Beeta screamed and ran into Mum’s arms. Mum stared so long at where the pond and seven people had been, that night fell, and Dad had to go with a lantern to bring her back. Having observed everything, I was silent, waiting to see if Beeta knew anything. Yes, she knew. She knew exactly. That night after Mum had put salt in her mouth and Beeta had finally come out of shock, she admitted having seen Aunt Turan go to the forest a number of times at sunset to talk and connive with invisible beings.
After that, little by little some of Mum and Dad’s books disappeared from their library. Then, a large mat that had been stashed, unused, under my bed vanished, and then an oil lantern, a plate, fork and spoon, a pot and some food, and then finally, a blanket. The day before, Sohrab’s camera had disappeared from his desk. Mum, who had forgotten that I had warned her about this, attributed it to the invisible presence of Aunt Turan and her six children. Finally, she came into the living room one day and yelled angrily, “What on earth is going on in this house?” Scared, I quickly answered from my room, “I inherited Sohrab’s camera!” Pulling off her ballet slippers, Beeta screamed, “Idiot! The way you say it makes it sound like he’s been killed—executed!” The only one who knew of Sohrab’s execution, I quickly jumped out of my bedroom window with the last things I needed and ran to my treehouse. Although I had officially declared I was not responsible for more stealing, things continued to disappear and be moved around the house.
Some days, objects moved around audaciously right before our eyes until one day things went so far that while we were all sitting around the table eating lunch, we could hear frenzied munching, and the stench of belches reached our noses. It couldn’t be denied any longer because food was being lifted from our plates only to disappear into thin air to the sound of noisy chewing. If Dad hadn’t put a stop to this excess on the part of Aunt Turan and her six gluttonous, ill-mannered children he might have had to bring in Razan’s Soothsayer—a terrifying
prospect for any jinn. After the First Soothsayer disappeared in Razan’s fire, this Soothsayer was said to have turned up in the forest one day and come to Razan to see to dealings of people with the beyond. At any rate, without a Soothsayer, Razan was unable to control the relations with, and excesses of the invisible beings around the forest who were constantly trying to force their presence, preferences and laws on the people of the region.
One night while we were all talking, laughing, and eating sunflower seeds around a fire in the yard, Dad suddenly grabbed Aunt Turan’s invisible wrist in mid-air, threatening that if she didn’t leave us alone he would bring the Soothsayer to darken her days. Taken by surprise, a sunflower seed caught in her throat and Aunt Turan began to cough. Finally, she said, “It’s your fault. You saw us as such a burden, so this is what happened to us. Now you have to put up with it.” But Dad didn’t give in, and squeezing her wrist, said, “Then it will be, as I said!” For a moment, Aunt Turan seemed to regret what she had done and with a sad, honest voice said, “Nobody wants us. We weren’t even welcome in our own home. My stingy husband saw the children as rivals and bought a separate refrigerator for himself which he kept locked. Everywhere we went people soon began padlocking their refrigerators. So, this year I resolved to do it. I read one of Father’s books on the secrets of relations with jinns. It was with their help that I found the way to your house. I came here to join them. Now I’m with them and I’m happy.”
From then on we no longer heard Aunt Turan’s children eating, or smelled her foul belches; but we were all deeply saddened by her story and promised ourselves not to react when things in the house were rearranged. Although we could no longer count on finding food in the refrigerator, which in those years was hard to come by, nobody complained. A mere three days later, word from the village had it that a troop of hungry jinns was ravaging Razan. The time had come for the Soothsayer. The villagers say that before he had even wiped the dust from his mirror or spoken a formula, the amateur jinns became frightened and chose flight over fight. Now occasional rumours from villages in distant forests complain of a hungry band of jinns that has wiped out food supplies.
For several months, nobody really knew about my treehouse. Then one day, with his usual pipe in his mouth as he was riding his brown horse aimlessly to the grove’s far reaches, Dad caught sight of the rope ladder and, climbing up it, found my papers among the things swiped from the house, and began to read. That night at the table with everyone looking at their last bites of dinner, Dad pulled out a notebook and, not looking at me, began to read aloud: Dad’s hand-made tar was still in my hands when it happened. I don’t have words to describe it. I’m trying to forget that horrible burning of my skin and eyeballs … I need to keep my mind busy with other things. I need to write. To think about them. About those who are now so alone.
It felt as if my face and neck had flushed purple—I was so angry. I couldn’t curse Dad. That just wasn’t done in our family, but I really wanted to call him a shithead. It was the worst swear word I knew. Beeta said, “And?” Dad continued: I need to write. I must remember to take that five-hundred-page notebook from Dad’s room. When I write, I can better focus on distracting myself.
Without finishing my meal, I ripped the notebook from Dad’s hands. It flew through the air and was sailing out the door when Mum said sternly, “You’re growing up. You can’t behave like that anymore”. With my back still to them, I said insolently, “Have you forgotten? I’m not going to grow up!” As I was exiting the house, Mum repeated one of her favourite sayings, “I don’t care if people’s lives are divided into before Nowruz and after Nowruz, or before the Revolution and after the Revolution, but in my family, it’s divided into before the Arab invasion and after the Arab invasion”. After that event Mum always said Arab invasion, not fire or burning … She still wants to make the point that they came and burnt, plundered and killed. Just like 1400 years ago.
3
Last winter when Mum hadn’t yet been up in the greengage tree, Sohrab hadn’t yet been executed and the events with Aunt Turan and her hungry children hadn’t yet come to pass, by the time the five of us woke up to the barking of our guard dog, Gorgi, early on the rainy morning of February 6, 1988, it was already too late to help Sohrab run into the forest. In the blink of an eye, four armed Revolutionary Guards and a mullah descended on the house, snapped handcuffs on Sohrab who was still in bed and, grabbing randomly at some pamphlets and books, took him away. Before Dad could run after them or Mum could scream, “Where are you taking my son, you thugs?!” they sped away in their Patrols, mud from under the wheels splattering on our faces, as Gorgi continued to bark.
For five months, nobody knew where Sohrab was being held until one day a stranger with an unkempt face and sorrowful eyes entered Razan, and pointing to our house up on the hill to the first man he came across, said, “Tell them they can find their son in Evin prison”. Just as he had come, the sad stranger set off along the winding alleyways towards the paths that led to the forest, to deliver prisoners’ messages to other families. Before he could leave, however, a man sitting in one corner of the village square, sharpening his knife on a rock, said, “Why do you go to the trouble of delivering news to people you don’t know?” The sad man said, “The story is much longer than you have patience for”. And he set off again. But the villager went after him with slow, steady steps and handing him a hand-rolled cigarette, said, “I have lots of patience”. It was thus that the stranger sat down across from the villager who was once again sharpening his knife, and said, “I grew up in a family that was so poor that eating chicken was our biggest dream. When I was just twelve, my mother fell pregnant again. One night I heard her tell my father that she was prepared to die for a chicken thigh. The next day I was thrown in jail for stealing a chicken, but I was content because, before being arrested, we were able to cook it for my mother, who ate its thigh with ecstatic pleasure. I was released a year later and was shocked to see my parents had both become ten years older, and poorer. When I was fifteen, I landed in prison again, this time for killing my boss because he wouldn’t pay my wages. Every day my longing to see my mother was greater than the day before, but not once did she come to visit me. Years passed. I was taken to the gallows six times but each time the rope snapped, so eventually, it was decided I would be released. Several days later, however, my little brother, the light of my parents’ life, ended up in the same prison with me. No matter how much I asked, he wouldn’t tell me his crime. Finally, in the middle of the night, the night guard whispered the story to me. He said my brother had killed all six of our brothers and sisters, and our parents. When I heard this, I went deaf and blind and slit the vein in my little brother’s neck with a razor, right then and there, as he slept. He just had the chance to flash me a tearful smile. The next day, the newspaper made it into the prison; the news passed from cell to cell, and from the prisoners’ whispers, I learned the truth. My little brother, the only one of us children to go to school, had learned in science class that ether could be used to make people unconscious. That very night, he placed eight ether-soaked rags over the noses of everyone in the house as they slept, so he could go and sell cigarettes on the street to help with expenses without the knowledge of my parents, who wouldn’t let him work. My father’s dream had been that my brother should only spend his spare time in study, so at least one of his sons would get somewhere in life and break the cycle of poverty. The thing is, if the teacher had told them ether would cause death if it were held to a person’s nose for more than a few seconds, none of that would have happened. So when my brother returned home early the next morning, happy because of the money he had brought for our parents, he removed the rags from their faces to find them all cold and dead.”
The stranger lit a cigarette. He took a long drag and continued, “The second I heard this, I slashed at my wrist with that same razor and killed myself. I died. I lay in the morgue for a night. But the next morning, one of the guards saw that condensati
on had formed on the plastic that covered my face. When I was taken to the clinic, they saw I was still alive, even though my artery was completely severed and black.”
The sad stranger breathed out, then sucked forcefully on the cigarette, showing his left wrist to the villager. There was a deep wound underneath a leather wristband; it was clear that the vein had been torn down the middle and was still black. The villager, still sharpening his knife slowly, glanced down at the man’s arm. The sad man asked, “You’re sure you still want to hear more?” The villager answered, “Of course, if you promise to listen to my story afterwards”.
Putting the cigarette to his lips, the sad man looked at the villager’s hands as they slowly, calmly, sharpened the knife. He stared at the unhurried movement of the knife on the rock, and continued, “They brought me up to the gallows three more times; but each time the rope snapped. After that, they threw me out of prison, hush hush, because they believed I was so cursed that I didn’t even deserve to die. I was determined to kill the teacher who had left that lesson so incomplete, but that very night I was sleeping on the side of the road and for the very first time had a dream about my mother. She was living in a glass house without any openings. I was walking around a glass room feeling as if it might crack and shatter at any moment. There was nothing in the house. My mother was standing by a wall looking outside. When she saw me, she touched my hair tenderly and said, ‘If I had known you were still alive, I would have visited you, every week’. Then she handed me a bag. She caressed my hands and pointing, said, ‘Take this bag and go that way’. When I woke up, I found this bag on the ground beside me. It’s full of letters prisoners have written to their families. Since that day, I have been travelling in the direction my mother indicated and on the way, I deliver the messages, knowing that if mothers know their children are alive in prison, they will visit them.”
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Page 2