The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

by Shokoofeh Azar

  To be rid of him sooner, Beeta said, “Alright, I promise. But how will I know what to do? The people you’re afraid of are everywhere. Even here”. The old man sat on the last step and said thoughtfully, “You’re right”.

  Then both of them sank into thought. As Beeta looked at the pale wrinkled skin on the old man’s hands and face, her fear slowly melted away and was replaced with pity. She really wanted to do something for him. That’s why she said, “As soon as you can send me somewhere where I will be free of them, I will do as promised”. The old man thought for a moment and said, “Where, for example?” Beeta said, “I don’t know, either. You think about it”.

  Upon hearing this, the old man got up and, just as he had descended the stairs with measured steps, he ascended them in a dignified and deliberate manner until he merged with the dirt and grime on the carpets and reams of Qajar-era cloth collecting dust under the rafters. After the old man left, Beeta forgot all about the encounter until years later when her hand brushed against her slimy fish tail and this conversation, long submerged in murky oblivion, resurfaced once again.

  Up until then, I had only seen a wandering ghost once. One rainy night when I was sleeping in my treehouse, I was awoken by a cool, wet smell. It was obvious someone was there—there was no need to turn on a light. Whoever it was approached slowly, pulled up the wick on the lantern and lit a match. It was the wandering ghost of a Siberian hunter who had lost his way many years ago. I got up and handed him a cup of water and two baked potatoes because I knew that wandering ghosts were always hungry and thirsty. Without saying a word, he sat down in the corner and ate voraciously. As he was eating he asked me for salt, which I gave to him. After drinking the water, he asked for more. Then, although I had asked for nothing, he showed me his deer-hide clothes from which a few pieces of rabbit and fox skin and several large handmade hunting knives were hanging. He said he was a Siberian hunter and that when he was alive, he had been fooled by a shaman who had told him if he could kill a big bear he would help him marry the chief’s daughter, whom he loved. However, the large bear ripped him apart and ate him, after which the shaman married the chief’s daughter, instead. The old man said he was only twenty years old when he died, but he learned later that even dead people age gradually. Since his death, he had been consumed with a desire for vengeance. Even after one thousand years, however, he had not yet had the opportunity for revenge, although he had managed to behead the shaman in four different lives and stab him once—but this wasn’t enough. In his last life, the shaman had finally used some of the shamanic tricks he remembered from previous lives and had trapped the hunter’s ghost in a tornado. After three days and nights of spinning and twirling in the tornado’s eye, the hunter landed; but now, centuries later, he was still unable to find his way back to Siberia. Because of his spiritual ranking, his questions couldn’t be answered easily by ghosts in this region—ghosts who were so uneducated they didn’t even know where Siberia was or where in the world they themselves were. I assured him that I knew where it was and that I knew it was towards the north, but that if he wanted a proper address he should return the following night so that I could show him on a map. The old man, hardly believing I could save him from his several-hundred-year-long peregrinations, evaporated into the air, reciting Siberian formulas.

  The next night, I brought a map of the world and, sitting with the old man in the light of the lantern, I showed him where we were and where he had to go. Throughout my explanation, he asked questions and touched the various colours on the map that indicated separate countries. Then he fell silent. It was a long silence. At first I thought the old man’s silence was one of satisfaction, but slowly I realised he had fallen into a philosophical stupor. When he finally opened his mouth, not taking his eyes from the map, he said, “So, the thing on which I lived is called Planet Earth, and it’s round, and according to you, all of these countries and tribal lands exist, and seven billion people live on this ball, and I don’t even know how many that is. I just know it means very many.”

  Then he paused and said, “It means very, very, very many. Many more than all the Siberian tribes.” I had bent over the map and was waiting to see what his conclusion would be. After much contemplation, he said, “It doesn’t seem to be worth it anymore”. I was happy to hear those familiar words. I was just about to ask him what he was going to do when he said, “Well, if there are all these people alive, think of all the dead people and wandering ghosts who also live on this ball. If every one of these wandering ghosts wanted to avenge themselves on another ghost or person, the world would become hell.” Then he looked at me with his dark, almond-shaped eyes, filled his sunburnt, unsmiling lips with air, and finally let out a laugh. His laugh made me laugh. His laugh gradually got louder and louder until it gave fright to sleepy birds, and here and there lights came on in nearby houses. Then the Siberian hunter got up and, laughing deliriously, walked out the door and disappeared into the air, waving to me from behind. He held his other hand over his belly, still shaking with laughter.

  At the end of that long, ill-fated day when all the errant swallows were executed in the skies over Evin, I finished my rounds in the house and attic memories. At that precise time, Mum, Dad and Beeta were being held up by a bunch of Basijis2 and Revolutionary Guards who had decided to create a surprise traffic stop and were pulling over cars on the road to Firuzkuh, to inspect bags and boots for any forbidden objects. There was neither alcohol in Dad’s car nor music cassettes, nor recordings of speeches by Masoud Rajavi3 or Kianuri,4 there were no speeches by Khomeini at the Feyzieh Madrasa in Qom,5 there was not even backgammon or a deck of cards. There was perhaps just a book forgotten in one of its recesses. From the moment a fourteen-year-old Basiji with a G3 assault rifle over his shoulder approached their car, kicked a tyre and, without even looking at Dad, said jeeringly, “It’s a foreign car!”, to when they were finally given permission to get back in and leave, Mum, Dad and Beeta had stood on the side of the road shivering in the cold for two and a half hours. Their car was turned inside out and, finally, when the Guards found One Hundred Years of Solitude by Márquez in Beeta’s bag, they spent an hour passing it back and forth and radioing around before they were eventually convinced that politically, it was not a dangerous book. When Dad’s car began to move off at last, seeing that he had had no excuse to show off in front of Beeta who was a pretty girl, the Basiji boy spat the shells of his sunflower seeds onto Beeta’s window and smiled, revealing rotten teeth.

  * * *

  1Famous Iranian tar masters who have playing styles named after them.

  2Young volunteer members of the Basij, a law enforcement auxiliary force set up after the Revolution that is engaged in activities such as internal security, law enforcement auxiliary, providing social services, organising public religious ceremonies, policing morals, and suppression of dissident gatherings.

  3Leader of the People’s Mujaheddin.

  41915-1999. Leader of the Tudeh Party.

  5One of Khomeini’s first speeches in 1963 in which he admonishes the Shah but at the same time, says he doesn’t want the Shah to be overthrown and the people to be happy about his departure.

  5

  There are a lot of good things about dying. You are suddenly light and free and no longer afraid of death, sickness, judgement or religion; you don’t have to grow up and live a repeat of others’ lives on your own behalf. You are no longer forced to study or tested on the principles of religion or what invalidates prayer. But for me, the most important sensation of death is knowing something when I want to know it. Kon fayakon.1 Piece of cake. If I want to be somewhere, I am, just like that. I realised all this the day I died. February 9, 1979. Just two days before the culmination of the Islamic Revolution. I died the day inflamed revolutionaries boiling with revolutionary hatred and fervour poured into our house in Tehranpars and, making strange noises, cried out, “God is great, God is great!” They stormed Dad’s basement workshop and, after pouring kerosene
on all his handmade tars and books and mulberry wood,2 set them alight. I was just thirteen years old and was down there practising tar. When they savagely attacked, I crawled under the table, paralysed by fear. I saw with my own eyes how they splashed petrol everywhere and threw the lighter. BOOOOM.

  It all happened instantly. I don’t remember the pain I suffered or how much I screamed, but the smell of my roasting flesh and the sizzle of burning curls has stayed with me. From the centre of a quivering swell of fire vapour, from the hallway and window, for a moment I saw all of them. I saw Mum, unconscious in the arms of the very women who had lit the fire in the name of the fight against the vices of pleasure. I saw Dad standing, his body half-burned, surrounded by the very group of revolutionary men who, until several months ago, had called him Master; and I saw Beeta and Sohrab who had screamed and screamed until no sound came out and they had fallen silent on the courtyard floor. All of them disappeared for one fluttering moment, and then … reappeared. Even after all these years it makes me sick to remember how Dad threw himself into the fire to save me and then, with half his body in flames, he was pulled out and taken to the hospital. I still remember how Mum, trying to reach Dad and me, had wrenched herself from the greasy clutches of the women who, ladles in hand, had come to scoop their revolutionary fervour and misery onto our quiet happiness.

  At the time, I didn’t have a concept of death or the afterlife, and I didn’t know that every death is an indication of another life. That’s why I was surprised to realise how light I was when my body was still burning and I was looking at myself from above. It didn’t take long to figure things out; as soon as I lost my physical abilities, others broadened. I learned which untrodden roads could be taken and finally, that the best thing would be to give into my family’s desire to see me again.

  When Dad was first brought back from the hospital, a deathly, terrifying silence reigned over the house. No one went near the basement whose destruction, smoke and fire had also spread to the courtyard, burning the flowers and trees. The atmosphere in the house with the smoke-stained walls of the basement and courtyard, the bare branches and scorched trunks of the sour cherry and peach trees, was so grief-stricken that even the butterflies and dragonflies of Nowruz didn’t flit through our courtyard. Sohrab and Beeta stopped going to school. So one day, fed up with all the sorrow and mourning, I began making mischief. I hummed O lady, lady, lady / sit on my knee in Mum’s ear as she was silently crying in the shower, and applied Desitin anti-burn ointment to Dad’s burnt shoulders when he was sitting on the couch, a tear rolling down his cheek, and I moved Beeta and Sohrab’s textbooks around in their bags.

  Another time, I put the lid to the pressure cooker in Sohrab’s backpack, and Beeta’s shoes in the refrigerator. This continued until one day when Mum was lying down, as she so often did those days, so little was the energy she could muster, I began tickling her and, unable to hold back, she let out a long, beautiful laugh. Dad and the children, who for ages hadn’t heard any loud noises in the house—much less laughter—came running, and found us with our backs to them sitting on the bed, laughing, and hugging. It was thus that I continued my life alongside my family. Sometimes Mum forgets and, textbook in hand, asks me about school, while Beeta haggles with me over doing the dishes just like before, and Sohrab constantly asks questions about the world of the dead.

  I became an enigmatic rumour in the family. Those who had come to my funeral later questioned their sanity when they saw me cooking with Mum or reading with Dad. That’s how Granddad Jamshid’s famous saying became the family mantra. He, who sometimes saw me and sometimes didn’t, said with a philosophical air, “In this world nothing becomes a reason for anything”. And so it was that family, near and far, gradually accepted me as an inexplicable, enigmatic being.

  After the ‘Arab Invasion’ which is how Mum always referred to it, we decided to leave Tehran. Beeta was the only one who needed persuading. She still thought that if we stayed she would be able to continue her ballet classes and become a great ballerina. Once Dad had shown her enough newspaper and magazine announcements made by the new power holders condemning dancing, music and singing by women, as being against religious law, she ruefully relented. As Dad said, we couldn’t join in the gangster party, the new power and mullahs’ honeymoon, or be silent bystanders to all the arbitrary, revolutionary injustice and revenge. We couldn’t watch as Pahlavi leaders and officials were executed, and political prisoners were broadcast daily on television, pale-faced and stuttering, apologising to the Great Leader of the Revolution saying, “We were deceived”. We couldn’t tolerate people who, in the name of anti-bourgeoisie resistance, looted Master Alborz’s house then practically gave away his valuable paintings from a street corner or the back of a truck. Once when Dad was passing by Shurabad,3 he saw a mountain of cassettes and reels of Iranian and international films that had been set alight. It was winter and as snowflakes melted in the flames, ministry officials whose job was to censor Western products stood around the fiery mountain, hands in their green overcoats that were all the rage among revolutionaries in those years, and reminisced as they pointed at the covers of old Iranian films, laughing.

  We’d had enough. Perhaps everyone else could manage. Perhaps everyone else was preparing to increase their tolerance for the events that were becoming increasingly violent and savage by the day. But for us, for our family, enough was enough. They could watch as a pregnant Baha’i woman was thrown from the roof of her house in the name of Islam to the words, “God is great”. They could gradually become accustomed to seeing executions moved from inside prisons out into city squares and parks in front of their homes. Putting the stress on the word wanted, Dad says most people wanted to get used to everything. As if it were a decision they had made in advance as they seized trophies, land, jobs, firms and factories from the enemies of Islam—the affluent and bourgeois— dividing the spoils among themselves and turning overnight from village-dwelling outliers into salaried Revolutionary Guards and City Council members. It was thus that we decided to sell the house we loved so much, and head to some undecided location towards the forests of Mazandaran where there would be no television, no Keyhan newspaper and no gun-toting, magna’e-wearing4 Sisters’ Committee, whose ranks had previously been the prostitutes of Shahr-e No5 and whose new job was the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice. All we wanted was to disappear in silence from the tarnished page of the city’s ever-more violent, ever-less friendly and increasingly criminal, history.

  Early the following summer when the real estate agent came to buy our house for a third of its value, wandering around her favourite spots, Mum was talking to herself in shock. She went to the patio beside the half-burnt flowering succulent that reached the top of the living room and to the terrace filled with fuchsia and coleus plants. Sitting on the terrace drinking tea in tribute to the past, she watched the women walking by, now mostly clad in headscarves or chadors.6 She whispered sadly to herself, “Now women have to put a lid on their hair again just like they do with their laughter. Houses and dreams are getting so small that even the butterflies are leaving the city. The walls will get taller again and people will buy thick curtains for their windows. Balconies will no longer be a place for flowerpots, chairs and books, but a storage space for people accustomed to sharing their garbage with others.”

  While waiting for someone from the real estate agency to come and finalise the deal, Mum sat down on the scorched basement steps and, brushing her hand along the sooty walls, stared into the basement’s blackness. Like a banished prophet, she warned, “You killed an innocent child. Wait and see how your innocent children will be killed.”

  We left as soon as we got the cash from the agent. After days of losing our way and finding it again in the forests and on winding, unmarked, and muddy roads, we finally arrived at a village that, one look at the calm eyes of the villagers told Dad, was the place. The safe place where we were meant to be: Razan. From among the areas shown to us by th
e locals, after sighting the ruins of an ancient fire temple, Mum settled on five hectares on a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside that was serviced by a road so poor and so far from the village, that no one had even thought to build there. In fact, no one in the village had ever exchanged land for money. God’s land still belonged to the people, and the people, as if offering votive food to a neighbour, gave us those five hectares, saying, “It’s God’s land. You build it up.” Standing on the hill that day, Mum turned towards the ruins of the Zoroastrian fire temple and said, “Just as you did fourteen hundred years ago, we also fled”.

  And yet, as we laid the first stone for the house near the forest and that ancient fire temple on a hill overlooking Razan, we couldn’t have imagined then just how useless our flight had been given that just nine years later the road leading to the village would be crushed under the wheels of a car carrying a mullah and his bodyguards that then ascended the hill to the grove and arrived at our doorstep. I watched them from up in my treehouse and wondered how obscenely they would deliver the news. Mum and Beeta, who had heard the vehicle from a distance, were each waiting in a room to see what it was they wanted this time, now that the house had been emptied of both Sohrab and his books. Smoking his pipe on the porch, Dad stood up, his brow furrowed. The mullah got out of the car. One of the Revolutionary Guards came into the yard and said, “Be at Luna Park Tehran7 in three days.”

  Three days later, in a place that evoked childhood games and laughter, popcorn, roasted corn on the cob, and smiley instant photos, Luna Park Tehran was filled with armed Revolutionary Guard patrols and plain-clothes officers equipped with radios, who had shut down the Upside-Down Ship and Train of Terror, to bring real terror to the people’s upside-down lives.

  More than one thousand men and women in black were waiting for their numbers to be called from noisily crackling loudspeakers mounted on the trees, the Ferris wheel, the Upside-Down Ship, and the Train Station of Joy. The crackling and the foul language of the person screaming into them made understanding impossible. The person bellowing into the loudspeaker said, “Shut up and sit your arse down!” Then, screaming at someone else, he could be heard saying, “What! Are you deaf?! I said your kid was executed. Here are his things. Now get lost before we arrest you!”