Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  I thanked her and said, “But I have to say I wouldn’t know what I’d feel if I saw that film now. There are some films you shouldn’t see twice. It’s best to keep the memory of it intact.”

  Staring at a point in the room she said, “I agree with you completely. The same goes for certain places, and even certain people

  “Yes, take Istanbul, for instance; what with our homeless compatriots there now it may not be such a pleasant place for sightseeing anymore. But a harbor is always a harbor, and the presence of a sea of freedom within a few paces is a comfort to the soul.”

  I had abandoned myself to the unpredictable logic of the conversation — come what may. It was getting dark. My hostess put the lights on and threw a purple shawl over her shoulders. She said, “Oh, I’ve been longing for a good chat for some time. These days all I hear is the nonsense of politics and the timing of when everything is going to blow up . . .”

  The doorbell rang, and the manager walked in with a bouquet of roses. He was wearing his best suit. With a foretaste of his usual laughter, he explained to the hostess, “I’m not much of a man for ceremony. I was wandering the streets for quite some time before I finally made up my mind and bought these flowers. I couldn’t think what I should be doing for you. I’m getting old, and the truth be told, I can’t bear good-byes anymore. I thought I should actually try to forget all about you leaving.”

  Our hostess placed the flowers in a vase from the kitchen and put them on a small desk near the window. The manager said, “Looks as if you were deep in a discussion.”

  “Yes,” said the woman, “this gentleman and I have realized that we have very similar tastes.”

  The manager threw me a blank look and sat down. When we shook hands, I realized he did so with caution. He seemed in top form. He took a sip of his coffee, lit up his pipe, and with a grunt of satisfaction, blew out the smoke. He said, “This gentleman managed to reduce one of my friends to despair just yesterday.” Our hostess turned around and looked at me curiously. She smiled.

  “Just imagine,” said the old man, “A man of about my age thinks of doing a translation in these darned times. And one day he even gets up and comes to our office with a notebook full of symbolist, or, as these gentlemen would call it, metaphoric poetry ...” The old man pointed at me, and then laughed long and hard. His eyes had a mischievous glint, and between his droopy lids his eyes were moist slits. He wasn’t looking at me.

  The old man leaned back in his seat and said, “This young man and I have been in deep discussion for quite some time over newfangled words which, between you and me, are often nothing but concocted and confusing.” He sighed and went on, “Well, maybe I’m getting old and crusty, but I do believe in any case that our language has evolved a lot, and I do know this: translation of poetry is an impossibility!”

  “That’s a rule of thumb. There are exceptions to the rule,” I said.

  “Yes indeed,” said the manager, “and to me, the task of the translator is to find those very exceptions.” He was silent for a moment. He dragged noisily on the pipe, which had gone out. “But what was interesting for me was that this person had thought of translating verse at this particular time,” he said, addressing the woman. “I gave the poems to this gentleman to read and give his view. And do you know what kind of view he gave? He came up to me and said, ‘You there, have you heard about the parable of the people who took refuge in the cave?’” The old man gave out another one of his throaty laughs.

  “I think this sort of direct confrontation with a work of art is actually a good thing,” the hostess said, with such simplicity and confidence that my stomach lurched. The old man immediately took her up on it, saying, “I agree. That’s quite right. This particular friend is of course a very educated, well-read individual — goes without saying; but he’s not quite with the times. The important thing is for a person to be up to date. In any case, I agree with our Mr. Editor here. There was nothing we could do for that person. Those poems were unpublishable, and for me as a publisher

  I could feel that the old man’s professional boasting was about to begin. At a suitable moment, on the pretext of browsing through the books that had been piled on top of one another on the living room floor, I got up. The books were exactly what one would expect to find in a house like that: novels, poetry, a few old Sufi texts — some read, and some unread, and expensive art books. There were also a few indoor gardening guides, a short teach-yourself-yoga for the enhancement of body and spirit, with color illustrations. That night it was agreed that the manager would sell the art books and send the money, in any way that he saw fit, to the woman.

  I began to watch the two of them. The hostess got up and put on another record — yet another string quartet. That was at my request. She told the old man in a loud voice, “Do you see what similar tastes we have?” And she stood for a few minutes in front of the roses. She bent her head, smelled them, and said, “I love the scent of roses. It’s there and not quite there at the same time.” I should have left the old man alone with his memories. When the woman next sat down beside him, the old man looked like a father having an intimate and confidential chat with his young daughter.

  On the black desk there was only a woman’s leather handbag, a key ring, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Without meaning to, I lowered my head so I could smell the old man’s roses, too, and as I did so, my eyes fell on the drawings that had been mounted on the wall in small wooden frames. They were watercolors of landscapes. I heard my hostess say, “Don’t look at those, they’re very old. I haven’t had the chance to remove them yet.” There was also a group photograph. The hairstyles and fashions dated the picture to at least twenty years before. I recognized the woman’s face from among the others. I thought to myself, what a total incarnation she was of all the intellectual beauty one imagines about oneself at the age of twenty-five: a young girl with high cheekbones and short hair, wearing a wide plaid shirt over a pair of jeans . . . and all of a sudden I yearned for my own innocent idealism of those early years. In another picture frame, one saw the black-and-white portrait of a man who, despite his masculine good looks, resembled a simple and forgotten sacrificial lamb.

  In between the soft and melodious sound of violins I could hear snatches of the old man’s conversation: “... despite all that, I’m not unhopeful.” He was never unhopeful. People like him somehow lived a good hundred years happily and knowingly. He was saying, “It’s exactly at a time like this that new faces arrive; new writers, translators, energetic publishers . . . What’s wrong with it, let these young faces drive us out. . .” By the time I sat down again at the table, the old man didn’t seem so hopeful after all. He was saying, “What can I say, it’s more like a breathing contest — we’re all holding our breath. Some people run out of breath before others. That’s all it is. And you can’t criticize anyone, either. But for a person like me, leaving here means starting life all over again, and it’s too late for that.”

  “I would never have imagined myself that one day I would have to leave here for good,” said the woman, “but here one feels lonelier by the day. My mother died last year. None of my brothers is here, and all my close friends have gone — even people you don’t see from one year to the next; they’re nothing more than a name in the phone book or on the neighbor’s doorbell which you happen to see every day; and then one day finally you have to rub out the name from the phone book, or you see that the familiar name has disappeared from the doorbell . . . It’s only a drop, but it’s as if the drop flows to an ocean of loneliness.” And after that, she got up and, heading for the kitchen, said, “But let’s not talk about it anymore. Things are sad enough as they are.”

  She placed three cups of coffee on the table. They were the last cups of coffee we were having. I had finished my cigarettes. Just for a change, I’d borrowed the old man’s pipe for a smoke. Our hostess said, “Now tell me, and I want you to tell it to me straight: how is the book I translated? Can it be published? Is i
t any good?” The old man had lowered his head. I knew that he was holding his breath. In answer to her question, I merely said, “It is excellent, Khanum, excellent!” The old man let out an obvious sigh of relief. His eyes were shining, and he fell to speaking again.

  Our hostess saw us to the bottom of the stairs to say good-bye. In the light of the old man’s beat-up Chevrolet reversing, I could see a lonely woman, standing at the end of a tree-lined street in front of the door of her building. A dog was barking from behind the wall of another house. The old man quickly drove out of the side street and turned onto a highway that wove past dark hills into the city center. He was dropping me off at home. He was humming some verse under his breath, and I could hear the occasional word. The cool autumnal night breeze brushed my face from the car’s open window.

  There are days when not only one’s eyes, but also the mind doesn’t seem to cooperate. The organs are drowsy and dispersed right from the start of the day. I sat behind my desk again. That yellow folder was still on the desk. I had sharpened my pencils earlier. I said to myself, “It can’t be that the only way to collect my thoughts is on the back of a tough sociology text.” But it was wasted effort. My cigarette had burned out and lay in ashes. I lit another one. I knew it was one too many. The night before, near dawn, I had remembered some words in my sleep that were juxtaposed flowing and balanced next to each other, taking the form of a stanza: “Eyes which blend in like a cricket to the color of its surroundings.” What an empty, irrelevant comparison that was, in the light of day . . .

  The office boy showed up and said, “Agha has called and said he won’t be coming in till the afternoon.”

  At twelve-thirty, I went to Havagim’s cafe, as always. I sat at my usual place by the window. Havagim, that cursed man, had also put some yellow chrysanthemums in a glass of water on the counter. The former design students had started their meal before me. Their faces looked dirtier and more unkempt by the day. One of them, the same one with the brown goatee, told his friend, “I tell you the truth, my friend, today I’m in a rare mood!” And his friend replied, “So you should, my man, that’s the kind of mood that’s called for.” I could hardly swallow. The food was tasteless, and it felt like eating after a long illness. I sank into my chair in the autumnal afternoon sun, pouring into the cafe through the window. It was as if at any moment that woman could pass by the window and catch me off guard by myself while I was eating a mouthful of food (and what a nonsensical act that was!).

  I strolled around the streets for an hour or so, and then went back to the office and sat at my desk. I convinced myself that sometimes working can be a form of amnesia. But the sociology text, with its long and winding sentences, had not progressed a single page. I had lost my confidence in the translator from the very first pages, and felt compelled to check every sentence against the original. From the commotion in the corridor I realized that the manager had arrived. He was ordering the office boy around as usual. Against habit, the old man shook my hand. He told the office boy to fetch some tea. “I’ll be at death’s door before he learns to do his work properly,” he said as we went into his office.

  Without further ado, I embarked on the subject of that woman’s translation. The old man lit his pipe, exhaled with a cough, and asked, “Now what was the title of the book?”

  “Double Dealing.”

  He got up and went to the window. He was looking outside, as if he was following someone he recognized with his eyes. I took a sip from the glass of tea the boy had brought me, and I said with some hesitation, “I don’t think we can publish it. It has passages that

  “Well, cut those passages, modify them, reduce them.”

  “The problem isn’t just that. The novel itself is just a commercial, romantic thriller.”

  “We’ll archive it, then,” said the old man, turning around.

  Maybe he read the surprise and questioning in my face, which led him to approach me and, without meeting my gaze, carry on. “What matters is not just the one work. People’s work, taken singly, may contain errors, may be less than perfect, but when people get involved, they learn to correct their mistakes on their own. What matters is the larger picture, and the continuity of it all. It wouldn’t have been right to let our mutual friend down. It’s only then that she’s encouraged to think about carrying on with her work. Let her think we’ll publish her translation.”

  “But. . .”

  “But what?”

  “But what if she comes back one day or writes us a letter, or asks about her book? What then?”

  The old man stood above me and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “I like that. I like your way of ultimately taking everything so seriously. But remember that in our trade, not everything we say has to be necessarily acted upon.”

  I realized there were still things I had to learn from that old dog.

  I lifted my head from the sociology text. By then it was sunset. I left the office. I didn’t feel like looking in on Fazli, but I didn’t feel like going home, either. I jumped over the dried-up, putrid stream by the side of the street, and stepped onto the tarmac. When I looked back, I saw Fazli — not in a bookshop in the middle of town, but as if I had abandoned him at a stall with a single lit bulb, in the midst of a vast and dark wilderness. A dim red hue could be seen in the sunset sky, but the sidewalks, the odd dried-up tree, and the graffiti had sunk into a smog-filled darkness. Cars drove past me noisily and with bright headlights. I was standing there, unable to put one foot in front of the other. The woman was leaving at the break of dawn to go to the airport. She had a few days’ stopover in Istanbul. Last night she had told me at the last moment that she would send me a postcard from there, to the bookshop address.

  I would spend other days working on the sociology text, other noons at Havagim’s eating lunch, other evenings chatting with Fazli, and sometimes I would walk home in the town’s empty streets. I recalled reading somewhere that a fool is someone who tries to take the dreams of one part of his life to another. I told myself that an even greater fool is someone who tries to take the dreams of one era to another. I felt as if the old man’s evil spirit, with his cruel words, had penetrated me over time. I walked on, and just as I was letting out my stifled breath, I found myself involuntarily thinking of the Arabic proverb: “Ah, ey ba-id ul-ahd, you breaker of promises ...” and realized that these were indeed the old man’s very own decaying and tired words.

  — Translated by Roxane Zand

  Reza Daneshvar

  Reza Daneshvar was born in 1948 in Mashad, Iran. He studied Persian literature at both Mashad and Tehran universities before beginning a career teaching theater in Mashad. He went on to become the head of the theater program in Khorassan province and vice president of the School of Arts in Mashad. In 1982 he moved to Paris, and has been living and writing there ever since. From 2003 to 2005, he has been teaching in residence, under a grant from the International Cities of Asylum, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. Daneshvar has written seven plays, published four novels — Ashura Ashura, The Hut-Dwellers, Prayer of Death, and The Virtuous Sovereign, the last of which was published as Le Brave des Braves in France — and two collections of short stories, Hey Hey Jabali Ghom Ghom and Mahbubeh and Ahl His work reflects his immense knowledge of and fascination with the popular vernacular, proverbs, the folklore of Khorassan, and his masterful command of the Persian language.

  “Mahbubeh and the Demon Ahl” is a haunting story that can be read on many different levels. Recounted as a folktale, it explores the anatomy of violence against women, the nature of repression, and the ways in which folkloric superstition explains, reflects, and supplements such violence and repression. Seminal events in the story take place parallel to major events in contemporary Iranian history: Mahbubeh is born during World War II, gets married on the eve of the coup d’état against Mossadegh, and her daughter’s wedding takes place at the time of the revolution of 1979.

  MAHBUBEH AND

  THE DEMON
AHL

  The story they told was that Mahbubeh’s father’s aunt, Hajar, was responsible for the family’s uprooting in the year one thousand three hundred and eighteen of the Hijra.1 A few months before Mahbubeh’s birth in the city, the wind demon unleashed a savage storm from his sack, tearing up God’s good earth, and exposing, bit by bit, for all to see, the remains of the aunt, gruesomely slain. Wailing and scandal filled the land.

  Everyone now knew that the mysterious veiled woman who, under cover of night, in remote caves and abandoned shepherd’s huts, had slept with any man who came to her on horseback, was none other than Hajar. The veiled woman never appeared in the same place twice, they said, and it took great luck to find her. What’s more, she never gave herself to a man who came on foot; only riders interested her. To the chosen ones who reveled in the sweetness of her favors, she spoke not a word, though at the height of ecstasy she seemed to murmur, “My regal, nocturnal horseman!” into their ears.

  The number of men who sought her passion and the heat of her whisper multiplied, desperate souls galloping through all the barren places around the village till dawn. Exhausted by their nightly quest, they would succumb to sleep in the morning and dream of delights yet to come. And so they began to neglect their tasks, stopped toiling in the fields, and the little village gradually crumbled into ruin.

  One sleepless night, Hajar’s husband — one of the few remaining able-bodied men in the village — quietly crept out of bed, leaving behind his apparently sleeping wife. He slipped into a neighbor’s stable, where a saddled horse awaited him, and joined the riders of the night. Hours passed as he rode the land. The cold nagged at him to abandon his search and return home. But before his desire for the legendary