The Blind Owl and Other Stories
Page 23
At this time I felt very happy. My senses undulated above me. But I felt that I wasn’t asleep. The last feeling that I remember of the pleasure and ecstasy of the opium is that my legs had become cold and senseless, my body motionless. I felt that I was going, drifting far away. But as soon as its influence waned, an infinite sorrow gripped me. I felt that my senses were returning. It was very difficult and unpleasant. I was cold. For more than half an hour I trembled violently. I could hear my teeth chattering. Then came fever, burning fever, and sweat poured from my body. My heart laboured, my breathing had become difficult. The first thought that occurred to me was that all my work was undone, and things hadn’t turned out as they should have. I was surprised at my useless endurance. I realized that a dark power and an unspeakable misfortune were fighting me.
With difficulty I sat up partly in the bed. I pressed the light switch. It became light. I don’t know why my hand went towards the small mirror that was on the bedside table. I saw that my face had swollen and had a sallow colouring. Tears fell from my eyes. My heart struggled hard. I told myself that at least my heart was ruined. I turned off the light and fell back in the bed.
No, my heart wasn’t ruined. Today it’s better. A bad product has no buyers. The doctor came to see me. He listened to my heart, took my pulse, looked at my tongue, took my temperature, the same things that doctors do everywhere, as soon as they see a patient. He gave me a mixture of baking powder and quinine. He didn’t understand at all what my pain was! No one can understand my pain! These medicines are laughable. There in rows on the table are seven or eight kinds of medicine. I was laughing to myself. What a theatre this is.
The clock ticks incessantly by my ear. From outside come the sounds of car and bicycle horns, the clang of trains. I look at the wallpaper, the deep purple leaves and white flowers. At intervals on the branches two blackbirds are seated facing one another. My head is empty, my stomach twisting, my body broken. The newspapers which I have thrown on top of the cabinet lie there in odd positions. When I look it suddenly seems as if everything is strange to me. I even seem a stranger to myself. I wonder why I’m still alive. Why do I breathe? Why do I get hungry? Why do I eat? Why do I walk? Why am I here? Who are these people that I see, and what do they want from me?…
Now I know myself well, just the way I am, no more, no less. I can’t do anything. I have fallen on the bed tired and exhausted. My thoughts revolve, whirl, hour by hour. I have become bored in their hopeless circle. My own existence astonishes me. How bitter and frightening it is when someone feels his own existence! When I look in the mirror I laugh at myself. To me my face seems so unknown and strange and laughable…
This thought has occurred to me many times: I’ve become invulnerable. The invincibility that has been described in legends is my tale. It was a miracle. Now I believe all kinds of superstitions and rubbish. Amazing thoughts pass before my eyes. It was a miracle. Now I know that in his endless cruelty, God or some other snake in the grass created two kinds of beings: the fortunate and the unfortunate. He supports the first group, while making the second group increase their torture and oppression by their own hands. Now I believe that a mean, brutal force, an angel of misfortune, is with some people.
* * *
Finally I’ve been left alone. The doctor left just now. I’ve picked up paper and pencil. I want to write. I don’t know what. Either I have nothing to write or I can’t write because there’s so much. This itself is a misfortune. I don’t know. I can’t cry. Maybe if I could it would soothe me a little bit! I can’t. I look like a lunatic. I saw in the mirror that my hair is a mess. My eyes are open and empty. I think my face shouldn’t have looked like this at all. Many people’s faces don’t go with their thoughts. This really irritates me. All I know is that I hate myself. I eat and hate myself, walk and hate myself, think and hate myself. How obstinate. How frightening! No, this was a supernatural power, a loathsome disease. Now I believe these kind of things. Nothing will affect me any more. I took cyanide and it had no effect on me, I ate opium and I’m still alive! If a dragon bites me, the dragon will die! No, no one would believe it. Had these poisons spoilt? Wasn’t the amount sufficient? Was it more than the normal dose? Had I mistaken the amount when I looked in the medical book? Or does my hand turn the poison into antidote? I don’t know. These thoughts have come to me hundreds of times. There’s nothing new in them. I remember I have heard that when a scorpion is surrounded by a ring of fire it stings itself – isn’t there a ring of fire around me?
Outside my window on the black edge of the tin roof, where rainwater has collected, two sparrows are sitting. One of them puts its beak into the water, then lifts its head. The other one, crouching next to it, is pecking at itself. I just moved. Both of them chirped and flew off together. The weather is cloudy. Sometimes the pale sun appears behind a bit of cloud. The tall buildings opposite are all covered with soot, black and sad under the pressure of this heavy, rainy weather. The distant, suffocated sound of the city can be heard.
There in the drawer of my table are the malicious cards with which I told my fortune, those lying cards which fooled me. The funniest thing is that I still tell my fortune with them!
What can be done? Fate is stronger than I am.
It would be good if, with the experience of life that a person has, he could be born again and start his life anew. But which life? Is it in my hands? What’s the use? A blind and frightening force rules us. There are people whose fate is directed by a sinister star. They break under this burden, and they want to be broken…
I have neither wishes nor grudges left. I have lost whatever in me was human. I let it be lost. In life one must become either an angel, a human being, or an animal. I became none of these. My life was lost forever. I was born selfish, clumsy, and miserable. Now, it is impossible for me to go back and adopt another way. I can’t follow these useless shadows any more, grappling with life, what firm reason and logic do you have? I no longer want to pardon or to be pardoned, to go to the left or to the right. I want to close my eyes to the future and forget the past.
No, I can’t flee from my fate. Aren’t they the truth, these crazy thoughts, these feelings, these passing fancies which come to me? In any case they seem more natural and less artificial than my logical thoughts. I suppose I am free, yet I can’t resist my fate. My reins are in the hands of my fate, fate is what pulls me from one side to another. The meanness, the baseness of life, which can’t be fought against. Stupid life.
Now I am neither living nor sleeping. Nothing pleases me and nothing bothers me. I have become acquainted with death, used to it. It is my only friend. It is the only thing which heartens me. I remember the Montparnasse Cemetery. I don’t envy the dead anymore. I am now counted in their world. I, too, am with them. I am buried alive…
I’m tired. What trash have I written? I say to myself, “Go, lunatic, throw away the paper and the pencil, throw them away. That’s enough rambling. Shut up. Tear it up, lest this rubbish fall into somebody’s hands. How would they judge me? But I wouldn’t be embarrassed, nothing is important to me. I laugh at the world and whatever is in it. However harsh their judgement of me might be, they don’t know that I have already judged myself even harder. They’ll laugh at me; they don’t know that I laugh at them more. I am sick of myself and of everyone who reads this trash.
These notes and a pack of cards were in his drawer. He himself was lying in bed. He had forgotten to breathe.
Paris, Esfand 11, 1308
(3rd March 1928)
Acknowledgements
The Publisher wishes to thank Nushin Arbabzadah for her extensive editorial work and Homa Katouzian for writing the introduction.
Notes
p.7, Nouruz: The national festival of Iran. It begins on 21st March and lasts for thirteen days. It is the custom to spend the last day of Nouruz picnicking in the country.
p.24, Shah Abdolazim: A mosque
and cemetery situated among the ruins of Rey, a few miles south of Tehran. Rey (the Rhages of the Greeks) was an important centre from at least the eighth century bc and continued to be one of the great cities of Iran down to its destruction by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century ad.
p.27, krans… abbasi: Coins worth respectively five pence and one pence.
p.37, bed unrolled: In old Persia bedsteads were not used. The bed roll (mattress, sheet, pillows and quilt) was stowed away in the daytime and unrolled on the floor at night.
p.38, Karbala: The burial place of the Shia martyr Hosein, the Iraq city of Karbala is one of the Muslim holy cities to which pilgrimages are made. Water in which a little earth from Karbala had been steeped was employed as medicine.
p.39, Nishapur… Balkh: A reminiscence of a quatrain of Omar Khayyam:
Since life passes, whether sweet or bitter,
Since the soul must pass the lips, whether in Nishapur or in Balkh,
Drink wine, for after you and I are gone many a moon
Will pass from old to new, from new to old.
p.55, Ezraïl: The Angel of Death.
p.58, huzvaresh: A convention of Pahlavi writing by which the scribe substituted an Aramaic word for a Persian one.
p.67, korsi: A stool under which is placed a lit brazier and over which blankets are spread. People recline with the lower part of their bodies under the blankets.
p.71, begged… get better: It is the custom on the last Wednesday before Nouruz for people to disguise themselves and go begging. The alms received on this occasion are believed to bring good luck.
p.78, La elaha ell’ Allah: “There is no god but God”, part of the Muslim profession of faith.
p.87, dirhems… peshiz: Medieval coins, corresponding roughly to the modern kran and abbasi respectively.
p.95, besmellah: “In the name of God”. The formula pronounced by Muslims at the beginning of any important undertaking.
p.96, sneeze… pause: A Persian superstition requires that, if anyone present should sneeze, any action which one may have been about to undertake be postponed.
p.97, got pregnant at the baths: It was popularly believed that women could become pregnant through using the public baths, which were frequented (at different hours) by men also. The belief could be exploited to provide an explanation of otherwise inexplicable pregnancies.
p.97, first leap… old man’s face: Another popular belief was that a baby would resemble the person at whom the mother happened to be looking when it stirred for the first time in the womb.
p.105, Karbala: See note to p. 39.
p.116, Darolfonoun: The name of a school in Tehran.
p.124, Pass Qale: A village north of Tehran.
p.126, Aide Qorban: A day of sacrifice in the Muslim religion.
p.132, I divorced my wife three times: According to Islamic law a divorce comes into effect when the husband tells the wife, “I divorce you”. At this point the couple can remarry if they wish. However, if the husband tells the wife “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you”, then they cannot remarry unless the wife marries someone else first and is divorced from him. This person is called a legalizer.
p.135, the Shah Abdolazim cemetery: A cemetery in southern Tehran containing the tomb of Shah Abdolazim, a holy figure.
p.140, Pah Chenar: A village outside of Tehran.
p.141, thirteenth day of Mehr 1311: The date given refers to the Muslim solar calendar. 1311 A.H. corresponds to 1932 ad.
p.142, Bandargaz: An Iranian port on the Caspian Sea.
p.150, Flandon: Hedayat says “E. Flandon and P. Coste were two well-known Iranologists, who ninety years ago did important research about ancient Iran. This section has been taken from Flandon’s notes.” They published Voyage on Perse in 1851.
p.156, Muharri and Safar: Months of mourning for the deaths of holy figures in the Shi’a branch of the Muslim religion.
p.156, the passion plays: Plays re-enacting the martyrdoms of Muslim religious figures.
p.196, Imam: A title given to certain religious leaders in the Muslim religion.
p.206, Mowlavi: Persian poet and philosopher of the thirteenth century.
p.206, Sar Cheshme: A square in Tehran.
p.209, dervish: A wandering preacher or holy man.
p.210, hadith: The body of transmitted actions and sayings of the Prophet Mohammad and his companions.
p.212, Masnvai: A famous book of poetry by Mowlavi.