The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  Ahmad wrote.

  “Oo,” Salman raised his eyebrows, “That’s the party’s official publication. I don’t know if they’ll publish you.”

  Ahmad flipped the paper and wrote.

  “I don’t know much about that, Ahmad, but I’ll ask. I can’t promise. It’s big. They take it seriously. Some say it comes directly from Moscow. I don’t even know who runs the journal.”

  The page was almost full. Ahmad wrote three words on the edge.

  “Some say tabbies? What does that mean? Who says what?”

  Ahmad laughed the matter off with a silent wave of his hand.

  “Too many punches in the head in that pit, my friend?” Salman said and leaned back.

  They drank more tea and Salman smoked a cigarette. Before Salman left, Ahmad tore another page out of his notepad and wrote on it.

  They will publish my poems.

  * * *

  —

  NOT THE MAJOR JOURNAL, BUT the Youth Organization of the Tudeh Party accepted Ahmad’s work. The editor’s essay that accompanied the poem posited that it was long past the time for literature to migrate from the courts and the ivory towers into factories, workshops, and farms where it belonged.

  “Congratulations, Anonymous!” Salman yelled when Ahmad walked through the door at Café Lalahzar. “The left likes you. Happy now?” Ahmad shook his head. It’s not the real thing. But thank you, he wrote on the copy Salman laid on the table and hung his arm around his friend’s shoulder. At Café Lalahzar Ahmad found a lost brother. Salman would go up to the café owner’s desk, say hi, pat him on the shoulder, and then put on his own favorite record. He would walk back to Ahmad and read his drafts with a concentrated frown. He underlined the lines he liked best. They were the same ones that shone the brightest at night. Salman could not write one line of poetry, but he could tell good from sloppy.

  In politics, Salman was the poet. He had joined the Tudeh Party a few years back, soon after he moved to Tehran. Ahmad’s politics pulled from the space between the communism of the Tudeh and Khan’s belief in the royal family, especially the young Shah. He saw himself in the middle, free to pick what was right. “But you want to get published with the lefties,” Salman said. Because the ass-kissers of the Shah stole my poem. “I know.” Salman tapped him on the shoulder. “But listen, Ahmad.” He leaned forward and laid his hand on Ahmad’s arm. “To me you’re like a brother I never had. No, no, that’s not true; you are my brother. So when I say this, you know I say it because I love you, right?” He did not wait for Ahmad to answer. His thick eyebrows knotted into a stern frown above his brown eyes. “You don’t know mule manure when you write politics. You’re an awesome poet. I’d bet my head over your lines. Stick to it. You put whatever you want in your poems. You want to write political epic, I’m with you. You want to get published with the party, I’ll try to help. But stick to your rhyme. Essay schmessay. Let go of all that stuff. Your home is poetry. Do you hear me? Does any of this get into that head of yours?” Ahmad smiled and thanked Salman for his concern. Salman was not sure how much he had convinced Ahmad, and Ahmad, certain of his friend’s good heart, became resolute to show himself and his friend that he could achieve anything he set his heart on.

  The young men’s visits in the café continued as before, filled with poetry and companionship. When the two were not discussing the young Shah, new to the throne, or oil or Mosaddegh’s opening the society up, they smoked hookah and played backgammon as they poured hot tea from small glasses into saucers and drank with sugar cubes in their mouths. “What did you buy that elephant of a gramophone for in the first place?” Salman would shout at the owner when the song finished and he had not had time to change the record yet. Lalahzar Street had transformed since the first time Ahmad set foot on it, when he strolled the city looking for Khan. The old pavement had been replaced by a layer of fresh asphalt; more cars were on the road, and the rugged cobblestone had become a sign of older times of backwardness and slowness. A second café had opened a few doors down. Stores were built on the lots that had been left empty between buildings like missing teeth. At one of those stores Majeed had his first ice cream.

  14

  ROM HIS DINGY BASEMENT, Ahmad moved into the second floor of a two-story building. Now he had two separate, facing rooms that opened onto a small corridor. On the first floor lived the landlady who sat in her rocking chair in the yard and held her radio to her ear. A flimsy metal staircase climbed to the roof from Ahmad’s balcony, and the only way to reach it was through the window. On hot summer nights Ahmad bundled up his mattress, blankets, and pillows, and stepped out of the window and up the staircase. With his arms behind his head, he lay looking into the stars before he set up his mosquito net.

  In the evenings, after the sun went down, he sat at his desk and took out his pencil to put words on paper, trying to make them glow. He erased the dimmer words and tried new ones until the draft gave off a good glimmer. When he could read whole lines by the light they emitted alone, Ahmad knew a poem had been born.

  “Do you sleep early, Mr. Ahmad?” the landlady asked him one morning. “I don’t see your lights on very often.” He saved on electricity money by lighting the newspapers he read with his poems, which he put on top of a stack of books on his desk as a reading light. He also wrote essays for small papers on social and political issues. When he called the Prime Minister a “national hero” after Mosaddegh tried to annul the Shah’s legal control on the armed forces, some pro-Shah publications published denunciatory editorials and put Ahmad on a list of condemnable names in contemporary literature, some big, some “fledgling like a certain Silent Fist.”

  We search the light no matter what, he wrote after he saw his published name. That sentence did not glow hard enough. The dim light died away as he crossed out the words. We search the light in the heart of darkness. Stronger, but not satisfactory. I seek the light in the heart of the dark. His hand was lit brighter with each word, but he crossed out the line for the third time. Sunk in the dark, I seek the light. A soft spotlight shone from the paper on his desk to the ceiling. That was a keeper.

  When he read that line the next day, Salman got to his feet and motioned for the waiter to shut the gramophone up. Then he read it out loud again and finished the poem blushing from the intensity of feelings. Sporadic clapping and whistling rose in the café. Someone shouted, “Encore!” and Salman read the lines again, gesticulating with his free hand, enunciating the words. Ahmad and Salman received more applause and two free teas from the café owner.

  That was the poem that the Tudeh Party magazine published.

  “You got what you wanted,” Salman said at the café, “but be careful, Ahmad. It’s not hard to draw the line from ‘Anonymous’ to ‘Silent Fist.’ You’re playing with fire.”

  Ahmad nodded his head and smiled.

  “Also there’s going to be a protest,” Salman said after the waiter put the hookah on the table. “Want to come?”

  Ahmad traced with his finger on the table: When?

  * * *

  —

  WALKING HOME FROM SCHOOL, MAJEED spotted Scorch Tail up an elm tree in a sidewalk on Shah-Abad Street. Ignoring his mother’s forbidding him to touch the telephone, he made his first phone call to Khan. Finally, the cat had moved to another neighborhood. Khan had long awaited that migration. He zeroed in on the area and began to lunch at the chai house on Shah-Abad Street every day. The workers got to know him. They would start him off with two cups of “lip-burning” tea followed by a bowl of deezee with extra fat floating in the broth that covered a large piece of lamb and optimum amounts of potatoes and beans. They were swift to bring another two cups of saffron tea and a hookah before the plate and bowl were taken away from Khan. From the first day he entered the chai house, the workers were struck by the aura of greatness that the old man exuded, the way he twirled the tips of his mustache and sat cross-legged with his b
ack straight, occupying more space than he needed. Word circulated behind his back that he had been a tribal khan who had fought in the south against the British during the World War II occupation. The waiters looked with awe and suspicion at the maps that he spread in front of him after he smoked the hookah. They noticed his visible restlessness with each passing day.

  After two weeks his maps started to show unusually high cat traffic. Every dot he had made with the tip of his pencil was a cat he had seen as he walked around the neighborhood: one dot was a kitten trying hard to climb a plane tree, one a cat dozing off in the shadows of vine leaves on a wall, two were the ones dashing away from the untimely kick of a butcher, and another was a tricolor that rode in a wooden crate tied to the cargo rack of a bicycle with head held high, as if proud of having shrewdly hitched a lift with the unsuspecting dolt of a pedaler who, pants legs tucked into his socks, zoomed toward destinations the cat was uninterested in. Khan’s calculations predicted that something would occur in the Shah-Abad Street area in the first month of summer. Theft, robbery, street brawl, or something bigger; Khan was not yet sure.

  Summer came. Khan was wary for a month. Every uneventful day added to his disappointment and doubt that his theory on the cats might be disproven. The chai house workers kept bringing him fresh hookahs and hot tea. One, grown especially fond of Khan, would stride to the door greeting him loudly and leading him to the special place he had set aside for the man and his maps. Finally, on a hot afternoon, when Khan was blowing out smoke, he saw two boys running after a cat in a mischievous game. Stray cats and dogs were often chased by boys who had nothing better to play with. Khan put the mouthpiece to his lips when a second cat dashed past the chai house on the sidewalk. He got up and went out into the street and saw them everywhere: in the trees, by the wheel of a parked bike, in the street and alleys. A white cat looked at him from among the fetid trash in the gutter. Two lurked on the wall like commanders of an army overlooking the operation from their vantage point. People glanced at them, raised eyebrows, and passed with more indifference than Khan could comprehend. Soon the felines dashed out of sight, leapt up walls, sprinted away into the unknown recesses of the city. In a matter of hours, Mosaddegh resigned and the new Prime Minister was inaugurated with a harsh admonitory speech that threatened to confront any unrest with force. A fleeting smile appeared on Khan’s lips. He took Sergey’s cage out to the edge of the hoez in the yard. “I think I got you beasts pegged,” he said as he cupped water and sprinkled it playfully on the cat that took shelter in the corner of the cage. Then he lifted the cage and started dipping it slowly into the water. As if accepting its fate, the cat did not move as the water rose from its paws to its stomach and then its shoulders. The cage swung and jerked with the smoothness that water gives to things when Khan plunged it all the way down to his wrist. The ripples distorted the reflection of the moon. The cage came out dripping. Sergey hissed and clawed at the wooden bars.

  “That was for what you did in my orchard,” Khan whispered.

  It was with unbearable exhilaration that Khan stood in front of the chai house the next day and watched with the workers and the other customers the shouting protesters sweep Shah-Abad Street. People wanted Mosaddegh back in office. When warning shots were fired by the police, the crowd surged back, only to drift forward again, excited and stimulated. Khan tasted success in his mouth. He could not spot any cats under the unruly stampede of legs, but he was sure they were somewhere nearby. They had completed their job; now they were watching it unfold. How they had succeeded in wreaking such havoc was something Khan thought deeply about as he walked back home against the waves of people who marched toward their hopes. For a brief moment, Khan thought he picked out Ahmad’s face in the crowd among the many other insignificant shapes, punching the air as he mouthed the slogans. It seemed as if the chorus of voices was coming out of his throat only. Three consecutive gunshots dispersed the protesters and the next moment the doppelgänger of Ahmad was gone.

  Before the week came to an end, Mosaddegh came back in what Salman called a “historic victory for the people.” Ahmad eulogized the fallen protesters in a long poem that Salman recited at Café Lalahzar. “This calls for a necktie,” he told Ahmad the day before reading the five pages. In his blue tie and suit, with waxed hair combed back, Ahmad sat beside Salman, his arms crossed on his chest, his legs crossed. Eyes flitted from Salman to Ahmad and back. Among the people at the café was a young woman in a light-gray jacket and skirt, her black hair fastened in a bun, casting long looks at Ahmad as she drank her coffee from a white cup. The young man in front of her wiped his broad forehead with a handkerchief from time to time. Full of young zest, the woman was composed and elegant.

  After the applause and as the server placed the free cups of tea on the table, the young woman rose from her seat and approached them. “I follow your work in the papers. Your poems have a certain je ne sais quoi that’s lacking from other poets’ works. Please never give up on writing.” She smiled and went back to her table. Ahmad watched her take deliberate steps in her black heels back to her table.

  The daughter of an army colonel and a lover of poetry, Homa had first read Ahmad’s pen name in the papers her father brought home for inspection. Silent Fist was the first poet she had seen in real life. The young man had defied her stereotypical image of a poet as a laid-back, shy creature whose efforts at mental acrobatics had taken a toll on his physique. The strength mixed with the joie de vivre that she found in his poems paralleled Ahmad’s hefty blacksmith’s arms and fine posture. He had no voice of his own and yet, it seemed to her, the words that came out of his silence could be the voice of many. Café Lalahzar became Homa’s haunt the nights of Ahmad’s readings, which had become a weekly event. When Ahmad glanced over at her, she would lock black eyes with him for a short moment before reverting them down to her coffee or back at the man with the broad forehead. There was grace in her gaze and in her turning away.

  On a Friday, amid the heated applause and whistling for the new poem, Homa rose from her wooden chair and traipsed over to Ahmad’s table. “I think we’re doing this the wrong way,” she said to the two young men. At her suggestion, Ahmad got to his feet and Salman sat back down. It was the first time Ahmad stood in front of an audience who leaned back, sipped from their teas and coffees, and blinked their eyes waiting to hear his poem. He could feel the weight of the looks on him. “Ready?” Salman asked and began the poem. Ahmad mouthed the words. Halfway through, Salman slid his chair behind Ahmad. Now it was only him. For the first time in many years, Ahmad felt what it would be like to speak. Even though the words did not come out at the same time as he had made his mouth look like them, it was a marvelous feeling. He received a standing ovation from half of the café who followed Homa’s lead.

  I’ll marry that woman, Ahmad wrote with his nicest hand on the edge of the day’s newspaper and slid it to Salman.

  “What about that other girl?” Salman asked. “What was her name?”

  Ahmad did not remember the last time he had thought about Raana. The image of her face had been replaced in his head by that of the woman sitting at the table by the wall, her hair in a flawless bun. The only person who might have known about Raana was Sara, who had shrewdly and generously accommodated Ahmad on his tryst. He could not talk about that night with Salman. He wrote on the edge of the paper: There was once an apparition called Raana. It disappeared in the dark.

  “What about that man she’s always with?”

  He’s a nobody.

  New love was a fresh breath of life into Ahmad’s writing. When reading the love lines in the café, Ahmad would not look at the young woman, and that was how Homa realized it was her he was writing about.

  * * *

  —

  KHAN KNEW IF HE TALKED about how he had predicted the unrest after Mosaddegh’s resignation, not only would no one believe him, they would suspect he was out of his mind. If there was somethi
ng to be done, he had to do it alone. Some weeks after Mosaddegh was reinstated, Khan saw new movements. Cats were congregating in a different part of the city. He saw timid kittens trying to get acquainted with the bustle of the new world without allowing too much space between themselves and their mothers. Scorch Tail was gone from his neighborhood. Khan trapped another cat and pushed a screwdriver into its eye. Cats moved around like boiling magma in the cone of a volcano and Khan could see that on his maps. Verbal attacks against the Prime Minister were rising in number. His climb back to power was challenged as illegal. Among those who wanted the old man with the walking stick gone was the Shah. “It’s because of the oil,” Salman said. “There’s no such thing as oil,” Oos Abbas said, “that’s why they nationalized it.” At the same time, the Tudeh Party, although pronounced illegal by the Shah, was the target of more denunciations as evil God-denying communists. But with Mosaddegh’s free-press policy, articles were also published in defense of the ambitions and the utopia that the party, if allowed, would pursue.

  One Friday in the middle of Ahmad’s silent reading, the large café window behind him was shattered with a terrifying sound. Large as a brick, the rock landed on the floor. When a few months later a group of thugs stormed in and turned the café tables over, the owner had to put Ahmad’s readings on a hiatus which ended up being permanent. Although he triumphantly mouthed many more poems and long speeches in the coming years, none ever had the sweetness that those Café Lalahzar readings did, when Homa’s hands clasped under her chin, her eyes fixed on him.

  The first thing Ahmad did after Salman gave him the news of the cancellation was to write hurriedly on his notepad: Where do I find Homa now?