The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  When hunger pierced deeper into stomachs, people turned to the mountains for wild rhubarbs, walnuts, and anything else edible that the rocks had to offer. With Khan’s approval, Ahmad accompanied Salman to set snares and shoot, with a slingshot, an occasional quail whose neck Salman would wring as soon as he lay his hands on the struggling bird. In vain, the bird wiggled and squirmed for a short time before its head turned a whole circle and life departed its soft, feathery body. “You want to try?” Salman asked one day holding a quail by its feet. The bird flapped its wings in a desperate attempt to take flight toward the earth. Tucked under Ahmad’s arm, the bird calmed down, its beak open as if gasping for breath, its heart pounding hard and fast like a miniature drummer was banging inside the downy ball. “Do it quickly,” Salman said. “Hold tight, it’ll fly away before you know it.” It was a beautiful, soft creature. The color of the mountain. The color of dry earth from which grew all that was good. Ahmad parted the feathers until a trace of pink skin showed. It was not just a ball of down; it was a creature of flesh and blood. Under the late summer mountain sun Salman opened the canvas sack that hung from his shoulder. Ahmad wrung the quail’s head and dropped it in.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE FALL, AHMAD WAS the only student in Mulla Ali’s class. So, the clergyman went door to door, sat in bare living rooms on folded blankets and threadbare rugs, asked how the family was holding up, and preached about the blessings of literacy in the new age to come while sipping at the tea he was offered. After the last rays of sun had departed from the western sky, Mulla shuffled in his sandals toward the mosque, nodding to the greetings of the people who walked in the same destination, and watched how the orange of the sky tinged the turquoise tiles of the single minaret. After the evening prayer, he climbed up the wooden minbar and sat on the third step down facing people. He pointed out the emphasis the Imams at the dawn of Islam put on the importance of education and specifically reading and writing. “Seek knowledge from cradle to grave,” he bellowed at the congregation sitting cross-legged before him in rows, some nodding, some running prayer beads through their fingers, some playing with their beards. Separated from the men by a tarp curtain, the women, wound in their chadors, sat in rows that continued the men’s. “Read!” the mulla howled at them all, “was the first word Gabriel had for the Prophet.” The next day three new students showed up in the class, a number which compared to the twenty-three before the war was nothing short of shame and frustration, but what else could he do?

  By then, Sara could read simple texts and write short sentences. She copied five lines of each new word in the notebook Ahmad gave her, carefully cramming the words on each line to save paper. When Sara had learned all the objects in the room, they set off on short journeys around the house and garden to find new things: kitchen, hallway, cauldron, soil, apple, fire. Back in Ahmad’s small room, Sara would let her chador slip off her scarfed head and they practiced the words. Soon she started to read one of Ahmad’s books. He marked the sounds of the words she stumbled over. With a satisfactory smile, Sara came to the periods: places where inanity gave way to meaning. With a period, words lost in confusion and whirling in the air like specs of dust convened and acceded; sap flowed up stems; flowers budded. When they came upon a word neither of them knew, Ahmad would run upstairs and knock on Khan’s door. If he was at his desk working the abacus and penciling in his ledgers, he would explain the word to Ahmad while twirling the tips of his mustache. If he did not answer, Ahmad would knock again and wait. He never went in without permission. But one day, Khan did.

  Without making any noise, he opened the door and stepped into Ahmad’s room. Ahmad and Sara were lying on the floor on their stomachs, a book and a notebook open in front of them. Sara sprang to her feet, picked up her chador from the floor and covered herself. Khan’s keen eyes darted around the room and landed back on the two kids. He did not like what he saw. Mash Akbar was a good man, a close friend of Nosser’s, and his daughter, Sara, although at times inelegant and unrefined, was a well-natured girl. But his grandson’s intimacy with the butcher’s daughter was acceptable only to the extent that childhood gaiety would permit. Lying side by side behind closed doors was no such occasion. But Khan did not say anything. After a short while looking at the two children standing in the middle of the room, the door half-open behind him, his breathing the only sound audible, he turned around and left.

  It was midfall when Khan summoned Ahmad to his room. He twirled his black mustache while the boy closed the door and stepped in front of the walnut desk. “As soon as the war is over and the fires are out,” Khan said, “you’re going to Paris.” Ahmad was shocked, but he stayed still. “This war can’t go on for much longer. You will go to lycée and then the Sorbonne. There are enough gardeners and apple pickers already. What this country needs is more lawyers. When you’re back, you’ll open your office in Tehran.” He paused to check the boy’s reaction. Ahmad’s eyes welled up. His closed lips quivered. But Khan knew that once he saw the beauty of Paris which Khan had heard about from others and seen with his own eyes on postcards, the boy would be nothing but thankful to his grandfather; that years later, enjoying the privileges of his degree, he would see Khan’s decision as pure wisdom. “Mr. Sergey will come soon to teach you French. You are a smart boy. I’m positive you’ll learn to speak French fast.” A tear slid down Ahmad’s cheek. “Before you go, I want to make sure you heard me right; I want you to speak French. Do you understand, Ahmad?” Ahmad nodded and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Now you can go.”

  6

  ERGEY BLOKOV ARRIVED IN TAJRISH in a sparkling white ZIS-110 with three bottles of Russian vodka stashed in his suitcase in the trunk. Standing in front of their homes or with heads stuck out of windows, the villagers watched the large car rumble up the streets muddied in the drizzle. Children and dogs were sure the vehicle had no destination other than the Orchard. They ran after it and stopped at a decent distance as it screeched to a halt.

  Khan’s friend, Meer, had brought Sergey to the café one day. “If you think you can find a better French teacher for your grandson than Mr. Blokov, you’re mistaken,” Meer said to Khan, “given the current circumstances.” Sergey was tall and had a gray ushanka on with hanging earflaps. He spoke Persian with a Russian accent, but he said his French was indistinguishable from that of a Parisian and his English from that of a Brit. He was on medical leave from the army for a disease for which he did not know the Persian name, but he looked healthy that first day in the café. As tall as Khan, but with broad shoulders, Sergey was a large blond who had a hard time fitting into the small wooden chair, but no difficulty polishing off his plate with the last piece of bread.

  “You could go back to your country to rest and recover,” Khan said to him as the waiter placed the three cups of tea on the table, “but you have decided to stay in this country?”

  “Mr. Khan,” Sergey said staring at him with his very blue eyes, “I have nobody in my home to go to.”

  “You don’t miss your house?”

  “Mr. Khan, that is not what I said.”

  Khan had first thought to make Sergey a small place on the lot behind the mosque, but he knew it would be impossible to get Mulla Ali’s consent; as if it were not bold enough that Khan had invited an infidel to the village. Instead, Khan built him two rooms behind his own house: a small one with a wooden bed and wool mattress for sleeping and a larger one for everything else. Before Sergey entered his rooms, he asked for a ladder, placed his shiny patent-leather shoes on the creaking rungs, and climbed up with his suitcase in his hand. Once on the roof, he put down the suitcase, pulled out a short, thin pole, and secured it in place with rocks that he had also brought with him. Once the pole was upright, he tied a Russian flag to it, stepped back, and saluted the flaccid fabric.

  “Comment allez-vous, petit bonhomme?” he said the first time he saw Ahmad in Khan’s room. “Under my supervision,” he turned t
o Khan, “this young gentleman will soon be more proficient in French than Persian.”

  “I expect nothing less,” Khan said to the Russian man, but Ahmad knew his grandfather’s comment was meant for him.

  Ahmad’s days were filled with Sergey. Every morning, he went to Mulla Ali and studied the Quran, classical Persian poetry, Arabic grammar, history, and geography. In the afternoon Sergey and his dictionnaire waited for him in the larger room. He saw the ragged book the first day on the table. Next to it was a plate of sweet-smelling candies. Sergey sat at the table and motioned for Ahmad to take a seat, too. “You can have a candy,” he said, “after you say bonjour.” He repeated the word three times, each time leaning forward more, urging Ahmad to utter the greeting. But in vain. A few days later a second plate appeared next to the first. Ahmad could take a fistful if he said only one of the words. Sergey read aloud a page from the dictionnaire in each class. The homework was to copy the page ten times. For Ahmad, it was an exercise in drawing. He traced the lines and curves of the foreign words as closely as he could, line by neat line. He could not fit the dictionnaire line onto a notebook line. He broke up the words at odd places and wrote from right to left as he did with Persian. One day, when Sergey was much too tired of trying to persuade Ahmad to speak a word, he got up and knocked back what was left at the bottom of a bottle. Soon his cheeks blushed and he continued the lesson with a happy smile. Then he laughed hard and spoke in a new language Ahmad did not understand. In two months, Sergey had not succeeded in eliciting so much as a syllable from Ahmad.

  When he was not teaching, Sergey hiked in the mountains, rode Khan’s horses, read books, or listened to the Russian radio. Out in the village, people avoided the foreigner they called “Blue Eyes.” He had no one to talk to except for Khan with whom he walked in the garden before the burning cold made strolls joyless. Khan listened to Sergey chatter about the weather, the Orchard, and how Ahmad’s classes were going. Sometimes he would repeat the story of his brother who had been drafted a year before him, after which no news ever came. Other times, he talked about girls. Sergey spent the weekends in Tehran. Every Thursday around noon, he got into his ZIS-110 in front of the Orchard and left for the city. Word had it that he spent sleepless nights in cabarets and paying occasional visits to underground brothels where Russian soldiers undressed Persian, Georgian, and Armenian girls. Sergey rode back to Tajrish on Friday evening, tired, disheveled, and unable to keep himself on his feet. He staggered straight up to his room and flopped down onto his bed.

  With Sergey’s classes, Ahmad barely saw Sara anymore and started to realize that he missed her. By the time French was over each day, she had gone back home. Sometimes he saw her walk past the windows of Sergey’s room on her way to do chores in the Orchard. Ahmad felt like she was aware of him watching her from the angle at which she held her face: neither turned away, nor facing, just right to give the impression that she could see Ahmad in her peripheral vision. But she seemed reserved, as if it had been his fault that he had to sit in the French class all afternoon. Early evening in Salman’s house, when Mash Akbar sat in the main room tuning the radio, the day’s work past him and the steaming tea before him on the rug, when the village retired from its diurnal struggle to survive the famine, when there was time for a short game outdoors, Salman would take out his ball and ask Sara if she wanted to go with him to the Orchard. She shook her head and he went alone. “She says she’s not in the mood,” Salman said to Ahmad. “What’s gotten into her?”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THE WINTER BEGAN DUMPING the first piles of snow on Tajrish, Khan went on his first weekend trip to Tehran with Sergey and became the Russian’s inseparable companion. The Orchard felt strange to Ahmad when Khan was gone, even if it was for less than two days. Everyone else was there as always, napping, talking, complaining of pains in knees and backs, rolling cigarettes in the stable. But a void would open somewhere near Ahmad, as if the Orchard was on the edge of an abyss, as if everything was on the brink of crumbling. He tried to be close to his mother, but in the absence of Khan, it was she who was in charge. She would send Ahmad away with a few nice words and a pat on the head before hurrying to talk to Norooz, or to send the stable boy on errands. Ahmad would then go to Agha who was always in his tree, never going anywhere, never busy. When he heard footsteps approaching, Agha opened the tarpaulin curtain and stuck his bald head out, the long collar of his new turtle neck up to his chin. He greeted Ahmad with his permanent smile and complained about the itchy sweater as he emptied the teapot to put on a fresh pot for his young guest. As he sat in that tree with Agha constantly speaking in a hoarse voice that became shriller with each year, Ahmad felt the void shrink into a little dot, insignificant and harmless. Through the age-old plane tree, Ahmad’s roots found solid ground to dig into.

  Sergey seemed to have given up any hope of making Ahmad utter a word of French. By the end of the winter, all he did was read the next page from the Dictionnaire Larousse out loud and explain the words and some rules of grammar through the rare example sentences in the book. All the while he drank from his nice bottles that were replaced with new ones every Saturday after the trip to Tehran. One afternoon when Ahmad went to Sergey, he saw two glasses on the table next to the plate of Russian candies. Before he started the lesson, Sergey brought out three oranges, cut them in half, and squeezed them into Ahmad’s glass. Then he took his bottle and poured some into the orange juice. “You have been a good boy,” he said, “did your homework conscientiously and made it all the way to J in such a short time.” He pointed to the book on the table and poured himself a little, too. Then he opened the window and broke off two of the icicles hanging from the underside of the window casing. He snapped the bigger one in half, and put it in his own glass. The shorter icicle he slipped in Ahmad’s. Raising the glass to his lips, he motioned for Ahmad to do the same. It was bitter. It made Ahmad’s mouth shrink. His face contorted as the acrid juice went down. He did not know what to do with the glass in his hand, to drink more or to put it back on the table. Luckily, Sergey took the glass from him. “Delightful,” he said as he drank the bitter orange juice himself and chewed what was left of the icicle before putting the empty glass on the table. “You’re such a big man. Now let’s get to work. Open your notebook.”

  Ahmad felt a chilling ache shooting down his veins. Needles flowed in him. His stomach was smaller. There was not enough room inside him. He looked around. Sergey’s bedroom door was closed as always. What was in there? He wanted to get down from his chair and go behind the curtain that partitioned off a strip of the larger room as a kitchen. But the chair was good, too. He had suddenly started to understand what Sergey was saying when he spoke his foreign language. He was not sure what the Russian exactly meant, but he knew he understood. He felt sick and well at the same time. He took one of the candies from the plate and twisted it out of the wrapper. Sergey said no, but Ahmad knew he did not mean it. All Sergey said was, “Bonjour, no candy, repeat after me: bonjour.” The heavenly taste of the candy was indescribable. He took it out, looked at it for a second, and then put it back in his mouth. Sergey said no, but that was a yes.

  Unlike every other day, Sergey did not dismiss Ahmad after the class. He gave him food to eat and a garlic to chew on, which Ahmad did not. He then made some more food behind the curtain which was delicious and also tasted like garlic. He told Ahmad to stay with him for the night and they would play games, but Ahmad wanted to leave. He had a headache. He took the gum that Sergey offered him at the door, but spat it out right after he stepped into the Orchard.

  Days later, as he helped shovel the snow from the roof, Ahmad told Salman about the drink. “How did it feel?” Salman asked. Ahmad fanned himself with his hand. “Warm?” Salman asked. Ahmad nodded. “Hot tea makes me warm.” He threw a shovelful of snow over the edge of the roof down into the alley. Ahmad pointed to his stomach and his body. Salman did not understand. Ahmad wrote on the un
touched snow with his forefinger: from inside. all of my body. very warm. It was then that Ahmad saw Sara step into the courtyard. He threw a snowball at her, but he missed. Sara turned around and looked at him on the roof. She smiled and packed a snowball to lob back. She was not avoiding him. Ahmad threw the next snowball at Salman and got him on the face. In the short moment that Salman stood frozen by Ahmad’s surprise attack, a second snowball from the yard smashed to powder on the side of his face. The next moment, the shovel dropped and Salman bent over to scoop snow with a shout that rang from his wide-open mouth like a war cry. Things were back the way they had always been. The three of them were friends again, in a trilateral war.

  But it did not last. The next day, Sergey and Khan left the Orchard for the weekend on two mules, the earflaps of Sergey’s rabbit-skin ushanka dangling all the way, as the SIZ-110 could not make it up the sinuous alleyways of Tajrish in the snow. Ahmad found Sara alone in the kitchen. He held up his left palm flat and made as if he was writing on it. Sara shook her head and turned back to peeling cucumbers. Ahmad tapped her on the shoulder. Why? he mouthed.