She went over to the pool Dad had made for his grandchildren and saw the fish, some of which had grown so much they were as long as the pool. There were so many, that they were writhing around on top of each other. Although she was very happy to see me, it was clear she planned to punish herself by asking nothing. She wanted to torture herself every day, thinking about Beeta and Dad’s fate and watching how the wrinkles in her face deepened. Even when she saw that the bathroom door had been cemented closed, its roof removed, and that the water lilies had grown out over the roof into the backyard and found their way to the pool, she didn’t ask any questions.
In all of her suffering, I felt she had fundamentally changed. She was no longer that delicate darling, only daughter, from Tehran that Dad only ever spoke to with kindness. Now she was experienced, world-wise and tough; she let daily afflictions pass through her heart but didn’t allow them to stop. Now it was her time to wait. Once she had taken care of everything in the house, had single-handedly built a new pool and transferred half the fish into it; once she had pulled and burned all the weeds in the entire five-hectare grove, and pruned the trees, she prepared herself for a long wait. She changed into clean clothes and sat on the porch with a cup of tea until on one of many days, in one year of many that lay ahead, Dad would arrive and she would say to him, “I wouldn’t have died before you came, Hushang!”
The waiting took a very long time. Much longer than Mum had patience for or the grove, in the face of weeds, could bear. Once again, the grove languished under unwanted growth and unpruned branches while quietly continuing to exist; just like Mum between kitchen, bedroom, and porch.
In the years of Mum’s waiting in Razan, and Dad’s in Evin Prison and Darband, on a foggy morning of an ordinary day when Mum had long since lost the fortitude and physical strength to tend to the grove and keep the house free of creeping vines, ants and lizards; and the inhabitants of Razan had become used to war, black snow and the absence of their sons and mothers; and the whole story of the First Soothsayer, Effat’s black love and Razan’s holy fire had become mere distant, inconceivable memories; the brazen sound of chainsaws aroused the villagers from their sleep, once and for all. Behind the chainsaws, the lorries and trailers arrived and flattened the grasses and wild flowers, felled massive trees with trunks as big around as houses—along with hundreds of dreams and thousands of life events—loaded them up and carted them off to the city.
When the isolation and virginity of the village was so thoroughly violated overnight, the people were left wondering how they’d ended up in a game whose rules they hadn’t written. The game of aggressor and victim. A game in which it didn’t take long for the victims to become the aggressors; become victim aggressors. At the beginning, the villagers did what they could to survive the changes forced upon them by the chainsaws and all that came with them. But it wasn’t long before they forgot their myths and dreams, their history and balance and, saws in hand, they themselves attacked the Hyrcanian forest, the forest entrusted to them by their ancestors. There was no longer any time of day or night when the sound of chainsaws, lorries and trailers was not to be heard. They flagrantly rent the dreams of the forest and thousands of years of jinns and spirits. They dug up the graves of their Zoroastrian ancestors and looted their daily objects and jewellery, selling them as antiquities to low-level intelligence agents. In the depths of the forest they squashed the luminous blue butterflies under their new plastic boots freshly imported from the city, and the ringing of their mobile phones made the grasshoppers and butterflies take flight. The birds migrated, firefly larvae committed suicide in their eggs, and cicadas would not come out of their cocoons.
While the villagers thought that they had never been happier with their new, air-conditioned houses, mobile phones, vases full of plastic flowers and shelves stocked with chips, Pepsi and gum, Razan was collapsing at Roza’s old feet and before her feeble eyes. And yet, if it hadn’t been for Mum’s timely shrewdness, profiteers would have attacked, thinking that our house, once again covered in moss, had been empty for years. They would have pillaged and murdered all the trees in the grove with their chainsaws.
The day that several people from the village and city came with their chainsaws and lorries and broke the rusty chain and lock on the gate to the grove, trampled the forget-me-nots and green and blue lizards, and cut down the old greengage trees as they went, it was Mum who sat up straight, grabbed the axe, went up to them, gave one of them a hard slap in the face, and said, “Take one more step if you dare, and I’ll split you in two!” The villagers, led by Issa and thinking the people from Tehran who had inhabited this abandoned house had long since died or left, ran away at the sight of this old woman with long, grey, wild hair because they thought it must be ghosts that protected the house and land. Only Issa stood his ground. He took a step forward and in his local accent dared ask, “Ma’am, do you know Miss Beeta?” Mum had never seen Issa’s sunburnt face, and so she turned around and walked away without answering. But Issa set off after her and, with his voice lost in the rustling of Mum’s long dress and her steps on the grass, he said, “Please tell me. I have to see her.”
Mum was sorely mistaken when she thought she could put them in their place with one slap. She didn’t realise this was just the beginning. Children who, not too long ago, viewed with respect the family that had helped in the reconstruction of their homes and land after the one hundred-and-seventy- seven-day black snowfall, had now become aimless young and middle-aged men whose imported city laws allowed them to encroach on any “outsider” property. These laws, very belatedly and via Hossein who this time had returned to Razan with chainsaws, taught the villagers they could call rich people from Tehran “arrogant” and “Shah-sympathisers”, and loot their belongings. It was thus that when rumours of Mum’s presence in the big house spread, the harassment began.
Young rabble would gather around the house at night and throw stones at its pitched roof, break the windows and recite obscene, sexual poems. Once, in the middle of the night, five of the most foul came onto the porch and wanted the old woman to open the doors and sleep with them. Mum was furious and, for the first time in her whole life, she asked the Zoroastrian ghosts of the grove and her ancestors to come to her aid. Mum had not really put much hope in their help and so, when they arrived soon after, she shed tears of joy. First, she hugged her mother whom she hadn’t even dreamed about in years and then, together with her father, grandparents, me, and the Zoroastrian ghosts, we slowly opened the glass door and stepped out onto the porch. When the foul men saw us, they froze and several wet their pants. Then, screaming and falling to the ground in their panicked haste to get away, they ran. By the next day, rumours in Razan had it that the house was inhabited by ghosts. The ghosts didn’t just save the house and grove that night from takeover and looting by the inhabitants of Razan who were running wild, thanks to the cry for Islamic equality, but also prepared one of the best nights Mum had ever had. After the foul men had left, they pulled out chalices of wine and, together with the finest foods and meat, drank to each other’s health, recounted memories, laughed, and danced until morning to an old record of Qamar that Mum found hidden behind a wardrobe.
After that night, Mum no longer felt lonely and, despite her many years and only God knew how many, she straightened her back and gave a loud command to the ferns and fungus and grasses that poked up between the mosaic tiles throughout the house, to retreat. She destroyed the ants and lizards, and it was clear she would do anything she could to stay alive until Dad arrived. She always remembered in time—but sometimes she would act as though she didn’t recognise me at all. This didn’t bode well, but I had promised myself I would stay to protect her from assault by creeping ferns, the cold, lizards and men.
And yet, I believe it was Issa who saved Mum from a siege of memories, yearning, the frrrt frrrt of the creeping plants, and rog rog of the tree frogs who clung to the windows with their sticky feet. The day after the villagers had so obsce
nely attacked the grove with chainsaws, Mum awoke to the sound of a sickle cutting back the grass and weeds in slow, even movements, perhaps in an effort to find traces of the scorched circles of so many years ago, and saw Issa. She wanted to shoo him out with her cane but before she could act, Issa said he had been the gardener there years before and now was willing to work for nothing to help the old lady of the house. Issa stayed for months, and with regret, remorse, and memories of his distant past with Beeta, he let the sickle, slowly, meditatively shear the grove, hoping perhaps to find a blackened stone as a souvenir of those years, underneath the thorns and thistle and grass.
Mum got used to his presence and sometimes even took him tea or food, but she never spoke with him, leaving his enduring question unanswered. She didn’t answer because she herself didn’t know and was too proud to ask me, “Where is Beeta, really?”
Mum was sitting on the porch as she usually did, allowing the flies of routine to pass over her wrinkled skin but trying as much as possible to keep them from harming her heart. She was clutching a bunch of small pieces of paper, looking intently at the words written on each of them. She hadn’t found a place for some: love, dream, kiss, heartsickness, memory, sorrow, loneliness, fear, escape, infidelity, yearning, lovemaking, hope, anguish, desperation, death, God.
Objects in the house had been labelled with what remained of her memory. She taped a label on everything: the vase, table, books, refrigerator, paintings, paper. For several days, her mind was busy wondering where she should put “love” so she wouldn’t forget it. She laughed at the thought of labelling the bed “love”! She thought, It doesn’t get more stupid than that. Then for the first time she doubted a bit the order of the words. Words were moving around in her mind to form correct sentences. Maybe it would be more correct to think, More doesn’t it stupid get! She looked again at the pieces of paper in her hand. Take this one: heartsick. What should she stick “heartsickness” on? But it didn’t take her more than a few moments to realise her problem was not just her memory, words or names, but her sense of sentence structure had also become muddled. She wondered if she would even be able to express heartsickness if Hushang came back. Should she say, “Missed you I” or “You missed I”? Or perhaps it was enough just to say, “Missed”. As she was playing with the pieces of paper in her hand, her philosophical understanding began to doubt the words in her head. She thought, What ridiculous linguistic rules I’ve been dealing with all these years, and as she verbalised it, she herself was surprised to hear, “I was ridiculous with language dealings in the rules of the year”.
Mum got up, went inside the house and returned with a needle and thread. She sat down again in her usual chair. She took a look around to make sure I wasn’t nearby. Then, with utter serenity, she slowly sewed each of the pieces of paper onto her long black dress. When she had finished, she took a deep breath and let the hot summer sun evaporate her remaining memory and carry it up to the sky. Over her heart, she had sewn: love, heartsickness, lovemaking, sorrow, God, and hope.
And yet, on that beautiful sunny day, wrapped in the fragrance of secrets and dog-rose and wild primrose, as she sat there in the heat of the sun, fiddling with words and letting their melancholia sway in her head, her mind in a turbulent onrush of sleep and waking, consciousness and oblivion, she didn’t know that a few minutes later Dad, old, shaking, and out of breath, would appear before her.
17
One of the men standing at a distance and taking a video yelled, “Fuck her! Cool. I’ll Bluetooth it to everyone!”
The young man stopped trying to kiss Beeta, the helpless mermaid. Three other men came to help, twisting Beeta’s arms tightly and holding them over her head so the young man could unzip his pants. Feeling around to find her vagina among the beautiful scales that shone silver like the moon in mid-cycle, with the other hand he pulled out his penis that had just swollen into a large erection. But no matter how much he groped and poked around with his fingers, he couldn’t find anything. Curious and annoyed, he sat on Beeta and began examining and touching her. Finally, he jumped up and cried, “It doesn’t even have a hole!”
For the last two hours, the locals had surrounded her and had been yelling, “Kill the mermaid, kill it!” Beeta, the mermaid who in the last few years had become younger and more beautiful by the day, had covered her naked breasts with her arms and long hair, and was cowering, terrified and trembling, as she looked into their greedy, animal eyes. The men had completely surrounded her so that she couldn’t get away. One of them, wearing a Revolutionary Guard uniform and a long black moustache and beard, was pointing his gun at her, scowling deeply.
An old fisherman was dangling a fishhook with a brown worm attached to it over Beeta’s head, laughing with rotten teeth and saying, “Eat it!” He rubbed the hook and worm over Beeta’s mouth and laughed. Beeta turned away with revulsion and looked out at the sea from between the sweaty bodies of her attackers, the orange vendors, fisherman and rice sellers. It was so close. Close enough that it would only take one jump and this nightmare would be over; and she would promise herself never, ever to set foot on dry land again, or make even the slightest effort to see us. Oh, what a mistake it had been to follow the dream she had had the night before, only to end up here. There was no trace of us left in her fish-like mind, but that accursed dream had suddenly brought everything back and she had come to the beach in the hope of seeing one of us, after all these years.
The yelling had increased again. More people had gathered around. Men had scrambled to park their tractors, motorcycles, trucks of citrus fruits and fish and rice— rushing over to watch. Those who were silent, those who perhaps didn’t agree that she should be killed, pulled out their phones and began filming and taking photos with their calloused workers’ hands. The few women who had stood with curiosity a little way back, very quickly returned home because the men had told them, “It’s a man thing”. The rest kept shouting together, “Kill it! Kill it! It’s a sign of the Last Days”. In the commotion, several people were bickering. One was saying, “Why do you want to kill her? What did the poor thing do?”
“Can’t you see she’s naked?!”
“This one should be killed to be a lesson to the rest. What if they want to come, too?”
The one who had dissented asked, “Which rest?”
“The rest of them … mythical creatures!”
The dissenter said, “She’s real … What do you mean by ‘mythical’? … Can’t you see her?”
“Then where’s she been all this time? What? Now demons and jinns and fairies are supposed to be real!”
Again, the dissenter insisted, “But come on! She didn’t hurt anybody. We should talk to her.”
Then, continuing to film, he pushed the others aside, and kneeling down next to the mermaid, said to the terrified Beeta, “What are you doing here?”
Seeing the compassion in his eyes, sobbing, Beeta wailed, “I just came to see my mother and father. That’s all. If you let me go, I swear I’ll leave and never come back!”
The men didn’t understand anything. Although she easily understood human speech, for them her voice sounded something akin to a dolphin’s. Somebody laughed and said, “What a funny voice she has”. The man who was opposed to killing her didn’t understand anything either, but out of pity he pretended he had. That’s why he continued, “Is anyone else coming? I mean … any mythical creatures?”
Surprised, Beeta said, “Mythical creatures? How am I supposed to know? I just came to visit my family. I beg you, have mercy! Let me go home!”
No one heard anything but the dolphin-like sound, and yet again, the man asked, “What are their names? Tell me and we’ll let you go”.
Crying with anguish, Beeta dug her fingernails into her cheeks and screamed, “How am I supposed to know? I only know the fish and the merpeople. We live a long way away. Way over there.” She waved her arm towards the other side of the Caspian Sea.
The young man looked in that direction
and said, “I think she’s trying to say the others are coming from the other side of the sea”.
Horrified, a murmur rose from the men. But still the young man, turning to them, said, “Let her go. She didn’t do anything.”
One said, “Where? So she can go and tell the rest to come?”
Another said, “Oh, just think: one day you wake up and see mermaids, jinns and spirits coming at us from the sea and forest. How awful!”
The other answered, “Security has become so bad! God protect us all.”
Bewildered, Beeta looked at the men’s mouths. One moment she was hopeful she would be released, the next moment, she was despairing, tired, dirty, covered in blood and crying. Her whole body hurt. She wanted them to leave her alone to cry and die on her own. She had been so foolish to think she could come to the beach and wait for us in broad daylight!
While the men were busy talking, she spotted a little corner of sea through their boot-clad feet. One jump was all it would take. Using every ounce of energy she had left, she jumped, slid on the sand through the muddy boots, and dragged herself towards the water; but the men saw, and grabbing her by the arms and shoulders and tail, threw her back into their midst.
Shoving back the man who opposed her execution back, the other men moved in closer to the mermaid. They zoomed in on Beeta’s firm, white breasts with their phones, on her back and her beautiful wavy tail. As he filmed, one young man said to the person standing next to him, “How cool! How beautiful!”
The other answered, “Look at her hair. Check out her round arse. I want some of that!”
The circle of people tightened as they moved even closer. Eventually, someone came close enough to touch Beeta’s shoulder. Feeling his hand become damp and slimy, he gave a loud laugh and said, “That’s awesome! She’s like fish!” He sniffed his hand and said, “Smells like fish too. Dead fish.”
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree Page 22