by Ali Araghi
“I say we all stay here,” Lalah said to Leyla one day. “There’s room for everyone.”
“Once you’re married,” Leyla answered, “you belong where your husband is. But I’ll try to stay with you as long as I can.”
With her first baby born and her mother gone, Leyla felt the responsibility of motherhood on her shoulders as if Behrooz, the baby, was her second child, her first, the teenage girl who was also her sister. She knew Lalah was out in the streets, and when Lalah came home with her short hair, Leyla told everyone it was she who suggested that Lalah cut it for a change. She also knew Lalah did not tell her everything. One night, when Behrooz was still inside her, she had woken up parched and seen, from behind the kitchen door left ajar, Lalah funneling oil from the twenty-liter can into an empty Rika bottle. After so many years away, Leyla needed more time to regain her sister’s confidence, and that was why when, up on the roof in her room, Mr. Zia told her it was time for them to leave, she shook her head.
“Not until the baby is a little older. I can’t do it all alone.” On top of that, the difficult conversation with Ahmad was coming.
“All that man cares about,” Mr. Zia said, “is himself. I want to live with you again.”
“It’s not a good time,” she said. “I have to ask my father’s permission.”
“We are married. You need no one’s permission. That’s what law and tradition say.”
“The law says I need your permission.”
“Stop it,” Mr. Zia said. “You know I’d never pull such a thing on you.”
“Will you allow me stay here longer?” Leyla pulled herself closer to him, running her hand on his arm.
“I said stop it.” He held her in his arms. “I don’t want you to ask my permission.”
Mr. Zia went back to his rented room and called old friends. He had been away for too long and the times were not favorable for returning to politics with a smeared reputation. After Mr. Zia had disappeared, his wife was the first one to spread word that he had eloped with a lover. Great Zia had to send a lawyer to negotiate with her, and it was not without considerable money, including the rose garden, that the woman consented to a divorce. On top of that, a bill had been proposed by the Shah to annul all political parties. In their place the Resurrection Party, the party of people, the party of the country, would be founded in which everyone could and should register as a member. Mr. Zia brought Leyla a small pot of violets and said, “I lost everything to be with you. This house is everything we wanted to leave behind. Both of us.”
Leyla dusted the windowsill before putting the pot on it. “Please,” she said tilting her head, “a little longer.” When the baby was asleep she went up to her own room on the roof. The first day she opened the door, everything was so clean and bright that she knelt and smelled the rug. Woven by Zeeba years before, it still smelled new. The bundle of mattresses, blankets, and pillows was neatly stacked in a corner of the room. Two curtained windows faced each other, one with a view of the outside of Zeeba’s room and the other of East Tehran, where the sun used to rise before the clouds had amassed in the skies. She was soon integrated in the flow of the house, taking up some of Pooran’s responsibilities so her grandmother could rest, since she spent most of her nights up coughing. Rocking Behrooz in her arms, Leyla made decisions about lunch and dinner and saw to it that Khan put on enough clothes before he stepped into the yard.
One evening she went down to the basement and like always, Ahmad broke into a smile at the sight of her and put aside the tape recorder he was opening with a screwdriver. But when Leyla suggested her parents get back together, he shook his head, picked up the machine, and motioned for her to leave the basement. From that day, she started to act like her mother. She began by bringing Ahmad tea, right after he came back home, after each meal, and a few times in between. Little by little she replaced the details of the house with ones from the past: first she changed the cups for the small tea glasses her mother used at home, then she removed the saucer which her mother hated, and then she changed the tray and sugar bowl. Finally, she began to change herself. She combed down her bangs and tied her hair into a neat bun and carefully plucked the right hairs from her eyebrows to create a curve that was her mother’s. One day, Ahmad walked past the kitchen and, for a moment, thought he saw a young Homa standing at the oven stirring the pot. He went in, looked at Leyla for a little while, and then nodded his consent, his face beaming with a hopeful smile. The girl smiled and kissed him, her arms clasped behind her father’s neck, before she ran out to tell her grandmother.
“We should clean up the house,” Pooran said, flinging the comforter away and stepping out of her bed. “My Homa is coming back.”
Pooran dyed her hair, cut her nails with scissors, and gave orders to the girls and Ahmad on how to go about the chores. Ahmad scrubbed the floors. Lalah wiped the windows from inside and out. Zeeba dusted and did the laundry and dishes. With her old obsession triggered, this time by happiness rather than distress, Pooran thanked Ahmad every time she passed him for bringing the family back together and had the girls rewash the clean dishes and rewipe the sparkling windows. From the wardrobe she took out Khan’s suit and had Leyla iron his red striped tie.
On Friday, after Zeeba took the laundry from the lines tied to nails above the heater in the living room, Pooran told Leyla, “It’s time.” The girl hurried up the creaking elevator and came down in her sandy-brown hat, chocolate coat, and sumac boots. It was two hours before noon. As Leyla strode off down the street, Ahmad kicked snow off the trees in the flower bed, tidied up his basement, took the lid of the pot to smell saffron in the food—Homa liked saffron, he added some more—and went to Khan. In suits and ties, the two men sat in chairs by the radio and listened to the news, handing Behrooz back and forth from lap to lap. A light snow started an hour after noon. It fell without haste. Lalah took the baby and changed him. When the day was almost over, but some light was still left in the skies, the doorbell rang. Everybody hurried to the yard to welcome Homa. Lalah opened the door. Leyla was back, alone.
28
T WAS A DOMINO EFFECT: the anniversary of the thirty-seven killed on Blood Wednesday was held in the city of Tabriz; the Fortieth-night service of the five killed in Tabriz was held in the city of Isfahan; and the anniversary of the twenty-two killed in Isfahan was held in Tehran. Expecting these gatherings, the new government announced a curfew in Tehran for the first time in two years, starting at six o’clock in the evening, according to the radio news, then, after the intelligence officials opined, four in the afternoon.
A cassette came in through the clouds that said, in a husky voice, “Don’t heed the curfew. The curfew is a ruse, to silence the movement of our people. Take to the streets and put your trust in God.”
Around noon, the rallies were in full swing on Reza-Shah Street in front of the University of Tehran. Shortly after, the confrontations began.
Since his escape, Salman had kept himself away from trouble. He read and heard the news, but didn’t dare to be anywhere near a gathering of people. He grew out his beard and found work as a loang man at a bathhouse in the southern parts of the city, mopping floors, cleaning the private showers, and buying supplies. He lived in the part of the city where roofs, old as God, had given in to the weight of years of snow and people were so poor they had forgotten the names of foods. Women had learned to cook a lukewarm soup with snow and turnip and when turnip was out of season, they compressed and sliced snow which they seasoned with salt and served on dried flat bread. Salman panicked the first evening he found a hand sticking out of a snow pile. He cried at the passersby for help as he dug out the little girl with his empty hands. Horrified at the indifference of those who looked at him in passing, he pulled out the frozen girl, her face livid and her eyes still open. He found more bodies later, young and old, so many he had to stop his morbid excavation. The day he found a customer’s ID on the bathhouse floor, Sal
man slid it in his pants pocket and did not raise his head from his mop when the man came asking after it the next day.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said to the bathhouse master.
He sheared his beard to stubble and a mustache, glancing in turn at the card and his forty-five-year-old face in the bathhouse mirror. The document gave him the courage to venture north toward the center, where the city was more familiar and where the protests happened. He watched from afar the young men running like gazelles, while whispering the slogans to himself. Then he went for a tea and hookah.
At the chai house, men, many of them workers, sat in two facing rows, against the walls, with hookahs erect in front of them on metal tables, sucking at the ends of hoses and breathing out gray smoke. If there was a sign of the outside world, it was in their conversations about the government, the prices going up, how a friend had lost his land to the new land reform policies, and in their jokes. Other than that, there was warmth, burning coal, and hot tea. Among those men, one day, with the mouthpiece between his lips, Salman saw Mamad Cucumber for the first time after the escape. His hollow cheeks had been replaced by a full face and his long, black hair had been combed to one side. He was thirty-two and he looked thirty-two, ten years younger than the ghost Salman had known in prison.
Turning to say a few words to the middle-aged man by his side, Mamad threw knowing glances at Salman. Soon he left the chai house. Salman paid for his tea and hookah and followed him out. In a quiet alley, they took their gloves off, shook hands, and hugged like brothers reuniting after a long separation. Mamad Cucumber had recovered his ties with the Fadaee Guerrillas and was starting to ramp up opposition and resistance. On the anniversary of the twenty-two killed in Isfahan, Mamad picked up Salman at his door and drove him to the rally. Salman shook his head and sat in the parked car to watch with the windshield wipers on. Mamad nodded and closed the door. After an hour, he came back.
“They say people are going to the air force base,” he said with the excitement of a child, putting the car into first gear. “Ah, the guns.” Driving through the busy streets, which people crossed at whim, was slow and the heavy snow had just started. Swerving ahead as fast as he could and stopping once to push another car out of snow, they arrived half an hour later. “Come on, let’s go,” Mamad Cucumber said as he parked and pulled the hand break. “This is big.” But Salman preferred to stay.
From where they parked, Salman did not have a view of the base. He could only hear the commotion rise and fall and see the people who ran past the car to join whatever was happening. Soon his patience ran out. He would not get into anything, just stand near enough to take a closer look. He killed the car and locked the door. The wind howled in his ears. Snow came down in slanted lines. On the only guard tower of the base, three soldiers stood behind the curtains of snow with G-3s in their gloved hands and the olive domes of smooth helmets on their heads. Even topped with coils of barbed wire, the metal-bar fence that enclosed the base did not seem to reassure the major, who came out of the main buildings with a megaphone in his hand, eyeing the crowd behind the fence all singing slogans and punching the air. He raised his megaphone to his mouth and cried, “This is a military facility! Any violators will be subject to arrest. We are asking you to disperse immediately.”
The few soldiers the major had at his disposition were positioned across the white yard, facing the crowd that grew in numbers by the minute. At that moment Salman saw Mamad Cucumber approaching him fast through the crowd. “You were supposed to be in the car,” he said agitated, almost shouting. “Good thing I found you. What was the name of that girl in the poem?” Together with three other young men, Mamad Cucumber had been trying to penetrate the facility by removing a few bars in the fence. Relying on the inadequate number of guards and a tall tree that blocked the view, Mamad had scratched the poem as he remembered it, but he had paused on the last word; he had forgotten the name of the girl. He removed his welding goggles. One of his friends urged him to hurry up. The light from the metal bar was strong. Between “Rosa,” “Ayda,” and “Saba,” Mamad picked “Ayda.” When the name did not work, he took off his heat-resistant gloves and sent for Salman, who had already left the car. The four of them scattered in the crowd to find him. It was at that time when the major saw the light from his office window and made a phone call. The tanks and trucks were deployed a minute later. He ordered three of the guards to watch the spot in the fence and shouted into his megaphone, “The guards have orders to fire at anyone who sets foot inside.”
“What was the name of that girl in the poem?” Salman went with Mamad Cucumber, nudging his way through the crowd. His return to the action was sudden and without question, as if somewhere inside him he always knew the right moment would come, and now was that moment. At a different spot, with fewer guards, they etched Homa’s name at the end of the poem on three of the bars. Cucumber was the first to step inside, and following him, an avalanche of people. The base fell. By the time the two tanks arrived, the arsenal was empty of guns and ammunitions, the raiders gone.
“I can’t help you with any kind of transfer,” Salman said in Mamad’s car, in whose trunk clanked thirty-six automatic rifles, seventeen handguns, and a case of cartridges.
“You have already done more than your share, my friend,” Mamad slapped him on the shoulder. “The movement is armed.”
Alarmed, the government promised on the radio news that the perpetrators would be sought and punished. A daily four-o’clock curfew was announced which unlike the previous one would last for two years, until the day the Revolution came to its culmination. The previous curfew had lasted less than a month.
“Thank God it’s over, Khan,” Pooran had said, “I was nervous the girl might do something stupid.” Although Lalah had never broken the curfew and Leyla and Behrooz were still with them, Pooran would go to the yard and call out to Lalah every once in a while to make sure she was home. The girl would crank down the elevator to do the chores Pooran asked of her or just accompany her to the store, to a neighbor’s house for an afternoon tea, or to women’s religious gatherings. She knew Pooran was worried about her. She also knew that Pooran wanted to show her off to other women who were looking for wives for their sons. Although she was aware of this plot, when the first suitor actually arrived at the house, Lalah was shocked, then amused.
He came in a navy suit and tie, a fedora, and a pocket square and was so impolite as to step in through the front door before his parents. From the kitchen, Lalah listened to the two families exchanging regular pleasantries, comments about the snow and storms, and Khan talking to the boy’s father about the issues of the country, before the suitor’s aunt changed the subject. The boy was twenty-three and worked with his father in a confectionary shop. They had brought a box of sweets that he had specifically baked for Lalah. When it was time for her to bring the tea, Lalah’s heart pounded not from love, but from the excitement of the new. She straightened her dress and lifted the heavy tray laden with steaming tea cups and the silver sugar bowl. When she entered the guest room, all eyes turned to her and she felt for a moment a trembling build up in her. She offered tea to everyone, starting with the eldest of the guests, then Khan and Pooran, and then the groom. She glanced at the boy’s face as he took a cup from the tray. His eyes were olive and for a brief moment she thought she could find calm and adventure in that color at the same time. But after the guests were gone, she shook her head when Pooran asked her what she thought. She had seen little in him aside from that elusive color. The suitor’s aunt had not liked it that Lalah had shown up without covering herself either.
“The audacity,” Leyla told her sister, pacing the room. Lalah’s room was her favorite part of the house. Plants of different sorts, in colored pots, were everywhere: all along the windowsill, across a wooden table by the window, at the foot of the bed on the floor, on top of the radio that Lalah never turned on, and along the foot of the wall. She had asked som
e of the names and forgotten later—there were so many—but she knew Lalah got them from her friend, Shireen, whose uncle was a truck driver and brought her the plants from beyond the reach of winter. Shireen was too lazy to keep a living thing alive.
Lalah shrugged, indifferent as God about the misfortunes of his people. On the armchair by her bed, she was painting her toenails cherry red, one bent knee under her, the other up against her chest.
“Aren’t you upset?” Leyla asked. “What is it to them to talk about what you wear?”
“It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” Lalah answered. “They want a girl for their boy who dresses in such and such a way, I’m not doing that and it’s fine if they don’t like it.” She started on her other foot. “I’m only doing this for Grandma.”
Leyla sat cross-legged on the bed, holding her ankles in her hands as if ready to hear an amusing story. “Is there someone else?” she asked.
“Always,” Lalah said without lifting her head from her toes.
His name was Ebrahim. Ameer and the other two boys called him Ebi. He was the brain of the group: he decided the number of the Molotov cocktails for the week and determined the pickup times and places. Although Ebi had not shown any particular interest in her, when Lalah learned that the group had put him in charge of communication, she immediately requested the responsibility on the girls’ side which Shireen gracefully gave her. She called Ebi from public telephones.
After sliding the coin into the slot, her finger still hovering over the rotary dial, she felt she was nearly fitting into a memory of Leyla’s. In those days, she had only waited for Leyla to step out of the booth and hoped she would be in a good mood so they would play on the way home. But her sister had called someone who was madly in love with her, who left his life behind to be with her. Lalah was a nobody to Ebi. Still, when the coin dropped with a metallic sound, something surged in her blood with the dial tone, something with a taste of fear and expectation. Before she dialed, she would say “hi,” a few times out loud, testing for any trembling, putting more power behind her voice. She listened and talked to Ebi with heavy breaths. Through the panes, her eyes slid over the cold life of the street, but she did not see the cars that went down the road with tire chains clattering, the men who walked with overcoat collars turned up, the women who sheltered their shopping baskets under their chadors, and the kids who threw snowballs.