The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  The fights took place in the Pit, a circular depression in the ground at the brickyard. Not too far away, the long chimneys of the brick kilns were silhouetted against the setting sun breathing out clouds of smoke into the sky. Spectators stood around cheering and making bets. “Do you have a name or something?” someone from the crowd called at Ahmad the first day he walked to the Pit with Jamaal. “I’m talking to you. Cat got your tongue?” The next moment, Ahmad was straddling the boy, rubbing his face into the dry dirt, and punching him in the ribs. When they jumped into the Pit—Ahmad, Jamaal, and the two boys—their rivals were waiting for them. Four against five. Jamaal was accusing the rivals of being cowards for having appeared with one extra when Ahmad’s silent punch sent one of the boys flying. Amid ecstatic cheering, the brawl ended just after it began. Soon no one in the neighborhood dared to mock or pick on Ahmad, and if a stranger did so, boys readied themselves to watch a fight in the Pit, where Jamaal’s knife had scarred faces and Ahmad’s fist had broken ribs. One fourth of every bet in the crowd would go to Jamaal and his boys; Jamaal would get half of the money himself, Ahmad half of the other half, and what remained would go to the other two boys. Dead tired of the day’s work and evening fights, Ahmad would lay down on his kilim and fall asleep before he had time to mope or mull. With every day that passed, the flames flared a tad shorter and Oos Abbas knew that an unseen fire was being extinguished. When the summer was almost over, Ahmad took the money he had saved and signed up for night school. He walked two hours every day and punched extra people for Jamaal when he needed books.

  Within a month there was no one who could beat him at arm wrestling. At night, after he returned from the Pit and rubbed Mercurochrome on his wounds and scratches and pressed on his bruises to assess the damage, he took the newspaper, shook the dirt out of it, and read. So it was with pain that he learned about Mosaddegh, a member of the parliament and one of the founders of the National Front Party, who in some years would become Prime Minister. With his big ears, a head bald on top and gray on the sides, and a long nose on his horse-like face, the politician looked like a kind, old father in the photos. Reading Mosaddegh’s speeches on the nationalization of oil gave Ahmad’s poems a taste of the political. Ahmad debated with Oos Abbas by gesticulating and fervently shaking his head as he landed the sledgehammer on glowing spades. At that time, Oos Abbas was one of the few people around Ahmad who cared enough to voice an opinion about-the political issues that seemed immaterial to many. When Ahmad broached a topic they had not talked about before, though, Oos Abbas would reduce their debates to a simple mantra: “Leave empty talk to empty people. We have bread to win. Those, up there, they don’t. They have their games to play. We have a fight. We fight iron. They don’t have a fight.”

  Ahmad did not agree. The day he spoke of oil for the first time, Oos Abbas did not seem to understand him. Ahmad brought the lamp from a corner of the forge and pointed to its oil storage. Then he sat on a number of imaginary seats arranged in concentric semicircles and made a heated but silent speech to the nonexistent members. “Parliament is where they talk about things that don’t exist,” Oos Abbas said in response. His father had told him the story of the first parliament: how the cossacks rolled in mule-drawn cannons, shelled the building, and hanged a dozen members before the dust settled over the rubble. After a long hiatus, the next parliament decided to only discuss things that did not have material existence so as not to offend anyone in power. “Even you could be a member,” he told Ahmad, “because it doesn’t matter what anyone says or not. It’s an assembly of mouths, with no ears.” Ahmad would not swallow the myth. He unscrewed the cap and tilted the lamp. Oil trickled down on the hardened dirt floor of the forge. Oos Abbas sat on his armchair and scratched his chest through his undershirt that was his work attire, too. Ahmad pointed to the iridescent puddle that reflected the light of the sunny day outside. “It’s not lamp oil, but this black goo that comes out of the earth, that’s what they’re talking about.” His itching not satisfied, Oos Abbas pulled down the collar of his undershirt and scratched his hairy chest more with his forefinger. “There, take a shovel, be my guest, take a dig. When you reach the black juice, I’ll believe you and your parliament.” In the near future, Oos Abbas would find himself in the minority. People would believe in the viscous black fluid and see it as the reason for the election of a Prime Minister who had succeeded in nationalizing the industry, as well as the Coup that toppled him, and much more of the history to follow. No one ever saw the oil with their own eyes, but the bludgeons and blood were real.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Oos Abbas said one day as he laid the sofreh on the small table in the back of the shop for second breakfast. “Escape.” Ahmad kept his face down to his work. Sparks leapt from the grinding wheel. Oos Abbas put the fresh bread on the table and unwrapped the cheese. “You write about politics, because all you really do is try to forget that girl.” Ahmad raised his eyebrows, his head still down. “What, you think a year is long? How long has it been? A year? Two years? Whatever. You think two years is enough to forget someone? What if I told you twenty? How about twenty?” Strong tea trickled from the spout of the teapot into small, glass cups. Ahmad held the knife up and looked at the reflection of light in the blade, then gave the handle a few turns and put the knife back to the wheel. “I want you to know what’s going to happen: you’ll try to jam all of that love into the hammer and bang it away, look close into the fire until all of it burns off of your face. You read all that gibberish in the paper to feel you’re big, that you’re dealing with important things, that you don’t have time to think about her. But what’s going to happen is you’ll write crappy poems and no one will ever read them and all of a sudden you look in the mirror and see a forty-year-old man who still thinks about that one stolen kiss on a night that refuses to leave your memory.” He broke a lump of the cheese and rubbed it on a piece of bread with his stubby thumb. “Now come eat.”

  Three weeks later, Ahmad’s first poem was published, proving Oos Abbas wrong. On a Thursday, after he was done at the forge, Ahmad started for the Pit and, as he did every week, bought the Young Iran magazine on his way. He leafed through and suddenly stopped walking. His ghazal was somewhere in the middle of the magazine below an ad for the Westinghouse fridge. He read it from top to bottom over and over again, tasting each word and letter. People passed by him looking over at what he had in his hand. By the time he got to the Pit panting, the fight had already started. He elbowed his way through the crowd and jumped in, but before he could stop thinking about his poem, someone heavy was sitting on his chest.

  “What’s this?” Oos Abbas asked the next day, refusing to take the trampled magazine, ripped across the middle, that Ahmad held out to him. Ahmad turned the pages and wiped some dirt off of his poem. “That’s yours?” Ahmad nodded. Oos Abbas took the magazine and lowered his big round head as he looked at the page. “Well, I can’t read,” he said giving the magazine back, “but even if it is, you know one swallow doesn’t summer make, does it?”

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME HE FINISHED high school, Ahmad had published fifteen poems in newspapers and journals under the pen name Silent Fist, which Oos Abbas found “as interesting as this horseshoe.” The poems became popular among an offshoot of the Tudeh Party that worked in favor of the nationalization of oil. In a letter that came to the forge, they asked him for poems to publish in the special issue of their magazine, Rebel, for the anniversary of Marx’s birth. His hidden identity added appeal to his sophistication as well as intensity to the denunciations. But a critique of Rebel soon called the proponents of the oil movement “ignoramus traitors,” and Silent Fist a “vacuous voice of vanity whose ideology fails to surpass the communism of the Tudeh Party high school brochures, a dimwit whose discordant words enjoy no more than the mystery of anonymity.”

  Although he never joined the party, Ahmad had read the pamphlets and was aware of its gro
wing influence in schools and universities as well as in factories. He believed his path to the heights of greatness went through politics, that he would not create lasting poetry worthy of attention if he did not engage himself with the same issues that busied men in the royal palace, government, and parliament. He devised metaphors in his poems that were read as references to the oil movement and the party. The summer after he graduated, his first political essay came out in which he lamented what he called the prevalent ignorance of ordinary people—those who worked the lands and those who worked the machines—that had caused the suffocating atmosphere, general poverty, and the corruption of those in power:

  In a society where the labor is rendered impotent by superstition and ignorance, how can we expect to succeed in severing the hands of those who loot our God-given treasures?

  The essay was published in Rebel and was read and referred to in some political circles. Lying on his sleeping mat at night, with his hands locked behind his head, Ahmad asked himself if he was a vacuous voice of vanity. The sound of someone practicing the violin came from the apartment upstairs. It was a man in his thirties. He always started an hour before midnight. The discordant notes inspired Ahmad to sit at his small desk. He opened the magazine and turned the pages to his essay. He looked at it for a few moments, then closed it and started to write another.

  * * *

  —

  FALL CAME CALM AND TENDER. It dissipated the unbearable heat and brought Mosaddegh and the National Front a season closer to victory. Composed and charismatic, the old man who had gotten into parliament as Tehran’s number one representative walked with a cane—a souvenir of his time in prison and a necessary accessory for rheumatoid joints—and made speeches that brought cheering and applause from his listeners. With his characteristic bald head, the tall, thin nationalist had become a vanguard in oil battles and the hero of many.

  The leaves of plane trees withered yellow and fell like hands about to clench into fists. There was an aroma of romance in the cool breeze. Fall was Ahmad’s favorite season, when the city showed itself off like no other time, with the intolerable heat already gone and the penetrating cold not yet on the horizon, with greens turned into yellows and oranges, with falling rain and leaves. He watched the old people who sat by their doors in alleyways, the passersby, men in suits and hats, women in chadors, in blouses, skirts, and dresses walking on sidewalks and across the streets in which an incongruous mixture of cars, buggies, carts, and buses started and stopped, and among all of that, the weaving bicycles. The wounds the famine had inflicted on the city had healed. People streamed into and out of the repaired and repainted shops. New trees had been planted along the sidewalks and shopkeepers kept flowerpots out front. Walking in the alleys Ahmad could see the tops of trees from behind the walls that enclosed yards; vines and ivies snaked on top of walls; on crowded sidewalks, the street vendors sold steaming boiled beet and fava beans. The city had survived. Life had seeped back in. In the distance, the ever-snow-covered cone of Mount Damavand towered in the Alborz range. Fine and fragile, fall reminded Ahmad of his family: his mother, his sister, and the little boy, Majeed. He had not seen them in years. The hatred that boiled inside him when he left home had abated. Fire had purged his soul.

  * * *

  —

  NANA SHAMSI HAD THE DREAM a week before. “The boy’s coming back,” she told Pooran at breakfast. “What boy?” Pooran asked after a moment of pause. “He’s grown taller than the door,” Nana Shamsi answered. The following Friday, when the neighborhood fruit seller had brought out the first persimmon of the season, Ahmad hopped onto the horse tram and knocked on Khan’s door. Nana Shamsi opened it, held up her small face framed in a pink headscarf, and looked at him for a few moments with a smile. “The boy’s here,” she called out toward Pooran across the yard. When Nana stepped aside for Ahmad to bow his head and walk in, Pooran did not turn to look at her son. The yard was a lush little garden in warm colors, a minuscule Eden in spite of all the leaves that fall had claimed. Pooran was picking grapes from the vine that crawled up the ladder and along the top of the wall before scaling three ropes onto the corner of the roof. Ahmad stepped forward, took the basket from his mother, and held her hand in his. Although still free of wrinkles, her skin had lost its bright freshness. Strands of white waved inside her hazel mane like fish in a stream. He pointed to his chest and mouthed, I’m Ahmad, your son. But Pooran did not turn her eyes away from the yellow bunch that dangled in front of her. Ahmad placed his mother’s hand on his chest. She would not budge. Finally he kissed her fingers and let them go. She picked up the basket and went inside.

  “Four years and six months and eighteen days,”—the voice was as strong as before, though slightly gravelly, as if he had a sorrow stuck in his throat—“that’s how long she waited for you.” Ahmad turned around. Khan’s eyes and cheeks had sunk in. His skin was darker than Ahmad remembered. His hair was thinner. His bushy eyebrows cast his face in a constant effortless frown. But a narrow smile appeared on his face, the tops of his salt-and-pepper mustache moved. “This will always be your home,” he said opening his arms. Ahmad looked at his grandfather for a while. His legs wanted to go forward to accept the invitation of the man he had revered most, and to feel at home again, but Ahmad’s memories of him—all from when he was taller and walked as if he took each step with a plan—had a bitter taste behind them. A cool breeze rustled through the leaves. Khan dropped his arms. The smile shrunk away. “You’re still mad.” Ahmad nodded. “Do you have children?” Ahmad shook his head. “Can I speak to you about something?” Ahmad did not answer. “It’s important.”

  The large basement table was strewn with books, papers, and magazines, pens and pencils, rulers, a knife, and an abacus. Against the wall stood two short bookcases. Old, yellowed volumes sat on the two top shelves, brittle and about to collapse. To the left, a curtain partitioned off a section of the basement. After he had furnished the basement with new equipment, Khan had sat and written down Agha’s tale and read it word for word for a week. Then he started studying the uprising in the Azerbaijan Province. The harder he explored the printed and oral news and rumors, the farther he found himself from piecing together the puzzle. What had been called the People’s Republic of Azerbaijan had many gaps in its short, one-year history. People’s names had been inconsistent or untraceable; a small local government had formed, but it was not certain how; the man who had drafted and later read the declaration of independence had been called two different names; there was never a photo of the appointed minister of war who had warned the farmer resistance. Soon after the threat, the farmers’ crops wilted as if the water that ran in the fields had stopped being water. And that was the beginning of the famine. Khan had not at first given much significance to the people who had reported hearing a purr in the background on their radio when the independence announcement was being read. “But then”—Khan got up from his chair—“I saw this.” From his bookshelf, he pulled a hefty tome with faded black leather covers and gingerly put it down on the table. He turned the brittle pages with dextrous movements of his aging fingers and stopped on a page that, from the other side of the table, seemed to Ahmad like the drawing of a flower. “Listen to this.” Khan began reading:

  That the petals and leaves of the regret flower are of poisonous nature and that the bane is most murderous to the cat is knowledge that passed down to us from the times of our forefathers and a matter I disserted on in the preceding pages of the present treatise, but what I, after years of examination, have found which since its discovery has not failed to astonish me, is the fact that the feline, itself, knows this. One ought not to confound this knowledge with the instinctual refrainment of the beast from eating plants in general. Many years of observation have shown me that the death in the regret flower passes through a cat and leaves the body in the beast’s last urine and the cat knows this.

  Here Khan stopped and looked up at Ahmad as if waiting for th
e excitement of the discovery to come from his grandson. “Now do you see this? This is how the famine started. It was the cats.” Ahmad found the story intriguing. Even if bleak and foreboding, cats sacrificing themselves by chewing the purple gossamer of the regret flower petals and urinating annihilation and ruin before drawing their last breath had something of a poetic nature to it. “You must be wondering what the Russians’ role was in all this,” Khan went on, excited to have prepared answers for Ahmad’s unasked questions. From the pile on the table, he pulled a page from a newspaper and handed it to Ahmad. It was almost four years old. Ahmad perused the page, but did not find anything extraordinary. “Above the caricature,” Khan said. A short piece of news set in a small block of text talked about a rodent infestation in Azerbaijan. “The Russians leave, the Shah sends in the army, Azerbaijan is back, then what happens? Rat issues. Cats had the whole region, they killed the crops, they influenced the party and the local government. And the Russians protected them.”

  Ahmad got up from his chair and put the paper on the table.

  “Wait. Have you seen the map?” On the wall facing Ahmad, the map was marked by small arrows and X’s. Khan showed him the routes from the deserts in Iraq, into Azerbaijan, and ending at last in Tehran. “There are words about the Tudeh Party, too.” Ahmad started for the door. “I don’t know if I believe this myself yet,” Khan said, “but cats roam the buildings of the party. Go and see for yourself.” Ahmad turned back, took a pen from the table, and wrote on a piece of paper.