by Simon Parke
‘It’s just like any other time, in my book.’
‘ “Unrememberable but unforgettable”, as someone once said.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well, we can’t consciously remember any of it, not the earliest, most formative times, not a scrap.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But our body does, our body remembers everything and holds these truths, sometimes painfully, until we’re ready to collect them.’ The lights inside Henry House glowed bright in the deepening dark. And there were peals of laughter inside, a guffaw from Virgil.
‘What if we’re never ready?’ said Tamsin. Peter smiled.
‘Doesn’t even the smallest part of you wonder what truths your body has held for you all these years?’
‘I’m too busy, Uncle, too busy to wonder.’
‘And that’s that?’
Fear in Tamsin’s face, a tightening.
‘I don’t have time,’ she said, ‘and nor do you, by the looks of it.’ Car headlights were swinging round the corner.
‘That’s your taxi and you have a plane to catch.’
‘I do.’
‘Thank goodness it’s on time.’
‘Maybe on this occasion it suits you more than me.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
***
Back in the present, high in the sky, peering down through the small window, and below him, Iran’s first solar power plant, so well done Shiraz... not the poetic ferment you once were, but life is change... and then not much to report of the journey until the charmless taxi driver at the airport, who despised both Peter and his habit in one seamless reaction. The Abbot did stand out in Iran, he was not unaware, a walking monastery in a way and a fox among hounds. But was it really so different from the robes that busied themselves around him, with suitcases and dreams very like his own? And Shiraz was a tolerant city, this was the tradition and a city which even today, in different times, hosted a Jewish synagogue, a Baha’i community and two Christian churches.
But if the city was tolerant, the driver was not, an embodiment of religious loathing; and things worsened as they tried to fix a price. Peter disliked haggling, organised acrimony from start to finish, a wretched descent into lie, gamesmanship and grievance, worse even than Monopoly. There were no happy endings in the haggling game, and none this afternoon in Shiraz. But it was the driver, not passenger, who was sorer than a wasp bite when the deal was done; for while Peter hated haggling, he was very good at it. After twenty five years in Egypt, where every pint of goat’s milk was a negotiation, forget meek and mild Ø here was a haggle-hardened veteran of bitter consumer wars. He looked the driver in the eye, knew him from the inside out and didn’t give him an inch.
The car jerked away from the kerb with Peter barely seated, his suitcase tumbling, and then drove with speed into the traffic, sometimes quite literally. Peter didn’t mind the speed, speed was good, they would at least die together and he was in a hurry. Beyond the dust of the car window, the sun was setting in a serene blue sky, as in the chaos below, they made the wild drive to the North East of the city, his final destination. On arrival, he thanked and paid the sullen driver and stepped from noisy street into sudden quiet - the quiet of the Musalla Gardens.
***
At last! He stood for a moment, breathing in and breathing out, putting the travelling behind him, he was here. He luxuriated in the scent of the orange trees, and slowly he began to walk, treading the labyrinth of little paths among the clear pools, streams and flowers.
The Tea House was closing, waiters washing tables and sweeping around, but open enough for a frosted glass of rose sherbet, the last of the day, ‘You lucky, Sir!’ And then for this Englishman abroad, the deep pleasure of thick petal syrup, chilled with ice. As Lord Byron had once declared in these parts: ‘Give me a sun, I care not how hot, and sherbet, I care not how cool, and my heaven is as easily made as your Persian’s.’
On this matter at least, the Lord and the Abbot agreed.
And he gazed on it now as he drank, there in his eye-line, a small island of columns and dome across the flag stones. He’d seen it as soon as he entered the Gardens, seen it from a distance, but had chosen the circular way, the slow approach. He’d come to Shiraz for its ghosts, for conversation with the dead who could on occasion be wiser than the living.
But he wanted the conversation alone and quiet, something great sites of pilgrimage struggled to offer. He’d almost been trampled to death on the Mount of Olives by a coachload of pilgrims whose commitment to loud prayer blinded them to the needs of all other souls present. He’d arrived for quiet meditation, and left harassed and judgemental, something he’d no wish to repeat in the Musalla Gardens, home of the tomb of Hafiz.
This was why he had come late. A popular attraction for locals and tourists alike, Peter had timed his arrival to avoid them all. It was nothing personal, he simply didn’t wish to see them. He desired a private audience with this magnificent spirit, this startling master of words.
‘A poet,’ Hafiz once said, ‘is one who can pour light into a cup, then raise it to nourish your beautiful parched mouth.’ And Peter’s mouth was parched.
He sat at his table, watching evening arrive, another cycle of the sun complete, the darkening sky of purple and blue. They call it ‘The Blue Hour’ in Shiraz, as public illuminations cast a gentle yellow on the greenery around him, the dome now a fluorescent glow. And in the embers of this day, he thought of Barnabus, because in truth, he didn’t want to be alone, why did he imagine he wished to be alone, it simply wasn’t so, for he wished to be here with Barnabus, would have liked to be here with Barnabus and Hafiz, the Three Deserteers as Tamsin called them. They should be drinking together! So much he could only say to them, so much only they could laugh about.
Lost friends.
And slowly, his breathing made him sane as the air passed through him, up and down, in and out, breath deepening, the madness of travel ebbing away, the planning, the rush, the in-flight hospitality, the hatred, the haggling all ebbing away and the quiet arrival of sane... and he wanted to be sane, now of all times.
He treasured the final drip of iced syrup, from tongue to throat, rose from the wooden table and walked across the flagstones towards the copper dome, bright with light, the shape of a dervish hat, and, according to the guidebook, supported by eight columns ten metres tall and built by the French archaeologist André Goddard in 1935. But there’d been a tomb for Hafiz since 1410, here in the Musalla Gardens, in life his favourite place on earth. So if you were going to meet him, if you had to pick a spot to speak with his ghost, this was surely it?
Peter felt nervous as he approached the tomb and shocked at the impetuous nature of his visit. Why had he come? It was just a tomb after all. Or did he really believe in ghosts? Did he really imagine Hafiz to be waiting for him, knowing him in some way, knowing his life in some manner? He climbed the five small steps and stood under the strange awning. Above him, a mosaic of tiles - gold, blue and white - in beautiful Arabian symmetry. Looking out, Peter saw a sunset Hafiz himself must have seen. And looking down was the tomb of the man who became a pen in the sun’s hand.
To Peter’s left was a leather-bound book. It surprised many to learn how popular Hafiz was in Iran, still the country’s favourite poet, with his tomb a place of guidance for people, even fortune-telling. Visitors in their thousands still made the pilgrimage to this place, still came here to understand their future better by picking a random page from the leather tome before him, the works of Hafiz. They would open the book and the poet would speak again, speak into their life. He would tell them what to do, how to live, how best to proceed from here. Was that the same as believing in ghosts?
Grateful to be alone in the warm evening breeze, Peter slowly opened the book. And now, unbidden, the smashed skull of Barnab
us returned to his mind, dark curly hair encrusted in blood, he’d never quite escaped the crumpled clown in the cupboard these past six months, reaching out to write on the wall, an unlikely copyist for the Persian bard, before the poker crashed down at midnight. He’d tried to get to the living Barnabus, but came back again and again to the dead.
Before him on the page are two lines:
The impermanence of the body should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes.
Reaction? Peter is disappointed, this is his initial feeling. The impermanence of the body had given him only pain these past few months; he knew the theory of clarity but for now, the reality was pain... and a sinking feeling, a sense of being let down by the guru. Had he come all this way to hear that? Was this all the ghost could manage? He wanted something new, a burning bush of revelation, some lightning to split his cloudy spiritual sky - and this wasn’t it.
So why keep on hoping, was hope mankind’s greatest folly? Freud was realistic - bleak but more honest than religion, selling nothing more in his Viennese front room than the shift from misery to ordinary human unhappiness. And really, why expect more?
Feelings of self-pity swamped Peter, a desire to cling again to tragedy. He’d come here to let go but how could he ever let go? How could Hafiz speak of wonder in the face of blood-encrusted wounds? And now anger, yes, Peter watched anger pass through him like a hot flux. And some self-importance, if he was honest: these were not words for the wise Abbot Peter, not words for one who’d seen what he had seen!
He watched the dismal procession of reactions pass through, and then nothing... nothing in the Musalla Gardens, a numb nothing at the tomb and a wasted pilgrimage, as he listened to distant traffic and caught the orange scent and... arrived home, in that moment, he came home, like a desperate survivor crawling ashore, some chink of light, some melting, a small sapling sensed in the dry ground of his heart, the strength of life, impermanence but glory, the impermanent but ever-deepening wonder.
***
The gate keeper is loitering. Peter smiles and the gate keeper smiles back, a public servant well-used to the pursuit of personal revelation in this place. It’s why people came, and why he had a job, and why the orange trees and pools were so beautifully maintained, when other space in the city was being sold off, taken away screaming and violated with new build. So for the gate keeper, revelation in the morning was good, revelation in the afternoon was good but revelation at closing time - revelation which caused customers to pause awhile before leaving - this was not good... but he would still smile!
Peter acknowledges him, acknowledges his desire to get home and glances again at the book, one more time, a brief farewell, what would the poet say? And there, six words of fading text in the half-light of dusk, Hafiz’s last hurrah.
Six words.
It’s time to go. Peter bows his head in gratitude, steps down from the shrine. He walks back to the gate, a return to the noise and bustle of the street. He pauses as the sun slides beneath the Zagros mountains like dropped egg yolk, bulbous orange sinking in the west, out of sight and in Peter, a sense of letting go, a peaceful end to something undefined, something put down, something finished, sinking like the sun and left here in Shiraz. Perhaps his desire for answers... He’d spend the night at the Chamran Grand Hotel on the north side of the city and fly back to Istanbul in the morning. More immediately, he’d argue with the taxi driver now pulling towards him at speed.
‘How much to the Chamran Grand Hotel?’
Five minutes later, an irritated driver pulls out into the traffic and Peter watches as the city passes by and listens again to the words:
The impermanence of the body should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes.
How he longed to get back to the deep wonder of the crashing waves, the shingled shore, the fish and chips, the possible purchase of a second comfy chair, Tamsin had a point there - and to the fragile impermanence of a little girl called Poppy, reaching up for him, demanding to be swung high in the sky.
And then, as if now ready, he brought to mind the six words he’d read before leaving the tomb... mad words really, not for polite conversation, but how strange - he could almost hear the poet saying them to some incredulous soul:
Death is a favour to us!
Could that be so? Could that really be so? Death... a favour?
‘Maybe it is, my friend,’ said Peter, as the Chamran Grand came into view. But as the last of the Three Deserteers left standing, he had a proposal: ‘Let us call it a favour postponed... for now, I want to live!’
Author’s Note
As you may be aware, Hafiz was a real person, and along with the poems quoted, many of his original lines are reflected in his dialogue in this story. He lived in Shiraz, accurately described here, for most of his sixty-five years, 1325 - 1390. There are large gaps in our knowledge about his life, but he left behind many poems and some facts do emerge through the mists of Persian time. His birth name was Shams-ud-Din and his coal merchant father, Baha-ud-Din, died when Hafiz was in his teens. He married in his twenties and had a son, there are references to both events in his poetry. He outlived them both, however, though we don’t know how or when they died.
He became court poet in his twenties, after the experience, as a seventeen year old, of delivering bread to the house of Shakh-e-Nabat, with whom he fell hopelessly in love. She became for him a symbol of the creator’s beauty and her image remained with him throughout his life. There is no record of him ever having spoken with her, however.
As court poet, he was the victim of various power struggles. Shah Shuja, his most reliable patron, overthrew and imprisoned his own father, to regain power. At this time, Hafiz wrote mostly protest poems. He reportedly upset the military genius and mass slaughterer Tamerlane, when he was rude about Samarkand, the great man’s capital, and Bokhara, his kingdom’s finest city. Hafiz was duly summoned to explain himself, so the story goes - but so disarmed Tamerlane with his charm, that he was dismissed and sent home with gifts.
Hafiz continued to drift in and out of favour with Shah Shuja throughout his life. On one occasion, for his own safety, he had to flee to his birth place of Isfahan for four years. He did not live in settled times.
He did learn the Koran by heart, and his spiritual teacher was Muhammed Attar, perhaps a man not dissimilar to the figure portrayed in this story. He is buried in the Musalla Gardens in Shiraz, on the banks of his beloved Ruknabad river and his tomb there is as described in the final chapter.
He wasn’t always a spiritual writer. He wrote Ghazals, a poetic form with strict structural requirements, used also by Rumi the century before. Common themes for this poetic form were loss, the pain of loss and the beauty of love despite that pain. We can guess where he got his material from.
I have taken two liberties with his life in A Psychiatrist, Screams. The first is the timing of the vigil which he keeps. The story of the vigil is an important part of Hafiz folklore, including the vision of the angel and the return afterwards to Muhammed Attar. But I have placed it earlier in his life than was probably historically the case. He wrote prolifically after the experience, adopting themes of union between God and humans.
The second liberty, perhaps more obvious, is that his poems were never smuggled out of Shiraz to the fictional monastery of St James-the-Less. But this story line is based on the known fact that Hafiz did face threats from strands of Islamic fundamentalism that appeared in Shiraz at this time. We have no evidence, however, that Muhammed Attar was harmed by them; only that he was secretive in his activity, and probably with good reason.
If you would like to meet Hafiz for yourself - and really, why wouldn’t you? - I warmly recommend the translations of his poetry by Daniel Ladinsky.
Also Available
atrist, Screams
