by Ali Araghi
“Yes,” Khan said after he read the note, “a few cats around doesn’t necessarily mean anything but I’m talking about cats waltzing into the door where they print their things in the morning. I have seen it with my own eyes. Come with me and see for yourself. A printer is not the street or a house now, is it? What are the cats doing there? Who do you think runs the place? Or should I say what?”
Neither spoke for a few moments.
“I’m running experiments.”
Khan was trying to understand what the cats wanted. He thought going back to the primitive stages of man-beast communication in Agha’s tale might be possible. The few books he found on weird creatures and history of sorcery seemed at first promising. He read about the cats’ feeding and behavioral routines and anomalies. He repeated mantras and performed acts of austerity and penitence and at one point divined significance and received a renewed encouragement from the cry of a street cat. Then in an obscure passage in the margins of one of the books, he found a slanted handwritten note about the link between the souls of a cat and a man who look alike. Khan walked behind the curtain. “The first step is to talk.” Ahmad heard him move things around. Khan came back with a cage. “Recognize him?” The wooden cage dangled in his hand. With ears flat against its head, a tricolor sat in a corner looking at Ahmad with eyes wide-open. Its mouth was twisted and half of its nose seemed to have been burned. The cat looked weak and ill, but its eyes were so alive they could rain blue sparkles. “Say hi to Sergey,” Khan announced. “He will help me with languages.”
* * *
—
POORAN BUSIED HERSELF IN THE garden and refused to talk to Ahmad the whole day.
At night, Ahmad sat on a chair by the hoez, the collar of his coat turned up, his hands warm in his coat pockets. The moon was reflected in the still water on which a few leaves floated. Soon they would drain the hoez for the winter. Khan snored in his room. Like crystal chandeliers, the grapes glistened in the silver light. Ahmad heard the door creak open behind him and the darkened figure of Nana Shamsi shuffled out of the house, her back bent from the weight of her age. “I have dreamed,” she said in her slow manner. “You will leave and you will do many foolish things. The next time I see you, you will be in a bloody fever. The next time you see me, I won’t be breathing.” She shifted and stood right before Ahmad. Against the moonlit black sky, she was a silhouette not much taller than the seated young man. “My husband never kissed me,” she said. She smelled raw like the New Year’s goldfish. “Will you?” she asked, but did not wait for a reply. Leaning forward, she put her lips on Ahmad’s. The touch was soft and rosy as if her lips had preserved the freshness they must have had when she was a teenage village girl. Ahmad felt Nana’s hand on the back of his neck. Then she went back into the house. When the first rooster cawed somewhere in the neighborhood, Ahmad stepped out the front door and clicked it shut behind him.
13
FTER LIVING IN THE FORGE FOR A YEAR, Ahmad had rented a moldy basement room nearby that became his first home. That night, the kiss from Nana Shamsi unsettled him so much that Ahmad slept not in his basement room, but in the forge again. He lay out the old kilim and, staring at the dark ceiling like five years before, fell into reveries of his courtship with Raana. With fingers knotted around the handle of the sledgehammer, he had pounded the frustration and confusion out of himself. He had flattened metal. He had cracked noses and ribs until he had found no trace of love within him for that girl anymore, but now it rose up again, a distant memory in the dark.
All night, Ahmad stayed awake. Then he got up in the morning, folded his kilim, and bought a razor. In front of the mirror over the wash basin, he shaved the soft hair on his cheeks and upper lip for the first time and washed the blood from the cuts. Once again, he hid a chador under his suit and waited around the corner from Raana’s door. The door was the same, five years older, with more paint chipped off here and there. The streets were more crowded now than when he first did his trick, but he managed the donning of the chador without being noticed. On Ahmad’s seventh day of watching, the wind blew in stray flakes from the snow that was falling in the mountains. He saw one of Raana’s brothers with a wife and two children going in the house, but never the father, in spite of his old habit of going for a morning walk with someone holding his arm. And never Raana. Ahmad turned up his collar and decided he would wait for her for no matter how long. Once again, after years, he had to rock his toes in his shoes buried ankle-deep in the snow. The winter was hard. One day he had to dig through the chest-high snow for an hour before he could get out of his house.
Toward the end of the season, the postman handed Oos Abbas an envelope. “You’re becoming famous,” he said holding the envelope out to Ahmad. “A new poem?”
It was a short note from Raana. She had been aware of him the whole time, seen him from behind the curtains, but she could not leave the house unattended. Her brothers would kill her if they got wind of her walking out alone again. But she could not stand to see him waiting for her in the cold anymore. She would soon make the arrangements.
Several days later, as years before, Ahmad snuck up to Sara’s house, this time on a moonless winter night, pushed the door open gently, and passed through a short corridor into a small yard.
It was as if that distant night had been put on hold for Ahmad to resume five years later; as if nothing had happened in the interval except that he had lived one alternative of how things might have gone. This time, it was the same night and it would go some other way, as planned. Ahmad took off his shoes and stepped on the rugs. The place felt empty, but before he had time to figure out where he was, before he even smelled the scent of jasmine, two arms locked around his waist from behind. His chador had fallen from his head at some point. He turned around and held her in his arms. He wanted to see her face, but the curtains had been closed tight. His groping hands slid up her back and framed her face before he glued his lips on hers. The room vanished into a kaleidoscopic whirling darkness. His restless legs started moving; he took a first step and then a second, and then it was Raana who took the lead, pulled him and then pushed him until they were dancing a silent dance around the room, her head on his shoulder, the soft carpet caressing their soles, her warm breath eddying around his neck in quick, excited gasps that diced the dark. He slammed his shin against the edge of something. Raana pulled him away from another corner. She must have had better eyes than him to see the furniture through the obscurity. Short breaths cleft the night. After some time, at some unknown spot in the house, Ahmad took a step backward onto a puffy softness on the ground: a mattress, sprawling cool, expecting. Never before in his life had Ahmad wanted more to have a voice, to utter terms of endearment, to say even the smallest of words to Raana, the girl who straddled his chest and leaned forward to join lips with him. If only she could read, he could at least make a note and ask her to talk, to whisper his name, to say something, anything. She wanted to be one with him maybe, he thought, two bodies united without the interruption of sounds. But he wanted sounds. He rolled over and sat up. A phantom in the dark, Raana’s body sat in front of him: like him, cross-legged; like him, expecting. Extending his hand, he placed his palm on her chest, gave a push and now the silent girl was on the mattress. The night flowed through them.
Cherry blossoms.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING THE OIL industry was nationalized. It was a big victory for Mosaddegh and the National Front Party. They celebrated at noon by firing three shots at Cannon Square. Majeed, who was playing tag in the alley with some other boys, looked at the sky and ran inside to ask his mother and grandmother where the sound had come from. Neither Maryam nor Pooran knew. They were busy with housework and Majeed’s younger sister, Parveen. The boy climbed down to the basement. Khan did not know either. “But let’s find out,” he said to the boy, smiling playfully and pushing on the armrests to raise himself from the chair. Majeed’s
large eyes sparkled.
Out in the streets Khan soon learned about what had happened from the first shopkeeper who was standing out front chatting with a customer. Half an hour later he followed the seven-year-old around a corner and the vast expanse of the Cannon Square opened up in front of them, surrounded on four sides with government establishments. Gathering in the middle, in the large rectangular area with patches of greens and a few lonely trees, a great number of people cheered around the Marble Cannon.
“It’s something like that they’re firing,” Khan said to the boy, “farther out of the city.” A small group shouted half-hearted slogans against Mosaddegh in a corner where three nosed buses waited for passengers. From the windows of the long two-story building of the Ministry of Telegraph and Telephone, men looked down at the square. Many stood around watching on the sidewalks and many walked along indifferent to the news. Then Khan had an idea. “You want to play a game?” he asked Majeed. “It’s called count the kitties.” Excited, the boy listened to Khan’s careful instructions and watched his papa crouch down to tie his undone shoelace. “You should learn to tie your own shoes. You’re going to school soon.” Majeed looked down with hands in his small pants pockets. “Thanks, Papa,” he said and ran off out of sight. Khan sat on a doorstep and talked to a grocer. An hour or two later, the boy came back to report the number and Khan bought him some dried sour cherries and a rooster candy. On a hand-drawn map of the city, Khan marked the number of cats in each district as he and his great-grandson walked street by street, then back again to the same areas for new counts. The women of the house were happy about the changes they witnessed: Khan had come out of his obsessive illusions and become outgoing. He took the kid out for walks whenever Maryam paid a visit, which gave them more time for her younger girl.
Every passing day added a few more dots to Khan’s maps. “You see this?” he would show the map to Sergey. “These are your friends, see? Now you want to tell me what they’re up to?” The cat cowered in the corner of the cage not taking his eyes from Khan. But Khan could not sit idly until Sergey acknowledged the question. He studied his charts and drawings at night to find the pattern of the cats spreading across the city. Soon a problem presented itself: he could count the cats, but he had no knowledge of the way the felines moved from one point to another. If he could gain that knowledge, he would be able to test his hypothesis that shortly after the cats migrated to an area, things would go wrong there—that there was a relation between the cats’ activities and havoc.
One night he made a trap by balancing the rim of a heavy pot upside down on a short Y-shaped stick to which he tied a string. He placed some lamb fat under the pot and waited in his basement, holding the other end of the thread in his hand, squinting through a window into the night. Two hours later he pulled. The pot dropped with a loud clatter. Inside, the cat growled and hissed and clawed at the copper vessel. With a foot on the pot, Khan wound some rags around his hand and forearm before he lifted the rim and reached for the frightened animal. By the time he managed to throw the cat into a gunnysack, his sleeve was torn and his wrist was bleeding. All night the sack swung on a peg on the wall behind the curtain, jerking back and forth from time to time.
“I need your iron,” Khan told Pooran after breakfast the next morning. Back in his basement, he tonged glowing-red coal into the iron, then from behind the curtain, he took the squirming sack off the peg and put it on the table. With heavy books from his bookcase he tried to pin the restless cat’s legs. In its gunnysack, the cat squirmed free, toppling the stacks. Khan took out his hefty tomes and dumped them all over the animal until the sound that came from underneath was of total surrender. Then he pulled the cat’s tail out. The books wobbled. He spat on his finger and tapped the iron. The spit sizzled into vapor. When he pressed the iron on the tip of the tail, the cat sprang with such a force that it sent the books flying in the air. Smoke wafted from the scorched tail as the gunnysack rolled back and forth. It knocked over Sergey’s cage and then stopped squirming. Khan picked it up and let the cat out of the bag in the yard. The animal dashed up a tree, leapt onto the top of the wall, and was gone faster than death. “Keep your eyes peeled for Scorch Tail,” Khan told Majeed. Three days later Majeed saw the cat in an alley with a fish head in its mouth. Khan had expected it to move elsewhere to conduct whatever plot it was supposed to carry on, but the cat had stayed in the neighborhood. When the summer was over, Majeed’s father bought a new house on the other side of the city and Khan lost his full-time aide.
* * *
—
FOR A WEEK, AHMAD STOOD out front of the forge two hours before noon when the postman pedaled by raising a greeting hand and smiling to Ahmad without ever applying the brakes. Ahmad would go back in and hope a note would come the next morning. Trying to find a relief for his frustration in words, he wrote poems every night. He devoured newspapers and magazines. Then he wrote more. The next morning, he would clean up the forge, get the fire going, step outside, and wave to the postman who rang his bell twice, flashed him a smile, and rolled past. At night, Ahmad stared at his words and said them in his head as they formed on the paper. He ran his fingers over them. Ink smeared.
One night, when he was starting a new poem, Ahmad sensed the presence of something behind the words he formed on the paper, something underneath the curves. He could almost see a faint gleam, each letter adding to whatever was behind the array of letters. He turned the light off and held his face close to the paper, and saw a very weak aura. The words emitted a glimmer in which he saw with clarity a mosquito circling. The bug had buzzed around his ears for the past hour. He fanned it away, but it came back spiraling in toward the poem, until it was swatted to a bloody splotch on the paper.
* * *
—
TWO MONTHS PASSED AND THE postman did not come to the forge. Ahmad realized that somewhere in that time he had stopped waiting outside. His heart was empty of that unbearable craze that once made him storm out of the forge for Raana. He was optimistic and hopeful about the changes in the society. Mosaddegh, having succeeded in unifying the parliament into a unanimous vote for the nationalization of oil, was appointed Prime Minister and announced a policy of tolerance in which free speech and free press were everyone’s right. He wrote a letter to the chief of the police stating that no man should be prosecuted for what they wrote about him in print, no matter what. The strands of Ahmad’s feelings for a beloved in the dark, unseeable in her nakedness, were impossible to untangle from his political interpretations. His politics were romantic, his lyrics political. But his love had migrated from his heart to his papers. He wrote unspecifically and equivocally. A critic of the Prime Minister and a supporter of the Shah quoted one of Ahmad’s poems in a newspaper editorial. A range of accusations had been brought against the man who was officially the second highest-ranking official of the country. Ahmad was furious about the misappropriation. “What’s with you now?” Oos Abbas asked him. The fires he was making at the forge were raging again.
Shortly before the Coup flashed through the streets like a knife from the pocket of a thug, Salman showed up at Oos Abbas’s forge in gray wide-leg pants, a black suit, and a striped gray tie. He doffed his fedora and stepped in. “If you think you can hide behind your alias forever, you can’t be more wrong.” Salman and Ahmad hugged a long time, rocking back and forth and patting each other on the back. The many stories they had, they exchanged at Café Lalahzar. After Sara had married and left the house, Mash Akbar, Salman’s father, moved to Tehran too, to start a new life. On the night Sergey announced independence, the Russians had rounded up the suspect attackers in the open square in front of the mosque. Like Khan, they looked for Mulla Ali, too, but he was nowhere to be found, so they took the men away in the backs of their trucks. Tajrish was not a place to live in anymore. Mash Akbar closed down his butchery. Scarcely anyone could afford to buy meat anyway. The memories of his long-deceased wife and the absence of Sara lurked i
n every corner of the house, leaping at him at night until finally one day, Salman came home to find two big bundles in the middle of the large room, one of which his father straddled, tightening the knot that held it together. “We’re leaving,” he had told Salman between clenched teeth, his bad leg dangling on one side of the bundle, his knuckles white, his eyes not moving from the knot, “this damned house.” Before the sun went down, they entered Tehran through the defunct Shemiron Gate, a half-torn monument that marked the old borders of the city, the father limping, holding his son’s hand and pulling the rein of the donkey that barely kept its knees from bending under the load. They had their things stolen from them within the first three days. They slept on the streets for a week before someone came with a moving job for the donkey. It took Mash Akbar five years before he could afford to rent a place and open his small butchery in a cheap neighborhood.
“I admire your hand, my friend,” Salman said. “It fights well and it writes well.” Ahmad wrote on his notepad, tore the page out, and slipped it over to Salman.
“I know,” Salman said, “they misused your poem. But it’s not your best, is it?”
Ahmad took the paper back and wrote some more.
“That’s easy to fix.” Salman pushed the paper back to Ahmad. “Write another and start it like ‘My PM, I love him!’ And everyone will know you are not against Mosaddegh.” He laughed and waved down the servant for a second tea.