by Dalia Sofer
After much deliberation I accepted John Comenius as one undertakes a new friendship. For many afternoons I sat fully clothed in the bathtub under the bottles and read his book, cover to cover, discovering its catalog of a seventeenth-century world, which had remained largely unchanged from my own—fire, air, clouds, water, earth, metals, stones, trees, flowers, corn, shrubs, singing birds, ravenous birds, water fowl, laboring beasts, wild beasts, serpents and creeping things, sea fish and shell fish, the outward parts of man, the head and the hand, the flesh and the bowels, the channels and bones, the outward and inward senses, the soul of man, husbandry, the making of honey, bread baking, fishing, fowling, butchery, cookery, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the mason, a house, a mine, the blacksmith, the traveler, the horseman, carriages, passing over waters, swimming, shipwreck, writing, paper, the book binder, a book, a school, geometry, the aspects of the planets, moral philosophy, prudence, diligence, temperance, fortitude, patience, humanity, justice, liberality, the tree of consanguinity, a city, judgment, the tormenting of malefactors, a burial, a stage play, the kingdom and the region, the army and the fight, the besieging of the city, religion, the last judgment, the close.
I didn’t initially grasp that the book was in Old English, and for weeks afterward I recited my favorite passage, which I dutifully memorized in my very poor English, to anyone who would listen, never understanding why it garnered so many laughs from the adults—namely my parents and my father’s associates from the Ministry—whom I had hoped to impress rather than amuse. The passage, which I still remember, was in the section describing man, and went as follows:
The inward Senses are Three:
The Common Sense, (under the forepart of the head), apprehendeth things taken from the outward Senses.
The Phantasie, under the crown of the head judgeth of those things, thinketh and dreameth,
The Memory, under the hinder part of the head, layeth up every thing and fetcheth them out: it loseth some, and this is forgetfulness.
Sleep is the rest of the Senses.
* * *
TO PROVE TO MYSELF the existence of the world I followed the book’s example and began to draw. I drew my father’s eyeglasses, my mother’s faux fur coat, my grandfather’s imperial mustache. I drew the chipped porcelain Harlequin on the piano and the tarnished silver samovar in the kitchen. I drew winter coats hanging limp on the rack by the front door and hollow gloves stacked palms up on the console in the foyer, like hands outstretched and waiting. I drew my mother’s wedding dress, wrapped in an ink-blue cotton shroud, like some precious relic that could disintegrate if exposed to daylight. I drew, one summer afternoon, a bruised apricot fallen from the tree in our yard.
I tried to draw Uncle Majid, but I could not remember him as he had been. The memory loses some, I thought, and this is forgetfulness. With charcoal I traced the jagged outline of a black bowler hat and propped up the drawing by my bed.
“What’s this?” asked my father when waking me for school one morning.
“It’s Uncle Majid,” I said.
“That’s not Uncle Majid,” my father said. “That’s a hat.”
“It’s Uncle Majid,” I said again.
* * *
FROM THAT DAY ON my father ridiculed my drawing of Uncle Majid. I cried, publicly and shamefully, and my father introduced the storyline that would accompany me for the rest of my childhood: that I had a penchant for cracks, scraps, and splinters. That I was very thin-skinned, that I would break before long.
But I held on to my drawing of Uncle Majid. I needed it in order to be in the world.
5
UNTIL FIVE DAYS BEFORE HE DIED Uncle Majid was a house gardener who held no aspiration to be anything else. To my father—his older brother—this was a disappointment, and to my mother, it was one more familial humiliation. Why a man may wish to spend his days with rakes and hoses was, for them both, beyond comprehension, but my uncle insisted that the toil was good for the soul and until one has spent hours with hands dipped in earth one cannot know the meaning of existence. He had three clients in north Tehran: a Jewish steel industrialist, a wistful widower with a passion for tulips, and a professor of mathematics with a blond Irish wife whom everyone called “the Englishwoman.” More than once my father offered to use his connections at the Ministry to get his brother a job at one of the city’s municipal parks, say, the Niavaran garden or Shahanshahi Park, but Uncle Majid declined. “I would never work for anything named Shahanshah—king of kings,” he said. “Be it man or park.”
In addition to his modest ambitions my uncle exhibited few vices. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, couldn’t go anywhere near opium because he was prone to migraines. His food intake was measured and his clothes even more so; his collection of wool cardigans—hand-me-downs from the professor with the Irish wife—along with his bowler hat, made him look like he was perpetually stepping out of a Marks & Spencer catalog. His speech embodied the restraint of his outfits: he didn’t care for gossip and never trespassed anyone’s privacy. Of current events he was adequately informed but he read few books; even in his intake of information he was cautious, as though too much knowledge consumed at once could induce in him a fit of indigestion. No storyteller at the dinner table and certainly not a wit, his main virtue was kindness, which meant that all in all, Uncle Majid was deemed by society—our family included—to be rather dull.
But what he lacked in eccentricity was made up for by his wife, Azar, a professional grumbler who carried a small bottle of ethyl alcohol in her bag to disinfect surfaces the world forced her to come into contact with—a stranger’s telephone, an armrest, the door handle of a haberdashery, where she could be found on any given afternoon buying ribbons, buttons, or trimmings for her homemade outfits. According to Uncle Majid, she washed all the paper money in her wallet each night before going to bed and hung the bills to dry in the bathroom, pinned to a clothesline. “What about him?” my father would joke, pointing at Uncle Majid. “Do you dip him in ethanol each night before bed, too?” Azar would shrug, indicating that there was no danger of her ever coming into direct contact with her husband, and my uncle, who had fairer skin than any of us Mozaffarians, would turn red, and surrendering, would bow his head.
Until an incident in the fall of 1970, when my father returned from Germany with a Märklin train set, I had no definitive opinion of my uncle. His presence in our house was comforting in the way that a pair of woolly slippers tucked under the bed can be. When my father, galvanized from his visit to Cologne, where he had attended an art fair with the unpronounceable name Kölner Kunstmarkt, stacked the train boxes on the coffee table, Omid and I looked on with disbelief. The set had a steam locomotive, several passenger cars, dining and baggage cars, and stretches of track, some straight and others curved, all designed to link to one another and create a world so magical that no child—not I, certainly—was worthy enough to enter.
And I was, in fact, denied entry. My father enlisted Uncle Majid to help him assemble the set, allowing us—the children and the wives—to watch from a safe distance. My mother, who had no interest in toys and gadgets, turned on the television and busied herself with some old French film; it was Children of Paradise, a three-hour epic she had seen multiple times, twice with me. Dolefully she chewed a slice of pineapple, glancing every now and again with dismay at the bowl of towering yellow fruit masquerading as her dinner. She had been following, since the summer, “the Sexy Pineapple Diet,” which instructed its adherents to eat nothing but bowlfuls of pineapple for two days every week. Like a teenager replaying a tragedy song, my shrinking mother, who repeated the diet weekly despite everyone’s objections to it, was beginning to resemble a yellow trumpet fish and was turning our house, with its growing heaps of Brazilian pineapples, into the Tropicana. My father called her Carmen Miranda.
Azar sighed and slumped into a chair, fidgeting with the uneven sash of her orchid dress. “Do you know,” she said to no one in particular, “that I could have become
a fashion designer? Who knows where I could be now—London or Paris or even Amsterdam…” No one answered. I examined her gaunt face and her downturned mouth. By all means, I thought, go! Walk across London Bridge, play the accordion on the Eiffel Tower, buy yourself some clogs and twirl with a Dutchman along the canals of Amsterdam, or better yet, hop on a Märklin train and huff your way out of our lives. The unkind trail of my thoughts liberated me, and I could have carried on, were it not for my uncle who, watching me and Omid seated on two dining chairs side by side with our hands idle on our laps, said to my father, “Let the boys help us, Sadegh. After all, isn’t all this for them?” My father, sleeves rolled up and tie undone, shook his head and said, “Do you know to what lengths I went to get this? It’s expensive, and vintage besides. I won’t have it ruined by these two clowns.”
Omid and I watched as the men tinkered for hours with the cars and rails, constructing and deconstructing the set on the dining room table. Throughout it all, my father treated Uncle Majid like an orderly, but more than once, when Uncle Majid was the one who solved an engineering conundrum, he reluctantly shut up, though he never went so far as to grant his brother due credit. I ignored their bickering, listening instead to the sound of the television in the background, to the smart-alecky voice of Arletty playing Garance, the woman who receives the love of four men—including the mime, Baptiste—but who, in the end, must relinquish all.
As the film’s final scene played and the carnival music drowned the cries of the lovelorn Baptiste calling out Garance’s name in the crowd, Azar bid everyone farewell. My aunt’s one laudable trait, a consequence of her fear of germs, was that she never kissed anyone goodbye and disappeared from any gathering with little ceremony. To keep the men awake my mother brought glasses of tea, and to us she offered cookies, then apricot lavāshak—a fruit roll-up—and finally nothing, because it was midnight and she was going to bed.
Omid and I were allowed to stay up, as the following day was a holiday marking the birthday of Imam Mahdi, the twelfth Imam who is believed to have disappeared and who, it is said, will reemerge prior to the Day of Judgment to rid the world of its ills. Often I wondered why occultations, like resurrections and parting seas before them, no longer happened in our own lackluster time. It was as though God, now a cynical adolescent in leather jacket and shades, had outgrown his tricks, opting instead for cigarettes and Jean-Paul Sartre—whose books occupied half a row on my father’s bookshelf. Still, we had this: in memory of those bygone marvels, school was closed.
I had intended to stay up as long as I could, but as I watched my father meticulously placing the dining car on the rail, the room began spinning around me and I felt unsteady on my chair. I got up and followed my mother to her bedroom. “You don’t want to stay until they finish?” she said. I shook my head no, feeling inside my body a widening crack. I told her I wanted to sleep in her bed, but she laughed. “You’re ten years old,” she said. “Too big for that.” She led me to my room and stayed while I changed into my Batman pajamas and wiped my toes with my socks. Sitting on my bed, she buried my head in her chest, which smelled of her perfume—a bittersweet scent of orange blossoms. “When you see the train set all finished in the morning,” she said, “you will forget that tonight you were sad.”
Even this, I thought, my sadness, they want to take away from me. I burst into a sob, and my mother, stiffening against me the longer it lasted, continued, “You are a big boy now and must learn to contend with the world. To survive in this life one needs an armor, like a soldier.” She left a cold kiss on my forehead and walked away, shutting off the light after her. I lay alone in the dark, wondering where I was supposed to buy this armor and whether anyone was going to help me find it. And if I were to be a soldier, didn’t I need a regiment? What kind of war can you wage with an army of one?
I heard Omid collapsing on his bed. “Are they done?” I asked him. “No,” he said. “They are trying to make the traffic light flicker.” I contemplated enlisting Omid into my army, but he was too young, and besides, I could never be sure of his loyalties. I turned to my side and stared at the blank wall. “I hate that train set,” I said. Omid was quiet for some time and I thought he had already fallen asleep. “I like the bridge,” he suddenly said. “The bridge is all right.”
“You Kölner Kunstmarkt,” I said to him as though it were an insult.
“Kölner Kunstmarkt yourself,” Omid said, and we laughed out loud in the darkness of another indifferent night.
* * *
I WOKE UP, startled, to a figure standing over my head. From the silhouette of the bowler hat I understood that it was Uncle Majid. “It’s finished,” he whispered in my ear. “Do you want to see it?” Placing a finger on his mouth he added, “Be very quiet. Your father already went to bed.”
Groggy and parched from too much lavāshak, I followed him to the dining room. There, on the table, were the train cars running along their faultless tracks, stopping at the traffic sign, like a memory retrieved from a dream.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
He brought two chairs and we sat side by side. The longer I stared, the more real the train set became and the farther my own life receded from reality. In the electric sound of the wheels rolling along the tracks, I heard, with remorse, an echo of my father’s love. I was sorry for having begrudged him earlier.
“It’s two in the morning,” said my uncle. “You must go back to bed and I should go home. Azar is going to throw a fit.”
“Yes,” I said, without taking my eyes off the blinking traffic light.
“Hamid…”
“Just a few minutes?”
“All right,” he said. He showed me the Off switch for the train and kissed me on the top of my head. “Goodbye. Tomorrow night I’ll be on a real train. Azar and I are going to Tabriz to visit her family for two weeks.”
“Goodbye,” I said, wondering why he was so dutiful toward such a sour woman.
* * *
THE FRONT DOOR BANGED SHUT. I had never been up and alone in the middle of the night. Objects innocuous in the daytime—the porcelain figurines in the vitrine, the wall clock shaped like a hot air balloon, and even my own sweater draped over a chair—became uncanny at this hour. To distract myself I walked to the kitchen and there, as I opened the fridge and examined the contents, my earlier terror left me, replaced instead by a rush of freedom. I poured myself a glass of milk and to it I added two heaping tablespoons of cocoa powder and as much sugar as it could absorb, then I walked back to the dining room and sat patrolling the train, drunk on my sickly sweet drink and my own sovereignty.
* * *
WHEN I WOKE UP, I was facedown on the dining table. Lifting my achy head I saw my father sitting before me, in his suit and tie, staring me down. From the kitchen came the usual sounds of the morning—the clink of breakfast dishes, the news on the radio, Omid reciting some school tale to my mother.
My father said nothing. A fly was on the sun-drenched window, busy configuring for himself an exit. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The night’s events arranged themselves in my memory, and there, before me, I saw it: the catastrophe—chocolate milk drowning the rails, several cars, and the power switch. Next to it was the toppled glass bearing my fingerprints. I looked again at my father, who sat as still as the marble bust of Omar Khayyam in his study. “Explain,” he said.
“I guess I fell asleep.”
“Who told you to sleep here? And the chocolate milk, where did it come from?”
“The kitchen,” I said.
I saw rage in my father’s eyes. But after my initial fear, a strange exhilaration followed. It occurred to me to blame Uncle Majid—it was, after all, partly his doing—but I decided to do better. “Accidents happen,” I said.
“You know what else happens? Nights spent without a roof. You will sleep in the garden tonight.”
“The whole night?”
“It will teach you that a house is a covenant and a covenant has rules.”
My father put on his shearling jacket and left without a word. Minutes later the engine of his Paykan filled the morning air.
Sitting before the ruined train, I flipped the power switch on and off, but nothing happened. “Go wash your face,” said my mother. “Your breakfast is ready.”
How does one go through an entire day knowing that doom awaits him at night? Omid nagged me all morning for destroying the train set but finally agreed to help me. He blew my mother’s hair dryer over the power switch in an attempt to undo the damage; it didn’t work. I spent the rest of the day contemplating my defense, then my escape, and finally my surrender. “We may as well play ball,” said my brother, who, bored with my misfortune, urged me to give up sulking. But given the diminishing hours of the day, playing seemed juvenile. That I was a condemned boy filled me with self-pity, followed by a sense of grandeur; there was something consoling about being maligned, having a grievance, and maybe even dying misjudged. Many great men had thus met their end. Cicero, Galileo, and our own toppled prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who, as my father never tired of explaining, had been brought down by a British and American–led coup d’état after nationalizing the country’s oil. Sentenced to house arrest, he had died after a long illness, secluded and alone.