Listen. Can you hear them now? Buzzing just over there, do you hear it? They sing to their mother, they sing a new song with rhyme, Ir-an, Maman, Ir-an, Maman, my dutiful six. She wrings and snaps and they hold and hang. And here I must hang my own head, as I have lied to you, shah. I lie to you when I lie with her. She is a fine woman, one of your very own, a proper Tehrani, lover of all things foreign: perfume and books, ideas and attitudes. I lie with her every night, our maman Ir-an. But let me not be unduly dutiful—let us have honesty among modern men—I take her, like a good husband, proper in the eyes of God, but think only of washing her, inside out, with the white cream soap of my Kurdish seed. A pardon for my vulgarity (but come now, what is a little vulgarity among men?). Let me admit: I take this woman who is my wife from behind, where she cannot reach me with the wring and snap of her hands (she is forever wringing and snapping), and spread myself out inside her until my loyalty to you is extinguished. I scatter inside her the timeless seed of this un-named, un-nationed place and curse you. For what is a nation, shah oh shah, but a growth in the wall of a womb? I lie to you when I lie with her and her schooled mind, street walk and songs, her hate of well water and dry air and the stone gods all around us.
And I lie with my own shame, night and after night.
I could not help my blasphemous imaginings: I’ll lie with her, and lie to you, and fill her full with my mountain blood and then erase her and we will see whose soldiers my children will grow to be, shah oh shah.
They are gone, have gone in, our queen and her bees, and I have filled my head with smoke and heat enough for the sting to subside into a dull throb, enough for the laundry to hang and swing before me like flags. Ah, shah oh shah, what do we care? This land will outlive us and there will be nothing but to lie beneath it atop each other: I lie on you, you on her, the lot of us on the bodies of the long dead. We lie together under the earth, first as flesh, then as rot, then as dry, sandy bone, then as sand itself. Even my children, those dutiful little sarbazes, holding and hanging the wash, will not outlive the cracks in mountain rocks, the push of a summer storm. It’s all I can do, to lie and smoke and sigh and know that just as the wind blows the drops of water from the wash, we too will be dry and gone. It is a thought I sleep to, shah oh shah.
Ah, but, shah oh shah, in these years my flock has flown.
For the loss of mother and love, shah oh shah, for nothing, away my flock has flown. I have orphaned them just as I was once orphaned and now they have absconded from these stone palaces and abandoned me in the shadows of their escapes. Escapes you made possible with your modern Iran full of roads and rails to drain this long-loved land of so much blood. They have taken a flight above these Zagros, across this Iran, and traveled distances I cannot contest, farther than far. Even my Naasi, young and last and most un-mothered, folded herself into the trunk of the valet’s car and disappeared. And I am left, an old man, impotent and encased in a flaccid shell, without brethren, wife or child, a eunuch of devotion beholden to you, shah oh shah. (You too will soon flee, to keep the blood in your neck and the beat in your heart, and just barely escape the revolution that will crush your father’s legacy and hand over the rubble to an ayatollah wrapped in black robes and myths so old even you can’t remember them.)
Maybe a map?
Maybe a map with lines that lead?
That is how I will seek my fledglings, shah oh shah. I will draw a map for myself and a map for them and that is how we will all be found.
Your father was quite the mapmaker, shah oh shah, determined on his unlined images of Iran, without borders, unconstrained, larger in the old man’s imagination than whatever dimensions a page could hold. In service to your father with such faith, I too made some of the finest maps. Maps to extend borders, maps to bring troops from here to there, maps to find the clandestine tribe, maps to still the nomads and a map to punish those who would not stay still. Maps to capture the aghas, militiamen and brigands. Maps to find the weather-wizened shepherd and his frightened wife and a special map for killing them and yet another map to give directions for the placement of their bodies for all determined shepherds to find and fear. There were maps for the shoot and kill and maps to make you forget the shot and death.
I have made a dozen maps and now I must make another.
A map to lead the orphan home; a map to love.
I will begin with the crisscross of my own maman’s lap, an X to start from. From there a line to the massacre and another line away from the fright of the boy who gave himself readily to an army, all for the sake of shined boots. Here is where I took my first wrong turn of many, shah oh shah. Out of fear and the slow spin of my baba’s severed head I ran into your lap, from which I sucked at the sour metal milk and misery. But on this map, I make no mistakes and draw a circle to return the boy home, to take his place in the X of his maman’s lap and wait for the next battle and victory, to be a hero on his land.
Then there will be instructions for how to find the love of a Kurdish girl, light-eyed and thick-legged and proud (including the scant hints on where to dig the children out from her). And finally a map for the children with clear directions for how to move through and around the mountains into the dark and joyous caves and then down again into the crisscross of their maman’s lap and then away again, to the mountains for my boys and to the gardens where my girls will weave peacock feathers into fans. All the movements in a circle, from lap to lap and love to love.
Yes, shah, I must draw a map, a map to bring back the hearts that have strayed from love.
The night is mild and the moon is bright and I have pen and paper enough. So I must begin here, with this land drained of my blood, void of the cry of swaddled child, running child, fallen child; from this perch I will draw my children back to me. I will devise a clear key and mark all lines boldly so there will be no mistakes and no heart will get lost. Let us work then, shah oh shah, burn a candle through this night and hold tight for the welcoming of the father and mother and child, the imagined reunions: an oncoming cavalcade, bright eyes and shouts of Salaam, Maman! Salaam, Baba! sweet enough to make an old man cry.
Alas, I lie again.
I am not a mapmaker, only a man of stone.
Here I am immobile and clutched in this cunt of rock where all I can do is watch the line of smoke that stretches across the horizon. I am as frail as that silver wisp. I can sit here on my stone throne, as a boy birthed of the mountain (see, is this not a mountain in the shape of a snug chair?), and I am at once a boy and at once an old man and time cinches itself and I am returned, frail, to an earth strong and revolving that each day spins beneath our feet such that no matter how much we move, how far we pledge our loyalties, how long the distance to our desires, we will forever step and die in the same spot. She turns and turns below our feet each day and around the sun each year and we are always and again ourselves on top of her, on top of our history and our dead. I have marched, shah oh shah, once with the Kurds, once with you, once alone with the thrush of starlings at my fingertips, and still I am an orphan of this earth, left behind by her slow spin. Though I have left my step here and there, now I must sit, stuck on this perch, over this vista, in this tight clasp of rock, stuck to watch, to smoke, to sing and die, die into dust, loyal to the winds of an unspeakable home.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the creative writing faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and to Carl Djerassi for his generous fellowship that allowed me the crucial nine months of snow and solitude to complete this book. I would also like to thank Emory University for awarding me the 2007–2009 Creative Writing Fiction Fellowship.
Thank you to Ellen Levine for loving the book and helping it find a home. And to that home, which turned out to be Anton Mueller, editor extraordinaire, to whom I am grateful for the encouragement and the challenges. A million thanks for believing in the work, championing it and taking it with you.
This book would not exist if not for the generous storytelling, me
mory, and time of my aunts, uncle and father: Kambiz, Kamran, Gashi, Minou, Mandana and Fariba. Though the characters and events of this book are fictional, the text derives much of its flavor from the afternoons and evenings I spent listening to their reminiscences and recollections. I am wholly grateful for their cooperation in those early stages of research, and their stories continued to serve as inspiration throughout the writing and editing of this book.
I would also like to thank Mehray Etamadi for her assistance and inspiration.
I am deeply indebted to many guides, and of them I most warmly thank: Ginu Kamani for her fire and relentless electricity with which she ignited (and continues to ignite) me; Micheline Marcom for drawing my gaze to the infinite wonders hidden in book after book, and for the conversations and her steadfast belief in the sanctity of the work; Cristina Garcia for first recognizing there was a book hidden somewhere in the random pages I handed to her that spring long ago, and for her encouragement, connections and excitement that have made these last two years a joyful journey rather than a nerve-racking one. I am forever grateful.
Of friends, there are too many to list here. In the years spent writing this book, a few were omnipresent whom I’d like to thank: Keenan for reading and understanding and with whom I look forward to a long literary friendship; Blaine and Brent for their presence in the house and in my heart; Odiaka, who was a fan from the beginning and an excellent harbor during the storms of doubt; Saneta and Helen for reminding me to take my time. And Erika—who knew my sister would have such wide-eyed stares?
The warmest love to my parents, Kamran and Fereshteh. Your support and love brought this work to life. Merci.
About the Author
Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977 but left with her family in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. The Age of Orphans is her debut novel and the first in a trilogy about three generations of Kurdish men.
Copyright © 2009 by Laleh Khadivi
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Khadivi, Laleh.
The age of orphans : a novel / Laleh Khadivi.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60819-158-1
1. Kurds—Iran—Fiction. 2. Orphans—Fiction. 3. Conflict (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.H315A73 2009
813'.6—dc22
2008032551
First U.S. Edition 2013
This electronic edition published in 2013
www.bloomsbury.com
The Age of Orphans Page 22
