The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  “It’s good to meet you, sir.” The first time Ahmad had seen him, Ameer was the calm little boy who had held his Uncle Salman’s hand at the door while shooting curious looks into the forge. Ahmad touched his temples, picked at the edge of the tape that held the white gauze over his eyes, and ripped them off. Sara stifled a faint cry. Ahmad’s skin burned. Light invaded his closed eyes. The back of his head throbbed. He pressed his eyelids together and squinted to blurry patches of color. Two figures stood before him. One was a woman, but the other was not a boy. He was almost as tall as Sara. That could not be Ameer. “This is bad for your eyes,” Sara said. “Close your eyes.” Sara, that baffling woman, had thrown him off again. That could not have been Ameer. Within a short moment, the nebulous picture evolved into detailed reality. The boy was not a boy. He was a man, with a beard and a black mustache in sharp contrast with his white, soft skin, standing with one hand in his pocket, the other nonchalantly swinging a blue cap. “Close your eyes, please.” When he could make out the details of the faces, Ahmad saw consternation on Sara’s and disinterest in the young man’s. He looked for his pen and pad, but Sara intervened. “Mr. Torkash-Vand, this is Ameer.” She looked at Ahmad as if secretly confessing to a wrong they both shared the blame for. The twelve-year-old boy looked twenty and Sara knew that.

  “What’s wrong?” Ameer asked, turning to Sara, a suspicious look on his face.

  “Nothing,” Sara said.

  “He knows me?”

  “No, honey,” Sara said, “that’s not what this is about.”

  “It’s about the beard again?”

  “No, Mr. Torkash-Vand’s eyes aren’t used to the light yet.”

  Ahmad looked at them for a little while.

  “I know what this is all about,” Ameer said. “Yes, I have a beard, so what?” He stormed out of the room and left the door half-open.

  Ahmad picked up the gauze and put it back on his eyes—rolled at the edges, the tape would not stick well—and ran his fingers over them with extra pressure as he turned his back to Sara, lying on his side and pulling the blanket over him.

  “He’s just a bit precocious, but nothing’s wrong with him.” Sara took a step toward the bed. “Please help me find Salman. He always looked up to you.” Ahmad did not move. He felt the bed depress under the weight of Sara. “Remember that Russian officer, Sergey?” Sara said, her voice near now. “You remember how my father dragged me out of the Orchard after people started gossiping about me and the Russian, don’t you? I don’t know if you know, but they talked about Khan and you, too. People talked about me and you alone in your room. But even then, when Salman was mad at you, he never spoke ill of you.” Ahmad listened in his darkness.

  “Please help me find him, Ahmad.” He heard her get up from the bed, put her coat back on, and slide the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “And the boy is really okay, Ahmad,” she said after a little pause. “He’s just tired of the stares. He’s all I have.” Ahmad heard her heels tick away toward the door. Then the hinges squeaked, and, behind the closed door, the clicking receded into silence.

  Homa came after visiting hours with a bowl of Ahmad’s favorite soup. Have my phonebook with you? Ahmad wrote. “No. Why?” Can you get it tomorrow? And messenger boy? “I’m not letting you open your eyes,” Homa said. “Work can wait.” It can’t. Short messages. Will write eyes closed.

  In the dead of night, while Homa snored in her chair, Ahmad lay awake with his bandaged eyes closed thinking about Ameer.

  22

  O ONE KNEW HOW THE REVOLUTION BEGAN. Years later, long after the Shah had flown away and throngs of revolutionaries celebrated in the streets of Tehran, everyone searched their minds to find an event that marked the beginning. To the many religious, the day the tank rode into the cinema, Black Thursday, was the tipping point. The leftists went back to the incident a few years earlier when a group of armed Fadaee Guerillas attacked the Siahkal post by the Caspian Sea and killed three gendarmes with machine guns and hand grenades to free an arrested comrade. To Khan, it was always the cats.

  By Black Thursday, Khan no longer harbored any doubt that the people in the streets, the leftists, the parliament, the government, the army, were all being driven by feline plots, but were gullible enough to believe themselves effective players in the game. He had improved his techniques when he found medieval mystic literature on the behaviors of animals and animates, and the calculations regarding good and evil. After Sergey’s death, he removed the partitioning curtain, emptied the basement of the cages, the vice, and the trash and turned the space into a small library. Shuffling heavily, he would bend one painful knee after the other down the four steps to the door that he no longer kept locked. With a shaky hand he leafed through the yellowed pages as he wheezed in the musty air.

  In the afternoon, he took his agate worry beads and walked the neighborhood, said hi to the baker, the grocer, the butcher, and the fabric seller, Seyf Zarrabi. He would chat with the shop owners for as long as they could, until a customer walked in or the phone rang, or until Khan felt he had stayed too long. On his way, he passed a bead under his thumb whenever he saw a cat, and when back in his basement, penciled down the headcount in his tables. His calculations reached perfection with Avicenna’s Remarks and Admonitions. By fusing empirical methods with the philosophies of the tenth-century thinker, he drew new maps and made projections and eventually took his pencil in his old hand and wrote on his paper: February 11, 1979.

  He grabbed his walking stick and stepped out of the basement. The hoez that they had drained for the winter was now full of snow. Majeed had stopped by in the morning to shovel open walkways in the yard: one from the front door to the house, one to Agha’s room, another to the basement. In spite of Pooran’s concern that he might be late for work, Majeed cranked his way up the elevator and shoveled the portion of the roof in front of Zeeba’s room where she now lived alone. He had piled the snow in the hoez and taken pictures of it with his camera before he left.

  The snow had stopped now. Sitting on his chair, Agha was looking out of his window. Inside his room, a gas heater glowed red high on the wall, out of the old man’s reach.

  “I found something new,” Khan said. “There will be a revolution.”

  “Oh yeah?” Agha said without turning his face away from the window.

  “When?”

  “1979.”

  Agha breathed on the window and wrote the number onto the fogged-up glass. “What’s now?”

  “1964.”

  Agha wrote the second number under the first and counted on his fingers. Then he turned to Khan. “Khan.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know how I told you we’re not going to die, me and you, and Ahmad?” Khan nodded. “I thought a lot about it. And it’s going to be all right.” Then he remained silent for a little while still looking out. “You know what,” he said, “I don’t remember the last time I made a snowman.”

  “You made me one when I was little.”

  Agha nodded as if reliving the memory in his head. “I want to play.”

  “You’ll catch a cold.”

  “So what if I do?”

  You will die, Khan wanted to say. But he did not. After a long moment, he nodded and Agha’s eyes grew big and his face opened with excitement. But when Khan said they had to wait for Pooran to come back and push his wheelbarrow, the sadness in Agha’s face hung so heavy that Khan got him dressed: wool long johns and socks, a sweater and a coat, a scarf, knit hat and gloves. Agha hooked his arm around Khan and came down from his chair. He took no more than two steps before he had to stop. Khan was too weak to carry even Agha’s disappearing frame. Holding the handle of his walking stick tight in his hand, thumb on the lion, Khan had to let Agha sink onto the floor. Agha crawled to the door and waited until Khan came back from the kitchen with the big tin tray. On the thin layer of snow that had fallen in the walkways s
ince morning, Khan pushed Agha from his door to the area between the hoez and flower bed where the snow was untouched. Sitting in his tray, Agha ruffled the snow with his hands and started to make a small snowman. Khan leaned on his cane and watched him fashion what ended up being little more than a distorted protrusion of compressed snow. When the snowman was done, Agha turned around and threw a snowball at Khan. Both men smiled. Khan dusted the snow from his knee. A second snowball flew past him. “Stop it,” Khan said, but a third hit him in the chest. “I said stop it.” Agha laughed and then, with the obstinacy of a five-year-old boy, scooped up more snow. Life had sprouted back in his ancient body. Khan stepped back, but the shot got him right in the face. The cold burned his skin. He brushed it from his white mustache. Agha was laughing harder, leaning forward and blowing out clouds. Khan bent down and dug into the snow, but before he could ball up what he had taken, Agha attacked again. Khan raised his hand to throw his snowball, but suddenly froze in place. He received two or three more shots from Agha, but did not seem to mind. He did not remember having seen Agha as happy as he was now. Where had the old man found the force to throw snowballs so hard?

  “I’ll be back,” Khan said hurrying into the house. He picked up the phone and called the doctor. A quarter of an hour passed before the bell rang. Agha was still playing when Khan opened the front door to the fedoraed, big-nosed man holding a brown leather bag in his hand. Standing tall over him in his trench coat, the doctor observed Agha in the large tray, happy in his warm clothes.

  “Hello, Doctor?” Agha stretched his hand.

  “How are you feeling today?” the doctor asked, shaking Agha’s hand, careful not to break the bones.

  “Superb. I had forgotten what this was like.”

  The certainty in Agha’s answer did not reassure the man. “Are you feeling any pain?” Agha shook his head. “Anywhere?” The tone of the question made Agha stop fidgeting. The joyous glow in his face faded as he looked up, intently shaking his head. The doctor put his bag down in the snow. “It’s okay, Agha,” he said as he knelt down. “Just give me your hand.”

  Khan took a step forward and watched the doctor push up Agha’s sleeve and take his pulse. A few seconds passed. The doctor moved the tips of his fingers ever slightly on Agha’s wrist and looked up as if he were trying to see a bird that soared high up in the clouds. Finally, he straightened Agha’s sleeve and tucked it back into the glove. Then he got to his feet.

  “Doctor?” Khan asked.

  “I’m sorry, Khan.” He picked up his bag. “He giveth life and He taketh it away.” He tipped his hat. “Give my condolences to Pooran Khanum.”

  The doctor left without brushing off the snow from his knees or the bottom of his brown bag. In the tin tray, Agha sat smaller than ever, his head bowed. Khan knelt down with difficulty. A tear dropped from Agha’s face onto the front of his coat. “Khan, I’m dead?” His voice was a high-pitched whisper. Khan put his hand on Agha’s shoulder. “You are more than alive to me.” Pain howled in Khan’s left knee like a wounded boar. Gingerly, he sat himself in the empty half of the tray, the two men’s legs stretched out over the edge, their heels pressed into the snow. Agha sniffed and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coat. “This was not supposed to happen.” Agha rested his head on Khan’s arm. Scattered flakes started to come down softly. Khan put his arm around Agha’s small figure and pulled him close.

  When Pooran opened the door, the first thing she saw was the two old men sitting in a tray in the yard, the younger holding the older like a father and his son. What Khan told her about how Agha wanted to play in the snow was at odds with the paleness she saw on the small man’s face, with his leaden look and downcast eyes. After helping Khan up, she took Agha to his room and brought him hot, herbal tea. Agha’s silence was nothing new to her. The refusal to communicate, which she saw as hereditary in the family, left no question or suspicion in her, but only a familiar frustration. The day they went to visit Ahmad in the hospital, when Ahmad asked “is he okay?” she had thrown a sideways look at Khan knowing that Ahmad could not see. Before they left, Khan took advantage of a short time Pooran left the room and whispered his prognostication into Ahmad’s ear: “A revolution. In fifteen years.”

  Will it succeed? Ahmad wrote.

  “That’s not something I can tell, but the cats are doing their best.”

  Pooran came back into the room with a big glass of carrot juice in her hand, the traditional remedy for eye maladies. The next night, when Homa slept in the chair beside Ahmad’s bed, Pooran put on her olive dress and draped her chador over her head. She sneaked out of the house and stood, twenty minutes later, in the shadows in front of Seyf Zarrabi’s shop. Of all the feeble street lights, only the one across from the fabric shop had a broken bulb hanging on a wire. Seyf had flung a piece of stone at it. City officials had replaced it twice but each time Seyf had hurled another rock. Pooran had noticed the patch of dark Seyf had made for her. The blinds were half up. Pooran turned the handle and went in. In the back room, the mattress was already laid. Seyf Zarrabi propped up Pooran’s drenched shoes against the oil tank of the Aladdin heater, warmed her cold feet, and smiled at her.

  “If you were sick and I brought you carrot juice,” Pooran asked, “would you drink it?”

  “I’d drink hemlock out of your hands.” He planted kisses on her shins one after the other. Then he looked back into her eyes and said, “Be my wife.”

  Pooran shook her head. “I can’t marry.”

  “You can do whatever you want, dear.”

  “What would Nosser say?”

  Seyf drew himself closer to Pooran. “Nosser is with God now, sweetheart,” he said, his face before Pooran’s, his lips ready to pout in demand of a kiss.

  “Oh, Seyf,” Pooran said, not being able to make the fabric seller understand what he would never know. She kissed him, lay on her back, and looked at the yellow light from the bulb hanging from the ceiling reflecting on the glossy scalp of Seyf’s bald head.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THEY BROUGHT SALMAN IN, he saw a new interrogator behind the desk, not much older than himself, rolling his pen between his thumb and forefinger. He had matched his navy-blue tie with his suit. His smart eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses were the kind Salman had learned during his months in the prison to be the most dangerous: calm and unpredictable. As always, a file was before him.

  “Hello,” the man said as soon as Salman was seated, his hands cuffed behind his back. “You are now going to tell me about your relationship with a man called Ahmad Torkash-Vand. He is secretly looking for you.” With drooping eyes, Salman talked for half an hour of games as innocent boys at the foot of the Alborz mountains in their village of Tajrish, all about Khan, the Orchard, the family’s move to Tehran and his irregular contact with Ahmad as a former friend and messenger to his sister. The interrogator listened with a shadow of a smile. When Salman was finished, he paused for a moment and said, “Thank you,” and the way he said it, calm and free of emotions, told Salman that he would have to tell those same things again and again.

  Two hours later, he was tied to a metal table, shrieking as each blow of the cable left a new bloody line on the soles of his feet. He had been right about the interrogator’s type: untrusting, clinical, believing there was always more to wrench out of a man. When the pain in his soles stung so hard that Salman was once again certain that a just God could not exist in this world, the investigator stepped into the torture room and watched a few of the strikes before he nodded to the flogger and left. The flogger untied Salman and helped him sit up. Salman hooked his arm around the man’s neck and set his throbbing soles on the cold terrazzo tiles, hobbling out of the room, sharing his weight with his torturer, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind him along a dimly lit corridor with closed doors, back into the investigation room.

  It was like reliving the same scene: the man was si
tting at the same place waiting for Salman with the same file before him, rolling his pen between his thumb and forefinger. The click of the cuffs on Salman’s wrists echoed in the room. The flogger left. “Now,” the interrogator said, “you are going to tell me all that you didn’t tell me before.” His voice was calm, the look on his face friendly. Salman could not keep his eyes from tearing up. He bowed his head. Rage boiled up somewhere deep within him, but found no way into his tired heart. He talked about the apple buds turning the whole Orchard into a pink paradise and how they went all white like small puffs of clouds floating very close to the ground giving off a dizzying smell that made you want to run. He talked about the Russian that Khan brought to the village, who had an eye for Salman’s sister. He told how Ahmad took his sister into his room. Then the Russian took Sara into his room and fed her, the village said, pig’s meat and vodka. And Salman did not talk to Ahmad for a long time. Ahmad moved to Tehran and a few years later Salman did too—“just like I said before”—when he was already a member of the party. He was curious about his friend, so he found Ahmad and stalked him for a few days. After a while Ahmad disappeared. Salman found him again and followed him some more. Then Ahmad disappeared once more, because he got into a fight with his grandfather over a girl named Raana and left his home. All those things Salman had found out later, a few years after he had left the Tudeh Party and worked with groups that would not refrain from pulling the trigger. He told the interrogator about his visit to Ahmad’s place some years after when Leyla was born. He had bought the baby red shoes with small Velcro straps.

  “Is that all?” the interrogator asked after Salman was finished. For a few moments Salman plowed into the corners of his memory to find anything unsaid about Ahmad. Then he nodded his head and his bound hands started trembling from the thought of what the interrogator might do next. The man got to his feet and buttoned his suit. “Thank you,” he said and left the room. Soon the flogger came in. Salman looked for a blindfold in his hands, but the man was empty-handed. That meant he was not going to his cell, but back to the torture room. With the help of the big man, Salman stepped into the short corridor in the opposite direction which the dried blood of his footprints pointed to.