Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  “It’s no use,” I said to the old man. “I’m checkmated.” “Huh,” the old man said as if he were waking up from a deep sleep, leaning over the board for a better look. “Really?” the old woman said.

  Suddenly realizing what happened, the old man gave out a winner’s hoot and extended his hand to me.

  “Yes, with the bishop’s move, you’re done.” He motioned to the old woman to come over and see my losing board. The old woman got up.

  The film also seemed to be ending. The man and woman were sleeping in one bed, but each with very different dreams. In another room, the child played all by himself with his lifeless dolls. I got up, too.

  “Where to?” the old man said. “You haven’t finished your whiskey.”

  “Later, another time. I’m really tired,” I said.

  As the old man, swollen with pride, described his victory to his wife, move by move, I left and climbed up the stairs to my room.

  The room was cold and empty, and the oncoming dusk made it even more depressing. I didn’t dare look out the window at the pine trees. But when I sat down on the bed, I saw a red light in the street that was glowing strangely in the fog. It looked just like an eye that had been crying all day. From above my bed I pulled out The Travel Memoirs of Nasser Khosrow and opened it to this passage: And from there my brother, Ghollam Maki Hindu, who accompanied us, and I entered a village named Kharzeville. We had few provisions. My brother went to the grocer to buy some food. Someone asked, “What do you want? I’m the grocer.” My brother said, “Anything you have, since I’m a stranger just passing through.” But everything my brother asked for, the grocer said he didn’t have. So from then on, whenever someone spoke like this, we said he must be the grocer from Kharzeville.5

  I set aside the book and closed my eyes.

  — Translated by Leyli Shayegan

  Footnotes

  1 Saadi Shirazi (ca. 1213-1293) was one of Iran’s greatest classical poets. One of his two principal works, The Golestan (The Rose Garden), published in 1258 and translated to English in the eighteenth century, was one of the texts commonly memorized by students of Persian literature and in Persian language classes.

  2 “Gooze peecham,” translated literally, means “I am wrapped up, or twisted, in farts.”

  3 Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951), a major modern Iranian writer, is famous for his use of colloquial language in his novels and short stories. His short novel, Alaviyeh Khanum, was written in 1933 and is full of episodes of juicy colloquial cursing.

  4 Kun is a colloquial term meaning ass; kunie is a derogatory slang term referring to homosexuals.

  5 Nasser Khosrow was an important eleventh-century Iranian philosopher and poet. His most famous prose work is Travel Memoirs, an account of his journey to Egypt.

  Iraj Pezeshkzad

  Born in Tehran in 1928, Iraj Pezeshkzad was educated in Iran and later in France, where he received his law degree. When he returned home, he served as a judge in the Iranian judiciary for five years prior to joining the Iranian foreign service. In the early 1950s he translated the works of Voltaire and Molière into Persian and began writing short stories for magazines. His writings include the best-selling comic novel Uncle Napoleon, as well as Haji Mam-ja’far in Paris, and Mashalah Khan in the Court of Harun al-Rashid. He has also written several plays, short satirical stories, and various articles on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. Uncle Napoleon, which was made into a popular television series before the Islamist revolution, was published in an excellent English translation by Dick Davis (Mage, 2000). Pezeshkzad is currently working as a journalist.

  “Delayed Consequences of the Revolution” was published in the collection Rostam Solatan (Los Angeles: Nashr-e Ketab, 2000), and was written when Pezeshkzad went into exile after the revolution. It is a hilarious depiction of the pomposity and emptiness of some of the members of the Pahlavi-era elite.

  DELAYED CONSEQUENCES OF

  THE REVOLUTION

  We were a more or less well-suited group of four or five people, and we spent our free time together. As time went by, each one went on in a different direction and I was left alone. I suffered through a few difficult, lonely months. Reading, writing, watching television, visiting doctors, ingesting medications, and the management of the internal affairs of the household can fill up quite a lot of time. But somehow it isn’t enough. The particular desire to converse — which is indeed an essential need — remains unrequited.

  What I actually mean is conversing in the Persian language, which is for us an absolute necessity. If we don’t say “Yes, no” in Persian several times a day on a daily basis, we get a sore throat. Of course, there are foreign languages too, but we have no use for them. Basically, we can work with foreigners if we have to, but we can’t really socialize with them. We don’t share any common memories; besides, trying to explain the simplest situation to them puts you out of breath. I mean that if you want to explain something to your compatriot in your own language, you can use five or six words and get the meaning across, but to explain the same thing to a foreigner in another language, you’ll need to employ at least fifty or sixty words. For example, if a foreigner asks you:

  “How did Mr. Ali X get so rich all of a sudden?” Then you have to respond:

  “Mr. Ali X had bought a million meters of land in the outskirts of Tehran at five shahis a meter many years ago.1 Then he invited a member of the Very Powerful Upper Crust Elite of the country to participate in this deal, and thus, as a result of the exertion of That Person’s influence, the definition and designation of the city limits were expanded, so that Mr. Ali X’s land came to be included within it. And since, on the one hand, during those years people were coming into Tehran in droves from all parts of the country and the demand for land substantially exceeded the supply; and because, on the other hand, the rise in the price of oil put a lot of money into the peoples hands, the price of Mr. Ali X’s land increased from five shahis a meter to two or three hundred tomans a meter. As a result, he very quickly became rich.”

  Now, with the aid of a few upward and downward movements of the eyes and eyebrows, you can convey precisely the same story to your compatriot in your own language in a just few words:

  “Oh, yes! One million meters of desert land outside the city limits, now inside the city limits thanks to the power of His Highness. Oh, yes! Quite obvious.”

  It is even possible to use fewer words while getting your meaning across by placing more emphasis on the vowels and consonants when you’re saying “Oh, yes!”: “Ooooh yessss! God’s vacant land now within city limits by way of His Highness!”

  Anyway, I was left alone, with no audience, and I was getting desperate. Quite coincidentally, during those very days I was watching a television program on psychology, and they were saying that these people who walk around in the streets talking to themselves mostly do so because they’re alone and don’t have anyone to talk to. Such possible effects of loneliness terrified me. So I began to eye some groups of my fellow countrymen in exile who got together in cafes for a few hours on certain days. By chance I ran into one group that included a number of pretty eminent people, one of whom, it turned out, I knew. He offered me a place to sit at their table, and so the bait worked. I was delighted to become a part of this gathering. Since almost all of them had held prominent positions in the former regime, in private I’d refer to them as “VIPs”: there was a former government minister, a former provincial governor, a former senator, a former ambassador, a former protector of the shrine, a former secretary general, a former high eminence, etc.2 My eagerness to become a part of this group stemmed from my deep-seated interest in history, and I suspected that socializing and conversing with such living icons of the history of our nation over the last fifty or sixty years would be a veritable gold mine for me. But I soon encountered certain obstacles and problems that distinctly detracted from the advantages of their company.

  The f
irst problem was enduring the constant redundancy. Redundancy in conversation is not unexpected among people of a certain age. But when the distance between repetitions shrinks from every three months to two months to every month and even to once a week, then it gets really enervating. Redundancy is annoying not only in quantitative but in qualitative terms as well, because, as versions of the same story changed and evolved, a dulling effect took place, and the recounted matter began to lose all credibility. Besides, sometimes this would lead to irksome arguments as well. Rampant as repetition was among this group, usually those present ignored the divergences in the same narrative. Once in a while, though, some younger, more meddlesome member of the group would make the speaker face up to it.

  For example, the protector of the shrine’s story of the ceremonial annual dusting of the Holy Shrine created a commotion. The protector of the shrine was recounting for the nth time:

  “Oh yes, I remember that one day, during the dusting ceremony of the shrine, a golden chain with a cross, like the ones that Christians wear around their necks, was found. It turns out that on that same day Her Highness Princess Ashraf had come to the shrine to observe the ceremony

  At this point, one of the aforementioned younger, meddlesome members said:

  “Sir, I think it was Princess Fatemeh who was present at that ceremony.”3

  The protector of the shrine snapped at him in anger: “If you were there, then you tell the rest of the story!” Although the meddlesome man was right, and all of us had heard the story of Princess Fatemeh’s participation before, and although Mr. Meddlesome was perfectly capable of finishing the story in detail, still, those present took the side of the protector of the shrine. Nodding heads and rolling eyes opted for the presence of Her Highness Princess Ashraf, and the younger man fortunately conceded.

  But interference in the general’s story led to harsher objections. The general took every opportunity to tell the story of how he quit smoking cigarettes. Sensing a wisp of smoke in the cafe or hearing a cigarette name brand would launch him into the story:

  “I used to smoke two or three packs a day. One day, His Highness Shahpur Gholamreza said, ‘Come my good man, make the effort. Once and for all, make the decision like a soldier and quit smoking.’4 I immediately crushed the pack of Winstons that I was holding in my fist with such force that the box and the cigarettes were reduced to a pulp, and I never touched another cigarette again!” As he was mimicking the act of crushing the cigarette box, the general’s eyes shone with a spark of power and courage, reminding the observer of that famous scene from World War II when Marshall Zhukov, after the capture of Stalingrad, described the crushing of the German Eighth Armored Infantry Division and the capture of Marshall Von Paulus. Lately, as soon as the general would begin to say, “I used to smoke two ...” everyone would quickly clear up the table in the vicinity of the general’s hands, because in recounting the moment of box-crushing excitement, he would grab whatever was on the table and squeeze it hard. The last time we didn’t take this precaution he squeezed the ambassador’s medicine box so hard that several of his medications were decimated.

  Now consider what happened one day when another meddlesome character jumped into the conversation at the sensitive moment of the crushing of the box of Winstons, and, interrupting the general, said, “But the last time you said the cigarettes were Kents. . .”

  The general was livid. He began to bang on the table with his fists. Fortunately, His Eminence saved the day by reciting a short poem about Great Men and their Will of Steel:

  If Willpower is the cause and motive

  A mere ant is capable of becoming Solomon.

  In any case, aside from these occasional incidents, there was a kind of a gentleman’s agreement among the members of the VIPs not to pick on one another’s penchant for redundancy and on the discrepancies between different versions of their stories.

  Another kind of problem came up once in a while when someone pointed out the unfortunate correlation between various illnesses and symptoms discussed and the age of the gentlemen present. The members of the VIPs, may they be spared from jealous eyes, had all lived long lives. The majority of them had been born during the Qajar dynasty.5 Those born during the reign of Reza Shah — who abdicated the throne close to sixty years ago — were the youthful minority.6 Nevertheless, all physical ailments from weak eyesight and cataracts to hearing difficulties, hair loss, high blood pressure, arthritis, rheumatism, and even hernias were considered to be the consequences of the revolution and life in exile. If anyone dared to suggest the correlation between these ailments and their advanced age, they would be deeply offended. And when that someone left, they would call him a good-for-nothing windbag.

  In socializing with the VIPs I am often reminded of Mrs. Afagh Saltaneh, who attributed all the ills of the age to Tehran’s terrible climate, and in praise of Tabriz’s good climate she would say:

  “When I was in Tabriz I would walk for kilometers and kilometers without a problem. In Tehran, when I walk a few steps I have to sit down for a rest. In Tabriz, I would have two huge servings of kebab and rice, and I’d be hungry in a flash. Here, I have a little chicken leg and can’t seem to digest it for the rest of the day. This is all because of Tehran’s terrible climate.”

  What this lady forgot to mention is that she returned to Tehran from Tabriz after her husband’s death sixty years ago.

  I should also add that the VIPs were very careful to make note of who else, besides themselves, was suffering from “consequences of the revolution.” So, during the time I socialized with them, I admitted to a few ailments that I wasn’t actually suffering from to create sympathy for myself. In addition to this, they made me pretend I was deaf, too. This is how it happened. His excellency was practically deaf, so that if he wasn’t sitting right in front of the speaker and looking at his lips, he thought no one was talking and would begin a new conversation. No one dared tell him about this problem to his face, so they thought that one of us would pretend to be deaf, and the others would try to convince him of the benefits of hearing aids. Then maybe his excellency would get the point, too. They dillydallied in deciding who should pretend to be deaf until one day they put me on the spot and made me accept the task. At the end of the next cafe gathering, as I strolled away with his excellency and he asked me a question, I put my hand behind my ear, and asked him to repeat his question. His face lit up, and he said, “Well, well! So you are hard of hearing, too! Like me! Damn this revolution and all that it did to us. Actually, my own hearing problem happens to be quite negligible.”

  Alas, this little plot did not solve the problem of the VIPs. His excellency did not begin to use a hearing aid, but instead began to use me as one. Whenever he couldn’t hear something, he would yell at the speaker, “Please, speak louder, for his benefit!” (He meant me.)

  As a result, as if I didn’t already have enough defects, I acquired a reputation for being deaf as well. From then on, ignoring the circumstances that led us to this point, the other participants in the group would address me with ear-splittingly loud voices.

  Of course, as we know, loss of memory and muddle-headedness are “consequences of the revolution,” too, and have nothing to do with age!

  Occasionally the “consequences of the revolution” became unbearable for this revolution-stricken crowd and the aforementioned “gentlemen’s agreement” would abruptly expire.

  The secretary general had joined the group quite recently, and for the second time he brought up the matter of his great courage in standing up for the interests of our country: “On the day that the cabinet discussed in the presence of His Majesty the Shah the matter of the ratification of the judicial exempting of American military personnel from Iranian law, I dissented. His Majesty said to me, go ahead, sign it, the defense interests of the country require us to give this advantage to the Americans. I told him that I wouldn’t put my signature on this document even if my hand were to be chopped off!”

  Suddenl
y, the general cut him off. “Excuse me!? You have already mentioned this before, and I was polite enough not to pick up on it. I just want to remind you about the time that you and I were both in the waiting room of Niavaran Palace, waiting for permission to meet with His Majesty, Your Grace had to go to the bathroom every five minutes.7 One of these times I happened to go to the bathroom, too, and we ran into each other. I asked you, ‘Do you have a prostrate problem like me?’ And you responded, ‘No, no, it’s a matter of nerves. Every time I have to meet His Majesty, the sheer fear of His Formidable Presence weakens my bowels.’ Now I want to know that if you were such a twisting, trembling bundle of nerves from the idea of meeting His Majesty, how did you summon up the courage to speak that way to him?”

  This reminder offended the secretary general to the point that he yelled, “Are you saying that I’m lying?!”

  “No, but with the passage of time and the problems of exile The secretary general stood up in protest and fury and left without saying good-bye. He never came back. We just heard him growl under his breath as he left, “Once a SAVAK snoop, always a SAVAK snoop!” 8

  Among the malignant consequences of the revolution was the impromptu and somewhat retarded inclination of his excellency the ambassador toward Persian poetry and letters. Perhaps the only occasion when repetition is not irritating, and is in fact pleasing, is when beautiful poetry is recited. But his excellency, recently harboring claims to be an expert on Rumi, and having duly delivered a couple of speeches on the subject, had accumulated a considerable number of nonsensical, indeed, trashy poems in his memory, and insisted on repeating them under any pretext. Unfortunately I remember this one:

  O Eyelash, mend the needle,

  Thread it with a strand of hair,

  For my broken heart still needs a few stitches.