Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  Or this one:

  My bones are burning to ashes from the agony of separation,

  On the day I die, I regret that I’ll disappoint the dogs in your alley.

  Sadder still, he recited these pathetic poems emulating the wistful tones of Miss Roshanak, the famed announcer of the pre-revolution radio program on poetry and music.

  Among the last “consequences of the revolution” that I witnessed before I split with the VIPs were the mutual infirmities of the governor and the general. These two discussed their painful knee joints and their respective remedies so often that even the others would raise their voices in protest. One day his eminence, who is essentially a snoop, announced that the “knee pain” of the governor and the general is nothing but an agreed-upon code to cover up their real infirmity, and that he had discovered this fact by chatting up the governor's brother.

  According to his report, for some time now the governor and the general had been keeping each other informed in private about the results of remedies they each pursued to strengthen their constitution and restore the powers of their youth. Together they would experiment with any new medicine they chanced upon. Accordingly, the general had given the governor a bottle of root of rosemary oil from Arabia, and the governor had provided the general with a quantity of ground rhinoceros horn from Malaysia. The story seemed credible enough with regard to the general, who, having recently remarried, was dyeing his hair and mustache. But the governor?!

  In any case, as a consequence of this scoop, at our next gathering, regardless of anything else that was being said or done, every member of the group was keeping one ear tuned to the private conversation between the governor and the general, who were discussing their “knee pain” in the corner as usual.

  The governor was asking about the effects of I don’t know what medicine. The general shook his head and said softly, “No. It had no effect. I mean, when I get up in the morning, I think I have the energy, but as I take the first step, I realize no, I don’t. The problem is still there, and my legs are weaker and more feeble than ever. The other day, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. But before the first step, my knee gave out. One of my friends was there, who very kindly warmed and massaged my knee. I really appreciated it, but alas, it didn’t work at all. But tell me about your acupuncture cure. How is that coming along?”

  “It is going nowhere, General. Of course, I have to go for ten sessions. I’ve only gone five times.”

  “Do they put the needles on the knee itself, or around it?” “On the knee itself.”

  “And the needles are hanging on the knee for the entire hour?” “Yes, unfortunately.”

  From the general’s contorted, repulsed expression, and the use of the word hanging, one could surmise that the “needled member” was a more sensitive part of the body than the knee.

  The image of the respected be-needled governor made me want to laugh out loud. I raised my head to exchange my suppressed laughter through meaningful looks with the others. Instead, I saw the members of the VIP not exchanging looks of mirth, amusement, or derision, but rather exchanging glances of sympathy and compassion. Like the compassion for a fellow soldier who will not lay his weapon down even if he has run out of ammunition, who will strive to keep the flag of resistance raised until his dying breath.

  After all these events, I decided to review the balance sheet of the past few months in which I tried to escape from loneliness by mingling with others. The result was not good. I had escaped one consequence of the revolution — my loneliness — only to get entangled in a host of other “consequences.” I had harbored hopes of speaking a few words of Persian, which hadn’t materialized, either, because the VIPs didn’t give one another a chance to speak, never mind a timid newcomer like me. Actually, two or three of them spoke loudly at the same time, at all times.

  To ingratiate myself to the VIPs and to be accepted into their circle, I had pretended to suffer from many of their afflictions, which had a decidedly negative effect on my morale. I was now considered, among most of my compatriots, to be deaf.

  In the realm of poetry and letters, instead of listening to the singer Shajarian’s beautiful recitations of the poetry of Hafez and Sa’adi, which I used to do in times of solitude, I had to put up with the ambassador’s recitation of the endless lamentations of an aged lover pining in shame about not being able to offer his burnt bones to the dogs in his lover’s lane.

  In the realm of politics, I had to ignore hundreds of books and articles and theses analyzing in depth the causes and consequences of the Iranian Revolution, and instead listen to a bunch of conspiracy theories about the machinations of foreigners responsible for everything going wrong in my country.

  In the realm of compassion, I was reduced to feeling sorry, not for the true victims of the revolution, but for the victimized “knees” of two so-called sufferers. Most important, I had thought that associating with this group would link me directly to the main actors of the living history of my country, but instead all I witnessed was a disastrous mangling of history.

  Considering this balance sheet, I abandoned this group of VIPs and their post-revolution symptoms to the grace of God and returned to consequences of my own change of heart. Now, in my solitude, I fervently appreciate sound health and peace of mind.

  — Translated by Nahid Mozaffari

  Footnotes

  1 Unit of Iranian money from long ago, virtually worthless today; 100 shahis equal one rial; 100 rials are equivalent to one toman. Roughly eight hundred tomans are equivalent to one U.S. dollar according to present exchange rates.

  2 “Protector of the shrine” refers to the traditional title Nayeb o-Tolieh, bestowed by kings on their relatives or supporters ostensibly to protect the holy Shia shrines, but also to maintain political control of economically important religious centers.

  3 Ashraf and Fatemah, names of two of the Shah’s sisters. This “story” refers to a rumor that one of the Shah’s sisters had converted to Christianity.

  4 Shahpur Gholamreza, one of the Shah’s brothers.

  5 The Qajar kings ruled Iran from 1796 to 1925.

  6 Reza Shah was the first king of the Pahlavi dynasty, and ruled from 1925 to 1941.

  7 Niavaran Palace, the main residence of the ex-Shah.

  8 The previous regime’s secret police, SAVAK; the acronym translates to State Information and Security Organization.

  Taghi Modarressi

  Taghi Modarressi was born in Tehran in 1931, and graduated with a degree in medicine from Tehran University in 1959. He moved to the United States in 1959 to do further training in psychiatry at Duke University and later, in Canada, at McGill University. Modarressi became an American citizen in 1977. A practicing psychoanalyst, he wrote fiction in his spare time, producing his first book, Yakolia and Her Loneliness, when he was still a medical student. His novels published in the United States, The Book of Absent People and The Pilgrims Rules of Etiquette, were written in Persian. Later, he translated them into English. He died in 1997, leaving his wife, the novelist Anne Tyler, and two daughters.

  This excerpt is composed of the first two chapters of The Book of Absent People. As the reader will note, Modarressi believed in the concept of “translation with an accent”; in other words, he felt that the cultural flavor and linguistic idiosyncrasies can, and indeed should, be maintained in translation.

  Excerpt from

  THE BOOK OF ABSENT PEOPLE

  CHAPTER 1

  Three nights before he went to Ghaleh Bagh, my Khan Papa Doctor sent a message to come see him later in the library. After I got the message, I went out to the balcony and looked down into the courtyard. Maybe he would appear and walk around the flower beds and inspect his crossbred roses one by one. With finicky care, he would clip the withered blooms and throw them into the green plastic pail he’d bought after New Year’s. He would hold the fresh blooms between his fingers and draw back and study them with the Heshmat Nezami pridefulness.

&nbs
p; But in the courtyard not even a bird was flying. It wasn’t dark enough to turn on the lights yet. Only one lamp burned weakly in the entrance hall of the library. I was about to give up when he appeared from the direction of the orangery. He wore his white coat. He was busy with some idea, and he paid no attention to his surroundings. I ran to the opposite side of the courtyard. When I reached the sealed room of his first wife, Homayundokht, God forgive her soul, I put my hands behind my back and, walking parallel to my Khan Papa Doctor, goose-stepped like a soldier. As we reached the end of the courtyard, I raised my chin. I slapped my bare heels together hard and shouted from the depths of my throat, “Ten-SHUN!”

  He noticed, but he continued walking. From his expression, it was clear he was displeased but not out of temper. He only threw a taunting, sidelong glance at me, as though to ask when I planned to give up my childish ways. For heaven’s sake, I was twenty-three years old; when was I going to pull myself together and find a job worthy of me like most of the Heshmat Nezamis and enter the society of respectable people? Finally I drew up and yelled, “At eee-ase!”

  He glared at me. He chewed a tip of his salt-and-pepper mustache. Close up, his face looked haggard and depressed. His white coat was gray with charcoal. With his sooty hands, he might have come from one of those whitesmith’s shops where they enamel copperware. He gave off a smell I couldn’t identify. It was something like a mixture of caraway seeds and potter’s clay. He narrowed his eyes, and in an undertone asked, “Rokni, do you hear something far, far away?”

  I said, “No, I don’t hear anything, Khan Papa Doctor.”

  “Listen carefully. See if you do.”

  I listened for a moment. Then I turned up my palms and said, “I swear by the Lord of the faithful, I don’t hear so much as a fly. I only wondered why you wanted to talk to me.”

  He gestured for me to leave, saying, “First I have to wash. Come to the library in half an hour and I’ll tell you.”

  Then he disappeared in the darkness of the orangery. I thought to myself how old age had changed his character. He behaved more like the Sardar Azhdari side of the family. He had become pale, melancholy, loose-lipped, and talked a lot of nonsense. His words would have sounded like gibberish even to a monkey.

  As I was heading toward my room, I pricked up my ears and listened to the mysterious sounds of our old house. In my mind, I heard the flapping of a handful of wild birds.

  When I entered the library, I was surprised. There were hardly any books on the shelves. The rugs had been rolled and they were leaning against the pillar near the dais. The floor was cluttered with cardboard boxes, bundles of old magazines, and lithograph books. He had found most of those books in the Shah’s Mosque bookstores, in dusty storerooms that had never seen the light of day, and he’d spent a great deal of money on every one of them. Some of them were sent to him from India, Turkey, and Egypt — books about alchemy, botany, the summoning of spirits, and secret societies; books with strange Arabic titles like Treasures of Secrets, Gardens of the Horrified, Meghdadi’s Secrets of Numbers, and The Deleted Beginning.

  The twenty-pound dictionary lay open on his desk, next to the lamp with its shade from the Naser ed din Shah period. The lamplight yellowed the page with a circle the size of a palm. A cigarette butt that had just been stubbed out was smoking in a china ashtray. The ashtray was a high-heeled shoe that my Khan Papa Doctor’s father, the late Heshmat Nezam, had brought for his wife, the Lady of Ladies, as a present from his last trip to Austria. Now, why he had brought an ashtray for the Lady of Ladies, who wouldn’t even touch a cigarette to her lips, was beyond anybody’s comprehension. We didn’t dare ask Khan Papa Doctor about it, either. He wasn’t the type to put up with any curiosity about the past.

  I looked around at the walls and doors. Nothing had changed in that house for a century. Anyone else in Khan Papa Doctor’s place, with his position and influence, would long ago have built a chic, new-style house on Pahlavi Street and put two of the latest-model cars in the garage and married a modern European wife. But my Khan Papa Doctor insisted that nothing should change in the house of his forefathers. The photographs of the late Sardar Azhdar and the late Heshmat Nezam still remained on the walls behind the dais. The only new ornament in the library was Khan Papa Doctor’s own full-length photograph above the mantel, the one that he’d had taken in his youth before his marriage to Homayundokht, God forgive her soul — wearing a wool Cossack hat and his military uniform, with a cape on his shoulders and his hand on the hilt of his sword. He was staring at a corner of the veranda as if he’d been called unexpectedly. His expression revealed a sort of absent-mindedness that was seldom seen on the face of a Heshmat Nezami. I stepped forward and stood in front of his photo. It came as a surprise. I said, “Good Lord, how much he takes after his late father! They’re like two halves of an apple; they don’t differ by a hair.”

  Steps approached from the hall behind me. I turned, shifting the paper tube I carried. It was Khan Papa Doctor. He was standing in the middle of his office doorway, slowly taking off his surgical gloves. He was still wearing a white coat, but this was a clean one, starched and ironed. From beneath the hollow arches of his eyebrows he fixed me with his gaze — a cold, magnetic, penetrating gaze that made him look distant and unreachable. I thought he might finally have decided to start talking about his marriage to his first wife, the late Homayundokht, God forgive her soul.

  He came closer, with easy, sauntering steps. When he reached the center of the library, he threw the rubber gloves on his desk. He took a cigarette from a drawer and lit it with the gold lighter he’d brought from Germany. He blew into my face the voluminous, dense smoke of his first puff. He sat calmly in his chair, leaned back, and looked at me. Maybe because I was in a weak position, maybe because I was nervous, I smiled foolishly. I unrolled my sketch on the desk and said, “Here.” With a snap of his thumb, he flipped cigarette ashes into the late Heshmat Nezam’s ashtray. He said, “Here what?”

  I said, “I made this for you.”

  I showed him the sketch of the legendary bird Simorgh. He stubbed out his cigarette, leaned forward, and examined the sketch. He became absorbed and ran a finger around the outline of the bird. When he reached Simorgh’s wide wings, he looked up and said, “These are flames, aren’t they?”

  I said, “What do you mean, flames, Khan Papa Doctor?”

  “They say it burns up and then a thousand chicks will rise from its ashes.”

  “That’s a phoenix. This one’s Simorgh. Simorgh of Mount Ghoff. When it spreads its wings, the sky turns blue. When it opens its eyes, the sun or the moon shines.”

  I stretched out my arms like two wings, as if I were Simorgh circling the sky on my own, revolving and sightseeing and harming no one. My Khan Papa Doctor frowned and set aside the sketch. He stood up and started walking among the bookshelves with his hands clasped behind him. There were a few old books remaining. He lifted them off the shelves, dusted them, and put them in cardboard boxes. He was distracted and paid me no attention. I took my life in my hands and asked, “Didn’t you send a message for me to come to the library?”

  He paused and nodded. “Have patience,” he said.

  “Are you pleased with my sketch? Do you still say painting and sculpting won’t make my bread and butter? Do you still think I’m wasting my life?”

  “Rokni, stop this foolishness,” he said. The tone of his voice had changed. His words echoed through the empty library as if he were talking in a Turkish bath. He gestured for me to sit on the leather chair in front of his desk. Without a care in my head I sat down, hoping he wanted to talk about Homayundokht, God forgive her soul. In recent weeks he had been behaving as though he was searching for a confidant. As though, finally, he was tired of thinking about Homayundokht, God rest her soul, and of all the events in the past. As though he wanted to open a conversation. But I knew I should watch myself. I should stay alert and act rational so I wouldn’t annoy him. He set his heavy fists on the desk. He l
eaned forward and said, “I want to tell you something very important. Listen carefully.”

  I said, “All right, Khan Papa Doctor. Whatever you say.”

  He was silent. He looked disheveled, and the Heshmat Nezami confidence had gone from his eyes. The lamplight carved deep lines in his face so that he seemed awesome, like Boris Karloff. In a hushed, intimate tone he said, “Rokni, this afternoon I stopped practicing medicine. I’ve examined my last patient and lanced my last boil. Do you hear me?”

  Humbly I said, “I’m listening.”

  He said, “Today is the last day of the month of Khordad. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to go to Ghaleh Bagh and look after my herb garden. I want to get away from here and spend all my time discovering an anticancer medicine. In ancient Iran they had a cure for cancer that’s lost now, it’s gone

  With a stroke of his hand he emphasized “gone.” He pushed the dictionary toward me and with a palsied finger showed me pictures of wormwood, Mary’s palm, Roman anise, and sweet marjoram. “The cure for cancer is among these plants. There are secrets in these herbs that nobody knows. Nobody understands them. Only the ancient Iranians guessed their uses. They knew long ago that the cure for cancer is not in the knife. You have to get to know cancer to uncover its mystery and halt it.”

  His eyes glittered. He looked at me triumphantly. Then he went to the next room and brought back a few small sugar pouches. These pouches were filled with the herbs he’d grown. He held one of them above my head and ordered, “Smell it, Rokni. See what kind of mood comes over you.”

  I said, “What is it, Khan Papa Doctor?”

  He said, “Never mind. Put your nose close to the pouch and breathe deeply.”

  I rose from the leather chair to a half-standing position. I closed my eyes. I drew in a breath and waited for the effect. All of a sudden, in that hundred-degree summer heat I felt a kind of damp, sticky chill raising goose bumps on my arms. I thought, What if he wants to poison me? What if he’s gone mad? Though this kind of personality change is very rare among the Heshmat Nezamis, anything is possible. It’s the Sardar Azhdaris who have passionate dispositions. At around age thirty the hereditary melancholia afflicts their minds; their deaths occur on Thursdays that are even-numbered days of the month on the lunar calendar.