The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  “Agha is sometimes confused these days,” Khan said to Mulla as they walked away from Agha’s tree. Mulla looked at him waiting for more. “But I know he’d want us to remain patient and prayerful.”

  With his bushy eyebrows raised above his small eyes, Mulla threw a knowing glance at Khan and nodded his head, thinking he had to be cautious of the apple man’s cunning. Someone who usurped the words of his own kin to smooth out his problems could stab him in the back if the situation became worse.

  * * *

  —

  MULLA TRIED OVER THE NEXT couple of months to keep people hopeful, telling the rows of prayer-sayers stories Agha had not actually told about famines far worse than what they were experiencing. “Patience and prayers,” his voice would ring in the mosque, “are the weapons with which Agha and his people fought with the famines of their time. Those two words. Gold. Gold.” But when six families left Tajrish, he stood up in front of the congregation and said the main reason for their troubles were the foreigners in their country and that no wrong would turn right until they left. If those high up were not men enough to take a stand against the invaders, the people themselves had to rise and, hand in hand, banish every outsider from their land.

  That was a declaration of war against Khan. In response, Khan struck a deal with one of the Russian commanders through Sergey at a party, and a week later the villagers ran to hide in their homes as two army trucks rumbled up the Shemiron Road. Khan and Sergey welcomed the drivers climbing down their vehicles at the end of the drivable road. Khan sent Norooz the Gardener to fetch men. Shortly after, the villagers were unloading the first truck, carrying sacks of flour up the trails like ants. The bakery was full of one month’s supply for the whole village. The second truck was packed with oil, tea, rice, beans, sugar, and salt, which they stacked up in a storage room in the Orchard. The bakery fired up its tandoor after many months of disuse and once again the smell of hot bread wafted through the alleyways of Tajrish. Mulla stopped fomenting hatred against the Russians and Khan kept standing in prayer right behind him every night. He was sending his message: Mulla was wrong about the Russians; they had turned out to be the saviors, and Khan’s generous heart was the one to support the people of God at all costs. The second convoy of food came in a month, and this time, everyone huddled at the end of the road as soon as they caught sight of the cloud of dust the vehicles stirred.

  “If it comes to it,” Khan said to Norooz as he watched the unloading, “I’ll feed the whole village until the end of the war. Or after that.”

  * * *

  —

  NOT LONG AFTER THE WINTER came to an end, word spread that Sergey secretly took girls into his room. The families that had left the village only did so out of the embarrassment. Sara’s father forbade her to go to the Orchard. Ahmad heard from one of the women in the building that she had seen the girl with a bruised face and a black eye. “The poor girl has done nothing wrong,” Pooran said. She threw on her chador, like a warrior his cape, and went to Sara’s house.

  “I have been with her the whole time,” she told a grim Mash Akbar who opened the door only halfway. “No one is more innocent than that girl.”

  “I know you for an honest woman, Pooran Khanum.” Shame and grief bore on Mash Akbar; his head hung heavy with latent anger. He could barely look into her face. “You’re like my sister. But people say things.”

  “Let me see her.”

  “With all due respect,” Mash Akbar answered, “forget about my daughter.”

  With the door closing in Pooran’s face, not only did Sara’s days in the Orchard come to an end, but Salman, too, became a stranger to Ahmad. He avoided him in public and refused to talk to him even when Ahmad sought him out at the butchery. Ahmad ceased trying to win his friend back the evening he blocked Salman’s way in the alley and grabbed his shoulders and shook them and mouthed why? why? Salman looked at him in the eyes for a few moments, then said, “You don’t know what they say behind my sister’s back, do you? You should have kicked her out of the Russian’s room. You should have told me she went there.” He jerked his shoulders out of Ahmad’s hands. And with that he walked toward his home.

  Khan strode into Sergey’s room and yelled at him: “If you wanted girls, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “When I want girls,” Sergey said turning his blue eyes back to the book on his table, “I go to Tehran with you. It’s you who should come to me when you want girls.” Khan pounded on the table. Sergey denied the rumors, only confessing to Sara’s innocent visits which he said happened in the presence of Ahmad. Having witnessed the Russian’s appetite for young, female bodies in Tehran, Khan could hardly believe him. But he was ready to feign it. A palpable tension hung over the village. Sergey stopped going out altogether and although no one dared direct any irreverence at Khan, he could feel their hatred behind the spurious appreciative looks.

  Khan decided to stay home for a few days and put his thoughts together, but before he could do so, Mulla pulled a new trick out of his sleeve: after the evening prayer some days later he started talking about the Russians, this time specifically mentioning Sergey. He said he had proof of Sergey’s otherworldly deception and evil. From a paper bag he pulled out a wooden doll on which a woman was painted in gay colors. He said some well-meaning person in the village had brought it to him from the Russian’s very room to reveal his true nature to everyone. Brandishing the doll with a dramatic gesture so everyone could see well, Mulla twisted the doll in half to reveal a second one inside the first. He did the same thing four more times and every time more eyes opened wide in surprise. The row of six dolls standing in order of height on the minbar was evidence that Sergey was a womanizer, and that the six families who had left the village were victims of his lust. Fury welled up in the village.

  Khan was in his room when he heard the angry mob break into the Orchard holding up lanterns and waving sticks in the air. By the time he was out of the house, they had gathered in front of Sergey’s rooms. The murmurs receded as Khan walked toward them with confident strides. He climbed up a rock at the foot of a tree and looked at the crowd, his face barely visible in the dark. With an unwavering voice, he announced that the man had done nothing wrong. Before the whispers snowballed into protesting words again, he said it was thanks to Sergey that they had bread to feed their wives and children, that if going back to misery was what they wanted, he would arrange for him to leave. But the man needed time to pack his belongings and prepare for his departure. Sensing the double thoughts brewing in the villagers’ heads, Mulla accepted Khan’s offer and said they would give Sergey three days, not a single day more; they wanted the Russian gone by Friday noon.

  In the feeble lights from the lanterns Norooz and the stable boy held up near Khan, Ahmad did not see the whirlwind in Khan’s heart, or the shaking of his hands that he hid in his pants pocket. The first thing Ahmad thought that night, as Khan stepped down from the rock and strode toward his house with the gardener and others following, was that more than anything he wanted to be like Khan: strong and resolute, a man of not too many words, but of exemplary determination, capable of anything.

  Sergey had heard the commotion from his room but decided not to show his face. Khan opened his door and went in. The prudent thing would be for him to leave, even if temporarily.

  “I understand, I understand,” Sergey answered as he dragged at his cigarette. When Khan was gone, he sneaked across the garden to the stable boy’s room. Through the small wooden window set in the cob wall, Sergey passed the boy a letter to take to Tehran, and before the boy had the chance to open his mouth, he stretched his hand through the window into the shadows of the room and slid a folded bill into the boy’s breast pocket, promising there would be more when he made sure the job had been duly done.

  Three hours after breakfast on Friday, Khan knocked and stepped into Sergey’s room. The place was untouched, showing no sign of an imminent dep
arture. Gently swaying back and forth in his wicker rocking chair, Sergey was listening to Russian music wheezing from the radio that he had placed on a low table. A soft smile flashed on his wide, flushed face when he saw Khan. Without a drop of consternation in his blue eyes, he kept smiling and rocking to the beat of the song. If Sergey needed help with the packing, Khan offered, he could send for people.

  “No,” Sergey said and kept his ear to the speaker as if he had no interest in the conversation and would rather be left alone to engage with more pleasant themes. Khan suggested Sergey get to work sooner rather than later, since time was short. Mulla and his followers would be there any minute. “I haven’t danced in a whole goddamn year.” Sergey got up from his chair, took Khan’s hand, and put it on his own shoulder. Khan saw the empty bottle on the floor by the runner. He sat the Russian back in his chair, but Sergey jumped to his feet and held out his hand. Khan did not take the hand. Sergey raised his arms sideways and started a little dance on his own. Unmoving as a cross from waist up, his legs crisscrossed like scissors cropping hair in a hasty cut. “You’re old, Khan,” he said. Khan turned the radio off and held Sergey by the shoulders. “Listen to me,” he shouted into his face.

  “It’s all in here,” Sergey tapped his index finger against his temple and danced on and on until Khan heard the sounds: the villagers were in the Orchard.

  * * *

  —

  CROWDING IN FRONT OF HIS small house like three nights before, the villagers were offended at the audacity of the Russian. Khan came out, not knowing what exactly to tell them. He tried to keep things under control. He said the automobile had been late and as soon as it arrived their guest would be on his way, no later than an hour after noon. At that moment Sergey flung the door open and appeared with a pistol in one hand and a full bottle in the other. His large stature almost filled the frame. His round, white face was blushed even more than moments earlier when he was dancing. Ahmad watched from a distance and knew Sergey had drunk his magic water. The late afternoon breeze swayed a lock of the Russian’s blond hair over his broad forehead and drifted through the supple branches of apple trees that flaunted their young shoots. “It’s about time,” Sergey shouted at the people with his accented Persian, “everyone went home. Enough of the farce. I don’t want to hear a word about this anymore.” Then he said something that no one understood. The sounds were familiar to Ahmad; he knew it was not French. “That flag up there, do you see that flag?” Sergey pointed to the Russian flag on the roof with the gun. “It says this is Russian territory and you don’t get to decide about it.”

  Even Khan was taken by surprise. “Mr. Blokov,” he said, “that flag, you put it there with your own hands. It doesn’t mean…”

  “Damn right,” Sergey cut in. “Russian puts up Russian flag, Russian takes down Russian flag. Now away with you.” He went in and slammed the door behind him.

  Khan could only watch as the men broke the door and raided the rooms. Two shots were fired inside, but before Khan had time to wonder if Sergey had killed anyone, new sounds came from the other side of the Orchard. Russian soldiers had arrived in Tajrish in ten army vehicles, not unlike the trucks that brought food, and marched into the Orchard. Women shrieked and escaped inside. The men in Sergey’s room poured out and ran for their lives. The villager on Sergey’s roof was riddled with bullets before he could uproot the flagpole. By the time Sergey could open his bloody mouth against the shooting pains of his broken ribs, the soldiers had searched every inch of the Orchard and rounded up Khan and everyone else in front of the house. Norooz the Gardener raised his voice in protest. A soldier walked up to him, put his bayonet against his heart, and pushed the blade in. They put Sergey on a stretcher and sent him off to Tehran. Khan and his family were released. The soldiers spread out into the village. Sporadic gunshots echoed in the winding alleys of Tajrish for four hours. Before sundown, the drivers started their vehicles, the roar of which slowly faded out as the dust settled back down on the dirt road that, in the years to come, would be an asphalt street lined on both sides with overarching plane trees in the heart of a city so big that neither the dead nor the living residents of the village of Tajrish could ever fathom it.

  7

  HMAD LOOKED BACK at the broken gate of the Orchard and tried to keep up with his mother’s long steps. He heard a front door creak open behind them, halfway down one of the alleys, and a moment later a stone hit his mother in the back of the neck. She did not turn her head, but Ahmad saw Nemat the Barber’s face looking through the half-open door in that unblinking way of his when he cut hair. Pooran hurried through the rest of the descent pressing on her neck, pulling Ahmad’s hand, not saying a word, not even looking back at him, until she tripped over a rock and fell. That was the first time Ahmad helped his mother get to her feet and dust off her clothes. But even then, she would not look into Ahmad’s eyes, as if embarrassed of the reversal of roles. She got to her feet and did not thank him.

  A few hours after they mounted into the wagon, Ahmad and his mother entered the capital. He had not been to Tehran since his father died. One memory of the city alone lingered from before the Day of the Fog: the Smoky Machine, the two-car train that ran between Tehran and the city of Rey. Ahmad had ridden the machine twice on trips to the Abdol-Azīm Shrine that were less of a pilgrimage and more of a family outing. He thought he also remembered the turquoise dome and the flags flying at the top of the minarets, and his father refusing to go in with his mother, and games he played with other kids where someone screamed from excitement. On both trips, some children at the station had said the machine was alive. As if exhausted from hauling so much iron, the “horse” heaved black clouds of smoke from its chimney-like nose. Few people were on the cars; more huddled on the dirt area that was the platform to see their family and friends off or watch how the iron horse would come to life with a clatter and pull the two carriages on the shiny metallic roads. Ahmad had looked out of the open-air cars at the barren plains sprawling between the capital and the small town of Rey as they crawled southward. The rough ride and the demonic din of the metallic horse sounded sweet to him then, as it churned his insides with excitement.

  Had it not been for the memory of the Smokey Machine, it would have seemed that Ahmad’s life began the day he stopped speaking. The rest of his past had vanished. Now he watched with keen eyes and a heart pounding in uncertainty as he passed through the remains of the old gates of Tehran with his mother and the stable boy, with the pots and pans banging against the leather suitcases, toward the new apartment that Khan had rented for them, on the second floor of a two-story brick building in a row of similar houses with flat roofs. Each attached to its neighbors; the houses formed two unbroken walls along either side of the alley where, unlike in the village, people walked until late at night.

  All the way from Tajrish to the city, images from the day before flashed in Ahmad’s head: Sergey’s broken door, the Russian soldiers raiding the Orchard like lightning, and the way the bedlam came to an end as abruptly as it had started. After the trucks left, Khan had stormed out of the house with his rifle in his hand. “My horse!” he roared, pacing the area between the hoez and the flower beds. He snatched the reins as soon as the stable boy returned with the piebald. Ahmad had run after him with the others, but they quickly lost him. Khan had ridden to Mulla’s house and then to the mosque, but both were empty. He galloped up and down the tortuous alleys of Tajrish, under the tall, interweaving trees, and past the little green leaves that sprouted from the cob walls of orchards. He dashed along the brick walls that enveloped courtyards, past half-open doors where people stuck a head out to watch. He stopped when he came back to the open area in front of the mosque and shouted, “These bloods are on your hands, Mulla!” The last of the purplish orange was setting behind the western mountains. “These bloods are on your hands, Mulla!”

  Years later Ahmad learned that not only had Khan’s voice reached everyone in every corner
of Tajrish, it had also traveled to villages as far as three hours away. That sentence never died. It lived in the Alborz mountains for years, going from gorge to summit, from peak to ravine. The inhabitants of Tajrish heard it every time it returned to their village, even after those who were children at the time of the Russian Invasion had children of their own, even when Tehran grew so large that the whole of Tajrish became no more than a neighborhood of the megacity, when the metal din buried every other voice except the sentence Khan had cried into the night.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN AHMAD SAW THE CAPITAL that day, the orchards of Tajrish seemed to him to have been the promised paradise. The large city was a maze of narrow streets and alleys flanked by connecting buildings. Tehran lay close to the mountains, but had an open sky. There was nowhere to escape from the sun that blazed on the ground and walls. An occasional plane tree, elm, or cypress sprouted on the edges of sidewalks, but until he saw a bony, middle-aged man on a ladder picking leaves from a white mulberry tree and shoving them into his mouth, Ahmad could not imagine why the lower branches were all bare as winter. In the trees, only crows had nested. Other birds, even those that did not migrate, had flown away. Without birds, the city was as bizzare as a face without eyebrows. Tehran was a city of fading glory and growing horror. A combination of cars, buses, bicycles, passersby, and horse-drawn carriages wandered the streets in such a way that it seemed they had forgotten the goal of their movement. Where the streets crossed, four-faced lights stood in the middle changing from green to yellow to red. Glorious mansions of the royalty and rich and large government buildings stuck a head up here and there, but Tehran was a city of two-story buildings: lying low, dry, and warm. More straight lines everywhere, more cubes. Roofs were flat, some gable. There were many stores with wooden doors and windows, but food was scarce. Groceries were almost empty. Bakers sat on low wooden stools in front of their shops under the awning that flapped in the spring breeze. Hunger was visible on faces, like sadness.