He thought of Malak-Azar. Her chiming voice tinkled softly in his ear, and the memory of her perfumed body tickled the back of his throat. Some fragments of this woman still lingered in him, and her absent presence hung from the edges of his thoughts like a cobweb spun by an old spider. When he was away from Malak-Azar, he missed her, he missed an imaginary Malak-Azar, who had the hypnotic voice of a mermaid and a comforting embrace as vast as an eternal plain. Deep in his heart he longed for this absent woman who was nowhere.
He traveled for two months. The repugnant smell of his body had disappeared and his rebellious limbs were at peace. He called home once, but before he had a chance to speak Malak-Azar had slammed down the receiver. The second time he called he was told that the lady of the house was not home.
“It’s still too early to go back,” he told himself. “The time is not ripe for me to return. My wife is still angry. I must wait a bit longer. Be sure of myself.”
He spent another month traveling, going from one village to another, from one satellite town to the next, from one teahouse to another, driving aimlessly, drowsy and half intoxicated, oblivious of time, unaware of particular people and places, mindless of the Yarn and Spool Company and of duplicate and triplicate accounts. During the day, he drove on the edges of vast deserts, and at night he lay down and gazed at the sky and open vistas. And yet, he was still tied to the past, and obviously the sane thing to do was to contact his family and put an end to their worries and uncertainties. His mother was still alive, even though her life was hanging by no more than a thread, as unreliable as a soap bubble in the air. He had to see her before she died.
The door to his house was locked, and the lock had been changed. Hard as he rang, no one answered. He realized that he could not go to his office looking completely unkempt. Uncle G’s house was around the corner. He went there and the old man was shocked to see him. He took a step backward and gaped. His mother-in-law was there, too. She was peeking from behind the upstairs bedroom window and quickly withdrew her head. Amir-Ali inquired about his wife, and Uncle G kept staring at him in astonishment.
“Where have you been all this time?” he asked.
Amir-Ali was in no mood to explain. He repeated his question. Uncle G sighed. He placed his hand on Amir-Ali’s shoulder and cleared his throat. He was preparing for a long lecture. He extended his right arm forward (evidently he had rehearsed this pose in front of the mirror), stretched his neck, and with the voice of a retired actor, devoid of any resonance or excitement, explained that Malak-Azar had gone abroad. And that she had put the house up for sale, and that the key had been given to so-and-so (meaning me).
Amir-Ali was neither surprised nor distressed. He seemed to have expected this all along. He bid a hasty good-bye. He shook his head and was about to leave when Uncle G called him back. He had another piece of news for him. Bad news.
With a voice that had again taken on a dramatic tone, he said, “I am sorry. I don’t know how to put it. It is not easy.”
Amir-Ali’s heart sank. Uncle G was mumbling. He wanted to prolong Amir-Ali’s misery as much as possible. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, once, twice, all for theatrical effect. He coughed. Amir-Ali’s eyes were glued to Uncle G’s mouth. At last he could take it no longer.
“My mother?” he asked, and he turned deathly pale.
The doorbell rang. The mother-in-law’s head reappeared behind the lace curtain, and a moment later was gone again.
“Please allow me to open the door,” Uncle G said.
Amir-Ali followed him to the door. He felt like kicking Uncle G in the ankle again.
“Please. What has happened?” he asked.
Uncle G had reached the door. “You have been missing for three months,” he said. “And during all this time you failed to contact your wife or your children or your mother. What did you expect?”
Malak-Azar’s brother and I arrived on the scene together. When Amir-Ali saw me, he heaved a sigh of relief and stepped away from Uncle G. He knew that I knew everything. I went straight to the point. I gave him the key to the house and told him that it had been placed in my trust and now I had to return it. Then I told him calmly and coolly (I knew how much he detested excitement) that his mother was in the hospital, that it was hopeless, and she could pass away at any moment.
My car was parked right outside the house. I offered to drive him to the hospital. He accepted and ran out ahead of me. I had called the hospital before coming here. The nurse who answered the telephone had made me understand that the patient was on her deathbed. I was not sure that Amir-Ali would get there in time. The hospital was in the city center and traffic was heavy. The cars were being stopped and the spaces under their seats and inside their trunks were being searched. Amir-Ali was struggling with himself and his hands were shaking.
“When was the last time you spoke with her?” he asked.
For a moment, I thought he was talking of Malak-Azar, and my heart sank. I looked at him. He meant his mother. His thoughts were with her. There was an accident at the intersection. Someone had been run over. People were shouting. Two men were beating each other up. We had to make a U-turn and choose another route. Amir-Ali repeated his question.
“Two days ago,” I replied.
“How was she?” he asked. “Please tell me. Tell me how she was.”
I couldn’t drive and speak at the same time. We were in front of a school. Children were running around. It was chaos. A truck was unloading bricks at the end of the street. The road was blocked. Amir-Ali was going out of his mind. He was sweating. He got out. “I’ll get there faster if I walk,” he said. He got out of the car and started to run. I let him go. There was nothing I could do. I wanted to tell him of Malak-Azar and give him her message. But I couldn’t.
The hospital was crowded. There were lines everywhere, in front of the elevator, in front of the pharmacy, in front of the restrooms. There was a disorderly line in front of the information booth. His mother’s name was not to be found on the patient list. The information clerk said perhaps the patient had been released.
A voice whispered deep inside Amir-Ali that he had arrived too late, that it was all over. Perhaps she had been admitted under another name. He gave her maiden name.
“When was she admitted?” the clerk asked. Amir-Ali did not know. He shook his head.
“You need to know the exact date of admission,” the man said. “A hundred patients come and go every day. Many of them die. Let us hope your patient is in good health and has been released.”
It took another ten minutes for the information clerk to find her name. Room 502, fifth floor. The elevator went up only to the third floor and then went back to the second floor and stayed there. Amir-Ali climbed the stairs two at a time and finally reached the fifth floor. A number of visitors were sitting quietly in the waiting area. Their heads were down and their eyes were mostly wet with tears. A framed photograph of a nurse hung from the opposite wall. She had a sweet face and held her finger to her lips. The door to a room opened and a doctor, followed by a few nurses, emerged. A young boy and girl got up from among the visitors. Their eyes were glued to the doctor’s mouth. They followed him. After a few steps the girl stopped, leaned against the wall, and buried her face in her hands. A nurse was passing by with a tray of medications. Amir-Ali stopped her. He told her he was looking for his mother and mentioned her name. The nurse pointed with her head in the direction of the room across the hall.
Then she was still alive. Never mind that an IV was connected to a vein in her arm and a tube inserted in her nose and that she looked like a plucked chicken, and that her face was drained of all color, and that the line on the heart monitor was almost flat. She was still alive. She was waiting for him. She was not going to leave without saying good-bye.
Dazed and trembling, Amir-Ali stood in the doorway. He could not bring himself to walk in. He would have liked to put this frail creature into a bag and take her far away. A nurse entered
the room. She looked at the patient, took his mother’s pulse, tidied the sheets, and shook her head. Amir-Ali felt that something inside him was shifting, that he was about to collapse, and that the particles of his body were scattered in the air like the ashes of a cremated corpse. He held on to the wall and slid forward. Did his mother remember him? Perhaps she was looking at him with her soul, with a third eye, with a mind that was outside her body. His mother’s white hands rested on the sheets, lined with spidery blue veins. Her fingertips quivered. He sat on the edge of the bed, put his hand under her chin, and turned her face toward him. Two translucent circles shone deep inside her eyes, two windows to another life. She nodded her head and smiled. It was as though the old lady sitting on the brink of death had been waiting for this last encounter with her beloved child.
Amir-Ali caressed her white hair and closed her eyes. A major chapter of his life had come to an end. He felt that he no longer belonged to anything or anyone and that all the sunny shores and the clear and bright skies and all the green fields and vast deserts were waiting for him.
Malak-Azar had moved most of the valuables — the carpets, the antique objets d’art, and everything else that had belonged to her — out of the house. Only the drapes and the beds, stripped of their mattresses and sheets, remained. The cabinet doors were left open, their interiors emptied out. The drawers had been pulled open and left in that state, in complete disarray. The floors were covered with old newspapers, torn papers, and photographs — Amir-Ali’s photographs. His clothes — pressed trousers, clean white shirts, double-breasted jackets, neckties, imported scarves — all lay in a pile at the foot of the wall, like corpses on a battlefield. Each pair of striped gray trousers, each pair of leather gloves, each silk handkerchief, and each pair of polished leather shoes hinted at some old memory. His father, with his avaricious body and his lustful gaze that betrayed carnal desires, his mother, with her aristocratic silence and hidden grief, his wife, with her delicate body and her cardboard masks, and Uncle G, with his pitiful dread of old age and death, were all there, milling about, mementos of a lost life.
Malak-Azar had left him a note on the kitchen table, cold and concise. There was no greeting, no “Dear So-and-so,” nothing. It just told him in very few words that she had no intention of coming back and that she did not want to see him again. Ever. And this last word she had underlined twice for emphasis. (She had also sent me a short letter. With a temporary address and a secret telephone number that I was not to pass on to anyone else.)
Amir-Ali lay down on the empty bed in the master bedroom and stared at the low ceiling and the antique chandelier, which weighed down on him with its massive bulk. Scenes from his life passed piecemeal before his eyes, like a hodgepodge film shot with a cast of strangers. Perhaps it had all been a dream. Perhaps he himself was an obscure character in someone else’s dream, a stranger. The walls, the doors and windows, even the smell of that house, were unfamiliar to him. Malak-Azar still wandered in the rooms like a faint ghost and kept an eye on him from the far side of another world. He got up. Packed his things. Took some money and dollar bills that he had hidden away at the back of a closet (instinctive farsightedness) and stuck them in his pocket. He put the half-dead plant of the guest bedroom under his arm and he was on his way.
One night at a wayside teahouse, he looked at himself in the mirror and was startled. A sixty-year-old man was looking back at him. Until then he had fought the onslaught of age. He had looked twenty years younger than his real age, and he had hidden, by hook or crook, those twenty years somewhere behind his face. He had watched his figure and his good looks like a hawk. He would not touch fatty foods or sweets, and the clothes that Malak-Azar carefully picked out for him presented him as a youngish man of good taste. Now he had become someone else: a middle-aged man with a small double chin and sunburned cheeks, with a deeply furrowed forehead and crow’s feet around his eyes, with a graying stubble and white hair showing up here and there on his head and in his eyebrows. He had bought a pair of roomy and comfortable Kurdish trousers at the bazaar in Sanandaj. He did not mind letting out his paunch and did not fear the judgment and inquisitive looks of others.
Amir-Ali stared at the image in the mirror with growing astonishment. He realized that he knew this face, with that familiar look and that wry smile, and that he had seen it somewhere before. He went closer to the mirror to take a better look. He had imagined a different reflection of himself, and this being in the mirror was quite someone else. He and that other person stood facing each other like two strangers, and Amir-Ali realized that this new person, with his different looks, was no other than his second personality, he who commanded his limbs and made his bowels rumble, that invisible being who followed him like a shadow and who was at war with him. But perhaps this shadow, this alter ego, was not at war with him after all. He had been a friend, forgotten and banished, and thus wounded and in a rage. They had now made up and had no other option than friendship. Amir-Ali did not dislike this easygoing, unkempt self, with his sunburned complexion, his earthly and rustic air. The image in the mirror was looking at him with inviting eyes. He had come a long way and seemed to be tired, as if wanting to sit down and stretch out his legs. After so many years of absence, he wanted at last to settle down in his rightful place. The two approached each other until they merged. And only a memory remained of the man who was once the head of the Yarn and Spool Company.
Amir-Ali is in his car, driving on mountainous roads. He has no destination in mind. He enjoys this aimless driving, this trip toward unknown and unexplored deserts. He is glad that no one knows him and that he is not imprisoned in a mold. His body is tranquil and his limbs are at peace with him. He has rolled down the driver’s side window and the autumn sun shines on his bare arm and his face. He feels he can drive on forever.
He spends the night at a small roadside village and looks at the blue ocean above his head. A gaunt cat comes and sits beside him. His right hand reaches out and pets the cat on the head. His hand is full of kindness. His eyes look deep into the sky, at the bright crescent moon and the galaxies dispersed in the universe. He thinks of somewhere beyond the farthest celestial bodies, of a world parallel with another, and of a past that is renewed and of a time that is yet to come. And for a moment he envisions his childhood kite as it soars above the clouds, and he sees himself amidst all those galaxies, transformed into a little speck, floating in space. His body aches with ecstasy and an indescribable pleasure creeps into every cell of his body. For a moment he thinks that he has disintegrated, been pulverized and absorbed into the Milky Way. His kite is flying along with him, its colorful tail gently swaying this way and that. Perhaps he is dreaming. In whatever state he is, asleep or awake, he is happy, the innocent joy of a speck floating in space. It is not easy to understand and it may sound like nonsense. But nonsense or not, this is how Amir-Ali feels and it cannot be expressed in any other way.
Let us observe him: He has been awakened by the crow of a rooster. It is not yet sunrise. He is at a roadside teahouse, sleeping on a wooden couch under a satin quilt, and he feels cold. He hugs his knees, and a cool breeze brushes over his face. The smell of freshly baked bread is in the air. He is hungry. He opens his eyes a crack and stares at the fragments of his dream flying away. The air has warmed up to a pleasant temperature. He can smell the aromas of his childhood summers, the scent of the wet mud and straw mixture of the orchard walls and the whiff of the sticky resin oozing out of the pine trees. No one is staring at him, no one is judging him. He can roll over, he can shout. He can speak and pour out the unspoken words that have remained imprisoned in his chest. He can choose, protest, decide, or do nothing. No one can tell him that he has to stand up for something or against someone, or to be the Iranian ambassador to the Court of St. James or the president of the Yarn and Spool Imports Company. He can lie down under the trees and listen to the crickets if he feels like it. He can realize his old dream and become an astronomer or he can water his plot of cucumbe
rs and plough his land. He can transform himself into any shape and metamorphose. He can die, and opting for death is a choice he can make.
Uncle G had read somewhere that all the occurrences in the world are somehow connected. He had wanted to pontificate on that, but he had not been given the chance. But for once in his life he had been right, and those who were busy eating dinner around the table that night did not realize how a series of thin threads hung from each word, each random encounter, each minor incident, and how these threads were interwoven like the colored fabrics of a cosmic carpet. If that pesky mosquito had not bitten Amir-Ali’s foot on that eventful night, in all likelihood nothing would have happened, and the destiny of Amir-Ali and Malak-Azar and her mother and Uncle G and the Yarn and Spool Imports Company would not have changed course. The same can be said for my destiny.
— Translated by Karim Emami and Sara Khalili
Behnam Dayani
Behnam Dayani has published one volume of short stories, entitled Hitchcock and Agha Baji and Other Stories, in 1994.
Like Hitchcock’s Psycho, “Hitchcock and Agha Baji” is a story about the tyranny of the past over the present. It first appeared in Short Stories from Iran and the World, edited by Safdar Taqizedeh and Asghar Elahi (Tehran: Safdar Taqizedeh, 1993).
HITCHCOCK AND AGHA BAJI
On that sunny autumn Thursday afternoon, between the hours of two and seven, three unusual incidents took place. From three to five, my friends and I went to Mahtab Cinema to see Hitchcock’s Psycho. At six-thirty, Agha Baji came to our house to visit my grandmother. Fifteen seconds later, the tile floor in the bathroom collapsed and I almost fell through into the stone pit below. Apparently, these three simple incidents have nothing to do with one another. But behind this simplicity, there lie numerous complexities.
Strange Times, My Dear Page 33