My Uncle Napoleon

by Iraj Pezeshkzad

  Dabir Khaqan’s car was waiting at the door, with Dear Uncle’s luggage tied down on its roof. The Indian was walking up and down beside the car. As soon as he saw him Dear Uncle said, “How lucky to see you, brigadier, and to be able to say goodbye to you.”

  “Have a good trip, sahib.”

  Dear Uncle sat in the back of the car and Mash Qasem took his place beside the driver. At the same time Dear Uncle kept up his conversation with the Indian, “Yes, it’s quite a while since I’ve been on a pilgrimage to Masumeh’s shrine . . .”

  The Indian cut him off, “But aren’t you afraid, sahib, that the road might be unsafe with all these goings on?”

  “No, my dear sir, that’s just talk, rumors, the fighting’s over . . . and then I’ve faith that the blessed Masumeh will protect her own pilgrims.”

  All the relatives were crowded around the car, but the Indian wasn’t going to give up.

  Asadollah Mirza, who I’d expected to pay more attention to this conversation than anyone else, was busy exchanging glances with Lady Maharat Khan, who was peering into the street from behind her lace curtains. I had my eyes fixed anxiously on the Indian’s mouth.

  “Sahib, you aren’t taking your lady wife with you?”

  I could guess that Dear Uncle was raging inwardly, but he answered in an apparently calm voice, “No, I won’t be staying more than a few days.”

  “But sahib, however short separation might be it is being very hard on the heart, as the poet says, ‘My love’s in Lahavard, while I am here in Nayshapur . . . .’”

  I stared at Dear Uncle’s face. When he heard the name “Nayshapur” come from the Indian’s mouth he suddenly gave such a start that it was as if someone had passed an electric current through his body. For a moment he stared at the Indian with his mouth wide open, and then in a voice that could hardly struggle out of his throat he said to the driver, “Mamad, drive on!”

  The engine started, the driver revved it and everyone took a step backwards. The car set off and dust filled the alleyway.

  I made my way over to Asadollah Mirza and looked at him. He put his hand on my shoulder and said quietly, “Dear Uncle’s goose is well and truly cooked. You can go and sleep easy . . .”

  At this moment Dear Uncle’s wife’s voice rose above the hubbub, “Don’t forget tonight . . . we’re having ash-reshteh soup, to remember the Master and give him a good send off.”

  Asadollah Mirza quickly went over to the Indian, who was about to return to his house and quietly said to him, “Brigadier, you said it beautifully . . . well done!”

  And then he went on in a louder voice, “But the Master’s wife’s cooked ash-reshteh tonight, and they’re asking you and your wife to do us the honor of joining us.”

  Everyone looked at Asadollah in astonishment, because relations with the Indian were not of the kind that involved their being invited to the house, but Dear Uncle’s wife could not refuse an invitation now and she said, “Of course, they’ll be more than welcome.”

  The Indian stood on ceremony, too. “No, sahib, we won’t trouble you . . . there’ll be many opportunities, another day . . .”

  But Asadollah Mirza wasn’t giving up so easily. “Moment, brigadier, you’re like a brother to us. What do you mean, ‘trouble’? I promise you the Master’s wife will be very upset if you refuse her invitation!”

  And he turned his face toward Dear Uncle’s wife. “Isn’t that so, ma’am? I know the kind of person you are . . . of course you’ll be upset . . .”

  “Sahib, perhaps my wife will be being busy . . . perhaps I might be able to be coming by myself . . .”

  “Well, if your wife is busy you can’t leave her alone, and we’ll have to leave it for another time. But please, ask her . . .”

  And he glanced over at the window of the Indian’s house. When he saw the English woman behind the window he shouted across, “My Lady! Lady Maharat Khan!”

  And when the English woman stuck her head out of the window he invited her to supper in his broken English. Lady Maharat Khan said simply that if her husband had no other plans, she had no objection.

  “You see, brigadier . . . and so we’ll certainly expect you. You are doing us a great honor, oh yes indeed.”

  The Indian promised he would be there and we went back to the garden. I went over to Asadollah Mirza again and said, “Uncle Asadollah . . .”

  But he cut me off, “Let me see now . . . Dustali, tonight you’d better keep your eyes to yourself! Because this Brigadier Maharat Khan has two cobras that he keeps in a cage in his house, and if anyone starts ogling his wife he takes one of these snakes and throws it in the fellow’s bed . . . not at all funny! Don’t think I’m joking! Do you want me to take you now to see the snakes?”

  Asadollah Mirza spoke in such a serious way that Dustali Khan turned pale. “Good God, are you telling the truth, Asadollah?”

  “You bet your life I am! . . . of course he doesn’t tell people why he keeps them, he doesn’t even let on that he has any snakes . . . but Lady Maharat Khan told me one day.”

  Dustali Khan looked over his shoulder and said, “Now please don’t mention the name of Lady Maharat Khan in front of Aziz al-Saltaneh, because tomorrow she’ll be imagining that I’m in love with this English woman. It was your jokes that started all that ruckus last year.”

  TWELVE

  AT THE BEGINNING of the evening all our close relatives were gathered in Dear Uncle’s house. Although I was very happy to be together with Layli and away from Dear Uncle’s watchful eyes, occasionally I’d fall to thinking of Dear Uncle’s trip and then a kind of horror would take hold of me from head to toe. A few hours had gone by since Dear Uncle’s departure and I had no idea where he was. Asadollah Mirza had assured me that Dear Uncle hadn’t gone to Nayshapur, but I knew very well that he wasn’t the kind of person who would go toward Qom when according to Mash Qasem the English were within six miles of it. And so where was he?

  At every moment I wanted to ask Asadollah Mirza’s opinion, but he was so deeply engaged in conversation with Lady Maharat Khan that it was impossible to get near him.

  In the midst of the party’s cheerful laughter and chatter my father was called to the front door. Hoping that there was some news of Dear Uncle I went to the door after him.

  It was Seyed Abolqasem’s son. He said that his father was asking that my father come by to see him for a moment. At first my father was livid and said that he would never set foot in the house of that worthless fake Seyed, but the messenger’s insistent pleading—he said it was an important matter, a matter of life and death—finally convinced him to go. When he was ready to set off I managed, by pleading and begging, to get him to let me come along too.

  “All right, all right, you come, too . . . but I can’t understand why you’d want to leave a party to come to a preacher’s house!” When we reached Seyed Abolqasem’s house the preacher’s son acted like someone who wanted to enter a place surreptitiously. First he glanced all round, and when he saw that the street was empty he knocked at the door in a special way. The Seyed himself opened the door, quickly ushered us into the yard, and closed the door again.

  “This way please, this way, if you’d go into the sitting room . . .”

  My father went ahead and I followed him into the sitting room. We both stopped dead in our tracks with astonishment. Dear Uncle Napoleon was sitting on a mattress, still in the same travelling clothes, slumped back against some cushions. And Mash Qasem was there too, kneeling on the floor at the end of the room.

  “You? What are you doing here, sir? But didn’t you go to Qom?”

  Dear Uncle’s face was even paler and more contorted than usual. In a strangled voice he said, “Please, sit down and I’ll explain . . . but I asked that you come alone, and now this boy . . .”

  My father interrupted him, “The S
eyed’s son didn’t say anything about that. He just said that the Seyed had something he needed to talk to me about.”

  Dear Uncle turned to me, “There’s a good lad, go in the yard for a moment, I’ve something private I have to discuss with your father.”

  I immediately left the room. Seyed Abolqasem was just getting on his donkey to go out; when he saw me he said, “Hey boy, do me a favor, I’ve sent my son on an errand . . . there’s no one in the house, bolt the door behind me as I go out, and tell the Master I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  I closed the door behind the preacher. The preacher’s wife wasn’t there, his son had gone out, the situation couldn’t have been better for me. I stood behind the door to listen to their conversation. Dear Uncle was saying, “When I say the English don’t take their eyes off me for a minute, my brothers and the rest of the family say I’m exaggerating . . . but did you see how they’d discovered my plan to go to Nayshapur! Did you see how he talked about Nayshapur?”

  My father said, “But don’t you think this Indian just happened to say the poem by coincidence?”

  “My dear sir! I’m supposed to be going to Qom; no one besides you and me knows that in fact I’m going to Nayshapur. And then this Indian just accidentally at the last moment recites that ‘My love’s in Lahavard, while I am here in Nayshapur’ verse?”

  Mash Qasem jumped into the conversation too. “Why should I lie? To the grave it’s ah . . . ah . . . even I didn’t know the Master wanted to go to Nayshapur. What buggers them English are! . . . O God, just let me go on a pilgrimage to the saintly Hasan’s tomb so’s I can light a candle to him and he’ll destroy them English. You don’t know what miracles the saintly Hasan’s performin’, I’d die for him, I would . . . there was a man in our town once who . . .”

  Dear Uncle cut him off, “That’s enough, Qasem! Let us talk, will you! Now what do you suggest I do? When I left the town today, however much I thought about it I couldn’t see my way clear, and so through back streets and I don’t know what we came here to Seyed Abolqasem’s house . . . and now I’m to go back home so that this Indian will immediately inform London . . . I’ll bet you anything you like that now that Indian is lying in wait with a telescope behind a window in his house spying on what’s going on in our home . . .”

  My father interrupted him, “Then I’ve some good news to give you. At this very moment the Indian brigadier is in the sitting room of your house eating ash-reshteh at the gathering for your send-off!”

  Dear Uncle suddenly froze to the spot as if electrocuted, and in a voice that sounded as though it were coming from the bottom of a well he said in broken phrases, “What? What? . . . the brigadier . . . the Indian brigadier . . . in my house . . . mine? Then they’ve stuck the dagger into my back?”

  When he heard this news Dear Uncle’s condition worsened. His face turned a whitish yellow, his upper lip and his whole mustache trembled. He spoke in broken, incomprehensible phrases.

  My father seemed to be enjoying torturing Dear Uncle in this way. But of course he outwardly showed himself to be sympathetic and concerned. Once more he turned the knife in Dear Uncle’s wound. “As you yourself say, they stuck the dagger into your back . . . though it seems to me that the instigator isn’t the Indian fellow . . . they’ve a thousand ways to close their files . . .”

  He was silent for a moment and then went on, “I’ve never had the slightest suspicion of Brigadier Maharat Khan, but tonight in your house I was a bit worried about his wife. That English woman . . .”

  In a strangled tone, his eyes popping out of their sockets with rage and astonishment, Dear Uncle cut him off. “Then the brigadier’s wife came to my house, too? All of a sudden people have taken it into their heads to make my house a meeting place for the British Army’s General Staff, have they? What I have to know is, who brought them to my house?”

  My father wasn’t going to give up; with a thoughtful, mysterious air he said, “The thing which made me suspicious of her was that when she was looking through your photo album she stared a great deal at a big old photo of you in your Cossack uniform . . . and when someone there said it was a photograph of you she showed it to her husband and said something in English that I didn’t understand and then they whispered to each other for a moment.”

  Dear Uncle, who had been staring at my father’s mouth wide-eyed and with his own mouth wide open, suddenly clasped his hand against his heart, moaned, and slumped to one side.

  My father ran over to him and said, “The Master’s fainted . . . Mash Qasem, run and get Dr. Naser al-Hokama.”

  Dear Uncle suddenly raised his head and screamed out with all the strength left in his body, “No . . . no . . . sit down . . . I’m perfectly all right . . . Dr. Naser al-Hokama’s a lackey of the English . . . his cousin works for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.”

  While he was massaging Dear Uncle’s hands my father said to Mash Qasem, “Run and get a bowl of water.”

  Mash Qasem ran quickly into the yard. I hid myself in a corner until he took the bowl of water back into the sitting room. A swallow of water was enough to bring Dear Uncle back to himself. Leaning back against the cushions and with his eyes closed he whispered to himself:

  “When once a savage lion’s cornered you

  Accept your fate—what else is there to do?”

  In a reproachful voice my father said, “This accepting your fate talk isn’t like you. You’ve spent your life in the struggle, you can’t give up like this and let yourself be borne along by whatever happens. Great men are recognized as such at times of crisis . . . they appear in the midst of catastrophe . . . excellence and magnanimity and leadership . . .”

  Dear Uncle raised his head and with a thoughtful face said, “You are right. This is no time to take a back seat, in fact it’s impossible to take a back seat. We must continue the struggle. But the first factor for carrying on the struggle is that I have to stay alive, and with the malice they have against me it’s impossible the English will leave me alone. Today I stopped outside the city gate and stood at a café there to drink a glass of tea. You should have heard the stories about their atrocities that the people coming up from the south were telling.”

  It was a long time since Mash Qasem had said anything. He nodded his head and said, “God help us all, so far they’ve slaughtered two and a half million folks. God help Ghiasabad near Qom. Because the folks in Ghiasabad have really hammered them English . . . Ghiasabad’s done more ’n all the other places in the country put together . . . why there was a man in our town who . . .”

  Dear Uncle impatiently said, “Qasem! Enough! Let us think about the difficulties of our own situation.”

  Then he turned to my father, “What in your opinion should I do now?”

  My father stroked his chin and said, “In my opinion your continued existence is necessary for the country. You have to keep yourself alive for the sake of the people, and in a blind alley like this the best way is to hit the enemy by means of an enemy of his own. In my opinion your only means of salvation is the Germans. You have to place yourself under the protection of the Germans.”

  “The Germans! But there’s neither hide nor hair of them left here.”

  “Don’t you be so sure, sir! As far as appearances are concerned they’ve gone, but they have an immense underground organization in this very city. In my opinion you should write a letter to the Germans asking them to place you under their protection.”

  Dear Uncle was leaning forward with his neck stretched out, listening intently. My father went on, “It just so happens I know a means of sending such a letter . . .”

  “Who should I write the letter to?”

  “To Hitler in person.”

  Mash Qasem burst out joyfully, “Brilliant! I was wantin’ to say exactly that same thing. If there’s one man in the world, that man is Hitler.”

 
“So you pen a letter to Hitler asking that they look after you for a few months, until their army gets here, because there can be no doubt that in a few months’ time the German army will be here.”

  For a few minutes Dear Uncle, my father and Mash Qasem talked amongst themselves in such a way that it was difficult to make out the subject of their conversation. But it became clear when Mash Qasem got up and started looking for a pen and paper. The preacher’s inkstand was on a shelf in that same sitting room. Dear Uncle started writing with my father dictating the contents of the letter to him.

  “If you would write as follows: ‘To his esteemed excellency Adolf Hitler, great and glorious leader of Germany; in token of profound devotion and respect to your exalted glory. Your humble servant is sure that your exalted self is sufficiently aware of your humble servant’s and his late father’s long and arduous struggles against English colonial adventurism, nevertheless I shall take the liberty of setting out my struggles below . . .’ have you written that?”

  Dear Uncle was busy carefully writing.

  My father said, “Now write down a description of the Battle of Mamasani and the Battle of Kazerun and the other clashes with the English you were involved in, and then make some reference to Brigadier Maharat Khan and his English wife, and the fact that they’ve been detailed to keep you under observation . . . of course we’re not absolutely certain that this Indian is an English spy, but you write down with no ifs, ands or buts that you’re sure he’s one of their agents and . . .”

  Dear Uncle interrupted him, “What do you mean, we’re not absolutely certain? I’m as certain as the fact that I’m here in this room that this Indian is one of their agents and that he’s been detailed to keep me under observation.”

  “In any case write about him to the German leader . . . and at the end of the letter write down the phrase ‘Heil Hitler.’”