The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

by Shokoofeh Azar

  The man finally finished his long sentence, took a deep breath, and stared into the fire. Nobody said a word; all looked into the fire in silence. Finally, I said, “What a story!”

  Another man said, “My concentration didn’t falter for even a second”. The middle-aged man blushed in embarrassment and asked, “I’m sorry, is this how people tell stories?” The old man answered, “Yes, this is one way people do it”.

  I looked at the eyes of the ghosts sitting around the fire and at Beeta, and suddenly I realised that we dead are the sorrowful side of life, while the living are the joyful side of death. And yet, Beeta was not joyful. It was the sad side of life that she didn’t even know she should be joyful in life because that was the essence of life. I wanted to tell her this, but was afraid of bringing her damaged spirit down even further. Fortunately, she herself eventually spoke and said, “It seems that from among you, I am the more fortunate because nobody killed me. But I don’t feel happy at all.” She looked at we who had died. The dead who had been the first to meet her in the world of the living outside Razan. An old man in the group responded, “This is because you don’t yet realise how beautiful, young, and healthy you are”. Beeta smiled and her cheeks reddened by the light of the fire in silent emotion; and all of us who were dead saw how good the smile looked on her. But as she recalled dark memories, her smile faded and she said, “But the man who loved me simply turned his back on me and married a young girl”. The middle-aged man said, “All the better! It means you were lovable enough but he wasn’t smart enough to realise it”.

  Beeta wore the smile of a bewildered woman who didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. In the end, she said, “What do you say I should do? My mother, with whom I am extremely upset right now, left—–”. Pointing at me she continued, “My little sister and big brother were killed, and I left my lonely old father to go to Tehran; but I don’t even know what I’m going to do once I’m there”. “Go, be strong,” the old man said. “And any time you despair, think of us; we are eternal but joyless, while you are mortal but joyful.”

  Beeta was clearly heartened a bit by these words and I thought what lonely people we had been, living for years without anyone around to see us beyond the family tragedies, to praise us, and give us the strength to continue living. And it was thus that after a long pause, Beeta suddenly turned to me, sitting opposite her on the other side of the fire and, with a courage I didn’t know she had, said, “Forgive me for not being the sister I should have been. You were a sister to me in ways that even went beyond what you were capable of. Because of us, you even continue to live alongside us and protect us. During the years of the black snow, who would have brought us wood and food, if you hadn’t? If you hadn’t gone to see Sohrab in prison, who else would have been able to go and comfort him? And most importantly, if you hadn’t come back to us after your death, how would we have been able to bear the sorrow of losing you?” Then she paused, and embarrassed, continued, “But from now on, how about you respect the boundaries of life and death when it comes to me”.

  The Holy Gospel begins thus: In the beginning was the Word. And the word is so heavy that it can bear the weight of creation and all existence on its shoulders. Just like right now when the weight of Beeta’s words were making me aware of the limits of my breadth. “What you ghosts said tonight showed me that I am not strong enough,” she continued. “You have to be extremely strong to live among the living.” Then turning to me again, she said, “That’s why I don’t want you to come checking on me until the day I go back to Razan. Let me come to understand what it means for a living person to be alone in the true sense of the word; let me find my own way. If I survive the throngs of people in Tehran, you will see me again in Razan, and if I die, I’ll also come looking for you to say just how precious your existence beyond life and death has been.”

  And so it was that kissing Beeta on the cheek as we said goodbye, I was anxious it would be our last meeting, unaware that she would be the only one of we three siblings to survive, albeit in the depths of the Caspian Sea.

  * * *

  1A type of stew eaten like a sauce as an accompaniment to rice.

  2A type of soup.

  3A layer of rice crisp, browned rice that forms at the bottom of the pot.

  13

  Afterwards, I took the road towards Dad and solitude, while Beeta took the road to the city and its hustle and bustle. She left with the innocent face of an anguished girl, and returned with the expression of a stalwart woman; with several grey hairs, a few wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, lips that were accustomed to silence, and steps that had covered long distances. Moreover, her account of the events of the last several years was so succinct we didn’t dare ask more. She seemed to have become inexplicably accustomed to keeping silent. I didn’t blame her. When she described how she had joined the first student dissent group upon enrolling at the university as a student of art history and was arrested at a student protest, banned from studying, and then sent to prison, we realised that life still had yet grimmer things in store for the members of our family. It had taken her less than an hour to recount everything from start to finish; and then, at the end, as she went to the kitchen to pour herself and us some tea, she wrapped it all up with two bits of news: Uncle Khosro, whom I’d been expecting to see in Razan for years, and had been arrested because of his mystical beliefs, was finally out of prison but had immediately and indefinitely left Iran for India, without being able first to say goodbye. He left to live out the rest of his life in one of India’s thousands of strange and fantastic temples, to seek the nature of God in the unity of its seventy-seven religions. Second, that the mayor of Tehran, still trying to get his clutches on the city’s old estates, was resorting to threats and bribes, but Granddad and Great Granddad were determined to die in the house where they were born.

  The whole time Beeta was giving us headline-like snippets of prison and arrest, Uncle Khosro’s self-imposed exile and the city’s threats, my gaze was unwavering, locked on Beeta’s pained eyes, prematurely aged with experience but innocent with youthful disbelief, as she attempted to show how ordinary all the bad news was. Had she wanted, perhaps she could have recounted everything in all their details like the middle-aged ghost, without interruption or pause, but she had decided otherwise. Brevity is a response to suffering, and she wanted to be strong. Perhaps that was the reason she had become so prone to silence. She didn’t want to prolong the suffering that affected us any longer. She wanted to be in the present as much as possible. Yes, Beeta had changed. She had lived through suicide and gone on to interact with the living. And so it was, that after several weeks of relaxation and wandering in the garden around the circles of scorched earth, reliving memories she didn’t want to share, she began leafing through Dad’s old magazines. Books had always been the first and final refuge in our house. Contrary to my expectations, she didn’t turn to books on politics or sociology, but directly to serialised stories of romance in popular magazines. It was then I realised that a person’s seemingly unemotional exterior was no indication of their interior. Then to my utter surprise, she began reading children’s books. She gradually developed a great fondness for fairytales. She read all of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Mehdi Sabahi, Sadeq Hedayat, and Samad Behrangi, then turned to One Thousand and One Nights, the Shahnameh, Darab Nama, Samak-e Ayyar, Amir Arsalan and Hossein Kord Shabestari. Reading all these long books took months. Then she began collecting photographs and paintings of sky fairies, mermaids, earth fairies, angels, jinns and mythical demons. Finally, one day she found a five-hundred-page notebook and began writing an encyclopaedia—Encyclopaedia of the Imaginary Creatures of Iran—with no clue, herself, of where the idea had come from. The encyclopaedia grew bigger and bigger as time went on. Everything from the Al,1 Anqa,2 Ashu Zusht,3 Bakhtak,4 Chamrosh5 and Davalpa, to the Huma, Fairy King, First Cow,6 Mardazma,7 Rokh,8 Shirdal,9 and Simourgh10 were featured. In comprehensive chapters devoted to the demons of A
ncient Iran, she described Aktash,11 the demon of denial, Apush the demon of drought, and Bushasp, the demon of deep sleep. The more she read old books such as The Darab Nama, One Thousand and One Nights, Khayyam’s Nowruz Nama, Hossein Kord Shabestari, The Shahnama , Eskandar Nama, Malek Jamshid, Jame al- Olum, Ajayeb Nama, and Aja’ib va Ghara’ib, the deeper she delved into the magnificent expanse of ocean that was the Iranian people’s real-imaginary beliefs, and became ever more detached from the real, day-to-day world. To deny or forget her past, she read and wrote, submerging herself in the meaning of myth, until one night as she was bathing, her eyes fell on her naked body. She spent long minutes looking at her reflection in the mirror and suddenly realised the futility of what she had begun. Her body, long in denial, had become accustomed to love and life, and with the recognition of that reality had begun to wilt. Try as she might, she couldn’t recall when several large wrinkles had appeared under her eyes, one hundred and thirty-eight grey hairs had sprouted at her temples, or the skin on her upper arms had loosened. Try as she might she couldn’t recall when one of her molars had rotted or her periods had been delayed. Emerging from the bathroom she went straight to the porch knowing she would find Dad there. She took his hand affectionately in her own, held it to her cheek, and said, “I think it’ll be my turn soon”. Sitting there looking at the circles still scorched in the grass, he looked at her listlessly and then, after a while, contrary to Beeta’s expectation, a pale smile formed on his lips.

  So Beeta stopped reading and writing, and began to wait in anticipation. She didn’t know what she was waiting for but she had no doubt the time would soon come and she would be ushered into a new, maddening chapter of her life. A point of no return. She thought of Charles Bokowski’s words, Find what you love and let it kill you. To begin with, she stopped reading and writing. Perhaps it could be said that she stopped resisting, and eventually she stopped her silence. Years in Tehran had made her tough enough. Maybe enough was enough. So, she stopped monitoring herself, her thoughts, the grove, Dad, and finally gave in to that in which she had recently been drowning: fantasy.

  She lay on the bed and fantasised about this new phase of life. Ashamed, she thought maybe after all these years Issa would suddenly appear and they would go together to some distant place, forever. But immediately, she berated herself for being so foolish, for still thinking about him after all this time. Then she entertained herself with newer fantasies. She thought that maybe she would set off to search for Mum. She imagined herself going from city to city, showing people a picture of her until one day a child would point out a house and she would see Mum with a new husband and kids, and she wouldn’t recognise Beeta at all. Sometimes in her imagination, Beeta would miss who she no longer was and cry, and would curse Mum in her heart for leaving them like that, without any warning.

  Once, after we had been sitting together at the edge of the forest for a long time, and had rolled cigarettes from the grass the way she had learned from Issa, and smoked and smoked, she said to me, “It’s life’s failure and its deficiencies that make someone a daydreamer. I don’t understand why prophets and philosophers didn’t see the significance in that. I think imagination is at the heart of reality, or at least, is the immediate definition and interpretation of reality.” I was staring at her, thinking about her words. I was coming to the conclusion that she was changing, shedding her skin once again when she said, “Aren’t dreams part of life’s reality? Or desires? Who doesn’t believe that the Huma bird, who made whoever it was flying over, happy, really existed at one time? Or the Simorgh, to which the lives of Sam, Zal, and Rostam were bound. All these books have been written about it and all of these paintings painted. What’s common to all of them?” She paused, gave a deep sigh, and then said finally, “I mean, when life is so deficient and mundane, why shouldn’t imagination supplement reality to liven it up?”

  Gradually her dreams became longer and her reveries increased. In the house’s estrangement, she discovered a new world in her extreme efforts to prevent her dreams from evaporating. She spent hours tossing and turning in bed after waking up, or would sit and think about her dreams, connect them, and seek to understand them in books by Ibn Sirin, Jung, and Freud, or the fiction of Mircae Eliade, Mehrdad Bahar, or Lévi-Strauss, hoping for a clear idea of the path her future would take.

  One night she dreamed she had turned into a fish and when she awoke the next day she said, “My dream was so realistic that I don’t know if I’m a human who dreamed she was fish, or a fish who’s dreaming she’s a human”. Although she expected to see signs of reality in her dreams, before the birth of the first fish, she had had a multitude of dreams about the sea and fish but her interpretation of them had been incorrect.

  Issa had once told her, “One day I will see you again when the dragonflies are mating”. But when she asked when their mating season was he never answered. Yet Issa did keep his promise, and now on one among many spring nights, among dragonflies pregnant with sleep, they saw each other again for the last time although, contrary to Beeta’s expectations, this meeting didn’t take place in a concealed corner of the grove encircled by flames. As it happened, when Beeta woke up in the morning she was sure she had spent all night making love to Issa. However, the more exact the details of his presence became, the less she could recall if Issa had come into her dream or if she had entered his. But either way the result was the same. Soon she felt all the signs of pregnancy. The first child was born in the tumult of evaporating dreams, astonishment, and the anticipation of entering a new life phase, the nature of which was a mystery. What she least expected on the threshold of this new stage of life was born in the hush of the dead of night in her bedroom, and fitted in a small glass bowl. It was a little goldfish. Horrified, she placed the bowl on the shelf and decided not to say anything about it to Dad. Her second child was born the morning she was screaming in panic, “Why is my bed wet, and full of sand and scallops?!” The fish was still alive, and Dad, who was drawn into the room with all the commotion, very quickly pulled it out from the bloodied sheets and put it in the bowl on the shelf with the other. Soon we had to add tanks because every morning she gave birth to another goldfish. The house was full of tanks and bowls, both large and small, which were placed on shelves, in the corners, on Sohrab’s empty bed and on mine, and even in Dad’s workroom. It added to the weight of the house’s isolation and estrangement. Like a large, lazy iguana, Dad had no choice but to crawl out from the leaden shadows and his sphere of oblivion several times a day to feed the poor animals. He thought to himself, “I could think of these as my grandchildren. My forlorn, scaled grandchildren.”

  Had she not come to her own rescue in time, Beeta might have bled to death one morning when a very large shell harbouring a giant pearl, got stuck in her cervix. Once again, she was close to drowning in the sea within her body. It was thus that several months later, when she was awoken by the slosh slosh of water beneath her, she was not too surprised, but when she fell to the ground as she got out of bed, she was worried. Pulling herself across the floor, she made it to the wall and managed to reach the light switch. When the light came on she saw Zakariya Razi, our great ancestor, standing ankle-deep in water, leaning against the wall, and saying gleefully, “I found the solution. This way you’re safe from ‘them’, and so too, the trunk”. Then before Beeta had the chance to say anything, he disappeared, happy and smiling, through the damp wall. Beeta’s legs had been transformed into a fish tail.

  For all of its marvel and beauty, in the beginning the tail horrified her. She sat in a corner all day looking at it, and gradually discovered what the beautiful thing was capable of, but was left wondering how she was supposed to go to the kitchen to cook, or to the grove to direct the workers. I had to come out of my treehouse more than usual to check on her, and to reassure her that change was necessary to reach her dreams. At the beginning, Dad thought it would be best for Beeta to stay put and for things to continue as they were. That very same day he filled
the large bathtub with water so Beeta could spend time there. Several days later however, he saw the cruelty in this. Sitting in a bathtub for hours staring at white tiles wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of fun, so he hung some pictures on the bathroom walls and placed some flower pots in the corners. But he soon saw this, too, was useless. So, he decided to seal the bathroom door with cement and remove its roof and fill the whole bathroom with water so she could enter through the ceiling any time she wanted a swim. Then he released all the fish from the bowls into it, too; this way, at least, she could keep herself occupied with her children.

  Despite this, all was not so simple. Any time Beeta needed to immerse herself into the bathroom ‘pool’, Dad would hoist her up in a large tub over the walls, through the nonexistent roof, with a rope and pulley he had installed that was as far as possible, from the prying eyes of the villagers and people working in the grove. Beeta was delighted that she had inadvertently forced Dad to move about, although she was afraid these efforts would be temporary and Dad would return to a state of inert silence. However, contrary to what she could have imagined, Dad then gave her all the shells he had collected during Sohrab’s absence so she would have something in addition to the fish to keep her entertained; and collected waterlilies from the swamp to grow in the water. Every day he brought her food through the roof. Finally, one day Dad called me over to help him build some steps and a balcony where the bathroom ceiling had been. It was thus that mealtimes gradually became enjoyable for all three of us. Dad would make food and, just like in the olden days when all five of us would picnic at the foot of Mt. Damavand, Darband, or the road to Chalus, we spread our things out on the new balcony next to Beeta and, looking at the view as we ate, we would talk about our day; and in the absence of Mum and Sohrab, we sometimes allowed ourselves to laugh and watch how the fish were growing, and the grass—which was gradually filling in the scorched circles. But Beeta was changing. She wanted to stay in the bath twenty-four hours a day, and could no longer lie on her bed; instead she slept deep underwater in the bathtub. Then her skin began to change: gradually her arms and shoulders and face became covered with beautiful, tiny golden-silvery scales; and when we weren’t looking, she would press herself against the walls of the bath to feed on tiny algae. Every afternoon as we sat talking for hours, she said it had been easy for her to leave Dad in order to seek her own destiny, but now she was willing to endure her tight space so as not to leave him alone, again, to his immobility and silence.