The House of the Mosque

by Kader Abdolah

  They stood up to show their respect, and one of them told the story: ‘We hadn’t seen Kazem Khan in the teahouse for several days, but we thought he was away on a trip. Then last night we heard his horse neighing and assumed he was back, but the horse didn’t stop neighing. So we went to his house and found him lying in bed, almost dead. This morning we put him in the litter and brought him here by bus.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m grateful for all you’ve done for my uncle,’ Aqa Jaan replied.

  That evening he placed a chair by Kazem Khan’s bed and sat next to him for hours, quietly reading the Al-Fatiha surah to him.

  Kazem Khan was the heart and soul of the house, despite the fact that he had never formed an attachment to either the house or the mosque. He was the kind of person Aqa Jaan would never be. Aqa Jaan was the head of the household, the mosque and the bazaar, and had numerous other obligations; Kazem Khan, on the other hand, was as free as a bird, and now he was dying like a bird, for old birds suddenly plummet out of the sky, close their eyes and never wake up again. Kazem Khan was a poet who had always thrown convention to the winds. He had done all kinds of things, things Aqa Jaan didn’t dare think about.

  Aqa Jaan reached into Kazem Khan’s pocket and took out his poetry book. He leafed through it until he came to the last poem, which he softly read aloud:

  If those sweet lips, that goblet of wine,

  Yes, everything, ends in non-existence,

  Then remember, for as long as you exist,

  That you are only what you will be one day:

  Nothing. It’s impossible to be less than that.

  For the past seventy years someone had always prepared the opium kit for Kazem Khan the moment he stepped through the door. Now that long-standing custom had come to an end.

  The grandmothers sat in the kitchen, talking and weeping silent tears. The man they loved was about to die. When had they first met him? One afternoon more than a half-century ago, when they were young girls and the poet Kazem Khan had come riding into the courtyard on his horse. Before that time they had never even heard a poem. A few days later Kazem Khan had written two poems, one for Golbanu and one for Golebeh. Poems about their eyes, their long plaits, their smiles and their hands, which were pleasantly warm when they lit the fire in the opium kit. The next time he came to the house, the two women were his for all eternity.

  Am Ramazan appeared in the doorway. He was the man who looked after the garden. Every day at dusk he stopped by to see Muezzin in his studio. He kept track of the clay and ordered a new supply when Muezzin was running low. Am Ramazan lived alone; his wife was dead and he had no children. All he had was a donkey. He earned his living by mining sand from the river and transporting it to his customers on his donkey.

  Am Ramazan whispered a greeting to Aqa Jaan, who returned his greeting and motioned for him to come in. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Kazem Khan hasn’t had any opium for a while. His body is crying out for it. The grandmothers are going to prepare the opium kit. If you could smoke the pipe and blow the smoke into his face, it might give him some relief.’

  Am Ramazan smoked opium from time to time, but couldn’t afford to buy it for himself. He was delighted to accept Aqa Jaan’s offer, because he knew that Kazem Khan smoked the best opium in the mountains. Am Ramazan and his friends smoked a dark-brown opium that stank to high heaven, but Kazem Khan smoked a yellowish-brown opium that smelled of wildflowers.

  Aqa Jaan handed half a roll of opium to Am Ramazan, who slipped it in his pocket and went outside to help with the fire.

  Before long Golebeh came in with a pot of tea and a brazier filled with glowing embers. She looked at Kazem Khan with tears in her eyes and set the brazier on the floor. Am Ramazan stuck the pipe in the hot ashes and cut the opium into thin slices.

  When the pipe was hot, he put one of the slices on the tip, secured it with a pin, picked up a glowing ember with a pair of tongs, and held it up to the opium. He started out with a few gentle puffs, then inhaled more and more deeply. For a moment he forgot he was smoking the opium for Kazem Khan. Then his eye caught Aqa Jaan’s and he stood up, holding the pipe in his left hand and the tongs with the glowing ember in his right hand.

  Leaning over Kazem Khan, he heated the opium in the pipe with the glowing ember, then inhaled deeply and blew the smoke in Kazem Khan’s face.

  He smoked patiently for half an hour, until the room was filled with a dark-blue cloud of smoke.

  The door opened and Crazy Qodsi came in. The grandmothers tried to stop her, but Aqa Jaan gestured for them to leave her alone. She walked over to the bed, leaned down, peered into Kazem Khan’s face, mumbled something and tiptoed out, without saying a word to Aqa Jaan.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Golbanu said to Am Ramazan. ‘If you would care to leave, we’ll read to Kazem Khan from the Koran.’ Aqa Jaan, having grown a bit drowsy from the smoke, roused himself and left the room along with Am Ramazan.

  Golebeh took the Koran from the shelf and sat down on the floor beside Golbanu. Reading ordinary books wasn’t a problem, but the Koran was much more difficult. Fortunately they both knew a number of surahs by heart. Golbanu opened the book and stared at the page, then began to recite a surah by heart, while Golebeh repeated the words after her:

  By the pen and by what you write.

  We put the owners of the gardens to the test.

  In the morning they called out to one another:

  ‘Go early to your field,

  If you wish to gather the fruits.’

  And they set off early,

  But when they saw it they said:

  ‘We must have lost our way.

  No, we have been dispossessed!’

  Golebeh brought her mouth to his ear and whispered, ‘Kazem Khan, you have begun your journey. Sooner or later we will follow. We have a secret. We aren’t supposed to tell anyone, but we’ll tell you. A few weeks from now we’ll be going to Mecca. We owe it all to the Prophet Khezr. We were planning to go to Jirya to say farewell. I kiss you, Kazem Khan. We both do. You made us happy.’

  Golbanu and Golebeh kissed Kazem Khan on the forehead and left the room.

  On the third night Aqa Jaan noticed that Kazem Khan’s end was nearing. He went into the room alone, shut the door and kissed his uncle on the forehead. ‘You can let go now,’ he whispered. ‘We will remember you always. I will put your shoes and your poems in the treasure room. I’m here beside you, holding your hand.’

  Shahbal tiptoed in and remained standing by the door.

  ‘Would you bring me a glass of black tea and a spoon?’ Aqa Jaan asked him.

  When Shahbal returned with the requested items, Aqa Jaan put a slice of opium in the glass and stirred it until it dissolved. ‘Here,’ he said to Shahbal, ‘put a spoonful of this in his mouth, his body craves it. This way his soul can depart his body more peacefully.’

  Shahbal carefully spooned the yellowish-brown liquid into Kazem Khan’s mouth.

  Aqa Jaan put his hand on his uncle’s bare shoulder. ‘He’s going,’ he said, and he leaned down and kissed Kazem Khan again on the forehead. Slowly, the life ebbed out of the old man. ‘He’s gone,’ Aqa Jaan said, his voice filled with sorrow. ‘Will you let the others know?’

  The grandmothers were the first to enter the room. They offered their condolences to Aqa Jaan and stood quietly by the bed. The next to arrive were Fakhri, Zinat and Muezzin, all crying. Aqa Jaan gathered up Kazem Khan’s shoes and his poems and carried them through the darkness to the mosque.

  The mosque had a treasure room, a secret chamber in the crypt, where items of value to the house had been stored for centuries, such as deeds, parchment rolls, letters, the robes and shoes of the mosque’s imams from the past to the present and hundreds of journals filled with mosque reports written for centuries by men like Aqa Jaan. Every object had been arranged in chronological order and placed in chests.

  The treasure room was a gold mine of information. You could trace the country’s religious history in its archive
s. Many personal items that had belonged to the residents of the house were also stored there.

  The archives and personal items should probably have been given to a museum for safekeeping, but they constituted a unique – and more importantly – personal history of the house and the mosque.

  The head of the household was obliged to carry the key to the treasure room at all times.

  The only other person aside from Aqa Jaan who knew about the treasure room and its contents was Shahbal. Aqa Jaan had told him about the journals. ‘When I die – and God is the only one who knows when that will be – you will become the keeper of the key,’ Aqa Jaan had said to Shahbal. ‘You will write in the journals, and you will decide what happens.’

  He himself had been a mere twenty-seven years old when he entered the treasure room for the first time.

  After the death of his father, he’d taken a lantern and gone down to the crypt in the dark of night. With trembling hands he’d inserted the key in the ancient lock, opened the door and gone inside.

  He had felt as if he were in a dream world, for that vaulted room was like nothing he had ever seen before. An old pomegranate-red carpet had been laid over the stone floor. One corner contained a chair and a table, on top of which stood an inkpot, a quill pen and a journal, opened to a blank page. The wall was lined with dozens of pairs of dusty shoes, each labelled with the name of the deceased imam to whom they had belonged. Across from the shoes were rows of coat-racks, and on every hook was an imam’s prayer robe and black turban. Next to some of the coat-racks were walking sticks and small chests, in which the personal belongings and important documents from that particular imam’s era had been stored.

  Aqa Jaan didn’t know exactly how old the mosque and the house were, though he could have found out easily enough. All he had to do was to take his lantern and walk past the coat-racks to the darkest recesses of the crypt, where he would no doubt find the oldest chest and the very first journal. The blueprints of the house and the mosque might well be in that chest.

  There was a dark passage at the far end of the room, which made Aqa Jaan suspect that there were even more nooks and crannies, with even more ancient chests. He decided to explore. The first thing he saw when he held up his lantern were parchment documents hanging on the wall, though the light was too dim to make out the words.

  Just as he was about to step into the passage, he saw a thick layer of dust on the red carpet, thicker than that on the chests, prayer robes and other items. For the last hundred years or so, no one had ventured any further than where he was now. Aqa Jaan didn’t feel that he could go any further either. The dust represented a kind of seal that wasn’t meant to be broken.

  He would have liked to stroll past the robes and read the names of the former imams and occupants of the house. Who were those people? What kind of clothes had they worn? What sort of rings had they worn on their fingers?

  He wanted to open one of the chests and examine its contents, to smell the clothes, try on the rings, read the entries in the journals. What had people written about back then? What had gone on in the house, the mosque, the bazaar? What colour were the hauz’s first fish? What type of tree had grown in the middle of the courtyard before the cedar tree? Which crow had been the predecessor of the one they had now?

  He wanted to spend weeks or even months in the cellar, journeying back to the past, finding the answers to his questions. But that was impossible. The treasure room was a secret that lay in the dark, a secret that was bound up for ever with the mosque, a secret that was more suited to the Koran and the long-lost past. The past was a room to which you had no access. Once Aqa Jaan had reached this conclusion, he was able to curb his curiosity.

  Tonight he tiptoed into the treasure room and laid Kazem Khan’s poetry book in a chest. Then he placed his uncle’s shoes at the end of the row and blew out the lantern.

  Kazem Khan had stated in his will that he didn’t want to be interred in the crypt, so the villagers looked around for an appropriate burial site. They chose a spot at the bottom of his garden, where an old almond tree shed myriad blossoms in the spring.

  The next day dozens of villagers came to the city to collect the body of their poet and take it home to Jirya.

  Aqa Jaan, Fakhri Sadat, Zinat Khanom, Muezzin and the grandmothers went with them.

  Exactly forty days after the death of Kazem Khan, the grandmothers were scheduled to begin their trip to Mecca. After the morning prayer they donned their chadors, picked up their suitcases and went out to stand by the hauz.

  ‘We’re leaving!’ Golbanu shouted.

  ‘On the trip of our lives!’ Golebeh added.

  The grandmothers had been terrified that the trip would be cancelled if anyone discovered their secret. Today, however, they couldn’t stand the strain any longer.

  Muezzin was the first to hear their cries. He rushed upstairs. ‘What trip?’ he asked.

  ‘To Mecca!’ they said in chorus.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Mecca?’

  ‘We aren’t allowed to talk about it, Muezzin. You’ll just have to take our word for it.’

  He ran his hand over their suitcases. They were indeed embossed with the holy Kaaba. ‘The grandmothers are going to Mecca!’ he hollered.

  It seems that everyone was already awake, because when Aqa Jaan switched on the lights in the courtyard, they all came trooping out in their best clothes. Laughing and crying, they hugged and kissed the grandmothers.

  Fakhri Sadat came over to the grandmothers with a brazier full of fragrant esfandi seeds. Her daughters, Nasrin and Ensi, carried a mirror and some red apples, while Zinat Khanom bore the traditional bowl of water that was used to wish the travellers a safe journey.

  Shahbal went to the library to fetch the antique Koran and handed it to Aqa Jaan. Golbanu and Golebeh picked up their suitcases. Aqa Jaan kissed them, held the Koran above their heads and escorted them to the gate.

  Zinat threw water on the ground behind them, and everyone wept, as if the grandmothers were leaving the house for good.

  Sayeh

  Aqa Jaan had seen Zinat slip out of her room at night sometimes like a sayeh – a shadow – but he had no idea where she went. Zinat’s bedroom was on the second floor, and to reach the stairs, she had to go past Fakhri and Aqa Jaan’s bedroom.

  Late one evening, Aqa Jaan was reading in his study when he heard the door at the top of the stairs open. He thought it was Fakhri, but when he didn’t hear any footsteps, he looked out through the chink in the curtains and saw someone stealing through the darkness.

  He opened the door and stepped into the courtyard, just in time to catch a glimpse of a black chador by the stairs. It might be Zinat, but what was she doing up so late at night?

  He went back inside. Suddenly the crow screeched.

  The crow’s warning reminded Aqa Jaan of the woman from Sarandib:

  Once upon a time there was a merchant from Sarandib, whose wife was named Jamiz. She was so beautiful that people could hardly believe she was real. Her face glowed like the day of victory, and her hair was as long and as dark as the night in which you wait for a lover who never comes.

  Jamiz was secretly having an affair with a famous artist who could do magical things with his brush. She slipped out occasionally to visit him, and together they experienced the most beautiful of Persian nights.

  Then one night she said to him, ‘It’s becoming harder and harder for me to steal away from my house, and even harder for me to have to wait so long. Think of something, so I can visit you more often. After all, you’re an artist!’

  ‘I have an idea,’ said the artist. ‘I will make you a veil. On one side, it will be as clear as the reflection of the morning star in a pool of water. On the other side, it will be as dark as the night. At night you can wear the dark side of the veil, so that when you come to me, you will blend in with the night. In the morning you can turn it round to the clear side, so that when you go back home, you will merge with the morning.’
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  With the grandmothers away, the house entered a new phase. The rhythm they brought to the house had been broken. A sure sign of this was that the antique clock stopped ticking. When the grandmothers were at home, the kitchen was abuzz with activity, the crow cawed to announce the arrival of visitors and the library was always neat and tidy. But those days were over.

  It was the grandmothers who woke the children and helped Fakhri Sadat clean her room. It was the grandmothers who told Aqa Jaan what was going on in the house. And it was the grandmothers who kept an eye on Muezzin’s studio. While they were away, their tasks were left undone.

  No one could fill their empty shoes. If the grandmothers had been here, they would already have followed Zinat to the roof.

  Aqa Jaan was satisfied with the substitute imam. Janeshin carried out his work with enthusiasm and seemed to be happy. During their initial talk, Aqa Jaan had noticed that he was ambitious, but had doubted that he would accomplish much.

  The man still couldn’t talk about anything but rural matters, though he did that well enough. Not long ago he’d criticised the Minister of Agriculture for doing too little to help the poverty-stricken villages.

  Janeshin had never been to Tehran, but in one of his sermons he made a remark that was quoted on the front page of the local paper: ‘I’ve been told that everyone in Tehran has a telephone in their home, and yet hundreds of mountain villages are without a single phone. If you cut your finger in a kitchen in Tehran, you can call an ambulance, but what am I supposed to do if I find my father on his deathbed? I’m warning you, Tehran! Take heed! We are all equal in the eyes of God.’

  The secret police smiled at his innocent barbs. They valued such criticism; in fact, they even encouraged it.

  Janeshin’s remarks were becoming increasingly popular and were often quoted in the local paper. Aqa Jaan was so satisfied with him that he gave him a bit more leeway. One time, after the paper had printed a photograph of Janeshin and an excerpt from one of his sermons, a colleague of Aqa Jaan’s had observed, ‘The man’s naïve, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head.’