Strange Times, My Dear

by Nahid Mozaffari

  It’s afternoon. We have two periods of grammar and literature. We’re sitting in the classroom. The atmosphere is filled with conspiracy and intrigue. We’re about to rebel against our teacher. But the remarkable part is that the instigator of our supposed rebellion is actually our principal. By making us do this, he wants to pull the rug out from under Mr. Chabok’s feet. Mr. Chabok, our language teacher, must be on a temporary contract, which is why it’s possible to fire him so easily. He is a university student with a hefty build. He has a bony face and a protruding jaw. He always grinds his teeth.

  He is an irritable teacher, but sometimes he can be very informal and friendly. Granted that we’re eighteen years old, and we’re in twelfth grade, but the day he smoked in the classroom, we all flipped. The weird part is that he was asking the kids for matches. They say he says fishy things. I really don’t get that impression. Though he once did say something that wasn’t half bad. When we were talking about the Queen of England and her husband, he said that in the end, only two kings will be left in the entire world — the king in the deck of cards and the King or Queen of England.

  Tahmures Yazdani was the first person to bring up this business of fishy talk. One day, after Mr. Chabok left the classroom, he gathered all the kids around, his eyes gleaming with excitement, and said, “Did you see the back of his coat collar?”

  We all stared back at him like zombies.

  He smiled indulgently as if addressing a bunch of idiots. “He’s got the sign of the Third National Front pinned to the back of his coat collar!”1

  The truth is, we hadn’t seen anything. Even if we had, we wouldn’t have understood it. Tahmures has a big head and talks big. He says his dad is in the ministry of foreign affairs. He always concludes his essays with the famous concept of “Positive Nationalism.” Even if the topic of the essay is, “Write a Letter to Your Father and Explain Why You Have Failed.” Once, a few of the kids and I asked him some questions about Mr. Chabok and his fishy discussions. But he only raised his eyebrows and said, “He is a traitor.”

  So we are sitting in the classroom and whispering among ourselves. We don’t know why Mr. Chabok hasn’t showed up yet. Either he has smelled a rat himself, or else someone’s told him about the setup. The truth is that we are all ashamed to pull this spineless, nasty trick on Mr. Chabok. The head boy keeps insisting that the principal is in the loop and encourages this move. But none of us really believe that yet. Tahmures, whose irritating schemes have fallen on deaf ears until now, leaves the classroom in frustration and returns, short of breath, with the principal himself. The principal looks at us angrily and says, “So why are you all still sitting down?! Get up and leave!”

  Slumping with shame, we reluctantly pick up our books and leave the school. Some people go home. Some stand around at the intersection and light up cigarettes. Alexander, Abbas, and I go to Mahtab Cinema. The movie is Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, and John Gavin. All three of us are Movie Star magazine readers, and I am a Hitchcock fan. I have memorized the list of frames in which Hitchcock has appeared in his movies far better than the extended formula of ethane and methane. I have seen almost all the Hitchcock films that have been shown in Iran. Once, Abbas cautiously compared Hitchcock to the director Samuel Khachikian. With great disdain, I advised him to quit making such futile analogies. Vertigo is the best film I have ever seen in my life, and the best director is obviously Hitchcock.

  Mahtab Cinema is almost deserted. Only three or four of the best rows are filled. After some desperate negotiation, we obtain permission from the usher and sit in the front. Supposedly Hitchcock has requested the theater doors to be shut as the film begins, but they are not. At the beginning of the film, there is a minute of silence and darkness. One or two people crack jokes and several others whistle. But the three of us are already in a world of our own. As if we are in a different orbit.

  The film takes our breath away, from the beginning when it focuses on a window in a building, to the very end, when Anthony Perkins is sitting in the sheriff’s office with a blanket around his shoulders, not whisking away the fly on his hand. The shower scene — well, that’s special, of course, but the most excruciating scene is when Vera Miles goes down the basement stairs alone, to see what’s happening down there. All three of us are clutching the arms of our seats. We’re hunched over, and are pulling ourselves back in our chairs. As if we don’t want to go down with her. But Vera Miles doesn’t pay any attention to us. She goes down the stairs, one by one. In the basement, she sees a woman from the back, who is sitting on a chair. She calls out to her. The woman doesn’t answer. She touches her shoulder. The chair turns around. The music screams. Just like when the edge of a sharp razor is scratched across glass. Vera Miles’s hand hits the hanging ceiling lamp from sheer fear. The shaking light twists and distorts everything, blurring all lines and boundaries. Sitting on the chair is the skeleton of an old woman. Gray hair tied back, with a straight part in the middle. Some remnant of dry and wrinkled skin, black eye sockets, and a void mouth.

  It’s been about an hour since I got home. I don’t even remember how I came out of the cinema or how I got back. I put the book Physics and Mechanics in front of me, and I am trying to read tomorrow’s lesson. The words keep moving out of focus, and the old woman’s face replaces them. I try to fade out that image by shaking my head a few times. I stand; I see the neighbor’s windows. The windows go out of focus, the old woman’s face takes their place. I walk a few steps and stare at the flowers on the carpet. The flowers go out of focus, and the old woman’s face appears in their place. I go to the refrigerator to eat something; the lightbulb blinks, and the old woman’s face replaces all the containers of food. Trembling, I stand above the heater and fix my eyes on the blue flames. The flames dance around, and the old woman’s face appears among them. I try to make myself busy. I move from spot to spot aimlessly, like a lunatic. Unfortunately, no one is home, otherwise

  I could talk. I switch on the radio and turn it up high. The strumming of the tar and the kamanche fill the room and I calm down a bit.2 I am about to pick up Physics and Mechanics when someone knocks on the door.

  The door of the house is wooden. It has a bronze, crescent-shaped knocker. As far as I remember, no one ever uses the knocker nowadays. Everyone rings the doorbell. I don’t know why I am suddenly overwhelmed with fear. I come to the top of the stairs and listen carefully. A few seconds later, the rat-a-tat of the knocker comes again. The strikes are irregular — short, short, long. As if the striker’s hand is weak, without energy. I come down the stairs and turn on the hallway lights. The lightbulb is only forty watts. For years, it has been a safe haven for the flies to sit on and do their business. A halo of dirty yellow light falls on the surroundings. I stand behind the door, and ask, “Who is it?”

  No one answers. I open the door. I expect to see a person, but there is no one there. The door frame, black and empty like a hollow grave, appears before me. Suddenly, my heart beats faster. The hairs on my body stand on end, and my insides churn. I take a couple steps back, and ask out loud, “Is anyone there?”

  A head slowly enters the black frame from the left side. Gray hair with a straight part in the middle. Wrinkled skin, deep-set eyes, a pointed nose, a toothless mouth, a few strands of long, black hair on the chin, all of this framed by a white scarf and covered by a black veil. My common sense recognizes this face, and says: “This is Agha Baji.”

  But something else inside me erratically says: “This is the old woman from Psycho.”

  Just like Anthony Perkins, who clasps his hand on his mouth when he sees the body of Janet Leigh, I cover my mouth with my hand, so that my life doesn’t jump out of my body from fear. I stumble a few steps back and hit the sink. Suddenly I lose my balance and I feel like one of my legs is sinking. I let out a loud yell, and grab the edge of the sink along with the drainpipe. I look down, and I see that one of my legs has sunk into a black hole about the area of one tile, and my ot
her leg is stuck at the edge of the adjacent tile, which is about to collapse and fall down. With a speed unexpected of someone of her age, Agha Baji enters the house and approaches me. Just then, the adjacent tile and a few others collapse. Now, the entire lower half of my body is in the hole, and the upper half is hanging on to the sink. Agha Baji realizes what is going on, and stops. Whimpering, I plead for her help. She takes her veil, ties one end of it to the wooden handle of the water pump, and throws the other end toward me. The water pump is a hefty cast-iron contraption. In the old days, they used it to pump water from the underground water reservoir in the cellar to the water tank on the roof. With the help of the veil, I pull myself up and collapse in the hallway. Agha Baji doesn’t get too close to me. She’s a sharp old woman and must have understood that I have been frightened by her.

  She goes to the foot of the staircase and calls out to my grandmother. She calls out “hey” several times. She still calls my grandmother “brother’s wife,” even though it’s already been about fifty years since her brother died. When she is convinced that no one is at home, she sits on the bottom stair. She takes out a pair of metal-rimmed glasses from a pouch in her head scarf. Once she adjusts her glasses behind her head with an elastic band, she looks at me with careful concern. Even though she has rescued me, she’s still the old woman from Psycho.

  An acrid odor has permeated the whole area. Something between alcohol and vinegar. I guess that the odor is coming from the hole that I was suspended in. It’s so pungent that it makes me dizzy. Exasperated, Agha Baji looks around several times. She’s probably thinking of a solution for my condition. She takes out two pink objects shaped like horseshoes from another pouch in her head scarf and puts them in her mouth. Her face assumes shape, like a flat tire that’s suddenly raised up on a jack. The pink objects are her false teeth. She can’t talk or eat without them. At this moment, my grandmother comes huffing and puffing into the house, carrying a bundle in her arms. Her face is red, and steam is rising up from her. She was probably at the public bath. Before I pass out, I glance at Agha Baji, who has now assumed a human face and is no longer the old woman in Psycho.

  Half an hour passes. I am upstairs and I feel a little better. My grandmother believes that I passed out from shock. She is sitting beside me and wants to force me to eat a piece of rock salt. She says God took pity on me that I didn’t fall into the pit. I put the salt in my mouth and confirm her point. By now, she has put the neighbor’s father and mother and their fathers’ fathers and all their ancestors in the grinder, and ground them up, making minced meat out of them with all her insults and curses. She has decided to go to the police station first thing in the morning to complain. The next-door neighbor is Armenian. I still don’t get why she wants to complain to the police. She explains that the neighbor is using his cellar reservoir as one gigantic wine cask and is making wine in it. The wall of the well, which is the boundary between our house and their decrepit cellar water reservoir, has crumbled, and that’s why the tiles collapsed. Now I understand where the sour smell of alcohol and vinegar came from. My grandmother slaps the back of her hand and bites her lip in shocked disapproval. She is wondering what the hell she would have done if I had actually fallen into the pit. I have a feeling that what she is saying doesn’t make sense. What does the collapse of our well have to do with the fact that the neighbor is making wine in his cellar? I try to dissuade her from going to the police. If she starts getting into the pure-impure discussion with wine and whatnot, there will be no stopping her. But Agha Baji settles the issue with two statements. First, she suggests that we pour a sack of lime in the well to clean up the wine. As for the neighbor, she believes that each person will answer for his own deeds in the next world. Besides, she adds, hell needs street sweepers, too!3

  My grandmother lets it go at that and sets up the tea things. Then they sit beside each other and begin to — as they call it — mingle. I don’t really know Agha Baji that well. I only see her a few times each year. Within the family, they say that she brings bad luck. Some also think she can bring the evil eye if she’s rubbed the wrong way. Her name is Gol Baji Khanum, but everyone calls her Agha Baji.

  After I read a few pages of Physics and Mechanics, grandmother calls me. She puts a cup of freshly brewed tea in front of me, and beckons to Agha Baji. Agha Baji is sitting across from me, staring at me. Maybe she is offended that seeing her frightened me so much. She says: “I’ve never seen Jonah and the whale, nor have I built the dam of Alexander, but even if the tribe of Gog and Magog had encircled me, I wouldn’t be this shaken with fear.”4

  Then she turns to my grandmother and complains: “As soon as your grandson set his eyes on me, he almost died of fright!”

  My grandmother throws a reproachful glance toward me, and tells her in a consoling voice, “He didn’t mean to be disrespectful — you must forgive him, Agha Baji. He’s a bit prone to delusions.”

  I say, “It. . . it’s because I saw a film today.”

  Grandmother waves her hand dismissively at what I say and replies, “Talking about film and cimnema again?”

  No matter how hard I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to get her to learn how to say “cinema” correctly. I explain that the film was very sus-penseful and frightening. Both their ears prick up. In a few sentences, I explain the gist of the story to them. My grandmother laughs and says, “Baji dear, are your ears big enough to absorb that tall tale?”

  But Agha Baji’s manner is suddenly transformed. Her look makes me feel unsettled. I have a feeling that she wants to draw something out of my insides. Without getting off the floor, she slides her legs over to me like a grasshopper and sits beside me. She asks me to tell her the whole story. I tell her the story, not from A to Z, but a good summary. Stunned, she fixes her stare on my mouth without blinking. When the story is finished, my grandmother gives us each another cup of tea. The room is uncannily silent. Agha Baji seems to have withdrawn into herself and her stare is fixed on the flower pattern in the carpet. I don’t dare say anything else. I’m afraid that she will turn into the old woman in Psycho again. To break the silence, my grandmother coughs and asks with a laugh, “So who was the operator of the film?”

  She has learned from me that every film has a director. But she confuses this word, too, like “cimnema,” and always says “operator” instead of director. Before I answer her, I glance at Agha Baji, and her lips are quivering. She weeps silently. Puzzled, I look at my grandmother in search of an explanation. She gesticulates with her eyes and brow, urging me to leave the room. I get up and go back to my Physics and Mechanics.

  One hour has passed. It’s dinnertime. My grandmother wants to keep Agha Baji for dinner. I hear them arguing about it from upstairs. Finally, Agha Baji comes downstairs, remarking that she wants to cook halvah to take to the cemetery tomorrow to visit the dead.5 When we are saying good-bye, I try to console her about the unpleasant incident that occurred at the moment of her arrival. I whip out some fancy phrases that I’ve learned from grown-ups: “You have honored us with your presence.” “Your visit is precious to us, more precious than our eyes.” “You blessed us, your servants.” “Please privilege us again.”

  Agha Baji waits until my gibberish is finished. Then she says, “Will you take Agha Baji to observe this show sometime?”

  I don’t understand what she means. I get nervous. I worry that I am about to offend her at the time of her departure, too. But what she actually means is the simplest among all the different scenarios I could conjure. She wants me to take her to see the film Psycho. That’s why I can’t believe it. To avoid committing a gaffe, I give her a neutral answer, I say, “Please, whatever you say.”

  She nods her head, and disappears in the dark.

  When I tell my grandmother about it, she isn’t really surprised. She says, “Don’t judge Agha Baji the way she is now that she’s like a marshmallow. Once upon a time, the earth used to tremble beneath her feet!” I get curious, and inquire about her more. After
dinner, she tells me Agha Baji’s life story.

  At night, as I lie down in my bed, the old woman from Psycho is about to pop into my mind again. I think of Agha Baji to distract myself. Her life is more like a film than reality.

  When she is fifteen, the governor of Karbala asks for her hand in marriage.6 (I later discover that this happened at the time when Iraq was still part of the Ottoman Empire.) No one knows where the Turkish Pasha who was governing Karbala had heard tales of her beauty — of long tresses of hair like embroidered flowers in a tapestry, down to the curve of her waist. Her brow as smooth as marble. Eyes, brown as the eyes of a gazelle. Thick, bow-shaped eyebrows. Nose like a chickpea. Lips parting in a smile like the shell of a pistachio, and the dimple in her chin — an abyss for lovers to plunge into. Hard as I try, I can’t make Agha Baji’s current face correspond to such features. Most awkward of all is her current chin, full of grooves and wrinkles with long hairs growing on it; nothing whatsoever to do with a pretty dimple.

  The Turkish pasha had offered many gifts in return for her hand, one of which was a fully grown white horse, the size of a pony, with horseshoes made of gold. Miss Baji took the wedding vows with the groom in absentia. Riding among twelve camels transporting her dowry, accompanied by soldiers wearing fezzes, she set off for the border. (It’s the threshold of the First World War. The end of the Qajar dynasty in Iran and the Ottoman pashas in Turkey is near, and there is turmoil everywhere.) On the way, the news reached them that the hapless old pasha had left this world. The fifteen-year-old Miss Baji was left alone with a number of lusty befezzed Arab soldiers, the gifts of the unfortunate deceased governor, and twelve dowry-laden camels. That night, she sewed all the Persian and Ottoman gold coins into the lining of her dress, and early in the morning she fled back to her father’s home, riding her golden-shod horse.