Haven’t you heard about the revolution?
How could I have heard about anything if I was in the basement day and night? I’d just heard the bullets and the distant explosions. But I had to see it, learn it. So I came down from the tower and ran through the slush and freezing snow to my room. I had to disguise myself before Assad arrived. A boy would be in danger on such a night. I wore Grandmother’s clothes, the same black shirt and skirt I had brought with me when I stole the last stack of her letters. But my hair, my damn hair again. It was neither a boy’s nor a girl’s. I wished I had one of the aunties’ wigs. I found a scarf, put it on, and headed toward the gate. Jangi shook himself and splashed dirty water on me. I became angry with him, shoved him and chased him away. I reached the gate and stepped outside. I was about to cross the street when a blinding light made me stop. It was as if it stripped me, seeing my insides as with an X-ray. A car pulled up very close. I stepped back, it moved forward and almost crushed me against the iron gate. Assad from the driver’s side and his friend, Mustafa, from the passenger’s side jumped out, ran at me, and grabbed me by the arms.
“Look! She’s wearing her grandmother’s dress! The lunatic bastard! You can go, Mustafa, I’ll teach her a lesson.”
Contemplating Murder
He dropped me on the bed and slapped me on both cheeks, then grabbed the collar of Grandmother’s silk shirt and ripped it down to the waist. He rolled me on my face, straddled me with his knees, and pulled the black skirt up. He spanked me with his big, rough hand and spat angry words from between his teeth.
“I warned you the first time, didn’t I? I said I’d spank you if you didn’t behave. Didn’t I warn you, damnit?” He hit me, and cursed. “So this means I can’t trust you. I have to tie you to the bed before I leave.” As he said this, he pulled a checkered handkerchief out of his pocket and tied my wrists behind my back. Now he found Grandmother’s scarf and tied my ankles to the bedpost. “I have work to do. I’m very busy these days. The mosque has given me a huge responsibility and I have to prove that I can handle it. They’re going to give me a gun tonight, and soon I’ll be wearing a uniform.” He got off the bed, wiped his sweat and examined the door. “The damn lock is broken. I’ll have to fix it later. I’ll be back in few hours.”
Just before leaving, he pulled the skirt down over my butt and laughed, not his usual, silly laugh, but a bitter, angry one. “Wearing the old hen’s clothes, huh? I have to take her fancy wardrobe to her sisters’. She’ll need it, because she’s not coming back. Oh, by the way, first thing in the morning my Brothers will be moving in and there’ll be two men guarding the gate. So don’t you ever imagine running away! Are you listening to me? We have occupied this house. Poor people are occupying rich people’s houses all around the city. This is my house now. I just need to find the fucking document and put my name on it. The country doesn’t have any law now.” He said this and dragged his booted foot behind him. “God loves me because He knows that I’m His devotee. How could I catch you both times you escaped if He didn’t love me? Huh? So, don’t stir because He’s watching you for me!” He said this and banged the door.
Most of the long night, I lay half-naked on my belly, drifting into sleep. Then I heard long nails scratching the windowpanes. It was Jangi behind the window, his long tongue hanging out, his wet eyes begging. Old friend, I’m tied up, I can’t come out and feed you, I whispered, and drifted into a light sleep. It had been a long time since I’d slept.
The pressure of a heavy weight woke me up. It was on my back, a tractor pressing me into the ground, burying me alive. It was dark, I couldn’t see anything, but I could smell sweat, vodka, and grease. He forced my head into the pillow and cursed. He had untied my wrists and ankles, but with his weight on me, I couldn’t move. His prickly, unshaven face brushed my neck.
“Damn you, damn you and your mother who ruined my life! Damn both of you!”
He pressed my head down with his right hand, pulled up my skirt and said, “No, I won’t mess with your virginity now—that’s for the wedding night. But how about your little ass?” He spanked me and I screamed, but into the pillow, into my own mouth.
Tearing winds blew inside me and released their old voices, but I was deaf and couldn’t hear; I was blind and couldn’t see. I was empty—the winds filled me and I lost all my senses.
Now I heard the sound of a spoon nervously hitting the side of a drinking glass. He dissolved something in water, turned me over, lifted my head and brought the glass to my mouth.
“Drink it! Come on!”
I took a sip.
“The whole damn thing!”
I drank the bitter water.
“It’s your own stuff, your pills. Sleep! I have to take a nap too. I have work to do early in the morning.” He said this and collapsed on my bed. I moved to the edge and when I heard his snores, tiptoed to the desk. There was a handgun next to his key chain. Khanum’s marble box was on the desk too. I sat, half-naked, staring at the gun. The pills would cloud my head any minute and I’d fall asleep. I had only a short time to act—maybe a few seconds. I could lift the gun, wrap it in a shirt and shoot him so that no one would hear anything. But what if I collapsed and fell asleep? His friends who were guarding the gate would come in and find us. They’d throw me in jail for murder.
Or, I could shoot him first, then shoot myself. But how absurd my short life would be. Having found nothing. Having gone nowhere. Did I find the sapphire feather of the Bird of Knowledge? Did I find my mother? Did I find my father’s revolution? Did I wake Baba-Ji?
It wasn’t easy to kill. After death—my death or his—things would cease happening. I had to make things happen. Maybe I could get out of here somehow. Maybe I could find Taara—she’d play her setar and sooth my pains. Maybe Father would write a long poem, recite it, and say it was meant for me. Maybe I could walk on a long street, carefree, my hands in my pockets, whistling a tune. Maybe a brown-skinned woman would stop me in the street and ask, “Are you Talkhoon?” I’d nod and she’d say, “I’m your mother, Soraya! I’ve been searching for you!” Maybe Baba-Ji would wake up, comb his white hair, turn on his Firebird music, and sit at his lap desk and finish the last chapter of his book. Maybe he’d raise his head from his manuscript, gaze at me and say, “Talkhoon, did you doubt? Did you ever doubt the Bird of Knowledge?”
Winds howled in my head and dark clouds filled my skull. Now even if I wanted to stretch my arm and pick up the gun, I couldn’t. Too much thinking. Wasted time. I lay my heavy head on the desk, thinking that everyone that I’d ever loved was frozen in time. Baba, Taara, Vafa, Daaye, Father—even Khanum-Jaan. Only us, this man and I, were still alive. This man, who was not my half uncle anymore, who was not that dumb, dirty-looking Uncle Assad anymore; only this man, who was a complete stranger, and I, Talkhoon, the bitter-blood, were moving in time. Things happened only here, in this basement room, to us.
The Vine-Covered Gate
I heard the unmistakable sound of teeth biting into an apple and opened my eyes. I saw him sitting with his back against the desk, facing the bed, eating a red apple.
“Did you sleep enough?” he asked, munching. “You slept like a stone! I have to go now. As I said yesterday, I’m bringing the boys here today. So behave yourself. Don’t leave your room unless I tell you. Your grandfather is going to stay in his room until I find a vacant space in a hospital for him. Hospitals are full these days; we have to wait. But I’m checking on him regularly. He’s still alive! Poor Baba-Ji. All of Khanum’s antiques are gone, except for this last piece. No one wants him!”
He took another bite of the apple and threw the rest on my desk. Then he picked up his handgun and shoved it under his belt. There was a machine gun leaning against the door; he limped toward it, picked it up and stopped.
“Before the Brothers occupy the house, go up and eat something. There is still plenty of food in the kitchen and pantry. Then come back and rest. You have to fatten up. You’re all skin and bone!”
After he left, I stayed in bed and looked at the courtyard. The deep, artificial sleep had clouded my head. I couldn’t remember the details of yesterday—only bits and pieces. I wanted to escape, Father had come—rain and then snow. I wore Khanum-Jaan’s clothes; Assad and Mustafa held my arms. Curses. Smell of vodka. Slaps. But I couldn’t remember anything more. Did he touch me? I looked at myself—instead of Khanum’s clothes, I had on my blue sleeping gown.
I slipped out of bed and climbed the steps to the courtyard. My knees shook. The cold air pinched my skin. The day was dry, sunless and still. Jangi ran toward me, jumped up on his hind legs and hugged me with his front legs. Boor-boor made a husky sound that wasn’t quite a “Boorrr.” She was excited too. I stroked the dog and examined the bird’s wings. Some of her green feathers were broken.
But I didn’t have much time to stay with the animals. I had to see my grandfather before the Brothers arrived; maybe this would be the last time, maybe Assad would take him to a hospital today—a third rate, poor people’s hospital where he’d die.
Baba-Ji’s room was bare—no furniture. The tapestry of the Simorgh was missing from the wall. The tall bookshelves were empty and in the middle of the room a few piles of books were ready to be sacked and thrown away. But he was on his recliner in the same position, half-sitting, half-lying, in a deep sleep. He was the same and was not the same. He had shrunken and I could swear that his legs in his blue pajamas were shorter and his face was thinner. My old grandfather had become a child. He was a white-haired Prince Zaal, abandoned by his family, waiting for the Simorgh to save him. Meanwhile he slept the longest night of his life, without light and with no bird in the sky.
I went to the window and looked out. Assad hadn’t been bluffing. A jeep was parked in front of the gate and two armed Brothers paced up and down the sidewalk. Across the street, where Vahid in his white raincoat had slipped love letters into Taara’s hand, a tank sat, squat, muddy, and ugly, but not empty. Something like the lid of a can opened and a hooded head popped out. It looked around, then disappeared inside the tank’s belly.
Back at the pile of books, I searched until I found the cardboard box of the original manuscript of the Simorgh book. I pulled it out from under the books and sat down on the cold floor, recently robbed of its carpet. Leafing through the manuscript to make sure all the chapters were there, I glanced at my grandfather’s small, round cursive—his little green words, fruits of half a century of steady work. I began reading the preface, first in a whisper, then louder. He must have written these lines decades ago, before his sons were born.
When he was a small child residing in the deep quietude of the mountain skirts of Azerbaijan, in the house of his father who was a knowledgeable but humble school teacher and scholar of Persian and Azeri folklore, in the harsh winter nights of the Aras River area where the scent of snow rode upon the wind, he sat by the fire next to his seven brothers and sisters, all wrapped in thick sheepskin coats and listened to Dada, their father, whose round spectacles sat on the tip of his nose, reading the old, forgotten legends that he strived to resurrect from the dust of neglect and oblivion.
The seed of the notion of the bird, the mighty Simorgh—the Angha, the Rukh, the Feng-Huang, the Phoenix, the Ho-ho, the Ilerion, the Firebird, and many more, in many different lands—was planted in his small head, the head of a nine-year-old. He played with the notion, fed it with his ambition and imagination and the tales of his scholar father, and before puberty he knew what the path of his future would be.
What was this crimson, gold, purple bird, with jeweled eyes and sweeping sapphire tail feathers? Why did the Greek writers give the Egyptian bird, Bennu, a symbol of the gods Ra and Osiris, the name Phoenix and associate it with the sun? But shouldn’t he go even further back to prehistoric Persia, and trace the bird’s origin to the Epic of Shahnameh? Won’t he find the same bird, with the same descriptions as before, now symbolic of “knowledge,” restoring justice in the unjust world of the kings and warriors? Why should the wise Persian bird—that in some manuscripts was called Senmurv, or Dog-bird, and had the powers of reason and human speech—shelter the abandoned, white-haired Prince Zaal in her nest in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge? And wasn’t this Tree of Knowledge the same dryandra tree in which the legendary Chinese bird, Feng Huang, built her nest? The same Feng Huang who was born of the sun and was the source of the Chinese musical scale? Sun, knowledge, wisdom, justice, music? What was the connection between these? The boy wondered.
His road was long and unpaved. The blue horizon that separated the vast sky and the sea of knowledge seemed unreachable. Little had been done; no one had linked the myth, the archetype, the legend, the poetry, the folklore, the history, the illusion and the reality of the archaeological discoveries to find the truth of the Bird. If the bird was Virtue, Justice, Truth, Knowledge, Humanity, Art, the promised Savior, one of the forms of the numerous shapes of God, no one had done much to discover this. So how could he, the young, unknown, unequipped scholar in a remote corner of an unfortunate country, at the far edge of the Near East, at the beginning of a strange century, be the one who would prepare seven iron shoes, seven iron canes, seven iron hoods, set off on a voyage through the dark and narrow passages of uncharted mountains in search of the lost bird?
But his doubts didn’t last long. At age twenty-one, when he graduated from—
I pressed the manuscript to my chest and whispered, “Baba-Ji, your book will be with me. I’ll keep it here, against my heart,” and dashed out of the room because I heard doors opening and closing. But it was only the wind that whistled and rushed into the house and escaped from the open doors. I stood in the dim lobby and listened. Upstairs, in the third floor’s master bedroom, the old springs of the bare bed creaked. Unaware of time, Grandpa Vazir and Grandma Negaar lay together on their ancient bed, whispering. Ghosts could not perceive change. For them, time did not exist.
I walked, barefoot, in the wild garden. The sun was cold in the sky, unable to warm the earth. I walked under the willows and stopped by the water storage and looked inside the black hole. Nothing could be seen in that immense darkness. A foul odor—the smell of standing water, dead animals, and rotting leaves—rose in the air. I ran toward the right edge of the garden, pulled away the tangled twigs of the overgrown trees and walked toward the depth. It was as if someone else led the way. I didn’t know my destination, but she knew. She took me to that hidden gate, covered with thick vines. I stood there and remembered that once before I had walked to this end of the garden and had even thought about escape. This was the eastern gate opening onto a back street. Assad’s guards were not here. I looked at the thick, tangled layer of vines and ivy covering the gate. This needed more than a day’s work—many days’ work. I had to cut the hard, ancient branches with a sharp knife and work my way out gradually. With the Brothers inside the house and Assad in and out of my room, I couldn’t do it. I lost heart and turned away. But then I stopped and stepped closer to the gate. I touched the thick branches and dry twigs. I had to find a knife before they occupied the house. I had to hide it somewhere in my room. I’d cut the vines, twig by twig, branch by branch, whenever I had a chance.
Back in the house, I found Daaye’s collection of knives hanging on the kitchen wall. I took two, in case one broke or went dull. I left the kitchen just as the Brothers’ truck pulled through the front gate. When I hid the knives in the depths of my crowded closet, I realized that Baba’s manuscript was still pressed against my body. My left hand had secured it so tightly against my chest that when I stretched my arm, it hurt. On my crowded desk I found my father’s poem; I unfolded the old piece of paper and glanced at it. On top of the page, he’d written, “For Taara, my setar player.” I smoothed the paper and lay it between two pages of the Simorgh book and hid the manuscript in the closet with the knives. Feeling a strange lightness, as if I were clean and new inside and nothing could hurt me, I took the longest shower of my life.
Now I pulled
the dirty sheets and blankets off my bed and took them to the abandoned laundry room next to my room. I covered the bed with fresh sheets that Daaye had stacked in one of the closets. I picked up as many pieces of clothing as I could manage in a short time and shoved them into the closet. I cleaned up, then went to the bathroom, took all the old and new bottles of pills from the drug cabinet and emptied them into the toilet and flushed it. I lay on my clean bed and felt my body’s pulsing. Heart, temples, wrists, neck—all thumped like drums. But there was a hidden pulse too, somewhere within, somewhere vague. This solitary drum tried to remind me of something that I could not quite remember—something alarming and dangerous. It told me that I had to use the knife, unveil the hidden gate and escape. When I saw Assad’s boots behind the window, my pulse ceased. I closed my eyes and pretended sleep.
“Here, I brought you warm food from outside. Rice and meat. Get up and eat, before it gets cold. I know you didn’t eat. Get up! Leave all the sleeping for the night. I’ll be with the boys upstairs. We’re storing artillery up there. Now Drum Tower is one of the most important headquarters of the Holy Revolution. Weren’t Khanum-Jaan’s ancestors war viziers and Drum Tower a fortress? Well then, I’m the war vizier now! Get up, Talkhoon, and see what a revolution means! Get up and look at Assad! He’s wearing a uniform now and carrying Grandpa Vazir’s ivory cane!”
The Drum Tower Page 14