The stranger took a drag on his cigarette, then stamped it out and said, “But I still haven’t figured out why she wanted me to come this way … north”.
“Once you understand, you will die,” said the villager, coolly. For a second the sad man’s eyes flashed. He paused and said, “I’ve been dead from the very first time I stood at the gallows, but nobody knows it”. The villager said, “Then listen to this,” and picked at his tooth with his sharp knife. “My family was also very poor. Years before I was born, my father travelled through forests and mountains, from village to village and from city to city, until he reached Tehran. There, after years of hardship and labour, he managed to build a small brick kiln with his own two hands. But several months later, he was killed. “One evening before he died, my father dreamed that a snake came out of his sleeve and bit him. The very next day he told my mother that he owed his apprentice one hundred Tomans, and money also to several other people; so, he instructed her what to do were he to die. Right then and there, my mother removed her wedding ring, rolled up the carpet from under their feet and told him to sell them, pay back his debts and give some alms to ward off death. However, after my father sold the items he spent some on a burial shroud and a few things for a funeral. He put one hundred Tomans in his pocket to give to his apprentice and the rest he put in my mother’s cupboard. At noon that day before my father had a chance to pay him, his angry apprentice stabbed him to death. When my mother heard what had happened, she languished and died of sorrow leaving me, just ten years old at the time, to begin begging and working as a labourer, passing from city to city and village to village, until I arrived here. The first night I was here I dreamed of my father. He was living in a windowless glass house without any furniture that I was afraid would shatter and fall in on him at any moment. He caressed and kissed my feet tenderly and said, ‘If I had known how much you would suffer, I would have given the alms’. Then he moved towards one of the glass walls and pointed to the square beyond and said, ‘Go and wait at that square with a knife’.” The villager showed the sad man his knife and said, “This is the same knife that killed my father”. At this, the sad-eyed stranger stood up and said, “Before I die, allow me to kiss your hand”.
The villager stretched his hand out coolly toward the stranger. The sad man kissed it and said, “I am grateful to you for helping me attain what I desire”. In silence, they slowly walked together to the depths of the forest and, once far out of sight from the village, the villager plunged the knife down to the hilt into the sad man’s heart. With mournful eyes the villager would never forget, and smiling faintly, the sad man died. Afterwards, as the villager was about to throw the body and knife into a swamp to feed the maggots and insects, he looked into the dead man’s eyes for the first time and something inside him crumbled. Seeing the dilated pupils, he realised that the man was nothing like the person he had spent a lifetime waiting for, hating. The villager stared at those pupils until nightfall. Then he lit a small fire and spent a week looking through its flames at the body that was slowly swelling and beginning to stink, preyed upon by maggots and cockroaches and snakes. And so it continued, until his nose became as filled with putrid stench as his life had been with loathing. Eventually, he was so repulsed by the birthing maggots and snake and scorpion infestations, that he despised himself. When the stench of the corpse became so foul that nearby flowers wilted and butterflies and dragonflies diverted from their course, he dumped the knife and what was left of the body into the swamp. Then he slung the man’s heavy bag over his shoulder and set off towards distant villages. But first, reaching the top of our hill and Dad, who was sitting on the porch, he gave the news in a clear, quiet voice and left.
Dad was relieved to have news of Sohrab at last, momentarily thinking, What sad eyes that man has. After coming into the house to collect his things, he set off for Tehran immediately. He didn’t know, nor would he find out later that, before being transferred to Evin prison, Sohrab had spent eleven days in the nearest city—left forgotten, in a solitary confinement cell.
Dad never knew that after the Revolutionary Guard shoved Sohrab into the cell, he went to the changing room, changed his clothes, signed a leave paper, and left: to spend eleven days in his village near Ardabil to celebrate his wedding, sleep with his wife, and get her pregnant before coming back. Upon his return, while drinking tea and chatting with his colleagues, he asked what had happened to the boy from Tehran. It was then that everyone asked, “Who!?” and rushed towards the solitary confinement cell at the end of the long, dank, dark underground corridor where Sohrab, contorted in delusion and terror, hunger and death, was taking his last breaths. Eleven days before, when that soldier had departed, leaving him without food or water, at first Sohrab thought somebody would come to interrogate him a few hours later. From the very beginning, the stench in the cell had given him a headache: the smell of urine mixed with fresh blood, puss, sweat and vomit. He tried to comfort himself by thinking someone would soon come and tell him what lay in store. It was pitch black. He stood up and tried to get a sense of the size of the cell. One step wide, three steps long. About the size of his grave. There wasn’t even the smallest opening, or at least not one that could be made out in the thick darkness. He put his ear to the iron door and heard a faint sound in the distance. After several hours without the slightest sound coming from outside, the first wave of fear welled up inside him. The fear of being forgotten. Terrified, he got up and began banging on the door, then kicking it, frantically. After several more hours of struggle, frightened, hungry and thirsty, he groped blindly along the wall and found an extremely short tap near the floor. But it was so low to the ground his cheek was pressed against the floor as he drank, greedily, the taste of rust filling his mouth. He didn’t know if it was the water or his anxiety that was making his stomach churn. There was no toilet. Another hour passed. In the end, he had no choice, however, but to relieve himself right there and wash himself with the same tap. The smell of fear-induced diarrhea made him throw up several times. He removed his clothes and threw them over his excrement to mask the smell—to no avail.
The delusions began. Fear. Feeling close to death. Suffocation. Vomit. To comfort himself, he wanted to compare himself to all the protagonists in the political novels he had read, but their names had vanished from memory. He couldn’t even remember the music he liked and usually listened to, on the stereo. From those very first hours, he couldn’t distinguish day from night.
By the third day, he could no longer recall the day of the month; and by the seventh he couldn’t even remember what day, of what month, of what year it was. He had stared so long into the blackness in front of him, into the vacuum, into the eyes of death, his eyes were bulging from their sockets, and it felt as if the capillaries in his eyeballs had run dry. His saliva had dried, making him cough again and again. He put his hands on the wall and traced scratches that had been made with a fingernail or a sharp object, trying to guess what letters had been hacked there. Once he managed to read a complete sentence: The third world is a place where we share the same pain but not the same path. No matter how hard he thought, he couldn’t remember who that quote was from. He unfastened his belt. If he didn’t keep himself occupied, he would go crazy. He wanted to scratch a poem into the wall with its buckle prong but he quickly forgot what he wanted to write. He was so hungry he stuffed fallen plaster into his mouth. His dry tongue burned and he began coughing even more. From the seventh day onward, he couldn’t even muster the energy to drag himself to the door to press his ear against it, straining to hear distant sounds that, recently, had sounded like people whispering a plot to murder him. The indistinct voices were conspiring on how they would come to strangle him in the dark. The voices blended together. The laugh and howl of a murderer, torturer, interrogator; and the person whose job it was to pull the stool out from beneath the condemned at the gallows. On the eighth day, no matter how long he groped along the floor, he couldn’t even find a cockroach to eat,
like the character in a book whose title he couldn’t recall. Then he even thought of eating his own excrement to stay alive and prove to those filthy animals who had thrown him away like a dog that he could survive in spite of them. He picked up a piece of dried poop with his shirt and tried to convince himself it probably tasted like mud. But before he could even lift it to his mouth, he vomited so violently he spewed all that was left of the bitter bile in his gut over the wall. After that, he couldn’t remember anything. Not fear. Not scary delusional voices. Not hunger. Not death. Not sorrow. Not missing Mum, Dad, Beeta or me.
He didn’t know how much time had gone by when he saw a little sliver of light through the crack in his eyes. He found himself lying in a bed with IVs connected to both arms; and heard a slap, pummelling punches and kicks, and then someone yelling, “If he’d died, who’da been held responsible then, you jackass, Turk!?” The next day, the nurse changing his IV whispered in his ear that the Revolutionary Guard who’d left him for dead only received a mere month of additional military duty. Everything was over. It was seemed as if nothing had happened. As if he wasn’t meant to stay alive. Or perhaps the plan was to bring him back from the brink of death, to then execute him in a ceremony befitting of the Revolution.
Three weeks, later when Sohrab was handed over to the provincial prison and Dad went there to inquire about him, he was given the same answer he’d heard before, “Who?” The soldier looked at the list, shook his head, and said empathetically, “No sir, we don’t have anyone by that name”.
As Dad went from city to city looking for his son and our brother, they moved Sohrab like a hot potato from city to city, beating him so severely he peed blood and one of his kidneys failed. Finally, they decided to transfer him to Tehran so that his blood wouldn’t be on their hands. His one-page file in which he had been accused of evading military duty and reading various Fadai Guerrilla pamphlets, swelled to justify the move. It was thus that with a broken jaw, crushed rib and only one functioning kidney, Sohrab was sent to Tehran, where Mum, Dad and Beeta were able to see him for the first time in five months. And throughout the visit, they all joked and laughed—so much so that other visitors glared at them, annoyed.
Mum despised herself that day—eight years after we had come to Razan—because she had no choice but to don a headscarf for the first time. Eight years before, when we decided to leave Tehran for this remote village, she had vowed not to leave the village or even the grove as long as the regime was in power just so she wouldn’t have to put one on. For eight years, she kept herself busy with books, chickens, roosters, rain, music, and memories; and even when news came of the death of a relative in the flooding in Darband on July 26, 1987, she didn’t leave the grove so as not to be forced to wear a headscarf for the funeral. Neither could she be contented to put one on to go to Tehran in an act of solidarity with a child and his family when she heard that one thirteen-year-old relative had been sentenced to seventy lashes in Enghelab Square1 just for eating a greengage plum during Ramadan. She said she didn’t want to witness mass violence. Mum would say, “Once your eyes get accustomed to seeing violence in city streets and squares, they’ll get accustomed again. Gradually you’ll turn into your enemy; the very person who spread the violence”. Mum wasn’t surprised when she learned years later that the thirteen-year-old child, harbouring hate for the Iranian people, had left for France, never to look back. She didn’t blame him because she had heard that on the day, the man charged with carrying out the punishment, had taken pity on the skinny, thirteen-year-old boy and tried to hit his back lightly. But the people gathered in the street watching the scene, greedily, as though it were some sort of street performance, yelled, “You’re hitting too lightly! … Again! … Start again! … From the beginning!” And so, instead of seventy lashes, he received ninety-three. Later, the boy told his family that pressing himself against the ground in pain as the sharp blows hit his skin and delicate bones, he promised himself that if he made it out alive, he would take whichever opportunity came first: revenge on the people or run away from them, forever. Several years later, he fled over the Turkish border to Europe, and we heard that he had changed his name and identity—any time he was asked where he came from he would say, “Greece!”
Despite this, Mum didn’t know the inevitable is inevitable, as Dad would say, and that one day she would have to break her own rule, to visit her dear son. It was thus that when they went to meet Sohrab after five months of silence and found him twenty kilos lighter, not only did they pretend not to notice, but they laughed and talked to alleviate the pressure inflicted both by Mum’s mandatory hijab and Sohrab’s arbitrary imprisonment. Mum asked how the food was and Sohrab, with a laugh, said it was great. Dad asked if he knew when he’d be released. Laughing again, Sohrab said it was news to him that they would release him at all! Then to change the subject, Beeta said they had looked for Bahar everywhere so she could come and visit him, too, but they hadn’t been able to find her. She was neither in the chicken coop nor the stable! Sohrab laughed and said he wasn’t worried because he had had a dream about me the night before. Dad asked very earnestly, “So, how was Bahar? What did she say?” Everyone laughed, but Sohrab said very earnestly that I had told him, life goes on. And so it was that the thirty-minute visit was spent joking. Everyone was happy that Sohrab had only been arrested by mistake and would soon be released. However, when Mum accidentally overheard other visitors, all similarly lighthearted, she began to feel uneasy. But by then it was too late to show any concern because the prison guard’s untimely bell rang out, making everyone jump.
There was a ruckus in the big prison yard, filling some unwitting visitors with the fleeting hope that protests to bring down the Islamic regime had finally begun. In those days, many people were so naive that the slightest commotion, gun shot, sudden blackout of a television program, electricity, or anything else unusual, prompted joyous shouts of, “They’ve come … They’ve come!” But who had come? Nobody knew. So, when the first swallow flew into the small window, high on the wall of the visiting room, the guard panicked and sent a shower of bullets towards the glass because he, too, had automatically thought, They’ve come … They’ve come.
Everyone held their breath as they watched the bloody swallow with shredded feathers fall to the ground and take its last breath. The guard, the prisoners, and the visitors were still in a daze from the unexpected shots when a second swallow flew in through the broken window. Then another, and another. In the blink of an eye, the room was filled with chortling birds whose song struck anxiety into hearts. Unaware of what he was doing, Dad cried, “The swallows … the swallows!” Officers fired at the frightened, confused birds. Suddenly the air was black and the sound of shots ricocheted off the surfaces. Terrified, people covered their heads with their hands and were herded out into the yard at the end of gun barrels, without saying goodbye to their detained, loved ones. The yard was drowning in bullets, feathers, and the corpses of thousands of swallows who had mistaken several days of spring-like weather for migration season, and so had taken to the skies over Tehran. In the large rectangular yard the terrified, disoriented swallows flew into people, prison walls and barbed wire as they were shot at by officers. Dead birds rained down like black hail. Several people were shot. Bloody human and swallow bodies fell to the ground in the prison yard at Evin; and people, still being driven out the back door, trampled them, screamed, and shed tears for them. An old man, weeping and yelling, “The poor swallows … the poor swallows!” was hit in the mouth with the butt of a gun.
Just thirty minutes later, the prison yard was littered with swallow feathers and the blood-stained corpses of birds and visitors killed by mistake. The sky was once again clear and blue, indifferent to the blackness of migrating birds just minutes before. Officers were sitting at the edge of the yard, resting and looking at the bloody bird corpses whose black and white feathers were still suspended in mid-air. Who would have thought all those forlorn birds would be killed just because
they miscalculated the season? One of the officers laughed at this thought. Then another and another. The high prison walls bounced the armed officers’ guffaws from one wall to the next. A wind blew into the Evin prison yard, over the heights of Northern Tehran, over the victorious guffawing officers, taking the floating feathers over Evin’s tall walls to fall one by one on houses and oblivious people as they rushed over endless distances from one end of the city to another just as on any other day. Back and forth. Back and forth. An hour later, one of the bloody, bullet-riddled swallow feathers stuck to the windshield of a silver Buick Skylight whose driver, teary-eyed and terrified, was driving northwards in silence. Towards the forest. To the least likely place to ever see another human being, again.
* * *
1Literally, Revolution Square.
4
At exactly the same time the swallows were being massacred in the skies above Evin, Mum, Dad and Beeta were running to and fro under a spray of bullets; Sohrab was looking miserably at the bloody swallows from the one little window in his cell; and I was wandering freely through the house’s winding corridors, peeking into all the rooms, and occasionally nicking something. I go into Dad’s workroom located behind the kitchen with a small door connecting it to the backyard. The room is filled with wood, books and tools for carpentry and framing. Then, just as Ms. Henna, Mum’s favourite chicken, enters the room to take advantage of the empty house to leave her turds anywhere she wants and snoop around just as I have, I find the photo I’ve spent months searching for. It was in a yellow envelope next to Dad’s other photos: Dad with this favorite tar; Dad making a tar; Dad alongside Jalil Shahnaz, Farhang Sharif, Pir Niakan1; Dad with his arms wrapped around me from behind, as we play tar together. This was the photo I’d been after. I take it and slip it under my dress to join several walnuts left over from that morning. In the corner of Dad’s workroom is an old dust-covered love seat and a table with everything on it. Everything but a tar. Everything from an ashtray to a reading lamp, and an old aquarium without any fish or water, but filled with shells; shells that Dad collects from the seashore. Dad’s had this mania for shells for a while now. At the same time, Mum got her mania for fireflies and went into the forest every night, returning with jars full of them, Dad got his mania for collecting shells. When everyone was asleep, Mum would release the fireflies she had caught on the edge of the forest and let them fly around. Unaware that I was always watching her, she would lie down in the middle of the floor and look at them; at fireflies that shone like stars and made love in the layers of her hair. One night when Mum came to share her anguished insomnia, induced by Sohrab’s arrest, with the fireflies, the house’s silence and the shadows, she found me surrounded by them, and shining. I gave a laugh and she looked at me horrified, her hair dishevelled. That night Mum sat down next to me on the floor and allowed me to share the harmony of the fireflies. That was the night I realised how little I still knew her, my mother, the woman alongside whom I eat three meals a day, who tucks me in every night and whose gentle Goodnight is the last safe sound to echo through the house. That night, she shared one of her poems with me. It was from her life before marriage; a time she had dreamed of becoming a poet. Keeping her eyes closed and leaning against the low table, surrounded by twinkling fireflies, she recited:
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Page 3