The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  One day when Pooran was threading the needle at her sewing machine, there was a knock on the half-open door. Khan walked in with two sacks of money in his arms. His gray hair had started to recede to show the dome of his head and accentuate his large ears.

  “Should you need more,” he said putting them down on the rug, “there is more.” He left the room whistling a happy tune. No matter how hard she thought, Pooran could not remember the last time the old man had whistled.

  * * *

  —

  A WEEK BEFORE THE WEDDING, Ahmad took off his fedora and followed Homa on board a long-nosed bus that coughed out black clouds as it clanked its way toward the village of Tajrish. He watched from the dusty window the dirt road he had taken to Tehran eight years before with his mother. Buildings had sprouted where there used to be trees, walled-off orchards with overhanging branches, or sprawling, barren land. Midway there, Ahmad tapped Homa on the shoulder and pointed toward the front of the bus. Through the windshield, Agha’s tree was visible in the distance, on the lower mountainside, towering high over the greenery and roofs. They got off at a wooden bench and a sign marking a bus stop where there used to be nothing. They started toward the village, Homa panting as she caught up with Ahmad who strode quickly up the steep alleys to avoid familiar faces that had put on eight years of wrinkles. He raised a hand in response to the occasional greeting.

  With half of its leaves fallen, the other half brown and orange and yellow, but still consoling and strong, gently swaying in the breeze, the giant plane tree stood taller than everything in the village, a beacon that showed them the way. The wooden door to the Orchard was ajar. Ahmad pushed it open. Homa was catching her breath, but she was fascinated to see where Ahmad had grown up, walking past dead trees and trying to bring them back to life in her head, to bring out imaginary fruit from their branches and to shrink Ahmad in front of her to a five-year-old boy—let him play to see what he did, where he went, and what his voice sounded like. They made their way through waist-high weeds, Ahmad agile, as if his feet instinctively found the right place to land, and Homa pushing through behind him. Ahmad knew nothing would grow on those trees ever again, but the only tree that mattered to him then was the one that never bore anything to eat.

  The same drape covered the opening to Agha’s tree, the same worn and weathered tarp. “Who’s there?” called Agha’s voice. He had heard footsteps. “Mulla, is it you?” At that moment the drape was pushed aside and Agha’s head emerged from inside the tree, jutting out of his old but clean, red turtleneck. He had not changed; the same perpetual smile was on his lips, but beneath that facade Ahmad could see irritation. On all fours, his eyes darted from Ahmad to Homa for some time. “You don’t live here anymore,” he said with an affected petulance and pulled back in. The tarp swung back to its place, stiff from years of exposure to sun and rain.

  Before he jumped on his horse for Tehran, Khan had made arrangements with his stable boy: he was to stay and look after Agha, and in return, he would receive rights to use the Orchard. Three days after Khan’s departure, the boy had rolled up five of the finest rugs in the house, tied them tight on the back of a mule, and before anyone got wind of it, he had sold out all he could in Tehran and vanished from the village. When the villagers went to Agha’s tree, they pinched their noses first, then saw the small piles of feces right at the entrance. Mohammad the Carpenter had dripped water into the old man’s mouth and Mullah Ali took up the responsibilities of taking care of Agha.

  Ahmad went in. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the relative dark and see the jumble of things. Without a family to tend to Agha, Mulla Ali had moved all the old man needed inside the tree. Inevitable as a mast on a boat, the samovar stood on the low, wooden table, under which Agha’s shaving box sat by some china plates and bowls and the tea tray. A jacket and a coat hung on separate nails on the tree walls, the rest of the clothes piled on the pegs of a short hatstand and by the foot of it, his chamber pot. In his constricted tree room, Agha sat on the mattress that was his bed at night. “We are here to invite you to our wedding,” Homa called from outside of the tree. “I have heard a lot of good things about you.” She cracked the tarp and stuck her head in. “Will you come, please?”

  Agha looked at Ahmad and the girl for some time as if contemplating the invitation. “Festive news,” he finally said, his face opening like spring, “this calls for the light.” He produced from behind the samovar a lightbulb and a socket attached to a yellowish, white cable that reached into the tree through a small hole. “Mullah turns this on when he comes after the dark.” Ahmad went out to look.

  Swallows circled the sky, gay in their erratic embrace of the dusk.

  “Plug it in, boy,” Agha said from inside.

  At the other end of the cable was a plug. High on the tree a half-broken outlet was screwed to the trunk. A thick black cable snaked out of the outlet up the tree, then away toward the wooden power pole behind the cob walls of the Orchard.

  “Plug it in already.”

  It was a rickety assemblage to transfer stolen power, primitive and unsafe.

  “You go check on him,” Homa told Ahmad, taking the end of the cable from him. Ahmad went back inside, but he froze when he brushed aside the tarp. The old man had unscrewed the bulb and was waiting with his finger stuck in the socket. He looked at Ahmad with the pleading eyes of a kid who desires nothing more than for his mother to buy him the toy. The next morning, Ahmad wheelbarrowed Agha down the alleys and took him to Tehran on the first bus. Ahmad sat by Agha, who refused to talk or turn his head away from the window.

  * * *

  —

  HE SAID HE WOULD NOT go to the wedding either, but when the day was near, Agha made Ahmad go back to Tajrish to fetch his purple tie from the hatstand. In Ahmad’s old room at Khan’s house, Agha sat on the edge of the bed, a short stool under his feet, as Pooran tied and retied his tie, holding the mirror in front of him until after the fourth try he was satisfied. “Can you ask Khan,” Agha whispered leaning forward, “to get me a wheelbarrow?” Pooran smiled and assured him she would. “Can I paint it purple, too?” he asked.

  The ceremony was in midfall in an orchard west of Tehran where city services had not reached yet. Toward the back walls—where the well was—two mules trotted on a conveyor belt attached to a generator that produced the electricity for the wedding. The central building was decked with colored light bulbs like flickering fruit grown out of brick and mortar. Ensembles of musicians performed one after the other. With the Azeri music, Colonel Delldaar hit the floor and danced in his cap and uniform. Small and crumpled, but in his pressed, cream suit, Agha waved a cheerful handkerchief. Sitting cross-legged on an armchair next to the Great Uncle, with his wide tie coming down his neck and resting on his lap, he was too small for an adult and too wrinkled for a child. After a while watching the youths dance, Agha turned to the Great Uncle. “I want to get married, too,” he said, shouting to make his squeaky voice heard. The Great Uncle nodded as if only to be polite. “There’s a girl in the house,” Agha said, “I like her.” “Good,” the Great Uncle said, then turned his head back toward the circle of dancers. “Her name is Nana,” Agha said nodding to himself, as if approving his own decision.

  Khan would not sit in his chair. He paced so much to make sure everything was carried out as planned that he would rest for three days after the wedding. The music excited the cantankerous Great Uncle, too. To the applause and gay whistles of the youth who stood clapping in a circle, he took his walking stick hanging from the back of his armchair and joined the Colonel in the Azeri dance. Holding his arms straight out to his sides, like a cross, his legs sprang up and down with slow moves that showed remnants of a harmonious dexterity of years long gone. He snatched Colonel Delldaar’s hat and donned it on his bald scalp with a soft whirl. “Now the groom!” Great Uncle called after a while. Cheers went up to the sky from the orchard when Ahmad entered the
circle. The women watched—some in the orchard from the peripheries of the dance circle, some in the house from behind the windows. Their own dance floor—the large salon, decked with white lace and ribbon and flanked with two rows of chairs in front of which sat small tables laden with fruit and sweets—was a gaudy scene of jubilance and jitter, where Homa’s best friend was dancing with Shamse, a friend of her sister-in-law. The bond between the two, though distant and flimsy, barely there at all, brought solace to Homa, whose mother’s heart was not with the wedding. Behind her made-up face that smiled at Pooran, Homa could read her mother’s dissatisfaction, except that this time she tried not to show her usual disapproval outwardly and Homa was at least grateful for that.

  In her white wedding dress, she watched Ahmad from behind the lace curtain, in his black suit in the circle of men, holding his arms up, swinging to the sides to the rhythm of music, and she did not feel a doubt about the decision she had made. Music slipped out of vibrating strings and throbbing percussive skin, from under restless picks and hands. Great Uncle reached into his breast pocket and threw a fistful of bills into the air, then a second. Children dived to collect the money from under the stomping feet. Seeing this, Khan left the circle and strode away from the celebration. Outside, he motioned for the chauffeur to open the trunk of the white Jaguar. Back at the dance the crowd split open to let in Khan and his driver boy who carried two sacks under his arms. Khan dug his hand into one and the bills flew into the air. Children ran around trying to catch them as they spun like raining pin-wheels. The Great Uncle emptied his pockets and then motioned at Colonel Delldaar for more. As the evening proceeded, more nimble-fingered musicians performed. The cool, fall breeze could not dry sweat off the dancing bodies. Until the last one dropped down panting, Khan and Great Uncle showered bills on the dancers. So much money was dispensed that after the wedding was over and the last of the guests had left, the owner of the orchard spent a sunset to sundown excavating bills from under mud and dirt.

  The last player of the night was Maestro Shahnaz. After the dinner tables were cleared, a humble wooden chair was placed for him in the middle of the open space. The night was calm except for the murmur of those outside and the chatter of those inside and the chirping of the creatures of the night. The maestro approached his chair with slow, calm steps and sat himself, eyes cast down. He crossed his legs and balanced his taar on his thigh. A silence fell over the wedding as he turned the pick in his hand and took a deep breath, his head bent toward his instrument. With the first strum of his pick on the strings, the dead branches of the trees turned soft and before the end of the overture, green shoots had sprouted on them. A few scales into the rhythmic piece, blossoms opened on the leafless trees. The music was almost visible, floating in the breeze, weaving in and out of the plum trees, billowing the curtains into the house, scaling up the women’s legs and wafting around their bosoms. Suddenly happy cries rose from the bride and groom’s room. The bride’s dress had bloomed. Homa’s mother kept picking the blossoms from her veil so she could see. Ahmad smiled at Homa and got up from beside her to look at the maestro through the window. The orchard was carpeted with orange and plum blossoms that grew and fell from the trees. A pinkish-white petal sat on the maestro’s bald head.

  “We’ll be happy together,” Homa whispered in Ahmad’s ear when he sat back by her. Ahmad took her hand and gave it a gentle but firm squeeze. “This is a sign.”

  After the wedding, the newlyweds boarded the automobile that Mohammad Reza had, with Khan’s directions, rented for the wedding ride. Parked right outside the orchard, the Jaguar, too, like all the other cars, had grown little flowers on its handles, trunk, and hood. Sitting in the backseat, one ringed hand locked into a ringless one, smiling and calm, Ahmad and Homa circled the streets of the city in the mirth of their unity. Years later, after the Revolution and the Eight-Year War had already become history, when Ahmad walked the streets of the megalopolis of Tehran and saw how people decorated their wedding cars by taping gladioli to the hoods, trunks, and door handles, he felt an urge to write on a piece of paper and show the person nearest him, That’s the doing of Maestro Shahnaz. You should have seen the orchard that night.

  16

  HE COMING MONTHS saw an escalation of speeches made by several members of the parliament arguing that Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister, had caused the uprisings of the past summer with his childish resignation. He was a traitor and his office was illegal. One small paper even claimed that he had meant to take over the army and orchestrate a coup against the royal family. Those were grave accusations that, although not picked up by the mainstream papers, showed what measures the opponents of the Prime Minister were prepared to take to topple him. “Bullshit,” Khan said out loud in his basement, “Isn’t it bullshit, Sergey? We both know who was behind what happened. Don’t we, Sergey?” The cat was silent on the other side of the curtain.

  Toward the end of winter, Khan was surprised by what his figures and charts showed. Something new seemed to be brewing. A large number of cats had been mobilized as if by well-thought orders from some headquarters. He put Sergey’s cage on the table. “I know you have been in here for long,” he said. The cat sat still in the corner. “And I’d believe you if you told me you did not know what this is all about. But you can still help me.” Sergey did not move, never taking his blue eyes away from Khan. “If you do,” Khan said, “I will let you go.” He paused for a second. “I will open the cage and out you can go; anywhere you want.” He looked at Sergey for a moment longer. The cat did not show a sign that he would cooperate with Khan or even that he understood what the man had said. “Anywhere. Even back to Russia.” A few days later, Khan came down to the basement with a small cat in a bag. He wound rags around his hand and forearm, took the cat out, and shoved him into Sergey’s cage. Then he left.

  He came back after two days and put the cage on the table, wrapped his arm again with deliberation, looking at the two cats. The new cat hissed and meowed. Khan grabbed him by the neck and put him out on the stairs. The cat leapt up and was gone into the night like he was escaping hell. Khan closed and bolted the door. “I hope you two had a good talk, Sergey.” He unrolled a map of Tehran on the table and held it in place with four books from his bookcase. Then he took Sergey out of the cage and put him on the map.

  “Now is your chance.”

  Sitting on the map with his head lowered and his paws pressed together, Sergey stared at Khan for some time. “I know you know what I am talking about,” Khan petted the cat’s ears flattened back against its head. The blue-gray fur reminded Khan of the rabbit-fur hat Sergey used to wear in the Orchard. “We have done each other harm,” he kept petting Sergey’s head, “but we have helped each other, too. You ruined all I had, remember? Yes, you did. Yes, you did. My Orchard, my orchards, yes, they’re all gone. How long I spent building all that, planting tree after tree for so many years. You ruined the life of that poor girl, Sara, too, and the whole village. What havoc!” The cat was motionless, but Khan could feel his heart racing within his body. “You helped me, too, no I have not forgotten. I admit, I was scared in there. When they took me to that boor of a major, I was happy to see you there, although I was sorry for your face, too. I was. I still am. But you did me more harm than me you. We had fun, too. Remember that night in Tehran? You were howling my name. The poor girl I was with was afraid. I was afraid. Your girl had already taken off. Of course she would; you had alcohol in your veins, damn it, and who knows what you were doing to her. You don’t remember, but you said, ‘Khan, I can’t find my underwear. It’s important that I find my underwear,’ like they were the only thing that could save your life. And I pointed to them on the floor and you looked really long, and then turned your head back, with those bloodshot eyes of yours, and said, ‘Khan, I think you’re drunk. That’s my pocket towel.’ Yes, that’s what you said, ‘pocket towel.’ And no matter how much you deny it, I saw your thing too. Now get up.” Khan stopped pettin
g the cat. Sergey looked at Khan for a short moment, then got to his feet. “There you go, there you go.” Sergey walked to the edge of the table and looked down, then came back to the map. He sniffed at the paper and looked at Khan some more. “What I want is for you to tell me what the cats are up to. Where are they going to strike this time?” Khan sat down on his chair and crossed his arms. Sergey watched. For half an hour, he walked on the table, jumped down and went behind the curtain, came out, jumped back up on the table, until finally he lowered his head, as if studying the map. Then he lifted his paw and gently scratched at the paper. Khan got up and looked at the marks. “The Prime Minister’s house! They have aimed high this time,” he said petting the cat on the head, “Now that’s cooperation. We’ll soon see how you did,” he said as he put Sergey back into the cage. “You’ll be very sorry if you’ve lied to me.”