by Ali Araghi
“I won’t go until you talk to me.” Haji eyed her for a few seconds, then opened the door after throwing suspicious looks to make sure no one was with her in the alley.
The apartment was dark. The air smelled like sour milk. In the short corridor inside, the stocky man stood before her in his loose, striped pajamas with legs tucked into his socks.
“I don’t do that anymore.” Homa held out a wad of new, crisp one hundred toman bills. “I can’t accept that.” Haji shook his head after looking at the money for a few seconds as if shaking a temptation. Homa pulled out a second wad. “How many more are in there?” Haji asked glancing at Homa’s bag that hung from her shoulder under her draping chador.
“Enough to take you out of this place.”
Haji rubbed his cheek, bearded with short gray hair, took the two wads, and held his hand out for more. By a burning Aladdin heater, they sat on the floor. Homa pressed her leather purse in her lap, her right hand in the bag ready to close around the deer antler handle of a knife. Like years before, Haji sat in front of her, consulted his old books, and took notes in a notebook, but this time he threw glances at the woman who seemed to be in her early thirties. She was trying to put on a serious look by pressing her lips together, which made her dimples show.
“Now give me your hand,” Haji said, putting out his hand. Homa paused for a moment, not sure what to do, but looked at the man’s thick fingers and the deep-cut lifelines on his palm. “It’s for the prayer.” She put her left hand in his. The man’s knuckles were crooked, but his nails were beautiful: a healthy pink and smooth. He ran his hands on the back of hers one after the other, and then turned it around to examine the palm like fragile glassware from previous centuries. The tips of his forefingers ran deliberately, as if savoring the pattern of the interlocking lines. Then the probing fingers advanced in their path and slid up Homa’s forearm. In the future, she would ruminate on that moment more than she wanted to, wondering if she could have done anything differently. Holding Homa’s hand in his, the prayerwright’s palm pushed up the sleeve of her gray blouse and slithered up and down her forearm. His breathing was the only audible sound in the room. “Oh, pure marble,” he said. When he bent over to kiss the soft skin, Homa clasped her hand around the knife in her bag, not the handle, but mistakenly the blade. She felt the warm blood gushing out of her fingers. She took the knife out, pointing it at Haji. Blood dripped on the rug. “That’s as far as it goes,” she said pulling her sleeve back down. Shocked by the blood, the prayerwright withdrew and looked at her heaving breaths through her nose, her fine nostrils flaring.
Before she left the apartment with the prayer safe in her purse, she accepted the rag that the man brought her at the door. “The man who has you,” Haji said as she held out the blue piece of cloth, “I hope he knows what a gem he has. They never do.”
Homa felt proud. She had beaten the fate that had tried to hide the prayerwright from her and she had gotten her hands on what she came for. All the way home, Homa pressed the purse to her body and squeezed the rag in her fist.
Homa wrapped up the prayer and cooked Ahmad’s favorite dish. After dinner and when the girls were in bed, she did her hair, put on her green dress, and brought the gift to Ahmad with tears in her eyes. She handed him the thin present, but could not wait for him to open it; she threw herself into his arms. “I’m going to hear your voice,” she said, crying on his shoulders. Ahmad unwrapped the gift, took the piece of paper out of the envelope behind her back, and looked at the Arabic words written in red ink in a beautiful hand. “Every morning,” Homa said, sniffing in a way that let Ahmad know she was smiling, “on an empty stomach.” Ahmad patted her on the back.
For the rest of the night, Ahmad looked at the prayer lying flat on his desk and tried to imagine a version of himself who could open his mouth and make meaningful sounds. He could call his daughters instead of walking up to them. He could say Homa’s name for the first time. He could read his poems. Of all the voices in his head, he tried to find one that would be his, but it was useless. When he detached himself from himself and looked, like a hovering ghost at an imaginary, vocal Ahmad, he did not recognize himself. He tried to make a new image of himself: an Ahmad who talked like everybody else, but was not frightening or banal. Thoughts slipped out of his mind as easily as water. In bed that night, Ahmad scribbled a line on his notepad and gave it to Homa.
Now tell me how you really cut your hand
* * *
—
A WEEK AFTER HOMA VISITED him, Haji was boiling lamb shank, beans, and potatoes in a pot for his favorite dinner when he heard a knocking. He stopped whistling and tiptoed toward his door. There was a piece of paper on the floor.
Thank you for your prayer. I know it will be worth more than I paid for it. You’re despicable, so I will not face you ever again, but the money, I’ll leave it in a paper bag in the heap of trash in front of your building.
Haji listened for a sound behind the door in the hallway, any rustling of clothes, soft breathing, or shifting of feet. Then he cracked the curtain to look out with half-squinting eyes. There was a paper bag in the trash. He went back to sit by his Aladdin heater, but no sooner had his behind touched the folded blanket than he got up and checked the window again. The garbage man would soon come and spade the heap from the foot of the wooden power pole into his cart. Haji paced his room and listened to the boiling of broth for a few minutes before he finally pulled his pants over his pajamas, threw on a shirt, and stepped out into the evening dark without doing up his buttons. Orange clouds sprinkled the city with small flakes that glistened in the cones of light the streetlamps shot down into the alley. Haji made sure no one was around before he hastened to the power pole ankle-deep in snow, in his rubber sandals. The bag was wet and reeking with a foul liquid. He turned it over and shook it. It was empty. Furious that the woman had made him rummage in the trash in snow, he strode back to his apartment and slammed the door behind him, but he had barely stepped in when two men jumped on him from behind and pinned him to the floor. A hand pressed over his mouth. When his hands and feet were tied and his lower jaw was on the brink of detaching from his face, they turned him around.
Three men in coats stood above him. He was sure they were SAVAK agents who had finally tracked him down. He wanted to shout, swear to God that he had written only three or four prayers in all those years, but they had stuffed his mouth with cloth. One of the men, who seemed to be the boss, knelt down and looked him in the red face. His eyes were calm and determined. At his gesture, the other two got to work. They brought two small stacks of books from around the apartment and put them down close together on the floor. They untied Haji’s hands and stretched his right arm across the two stacks, his elbow resting on one, his wrist on the other. Haji thrashed and yelled against the rag in his mouth, but one man sat on his chest and held his free arm. Haji threw his legs back and forth. His shrill cries did not pass through the rag and spit that stuck to his tongue. The boss knelt down by Haji’s extended arm and placed his closed fist in the middle of the forearm that bridged the gap between the two stacks of books. Haji’s wrist and elbow were held in place by the other man. The fist came down like a sledgehammer. The sound of snapping bones was audible, louder than any of them expected. Before he got to his feet, the man pulled a piece of paper from his breast pocket and gently put it in Haji’s hand, lying limp on the stack of books. They left the apartment without saying a word. If it were not for the prayer they left in his hand, Haji could never have known what had brought the punishment. And he had to move on again.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS PASSED AND AHMAD had not spoken. Homa asked if he was saying the prayer every morning as it had been prescribed. Ahmad looked her straight in the eye and wrote that he could not change himself beyond recognition. He had to remain who he was. He wrote with such determination that something crumbled in Homa’s heart.
&n
bsp; “Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked. Ahmad nodded then held her hand in his and mouthed, Thank you my dear. The next day, Homa went to Haji’s apartment and rang the bell, but no one answered. She slipped in a note under the door. I want another prayer. Call me. I’ll pay for it. There had to be something she could say without Ahmad realizing it, just like the prayer that had worked on Leyla. Her searches for Haji began again.
It was during this time that Ahmad had to begin writing his poetry on trays. Midway through a particularly bright poem, the paper turned yellow and then brown; it could not stand the heat. Ahmad got up and tore a cardboard box into pieces, but cardboard, too, turned too brown and brittle. He paced his room, worried he might lose his inspiration. From the dish rack he took the tea tray and hastily rummaged in his toolbox for a long nail. Back at his desk, he etched his poem in the tray, scratching each letter with repeating back and forth movements. Once finished, Ahmad could barely hold the hot tray in his hands. In the evening, when all the family was home, Ahmad showed them the new poem. Lalah turned the lights off and, holding the edges of the tray with two folded rags, shone the beam of light that came out of the tray around on the walls and ceiling and into her sister’s face. In turn, Leyla placed the tray on the rags on the floor and showed Lalah how to make shapes on the ceiling with the shadows of her hands.
Homa liked the poem so much that she became certain she would continue looking for Haji until she found him. She searched for months with no success. She despaired. She told herself that success comes to those who persevere, and persevere she did until the morning she got dressed, but did not know anymore why she was doing it. Let’s just put on my shoes, she told herself, but she stood at the door and stared at the clock and she realized that hope was not strong enough to make her step over the threshold. In her years of solitude later, she would reminisce about her trips around the city, in buses and taxis, and on foot, always carrying a chador and a knife in her shoulder bag. To her closest friends she would confess that neglecting her daughters was the biggest mistake she had made in her life. She had thought them old enough—if not Lalah, without a doubt Leyla—to walk to school and back on their own. She had never suspected a ten-year-old capable of doing what she did.
* * *
—
FROM A TELEPHONE BOOTH ON her way to school or back, Leyla called Mr. Zia. Still too short to reach the receiver, she asked a passerby to insert the coin and dial the number of her “uncle” for her. Then she closed the door and talked until the windows fogged up and Lalah knocked with her gloved hands and shouted that she was cold. The fire that had burned Leyla’s heart from the time she saw Mr. Zia had never extinguished. Every morning, she went to school with the excitement of the phone call. “I want to see you,” Mr. Zia said, his trembling voice hoarse in the receiver. “I love you,” Leyla answered, “but no one can know.” After Ahmad had resigned from the parliament, Mr. Zia was gripped by the fear that he would not see Leyla again now that Ahmad would not need him or his uncle in any way. It was the little girl who consoled him, made him certain of her love and the inevitability of union. She asked him to be patient. “I can’t wait,” Mr. Zia cried into the receiver. Leyla came out of the booth with a racing heart and a face so red that the rowdy Lalah fell silent with the apprehension that something ominous might have happened. After a few more times, Lalah learned that the rose color came with an elated mood that would end up in snow fights for the rest of the way home. Lalah began not only looking forward to the calls, but pushing her sister into the closest telephone booth on their way and waiting patiently for her to open the folding door and step out. The days when there was no call or when Leyla came out prematurely, Lalah knew the walk home would be silent. She loved her sister anyway. Leyla was the center of attention in any gathering because she spoke with long, complicated sentences that were the envy of most adults, but at the end of the day it was with her, Lalah, that Leyla played, it was her homework that she checked every day like a teacher, and it was with her that Leyla talked at night when they were in bed in their room and the lights were off. Such were the bonds of sorority between Lalah and her older sister that when one day Mr. Zia pulled up in his car by the side of the street, in front of the telephone booth, Lalah did not say a word to her mother about the event. She knew Mr. Zia was the man Leyla called from the booth. She was still young and did not know what love was, but she felt and understood the secrecy of the incident. Leyla looked around anxiously, but did not take long to go toward the car and open the front door. Before she closed it, though, she turned to look at Lalah standing by the booth holding the handle of her leather bag in her gloved hand, not knowing what to do, her face showing a fear of being left alone. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Leyla said. “Hop in.” This she said with a tone that Lalah liked to read as, Of course I’m not leaving you on your own, silly. Lalah enjoyed the short ride in the back seat and ate the steaming plate of crimson boiled beet cut into irregular chunks that Mr. Zia bought for the two of them. She laughed when the car got stuck in the snow and three other drivers stopped, pushed the car out, and went back to their cars as if pushing was part of driving. At home, Lalah asked Ahmad if they were going to have a car someday. The day after, Mr. Zia asked Leyla for a date.
“Just tell me when?” his voice asked in the receiver. “Even if it’s twenty years from now; just tell me when.”
“Only two more years. Until I’m in high school.”
When Leyla reached high school, Lalah spent her recesses alone in the yard and walked home on her own. She moved to the back of the class and shared a bench with Shireen, whose big eyes wandered off toward the window during class, who was unprepared whenever she was called on by the teacher. Shireen was tall and agile and skipped rope faster than anyone else. She was born in prison, five months after her father and pregnant mother had been arrested in a communal apartment. She lived with her uncle for two years until her mother was released. Although she had never seen her father, Shireen kept a picture of him in her purse. Soon after Lalah switched to the last row of the class, the two girls found such harmony that they could easily cheat on tests without the teacher having the slightest idea.
* * *
—
THE SHAH APPOINTED PRIME MINISTER after Prime Minister to tackle the problems of the country. It had been three years since the beginning of winter. Farmers were almost bankrupt and the population of the villages had dwindled to a third. Prices had shot up in the volatile economy. When more protesting voices started to rise, the Prime Minister had a meeting with the army generals and heads of ministries. It was decided, in spite of most of the generals, that the people had never been actually given a chance to express themselves freely. Venting frustration and anger through verbal channels would prevent unlawful eruptions of violence.
With royal approval, political leniency and tolerance of criticism were adopted and a new age of journalism flourished. Qualifications for starting a newspaper or journal were set as a university degree and thirty years of age. Iran Illustrated increased its circulation to eighty thousand and hired a court photographer for exclusive pictures of the royal family. Their rival, Black and White, used the freedom to expose the corruption at the core of the government—the way they handled the earthquake, the never-ending construction of the dam, the incurable nepotism, and the unaccounted-for monies—with critical editorials and essays. The journal’s editor, Dr. Afshar, a man of words and a believer in stories, paid the highest fees for a good yarn. With dreams of expanding his publication to reach an international readership, he had hired three writers who wrote all the nine stories of each issue. Dr. Afshar published three of the pieces under the writers’ names and the remaining six as translations: from the map on his wall, he picked six random countries and penned down fictitious writer names which, because of his basic familiarity with the language, all sounded French.
Three months after the adoption of the policy of leniency,
Iran Illustrated published a special snow issue. All the photos were of snow with no people in the frame: a line of small, white hills which on a closer look turned out to be buried parked cars, a crow perching on a traffic light—turned red—against a background of a white cloudy sky, a gridlock in a roundabout at the center of which stood an equestrian statue of Father King. They titled the issue where is this snow coming from? The next week, Black and White’s counterissue came out in white letters on black paper. In it was reports of houses having been damaged by four years of dampness and ceilings that had sagged under the weight of the snow. The headline of the issue became the one question that would repeat itself in the history of Iran and never receive an answer from any government: where does our oil money go?
No issue of Black and White was published without a poem by Ahmad. Dr. Afshar, the editor, thought he was the one poet alive whose work was worth reading. He visited Ahmad’s home in person and, sitting in the living-room armchair with his legs crossed, took out his glasses from a leather case and obsessively cleaned them with a white handkerchief before he read the weekly poem. He accompanied his nods with a few bravos and slid the paper into his cracked leather bag. When the selection committee for the first Shiraz Art Festival was formed, Dr. Afshar made sure Ahmad’s name would be among the candidates for poetry, and was not surprised when Ahmad was selected for a reading. With his latest book Through the Eyes, Blood, Ahmad had become one of the most well-known poets in the country.
In what would otherwise have been summer, the burial garden of Hafez, a fourteenth-century poet, was shoveled clean. Six concentric steps climbed to a circular platform, upon which a dome, supported by eight high, marble columns, protected the centuries-old gravestone from the snow. Before this monument, seats were lined up in ascending rows. The shovelers kicked the trunks and shook the snow off the branches that arched over the arena. Flags were hoisted up poles and for ten days pioneers of avant-garde art and the paragons of traditional national literature and music stepped onto the stage in front of the audience and the two rickety cameras that sent hesitant pictures to television sets around the country. Ahmad was scheduled on day three. Before him, a traditional music ensemble performed, sitting on the steps of the old poet’s tomb and among them, Ahmad recognized Maestro Shahnaz. When, in the middle of a piece, the members of the group turned their heads toward the maestro and he started his solo, Ahmad saw how, like years before at his wedding, the trees budded in knobs of blossoms and shoots. Before the maestro was done, the stage and audience were covered in petals, one of which fell into Ahmad’s open book. He picked it up and looked at it: varying shades of pink, delicate, and real. He brought it to his nose, smelled it, and kept it as a souvenir.