by Ali Araghi
Shortly before midnight and after he made sure Khan and his mother were asleep, Ahmad stepped into the yard and rolled up the wicker shades behind which yellow vapors drifted in the smoke chamber. He took a rock from the garden and hurled it through the window. Puffs of cloud billowed out and expanded into the sky like a genie ready for his master’s command. Before the first rays of the sun pierced the dark, a burly gendarme broke the door open. With flashlights in their hands, they ran to the broken window and then into the house. Khan came out in his pajamas, two soldiers clasping his arms and dragging him toward the front door. At the same time another soldier came up from the basement holding Nana Shamsi in his arms like a baby. “She refuses to walk, sir,” said the soldier to the lieutenant in charge who gestured with his head for the soldier to carry Nana out. They heaped the cauldrons and the cooking utensils and instruments into the back of a truck. As the gendarmes dragged Khan out, Pooran was shouting, “Where’s my son? Where’s my son?”
11
NABLE TO THINK CLEARLY or hear the threats directed at him from the front passenger seat, Khan sat silent during the drive along the streets of the dawn. The dark was about to yield to the sun. The shops were closed, the streets quiet except for a few sweepers and a handful of early risers.
The gendarmes locked him in a dark room with four other men who were there for different reasons, one for murder, two for street fights and stabbing, and the last for allowing his donkeys to demolish and defecate on the greenery in front of the palace. Khan did not know what awaited him. A trial or some sort of prosecution? Four days passed. Three of the four men left. Only the murderer remained and Khan was almost sure he would be there for a long while. But on the fifth day, a man in uniform opened the door and shouted, “Old man, out!” Khan was led into a room where a major leaned his elbows on a large desk. On one of the chairs in front of the desk sat someone in a different outfit, a Russian uniform. Khan was bewildered for a few seconds. It was only after he was seated directly across from the Russian officer that the blue eyes gave the man away.
It was Sergey. His sturdy nose was not straight anymore: distorted into a crooked beak, it bent to one side halfway down over the bridge. His lower jaw failed to align with the upper. The first thing Khan said to himself was, So the Russians have been behind everything—the war, the famine. All the time the major talked, Sergey refused to look Khan in the eye.
“If there’s a next time, I’ll make sure you won’t see the light of day again,” the major finished his speech and buzzed for his aide to let the old man out.
“I won’t leave without the woman,” Khan said to the major, resisting the lieutenant’s pull at his arm. Finally, Sergey looked at him.
“Some of us haven’t changed, I guess.” The lopsided smile that appeared on Sergey’s face gave him a menacing look. He got up from his chair; it was the same tall figure who always stood straight, broad chest pushed out. He stepped over and put a hand on Khan’s shoulder. “I know this man well, Major. This man is okay. He will make no such mistakes again. He will go home, live his life, and give my regards to his grandson, too. He is okay.”
* * *
—
ON THE FIRST DAY OF Khan and Nana’s arrest, Pooran had spent the morning and afternoon in the gendarmerie until she was certain she could do nothing for the prisoners, and went back home. The door was still half open. Ahmad had not returned. She checked to see if anything had been stolen and sat down on the edge of her bed. The ticking of the clock out in the living room was the only sound in the house. When the room was dark blue and the night just beyond the walls, she went to the kitchen, ate some bread, and went back to lie in her bed, but she was too tired to sleep. The moon appeared in her window and snailed out of the frame. She stared at the shadows on the wall and when it felt very late into the night, she turned her head again and looked out the window at the silhouette of trees in the garden.
When she turned her head back, the dark figure of a man was standing in the door. Pooran sprang from her bed, shrieking so loud that she was certain she woke up neighbors three doors down. The man’s face was concealed in the dark. The faintest light from the window revealed several days of stubble on his cheek. Involuntarily, another shrill scream rang out of Pooran’s throat. Khan is back, was the first thought that passed through her mind when she found herself thinking clearly again, but the man was of a smaller stature than Khan. Then she saw, in a patch of light, the man’s left foot in an old, crinkled boot caked with dried mud. He had not moved since she had seen him, apparently undisturbed by her cries and unstimulated by malice.
“Who are you?” Pooran asked, her voice weak and out of her control. The man shifted weight and the boot withdrew into the shadows.
“I’m tired.”
Pooran recognized that voice.
“Nosser?”
“I’m tired,” the man said and for a few seconds the ticking of the clock was deafening. “I scared you. I shouldn’t have come.” He shifted again, withdrawing further back, taking with him his stubbled cheek into the gloom of the living room. “I should go,” he said and turned away.
“No,” Pooran almost shouted hurrying around her bed toward the door to grab his arm. She dragged him into her room and it was in the vague light that came from the window that she first noticed he had a rifle slung over the back of his right shoulder, nozzle pointing up. It was Nosser, dusty and thin, his cheekbones jutting out, his head crowned with a gray buzz cut. In his eyes was a recognition void of emotion, a dead look that seemed to spear past Pooran. “Why did you leave?” she asked, leading her husband toward the edge of the bed facing the window and reaching to take the rifle from his shoulder, but Nosser turned away, clasping the strap with both hands as he stared into her eyes. Pooran sat herself beside him.
“They needed me,” he said looking out the window, “when the letter came.”
Pooran was confused. “What letter?”
Nosser turned to her with a bewildered look. “The letter,” he repeated as if only one letter had ever existed and then he told her about the letter that came shortly before Maryam’s wedding, demanding his immediate departure to join the carabineers.
“But there was no letter,” Pooran said, confounded at hearing Nosser repeat the lies she had told Maryam’s mother-in-law. “You died.”
“There was a letter.” Nosser turned back to look out the window, his voice still cold. “I didn’t fight all these years in the war without a letter.”
“What war?”
Nosser was silent for a few seconds, then shrugged his shoulders.
Pooran reached across Nosser’s chest and placed her hand on his hand, clasped firmly around the rifle’s strap. She was not bothered by how he sat straight, void of emotions like a marble statue. She leaned her head on his shoulder. Closing her eyes, she breathed the dusty smell of sweat for a long time before she asked: “Are you hungry?”
Nosser was not hungry, but his thirst was unquenchable. He drank two pitchers of water before the sun went up. In the morning, Pooran unbuttoned his uniform and knelt to undo his shoelaces. All the time that she stripped and washed him, Nosser did not separate himself from his gun. Tilting his head back, he opened his mouth and drank from the shower until Pooran turned the taps off and wound a towel around his waist. In Khan’s shirt and striped pajama bottoms, Nosser sat in the veranda, his rifle in his lap and a glass pitcher by the leg of the chair, barely noticing Pooran, rarely turning his head to acknowledge what she said. When time came for sleep, Pooran took him by the arm to her room where she had put an extra pillow on the bed. “I can’t lie down,” Nosser said. “Why?” Pooran asked. “I’m the guard.” All night he stood by the door, rifle in his arms, leaning against the frame, and when Pooran woke up shortly after the break of dawn, he said, “I had missed the way you snore,” then he took his empty pitcher and went to the kitchen for water.
Pooran swept the ya
rd and had the windowpane replaced. Whether or not Nosser turned a head toward her did not matter. She told him how she missed Nana Shamsi as if she had lost her mother a second time. She told him how Ahmad had grown up and how the past years that he was not with them had rolled by and how she felt there was no stopping her life from falling apart. Squatting by the flower bed, she shouted to Nosser that in a week or two, the lantanas would bloom, the clusters of color would appear in white, yellow, and pink turning later into orange and red and purple. All through summer bees and butterflies would flit from flower to flower. The vine needed better support. Pooran brought the broken ladder from the corner of the yard, leaned it against the wall, and wound the supple stems and tendrils around the rails and rungs.
“What do you think?” she asked Nosser. Nosser turned his head but did not say anything.
On the fourth night, Pooran filled up Nosser’s pitcher and went to bed with a foreboding in her chest. She woke several times, each time worriedly sitting up and looking toward the door, each time finding him where he was, in the doorframe. The last time, Nosser turned his head and said, “When I was the guard, no eye opened even a crack.” He said it with such reassurance that the next time Pooran opened her eyes was when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Nosser was standing by her side, back in his uniform. It was still dark but the kind of darkness that preceded the morning.
“I must go.”
Even though Pooran knew all along that the moment would come, she locked her arms around him and cried until the uniform was wet against her cheek. “My job is done here,” Nosser said. “Khan will be back today.” Pooran felt the weight of his hand on her head. “I must go back.”
“Where?” She looked up at him.
“To the war.”
“The war is over, Nosser.” The war had ended in early fall the previous year, around the time Khan had succeeded at enrolling Ahmad in high school. The grocer had put an extra egg in Pooran’s bag and congratulated her. Then everyone was talking about it. But the Russians had not left. They stalked the streets as if nothing had changed.
“I will miss you,” Nosser said and bent over to kiss her. As he left the room, Nosser took the pitcher from the floor. Pooran jumped out of the bed and walked behind him into the living room, through the short corridor, out onto the veranda, down into the garden, and across to the front door. All the way, and even when he was closing the door behind him with a metallic clank, Nosser did not turn around to throw a last look at her. Pooran cried until the sun was up. Then she brushed the dried mud from the carpets with her hands and put the dirt in a vial.
* * *
—
KHAN CAME BACK THAT DAY. Pooran rushed past him to Nana Shamsi and sank herself in her arms. Nana patted Pooran on the back and assured her with a smile that she had had a good long chat with the prison ladies. The fresh, soft putty around the windowpane and the absence of Ahmad revealed the story to Khan. Pooran saw his anger in the way he pressed his lips together under his large mustache. Then Khan turned away from the window and asked Pooran if anything important had happened when he was gone. “Ahmad’s not back yet,” Pooran said as she followed Khan to his desk. “I said anything important.” He sat at his desk. Pooran shook her head, but from his intense look, she knew Khan was not finished, that something else was coming. She was nervous. She thought maybe she should not have fixed the window, that the broken pane might have been useful evidence for something. “I want you to know,” he said, “that you are what keeps this house together.” Pooran smiled. “And thank you for taking care of the vine.”
THE MORNING THE NEW CAULDRONS and utensils arrived, Pooran bolted the door and would not let the worker in. “No more hat cooking in this house,” she said loudly as if to herself as she crossed the yard back to the house. The boy sat on his low cart by the door in the street, waiting for them to let him in so he could make the delivery and collect the money, until Nana Shamsi convinced Pooran that in hard times it was everybody’s responsibility to extend a hand and pull others out of the bog. “Okay,” Pooran said as she got up from beside Nana Shamsi for the door, “but be careful with all this. I won’t lose you again. I have said enough goodbyes already.” Soon the yellow cloud warmed the smoke chamber once more and hungry people in the neighborhood took lids off of pots, fished out fedoras, berets, beanies, Pahlavis, and cloche hats, soft and dripping with juice, and sunk their teeth into them in exchange for whatever they had to offer, which many times was just a profusion of gratitude and benedictions for the kind heart of the one who fed them.
But not long had passed when almost overnight people stopped buying hat dishes or even accepting them free. Their ravenous eyes longed for a bite, but even the regular customers began turning away the delivery boys. Word arrived soon after. The clergy had issued a decree: consummation of any apparel was deadly sin. Relieved, Pooran washed the cauldrons by the hoez and tidied up the defunct cookery. She placed pots of geraniums on the edges of the hoez and weeded the flower beds. The cooking was put on a hiatus and Nana Shamsi started helping with the housework.
With an unfaltering determination, Khan started looking for new ways of defeating the famine. For months he tried in vain. The day the Russians left, he was squeezing key lime to attempt a dirt marinade. He heard the news on the radio and froze with a half lime in his hand, a drop of juice hanging from his forefinger. In a matter of days, the streets were empty of the uniformed men that for the past five years were such a common sight. People used pots as percussion and danced in the public. The famine seemed to follow the Russians’ trail and soon Khan emptied his bowls of dirt back in the garden. In the coming weeks, a certain calm started to seep into the house. The weather grew warmer, the whole yard bloomed, and one day Nana Shamsi stepped into the kitchen and said, “Birds are back.” She held Pooran’s hand and took her into the yard. A mourning dove perched on a low branch of one of the pines. Pooran welled up. “Don’t distress yourself, my dear.” Nana put her frail arms around her. “He will be back, too. This is his nest.” Nana meant Ahmad, but Pooran saw Nosser in her head, leaving with the half-empty jar in his hand. Soon the sparrows followed and Khan saw a cat dash out of the half-open door of a house with a piece of meat in its mouth. People could buy meat again.
* * *
—
NOT LONG AFTER, NANA SHAMSI had a dream in which a dilapidated old man stepped out from inside a big tree, looked at her for a while, then tilted his head and grinned. Hovering in the dark, the head wailed in a way that sounded like tell Khan, tell Khan. As the head withdrew into the darkness of the tree, it said, “Tell Khan. It wasn’t the Russians.”
Leaning against the spade and running the tip of his finger on the sapling he had planted, Khan listened as the cook recounted her dream. Nana went back into the house, and Agha’s cat story came to life in Khan’s head once again as he stamped on the soil at the foot of the young tree. With the tapping of his foot in that early afternoon sun, Khan remembered news from the past year, before the Soviet withdrawal, of an uprising in the Azerbaijan Province: a local government had announced independence, a conflict that had resolved shortly after the end of the occupation. He leaned the spade against the wall and left for the store.
Before paying for the map, Khan unfolded it on the shop counter and traced the closest path from the borders of Syria and Iraq to Iran. If there had been any truth to Agha’s story, the cats would have entered Iran from the northwest corner, and that was the Azerbaijan Province.
The next afternoon, Pooran drew the curtain to the loud voice of the worker talking to Khan as he hauled the cauldrons, ovens, and copper ladles out of the basement and replaced them with a vice and piles of newspapers and magazines.
What is he up to now? Pooran sighed and closed the curtain. Khan nailed the map to the basement wall right across from the door and began his investigations.
12
ITH JAMAAL’S HELP Ahmad found work with Oos A
bbas, a forty-year-old blacksmith who sized Ahmad up with arms crossed over his chest, like he was buying a mule, before motioning him to step forward.
“Are they after you?” he asked.
Ahmad raised his eyebrows.
“The gendarmes, the police? Anyone?”
Ahmad shook his head.
“With these muscles you’ll last a day here,” he said, “no more than two for sure.” He paused. “And you have a long face.” Then he turned to Jamaal. “Long face is not cut for this work, but he can stay a day or two.”
Soon Oos Abbas was surprised at Ahmad’s zeal in pumping the bellows, making the crimson fire roar. “This doesn’t come from those spindly arms.” Ahmad slept at the back of the forge on a threadbare kilim. After Oos Abbas left the first day, Ahmad locked the door and lay down on his carpet. The sun set and the orange light crept in through the windows. All evening and night, he saw images of Raana in his head. Raana tearing a piece off the fresh bread, Raana walking, Raana holding her basket open for the shopkeeper to put the bunch of herbs in, Raana pulling glowing-red iron out of the fire, Raana sitting on the short, blackened stool in front of him, Raana working the bellows. He wiped his tears and joined Jamaal’s gang the next day.
