The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

by Shokoofeh Azar

  People emerged from their houses and courtyards to watch wide-eyed, as Sun Rose bushes, jasmine, and honeysuckle vines grew up the walls and trees in the dead of winter and, with the one little smile from Effat, burst into bloom. The perfume of spring flowers filled the air, the sound of laughter spread from Effat’s house to the neighbour’s house, and from the neighbour’s house to the next house, and then through the length and breadth of the village. Everyone picked a flower and put it in their hair. Everyone began to sing and dance with a bloom in their hands. Everyone fell to their knees in the streets and showered God with words of adoration. Everyone knocked on a neighbour’s door and placed a flower in the hand that emerged.

  Effat stood on the porch observing everything closely. The Soothsayer was dancing and laughing the most. Homeyra Khatun, her father, her brother, the neighbours’ girls, the village’s moody young men, nagging old women, the weak, critical old men; all were dancing and laughing. Effat looked her fill then descended the porch steps and walked towards the path behind the house. From there she went towards the forest and walked and walked and walked until she reached the village’s big tree. The tree that at least ten grown men needed to link arms, to encircle. It was getting dark. She sat down right there on the hill beside the tallest tree in the region and listened to the faint sounds wafting up from the people in the village, still laughing and dancing. She leaned against the tree and looked at the village below and thought, Now, everyone knows what it means to be two. Quietly humming local love songs, she calmly cleared away the snow and collected fallen twigs and branches. When she had made a huge pile, she set it alight and sat down for a while to let it catch. Grow. Intensify. And then, with utter tranquility and without even looking back at her village or house, she walked with steady steps into the fire. Smiling as though she had gone to stand beside a wood stove on a cold winter’s day, she let the fire penetrate to her bones. A place that would not leave any life. She smiled at her other; at her other who was playing the flute and watching his innocent lambs and sheep in the wide green Kaliman plains, and was thinking to himself how suddenly happiness can come and take you by surprise: the very moment that you realise that you are your innocent white lamb, and your innocent white lamb is you. You are that tree and that tree is you; that leaf; that fallen leaf you tread upon as you play the flute for your sheep and take a walk in the plains.

  Suddenly, the night sky over the village was filled with embers. Bright, shining embers that, like the tail of Hailey’s comet, flew slowly from the direction of the forest, from the direction of the big tree and fell on the villagers. As they were singing and laughing under the steady fall of embers, the villagers saw the Soothsayer collecting wood and piling it up in the village square. Then he lit a match and put it under the hollow, dry wood. The flames surged and grew. All the villagers sat around the fire and were silent for the first time since their wild laughter; as though their jaws hurt from all that laughing; as though all that joy had tired them out. The Soothsayer began reciting incantations. Ancient Pahlavi incantations. His arms outstretched under the shower of heavenly fire, he danced and sang around the flames, and let the embers rain down on his face and body and turn into light, brittle ash. Slowly, the villagers started dancing with him. They also sang incantations. Who would have thought that Pahlavi still existed in a part of each of their beings, so many hundreds of years after their conversion to Islam. After that, it wasn’t clear who went and brought wine or from where. Old, seven-year wine. Everyone, from young to old, took a cup of wine as they sang incantations and danced. It was as though these were not the people who had converted to Islam with the Arab invasion fourteen centuries ago. It seemed as though they were Zoroastrians from thousands of years before who were drinking wine in the square, dancing, and thanking nature and God with their joy. The old Soothsayer first poured a bit of the wine on the ground as had been tradition for thousands of years, drank the rest, and quoted a verse by Hafez:

  Your beauty in pre-eternity appeared in a ray of God’s light

  Love was created and caught the whole world on fire.

  Then without so much as looking back, without looking at the villagers or his ancestral home, he entered the fire and from its centre stared at a point above him until he was consumed by flames.

  The villagers didn’t panic or cry; they weren’t afraid. All were in a state of singular bliss as though suddenly they had achieved Certainty. Certainty of the existence of the other. Certainty about the existence of the other in themselves. Certainty about that which they had thought was life but wasn’t life at all. Then suddenly Issa’s father took on the Soothsayer’s role and continued chanting ancient incantations. Dancing, the people repeated the chants with him. Just then, the sound of cowbells could be heard approaching. Indian gypsies who came every year to pitch their tents for several days, sell their wares to the villagers and tell their fortunes, emerged from the forest paths in an untimely fashion with their loads of cloth, nails, sickles and copper dishes.

  When the swarthy men and women descended from their cows, camels, horses and mules, and saw the inhabitants of Razan standing around the fire, speaking in a tongue they hadn’t spoken a year ago and drinking wine, they stood open-mouthed, staring at the people who, contrary to every year, hadn’t even noticed their cacophonous entry. At the same time, Issa’s father recited:

  Wisdom desired a light from that flame of love

  With a bolt of love’s fervour the world was in tumult.5

  The villagers repeated the poem together with him and, upon the completion of the verse, they all stepped into the fire together, without looking back. Not one of them looked back. Not one of them thought of their children, or their spouses, or their parents … Not one of them glanced at their homes … They stepped into the fire as though to do anything else would have been senseless and meaningless. Having overcome their initial shock, the gypsies ululated. They yelled. They screeched, shook their bangles in the air, and hit themselves over the head. They ran towards the fire and each one pulled someone away from the flames. Then they rushed to draw water from the well in the village square to quench the blaze. In the blink of an eye they dispersed the villagers and pulled them into the dark alleyways. An hour later … nobody was left in the square. It felt as if the dream, or spell, or the magic, that had come over Razan, had passed and was gone. Issa, crouched and trembling in a corner, chilled to his core, stared in silence at all that had happened right before his eyes and thought, It’s as though the Soothsayer never existed, Dad never existed, Effat never existed … there was no fire … and no love.

  From the next day, for forty days, no one in the village looked at anyone else. Nobody said hello or goodbye to anyone else. From the next day for forty days, snow, heavier than it had ever been before, bound everyone to their houses. Cows and sheep were imprisoned in their stables and died of starvation. It seemed as though spring never existed. Summer. Autumn. Nothing.

  * * *

  1A poem by Margot Bickel.

  2In the Quran and religious stories, nasnases are creatures similar to humans but with one leg and one arm, who are said to have been created before man. They are considered to be sinning, transgressing creatures.

  3Creatures with the upper body of a man and a lower body of a snake. They sit on the side of the road at night looking for a ride. As soon as they are seated behind someone the davalpa wraps his snake-like legs around the person and forces them to work for him.

  4A traditional dance from northern Iran performed during weddings and celebrations.

  5A verse by Hafez.

  12

  Beeta, embittered, humiliated, and lost, stepped with sure and steady steps towards an unsure future as she thought about how the Revolution had changed her family’s destiny, her destiny. She recalled a day at the height of the turmoil when she had seen through the high windows of her ballet class, people’s feet rhythmically pounding the pavement and shouting, “Death to the Shah! Death to the Shah! Deeeeeee
ath tooooo the Shaaaaaaaah! Death to the Shah! Death to the Shah! Deeeeeeeath tooooo the Shaaaaaaaah!” At the same time, a teacher from a neighbouring classroom ran up to Beeta’s teacher and whispered something in her ear. Then the teacher from the other class yanked a headscarf from her purse, put it on, and left to join the protesters. Their teacher, however, stayed put and repeated decisively, “Your jeté foot at forty-five degrees to the right foot and hands in position five! Exhale deeply and feel your breath as you guide it out from your heart.” Beeta remembered how, just minutes later, some of those very same people came and dragged her teacher outside and began beating and kicking her in the street. Screaming obscenities at the students, they drove them out of the classroom, and their ballet classes ended forever. She wondered what her teacher was doing now. Maybe she should try to find her when she got back to Tehran. Maybe she had left Iran or maybe all her talent for dance had gone to waste in the back rooms of her house as she cooked, sewed, and swept the floor.

  Beeta looked around, trying to discern a path amid the trees and bushes. She saw nothing but green. Green leaves. Green branches. Green grass, and when, out of frustration, she turned to the sky to guess the way using the sun’s path, she saw me coming slowly towards her. I showed her the way and tried to lift her spirits. But in the next moment, words spilled from my mouth that, instead of offering comfort, came out as a rebuke of her not thinking to say goodbye before she left. Her angry response that since I am everywhere, hellos and goodbyes are meaningless, gave me the bitter realisation that even if ghosts are loved ones, we are still nothing more than the forgotten dead. Determined not to let it show, I asked instead what she would do now. When she just shrugged her shoulders, I understood that her grievances against me, and life, ran much deeper.

  What I said next caught even me off guard. “Life is usually determined in our absence which people find this vexing. Don’t you realise, though, how fortunate you are? At least you can still use your feet to walk, feel things with your skin, taste qormeh sabzi1 and abgusht.2 And you’re stupid not to realise that even making love once is to taste a moment of bliss that can enrich your life!”

  Before the last words had even completely left my mouth, she stopped and glared at me with such hatred that, ashamed and horrified by what I had said, I made myself invisible. I couldn’t believe I had uttered such a thing. Life had dealt us such harsh blows that we never had the opportunity to say hurtful things to one another. However, now that I’d actually said it, I couldn’t bear hearing her contemptuous response: that she was outraged by my secretly watching all her lovemaking over the last months, and that she knew it. I was embarrassed that since I was dead, I was capable of silently observing her private moments and those of others.

  I let her continue on her own, but cried quietly to myself—I did not want her to see my tears. I let her curse me from a distance, but she did not hear my own expletives. Hunched under a tree, my sobbing resonating far into the distance, I realised that the succession of events in our family had left no time for me to cry. Beeta’s look of hatred was a jolt that made me realise I was nothing but a delusional dead person; I could talk to the living and they could see me, but I was deceiving myself; my presence after death was a mere illusion. I thought that if I ever saw Sohrab again, I should tell him I’d made a mistake. I had been wrong to think that death only marked the end of some things. No! Death was the end of everything. The end of my body, my identity, my credibility. The end of everything that had meant something to me in life: family, love, trust, friendship. Yes … death was the end of all these things.

  I cried until the stars came out and the jackals began to howl. And then I felt the pressure of a hand on my shoulder. I had cried so much, my head felt heavy. Death also had its advantages; nothing could frighten me—not even the pressure of an unknown hand on my shoulder in the forest in the dead of night. Impatiently, I lifted my head. It was the ghost of a middle-aged man. Unbidden, he sat down beside me and lay my head softly on his shoulder. I don’t know why, but this made me cry even more. The man placed his hand on my head in a fatherly way, and I was happy he didn’t ask anything. When my sobs had receded, indicating with his head, he said, “I was going to visit the river ghosts, when I heard you. Join me if you’d like.”

  I went with him without thinking, and on the way, he explained that the river ghosts are people who had died in the nearby river and who came together, occasionally, to reminisce.

  “What a useless thing to do!” I exclaimed impatiently. “Well, you have to pass the time somehow or else the loneliness becomes unbearable,” the man replied. Wiping away the last of my tears, I said, “You sound just like the living.” “Don’t you see just how much we still live like the living?” he pointed out. “You’re right. Perhaps we should change that. Either way, we’re not alive enough,” I replied despondently.

  “Death hasn’t made humans happier,” the man said.

  We continued in silence until we reached a river where a group of people was sitting around a fire. Among them was a ten-year-old boy who was wet and shivering, as though he had just come out of the river. One of the ghosts gave the boy his coat and murmured to the others, “He just drowned an hour ago. He doesn’t know it yet.”

  I was looking at the boy’s miserable, disbelieving eyes. The fire trembled in his pupils just as the novice ghost and little boy himself trembled in death’s embrace. We were all in the arms of death and he alone didn’t know it yet. He thought he was still in life’s embrace. On the other side. The other side of the invisible wall. The little boy said he was a shepherd and that his name was Majid. He was crossing the river with his mother when he lost her. Again, everyone was silent. No one wanted to reminisce about life in the presence of Majid’s novice ghost. They didn’t want to rush his awareness of his own death. It had to happen naturally. I know, as I suppose everyone does, that the first hours of death are the worst; the hours you don’t yet know you’re dead, and if you do, you don’t want to believe it. You can still sense your body’s warmth, can feel the wetness of your tongue on your dry lips, and you know someone is nearby, waiting for you …

  Then Majid asked, “What are you all doing here? Are you travelling?” We all exchanged looks and hesitated, not knowing how to answer. At that very moment, several people approached, lantern in hand and alive. Majid’s mother, father and brother had come with a lantern to look for him on the banks of the river. Majid called out to them happily, flinging the coat off his shoulders and running towards them. We didn’t move. He ran towards them but they were yelling out his name, and looking in a different direction; then they hurried away, as though they had found his body. Excited and overjoyed to be reunited, Majid caught up with them and threw his arms around his mother, but she kept crying and continued to walk away, not noticing Majid hanging onto her from behind. They came to a halt nearby and cried. Majid caught up with them again. Again, he tried. This time he embraced his father, but his father didn’t pay any attention either. Walking right past him, his father hurled himself onto Majid’s corpse and began sobbing. Majid finally caught sight of his own dead, wet, ice-cold face that had fallen limply onto his father’s shoulder. Incredulously he looked at his own face. Then he took a step backwards. He looked at his hands and reached up to touch his face. Finally, he turned to stare at us. The middle-aged man who had spoken to me, got up, and together with an old man, walked slowly towards the boy. But Majid seemed to have become aware that life and death were inseparable, that they were of one nature; and panicked. He ran away from them screaming, and disappeared into the forest.

  For several minutes his terrified scream reverberated in my ears like a death knell. My chest tightened and right there in front of everyone, I wrapped my arms around my own loneliness and cried. A little later, the two men returned from the forest’s dark interior with Majid’s anxious ghost and sat him down next to me, once again wrapping their coats around him to take the edge off death’s chill. He stared into the fire in silence, u
ntil he fell asleep. I thought, poor Majid, poor me, poor all of us, the dead … because death has no release. When you’re tired of life you can commit suicide to rid yourself of its trials, but what comes after death? It’s not fair that in death, suicide isn’t an option for liberation from its torments. The true definition of death is eternal boredom.

  I looked at the slack muscles in the sorrow and bewilderment of Majid’s face. I wanted to take him into my arms like a sad little brother, comfort him and say, “Don’t be sad. Tomorrow when you wake up, you’ll see this is all just a dream. You’ll milk the sheep alongside your brothers again and will guide them up into the high pastures with your father … Don’t be sad, little brother. Soon you’ll be so big that during one of the migrations you’ll see a beautiful dark-eyed girl and you’ll fall in love with her, not with one but with a hundred hearts. Then, while you’re separated from her, you will fall ill, have a lump in your throat and a tightness in your chest, and not even the sound of your father’s flute will bring joy to your heart. “You’ll want to listen to sad songs, and so you learn how to play the flute, and will play melancholy songs until the next migration. Then you will see that beautiful girl again. Now you will even know her name, and seeing the curves of her body moving away oblivious of you, you will know from now on that life without her would be meaningless. And so setting embarrassment aside, you tell your father everything, with anxious eyes. After that, everything is arranged much more quickly and simply than you imagined. You ask for her hand. She becomes your wife. You build a wooden house with your own two hands, and a year later you will have one child, three years later two children, and four years later three children. Then one day, when you don’t know how that day could have arrived, your son will come to you with anxious eyes, and say he fell in love with a dark-eyed girl during the migration. You go and propose marriage for your son, and with the birth of your fifth grandchild, one day when you are not happier than on any of life’s exceedingly ordinary days, you die. That’s it. Just like right now.”