The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  Eh, Khourdi—

  A voice sounds from behind where he stands and Reza remembers a pug-faced boy from the Nevabad barracks; a city boy; a loud-laugher; an arrogant cadet. Reza turns to find him, nameless and familiar, in a suit exactly like Reza’s, with a wife on his arm. The woman wears a thin cotton dress and greasy paint is smeared far outside the lines of her lips and eyes. She peers at Reza with a squint. He cannot decide if she is meek or monstrous.

  Khourdi! So long since Saqqez!

  Reza nods and stands tall in his stiff suit.

  Still the serious Kurd, eh?

  The city cadet laughs and takes Reza’s hand to kiss him once on each cheek in the manner of friends.

  They made you a captain, I hear? Complete with a transfer to Kermanshah. Bah, bah, bah. Very nice.

  Reza nods and takes his wife by the arm. She is not listening, Reza is convinced. She is warm and round with child and hoisted on heels and she cannot hear. The soldier talks on and on about their cadet days, his Kurdish habits, and for the first time in Tehran Reza must listen to his secrets spoken aloud. He looks at his wife and thinks: She is round and warm and full with child and cannot hear. I am a proper man who paid for her proper marriage and we are well with child. The sun rises and sets on Tehran and her and the baby within and she cannot hear. She is warm and well and full with child and knows nothing and cannot hear that I have been a dirty Kurd, an abandoned orphan and an imposter in this very moment and for all the moments until she is dead. No. She cannot hear. It is warm and she is well with a child of mixed blood that she will come to consider a stain, but today she is warm and happy in her international suit and hat and claps and does not one bit care.

  Remembering not to remember, as it was another lifetime ago and as shame is a thing to stuff into a corner or a small box or a lantern that needs to be lit, Reza takes Meena’s arm to walk away from the soldier and the wife with her skewed smile, garish and ignoble. The city boy shouts to Reza’s back.

  It is a rare move, no? To put you back so close to the nest? A rare move, don’t you think?

  Though the spring air is cool and the mulberries bloom pleasant and juicy, blackness spreads through Reza like spilled ink. He loses vision of the neat garden plots around him and holds his hat in a clutched grasp. He escorts his wife to a chair, where she sits, round in the belly and straight through the spine, and squints up at him from beneath the white rim of her new hat. He cannot see her because she has disappeared into the blackness, as the time before has come up to meet the time now and the time to come in a suffocating triangulation of fate.

  The band begins to play a lopsided, brash tune. Now Reza recognizes himself as he is seen: a demon made; responsible and held aloft by rank and pay, woman and stature. He sits beside the rounding girl, who is satisfied in her high dress and enraptured by the shah’s speech and clapping: a wife of the new state, brazen and, to her mind, free. She claps and claps and claps. In the instant he cannot fathom the Farsi spoken by the shah, cannot clap when they all clap and does not jolt as the rifle shots slap the air. He works to restrain a sudden and exuberant violence—an urge to kick a boy in the face, smack used girls in damp rooms, grasp the snarling city soldier by the hair until the bloodline stretches across his gallant forehead. He reaches for Meena’s hand, which she gives to him once the clapping is done, and Reza holds it and keeps shut his eyes and ears to everything but the birds that perch in the trees above, joyfully chirping their songs of spring.

  Book IV

  Kermanshah, Iran—1940 to 1969

  The Barometer

  Land spreads out in all directions, scorched and cratered and held back by the plate-glass windows of the train. The heat, however, pervades, and for the first days Reza takes the window seat to suck from a vein of air that blows in through a slim opening. The cabin is full and quiet. An infantry of soldiers takes up most of the seats, their faces blank, their hands busy fanning themselves with caps and newspapers. They nod courteously to the captain when they pass his seat. In the front of the car a statesman from the Majlis converses with a trio of dour-faced Europeans whose crisp white chins and cheeks are beaded in sweat. In the back corner an old woman holds a wire cage filled with parakeets on her lap. The birds, restless, move about in silence, threads strung tight through their brittle beaks. For days this is how they move and Reza sits quietly next to his wife, who knits without abate, the clink of the metal needles in counter-rhythm to the snap of the wheels on the tracks. The sound aggravates him but the train ride is even and the scenery flat and unassuming, and so he remains calm as the soldiers smoke, the Europeans sweat and the parakeets flit and dart against the smooth motion of the train.

  In time the earth changes shape and shade. Cimarron and orange ground, deep blue and violet skies give way to a constant, monochromatic gray. They travel over an expanse of colorless boulders held down by an undifferentiated sky. No gradations separate night from day and no villages show human life. The air chills and creeps through Reza and he moves Meena to the window seat, where she then shivers and knits. He cannot bring himself to look at the new land that passes outside the window; the very sight of it makes him nervous and he takes to his corner to nurse the sudden disquiet that oscillates through him as if he were a barometer, an elevated sphere of soul, so sensitive to shifts in atmosphere and panorama that what forces were once stable and primary in Reza (his suit, his boots, the title of his rank) fall now, volatile and subordinate, and he can’t remember for what reasons he took the train in the first place.

  Meena adds another line to the blanket and changes hands, lost in her own thoughts. The needles click happily, out of syncopation with the click of the train on the tracks below. Rocked by this new nausea, Reza grows aggravated at the disjointed sound and slaps the insidious metal wands, and the small blue blanket they birth, from his wife’s hands. Oblivious to such outbursts Meena hoists her girth, now formidable and awkward, out of the compartment and leaves Reza alone to sit, shiver and smoke.

  Days pass and the conductor stands on the last step of the boxcar and yells.

  Bistoun!

  Mashhad!

  Shiraz!

  The train empties and moves on, empties and moves on. The sky pushes down in fists and folds of clouds and the earth reaches high in hillocks and mounts to meet it until just the narrow black band of the train separates earth from heaven, paradise from the dead. Reza feels the pressure from above and below as distinctly as a dreamer feels held up and down by the floors and ceiling of sleep.

  Kermanshah!

  The captain and his wife are the only ones who disembark. The platform smells of new wood and the train falls silent beside them as they await the military consort that will take them to their new house.

  KERMANSHAH. The sign swings in the wind.

  Kermanshah, Meena reads aloud.

  The rain starts, gentle at first, then steady, then adamant and hard. The vista of the town, the mountains, their new home, is dimmed by pendulous drops that fall rapidly around the captain and his wife. After some minutes two cars and a large camion arrive and soldiers, cadets, sergeants—high and low ranks alike stationed to await his arrival and build his house and prepare the city for his imminent command—spill out to pay respect to their captain, who is wet and getting wetter. Reza points his crop in the direction of their luggage and uses all his energy to order the loading of all trunks and supplies as the rain falls, downward on the captain’s hat and hands, downward on his wife’s globe stomach, down on their valises and everywhere. They ride in the car: Reza, his wife, the driver and the unborn child. They see nothing of the land through windows obscured with steam. The driver, a young lieutenant, focuses his eyes on the rearview mirror and addresses his captain.

  Agha Captain, I trust your train journey went well.

  Yes.

  And that the khanoum was comfortable?

  Yes.

  I am sure they informed you in Tehran that we are dealing with the reverberations of the Kurd
revolt and uprising of Kurds in Mahabad.

  Yes, I am informed.

  To have a state of their own, can you believe it, Agha Captain? They are but Kurds; what would they do with a nation?

  —

  These are interesting times, Agha Captain, very interesting . . . I am told you are to be responsible for the introduction of schools and programs and technology?

  Yes, those are some of my assignments.

  We are glad to have you. We are a small division but we will do for you what we can.

  Merci, sarhang.

  They drive through the rainy town, a tangle of twenty or thirty streets woven together with stones and old brick, and Reza wipes the steam from the window with his sleeve. The roads are made of dirt that is now mud and everywhere animals are tied to posts, women stoke fires with long flat pieces of tin and boys flap about, their heavy pant legs muddy and wet. They are dirty, these Kurds, and Reza makes no association between himself—the shine of his boots and the gleam of his belt—and these unfortunates who cannot even find shelter in the rain. The barometer evens out as he cannot recognize the land, the town or the people and he is glad to dismiss them, to feel no love in the face of their familiar faces, and tells the lieutenant the streets must be paved, at once.

  When they reach the house the rain has stopped.

  There is a kitchen with clay floors and a porcelain sink whose faucets only run cold. There is a divan and one electric light. Two rooms for sleeping, one with a door and one without. A veranda wraps around the house on all sides and an outhouse stands in the back. Reza’s house is made of concrete blocks and raised off the ground by concrete blocks and reached by five steps. The rain has turned all the builder’s dust and unmixed concrete powder to an ashen mud, and Reza leads Meena from the car by the crook of her elbow and watches her shoes sully quickly with the gray paste. She shields her eyes from the mist, as if dryness would afford her a better view of the bare house, the empty shed, the half-finished stable, the mountains and sagebrush. Meena turns to him after a quick moment, her eyes wide and watery with offense.

  Where is the glass for the windows? Why is there no marble on the floor?

  Reza leaves her and her remarks and what are soon to be tears of disbelief on the veranda and walks about with his crop, shouting to the men to place their things here and there. The men’s boots echo loudly on the dusty wood floors of the hollow home. He commands and orders and Meena paces the wet veranda with her hands on her head. When the men are done they stand before him to shake hands and welcome him with the cheek kisses more customary to father and son than captain and cadet. They congratulate their captain on his new home and apologize that it is not yet complete—The supplies were late in coming and Soon we will be finished—and then they leave. Their camion splashes off with the car behind it and Meena follows, dazed and indomitable. Reza watches her pregnant shape stumble pointlessly in the mud of the road that leads back to the train station. Not once does she look back to his calls, not once does she respond, and moves steadily away, like a pilgrim unconvinced of her new home.

  After the rain, the mountain air turns dry and brisk. Reza sits on the step and smokes a sodden cigarette and stares at the bend where Meena disappeared. After a time the clouds crack and indigo light pours through, sunless and clean, to illuminate the slate peaks around him, one after another, until he is sitting in the center of their steel glow. They are the same Zagros of his youth, the hiding place of his barracks, the peaks that shadowed over Saqqez; the spine of the Kurds. After the months in Tehran, a congested time made of doors and hallways and high tiny windows, Reza has forgotten how a horizon could be so consumed by such stone majesty, forgotten the manner in which these rocks, risen and ageless and labyrinthine, easily own the souls of all the men and children, birds and beasts that move before them.

  Reza smokes and thinks: if the rocks own all that is around, what then does he own?

  He sits up straight to take stock of what he, Agha Captain, can claim.

  There is the house, which does not belong to him but to his rank and his ability to do deeds both unwholesome and mindless. The trunks that are strewn about belong to his wife and his wife’s family. Not the ground, not the cement on it, not the cigarettes or his wet matches. Not his name or the money in his wallet. Even the clothes on his back and the boots on his feet are assigned by the shah and not for his purchase or keep.

  He is a man of nineteen or twenty or twenty-one, with a slim build. A man returned. A man without.

  He would like to claim Meena, and most especially the child in her belly, but they are gone. After his last cigarette Reza stands and spits out the bits of tobacco in his mouth and approaches the mud road, to set out and find his wife and hold something to him that will stay, if not in spirit at least in flesh. After a few steps in the direction of the mountains he stops. Their enormity presses forward to taunt him, to stop him. The endeavor is too much and he turns and walks back to his perch on the veranda, tired from the short effort and the heavy concern. He leans against the trunks and cases and night sets in, dark but for a half moon whose light outlines the highest peaks in bold traces of silver and white like heaven’s own fence.

  The throttle of the camion wakes him and before Reza remembers where he is, the engine stops and the air fills with the sound of laughter. For a moment Reza smiles too, mistaking it for a happy dream he might have had. He clears the sleep from his eyes to watch as the lieutenant, a tall man with clean boots, jumps out to open the door and offer his arm to Meena. The are joking and still laughing and she holds the crook of his elbow with two hands as the mud churns beneath her feet. The lieutenant calls to Reza, slumped against the luggage on the porch.

  Look what I found for you, Agha Captain! A pretty Tehrani girl. How did you manage to lose a gem like this?

  Meena looks down and says nothing as the lieutenant speaks.

  She was on the road into town, by herself, and I took her in for tea and some warming up in the barracks. You shouldn’t let this one out of your sight. The mountains are too high for a lady like this.

  On the steps she releases the lieutenant’s arm and thanks him with a shy smile Reza has never seen. She walks past him, into the house, where he can hear her heels thud and the sound of a faucet. Without a glance up at him, Reza thanks the soldier.

  You are a lucky man to have such a lovely wife. What I would give for a Tehrani woman in this place . . . the women here are bitter and already old at fifteen. But what can you do? This is our sacrifice to the shah, mageh-nah?

  The lieutenant stands a moment too long before leaving the porch and walking back to the camion, which he starts with a noisy acceleration. When he is gone the night quiets again and Meena comes out to the veranda and stands beside him, her shoes dripping, wet and clean. Reza notices her face is wet too, moist and flush from the walking and crying. What ever astonishment and anger she carried from the train station is gone and the softness is entirely sad.

  Our house, you promised . . . the chandeliers and marble . . .

  She shakes her head and walks into the house, leaving him on the veranda, where he cannot find reason or energy to follow after her, the landscape around him so incapacitating, so calming. Reza digs his hands deep into his pockets, slides closer to the cement of the floor and closes his eyes for an easy sleep. They come when it is darkest, in the nadir of the night. From land and sky, branch and burrow, to watch the flesh in slumber. The host of truth tellers gathers: the owl and javelina, the silent basilisk and lurking coyote, the living and the dead, sent forth by the land herself to carefully circle the sleeping form and keep their gaze fixed with their black-eyed, blue-eyed, red-eyed stares. He is not their captain or cadet or incapable husband, but a long-lost son, and they come to gently welcome their boy back.

  Glasses for the Glare

  He wears the glasses all the time, so much, in fact, that the cadets and officers at the barracks mimic their new captain’s shaded look, thinking it the most recent
trend from Tehran. For the first month the military office in Kermanshah is filled with soldiers in sunglasses, even on the cloudy late summer days, bumping into desks, each other and the occasional old man, each in his individual dark.

  Reza does not explain himself and keeps busy with paperwork and patrols of Kermanshah and the surrounding lands. No one questions the young captain’s ways as he walks through the streets and alleys ordering the instant removal of posters that claim KURDISH INDEPENDENCE! and A CALL FOR UNITY! and JOIN TO SUPPORT THE REPUBLIC OF MAHABAD! A HOME FOR THE KURDS OF IRAN! Now and again he will tear the poster off himself, with the tip of his rifle or even his hands, in such a controlled fury that all the Kurds and cadets watching quickly understand how a man so young came to hold such an important post. They follow him without further question and his first days and weeks are flamboyant ones, everyone certain a worthy flame burns behind those dark glasses.

  The cadets and officers are happy to oblige Reza and drive him from house to house, farm to farm, where he stands in the doorways and at the edges of fences and claps his hands once or twice and calls for the men. The Kurd men come and stand without fear at the instant interrogation. They answer all his questions (Have you made contact with Barzani’s men? Do you have weapons? How many sons do you have?) with shakes (No, no, none) of their head and the captain believes none of it. He orders the houses searched, the animals let out of pens and sheds, the women and daughters disturbed in the kitchens. The captain makes a great show of his disgust at their meager homes and smelly flocks, and the cadets, who toss about hay and rugs and grain and chickens and small children in search of guns, hold their noses alongside. The scene of guns and boots and unnecessary humiliation follow the captain wherever he goes and the word spreads among the Kurds, who begin to dread the rumble of motor engines and the sound of his shout.