The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  He had grown a mustache soon after starting middle school. In the morning, clutching his leather bag in his hand, he had stood in the bathroom as his father shaved off the fine hairs for him. He sat in the back row, and the women teachers felt uncomfortable calling him up to the front. The first day of high school, a new math teacher mistook him for the district inspector. With meticulous care, Ameer had looked at himself in the mirror and pulled at the skin on the corner of his eyes with the tips of his fingers to examine the few creases. He pulled his hair back to see if his hairline had receded. It was during one of these examinations that he had found his first white strand. He buried his face in his hands and cried until his father needed to use the bathroom. That was the day he realized that his time passed twice as fast as other people’s.

  Accepting the inevitable, he was emancipated from the responsibility of preserving life and decided that if he had half the time to live, he had to live twice as hard. That was the only way for him to take revenge on his fate. He poured his pills into the squat toilet, stepped out of the bathroom, and told his father he would not go to school anymore. He worked hard first at his father’s shop, and then as a shoveler. He watched all the movies in the city, tried food from every street vendor’s cart, went to cabarets, was present when a protest was underway, and treated himself to a big meal afterward. The day the bank caught fire, he was so close to the Molotov-cocktail boy that he saw him blow at his cold hands before he could strike the match. A thin boy no older than eighteen, with brown hair, swift as a gazelle, shouting, “The imperialist monsters. The militarist bastards,” before hurling the bottle.

  * * *

  —

  THE ANNOUNCED REASON FOR THE shortage of oil was the tankers’ accidents. The general ordered an urgent allocation of extra funds for securing and plowing the roads. “The snow is crippling,” he said to the reporters unapologetically, “but we’ll beat it.” Ahmad learned the real cause of the accidents one afternoon when he went to the Black and White office with a new poem. A reporter had interviewed one of the drivers at the hospital. Some hours after midnight, he had drawn close to the big city, listening to music from the cassette player he had screwed to the dashboard. The road was nothing but a small stretch of snow lit by the headlights. The rest was absolute dark. The wipers lashed back and forth cleaning the occasional flakes that melted instantly as they hit the windshield. He leaned ahead to take out the tape and put another on, but when he looked back at the road, he saw dozens of shining eyes in front of him, like a constellation of phosphorous-green stars, on that border of dark and light beyond which his headlights could not shine. In a moment of panic, he jerked the wheel, but lost control. The tanker skidded and slid on the ice before it flipped onto its side.

  Other drivers had told similar stories. A hoard of beasts jumping in front of their trucks out of the black of the night. Black and White’s headline, in the largest font possible, read: wolves on their way. Below it was a black silhouette of a wolf’s face looking with menacing white eyes at the reader. But the general consensus was that the government had spun the tale to dodge criticism and scrutiny into its squandering and corruption. In the next tape that came in from outside of winter, Ayatollah Khomeini said, “They say wolves. They think they can mislead the people with children’s stories. If there is a wolf, it’s the one with the crown.”

  The sentence caught on, was soon sprayed across the city, and entered hushed daily conversations as “the Wolf with the Crown.” But Ahmad knew it was not true. Khan knew that, too, but he had long lost his interest in cats. With an obstinacy and anxiousness characteristic of old age, he worried about his body. Clutching at his walking stick or anything else at hand—a table, a chair, or the door—he pushed himself to his shaking legs early every morning. Staying still meant death. His freckled hands showed aged bones and bulging veins. He tried to eat more, but his throat closed off after a few bites. Nevertheless, he would get to his feet and head to the kitchen. He offered to help Zeeba, who did her work with such ease that everyone had forgotten she was blind. Pooran was worried Khan would spill hot water on himself, lop his finger in half, or fall off the chair. Out of the kitchen she drove him. In the yard, Khan took the shovel from where it leaned against the wall and tried to scrape clean the path from the house to the front door. Then he would sit, alone on the veranda, or in Agha’s room with Ahmad, or inside with Pooran, his thoughts meandering into the past that was nowhere anymore but in his head. Before long, he snapped out of it and scrambled to his feet again. In the street, he walked from store to store, his agate beads in his hand, a nonfunctioning remnant of a lost passion, an expired quest. He had learned the truth up to the point beyond which no knowledge would help him. The day Ahmad opened the door with the Black and White weekly in his hand, Khan was catching his breath, both hands clutched around the handle of the shovel. He could no longer read without his glasses. Sitting by the oil heater in the corner of his black room, Khan listened to Pooran read the news out loud.

  “They are shrewder than I thought,” Khan said.

  “The wolves are hungry, too,” Pooran said.

  “They’re not wolves,” Khan said. “They’re cats.”

  “I’ll die before I see a grown-up man in my life,” Pooran said, tucking her salt-and-pepper hair under her scarf. She had worn one since the beginning of the long winter. She had worn scarves before, too, in those early days of her marriage with Nosser. Although there was no religious restriction then, she felt more comfortable wearing one. The color was very important to her at first. From her large wardrobe, she would pick the one that matched her clothes, or sometimes the colors of the Orchard: green, red, or pink, depending on the season. A month or two after her marriage, she stopped wearing headscarves and started to style her hair instead. When Leyla left, she put a black scarf on and did not take it off. In the wardrobe, she had set aside clothes for the day Leyla would come back, both the dress and the quince scarf.

  “I told you not to do politics. You didn’t listen to me,” she said to Ahmad as she got up, “You saw what happened. You lost your beautiful wife and daughter. Now I’m telling you, Ahmad, put your feet on the ground. Be a father for Lalah, mend things with your wife, put your life back together. Or you’ll unravel. Stop wandering. Look at yourself. Have you seen yourself? You’re already forty.”

  He was forty-one.

  Ahmad stood in front of the mirror that night. He looked no younger than his age. Short tufts of hair stuck out of his nostrils. His eyes had lost that buoyant glow that is in the eyes from birth. Am I wasting my life? He held his notepad before Khan who was polishing his shoes in his room. Khan stopped the brush midair and squinted to read the big letters. He asked for his reading spectacles. Ahmad pulled the glasses from a leather pouch and put them on Khan’s face. Khan looked at the paper, then turned back to his work, one hand inside the shoe, the other running the brush back and forth along the length of it.

  “You’re not asking to know,” he finally said. “What you want is denial.” The swishing of the brush was the only sound in the room. “You have done good things. You have done stupid things.” Ahmad got up to leave. “But the world is too complicated a place,” Khan said. “We’re all losers. You know that better than me.”

  Before he left, Ahmad scribbled on his notepad.

  YOU’RE WRONG. I WROTE THE POEM OF FREEDOM.

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE POKER FACE OF a veteran politician, the Great Zia told Ahmad again that he did not know where Mr. Zia was.

  “Don’t worry yourself, son,” he said with a smile, patting Ahmad on the shoulder. “Your daughter is in good hands. You’re probably already a grandfather.”

  Ahmad said goodbye and left the man’s house. The next morning, as he had the past sixty years, Great Zia woke at five o’clock. He stirred a teaspoon of honey into his tea and drank with the radio on before he stepped out for his morning walk
, which he had not stopped even with the winter. The chills of the past few days had abated. Rolls of dark-blue clouds in the eastern sky promised the beginning of the day, a good day with the snow coming down in big flakes of cotton, much better than the small, dry ones. The neighborhood windows were lighting up as parents woke to prepare breakfast for their kids before school. At the end of the alley, he turned onto the street that lead to the park, which was quiet and dark, with yellow streetlights shining over snow. In front of the park, before he crossed, he took careful looks both ways. There were no cars in sight. When he reached the middle of the street, he turned his head and saw a car coming toward him with its lights off, like a bolt of lightning from another world. The next moment, the car was speeding away down the street, leaving behind Great Zia’s body to twitch on a blanket of snow for a short while before coming to rest. Later they had a hard time taking his walking stick out of his frozen hand. When they found him, he was already covered in a thin layer of snow.

  Three days later, Great Zia was lowered into his grave under the black umbrellas that throngs of friends, family, and politicians held above their heads, amidst the wailing of women and the recitation of the Quran. His nephew, Mr. Zia, was not among the mourners, but he showed up for the Seventh-night service at the mosque. He could not bring himself to go in among the people who crowded the main hall and corridors, hugging and offering condolences. Hands deep in his jacket pockets, he bowed his head on the sidewalk across from the mosque. After a while, he walked back to the bus stop, rode for four stops, got off, wound through quiet streets, took another bus, and finally stepped into his parked car and drove back to his apartment, keeping a vigilant eye on the rearview mirror the whole way.

  Later that night, Ahmad was parked in front of his door, looking at the second-floor window of the two-story brick building from the passenger seat. He motioned for the driver and the two men in the back to wait. Ahmad rang the doorbell and heard it echo inside. Hands tucked in the pockets of his long raincoat, Ahmad kicked the snow and looked down the quiet street: only two men were walking in the distance; two shadows in the shadows. The rest was white. Footsteps climbing down the stairs sounded through the door, and soon Leyla opened, with a chador draped over her head. She looked at Ahmad, first trying to make out the details of the face silhouetted against the streetlight and then with eyes blurred with tears.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She buried herself in her father’s arms. The last time she had done that, she reached no higher than Ahmad’s chest; now she rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Who is it?” Mr. Zia’s voice came down the stairwell. Ahmad took Leyla’s hand and went up. In his pajama bottoms and undershirt, Mr. Zia froze in place like a tree as the father and daughter stepped up. He was not sure if he should be ready to defend himself, to plead, or to run away.

  “Father, he’s been very nice to me,” Leyla said, turning to Ahmad and grabbing his arm, anxiety in her voice. Her voice had changed, too, almost imperceptibly deeper. She was a young woman now.

  Ahmad turned his menacingly calm face to Leyla and mouthed, Are you married? She nodded, holding up her ringed left hand. While Leyla packed her suitcase, Mr. Zia dressed himself and found nothing to say to Ahmad beyond repeated apology. He had grown bald but he was still good-looking. It was only when Ahmad and Leyla were leaving that he asked, “Will I see her again?”

  Ahmad eyed him for a few seconds, but turned his back to him without saying anything. He walked out of the door, holding his daughter’s hand in one hand and her suitcase in the other.

  On their way home, Ahmad and Leyla sat in the back, while two of the men shared the passenger seat. The driver broke into song. Snapping their fingers to the rhythm of the tune, the two-man chorus sang the refrain along the slippery roads.

  Ahmad turned to Leyla and mouthed, You’re not pregnant, are you?

  In the yellow lights that flashed into the car from the streetlamps, Ahmad saw her cast down her eyes. He held her face in his hand and turned it toward himself.

  When?

  Holding her hand down so the driver would not see in the rearview mirror, Leyla showed Ahmad two fingers. In the front, the driver rolled down the window and screamed his song into the cold.

  The next day, when Homa stepped out of the hospital at the end of her shift, she saw Ahmad, Lalah, and Leyla standing side by side on the sidewalk with smiles. The girls had red roses in their hands which Homa knew had been Ahmad’s idea. If they had not been in public, she would have hugged them all, planted kisses on Ahmad’s face. Instead, she ran down the steps and held her long-lost daughter tight in her arms, oblivious of the gazes of the passersby. Feeling elated and supported by the obstinacy and determination of her husband, which she had seen as steel coldness, she celebrated the reunion of her family. But contrary to Ahmad’s expectation, when he asked her at night to unite as a family, she said, “I need more time on my own, Ahmad.” Stubbornness of that sort was not something Ahmad had known in Homa. He had thought that if he could find Leyla, Homa would have no reason not to mend the family back into its previous completeness. He felt indignant.

  “Give her some time,” Pooran told Ahmad.

  Until the baby is born, Ahmad mouthed.

  26

  NTIL THE BABY WAS BORN, Ahmad decreed that Leyla had to be in Khan’s house where Pooran and Lalah could tend to her. Any talk about what had happened in the past and what would come about in the future was postponed. Leyla’s husband could come and see her anytime he wanted, and Homa was welcome to visit her daughters as often as she wished. Zeeba opened Leyla’s room, swept the rugs, and dusted the furniture. Life came to the house once again. Khan brought in a mason to plan a new room for the baby. The two men stood on the snow-covered roof and looked at the three rooms already crowning the building. The mason rubbed his chin. He was not sure if it was a good idea to add any more weight on top of a house that had seen so many years. Khan said, “Some mason’s making me a room. It’s either you or someone else,” and so it was that before the baby was born, the fourth room was ready, on top of Zeeba’s. Its travertine facade, cemented over the brick walls, was visible from both ends of the alley. The first two rooms stood side by side, with a space between them wide enough only for two people to pass, but the ones on top faced one another. Each was accessed by a metal staircase. Of the previous three, only two rooms had been put to real use, one by Nana Shamsi and her granddaughter and the other by Lalah. The four-cube arrangement seemed to Ahmad unnecessary, only the realization of Khan’s age-old hunger to reach higher. The pregnant Leyla never stayed in her room either, since Pooran would not allow her to take the rickety elevator. “That kind of work will turn the baby around,” she said. “Plus, as long as I live, my granddaughter won’t be trudging the snow between her bed and dinner.” She gave Leyla her own bedroom and slept on a mattress in the living room.

  “Why don’t you take Ahmad’s old room, at least?” Leyla asked.

  “No dear,” Pooran answered. “There should be a woman seven steps or closer to a pregnant woman at night.”

  And so it was that Pooran slept close to Leyla’s door and pulled the covers up to her nose. Five days had passed when she woke in the middle of the night with her body tense with cold. She stepped out of the bed and found the door that opened to the veranda left ajar. She closed it and went back to bed hugging herself. The shivers that ran up and down her spine refused to abate for a few hours as she stared at the ceiling trying to stop the involuntary rattle of her teeth. In the morning, her head felt heavy. She found cat prints outside on the veranda and decided to lock that door from then on. The animals were looking for food at night. They pawed at doors and smelled their way into kitchens. Pooran developed a headache which was replaced at night by a fever and a cough that kept her awake. After three delirious days in bed, the fever relented. The cough persisted. Khan said, and Ahmad nodded, that the cat had not been looking for food, but h
ad opened the door on purpose. Pooran thought cats were innocent creations of God, less harmful than most people. Ahmad called the doctor and after two weeks of intermittent fevers, Pooran stepped out of the bed and started to arrange for spring cleaning, although spring had not come for the past nine years and would not return until six years later.

  “With or without spring,” she said, “the year will turn. The new will replace the old.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TIME-OLD TRADITIONS WERE STILL observed, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the general misery of the failing economy and harsh weather. As a New Year present, Third Lieutenant Akbari, the mail inspector of the Palace Prison, a small man who loved his uniform and dreamed of climbing up the ladder, decided to give his niece a book. He had not forgotten an incoming collection of poetry for a prisoner by the name of Salman something a few months before. He had liked most of the lines he read as he leafed through. After his shift, Third Lieutenant Akbari left the prison for the street that had the University of Tehran on one side and the bookstores on the other, the street that after the Revolution was renamed Revolution Street. For two hours, he came out of one bookstore and entered another, but the book could not be found. No one had even heard of it. The next afternoon, a soldier came to the ward and took Salman with him. After a short but emotionally turbulent walk, Salman was in the inspection room with four officers sitting at their heaped-up desks. Salman’s heart was racing so hard that he thought he would have a heart attack any minute. “So it’s you,” said Lieutenant Akbari from behind his desk, “you got a book, some time ago, right?” The four officers were looking at Salman now and the soldier that brought him in was standing behind him at attention. “With poems and stuff, right?” For a second he felt he was going to wet his pants. He nodded his head, his arms stiff by his sides, as if he, too, was standing at attention in compliance with an unheard order. “Do you know where I can find a copy?” Salman paused, unable to imagine what would happen if they found out that the book was fake. Fortunately, it took little insisting to persuade the officer to accept his own copy as a present.