The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  “Go,” she said, turning away from him again. In her were things she could not say. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  * * *

  —

  WITH FIVE DRUNK OFFICERS SHOUTING at the table against the music, Khan’s elementary Russian was of little use, so he drank his fill and hooked his arm around Sergey’s neck. “You know, I’m going to send my grandson to Paris,” Khan said out loud. Sergey spoke to the other officers. Some nodded. One snapped at a waiter. The other raised an eyebrow and said something from under his big mustache. Khan looked at Sergey, waiting for him to translate.

  “What is he going to do?” Sergey asked.

  “Is that what he said?” Khan asked.

  “Who?”

  “The one with the Stalin mustache.” Sergey knocked back what was left in his glass. The other officers spoke through wide-mouthed laughter. Khan could only make out the name Stalin from the string of unintelligible Russian, which sounded like hammers pounding on nails. The officer pointed his finger at Khan and said something. A roar of laughter rose from the table. “What did he say?” Khan asked.

  “Nothing,” Sergey said still smiling, “some joke about Stalin. It’s hard to put into Persian.”

  Khan looked at the officer for a while, then reached across the table for his glass. The uniformed man watched as the Iranian trickled his drink onto the wooden table. The smile evaporated from the officer’s face. “My grandson,” Khan said, “will be a lawyer, and maybe he’ll go to the military school, and fuck a lot of European girls, and maybe he’ll go to the military school, too, tell them Sergey”—he turned to Sergey, the liquid pooled on the table reflecting the yellow incandescent light from the ceiling—“and he’ll fuck some French girls too, not the butcher’s daughter, he deserves much better than a butcher’s daughter. That’s why I told her to keep away. ‘Keep your nose to work!’ Yes, that’s what I told her, ‘Keep your nose to your work!’ My grandson will go to Paris, then he’ll come back and sign up in the army of the young Shah and the young Shah will kick all the motherfuckers out of this country. All of them. How do you say motherfuckers in Russian?” He did not wait for Sergey’s answer. “Then I said, ‘Pooran,’ and Pooran said, ‘Yes, Khan,’ and then I said, ‘from now on I don’t want no butcher girl flirting with my Ahmad, do you understand?’ And then I told her, ‘Do you understand?’ And then he’s going to go to Paris. Tell that Stalin-mustache motherfucker, Sergey, tell him.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE next French class, two days later, Sergey excused himself and went out. He found Sara in the house and asked her to bring them two cups of tea because he was out of oil and could not use his samovar. But he did not go back to his room. When Sara went in, she found Ahmad alone at the table. He straightened himself against the back of the chair and shifted his weight from one side to the other as if he could not decide between getting up to go to her and staying where he was. On the verge of an unsure smile, he clasped his hands in his lap. She pitied Ahmad and thought of telling him about the warning Khan had given her through Pooran, so he would know the distance was something imposed on her. But she could not bring herself to taint his mother’s image for him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered and turned away. From his hiding place, Sergey watched Sara leave, then he went inside. That became the routine.

  Three days of this had to pass before Sara felt safe enough to sit at the table, in front of Ahmad. Ahmad and Sara resumed their daily reading and writing, now condensed into flash lessons. Ahmad was even more enthusiastic than before. He did not sit down for the short time Sara could afford to be there. Outside Sergey’s room, Ahmad would wink at her to catch her attention, as a playful acknowledgment of a shared secret that she did not want out. She turned away from him and he felt the change in her. She was becoming a grown-up. Now Ahmad never saw her out without a chador draping over her head. She seemed to have little time to play anymore. She worked harder and talked with girls of her own age. But in Sergey’s room she turned back into the familiar girl that Ahmad had always known. She would hang her chador on the back of the seat and lean forward over her book and notebook and sometimes even smile a tooth-gapped smile at him when she dexterously found her way to the period at the end of a long, arduous sentence.

  Sergey got tired of wandering in the snow-covered orchard while the children enjoyed their rendezvous and joined them in his room one day. “No, no, dear, I do not need that,” he said to Sara, who had sprung from Sergey’s chair. “I am going to sit in my rocking chair and listen to the radio. Never mean to intrude, but I don’t want to freeze in the snow. You two go on with your work.” Sara left earlier that day and Ahmad hated Sergey. She came back the next afternoon and stayed longer, but refused to sit and kept herself covered. It took her a week to get used to the presence of the Russian who, glass in hand, read a book, listened to the radio, or sometimes interjected a comment about what the two of them read. The day she finally sat down on the chair at the table, Sergey cooked for them. “Kasha is best with buckwheat,” he said from behind his curtain. “My brother loved it with buckwheat. But wheat is good, too, you’ll see. It won’t be like my mother cooks it, but Sergey’s kasha is first grade.” Ahmad knew he had cooked the porridge not for him, but for Sara. He felt an even stronger hatred for Sergey in his heart when he insisted that Sara stay longer once the time came for Sara to leave.

  The next morning, Ahmad decided to skip school to spy on Sergey. He banged the thick, wooden door of the Orchard behind him, but instead of going to Mulla, he hopped along in the knee-high snow until he got to the back side. Like a furrowing fox, he crawled through the water hole at the foot of the wall and squatted behind a thick tree and watched the puffed-up sparrows in the naked branches until Sergey came out of his room and walked to the stable with his hands in his long overcoat. His conversation with the stable boy froze over the blanket of snow and never reached Ahmad, but the clouds of fog the two men breathed out Ahmad saw and the wide Russian laughter he heard. After the dappled horse was groomed and saddled, Sergey left and came back when the sun had moved from the branches of one tree to the other, when Ahmad was hungry. The next day, he followed Sergey on his prelunch walk through the village and up a short trail. He saw the man sit on a rock, elbows resting on knees, and stare at the mountains for some time. There was a sadness in the occasional sips he took from a small canteen that he pulled from inside his coat. On his way back, Sergey tried to talk with the baker, the carpenter, a passerby, smiling and throwing accented hellos at them as if he were still a newcomer, ignorant of what was happening in the village and the country. The shops were almost empty. The shopkeepers, if they opened at all, idled inside, huddling in twos and threes around fires burning in emptied cooking oil tins. If an emaciated villager was out in the cold and snow, he walked listlessly as if to nowhere. Occasionally someone would approach Sergey to ask for money which he refused politely. Instead he gave them the gift of words: he asked them how they fared and what they thought was the solution to the famine. In reply, he received repeated solicitations for money. On the third day, Ahmad saw someone throw a stone at him. Sergey kept his composure, but hastened his pace back to the Orchard.

  Ahmad got an earful when word reached Khan from Mulla Ali that he had not appeared in the class for three days. He had not caught Sergey committing any wrongdoing, but deep down he felt the stranger was not without malice and that was why he decided to sneak into his rooms the next weekend. The day before, when Sergey left his room to find Sara and ask for tea, Ahmad unlatched the window that Sergey never opened. On Thursday, right after Khan and Sergey had mounted their mules, Ahmad was in front of Sergey’s window. He looked around, then gave the window a push and climbed in. His heart pounded in his ears as he turned the handle to Sergey’s bedroom. The door screamed open to a small space with a bed under the window and a small desk right by its side. The nice wooden case under the desk was where Sergey stored
his bottles of bitter water; Ahmad had seen him a few times, through the half-open door, squat in front of the case and then come back out of the room with a bottle in his hand.

  Ahmad pulled the case out and opened it. The unparalleled bitterness of the first sip on his tongue distorted his face into a grimace. It was much worse without orange juice, but something inside him wanted to swallow it down anyway. He looked into Sergey’s two suitcases and ran his hand over the sumac knit pullover. In the desk drawer was a wooden doll. Ahmad took it out. It was a painted woman without limbs, smiling in bright colors and intricate flowers as if in a summer garden. As he picked it up, Ahmad realized the doll was cut in half and something was inside it. He twisted the top and bottom apart and inside was another doll very similar to the first but smaller, also cut in half. Inside the second doll was a third doll and inside the third, yet another. Ahmad laid six of them on the desk. He did not know what they meant and why they were inside one another. When he did not find anything else interesting, he took one of the bottles and climbed out of the window. Before he went away, he made a snowball and threw it at the flag that hung listlessly from the pole. He hid the bottle in his room and wandered around in the garden only to come back for a second sip after a little while and then a third. Soon he was sitting cross-legged in the second-floor corridor, feeling the happiest and then the loneliest. He had to share that feeling with Salman.

  Among the apple trees that were like wizened hands turned to the sky, and with the main building well out of sight, Salman sneered when Ahmad crinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue to signal bitterness. He could gulp down as much as Ahmad dished out. “In a single breath.” Ahmad filled up half of the glass. Every swallow felt like hot nails scratching down his throat, but Salman was too proud not to force the liquid down. Afterward they shoveled a lot of snow into a big heap and Ahmad rode the wheelbarrow as Salman pushed it round and round until he dropped down panting on the snow. Salman took some of the magic water with him and drank it in the morning before heading for the bathhouse. Many a morning, as he worked the fire, he had heard the jinns’ horrifying whispers calling him by name and mumbling other unclear things. No matter how many times he uttered the name of God, they would not leave the bathhouse. With the magic water in his blood, his mind was peaceful, impervious to any nonhuman creature.

  Ahmad refilled the bottle with water and placed it back in the wooden case. Before even touching his bottles, Sergey saw that one had been opened. But he did not want word to get out, and from that week on, he would bring one extra back from Tehran: three for him and one for the little sneaker who came for it on the weekend. The addition of the extra bottle was a message for Ahmad: I’ve got my eyes on you, little pilfering thing. Although he still did not feel good when he saw Sergey beaming and radiant around Sara, Ahmad felt somewhat closer to the Russian man as an accomplice, someone with whom he shared a secret.

  * * *

  —

  CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS, THE SPRING brought neither an end to the famine nor solace to the injured hearts of the wretched and famished. “The doors of heaven are closing,” Mulla Ali said in his evening sermons in the mosque which was more crowded than ever before. It surprised him how people thronged to the mosque every day. Climbing up to his place on the third step of the minbar, he felt a fear of the impending moment when he had to turn around and look at the packed rows of faces waiting for him with growing expectation and uneasiness. Unlike the days of plenty when most left after the congregational prayer, now they stayed with haggard eyes fixed on Mulla, eager to hear about the famine and when it would end. Knitting his brows into a somber scowl, he taught them that every disaster to befall mankind was the consequence of sins committed in public or behind closed doors and curtained windows. They were only suffering what they had brought on themselves. He hollered at the hushed crowd, urging them to repent and return to God. The mosque should be crowded like that not only when calamity struck, but each morning, noon, and evening at every prayer. And the people who stayed in their homes, why were they not praying with the devout? Only by giving their hearts to God could they bring His compassion and mercy upon them and hope that the disasters that they had brought on themselves would soon come to an end. If there was not enough room for everyone in the mosque, as the praying area was almost brimful, they would expand the House of God to make everyone welcome, to extend their generosity and even make extra room for when guests visited. And if any man or woman was between them who harbored even so much as a hint of a doubt in their heart that the expansion could be done, that man or woman had to know that there were no limits to God’s grace and power.

  “If you take one step toward Him,” Mulla said, pointing an index finger up toward the modest chandelier that hung from a plastered ceiling, “He will take ten steps toward you.”

  A few moments passed in silence before Mulla got to his feet and deliberately stepped down the minbar. Holding his hand up as a testimony to his true words, he pulled his only ring from his finger. “A gift from my late father, and my last worldly possession.” He held the silver ring up, its red opal sparkling in the light from the chandelier. “May God accept it from his servant.” He placed the ring on the minbar and hung his head in silence.

  With the help of the people, a new wing was added to the mosque in just six months. The women’s section, separated off with burlap curtains, was annexed to the men’s and the entire new wing was dedicated to women. Khan managed to ameliorate his notoriety as someone who had brought a godless man to the village by sponsoring the building of a second minaret and announcing that as soon as the war came to an end, he would complete the mosque with a new, larger dome.

  By the end of fall, the mosque was the jewel in the crown of Tajrish: new rugs were laid on the floors, fresh paint applied to the walls, and a new chandelier hung above the supplicants so brilliant that it hummed a barely audible hum of magnificence. More people attended the prayers than Mulla ever remembered. Even in the freezing cold of presunset winter, line after line formed behind him, and while he could not be happier at how his mosque had grown in size and glamor, he felt the pressure, as he spoke to them, of their expectant eyes inquiring why the war and famine had not come an end yet. It was as if he was responsible for the continuation of the scourge now that he had wheedled the last bits of their valuables out of them and exhorted them into such hard work, as if it was his responsibility to put an end to the war.

  Mulla’s first temporary solution was to show it was the people and not God who had to do more, that they were not doing enough. He suggested optional prayers between and after the regular ones that he felt sure people were too hungry and tired to attend. But contrary to his expectations the additional prayers were equally welcomed by all. Mulla breathed a few curse words every time he turned his back to that overzealous crowd to start a prayer. He bought a better radio and started listening diligently to the afternoon news.

  “We need to do something about food,” he told Khan one day when they were alone in the Orchard. “Does the Russian know how to stop the war?” Although Sergey was part of the army, Khan said, he was not much into the war. When he was a child, he had once met Monet in Paris and decided to become a painter. He was a no one in the big picture. But Mulla saw him somewhere in the picture anyway. If nothing else, he wore the uniform. With that smirk on his face, traipsing up and down the village, making fun of their misfortune, the man was undoubtedly up to something nasty. Soon Mulla came to the conclusion that the Russian’s very presence was harmful for the village and that he had to be banished. Khan rejected the idea. Mulla Ali maintained his calm and mentioned Khan’s trips to Tehran, inviting him to ponder what the villagers would think of him if they somehow got wind of how he really spent his weekends. To soften his threat, Mulla mentioned the pressure he was under from the people.

  Khan suggested they go to Agha for advice. People revered the age-old man and would accept what he said as sagacious wor
ds. Mulla acquiesced. The two of them sat in the tree in front of Agha as he held his bony hands close to the samovar. “At my age, nothing can warm you.” They told him how the war and famine were ravaging their village and the country and how miserable everyone’s life had become. Sliding back to lean against a poshti, Agha listened in silence, his gnarled fingers resting on his knees. When they were done, he had nothing but a laconic answer for them:

  “You want the truth?” his high-pitched voice broke. He cleared his throat and went on, “Kill the cats. Before it’s too late.”

  In Khan’s mind this evoked the story Agha had told him when he was only a child. He had thought the man would have forgotten his tall tale ages ago. He himself had never believed it. Or tried not to, even when his own father became so obsessed with cleanliness that he stopped touching food at the end of his short life, and even when Agha refused to die after his age was not determinable anymore. The day Khan’s son, Nosser, shot himself at twenty-nine at the top of the minaret, Khan was closest to letting the shadows of the doubt that he and his family were under a wicked spell darken his soul. But he remained resolute to defy the myth and understand the incident in relation to reality. He had not turned every stone when his son left home at the age of fourteen to volunteer for military service. He had failed to make Nosser feel welcome when he came back and tried to be part of the family again. He had been negligent in his son’s upbringing and promised himself he would make up for his shortcomings by doing whatever he could for his grandson, Ahmad. Sergey had to stay and teach the boy French.