by Ali Araghi
“Only if he was younger,” she told Lalah pinching her arm. “Even just ten years.”
“I want you to be the mother of my child,” Ameer breathed into Goli’s ear the next time he was on top of her in her room. At that moment, Goli was not thinking about how she would manage the costs of raising a baby or what the madame would do if she found out she was pregnant. She felt all she wanted was to swing a crib, sing lullabies, and nag about how the little thing would not let her sleep.
* * *
—
IN SPITE OF POORAN, LEYLA gave birth at a hospital. “Babies shouldn’t be born where the sick go to die,” Pooran said. She had been born at home and she herself had borne many babies at home. “Both of you were born in my room,” she told Ahmad and Maryam, standing in front of her children in the waiting area, not able to stop talking, coughing from time to time, “and you’re fine.” Her cold had lingered as a persistent cough. She did not sit for the whole time, but walked to talk to the nurses at the reception desk, and strike up conversations with the others also waiting for something to happen. “She was not half as anxious,” Maryam said to Ahmad, “when my kids were coming.” She raised her eyebrows. “Well, we know she likes boys better than girls.”
Leyla’s baby was a boy who cried a little upside down, but started smiling as soon as the nurse held him in her arms. Leyla held the receiver to the baby’s mouth so Mr. Zia could hear his son. “Don’t cry,” she said into the phone, her voice weak. “Come in three, four hours. I’ll make sure Father is gone by then.”
One hour after the baby was born, the whole family was gathered around Leyla’s bed. Pooran, Khan, Maryam and her family, Lalah, Zeeba, Ahmad, Homa, her mother, and Colonel Delldaar. The baby was so sweet that anyone who held him broke an involuntarily, honest smile looking at his naturally happy face. They called him Behrooz, “the fortunate.” When the nurse came in and asked them to let Leyla rest, Majeed asked for a second, took out his camera, and put everyone together in the tight space between the bed and the window. What the photo did not show was that behind Lalah, in the short time while Majeed looked into his camera with one eye closed, instructing everyone to huddle more closely, Homa touched Ahmad’s pinkie with the tip of her forefinger as if cautiously testing a pot handle, until the camera clicked and saved that moment from oblivion.
* * *
—
THE NEXT AFTERNOON HOMA GINGERLY entered the room where Leyla was sleeping and bent over to watch the swaddled newborn in a calm sleep by his mother, trying to figure out who he had taken after. His eyebrows were high and his face open and inviting. He had Ahmad’s eyes and lips; in his forehead she saw traces of herself. She kissed Leyla on the forehead and turned up the heater before she left the room. Slipping into Pooran’s black galoshes, Homa crossed the yard and knocked on Ahmad’s door, turning the handle knowing that she would not hear a “come in.” Standing by the barred window, through which came a soft, white light, Ahmad was plucking dead leaves from his begonia on the sill. He had started to keep plants indoors in the years after Homa had left him, which Homa had learned from the girls who went to visit her in her apartment. Ahmad turned to her with a calm in his face that made Homa wish someone could snap a photo of him at that moment, so she could keep that frame on the table in her room.
“Ahmad, I want us to get back together,” she said, as if making a plea, as if it was the only thing that would warm her heart in that cold world.
Ahmad looked at her: brimming with a mature beauty, her cheeks rosy from the winds, and her tied hair tucked under her short-brimmed hat. Then he looked within himself and found a cornucopia of memories with that woman, the most vivid from the beginning when she came to that café with her chaperone to hear Ahmad’s poems. Bad memories were in his heart, like from the days when Leyla was gone, and Homa was a ghost, looking at him as if he was the devil incarnate. He went from memory to memory and from feeling to feeling, but no matter how deep he plowed, he was unable to find passion for her, even remnants of a lost one. He was surprised. He had not expected that moment would come. For the last years, every time he had gone to her door to silently plead her to come back, he had expected she would finally say yes, or something vague that would be a ray of hope for him. But she had so determinedly rejected him every time. Now his heart was empty. He shook his head.
The way Homa’s lips trembled for a few seconds, unable to utter a word, keeping her dark eyes fixed on Ahmad, with the door half-open behind her, with her galoshes still on, chunks of the ice and snow that clung to them starting to melt and slide down onto the doormat, that was how Ahmad would remember Homa in the future when years later, he asked himself, Did I make a mistake somewhere along the way?
27
N THE MONTH THAT IT TOOK the mason and his workers to make the new room for Behrooz, Ahmad readied himself for the Shiraz Art Festival which during the past seven years had turned into one of the most important summer arts events in the world. As well as the vanguards of performing and literary arts, tourists came for skiing. With the snow amassed for years, they had made slopes at the edge of the city, the core of which was hardened ice. With the hope of boosting the economy, the government had equipped the resorts with chair lifts and restaurants to attract worldwide tourists who looked to escape the summer heat. But the routes to get there were mainly closed. Roads were icy if not blocked, trains got stuck on the way for hours and days, and flying was limited to a handful of days in the year when black clouds were not rumbling and storms of infernal powers were not shaking the skies.
When the festival season came, though, the thousand-kilometer road from Tehran to Shiraz was plowed for the transportation of the guests and the queen, who supported and supervised the ceremony in person. The year before, Maestro Shahnaz had, for the sixth year in a row, made the frozen trees bloom with his music, and received the National Medal for Excellence in Art and that made Ahmad wonder: Why was Maestro’s music a whiff of life but his own poetry a flash of raging fire? He concluded that the same form of energy flowed within both forms of art; the difference was the medium. Through sound, the energy was directly issued from the instrument and enveloped all that was around it. It penetrated and warmed in a way that excited life into things. With writing, all the energy was concentrated in the words, on the page, and through the eyes into the reader who was already alive. It was the concentration that heated the words, made them burn things. If he could read his poems himself, he would have read the ones he could not write down on anything. Then he would have done more than make trees blossom, and the National Medal would be his. Since that was not possible, Ahmad suspected that there must be a way to make words themselves into sound. A machine to extract the hidden sounds of the words directly off the page? Something analogous to a cassette player.
Occupied with his new passion, he bought a phonograph and started to work. First, he wrote his poems in circles and glued the paper onto a record, then he scratched words into the record with a needle, but to no avail. He penned his poems in small letters on the tape of a new cassette. Once rewound and played, nothing came out of the speakers but some faint clicking and cracking. Using two large magnifying glasses, he repeated the experiment, this time putting extremely tiny letters on the tape. The broken hiss and fizz was meaningless and fleeting and Ahmad knew it was not a question of size. Next, he spread out the words on the whole length of the tape, but nothing came out and at that point he realized that the available machinery would not suffice for what he had in mind. He took his cassettes and tape recorder in his arms and walked down into the basement and in a short while surrounded himself with tools and apparatuses: several models of cassette players and recorders, gramophones, screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, small motors, batteries, and soldering irons.
After his daily attempt at shoveling, Khan walked over to the top of the basement steps and climbed down with the help of Ahmad to sit in the chair and watch his grandson work. When Ahmad came t
o the conclusion that he had to better understand the relationship between each word and its inherent sound, Khan’s memory was keen enough to point to the philosophers of the past, to Miskawayh, Mulla Sadra, Avicenna, and others whose books he had gathered through years in the large wooden bookcases against the wall. Ahmad read the books and thought and came to the conclusion that the key missing piece was sight. If the gramophone and tape recorder had failed to speak his poetry, it was because those machines were bereft of a reading eye. His nephew, Majeed, had the eyes. Down in the basement, Majeed showed Ahmad the features of a handheld video camera that you had to hold and point at the subject like a gun. After Ahmad gave a confirming nod that he knew what he needed to know about the machine, Majeed went up to shovel the roof, as it was around that time that Pooran made Khan stop shoveling. One early morning Khan had gotten up from his bed and pulled a second pair of wool leg warmers on in spite of the electrifying pain in his knees. Once on the veranda, he looked for his shovel in the dim light of the cloudy dawn, but it was not leaning against the dead cherry tree where he had left it the day before.
“As long as I’m alive,” Pooran had said a few hours later when Khan knocked on her door and went in, “you won’t shovel anymore. If something happens, I can’t take care of you. I’m not strong anymore, Khan, and neither are you.”
Khan turned around and closed the door behind him, but the disappearance of the shovel did not make him sit in a corner like an old man. He began getting up in the dark and shuffling his way to the oil line with an empty can swinging in his hand which later, if he was lucky enough to get oil, Zeeba or Ahmad would carry back home. He sat in the kitchen with a tray full of lentils to be winnowed from chaff and small pebbles. He would wipe at the windows with a rag. All that, he did while fighting pain and drowsiness. Sleep came to him as erratically as a leopard pouncing over its prey. He hung his head and fell asleep in the oil line, sitting on his tin can until someone tapped him on the shoulder and told him to move ahead. He fell asleep at the kitchen table, the lentils unready, the lunch delayed. He left the windows dirtier, with spots of dust smudged across in curves. On his bed, in his room, he cried himself to sleep under the blanket. He spent much of his time in the basement, on a wicker chair padded with thin mats, warming his hands over the oil heater and watching Ahmad fidget with things. Soon he would doze off.
It was during one of Khan’s naps that Ahmad finally attached the camera to the cassette player, but his expectation turned to exasperation when he held a page of his poetry in front of the lens, yet nothing came out of the player except persistent silence. He experimented with other texts: a newspaper, a page from a book, and different handwritten notes before he replaced the video with a photo camera. After the picture was snapped, the film would roll into the cassette player to be processed like an audio tape. To no avail. Ahmad held his head between his hands and rethought his process. In front of him, sitting in the wicker chair in suit and tie, Khan’s head hung over his chest, his freckled scalp reflecting the yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Ahmad had the eye. He had the mouth. What was missing was the brain, something with which to translate image to sound. Reluctantly accepting that it would not be ready for the festival that year, Ahmad left his mindless machine on the table and promised himself that he would go back the following year with his machine complete. He packed his suitcase and took the train to the city of Shiraz, ten hours across a white landscape, sometimes circumscribed with distant hills or low mountains and other times free and unending like the ocean.
On the second day of the festival, the troupe Le Troisième performed a new piece, a dance and play combination with two men and two women, including choreographed abstractions of repeated sex. The actresses’ dresses, thin as fog and barely covering anything underneath, attracted more attention than anything else: the minimalist set, the lighting, the actors in leather pants, or the two cats dyed crimson red that played so harmoniously one had to wonder how they had been trained. Ahmad knew that was no negligible matter. An uneasy feeling told him that the cats were not only there as part of the show but rather, for the first time, he was seeing them make a mark on history. What those two little red animals could achieve by lithely placing one paw in front of the other, weaving between the legs of the actors, and leaping from one shoulder to the branches of the makeshift tree was something Ahmad could not fathom as he watched. Indignant, and offended by the indecency of the show, a group of protesters, clad in shrouds, set off from the religious city of Qom for Tehran. It was a three-day walk in snow, but they had set out with rage.
The festival was canceled and Ahmad boarded the train for Tehran without even having his poems read by someone else. In his compartment, the man sitting in front of him put his transistor radio on the shaky folding tray, and they heard that the Shiraz Art Festival was canceled not for that year only, but for good. When he arrived home, before he went to his room, Ahmad left his suitcase in the snow and went down to the basement. Khan was there, sleeping on the chair as if he had not woken since Ahmad left. Ahmad picked up the hammer and smashed his apparatuses to bits that could be held between a thumb and forefinger. Khan was startled awake and looked around for a few moments. Ahmad wanted to tell him something, but the old man’s eyes were too bad to read in the dim light of that basement. From now on, he wrote on a piece of paper at the Black and White editor’s office, I’ll stick with literature only. That’s where I belong. He sent Dr. Afshar a poem a day, too many to publish in the weekly journal.
“The good thing is,” Dr. Afshar said, pulling his reading glasses down over the tip of his nose and looking above them at Ahmad, “I’ll have enough for the next century.”
When Ahmad told him he wanted to start his own magazine, Dr. Afshar took his glasses off and shook his head. “Publishing is the most dangerous job in this country,” he said tapping his hand on his desk to accentuate his point. “Do anything you want, anything else, but not that.” I’m not here to ask for help or advice, Ahmad wrote, I’m just telling a friend. When Dr. Afshar saw he could not make Ahmad change his mind, he said, “At least wait a little longer until we see what happens with this government. Until things are more stable.” But instability was nothing to discourage Ahmad. The next day, he went to the Ministry of Publications and Information to apply for a permit. The bank rejected his loan application, but he decided to be optimistic and believe that the money problem would somehow solve itself. At the Ferdowsi Bookstore in front of the University of Tehran, a meeting place of writers and poets, he broached the idea and found the interested writers. The money came one night when Lalah knocked and came in hiding something behind her back. Ahmad squinted expectedly, a faint smile on his lips as his daughter, in loose sweatpants and a T-shirt, walked across the room. When Lalah put the passbook on his desk, a questioning frown knotted Ahmad’s eyebrows.
“I’m sure you’ll be successful.” The passbook belonged to the account they had opened years before to set aside money for her dowry. “Go get it all. It’s not like I need it now.”
Ahmad stood up and hugged her. He borrowed the other half that he needed and in two months he started to put together his first issue.
* * *
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THE CANCELATION OF THE SHIRAZ Art Festival did not placate the shroud-bearers. Three days after their departure, so many people joined them in the streets that the shrouds were barely visible. That Wednesday a number of government buildings were set on fire, telephone booth panes smashed and street signs were uprooted. Bloody and warm, thirty-seven bodies were carried away in people’s hands. Lalah was one of the carriers.
After two shots toppled two men, she sprinted from behind a car to help take the bodies back. She held the wrist of a boy who could not be more than twenty. There was no blood on his chest, only a small hole in his overcoat breast pocket. Panting, she carried the boy with two other men back to where more people huddled. Someone stopped a passing car. They jammed the bo
y into the back seat and someone else slammed the door closed. The image of the boy’s head, hanging loose as she carried him, was too much for Lalah to bear. She had touched a dead person for the first time and that was enough fighting for her on a day that was later hailed as Blood Wednesday. Without trying to find Shireen, she detached herself from the crowd and walked away from the center of the conflict. Hands in her jacket pockets and head down, she went home.
Early the next morning, a curfew was announced for the first time. Six p.m., until further notice. She did not mind, at least that day. Going out was not on her mind. She picked up her nephew and held him in her arms. Since he was born, he had brought peace and happiness to the house. His plump cheeks jutted out of his rosy face like two small tomatoes. His eyes had taken after Ahmad’s and Khan’s. His eyebrows were from his father’s side, high up on his forehead. With the way he looked into everyone’s eyes and smiled, Behrooz had become everybody’s favorite in the house. Together with Zeeba, Lalah took care of him almost all the time, until the day Leyla left with her husband. Lalah had heard the couple argue in Leyla’s room, the second room on the roof and the largest of the four. That was where they were when Mr. Zia was first permitted to come see her. Lalah had not been able to make out most of the words, but she had heard her sister say, “Not now. I can’t.”