The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  It was in this situation that one day a man arrived from abroad with a tape. As he walked out of the airport in his long brown overcoat, hat in hand, he could hear the cassette click against his silver cigarette case in his black leather handbag. The sound was his way of making certain his stash was safe with him. Outside, he put on his hat and sat in a taxi heading for a house at the center of the city in the basement of which Ayatollah Khomeini’s speech was played that night out of a Hitachi cassette player. In front of the speaker lay three microphones each connected to separate tape recorders. Now he had three more copies of the speech. He repeated his multiplication process until he had thirty-six copies in his bag. Then the morning after, he set out to five meetings.

  Copies of copies were noisy and sounded like the words of a person with a cold. In the third copies, wind blew away whole words and phrases. What remained, though, was enough to be passed from hand to hand in mosques and played in houses and apartments. Years before, the Ayatollah had been arrested and put on an airplane which took off and disappeared into the clouds. His words now appeared on clandestine tapes and flyers. His name was spray-painted among the other slogans that appeared here and there in the alleys and streets on the walls of houses, stores, and sometimes cinemas that still boasted their large posters of bare-legged women and their lovers at whom life had not looked with a favorable eye. It was in those films that Majeed, now in his thirties, still lost himself. He took refuge in the burgundy leather seats that had stopped folding back years before. In the movies nothing had happened to Tehran. The city was immune and calm. Turmoil was only in the hearts and lives of the actors. There was certainty in the love, music, and dance, in the fake world of the screen where the knives of thugs flashed and the skirt of the beloved whirled. It was not until the first cinema was set on fire that Majeed found himself in the Revolution.

  Ahmad put the cigarette to his lips and took a second puff. The smoke went down with more ease. He was tired. The joke that was his career in politics now filled him with the dread of being on the list of people especially watched by the Shah’s intelligence service. He felt he wanted out. He walked not to his office, but all the way to Khan’s house.

  In the basement, Ahmad asked his grandfather to show him his calculations again. Khan opened the books on which he had based his theory. He read passages and explicated the gems of ethology in the works of Persian thinkers of the tenth to twelfth centuries. He went through the maps and charts with Ahmad and did the math again with a bony finger that shook when he flicked the beads on his abacus. “My knees are weak,” he said when he did the final stage of calculations, content with the accuracy of his results, “but this is still working.” He knocked on his temple with his finger and then penned down his prophecy on the paper as before: February 1979.

  Ahmad sat there for a while, his arms crossed on his chest, eyebrows knotted and face dark with the shadows of wavering thoughts.

  “Whatever you decide to do,” Khan said, “I will support you. But my predictions have been right. The one with the Coup and the one last year and the smaller ones. In my heart I have no doubt about them.” He remained silent for a few seconds. “But the tale,” he said, “well, not all of it is true, it seems. Have you seen Agha?”

  A smell like that of raw fish had given the air in the Agha’s room a bluish tint. Pooran had opened the window and the door and fanned the air with a towel. But the next time she came in, the air was once again blue with the fishy smell. She had gone to Khan, who nodded in response. Pooran had gone back to Agha’s room and hugged him so long that the dead man wiggled himself out of her embrace.

  Leaning against the wall, Agha sat on his bed in front of the backgammon board, throwing dice and throwing them again. He looked at Ahmad and cast down his eyes as if embarrassed of being dead. A tear dropped on the front of his shirt. Ahmad held the old man in his arms. Is there anything I can do for you? he mouthed. Agha’s tears slid into and along the creases on his stubbly face.

  * * *

  —

  HIS SERVICE WAS ONA Thursday. Pooran opened the large guest room. Her little granddaughters, Leyla and Lalah, swept the rugs. Maryam took charge of the kitchen and her daughter, Parveen, put the large kettles on. In a neighbor’s car, Majeed brought rental dishes. Neighbors had black banners calligraphed with condolences to the family and nailed them outside the house to the walls. Early in the morning, the Quran-reciter arrived, was sat in the guest room, and began his incantation. In the heat of things, when the mourners, dressed in black, streamed in and out, and shook hands with Khan and Ahmad and Majeed, Mr. Zia arrived in a creaseless black suit and pants and sparkling shoes. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said shaking Ahmad’s hand. “I’m here for the service,” he whispered, “but if you don’t want me here, I’ll leave right now.” From behind the curtained window, Leyla saw Mr. Zia’s deliberate walk, as his head turned like a beacon throwing looks around the yard. The service was a pretext, Leyla knew; he had come to see her.

  She hurried out of the women’s room into the kitchen. Squeezing her way over to the fridge through the women who flitted from steaming kettle to boiling pot, she took the box of dates and dumped some onto a plate and slipped out in time to see Mr. Zia take off his shoes at the door. She adjusted her steps, on her way back to the women’s room, to pass him as he was led and accompanied politely toward the men’s room. He looked at her with an unmistakable smile in his eyes. Leyla did not look away; she smiled back as she walked into the familiar smell of his bitter cologne. A discreet turn of the head allowed her to watch him enter the men’s room. Swiftly, Leyla offered the dates to the women and walked back out. From where Mr. Zia sat, he could see her and he knew he could be seen as she traveled gracefully between the women’s room and the kitchen.

  Before noon, the guest room was full of mourners dressed in black: older people leaning on poshtis against the walls, the younger sitting cross-legged in rows in the middle. Plates of dates followed trays of tea as a mulla gave a sermon. In a corner, a framed photo of a younger Agha was on a table flanked by lit candles. Agha looked at the picture and remembered the day Khan’s father had brought the photographer to the Orchard. It was a few years before he started to go to the bathhouse more often than he went to prayers. Norooz the Gardener came to Agha’s tree one day with clean, pressed clothes folded over his arm. Shortly after, dressed in a light-cream suit and pants, a red tie dangling from his neck, Agha was sitting in his wheelbarrow snaking through the trees that swayed in the spring breeze. Norooz was a young man then who spaded around the garden from sunrise to sunset and lifted apple crates two at a time. In front of the building, the whole family was seated on chairs in their best clothes waiting for Agha. Norooz sat him in a chair formed of curved metal and stepped behind the camera to watch with the other maids and servants what the photographer was going to do with his three-legged box. Khan’s father sat in the center and looked into the horizon, his wife on his right stared farther away to the right, and Agha on his left looked into the camera. Uncles and aunts filled the periphery sitting straight and uneasy. The five-year-old Khan stood closer than everybody else to the brown wooden box and stared right into its glass. “Now that’s très bien,” said the photographer when he came out from behind the cloth he had stuck his head in. “Portrait time,” he then said.

  When the mourners stood in lines to say the prayer for the dead, before them was not the dead person’s body as was customary, but instead the same framed picture in which Agha’s half-turned head, with his thin, white hair combed over to the side and his eyes sparkling in his aging, shaved face, questioned mortality. Unable to join the harmonious moves of the prayer-sayers, the old man himself sat in his chair on the first row, cross-legged and small, and said his own prayer for the dead.

  Sofrehs were laid and rental china plates came out of the kitchen. Rice and kebab with grilled tomatoes. Jugs of yogurt drink and water, pieces of sangak bread and plates of
basil studded the sofrehs. A cacophony of spoons and forks clinking and clattering against china rose from both rooms over the hum of subdued small talk. The plate in front of Agha remained untouched.

  Time came for the guests to leave. At the front door, Khan, Ahmad, Majeed, and his father stood in a row, shaking hands, kissing men, thanking them for coming, and accepting the repeated condolences. From behind the curtain, Leyla watched the long line move ahead and out one by one until Mr. Zia was gone. When Ahmad clanked the doors closed the house fell into a heavy silence. An hour later came the time for departure.

  With the dead man on his back, Ahmad walked around the whole house for Agha’s farewell tour. They went through the kitchen where Agha opened the fridge, the guest room, the living room, the corridor where he touched the walls, down into the basement, up the elevator onto the roof, into Zeeba’s room where Nana Shamsi used to live—Agha wanted to take something of Nana with him, but there was nothing—into Leyla’s room where she had never stayed, and up into Lalah’s on top of her sister’s. On the highest roof, Agha asked Ahmad to linger for a while to look at the snow-covered roofs. The edges of the city stretched far in the distance in all directions. The north was his destination, where the mountains were.

  They put Agha in the back of a neighbor’s car. Ahmad and Pooran sat on either side of him. Khan held onto his cane in the front seat. Majeed started the engine and they drove through the streets of iced-over asphalt. A row of young trees separated the road from the sidewalk where people strolled in their warm coats. They passed an empty cart pulled by a horse that blew clouds out of its round nostrils. The driver raised his hand and smiled at the strangers in the car. They swerved through buses, bicycles, cars, and people and left the expanding city for Tajrish. When the back wheels started to spin, they parked the car, and up the steep, snowy mountain roads they trudged. Humongous and skeletal, Agha’s plane tree towered against the white backdrop of the mountain.

  Twenty years had changed the face of the village. New houses with travertine facades replaced the old brick ones. The kids in the alleys looked at the party with curiosity. Some women stepped out to help Pooran up. “Khan’s back!” Ahmad heard someone shout and by the time they got to the Orchard, a small crowd was gathered at the door. Mohammad the Carpenter arrived trudging—still fat but old—and hugged Khan. In the Orchard were dead trees half buried in snow. It took Ahmad, Majeed, and the volunteer villagers two hours to clear a path to the tree. Soon Agha was put snug in his home, with fresh blankets under and over him. Mohammad had a young man Khan did not know install a heater inside, its electricity stolen with hook lines from the nearest power post in the alley. One by one, they kissed Agha and held him in their arms. Except for Khan.

  “Come, my son,” Agha said from inside, “Let me kiss you one last time.”

  Khan remained outside, his head bowed, his hands resting on his lion. “I am not going in.” His turned-up collar fluttered in the mountain wind. “This cannot be my last image of you.”

  There was no sound for a moment except for the hiss of the wind and Pooran’s stifled cries. “You are my children.” Agha’s sound came from inside the tree. “I have loved you all. I will never forget you.” He fell silent for a short time. “But Khan, let me see your face one last time.”

  Khan shook his head. “I can’t,” he said before he turned around and crunched away in the snowy trench. After everyone had left, Ahmad hugged Agha once more. Then he stepped out and pulled the tarpaulin curtain. “Ahmad,” Agha called out from inside the tree, “don’t forget me, my son.” From over his shoulder, Ahmad looked at the bluish-gray tarp as he walked away. “Death is frightening, Ahmad.”

  Down they went followed by neighbors from twenty years before, one unstable foot in front of another, toward the car. When they were saying goodbye to the small crowd, shaking hands and hugging, the voice of Khan came. Khan had not said it, but it was his voice, from the past, words that had lived in those mountains for twenty years now. “These bloods are on your hands, Mulla.” Hollow and cold, clear and alive, the voice came sweeping through the alleys and wandered away. If the cemetery had not been covered, like the Orchard, with snow, Khan would have visited Mulla’s grave.

  Majeed started the car. Men from the village helped push the vehicle out of the snow and a few moments later they were on the road back to Tehran. To Ahmad’s left, Agha’s absence sat on the backseat bright and buoyant. Majeed turned on the headlights. It was getting dark and there was still a long way until the Revolution. In that situation the opening line of a new poem came to Ahmad. Something told him they were the words to start a great fire.

  24

  ALAH MADE MOLOTOV COCKTAILS, without her parents knowing. She was a fifteen-year-old beauty and she could see that in the mirror. Her wavy hair was a dark walnut color, like her sister’s, but Lalah alone spent a long time in front of the mirror combing. Whatever empty bottles she could lay hands on she wrapped in rags and tucked away at the bottom of her bag. After school, Lalah walked with Shireen to her basement where they stashed their bottles, half-filled them with petrol and engine oil, and ripped wicks off old clothes. That much Lalah could do, but she was not daring enough for the rest. It was Shireen who passed the bottles to the boys.

  Shireen’s widowed mother had no authority over her. Every month or two Shireen’s uncle drove his eighteen-wheeler back to the city, sat her down, tried to talk some sense into her, and then beat her with his belt. After he closed the door behind him, Shireen was back in the basement and then out on the streets passing bottles and spray-painting slogans. “He’s kind in the heart,” Shireen told Lalah. “He brings me these plants, too, when he comes, but, boy, is he strong.” When working in the basement, the girls talked about which boy Shireen would meet. They were a group of four that Lalah had seen from a distance at two rare daytime rendezvous. She liked Ebi, the smaller one with the large ball of curly hair and sideburns that widened down to his earlobes. He could be a singer. “But he’s shorter than you,” Shireen said the first time Lalah admitted this. Shireen was into the older one in the group, “the man,” as Lalah called him. He was much older than the other three, in his fifties maybe. He combed his pepper-salt hair into a side part. His name was Ameer.

  The transfer of the explosives had to take place under the cover of the night and that was when Lalah had to be home. Her father wanted her back before dark. “He’s become timid since he quit,” she told Shireen one day, sitting at her vanity trying on her lipstick. She remembered the day Ahmad resigned from the parliament, when he came home and took his wife and children to the park. “He does that when he feels guilty,” she said into the mirror, “he rounds us up and takes us out.” Leaning close to the mirror and pressing her cherry lips together, she remembered the day: the park was covered in snow. Flying back and forth on the metal seat of the swing that stung her bottom, Lalah could see her parents talk, her father sitting on a bench, her mother standing, not able to bear the coldness of the green-painted concrete. Leyla was walking around the white playground, kicking snow. Lalah knew something was not right, and her parents were trying to make it seem as if everything was under control. Kicking her feet, she made the swing go faster, but she was not enjoying it. They went to a restaurant and afterward had saffron ice cream with pieces of pistachio and chunks of hard cream. From that day on Ahmad worked at home. Within a year, he finished the collection of poetry he had begun with bloody eyes. He refused a second call from the Ministry of Publications and Information. It was shortly after that when Homa found Haji on a snowy day.

  * * *

  —

  IN HIS MONTH-LONG DETAINMENT, THE prayerwright had cried and begged so much that when his investigator came into the room and said they would let him go provided that he quit his practice, he had accepted with a nonstop expression of his gratitude, right hand on his chest, half-bowing to the investigator and to anyone he talked to or even passed in the corridor. Once ou
t, he had relocated to a new neighborhood in Southern Tehran, where he hoped not many would know him.

  Taking care to wrap herself thoroughly in her chador and covering as much of her face as she could, Homa stepped off the bus into snow. Poverty crawled up the walls like ivy. Trying to avoid the stares, she asked for directions from a wizened old woman who sat at her doorstep watching the passersby with a thin layer of snow stuck to her scarfed head. Ahmad would have been mad if he knew she had been walking in those parts alone. Spotting a stranger, bored boys followed her, sniggering all the way. She quickened her steps, trying to ignore them. When she was starting to fear and question her decision, she arrived at Haji’s door. The boys threw a snowball at her before they ran away. She rang the bell and waited. The petrol-seller passed by pushing a low cart loaded with black, greasy tin gallons, announcing his arrival at the top of his lungs to the people hidden in their homes.

  The door cracked open and Haji’s bald head appeared, a Bic pen dangling like a pendulum from his neck by a white string. Homa wanted to hug someone at that moment. “What do you want?” Haji asked without opening the door any farther. He listened and shook his head no. But before Haji could shut the door on her, Homa wedged her foot in the frame.