Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  “These passports,” he mumbles, “will never contract cholera!’

  “They probably won’t,” I agree.

  “Here you go.” He hands me the batch.

  “Thanks, Doctor!”

  “Ha! Bon voyage!”

  When I emerge once more into the light of the transit hall and distribute the passports among their owners, it turns out that they have all been stamped upside-down! This does not matter, however, and everyone laughs, because now a new dilemma has come about. It is twelve-thirty, and the Turks have closed up their side of the lobby, and will not reopen till two-thirty. The officials have all gone out to lunch. The doors at the end of the hall are closed — padlocked and chained.

  So, we just wait another two hours doing nothing, behind the locked doors of the Turkish transit lobby. Most of our passengers are gathered behind the chained doors. A few are spread out on the ground, busy eating. Some offer fruit and nuts to one another. One group sits on the counter, filling out forms. Dr. Kiumarspur’s baby is asleep in the arms of the student, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor. The woman herself, her eyes red from crying, is also sitting on the floor, exchanging Turkish lire, German marks, and French francs with another student. I sit next to Soheili, beside his mountainous pile of luggage, and light up the last of my old Oshnu cigarettes. I do not ask how he managed to get all that luggage through, or, if he had any money with him, how he got that through. Being well traveled, and having spent a lifetime working for the national airlines, in close contact with customs officers, and having been the director of numerous excursion tours, has obviously had its effect.

  “Do sit down, Jenab Aryan,” he says. “Be patient.”

  “Yes.”

  “At this moment, we are actually nowhere. Neither in Turkey, nor in Iran.” He says this with delight. “Congratulations,” I say. “People without a country

  “Dear Agha Soheili, we are in the Bazargan border transit hall,” I declare. “Between Iran and Turkey.”

  “No. Neither here . . . nor there. People without a country, in this mad world. We’re all dangling . . . in nowhere, I swear.”

  “For the love of God, Jenab Soheili — don’t get philosophical!”

  “No, I implore you, it’s true! This is our situation, exactly. The whole country, the whole world, is in a sorry, confused state.”

  “In two hours, the Turkish officials will come back and open the doors. Then your excellency can walk to freedom and be on your way to Karachi and then Washington, D.C. In a week’s time, all this will be just a memory for you. You will joke about it at cocktail parties.”

  “They’re opening up in two hours?”

  “Apparently.”

  “What do they eat that takes two hours?” “Dolmas!”

  Soheili laughs. Taking another cigarette from his pack of Winstons, he lights it with a gold lighter, which he was hiding up to now, I have no idea where. Then he offers me a cigarette, too. I tell him I just finished one.

  “When we arrive in Istanbul, I must send a cable to my son in London,” he says. “Tell him to send me a money order, that sort of thing — I have none, at the moment. I’m indebted to you, too, Jenab Aryan. I also need something for the expenses of my journey to Pakistan.”

  “I was under the impression that you had dollars and pounds left.” “Oh, in the bank, yes!” I see.

  “I shall tell my son in London to send a money order immediately.”

  I do not know whether he is saying all this really for me to hear or for others.

  “I thought you said your son was in L.A.”

  “That’s my own son, this one’s my wife’s son from her first marriage.” I see.

  “Believe me, Jenab Aryan — he’s more sincere and more faithful and more loyal than my own son. He’s a petroleum engineer. Worked in London for OPEC. Now he’s working for Saudi Arabia.”

  “Who’s the one in Virginia, then? I thought you said he was your wife’s son from her first marriage.”

  “Oh, no. That’s Robert, my son-in-law. He’s American, he married my daughter in Tehran. She’s an IBM computer technician.”

  “Oh, her name’s Virginia?”

  “No, her name’s Firuzeh. Robert’s working with his brother-in-law now, that’s my own son from my first wife.”

  “I’ll have that cigarette now, if you don’t mind.”

  He laughs, extending the pack toward me, “Have I given you a headache with all my talking?”

  “No, but my stomach’s rumbling like crazy.”

  “I do happen to have some gaz and some pistachios at the bottom of one of these cases, somewhere. Allow me . . . I’ll be most happy to, eh, open them up and

  “No, no, please! We’ll be out soon, we should be able to get a bite to eat somewhere”

  It’s almost four o’clock when the last of our passengers leaves the transit hall on the Turkish side. I expect now everyone to be as tired and hungry as me, but suddenly the entire busload is restored, lively and jovial. The luggage has been reloaded, tied up, the coach is ready. In the rearview mirror, I see Abbas Agha Marandi’s beaming face as he releases the handbrake. He wastes no time with Salavat. He speaks only to say there’s a big restaurant two or three kilometers up the road, which has food “and everything!” and almost all the passengers applaud loudly. They know he means booze.

  At dusk, having eaten, rested and refreshed, we resume the journey, moving on through Turkey. It is cold again, and the sun sets rapidly, dying away into the horizon. I do not feel we are in another country; the noises and clatter in the coach are exactly the same as before, and the passengers are the same passengers. The steps and the hills are still naked, and the landscape seems to be the continuation of the hills and valleys on the other side of the border. The same birds seem to shudder in the heavy wind.

  Soheili is now very much livelier and jauntier. He has taken out a piece of paper and is counting up the expenses he and I have shared, and for which I have paid; supper, lunch, and other expenses, all of which he adds up. He writes In English, neat figures, in fine handwriting. He then divides the total by two, and takes out an amount of Turkish lire from his wallet, handing it to me. I do not want to take any money from him, but he insists, saying all must be made fair and square. When I put the lires in my wallet, he asks, “Whose photo is that? Your sister’s?”

  He’s a born snoop!

  “No, it’s Sorraya.”

  “Oh. She’s very lovely I hope to God she’ll get well, soon.” “I hope so.”

  “Who’s paying for her hospital expenses? Does she have insurance?” “Honestly, I don’t know. I’ll have to look into that when I get there. Apparently, the students are insured for as long as they’re at the university, but Sorraya finished her studies three months ago. She was waiting to fly back when the war broke out and airports were closed. And then this came up.”

  “What will you do if she’s not insured?”

  “Pay right out of the old pocket.”

  “Do you have money, there?”

  “No. Nor does my sister. We’ll have to work something out.” “It’s not easy now, sending money.”

  “I guess not.”

  He remains silent for a short while, then: “I expect your sister wanted very much to come along on this trip herself.” “She couldn’t.”

  “They didn’t give permission? Why? Didn’t you have a hospital certificate?”

  By God, he is nosy.

  “Yes, but they only allow one person to go.”

  “Why didn’t your sister go herself? I don’t mean to be inquisitive.”

  “My sister has sciatica, she’s partially bedridden.”

  “Did you say her husband’s passed away?”

  “Yes, he was a doctor in the oil company. He had a stroke and died.” “Goodness me. The world is a road to pass, Jenab Aryan.”

  “So it is.”

  The student bound for Germany passes round some baklava, giving me a reprieve from Soheili’s tirele
ss questioning. We spend the night in Erzurum sleeping in the tiny Heylun Hotel, with no shortage of night noise and bugs. Soheili and I take a twin-bed room, in which the radiator pipes sound like the entire Ottoman cavalry charging through. The establishment is a four- or five-story building, with narrow wooden staircases and wide, shapeless rooms. Whenever someone passes through the corridor or up and down the stairway, the building reverberates like the Great Armenian Massacre, but I take my pills and I think I sleep some five hours.

  The next morning, after a small breakfast, we start out. The students going to Germany, Dr. Kiumarspur, who was heading for Paris, and several other passengers have left us to catch their planes.

  All that day we travel through the Turkish mainland, spending the second night in Ankara, in a hotel not much better than the Erzurum Heylun. The third day we still travel on. Everywhere the land is very much like Iran — bad roads and bare trees. The small towns and villages are beautiful but trampled in mud and poverty.

  The steppes are empty the vast orchards weather-beaten. Army trucks, soldiers in full battle gear, fill the roads; they stop the coach every few kilometers and make a complete inspection. Everything from their helmets down to their boots and their strange weaponry is American-made. Sometimes, near larger cities, the coach’s progress is slowed down because the trucks and tanks obstruct the traffic, the long barrels of their guns jutting out, covered with tarpaulin in the rain.

  It’s a long, very tiring bus journey from Tehran to Istanbul, but every few hours, whenever it suits Abbas Agha Marandi’s fancy, he makes us stop and gives us a rest. He is a free and jolly spirit and I like him more and more. I wish I knew what he had left behind him in Tehran, what sort of a life he led, and I wish I could make him my guest sometime, buy him a bottle of something, somewhere. “One night at home and a hundred on the road forward — Fatherless Benz, to where doth thou lead me on?”

  But within three days he gets us all the way from Tehran, tired and travel-weary, to the furthermost tip of Asian Turkey, and across the Bosphorus to the European side of Istanbul.

  It is just after nightfall when we get off the coach at the Istanbul TBT bus terminal, in a busy section of the city, surrounded by hotels of all sizes. One by one, the passengers fade away into the misty Istanbul night. Soheili and I, still in the spirit of the journey, come to a small hotel near the terminal where the owners are pleasant, friendly, and humorous, like most Turks. When they learn we are Iranian, coming all the way from the Islamic Republic at war, they treat us with kindness and sympathy, giving us a “good” room with two “nice” beds.

  The room is, in fact, a little larger than a telephone kiosk. After a brisk shower, however, the only thing I care about is a good, long sleep.

  — Translated by the author

  Footnotes

  1 Agha is an honorific term for men, roughly equivalent to Mister.

  2 Zoroastrianism is the first monotheistic revealed religion. Founded by Zarathustra around 500 b.c.e., it became the official religion of various Persian empires and was the dominant religion of Iran until the Arab invasions in the seventh century. Ahura Mazda is the Zoroastrian term for God.

  3 Jenab is an honorific term, roughly equivalent to sir.

  4 “Nowhereland” is a Persian euphemism that means a very unpleasant, unruly place.

  5 Salavat is the traditional praise prayer to the Prophet Mohammad and his family. It is usually said in chorus.

  6 In Iranian money, ten rials are equal to one toman. Currently, roughly eight hundred tomans are equal to one U.S. dollar.

  7 Arabic greeting.

  8 The southern city of Khorramshahr was so devastated by the Iraqi invasion that it came to be called Khunin-Shahr, or Bloody City.

  Simin Daneshvar

  Considered to be Iran’s first female prose writer, Simin Daneshvar was born in Shiraz in 1921. She moved with her family to Tehran, where after the death of her father she worked for Radio Tehran and the newspaper Iran to support her family. Daneshvar received her doctorate in Persian literature from Tehran University. In 1948, she published Extinguished Fire, inspired by the works of O. Henry, the first short story collection by a woman writer in Iran.

  Daneshvar spent two years (1952-1954) as a Fulbright scholar studying with Wallace Stegner at Stanford University. Upon her return to Iran she became a professor of art history at Tehran University. In 1961 she published another collection of short stories, A City Like Heaven, and her novel Savushun — the first novel ever written by a woman in Iran — in 1969. Told from the viewpoint of a woman, Savushun is about the effects of the Allied occupation in World War II on Shiraz and surrounding areas. Many of the major themes of modern Iranian history and society — foreign occupation, the situation of women, tribal politics, and the condition of peasants — are touched upon in this important novel, which has been translated into English in two versions: Savushun, translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar (Mage Publishers, 1990), and A Persian Requiem, translated by Roxane Zand (George Braziller, 1992).

  Daneshvar continued to write after the 1979 revolution. Her collection, Whom Should I Greet? was published in 1980. She then began work on a trilogy, the first two books of which were Island of Bewilderment and The Dazed Camel Driver, both novels about the revolution and how the lives of various social groups, including intellectuals, were affected by it. She is currently at work on the last volume of the trilogy, The Mountain of Bewilderment. She is also an accomplished translator of English, including works by Chekhov, Shaw, Hawthorne, Schnitzler, and Saroyan. Daneshvar was married to Jalal Al-Ahmad, the famous Iranian social critic and writer. She lives in Tehran.

  Her short story here deals with the life and death of a young girl in Islamic Iran. It was first published in a collection by the same name, Ask the Migrating Birds, in 1997.

  ASK THE MIGRATING BIRDS

  I was dreaming that my mother had a dream about me, and I was present in it myself, playing out the events in her dream in person. True, it defies all logic, but should we weigh all things in life on the scale of logic? My mother could see the hand brandishing the scissors approach my head. Shorn hair littered the floor. My file was tucked under my arm.

  As I was going up the stairs, the head teacher shouted out, “Hey, you! Pull up your head scarf!”

  “Ma’am,” I replied, “there aren’t any men in our school. Even the janitor is a woman. The doorway’s screened by a heavy curtain, and the door’s closed, too

  “You little slut of an orphan!” the head teacher thundered. “Do as you’re told!”

  “I’m not an orphan, I’ve got a mother,” I countered. “What’s more, I’ve got a dear brother who’s just back from the war front and has his handgun on the mantelpiece!”

  “You wait till I show you —” she menaced.

  The geometry teacher was telling us in class, “Two parallel lines will never converge unless God wills it.”

  “God is plus infinity,’ and two parallel lines can converge in distant infinity,” I said.

  “Bravo!” said the geometry teacher.

  “The roundness of the earth helps too,” I added. I wrote down the formula for it: God is equal to plus infinity (+), and the devil is minus infinity (-). The geometry teacher came up to the blackboard. She sighed, and wrote:

  “There is only One who embodies Unity and merges with it.” She then asked, “What is a number?”

  “Sentences made up of ones’ that are bound together.” I added, “God is that ‘Only One’ who stands alone. More alone than anyone or anything else.”

  One of my classmates quipped, “Satan could be God’s only soul mate.”

  “Absolutely not,” replied the geometry teacher, “unless, just for your sake, we change the formula in the following way: God equals plus minus infinity. In that case we should recite Nasser Khosrow: If you were not plagued by a pebble in your shoe, why did you have to create the Devil?’ “1

  Before long the bell rang. Why had the head teacher rung the bell b
efore class was up? After all, she knew that we would only remain glued to our seats, listening with heart and soul to the geometry teacher.

  I don’t know whether in her dreams my mother went over the image of my mind, which was spinning like a top. I knew myself why I had suddenly been so reminded of God and Satan. But my mother hadn’t been with me in the geometry teacher’s class, had she? I was thinking, what did God think about before the Creation? I was asking myself: Can Satan really be God’s only soul mate? So why did He create the Archangels, then? The proverbial Archangels who came ‘knocking at the alehouse door’? I heard the knocking myself. I saw the two parallel lines converge together in distant infinity. I, who had had only paper flowers grow in the garden of my life. Did other flowers grow and I didn’t notice? Proud trees, uncaring tarmac. Bright green vegetables and red button radishes in the shop opposite our home; bougainvillea or oleander flowers — were the oleander meant to poison and petrify the head teacher?2 My corpse on the street tarmac, white sheets flapping on the neighbors’ rooftops, the screech of the siren, migrating birds in the sky — were they all just waiting around to appear in my mother’s dream?

  On the rooftop, I could see birds following their leader as they migrated. The leader fell. Perhaps it had been shot, or maybe it was exhausted, or both. I heard the gunshot. I had placed my brother’s handgun behind my neck. I was gripping the handle so hard that after the shot, my brother couldn’t manage to pry it out of my hand, no matter how hard he tried. He was sobbing. “Why am I bothering my darling sister? A burial is painful, with or without this handgun.”