My Father's Notebook

by Kader Abdolah

  Iraqi planes bombed our houses one night, and we bombed theirs the next.

  One evening, during the second or third year of the war, the phone rang. It was Golden Bell.

  “Ishmael? Listen, Tina’s not well.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s been hit by a bomb.”

  “A bomb?”

  “Well, she didn’t exactly get hit, but …”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Last week, when the Iraqi planes started flying over Senejan. I think you’d better come up here.”

  How stupid of me. I should have phoned. I knew that Senejan had been bombed. I’d put the news in the paper myself. There had been a couple of deaths, but the planes had bombed an industrial area far from our house. How could Tina have been hit?

  I reached Senejan in the middle of the night. The city was in darkness. Not a single light was on. A man racing away on a bicycle yelled, “Saddam’s going to bomb the city tonight. He announced it on the radio this afternoon.”

  Everyone had fled into the mountains. How would I be able to find my family? I switched off my headlights and drove cautiously down the darkened streets to our house. I was hoping they’d left me a note. Just as I was about to park the car, a figure came out from under the trees.

  My father. We couldn’t communicate in the dark. He got in the car and gestured: “Drive! Get out of here!”

  “Where’s Tina?”

  “I carried her up to the mountains on my back,” I gathered from his gestures.

  I drove off. Once we were in the mountains, I hid the car behind a boulder and turned on the inside light. “What’s happened to Tina?” I signed.

  “She was at the home of your sister Marzi, who, by the way, is pregnant,” he signed back. “They were standing in the courtyard. Suddenly an airplane flew over the house and dropped a bomb.”

  “On her house?”

  “No, on a nearby tractor factory. But one of the walls in Marzi’s house collapsed. Tina thought the bomb was going to fall on the house. She pulled Marzi to the ground and lay on top of her to protect her. After the airplane left, Marzi got up. But Tina didn’t.”

  “Was she wounded?”

  “No. I mean, yes, her left arm was bleeding. But she didn’t open her eyes. They took her to the hospital. I went with them, I saw her lying in bed. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t know who I was. They had her strapped to the bed.”

  “Why?”

  “The doctor said that otherwise she’d scream and beat herself over the head again. He gave her an injection. She was acting strangely. I think it had something to do with that airplane. The doctor gave her an injection every day to make her sleep.

  “Five days ago I went to the hospital again. I was sitting on the chair beside the bed. Suddenly everybody started running out of the room. Tina opened her eyes and began to scream. I undid the straps, lifted her up, threw her over my shoulder and rushed out into the corridor.

  “I found a doctor. Tina was still screaming, so he gave her another injection.

  “‘What should I do?’ I gestured to the doctor. ‘Take her home,’ he said and gave me a bottle of pills.

  “Outside, people were running away. I carried Tina all the way home.”

  “Is she all right now?”

  “The wound has healed, but she still won’t wake up and she’s lost weight. I don’t understand it. I think it must have something to do with that airplane, don’t you?”

  I started the car and drove to a farm, where my family had been given temporary shelter in the barn. Golden Bell came out just as I was parking the car.

  “You found us!” she exclaimed. She held up an oil lamp. I kissed her and followed her inside.

  I almost didn’t recognise Tina in the dim light of the oil lamp. I checked the wound and it seemed fine. I couldn’t work out why she was still so sick. Could the bomb have contained some kind of poison?

  “Here, this is her medication,” my father signed. He handed me a half-empty bottle of pills.

  I looked at the label.

  “It’s Valium. How many have you been giving her?”

  “Four or five a day,” he replied.

  Had the Valium been knocking her out?

  “Here, keep the bottle in your pocket. We’re going to stop her medication for a while.”

  “Isn’t it any good?”

  “I don’t know. Come and help me carry her to the car.”

  “Are we taking her to the hospital?”

  “No, to Saffron Village. She needs to be in a quiet place, far away from airplanes. I’ll stay with you for a couple of days. If she doesn’t get any better, I’ll take her to Tehran.”

  The sun was just coming up as we drove into Saffron Village. We went to our summer house, the one my father had built in the time of Reza Shah. I hadn’t been there for years, but Tina and my sisters often spent the summer there.

  “Golden Bell, will you make Tina some soup? I’ll make the tea. And Father, will you go and get some fresh bread? I’m starving! Are you hungry, too, Golden Bell?”

  My sister Golden Bell—the best, the prettiest, the sweetest sister in all the world—walked with such a cheerful bounce that I suddenly felt optimistic. Surely hope, health and happiness were on their way to our summer house! She picked up a basket and went off with my father to get some vegetables.

  Tina lay like a corpse in bed. But all the signs—my burst of optimism, Golden Bell’s cheerfulness, the light in my father’s eyes, even the birds singing in the garden—pointed to Tina’s recovery. Soon she would open her eyes and look around quietly, without screaming.

  Suddenly I saw a white rabbit. We didn’t have white rabbits in our part of the country, but there it was, sitting outside our door. It hopped around for a while, quite merry, then disappeared.

  Now I was sure that things would soon be all right.

  The next day, when a fire was blazing in the stove and the soup was bubbling away, my father gestured, “Look! Tina’s trying to open her eyes.”

  I stayed for five days, days filled with the smell of soup, milk, fresh bread and burning logs.

  We took care of Tina and walked around the hills, laughing at the antics of a little white rabbit.

  Those days, too, came to an end.

  Mount Damavand

  Let’s climb to the roof of our country

  and pray.

  One night dozens of Iraqi airplanes appeared above Tehran and bombed the city for the umpteenth time. It was the heaviest bombardment to date.

  Radio Baghdad regularly issued warnings that warplanes were going to bomb Tehran. The broadcasters also urged people to leave the city, so twelve million inhabitants took to their heels. Sometimes the planes came, sometimes they didn’t. Saddam Hussein played the same game over and over again. People no longer knew whether to stay or go.

  If you grabbed your children and fled, the planes didn’t come, but if you stayed, the city was bombed. It was psychological warfare. When the planes did come, the nights were hell. They flew over the city with a terrifying roar. Your house shook, pictures fell from the walls, pots and pans bounced off the shelves, the cat crept under the covers, the baby cried and the bombs thudded to the ground, accompanied by the rattle of anti-aircraft guns. The all-clear finally sounded, only to be followed by the shriek of fire engines and ambulances. You’d rush outside to see which houses had been hit.

  But that night, when dozens of planes bombed Tehran simultaneously, killing and injuring hundreds, Khomeini took advantage of the chaos. He ordered his secret police to arrest the leaders of the leftist opposition. For years they’d been pinpointing hiding places, so even before the Iraqi planes had finished, most of the important party leaders had been rounded up.

  In the morning, on my way to an editorial meeting, I ran into one of my fellow editors. “We’ve got to get out of here fast. Almost all of the leaders have been arrested.”

  It meant the end of the party. I immediately went ba
ck to my flat to warn my wife, Safa, who took our daughter, Nilufar, to her grandmother’s house in Kermanshah. Then I destroyed whatever documents were in my possession. After that, all I could do was wait.

  So far I’ve said very little about Safa. That’s because I don’t want to stray from my father’s cuneiform notebook. Otherwise I would also have written more about my sisters and about their husbands’ tragic fate.

  I met Safa at the university. She sympathised with the party, although she wasn’t a member. She hadn’t been the one to seek contact. If we hadn’t met, she probably would have led a normal life, but because of me, she got involved in all kinds of underground activities.

  Until the revolution broke out, we met in secret. We knew that every rendezvous might be our last. The revolution made it easier for us to get together and we gradually dared to talk about the future.

  The day after the fall of the shah, I had a date with Safa. I asked her to marry me.

  Our wedding was a simple affair: just two of our friends who acted as witnesses and the civil servant who performed the ceremony. In such momentous times, when we were all so busy, a wedding banquet was out of the question. We celebrated our wedding in a café, talking with our comrades deep into the night.

  Three weeks later I took Safa to meet my parents.

  “This is my wife.”

  “Really?” cried Tina. “She’s beautiful.”

  My sisters, surprised at this unexpected turn of events, embraced Safa. My father kept his distance. He knew I had a girlfriend, because I’d shown him a picture of Safa. In his eyes, however, the bride’s health was of prime importance in a marriage. He scrutinised her from head to toe.

  Not only did she appear to be healthy, she was also vivacious and sociable. I could see the approval in his eyes. Safa walked over to him and embraced him. And because she knew the story of his first wife’s death, she took his hand and held it to her cheek. “See,” she said, “I’m healthy.”

  What else? I can’t imagine that my father would have written more about his first meeting with Safa.

  She once spent a week with my family in Saffron Village. She reported that she’d had a wonderful time, that she’d quickly mastered our sign language and that she and my father had sat up late every night discussing the state of the world.

  “The state of the world?” I asked.

  “Yes. And we roared with laughter. I really laughed a lot.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’d use the wrong signs and they’d burst out laughing.”

  She never got another chance to visit my parents.

  When Safa was in the final stages of pregnancy, she invited Golden Bell to our apartment. After that, when we had to move again for reasons of security, Golden Bell no longer knew how to get in touch with us.

  In the dark time that followed the arrest of the party leaders, Safa and my daughter went to Kermanshah. She was planning to stay for a few weeks.

  As fate would have it, those few weeks turned into years. By the time Safa was finally able to leave Kermanshah, her whole life had changed.

  She was forced to move to a new country, where every-thing—from the front-door key to the bathroom mirror—was different. The teapot, the floor, the ceiling, even the ground beneath her feet, all were different.

  A KLM flight brought her to Amsterdam, where I welcomed her with a bouquet of red, yellow and orange tulips. We took a train from the airport and then a taxi from the station to 21 Nieuwgracht.

  But let’s go back to Tehran.

  A week after the arrests we still didn’t know how badly the party had been hit or what the movement was going to do next.

  While we waited, the secret police did their utmost to break the will of the party leaders, subjecting them to various forms of torture, in the hope that they would eventually bow down before the mullahs. The prisoners were thrown in separate cells and not allowed to sleep or sit. For five days and nights, they remained on their feet. Every time they nodded off, they got a bucket of ice-cold water thrown in their faces. They were given nothing to eat but a bowl of soup. Banned from using the toilets, they were forced to go in their pants. To weaken their resistance even further, their captors put tape recorders in their cells and forced them to listen night and day to Khomeini’s speeches. The torture went on until the prisoners agreed to kneel before the prison imam on TV, confess that they were Soviet spies and beg for forgiveness.

  The regime wanted the opposition to see what it was up against.

  Dr Pur Bahlul was arrested for the second time. Having spent years in prison under the shah, he was now flung in jail by the mullahs. He was forced to crawl to the prison imam on his knees and say, “La ilaha illa Allah. I repent. From now on I will follow you.”

  They wanted millions of viewers to see that he was worthless, a mere worm hoping to become a human being, if only the imam would grant him forgiveness.

  At home alone, I turned on the TV to watch the evening news. An old man appeared on the screen. A sick man with a pallid complexion. I knew who he was, or thought I did. There were a few seconds of deliberate silence meant to put the fear of God into the viewers. This ominous pause was followed by an icy voice, announcing that, after the news, the Soviet spy, Dr Pur Bahlul, would confess his crime.

  The news didn’t last long, but it was the longest news broadcast I’d ever seen. The dentist finally appeared. I couldn’t believe it. The old Dr Pur Bahlul was dead and gone. The devil stared out from his eyes. He claimed that he was a spy who had betrayed his country. He said that from now on he was a follower of Khomeini, and that Khomeini was God’s earthly shadow. He repudiated his past, his party and his comrades, and knelt before the imam. Then he cried like a baby.

  The party had been shattered, like an earthenware jar that falls to the ground. Hundreds of comrades were arrested, dozens were executed and hundreds more fled to the border areas and managed to escape.

  During the shah’s regime you could count on the support of the people. Even total strangers would take you in. During the regime of the mullahs, all that changed.

  The shah had governed in his own name, but the mullahs governed in the name of God. Khomeini himself appeared on television and said that God’s kingdom was in danger. He ordered his followers to keep a close watch on their neighbours.

  Suddenly your country was no longer your own. You didn’t dare take a step. You had the feeling that people were watching you from behind their curtains.

  After the revolution I wanted to make use of my new-found freedom to travel around the country with my father. To board a train with him and journey to the oil fields in the south, where the gas flames shot up into the air and the earth was dark with oil. Do you see that? Do you smell that? Beneath our feet, beneath this soil, there was oil. Lots of oil.

  I wanted to show him the giant tankers that transported the oil to other countries, but I never got the chance. Although he always looked in wonderment at our gas stove, he never found out where those blue flames came from.

  I wanted to take him to our marvellous Persian desert, where the sand glistened in the sun like gold. I wanted to ride across the desert with him on a camel, stop in a remote place and eat a simple meal with the villagers: a bit of camel’s milk and dry bread, a bowl of dates and a palmful of water that oozed gently from the heart of the earth.

  I wanted to sleep beside him on the roof of a desert café, where you can reach up into the sky, with its unforgettable moon and millions of stars, and pull it over you like a velvety-blue blanket.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to do that, either.

  I longed for just enough freedom to go with him to Isfahan, to visit the mosques he knew so well and talked about so often. I wanted to take him to the centuries-old Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque, and even though I’d stopped praying long ago, I would have stood beside him and prayed with him and for him.

  But my deepest wish was to climb Mount Damavand with my father.


  Mount Damavand is the highest mountain in Iran and also the most difficult to climb. People refer to it as the roof of Persia. I no longer remember whether it’s 18,934 or 18,349 feet high, but it has one very distinct feature: one side of the peak is always covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, and the other side is always warm. Once you’re at the top, you can see that the summit is shaped like a bowl—a great, big, warm bowl. It’s actually the mouth of a once-active volcano. If you put your ear to the ground, you can hear the volcano breathing.

  It’s dangerous to climb Mount Damavand in the winter. The best time is spring, when the storms have died down and the ice has not quite melted. Then lots of mountain climbers cautiously make the ascent. As soon as they leave the frozen mass of snow behind, they begin to sing love songs, such as this one:

  To goft keh gol dar ayeh mu biyayom.

  Gel-e alam dar amad kiy miayi?

  You said you’d come to me the moment the flowers blossomed.

  Now that every flower has blossomed, when can I expect you?

  At the time of Dr Pur Bahlul’s televised “confession”, I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Would I be arrested, too? Would I end up in jail? Would I crawl to the mullahs on my hands and knees and beg them for forgiveness? I didn’t know how much danger I was in, but I did know this: I didn’t want to flee. My comrades and I might be required to lead the party through these difficult times.

  First I had to leave my flat and go into hiding for a few days, to avoid falling into the hands of the secret police. Then I’d come back and see what was left of the party. I’d go looking for the rest of my comrades, so we could pick up the pieces. In the meantime, I had to get out fast. But where was I to go?

  Suddenly, the answer came to me: Mount Damavand!

  Even though it was winter, I might be able to make one of my dreams come true. I raced to the basement and gathered up my climbing gear, along with some hiking boots and warm clothes for my father.