by Ali Araghi
In the torture room, a previous agent, whose arm swings Salman recognized, was mopping the floor. He paused and threw a disgusted look at Salman. Later, Salman learned the interrogator was very meticulous about the cleanliness of the room and corridors. He had ordered “diligence and cleanliness, diligence in cleanliness.” Salman’s hands were opened. As the man put the handcuffs on a small metal table, Salman stood wondering what it would be this time: the cage, the box, the table, the chair, or the bed. From his metal table, the man took the jug of water and gave the big block of ice in it a swirl before he poured himself some. With the glass to his lips, he looked at Salman and pointed to the table. It was the sole flogging again. Salman sat himself on the table, relieved to get his weight off his feet. He lay down in position, hands where they would be cuffed to the legs of the table, feet where they would be secured with leather straps. The man put the glass down, rolled up his sleeves, and came to the table. He knelt down to put Salman’s wrist in the cuff that was permanently attached to the leg of the table. Salman’s hand shook violently. The man held it in his hand for a few warm and calm seconds. Then he put the metal around the bruised wrist. The fluorescent light buzzed on the plastered wall.
* * *
—
A FLUORESCENT LIGHT ALSO BUZZED on the plastered wall of Agha’s room all night. He had not slept since the day the doctor pronounced him dead. Shortly after the sunset, Khan went to him, the backgammon set under his arm. Agha would not play. Khan sat on the edge of the bed where Agha curled up. “But when did I die, Khan?” he asked. Together, they ruminated on their memories of the crucial incidents in Agha’s life. Khan remembered talking to Agha after he pulled the old man out of the hoez water. The night Agha hanged himself, Khan, with the help of Nana Shamsi, had cut the rope first from the ceiling, then from around his neck before laying him on the floor. Agha had taken the glass of water from Nana Shamsi and tried to drink, although he had not been able to. But he had smiled at her. Back they went into Agha’s life, but no matter how far they went, they could not find a decisive date. Not long before dawn, Khan lay down on the bed and went to sleep, but Agha sat up awake. If there was one day on which he had died, it was the day a merchant from the city came to his village and took the love of his life as his wife. From the distant wheat field, he had watched her leave on a white horse followed by the people of the village. Agha took his old machete from the corner of the basement, scrubbed it clean, and was sharpening it on the whetstone when his friends came to him to assuage his anger and break the painful news that the merchant’s arrangements had met the bride’s consent, if not willingness. That night, the young Agha left his village taking only his machete with him for the bandits.
Agha looked out of his window until the sun was in the sky, behind the clouds.
23
HMAD CAME BACK HOME from the hospital with gauze to remain on his eyes for an extra week, with the feeling that he really had a family that he wanted to be with. It was a few weeks before the New Year, although nobody yet knew they would not have spring for years to come. The girls left for school early in the morning. The little he could do to help with closed eyes, Ahmad would do: he crushed saffron in a small mortar, careful not to waste a speck of the valuable spice; he winnowed beans, lentils, and chickpeas and because he could not pick out the small pebbles, chaff, and husk from the grains, he did the reverse thing: feeling each one individually, he threw the grains one by one into a separate container. Sitting at the dining table with a pile of herbs in front of him, he picked the leaves and put them in a basket, one stem at a time. Homa did the rest: she washed, diced, sautéed, added pinches of spice into the pot like an alchemist, put the lid on, and lowered the flame.
By early afternoon, when the sisters came home from school, the smell of food wafted from the stove across the house. Excited, the girls talked to Ahmad about their day at school, their grades, what a classmate had done, and what their teacher had taught them. Ahmad helped with schoolwork. With the grace of a young lady, Leyla sat on the couch in the living room, one eye on her book and the other on her father as he explained math and science to Lalah. In the evening, the heater warmed the house in the corner of the living room, while it snowed outside. Ahmad listened to the radio. The tension between the clergy and the Shah had been rising. In their public sermons, some notable figures had asked for the freedom of Ayatollah Khomeini who had been put under house arrest nine months before.
Like every year, people cleaned up their houses from ceiling to floor, scoured the walls, scrubbed the kitchens, dusted the furniture, and wiped all the windows. They postponed washing the rugs until summer, which they thought would come in six months. The traditional Haft Seen tables were set for the New Year: nice mirrors were put on them; wheat sprouts were grown in low bowls and ribbons were tied around the stems; and goldfish were placed in bowls. The older bought presents for the younger; some placed brand-new bills inside the Quran to offer as their New Year present, others just fished the money out of their pockets. Shortly before the turn of the year, and dressed in their best clothes, Ahmad and Homa sat at their Haft Seen table with their daughters on their laps, looking at one another in the big mirror flanked by two candles. The goldfish circled in the bowl. The countdown had already started on the radio. In Khan’s house, the traditional assemblage was laid not on a table, but on the floor. Agha, Khan, Pooran, and Zeeba looked into their mirror waiting for the moment. Ameer had worn a suit and tie to the New Year Haft Seen. He sat in front of an oval mirror with Sara and Salar. Majeed took photos of his family. Salman and his three cellmates propped up against the wall a tray that did not reflect anything.
A few hours after the turn of the year was announced on the radio with the sound of a cannon fire followed by upbeat music, everyone gathered in Khan’s house to pay the elders the New Year visit. In a big basket, fruit came out of the kitchen into the guest room. Nuts were piled in bowls. Cups of steaming tea on saucers passed hands. The children played in the snow in the yard. Pooran moved from the kitchen to the guest room as if she was eighteen again. The kids stood in a row to receive their New Year presents from Khan who kissed them each and handed them an envelope which they opened with excitement to count the money. Embarrassed to confess his death, Agha put on a happy face and feigned life. He did not want to ruin the ceremony. He beat both Majeed and his father at backgammon. Watching him challenge the youth, Khan thought that never in a million years would he have guessed the old man was no longer around.
* * *
—
AT HOMA’S PARENTS’ VILLA ON the shores of the Caspian Sea, Colonel Delldaar opened a bottle of his homemade vodka and talked about his plans to make a pool in the garden whose water would come right from the sea. Weeks had passed since the doctor had taken the bandages off of Ahmad’s eyes, and now, with his good, wary vision, Ahmad watched Colonel’s every action and facial expression closely, careful not to say something he should not. Colonel asked Ahmad about his plans for the upcoming parliamentary elections. The New Iran Party’s move toward new faces, although subtle, was neither imperceptible nor unpredictable. Ahmad had started as a voice of the opposition, but had flitted around, distancing himself from his home base, trying to get closer to the conservatives. In the roofed gazebo, Ahmad put coals in the brazier and smacked them level with the back of the coal shovel. Out of a big steel bowl, Colonel Delldaar took marinated chicken wings and impaled them with skewers. “Promisc…What’s the word? Jumping from one thing to another might work with poetry,” said the colonel taking another wing, drenched in orange marinade, out of the bowl, “but certainly not with politics.” When the coals were glowing red, Ahmad put the wings on the brazier. It doesn’t matter, Col, Ahmad wrote in his notepad. It will be if it’s meant to be.
“If you’re talking about the Shah,” Colonel said, “he has his own problems.”
What Ahmad had meant was his own second term in parliament. He made a vague head movemen
t.
“The army’s been on the alert for ten months now, but I don’t care anymore,” he said, laughing and flipping the skewers with the jovial insouciance of someone who meant what he was saying. “I’ll retire next year and then you, my friend, can find me right here knocking back the good stuff, watching the sea in the sun, if these clouds ever clear, that is.”
The sauce dripped from the wings and sizzled on the coal. Colonel warmed his hands over the brazier as Ahmad wrote his cautious remark. If he had learned one thing from his catastrophic speech, it was equivocation.
I will remain at the service of His Majesty for now. Then after some time, when he looked at the man who, holding the end of one skewer in his hand, pulled a wing out of the other end and blew at it with such deliberation as if nothing in the world deserved his attention more than a well-cooked wing, he decided that his father-in-law might be trusted with the request about Salman.
Over on the beach, Homa and her mother sat around a fire while the girls ran about in their jackets and red knit hats. A cold breeze blew from the water penetrating the blanket Homa had wound around her. Hugging herself and rocking back and forth, she told her mother about her decision to go to university. “Any help you need,” her mother said, turning to her with a smile, “with the kids or with anything else, you just let me know, okay?” Homa nodded and thanked her mom and drew herself closer to her on the driftwood tree trunk they were sitting on.
It was after lunch when Colonel Delldaar made a phone call from his secure line in his room and reported that Ahmad had said he was looking for a leftist friend, by the name of Salman. He had apparently been asking around for a number of weeks now. That information was not new to SAVAK and Ahmad still had some time before he was summoned.
They ate the wings in the gazebo. The kids went inside with their grandparents. Ahmad and Homa walked hand in hand on the beach where calm washed over the fine sand with each wave. Not too far behind them towered mountains covered in oaks, beech, maple, and alder. Behind the mountains was Tehran. They walked until it started raining. That night, with the raindrops rapping at the panes, Ahmad saw happiness in the room, in the bed, and in Homa’s face when she brushed her hair. He kissed the nape of her neck. The wind started to pick up in the dark, pouring rain over the house, bending the leafless orange trees in the small garden, drenching the cold coals in the brazier. Winter by the Caspian Sea came in the shape of cold and rains.
“Will you promise me something?”
The rain had calmed to a drizzle. Ahmad’s nod could be felt on his pillow.
“Will we always stay together?”
Ahmad nodded, then took her hand and pressed it hard in his.
“Are you sure?” She pressed his hand back.
Ahmad nodded, his head still on the pillow.
“You’re like one of those bears that rub their backs to trees.” Then she did not say anything as if she was sliding out of the bed into other rooms, on other beaches, but after a few minutes she drew a deep breath and said, “I’m happy,” and turned her back to Ahmad.
* * *
—
AFTER THEIR VACATION, HOMA CAME home one afternoon with the girls to a bundle of all the books she needed to study for her university entrance exam. She walked up to the living-room table and read the card taped to the topmost cover: I’m sure you will make it. She smiled and in the coming months studied with a dedication that neither Ahmad nor Homa herself had imagined before. Having finished her first batch of books, she bought more. Then she looked at her cluttered desk and, deciding to put away the books she did not need, scooped them in her arms, and put them down on the floor at the foot of the bookcase. She started to empty a separate shelf when a piece of paper fell down from inside a cookbook. She picked it up and unfolded it. It was the prayer she had said for Leyla to open her tongue. All of a sudden, she froze in place. Why had she not asked the prayerwright, Haji, for a line for Ahmad? Incredulous at her stupidity and failure, she paced the room, spending a few minutes dazed, before she ran to her phonebook. Under H she found nothing. She gutted the storage under the staircase, ripped an old box open with a knife, pulled out a small, dog-eared phonebook, and found the number. Coiling the phone cable around her finger. Each tone made her more anxious. There was no answer. She dialed again and waited through the tones. She called after an hour, then again after two hours, and again in the evening and at night.
For a week she tried until she was sure Haji would not answer, so she decided to set out looking for him. The girls were old enough to walk to school together without their mother’s company. After they left home, Homa would put on her knee-high, leather snow boots, a raincoat, and a hat and walk carefully to the street in the tracks trodden in the sidewalk by passersby and wait for a taxi. Starting with the neighbor who had condescendingly introduced Haji to her in the first place, she found a trail of addresses and phone numbers. All in vain.
She went farther south into the more crowded neighborhoods of the city; Lalahzar Street with the new movie theaters and several playhouses was brimful with people who went in and came out, stopping to buy steaming food from street carts, taking out their gloves to hold tea glasses in their hands. In an alley adjoining a theater, Homa stopped in front of a brick building and rang the bell. A woman who looked and sounded Armenian opened and shook her head, but took Homa’s phone number in case she heard from the prayerwright.
With a dubious hope Homa used the prayer she already had. She whispered the words and blew in Ahmad’s direction when his head was hung in his newspaper or when he snored in the bed. Days went by. The prayer was not right; maybe not strong enough or perhaps something in it had expired. She would keep searching for Haji.
* * *
—
AT THE SAVAK HEADQUARTERS, AHMAD stepped into a neat and clean office where the cloudy sky could be seen through the half-open blinds. A major shook hands with him and sat in front of him with a calm smile as he crossed his legs. He started by talking about the weather and then like a friend asked Ahmad how he was doing and nodded with an eager smile as he read the notes. He had been sorry about the incident with Ahmad’s eyes and he could barely wait to read Ahmad’s new poetry. As far as his duties permitted, he had always been a supporter of “the art of the right word placed at the right place.”
“And your speech after the riots,” he said, “was a judicious start to your political career. Unlike, unfortunately, your affiliations.”
Knowing his presence there could not have been for no reason, even less likely for praise, Ahmad put each word on his notepad with the utmost caution. It would not happen too often that he was happy with his speechlessness, but that was one such day. Words on paper were tamer than the ones that flew off lips.
From a stack of papers on his desk, the major pulled out Ahmad’s second book, sat back, and read aloud his favorite poem.
“Provocative, fast-paced, and with epic proportions,” he said. “I’m sure you know the Marxist students’ march began with this one.” Someone had stepped up on a chair and read that poem in the middle of the crowd in front of the university library. Then they had started singing the “My Fellow Classmate” song and stamping their feet. It was those Mosaddegh years when such an association could legally exist at the university.
The major was sending oblique messages, as if opening an imaginary file and showing Ahmad the evidence they had against him, that could be used at any time. The major wished Ahmad good luck. “If you have anything to talk about,” he said handing him a card with a number on it, “or if you need help to find something or someone.” Ahmad nodded. “You,” the major added, “or your wife.” Ahmad knew the major meant that he knew about Ahmad’s looking for Salman, but did not realize the major was implying that he also knew about Homa’s excursions. Instead, he thought of the man’s final remarks as a soft threat.
Outside it had started to snow. Ahmad bought a pack o
f cigarettes. The bitterness grated his throat and sedimented in his lungs as he inhaled his first puff ever. His coughs, white and cloudy, rose in the air. The city was retreating into its evening languor. Two-story brick houses stood shoulder to shoulder in circuitous rows, their roofs no longer a place for mosquito nets. The cries of shovelers echoed along the alleys announcing their service. Heads popped out of windows and doors to call them in and lead them up to the roof. With the snowy spring, the farmers who had come to Tehran for the winter had prolonged their seasonal work. Each passing month brought more villagers to the cities. Careless shovelfuls of snow dropped from over the edge of roofs down into alleys with a muffled thud onto the heap already forming on the ground. Agriculture declined within two years. Farms were left unattended under snow or, in the warmer areas of the south where cold wind was the bane, ravaged by weeds. Minibusfuls of young villagers got stuck on dirt roads, pushed the heavy vehicles out, and arrived in Tehran to shovel snow.
The city population grew. The number of double-decker buses doubled, tripled, then quadrupled, and still sometimes there were no vacant seats. A few stood in the isle, clinging at the bars, inclining toward the driver with each break and retreating toward the back with every acceleration. Lines started to form at the bakeries, bus stops, and grocery stores. A Jewish owner of the first plastic company built the first high-rise in Tehran: the seventeen-story Plasco Building with indoor reflection pools and billiard lounges. The blight of inflation gnawed at the economy. The Communists had their own ideas. The Fadaee Guerillas got armed, got arrested and tortured. In sermons following congregational prayers, with raised fingers pointing upward, the clergy took on the corruption of the government and shouted their opposition of the royal purchase of a Boeing 747 while innumerable families lived in shacks made from tin bins in the expanding slums. The Tehran Cabaret was built in the northern neighborhoods. The city was stretching, pushing against its limits with new buildings that mushroomed between Tehran and the village of Tajrish, where orchards, now frozen for years, had once extended up the foot of the mountains.