The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  “There is no God,” Khan muttered to himself as he shuffled out into the dark corridors of the bazaar that snaked out and away from the mosque.

  Contrary to what he might have expected, that realization did not dishearten him. Not only were his hopes not extinguished, but a fire was kindled within him. Burning in oxymoronic feelings of despair of the heavens and zeal for life, he set up a banquet of scrumptious foods and sweet-smelling drinks and gorged on chicken and kebab and all the succulent fruits that money could buy in the times of famine. His vision shortened with every bite he forced down his gorged gullet into his contracted stomach. The last thing he saw beyond his walls was his neighbor’s bedroom. Whistling to herself and combing her hair, the woman looked at something out the window from behind the curtain and smiled a calm smile. Then Khan was back in his room surrounded by unremitting walls, bare and insignificant, telling of nothing. And suddenly he realized it all, he found the answer he had been looking for: there would be no sign; that was the sign. If there was no God, no sign would ever come. If there was one, Him sending no message was His way of delegating the responsibility of Khan’s life to him. Fate was put in his own hands. Either way, he had a lot to do and much to fight for; protecting his family, saving people from hunger, and liberating his vulnerable country suffering in the hands of the occupiers. Even if he could not do all of that single-handedly, he had to try.

  He took the ladder from the basement and walked out to the hoez. Rain and cold had turned the bills into a frozen slab that cracked when he set foot on it. Squatting on top of his money, he hacked at it with the broken spade and thawed out the chunks in the house. For a week, the house was carpeted with dirty wet bills. Then he shaved his beard, oiled the tips of his mustache, and knocked on Pooran’s door.

  “Pack up,” he said when she opened. “You’re going to a real house.”

  She stared at the unfamiliar face of the stranger with the voice of Khan for a long while, studying the sunken cheeks, the dark circles under the eyes, and the unkempt eyebrows, before she let him in and threw herself in his arms.

  10

  HE FIRST THING that caught Pooran’s eye in Khan’s house was the large yard. The hoez was drained, but there was no reason that come spring it would not be brimful with clear water in which the New Year goldfish would swim. Two flower beds flanked the hoez on each side. In one stood a young locust tree and two pines. The other housed a persimmon tree, a vine, and lantana shrubs. The next fall, orange persimmons would swing on branches. Some would fall into the water of the hoez and the sun would shine on the floating orange fruit. The house itself was a one-story red brick with a flat roof. The kitchen was as large as the apartment living room and bedroom combined. The warm water faucet even worked. She assigned the smaller room to Ahmad and directed him to heap up all their things there before she started the washing and dusting.

  Ahmad scrubbed the floors for his mother and wiped all the windows until the only way to ascertain their existence was with a hesitant fingertip. One day he came home and found a desk in his room. It was light-brown wood and the top opened into a large space where he could keep his poems and pencils. The upholstery on the seat of the chair was simple, but new. Ahmad touched the velvet-like fabric and the wooden back. He ran into the yard to Khan and hugged him. Khan patted him on the back of the head.

  Ahmad’s school was far from the new house. Khan offered to hire a buggy to take him to and from school every day, but Ahmad shook his head. Khan asked if he wanted to change his school. Ahmad shook his head fervently. Perusing Ahmad’s new report cards, the old man twirled his mustache. “This is good,” he said running a hand on Ahmad’s head, “but don’t get attached. You’re too good for this place. You’re leaving for Paris at the end of spring. You’ll finish high school there.” But Ahmad knew this was impossible. Nowhere in his mind did he see a future without Raana. He went to his room, took out the small lacquered box in which he had kept the ivory-white button from his father’s shirt since the day of Nosser’s death, and put it in his desk, at the bottom, in the corner.

  One afternoon Khan came home and brought four cauldrons with him in the interest of cooking hats. Pooran was skeptical, and she worried about the gendarmes breaking into the house any minute. Keeping the cooking secret would not be an easy endeavor. The smoke and smell were what had exposed most of the previous cookeries. Something in the recipe produced a thick cloud of yellow smoke and a tang of raw fish and iron. Oozing through brick-and-mortar within a radius of forty contiguous houses, the odor woke babies in their cradles into uncontrollable fits of crying.

  In horrified anticipation of the arrival of Khan’s appointed “cook,” Pooran scrubbed each cauldron by the empty hoez every day until the cracked skin on her fingers bled in the cold. At night, she pictured the moment when the cook would knock on the door and end the few calm days she had had in her new house. In a competition with an unseen rival, she cooked her best foods for her son and father-in-law. She lay on the sofreh plates of stew and dishes of saffron rice, complemented with sides of shallot yogurt and Shirazi salad. The days when Maryam and her family came to visit, Pooran would not let her daughter help with the cooking. Like an animal who saw a younger, fiercer beast closing in to dominate her tribe and territory, she expelled Maryam from the kitchen.

  Finally, the day came. The cook walked slowly in and the first thing she did was pull out of her bodice a clean piece of rag. She took Pooran’s hand and bandaged her bleeding fingers. She was an old woman whose fragile body was wrapped in a white chador with a pattern of small flowers. Her hennaed hair showed from under her pistachio head scarf. She could hardly stand straight, but she had a blazing light at the back of her light-brown eyes. Ahmad moved the cauldrons into the basement. Nana Shamsi picked up the rusty padlock hanging on the latch door. “A new one,” she said, putting it gently down on one of the steps, “please.”

  No one was allowed in the basement except for Nana Shamsi. She would receive her ingredients at the door and disappear behind the thick curtain she had asked for. Khan did not like the arrangement. He suspected several of the items the woman ordered were not used in the recipe. She would probably sell them herself and keep the actual ingredients secret.

  The ventilation problem had to be solved before the cooking could begin on a large scale. Word had it that the yellow smoke was emitted from the turmeric or orpiment in the concoction, depending on the recipe each cook used. Nana Shamsi promised an odorless cook with premium ingredients and a pinch of her special powder, a mixture of ground herbs and some unknown elements, but there was little she could do about the color of the smoke. Khan moved his furniture into the living room and repurposed his bedroom into an airtight smoke chamber. Trusted workers constructed a chimney system to direct the smoke directly from the lid of the cauldrons into the smoke chamber, sealed from ceiling to floor—except for the windowpanes—with tar. During the day, they would crack the window and let smoke out little by little, invisible against the bright sky.

  Khan hired two hatters to make headgear out of wool, fabric, straw, and used paper. One shopping basket at a time, Pooran smuggled hats in every evening and passed them to Nana Shamsi in the basement. The cooking took the whole night. In the morning, Nana Shamsi removed the lids from the pots and squinted through the steam at the soft hats floating in the thick orange brew. She would then climb up with difficulty into the yard and leave the rest to the others.

  Nana was a simple woman from a small village in the northwest who had come to the city after the wheat in her sons’ field died overnight shortly before the beginning of the famine. After a night of cooking she went to bed and slept for three hours, then got up and helped around the house without anyone having asked her. Not working was a state she was not familiar with. She washed the herbs, winnowed the beans and chickpeas, or pickled vegetables as if she was in her own house. Sometimes she sat in a corner of the living room or in the yard and told Pooran ab
out her past while smoking her long pipe. When the crows, by their shrill, ominous caws, announced the imminent sinking of the sun below the horizon, Nana Shamsi would stand up to descend into her basement and close the door and curtains behind her. Two hours into the dark, fluorescent greenish-yellow smoke billowed out behind the pitch-dark window of the smoke room. Some nights Ahmad would roll up the outside wicker shades of the smoke-room window to let a soft glow light the yard for a short while. Khan became suspicious of that smoke. Nana was either a fraud or much less than a great cook. He decided to hire another, but Pooran walked up to his bed in the living room with a suitcase in her hand. “I’ll go if she goes.”

  * * *

  —

  AS SPRING CAME, AHMAD HELPED with the delivery of hats, hurrying out of the house with warm servings, and from his deliveries he rushed to Raana. For some time, Ahmad followed her at a distance, wary of prying eyes, not daring to approach, until he ran out of patience and stole one of his mother’s chadors. Shrouded in the large piece of fabric, trying to keep it from slipping down from his head and struggling to cover as much of his face as possible, he set out for the bakery. The soft spring breeze blew the chador open treacherously. He thought he could smell Raana before he turned the corner. He stood in the women’s line and covered his fine strands of mustache with the edge of the chador. His heart pumped hot blood into his face. He did not know how close he could stand to the girl in front of him. Four women separated him from Raana. He knew her from behind: her height, the curve of her shoulders, the way she held her head a little tilted to the side. The line grew longer. Unsuspecting bodies—all clad in chadors like him—pushed forward, rubbing against him. Squeezing past the women in front of him was not easy. Since the beginning of the famine, everyone was ready to fight. He stopped trying and left the line. He stood under a locust tree and watched those two squirming lines of hungry people. A Russian army truck snorted by in the street. Under the tarped back, soldiers were sitting, rifles in hand. The truck was still in sight when the baker came out and announced, “Out for the day.” People started to disperse reluctantly.

  Ahmad followed Raana and caught up with her in a quiet street. The perplexed look on her face did not go away until Ahmad revealed his identity. “You can’t do this!” she said with eyes wide-open, a hint of a smile on the corner of her lips, looking around in apprehension. For a moment, she was going to walk away, but the excitement was stronger than the possible consequences. Awkward and nervous, with her heart racing and her eyes flitting from window to window, she walked by Ahmad’s side for the first time. “You can’t do this,” she kept saying, but soon she was proved wrong. From that day on, a veiled Ahmad would appear out of nowhere, from around a corner, from a recess in the wall, and start walking by her side, passing her notes with no concern of getting picked out by inquisitive eyes. They walked not as lovers but as friends, unburdened and unfettered. During their promenades she would forget hunger and her father wheezing in his bed. She felt an unnatural freedom she was not used to.

  One sunny afternoon, she extended her hand to take the long-awaited note but the hand that bore it would not let go. Grabbing at the folded paper, the two hands hovered in the air for a little while in a quiet alley. Then one hand slid onto the other. For a short second, two hearts raced in young chests. Neither knew what to do next. Ahmad could not stand being close to her any longer. He let her hand go and rushed out of the alley.

  With time, the initial electricity subsided into a heartening warmth that handholding and surreptitious touching of the fingers in quiet streets kindled. Ahmad was burning inside. He wanted more. Instead he gave more. His poems grew longer and more feverish. His notes were warm and restless, his touch affectionate and lingering. Raana burned with a smaller fire. Freed from her initial shock, she often became the one to extend her hand first, but fear walked with her everywhere she went. Except when she went to Sara’s house to talk about her adventures or listen to the verses of love that Sara read with such zeal, sometimes forgetting to say the words out loud, as if it had been written for her. The day Sara mentioned her husband’s imminent trip out of town to see a new doctor, the girls looked at each other as if they had arrived at the same thought. But the longer Raana pictured herself with Ahmad, the more the illicit encounter seemed like a dream of the past than a possibility for the future. She followed Sara around the house, unable to stop thinking out loud.

  “I can’t,” Raana said standing over Sara who sat on the rug and unscrewed her nail polish.

  “I think it’d be a waste not to,” Sara answered, running the brush on the nail of her thumb.

  “You think so?” Raana asked, walking over to the radio and back to Sara. “He is a gentleman. But how do I leave my house? What should I tell my mother? What if something goes wrong?”

  “You’ll be spending the night with me. I’m afraid of the dark without my husband.”

  “You are?” Raana’s eyes opened wide as if not only that was a good excuse for her mother, but it was also true.

  “Yes, terrified.”

  Raana did not answer the sarcasm. “I don’t know.” She sat down by Sara. “I’m so nervous. What if he turns out to be a jerk?”

  Sara raised her head from her hand. “A jerk who writes poems for you is not called a jerk.” She waved the brush in her hand as she spoke. “There isn’t much as good as this boy out there. Trust me.” She paused a few moments then got back to painting her nails, so deep in thought that she did not realize when Raana left.

  * * *

  —

  AHMAD COULD HARDLY HANDLE THE anticipation. He made twice as many hat deliveries than the other days. He could not concentrate in class. Sleep skipped him at night. When the evening came, he was near the house an hour early. He walked around so as not to attract attention. The moon was in the sky and the windows were dark when he tightened his chador around him and started for the door, and it was at that moment when he heard someone say, “Naa.” The sound came from above him. Ahmad looked up and saw a cat sitting on the wall that separated the yard from the alley. Front paws neatly placed in front of it, head held up and ears cocked as if to hear the most covert steps taken in the dark, the cat stared at Ahmad. A cat on a wall was not a new spectacle in Tehran. He shooed it away and was soon at front of the door. Before he pushed open the door that was supposed to be left unlocked for him, it opened and Sara appeared in the moonlight. “Somehow her brothers found out about you,” she said, throwing worried looks into the alley. They had not let Raana out of the house since five days before and they probably would not ever again; certainly not alone. “You should leave now,” she said. “But come back when this is over. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Ahmad strode away looking at his shadow sliding in front of him, wondering how Sara had sprung from the village of years ago into the doorway of that house. What he thought was long forgotten came pulsating back with the sound of his shoes in the dark streets. He suddenly felt the same pangs he once had in front of Khan’s desk as he pictured himself leaving Sara for Paris, unable to cry out, “Never!” His feelings for that girl, which he thought were buried in those apple orchards, rose inextricable from his fervor for Raana. Frustration made him walk faster. What he did not know was more than he could fathom. He had heard from his mother that Sara had gotten married, but he had never seen Salar, the thirty-six-year-old man, twice widower, who had done, and would do, anything anyone would suggest to cure his impotence. After the notoriety he gained, following the death of his second wife, as a wife-killer, the man withdrew into his despair until one day he went to Tajrish to spend a relaxing day in the mountains and heard word of a Sara whose name had been smeared by a certain Russian officer called Sergey. He sent his father to talk to Mash Akbar and ask for Sara’s hand, which was given to him in a humble ceremony. It was a bout of luck Salar never thought he would have. With a revived hope, he took his bride’s hand and went back to Tehran hoping t
he doctors would give him a son. Sara was the first wife he ever loved. He made sure there would always be plenty of food in the house, he turned the small yard into a lush garden, and he nipped at her breasts every night. He assured Sara that God the Compassionate would soon give them a rosy-cheeked baby and it was with a heart full of desire that he had gone to a new doctor in the northern city of Rasht and was now driving back toward his home.

  Two hundred miles south, Ahmad was walking away from that house. What echoed in his head with each step he took, above the murmur of confronting memories, was the name of the person he knew was responsible for what had transpired that night: Khan, Khan, Khan, Khan.

  * * *

  —

  WHY DID YOU DO THAT? Ahmad wrote, and Khan said, “You will thank me later.” Who told you? Holding his notepad in his palm, Ahmad wrote more and tore piece after piece out, handing Khan each reverently, but burning with anger. Sitting in his chair in the veranda, Khan read each note, and looked at his grandson writing intently with a red face. “When I was your age,” he said after reading the last note, “I didn’t dare look at my father in the eye. A son talked to his elder with his head bent down. Now look at you all impudent. What do you think you were doing mingling with a family you don’t know? Do you know those two ruffians have their own beds in prison? One brother comes out, the other goes in, sometimes they’re both in. You will not have anything to do with a family of this sort as long as I’m around.” Ahmad stood still for a while. Who told you? he wrote, sinking his teeth hard into his lower lip to fight the tears in his eyes. He did not see Khan’s hands clenched around the armrest. What he saw was a blurry, stone-hard Khan, cold and unaffected. “That’s not relevant.” It is to me. Khan kept the note in his hand as he spoke. “Listen, my son,” he said, crossing his legs, “you’re just a kid. You should focus on your studies. Consider this a favor from a friend. After you’re back from Paris, you’ll have lots of time for romance. Now go wash your face and get ready for school tomorrow. Nothing other than first in the whole school will be good enough for my Ahmad.”