The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  When she got back to the apartment, Ahmad was not home. Where in the big city he was, she had no idea. She was afraid her days of protecting her children from the world were already behind her. Outside, hunger ate people; men drew their last breaths on sidewalks and their skeletal bodies were later heaped onto the dustman’s handcart. She had to talk to Khan about Ahmad’s future, about the apartment that was meant to be only temporary, and was feeling smaller every day. When were they going to move to an actual house? Maybe Ahmad would do better in school if he felt more settled. The next time Khan paid a visit she would talk to him.

  * * *

  —

  BUT KHAN DID NOT SHOW up when she expected him. Since their exodus from Tajrish, Khan had acted erratically, and lived somewhat in hiding. He had bought a house, Pooran knew that, but even she did not know where. She waited a few days, suspecting some unforeseen incident had kept him busy elsewhere. By the end of the month, she could not sleep at night. She rolled around. She stared at the ceiling. She listened to the hum of the apartment. All the horrors of the night hovered above her, whispering. At breakfast one morning Ahmad looked pensive. He kept his gaze on his bread and cheese, but the few times he looked up at Pooran, she saw in his eyes the glimmer of that dreaminess that looked like madness, the same that she had seen in Nosser’s a few days before he climbed up the mosque’s minaret and started shooting flying Russians. Her fears found confirmation when Ahmad was not home from school at the usual time in the afternoon.

  What Pooran waited for at home, Ahmad sought outside. With no idea where to begin or who to ask, he walked the streets hoping to find a trace of Khan. For over a month he had believed that his grandfather would knock on the door any day, take his Astrakhan from his head, and ask for a glass of tea. The rustling of the sheets as Pooran turned over in her bed in the living room was in Ahmad’s head every day at school. On a windy afternoon, Ahmad walked to Bob Homayoon, the nicest street of the city, where the rich spent time in the famous café and took promenades on sidewalks. The wind shook the last leaves off the rows of trees that separated the wide sidewalk and the street. Ahmad walked past the shops taking looks inside each. Most were empty except for the owners and occasional customers. A woman was inspecting some cloth in the fabric shop. The kebab seller fanned six skewers of sheep liver over glowing coals for two Russian officers who whetted their appetite with hot bread and wedges of onion while waiting for their meat. Ahmad dared not go in; he would not be able to make himself understood with hand gestures and he was sure none of those shopkeepers could read. They would make a fuss and soon he would be the center of attention in the shop or even in the street, as the shopkeeper might call out to his neighbors to help decipher the dumb boy. Tehran was large, but just like Tajrish, word spread fast. If Khan had a reason to be in hiding, he must have had a good one.

  “Do you really think he’s at some shop,” Pooran yelled at Ahmad at night, “twiddling his thumbs, waiting for you to waltz in?” She had been waiting for Ahmad at the door when he came walking back up the dark alley. She had run up to him, slapped him in the face, then hugged him and cried.

  “You’re not lying to your mother, are you?” Pooran asked when they were inside.

  Ahmad shook his head.

  “You were just looking for Khan?”

  Ahmad nodded.

  “Nothing else?”

  Ahmad shook his head.

  “Will you promise me you come home right after school from now on?”

  Ahmad thought for a moment and then shook his head.

  Walking around after school became his ritual.

  Having lost hope of Khan’s return, Pooran trusted her daughter with the secret, hoping her son-in-law could somehow help with the search. When weeks went by with no good news, Ahmad noticed his mother spent her time rearranging the furniture around the apartment and washing anything she could lay her hands on. She had started doing more chores at Maryam’s, sweeping the rugs, mopping the floors and stairs with wet rags, and doing the laundry in a tin tub. Pooran came home exhausted, barely managing to cook dinner or do anything but rest and knit for the winter. But the more Khan’s absence carried on, the brighter a fire burned within her. She would do the dishes and cook dinner, then pile the laundry in the tub and dust the furniture. Late in the evening, when everything in the apartment was clean, she would rewash the glasses and silverware. Before she laid her mattress on the floor, she would take out a piece of clothing from her wardrobe—a skirt, a dress, or a blouse kept for a large party, one she had not worn in a long time—wash it, and hang it carefully on the clothesline in her room. In the morning, she would iron and smooth it back on the hanger. In her chest, she kept cuts of fabric. She took them out and placed fresh mothballs in their folds. Her favorite was light cream with large crimson flowers among waves of green leaves. That was for a very special occasion.

  Despite her concern about her son’s meanderings, Pooran did not recognize, in the midst of her engagement with fabric and water, that Ahmad was smelling new smells, his insides churned by fresh feelings. In his daily street-walkings, his eyes lingered on the girls and women. Many were draped in chadors, black or white with floral motifs, with an edge fluttering in the breeze sometimes. But like a hawk, he spotted the others, in coats and skirts, blouses and pants, heels clicking on the sidewalk, the more well-off in cafés, those riding in horse-drawn carriages, those who ventured out in dresses if the weather was lenient. He roamed about Bob Homayoon Street’s two cafés where many Russian soldiers brought their ladies. Officers and high-ranking government officials stepped out of their cars with their dates for the evening. In light-gray suit and pants with his blue tie tucked into his vest, a whiff of a mustache above his lips and hair combed to one side, Ahmad watched them all.

  * * *

  —

  TOWARD THE BEGINNING OF WINTER, the last shriveled leaves detached themselves from branches and with that withered the hopes of the poorest of the poor who had survived the fall by chewing on what could be found of leaves and grass. But soon word came that a group in a neighborhood south of Tehran had found a way of fighting the famine by eating hats. Someone had devised a recipe to transform the wearable texture of a hat into edible fibers. The inventor was a woman who had lost a baby to hunger. After nine months of undernourished pregnancy, her breasts had stopped giving milk three weeks after her girl was born. For a short while she took the swaddled girl from door to door to nursing mothers, imploring for a drop which they barely had for their own babies. After she buried her daughter, she decided to save her other two children at any cost. She went to her mosque mulla, then to a soothsayer. What she received would fill many an ear, but no stomach. Back in her home, after she found her pigeon and cat and mouse traps empty, she put a pot on the stove and began cooking. Boiled tree trunk was not edible. A dirt soup never became anything other than muddy hot water. Her children had stopped crying from hunger. Sitting on the floor, they played with their marbles as if they had accepted the futility of their situation.

  She ran back to the kitchen and refilled the pot with water. She opened the wardrobe and went through the clothes and finally pulled out a small brown suit she had set aside for when her boy would be big enough to fit in it. A pair of sharp scissors sliced the suit into the boiling water. Mixed with salt and whatever spice was left in the jars, the small pieces of fabric turned into a murky liquid. “Come, kids,” she said as she went to her children with two steaming plates, “Eggplant stew.” Later, before she threw out the reeking concoction, she realized that the few bites the children had managed to swallow were cuts from the collar. With that clue and with the help of other women, hats were being cooked and served all over the neighborhood within two weeks.

  Before long and for reasons unknown to the people, the government denounced the practice as black art and a hoarse voice on the radio forbade any transformation of headgear into food. The hat cooks withdrew behind
closed doors and into sealed basements. Ignoring orders from the authorities, the hungry bagged their hats and searched their houses for any threadbare dusty headwear that might have been lying forgotten at the bottom of a chest or wardrobe. Through “mediums,” who circulated neighborhoods, the bags of hats were delivered to the clandestine cooks. For every five or six wearable hats, depending on the size, the mediums returned four edible ones, sometimes steaming hot, but more often cooled by the winds that howled along the streets.

  Some said the ban had been the work of Russians; empty stomachs did not know the definition of resistance or see the occupiers’ sparkling boots and rifles. Besides, those who sat in the big government chairs had no leverage or competence to detect or do anything about hats. When a door-to-door search for cookhouses began in the original neighborhood and some were arrested, the cooking went on a hiatus for weeks before the remaining cooks split up and resumed their work, now scattered around the city. For a little while there seemed to be a respite from the pangs of hunger, at least in certain parts. But soon people ran out of extra hats and were left with the one they wore outside which they could not afford to eat.

  Boys and young men started filching hats from pedestrians’ heads and disappearing into circuitous alleys fast as the wind. They first targeted the middle-aged and older men whom they were sure to outrun. Embarrassed and furious, the bare-headed man would rush home or to some closed place so he would not be seen hatless in public. To discourage theft, clothes shops moved their hats to the back. The hat shops got raided and robbed so often that the business was no longer safe. Hatters worked with their doors closed and the corrugated tin shutters drawn all the way down as if the shop were closed. Customers would have to pound on the shutters. The hatter interrogated them about the purpose of their visit, and only after the customer slipped the money in under the shutters would the hatter unlock them, lift them up only as much as necessary, and pass the new or repaired hat out.

  Soon everyone was concerned about their hats. They became wary when they saw someone approaching them. Expecting a sudden attack from any passerby, people would put their hand on their hat while carefully eyeing the approaching person. Years later, after the Russians had long left Iran and the famine was over, when the account of the hat-eaters had joined the myriads of forgotten events in history, tipping one’s hat had become a form of greeting, although few knew the gesture’s origin in bitter suspicion and hunger.

  This complicated Ahmad’s searches for Khan. People looked at every teenage boy on the street as a possible flincher. As people avoided him, his daily walks were reduced to chasing girls on the street and in shops.

  * * *

  —

  FOR MONTHS, KHAN WOULD GET dressed a few hours after the sun had set, shove his hand into a sack, and head for the rundown bar. Before the winter chills turned the water into a block of ice, he had the hoez drained. The drainer man collected all the floating twigs and leaves, but soon more fell from the tree into the bottom and turned into a dark, tangled mesh and that was what Khan thought of when he looked at his long-unshaved beard that had started to overshadow the twirls of his mustache.

  “I’m going to see my grandson, tomorrow,” he told the barman, “right after school.”

  “Good.”

  “Did I tell you he studied French?”

  “With Sergey.”

  “Right, right.” Khan took a sip from his glass. “But Ara, you never told me how you lost your earlobe.”

  On his way to Ahmad’s school the next day, Khan heard two shopkeepers talking about hat-eaters. He did not understand what it was, but he had it in his mind when he waited for the school day to end. Ahmad stormed out through the gates smiling at something the other boys were laughing at. Bereft not only of words but also of laughter at the prime of his life, it was as if his grandson was shouting out Khan’s failure. Khan had not done enough for his family. He had made mistakes. Ahmad walked away from school and Khan felt he was not ready to face his grandson and daughter-in-law. He was empty-handed and embarrassed. As he was deep in his thoughts, someone dashed past and snatched his Astrakhan hat from his head so nimbly that he barely noticed it.

  “You don’t have your hat, sir,” Ara said when Khan sat down.

  “It’s my last night here, Ara.”

  Vodka trickled into the glass. Ara raised his bushy eyebrows.

  “I’m returning to God.”

  Ara wiped the counter with a threadbare towel and placed the glass in front of Khan. “Good for you, sir.”

  “It’s easy to blame the Russians for the famine. You see them in the streets in their sparkling uniforms and boots. No one even sees the British troops in the south. Do you?”

  Ara shrugged.

  “But that’s all surface.” Khan knocked back what was left in the glass.

  When Khan left that night, Ara One Ear opened the door for him. “You will be all right,” he said, extending his hand. “If you decide to come here again, your next drink is on me, sir.”

  * * *

  8

  N THE LAST DAY OF FALL, Ahmad saw a girl. Waiting for her turn in the women’s line, she was looking anxiously inside the shop. If a bakery managed a few bags of flour, it would open its doors for several hours during which a horde of people huddled out front in two lines to get their hands on fresh bread. Fights had been fought, door hinges had been broken, windows had been smashed, and the stronger had trampled the weaker. All over the city, the bakeries had closed their doors and installed metal bars across their windows. Hands squeezing coins would go in through a small opening and come out with hot flat sangak that was often ripped to pieces before it reached a safe distance from the crowd.

  The girl stood close to the front. Struggling to stand her ground and keep the women behind from cutting in, she kept her eyes on the inside of the bakery, oblivious of the fact that her chador had opened, exposing the clothes underneath. He walked past the bakery deaf to the commotion of the people in line, never taking his eyes off the brunette locks of hair encircling that angelic face. He could not go far though. He turned around the corner and waited. The girl left the bakery empty-handed. As she passed him, Ahmad found himself enchanted by the way she walked. He followed her at a safe distance, lest people suspect anything. His heart pounded in his temples and the winter around him suddenly melted and evaporated. He undid his suit buttons.

  That night Ahmad and his mother were invited to Maryam’s place for the celebration of Yalda, the longest night of the year. It became obvious that the invitation was a veiled babysitting request when Maryam and her husband left for a party, leaving the boy with Grandmother Pooran and Uncle Ahmad. As if burdened by a guilty conscience, Maryam had set the table with a cornucopia of the best she had at home: a small bowl of shriveled pistachios, stale walnuts and raisins, dull and dry seeded pomegranates, plates of sweets dripping with syrup, all on a pashmina tablecloth with paisley motif. She had even lit two candles. Deep down, Pooran was offended that her daughter had left her on that special night, but she told Ahmad they should thank God she had a husband who could put food on the table and a roof over her head. Soon after Maryam and her husband left, Pooran got to work washing the dishes and dusting the furniture. The memories of the past years’ Yalda nights when all the family gathered together accentuated the loneliness of that night. Norooz the Gardener would wheelbarrow Agha into the large guest room where they would sit around big bowls of nuts and fruit, listening to stories until well after midnight. Those memories were reminders that without Khan, something big was missing.

  Ahmad had found an image to substitute for all that was lost: protruding cheeks, thin lips, a small, marvelous ear that had flashed from under the chador for an instant. Words came bubbling inside him. He took out his notebook and started in the language of love. “It broke,” Majeed said, teetering up to him, holding a photo frame snapped in two. Ahmad raised a hand to the boy, meaning n
ot now, and turned back to the page. He was stuck at the first line when he could not find a rhyme for “turquoise,” but by the time his mother had rinsed the pistachios, walnuts, raisins, and even some of the sweets, he had written four lines in broken rhythm and loose rhymes about an ethereal and nebulous beloved. The main metaphor was that of the candle and butterfly and how eagerly the love-smitten insect would burn himself up in the flame for a fleeting kiss. He hid the notebook in his bag when his mother stepped out of the kitchen. They celebrated the night with wet nuts and soggy sweets that Majeed stuffed in his mouth, asking, “When’s my mom coming back?”

  * * *

  —

  AHMAD WAS A CONSPICUOUS FIGURE in the snow that blanketed the city the next day as he lurked around the girl’s house hoping to catch a glimpse of her again. He walked around the neighborhood passing by her door over and over again. He stood under the skeleton of a locust tree and sat on the single step of a house. People threw looks at him as they passed. After several days standing in the snow for hours, while trying not to be seen by many, Ahmad had found out that the girl had two older brothers, both big, hulking, and scary with small eyes and scarred faces; a protective mother; and a sickly father who rarely left the house. A week had passed and Ahmad had seen the girl only once when she left home in the company of her mother. A number of streets away, they had entered a house and stayed for at least three hours. Toward the evening, when it started to get dark, Ahmad could no longer feel his toes. At night, he wrote poems and spent long moments staring into the air imagining what her name might be. As if tasting an unfamiliar fruit for the first time, he tested name after name in his head, before vetoing each for a more beautiful one. Nothing sounded good enough. He ditched school to try his luck in the morning, but all he learned was that she did not go to school. That was a big disappointment. She would not be able to read his poems.