The Cypress Tree

by Kamin Mohammadi

  The first Abbasian that Bagher brought into the Company fold was Shapour. My eldest daiey, Ali Shapour had married Ashraf and settled down to a modest life that Fatemeh Bibi never really thought befitting of her first-born. Abbas had approved the match and Shapour had been besotted, so there was no going against it, but Fatemeh Bibi could not help but feel that he had married beneath him. ‘My son, as fine as a bunch of roses, marrying a woman like that!’ she had exclaimed in quiet moments; in later years, her daughters took up the cry too.

  As a young girl, I loved nothing more than to visit Daiey Shapour and Zan-daiey Ashraf’s small house on the outskirts of Abadan, a world away from Braim’s manicured lawns. Zan-daiey Ashraf was always kind and while I loved her I feared her too. Ashraf-khanoum was a formidable woman and she loved her Shapour fiercely, daring anyone to find fault in the quality of care she lavished on him. But her tongue was sharper than even Abbasian ones and no-one liked to challenge her to her face.

  By contrast, Daiey Shapour was the sweetest out of all my softhearted and loving uncles. He was gentle and kind, and there beat within him one of life’s noblest hearts. He and his family lived in Abadan in a small house whose back yard opened into a dusty alleyway where we always ended up playing with Daiey Shapour’s five children. I remember well his three eldest boys as they were just a few years older than me and, being a tomboy, I preferred to leave toys behind indoors and instead run in the dust with the boys on their escapades. Of the three boys it was Ebby who was my particular friend; a scruffy boy with a crew cut whose nose ran constantly and whose legs were always covered in the dirt of the streets. Ebby’s encrusted nose and bandy legs notwithstanding, we had the most fun together, chasing each other for hours. I usually came off the worst and my mother was constantly scolding me for tearing my pretty dresses and grazing my knees.

  One night, after an especially hard fall in the stony street when I was playing with Ebby, my daiey showed me how he could make the tail lights of his old 2CV blink like a beating heart. Daiey Shapour crouched by the car, and I perched on his knee as, with great patience, he cut out some shapes and, dismantling the lights one by one, arranged the shapes within the lights. He then reassembled them, switched on the engine and tapped his foot up and down on the brake so that, to my delight and wide-eyed wonder, the lights turned into red beating hearts. ‘You see Daiey-joon,’ he said, folding me in one of his big hugs, his springy hair tickling my cheek, ‘that’s how my heart goes when I see you – blink blink – that’s how much I love you, ghorbonet beram.’

  I was charmed beyond measure, the scraped knees forgotten, and every time I saw the back of a 2CV disappearing down a road in Abadan from then on, I squinted to see if it was Daiey Shapour’s heart blinking for me. Even in years to come and far away from Abadan, I could never break that habit of casting a lingering look at the tail lights of passing 2CVs to see if they were blinking their love for me.

  * * *

  Bagher had started Shapour’s career in the Company’s vehicles division, but he had made Shapour go to night school and get his high school diploma to qualify for the job. Shapour was quickly promoted to head of department and he never ceased to tell his friends and family of Bagher’s generosity and faith in him. He became the first of my uncles to be devoted to my father and soon after the other Abbasian boys started to find employment at the oil company. It was the major employer in Abadan and with Fatemeh Bibi so keen on the security it offered, it was perhaps natural that her sons gravitated towards it. But there is no doubt that Bagher’s presence in their lives contributed to the attraction – he was respected, held in awe, in fact, by his brothers-in-law and they took his advice seriously. Any help he offered was gratefully received and Fatemeh Bibi noted that her sons, always so cheeky and high-spirited, became more serious and sombre when Bagher was around. They stopped making dirty jokes and minded their manners diligently. This held true not only when they were in his presence – when he extended a helping hand to them they did their best to prove to him that they deserved it. In short, they sought Bagher’s approval in a way they had never craved anyone else’s, not even Abbas’.

  Daiey Pardis, one of my mother’s younger brothers, like his dadash Shapour and all my uncles that came after him, possessed the softer side of Abbas’ personality along with the mettle in his soul, a character so sentimental that he could never pass a beggar on the street without parting with some cash and wiping a tear from his eye. My daiey Pardis simply could not bear the misfortune of others. But unlike Sedi, Pardis never displayed the volcanic temper that made Abbas such a dangerous man to cross, instead he used humour and sentiment to try to diffuse the eruptions of temper that often overtook his siblings. At the time my parents were married, Pardis was working in a menial job in the oil fields but Bagher, after talking with him at length on the evenings he came to visit his favourite sister in her big new house, announced to Sedi that her brother had great potential and that he should be encouraged to better himself. With the older man’s support, Pardis landed a job in the Company and worked hard at getting his engineering qualifications at night school. As Bagher championed him and Pardis devoted himself to his ambitions, a bond of love and respect was forged between the two men that would not be broken even when the events of the revolution tested everyone’s loyalties.

  Abbas was an old man by the time Bagher became part of the family. He was thin, in some lights skeletal, even. He still worked and he still extolled the virtues of a traditional bazaari life – where a man could make his fortune by combining skill, hard work, an eye for opportunity and a steely nerve for gambling – but his wife had long won out in her love for the Company and now that someone as high up in the organisation as Bagher was part of the family, there was no arguing with her. Despite her carefree, sometimes even careless, nature, Fatemeh Bibi approved of the security, the sense of consistency and continuity offered by the Company. She often told me that her father, Mirza Esmael Khan, had felt the same way. After all, had not he and his brother given up their own lands to become civil servants in the last shah’s burgeoning bureaucracy? Had Fatemeh Bibi, born into the unthinking security of their life as khans of Busheir, when she had opened her eyes to the world to realise that chaos and not security was what reigned, had she not then learnt the value of a regular salary, the dependable expectation that each month one knew exactly what one would earn? Had she not, in her own life with Abbas, lived through the abrupt changes of fortune that life as a bazaari could bring? Her children would be safe working for the Company. Not only would they be secure, they would be sheltered from the unseen zephyrs she knew would always buffet Iran. Hard to imagine then, with the shah so powerful, so omnipotent, sitting on the wealth of the nation, untold riches flowing out of those wells in Khuzestan, flowing through the great pipes across the desert to the immense refinery in Abadan, the largest in the world, hard to think that anything could ever change.

  Fatemeh Bibi had lived through too much though, and she knew that in Iran anything was always possible. ‘Faghad yek chiz ghabele pishbini ast to Iran – ke hichiz ghabel-e pishbini nist,’ was what her father had always said: only one thing is predictable in Iran – and this is that nothing is predictable. Fatemeh Bibi had come to understand the truth of Mirza Esmael Khan’s words as she lived through the years, she told me, sitting on her small mattress in Khaleh Yassi’s small flat in Shiraz on my first visit, when she had more energy to talk. Then, Maman-joon reasoned, the Company provided the riches of the shah, gave the country its wealth, income and prestige, made it a player on the world stage, and since the Company served national interests, it was unthinkable that those working there would ever be vulnerable to change.

  Fatemeh Bibi should have heeded her own warnings and known that nothing in Iran was unthinkable, that the gales that were to come, that were already then gaining strength in the dissatisfactions of the people and the blustery speeches of the exiled Khomeini, would make the storms that had come before look like mere puffs of air and
that no one, not even those serving their country through working at the Company, would be safe from its enraged squalls.

  Little did she know. None of them could have known, my family, my aunts, uncles, my mother and father, living their lives in Abadan in the sixties, unable to imagine anything better, money in their pockets, coffees at the Milk Bar, visits to the Cinema Rex to see Hindi films while waiting for the latest release to come from Hollywood. The country was stable and no one looked to see how deep that stability ran, whether it was real or an illusion conjured up by a despotic shah with a team of expert prestidigitators. No one knew at what price that illusion was projected or even really understood it for the chimera that it was. And in the midst of all their good fortunes, Bagher stood as solid as an oak tree: distinguished, mature, considered, seemingly un-fellable. And Sedi was by his side, slim and elegant, already bent to the new shape of her splendid life. Luckily for Bagher and for my sister and I, Sedi had grown up around the adage her grandfather had been so fond of muttering throughout his eventful life: ‘We Iranians are like the cypress tree. We may bend and bend on the wind but we will never break.’

  9

  Khaleh Mina, Maman Doh

  I always found it difficult to explain Khaleh Yassi’s upbringing to my English friends. I could not quite make them understand how my youngest aunt had been reared by her older sister as well as her mother; to them it spoke of rejection and a transgression of the familiar lines of family. The concept of extended family, something so encompassing and supportive that it spilled over the walls of houses and flowed over front doors, was difficult for people born into generations of small nuclear families to fully understand.

  Yassaman was Fatemeh Bibi’s youngest child, her last daughter and born when Fatemeh Bibi was already in her forties. Mina had been well into her teens when Yassaman had made her appearance, and she had instantly fallen in love with the long and lanky little girl as if she was her own. Fatemeh Bibi had felt from the beginning that Yassaman belonged to Mina and she was glad of it. By then she was tired of child rearing and happy to let the elder children raise the younger ones for her. Yassaman was only two when Mina had unhappily submitted to marriage with Busheiry, and one of Mina’s greatest sorrows, in that time of sadness, was leaving her behind when she moved to Bushehr with her new husband.

  After three lonely years in Bushehr, Mina returned to Khuzestan and settled into her house in Khorramshahr, soon slipping into seeing Yassaman every day when she visited her mother. She started to bring Yassaman back to stay with her for the odd night and, as she saw Busheiry as delighted with the little girl as she was, the visits grew longer and more of Yassaman’s things found themselves to Mina’s house. Since Mina visited her mother in Abadan daily there was no such thing as an actual move for Yassaman from Fatemeh Bibi’s house in Abadan to Mina’s house in Khorramshahr – the family merely extended itself over the miles in between the towns, over the river and its suspension bridge, one house becoming merely an extension of the other. Whether Mina’s jasmine-filled yard or Fatemeh Bibi’s geranium-potted courtyard, Yassaman’s home was in the cocoon of love that her family spun around her and one day, when the little girl was visiting Mina, she simply never left. It had already become a habit of the younger boys to make the round trip at dinner time between the Abbasian house in Abadan and the Busheiry house in Khorramshahr to see who was cooking the more tempting meal – and it was not unknown for them to eat dinner at both houses. The convoy of Abbasian children wore smooth a path between the two towns and the two sofras and Fatemeh Bibi beamed her approval, telling the children to remember that when she was gone, they would always have another mother in Mina.

  By now it was becoming clear that the large-hearted Mina was not going to have a child of her own. The emptiness had echoed with pain until she, as was her nature, stopped fighting her fate and opened the space up instead to be filled by us – her nieces and nephews. When her brothers and sisters started having their own children, there would invariably be at least one child in each family who would naturally fall in love with Mina. This was a purely spontaneous happening and it did not matter whether it was one of Parivah’s children – born and brought up in Shiraz far from Mina, or Mahvash’s children, born and brought up in Burujerd far from Mina, or one of Mamaly’s children, born and brought up in Texas far from Mina – but there was always at least one who, on meeting her kind gaze with its own unfocussed baby stare, would tumble into the heart of this woman whose love was as vast as the Hayat Davoudy date orchards had once been. And no matter what happened, we would always belong to her.

  In my family – the Mohammadi family – that baby was me, and my khaleh Mina is still known to me as my mother number two. Her voice, crackling over the international phone line, bubbling with love, and the anarchy of her raucous humour fills me with joy – being around her swells me with self-confidence.

  When my parents got married, Mina was living in Khorramshahr and soon afterwards, my mother introduced her to the Store. Mina was instantly smitten; the Store was to become a lifelong love. It was the Company’s grocery shop in which employees could buy subsidised goods – the prices were not only cheaper than in the bazaar, but the quality was reliable and, more importantly, the Store carried shelves of farangi goods that were not available elsewhere. In the early days of the Company, the Store had been one of the many ways in which the British had tried to make themselves feel at home, now that nationalism had seen off the apartheid of those days, Iranian workers loved nothing better than to buy these rare farangi goods and were not above showing off to their non-Company friends by turning, before their wide eyes, a small heap of dry brown granules into coffee just by adding hot water. Hot water that came out of a kettle that was filled with cold water, plugged into the wall and came to a noisy gurgling climax within seconds, and not from the samovar bubbling quietly on the gas hob where it had been simmering all day.

  Mina loved the Store almost beyond reason – it represented the two things she was most devoted to beyond her family and little Yassi: modernity and household goods – and she questioned Sedi closely about everything that came from there. She adored her Nescafé, especially when whitened not with milk, which had to be boiled to be drunk safely, but with another powder, finer and white this time, called Coffee-mate, which dissolved into the coffee and not only turned it that particular shade of camel brown that Mina loved so much, but also gave it a creamy, artificial taste that she felt to be the height of sophistication. Topped by two heaped teaspoons of sugar, her long, thin cigarette teased out of the packet stuffed in its leather cover, poised and ready to be lit, the first drag timed to coincide with the first long draught of coffee, Mina was to repeat this ritual daily for the rest of her life, even when she was no longer in Khuzestan, even when the Store had long ceased to exist and she had to eke out the giant pots of Nescafé and Coffee-mate that I would bring her on my visits from London a lifetime later.

  By then, with Mina living in Shiraz and as consumerism had made modernity and sophistication an egalitarian right for all in the Islamic Republic of Iran, all these brands were available in ordinary shops all over the place. But Mina, devoted to her memories of the Store, insisted that the stuff in Iran, made in the Gulf Arab countries or Southeast Asia and imported from Dubai, Kuwait or Malaysia, was simply not the same, not as good, as the ones that I brought her from the UK, even though they bore the same labels. She always had two versions in her kitchen cupboards – the local Nescafé and Coffee-mate with its supposedly inferior provenance and, hidden at the back, far away from other, prying eyes, my gifts from London, saved for special occasions, particularly important guests or when the quality of the gossip to be shared demanded nothing less than the best.

  The day Busheiry’s accounting work finally gave him access to the Store was one of Mina’s happiest. She floated around with a wire basket on her arm, running her long fingers over the revered goods, tapping the glass containers with her pointed and painted nails, her stile
ttos clicking on the floor, her basket (Imagine! Not woven from straw but actually made from metal, by a machine – she thought she might faint with joy) growing heavier on her arm, hurting her elbow now, but she didn’t care. The powdered eggs, the thing called custard (she had no idea what it was but she added a packet anyway), tea bags – but wait, tea bags? No, that would never do. They might be able to do clever things with coffee that left no residue in the cup as traditional ghahve tork did, but she knew that there was nothing the farangis could possibly teach her people about tea making. Her nose turned up almost imperceptibly as she passed the rows of colourful boxes full of tea bags and clicked her way to the till.

  That night, she had treated Busheiry as if he was indeed Clark Gable. Along with access to education – which she loved with an unreserved heart – this was the greatest thing he had ever given her, and she felt something close to love for him as she prepared his powdered eggs and regaled him with tales of the different products she had bought and the plans she had for them. Mina, mistress of her own house back in Khuzestan where she could visit her family daily and dote on little Yassaman, was happy and content. She felt that from now on, life could only get better.

  She had decided, with her husband’s blessing, to go to night school and study for her high school diploma. Busheiry was a kind man and, unlike her father, he had no objection to Mina educating herself. In this sense, Mina found a sort of freedom in her unpromising marriage. Studying the high school diploma at night school was, apparently, all the rage. Over our habitual coffee and cigarettes in her kitchen in Shiraz, she told me the story: how carefully she had dressed in a natty suit with pointed kitten heels – a respectable length of heel – her hair shiny as a conker in a careful beehive, for enrolment day, how excited and nervous she was and then how happy to see so many other women her age there, from similarly good backgrounds. It was here that she had met Haydeh, her lifelong friend. She had been instantly taken by the regal-looking girl with jet-black hair and a proud, eagle nose. Haydeh was as proper, upright and correct as Mina in everything she did, while constantly assessing the world thorough hawk-like eyes. She was married to a career soldier and was from the north of Iran, the area bordering the Caspian Sea, with its tropical climate and rice paddies, heavy rainfall and a resultantly dense, green landscape unimaginable here in the parched, dusty south. Haydeh too had been forced out of school as a girl and, though she was newly married, her husband – who was in the military – had agreed to her attending night school to lessen her loneliness on his frequent absences. Haydeh and Mina found each other in their entirely formal fashion, not knowing then that they would become such friends that Mina would refer to Haydeh’s mother as Maman Doh – Mother Number Two – and that they would share a lifetime of coffees and cigarettes, all the while never failing to address each other as ‘Khanoum Vaziri’ and ‘Khanoum Busheiry’, even when revolution changed their fortunes and war tore up their houses and made them refugees in their own country. Forty years after first meeting, when I rediscovered my khaleh Mina in Shiraz, they were living close by each other in the suburbs, speaking on the phone for several hours on the days when something prevented them from sitting in one or the other’s kitchen drinking Nescafé and chatting, their cigarettes held regally aloft, wreathed in blue smoke.