The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

“At the café!” Salman said.

  15

  OLONEL DELLDAAR PRESSED HIS LIPS together when a major, who was new to the department and tried hard to be friendly with everyone, leaned forward and congratulated him. He had no idea what the wisecracker was talking about. “Your son-in-law, the poet.” The major held that the relations between the Colonel’s daughter and a certain young man were common knowledge among the regulars at Café Lalahzar. The Colonel called up his nephew and berated him for slacking on his supervision. The young man denied the situation. He confessed to his uncle that there had been something going on between Homa and Ahmad, but it had never gone past a few sentences decent enough to have been uttered in front of the whole café. There was nothing there to gossip about. “Then how come I hear gossip?” The nephew had no answer. He bent his head and apologized.

  Two days later, when the time came to leave the café, he followed Homa out past Ahmad and Salman’s table. The broken pane had been replaced, CAFÉ LALAHZAR written on it in large calligraphy in red paint with yellow shadow lines, and the owner had taken the opportunity to replace some of the older chairs and tables. It was at one of those new tables that Ahmad and Salman sat that day. When Homa was in the automobile, her cousin closed the door and ran back inside. He leaned forward and slapped his palms on the table to hold his face close to Ahmad. “If you want your head to remain on your neck, don’t even think about her,” he whispered to Ahmad, pushing the words through clenched teeth. Homa saw her cousin through the window, his fist, his involuntarily knotted brow.

  “I’m going to dinner with someone you have heard of, Colonel,” Homa told her father at the table after the servant had put the steaming platter of rice on the table and left the dining room, closing the door behind her.

  “There’s your daughter for you,” said Homa’s mother, turning away from Homa and shaking her head at Colonel Delldaar, pressing her lips together and putting her fork and spoon down in a way that made it unmistakable that their daughter’s affront was somehow the Colonel’s mistake.

  Ignoring her mother, Homa put some rice and chicken on her father’s plate, then picked up her own. The ceiling fan blew free a lock from Homa’s mother’s hair which she tucked behind her ear with her fingers, fury darting from her eyes toward Homa in sideways glances. “Don’t put pressure on the poor boy either,” Homa said, composed, keeping her head down to her plate, “he has been as good a chaperone as one could ever be.”

  Under the scrutinizing gaze of his wife, the Colonel looked at his daughter, not knowing what to do. Homa was the only one of the three eating. “Okay, let’s not get carried away,” he said. “Let’s talk after dinner. Everybody, eat.”

  The next Friday, Ahmad was already seated at a table when Homa arrived. His shiny patent-leather shoes were the first thing that caught her eyes. Ahmad got to his feet and fastened his suit button as she walked toward the table in a pistachio-green dress and light-rose heels. A smile broke on Ahmad’s shaved face. The waiter pulled the chair out for her, took their orders, and rearranged the table fan by the wall toward them.

  “I thought I was early,” she said, hanging her purse over the back of her chair. “I hate to keep people waiting.” She looked at her watch, a small rectangle on the inside of her right wrist fastened with a narrow brown band. “I guess our date begins in four minutes, then.” She looked up at Ahmad. “I say let’s be punctual?” Ahmad nodded with a smile. Homa leaned back and locked her hands in her lap. Her thin, painted lips were like ruby cut to good curves. Deep calm of the forests of the North in her eyes. Her fastidiously cut bangs swung ever so gently in the breeze from the fan. The murmur of the diners clanking their silverware on china plates and softly speaking to one another washed through the restaurant. Homa’s eyes flit to and away from Ahmad. Outside, the late summer evening was yielding to the night. Lights were on in windows. Homa extended her hand and gave the pepper shaker on the table a turn. She smiled at Ahmad. Ahmad smiled back. Shaped like a vague pear, the steel pepper shaker had five holes at the top. That was how Ahmad knew it was not its twin salt shaker which had more. Homa looked at her watch. It was not time yet. The waiter placed two plates on the table next to theirs. Steam rose from rice topped with chunks of grilled lamb and halves of tomato. The man moved the small crystal vase from the middle of his table to make room for more food the waiter was bringing. Ahmad looked at the vase on his own table. The roses were beginning to wither. He touched a petal. Homa was looking at him, a play in her eyes, a restlessness in her heart. She looked at her watch for a few more seconds. “Okay, hi,” she said, looking up with a smile. “Not the best way to kill four minutes, right?” Ahmad reached into his inside pocket, but before he had opened his notepad, Homa had slapped a notebook on the table. “Do you mind?” she asked. She pushed it in front of Ahmad. “I mean, I was thinking of keeping it. Just our first conversations?” Ahmad found that a nice surprise and slipped his notepad back into his pocket.

  What of yours do I get to keep? was the first thing he wrote in Homa’s notebook.

  Homa sat back and squinted her eyes as she thought. “How about something I’ve never told anyone?” Ahmad leaned forward and rested his crossed arms on the table as a gesture of enthusiasm. She told him that when she was seven, her mother made her a rag doll with unmatching buttons for eyes. The day before she went to school, she asked her mother to go with her, but she said Homa had to go alone, because all the other girls went alone. She asked if she could take her doll with her and her mother said no. At night in her bed, she took out her eraser from her pencil case and sat her doll in front of her by the eraser. She told her doll that she could not take her to school, but she would take that pink eraser in her stead, so she would not be away from Homa in spirit. Miss Buttons said, Okay. That was the reason she had two erasers in her pencil case in first grade: one to use, one not to.

  Tell me another story of when you were little, Ahmad wrote the next time they sat in the restaurant and Homa told him about the time her cousin, the same Ahmad had seen at the café, had pulled her hair in a hide-and-seek fight, and Ahmad wrote about the time he did Salman’s homework and Mulla did not dare punish them in the classroom.

  Homa read the pages once in the restaurant and again at home. Even though she had not seen Ahmad yet, Homa’s mother did not like him. “How am I supposed to tell others that my son-in-law is dumb?” she said out loud in the kitchen so Homa would hear. “Oh, the things they will say behind my back!” Colonel Delldaar was nervous. He knew how hardheaded Homa could get. Rained with reproaches from his wife to show some backbone, he did what he thought was best: try to gently talk Homa out of her immature infatuation with the poet.

  “You’re good for nothing,” said Homa’s mother to Colonel Delldaar in their bedroom.

  * * *

  —

  TWO MONTHS LATER, NANA SHAMSI walked into the kitchen. Pooran was chopping herbs. “The boy’s coming again,” she said, “but I won’t be here to see him.” The day Pooran opened the door for Ahmad, Nana Shamsi was in her village, tending to her sick granddaughter, putting wet towels on her forehead that burned with fever. Pooran would not look at Ahmad. With her head cast down, she turned around and started for the house. Ahmad ran into the yard and blocked her way. He held her face in his big hands. It was the second time he looked straight into his mother’s face since the teenager in him broke the window and left the house. Tiny wrinkles appeared in the corners of her eyes. Will you ask a girl’s hand for me? Ahmad mouthed. Pooran was not looking at Ahmad yet, but she could still read her son. A few moments passed. A cool breeze blew into Pooran’s hair. Then she looked up at him. And smiled. “Is she beautiful?”

  * * *

  —

  KHAN WOULD NOT GO.

  “I’ve been waiting for this moment since he was born,” Pooran told him.

  “Some things should not happen,” Khan said, “and this marriage is one of them. I can’t give m
y consent to this.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I don’t want another Nosser in my family.”

  Pooran remained silent for a short moment. “There will never be another Nosser.”

  Khan was drawing sectors on his map the next day when Ahmad bowed his head and stepped in through the short basement door. The passion and embarrassment of the youth had painted his face a soft rose. Khan knew what Ahmad was there for, but he put the needle of his protractor on a new point to make a full circle while the boy struggled with his pencil and notepad. Ahmad bent over the desk, writing and sliding papers over before Khan. Khan took a passing look and brushed them off his map. Ahmad wrote more. At last Khan put down the protractor.

  “This notepad of yours, you’re going to have it in your pocket for the rest of your life,” Khan said, “because of your father’s folly.” In silence, he looked at Ahmad for a while. “Have I told you the story of my father?

  “Rooh-o-Deen was a kind man, the nicest father I have ever seen. True, he did not talk much; he would not express his feelings openly, but you could see his emotions as if his whole being was transparent. He would treat his family with respect. In those times that a son feared his father’s belt and heavy slaps like a beaten dog, he never so much as shouted at me or my mother. He was the only man I knew who helped with housework, although he would not let it be known. It was a fact that Rooh-o-Deen did not have the ambition to expand on what was handed down to him from his own father, but he worked hard on both of the orchards. He was a god-fearing man. He took care of us.

  “Then one day, he packed his clothes to go to the bathhouse. My mother reminded him that he had been to the bathhouse only three days before. He said he needed to clean himself anyway. Three days later, he bundled his clothes under his arms and shuffled to the bathhouse again. When he came back home, he sat and drank the tea that my mother brought him. Before he finished the tea, he sniffed at his armpits and said he needed a bath. He patted me on the head on his way out. Soon the bathhouse keeper would find him sitting at the door every morning before daybreak. He would stay there all morning and come home for lunch. He wouldn’t touch the spade any more. So I had to start to run the orchards at the age of seven. The mulla came with some of the village whitebeards. They talked and talked, but the next morning, my father was standing outside of the bathhouse even earlier, before the morning prayer was called.

  “He stopped eating because he found food itself filthy. Meat was rotten flesh and blood of carcasses and greens came from under dirt. After two weeks, four men held his arms and legs and force-fed him roasted lamb and broth. He stuck a finger down his throat and threw it all up. Then he ate soap and went back to the bathhouse. He scrubbed his skin away with a coarse loofah. Soon he fell sick. Yellow pus oozed from his skin. He shrieked from his bed for four days, stopping only to catch a breath. So loud he howled that no one in the village slept a wink in four nights. I saw my mother in the kitchen pressing her hands over her ears.

  “When the last night was coming to an end, his cries stopped. The whole village was immersed in a soft silence. A few minutes later, a cock crowed. When I opened the door, I saw my mother sitting on my father’s chest, her hands locked around his frail throat like two pincers. He had been dead for a good while, but my mother was still sitting there, her tears dropping onto my father’s face. His eyes were open, almost popping out of their sockets, staring up; his hands clutched her wrists. She sat there for a long time until she heard the knocking on the door. People had come. Then she asked me, ‘Help me with the fingers.’ They were so stiff she could not free her own fingers from his.

  “My father and your father, that’s been enough. I don’t want to see a third. Do you understand me, Ahmad? They were good people and what they did was not their fault. I’m not saying it was the cats for certain, but it might have been. I think we are the family in Agha’s story. Think about it, your father died so young. So did mine. Agha is still alive. Why is he not dying? Because he’s not going to. I’ll be like him. And so will you. If you ever have a baby boy, you will certainly see his demise. You are the only person I’m telling this.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I may have found a way to prove to you what the cats are doing in the recesses of this city.”

  He walked over to Ahmad’s side. “I predicted the uprising after Mosaddegh’s resignation. Before it happened. All from how the cats moved between neighborhoods. It’s all on this table. Wherever they go, catastrophe hits. It is all in these numbers and lines. Those creatures are on to us.” He pulled the papers closer. But Ahmad shook his head.

  I’m not here for anything cat, he wrote. He fell down to his knees as Khan read his note. He would never ask Khan for anything again. He did not care if his son would go mad or not. He would even promise not to have a child if Khan attended the proposal ceremony. Homa was all he wanted.

  “What do you see in her anyway?”

  Ahmad held out his arm. Khan gave him his notepad. She gave me as much of a voice as I ever had. He kissed Khan’s hand. The old man tried to pull away, but Ahmad held it hard like a drowning man whose life depended on that hand only. The plea in his eyes was honest, the supplication in his grip was warm. Khan looked at him for a few minutes. Then he shook his head.

  Ahmad got to his feet and snatched some paper from the table.

  She has the courage to want me

  In spite of her family

  And I’ll be no less

  I’ll imagine I don’t have a grandfather

  It’s not harder than publishing in Tudeh Magazine anyway

  Khan read the last sentence and kept Ahmad from writing more. “They published you?” There was a pride in Ahmad’s nod. “Of course they would. Did you forget what I said? The Tudeh Party is under the influence of the cats.”

  Ahmad started for the door. Khan held him by the arm.

  “Listen. I have proof the cats were behind the rebellion in Azerbaijan. The Soviets protected them. That’s why the Shah couldn’t send in the army to take the province back before the Russians left. Then the cats started the Tudeh Party which is against the Shah and against what keeps this country in order. Of course they will support Mosaddegh and of course they will publish you.”

  Ahmad ripped a page out of his notepad, wrote on it, and slapped it on Khan’s chest.

  I loathe you.

  Khan fell silent. He listened to Ahmad panting and watched his red face. Sergey moved in his cage behind the curtain. Khan looked at the note and read the sentence again. “I think you’re wrong,” he said, “and I can’t condone this, my son.” Ahmad opened the door. “But if you get married,” he said before Ahmad was out, “I’ll throw you a wedding they write about in books.”

  * * *

  —

  AT THE PROPOSAL CEREMONY, AHMAD, Pooran, Maryam, and her husband sat in a room where twelve of Homa’s relatives had gathered. The awkwardness caused by the absence of a father or an elder male member of Ahmad’s was palpable. Great Uncle, Colonel Delldaar’s uncle and eldest in the family, found no one to talk to, the closest person to him in age being Pooran, a woman who did not even seem to be in her forties yet. Resting one palm on the other, both hands on the curve of his erect walking stick, he sat in a big chair, in the good part of the room, farthest from the door, looking at the gathering with a frown. His silence was a sign he was offended. The Colonel kept the ceremony from falling apart by maintaining a conversation with Pooran, turning his eyes to the groom with a smile or a nod every now and then. He began by talking about how the prices of eggs had gone up. He said, and Pooran agreed, that it had gotten so warm in the past couple of years, to the point that the ceiling fan was not enough anymore and they had to add the floor fan to the guest room—he pointed to the fan that scanned the room near the Great Uncle. Then he added how the house itself grew unusually hot in the summer and cold in the winter and he thought there was somethin
g wrong with the design and then he asked Pooran where she lived and was surprised when he found out that Ahmad did not live with her, but rather in his own place. He was not impressed when Pooran named the neighborhoods where she and Ahmad lived. Then he asked what the groom did for a living and nodded his head with a forced smile when Pooran said he worked at a forge and was also a poet. “Very good, very good,” he said, faking interest, nervous about what his wife was thinking and what Great Uncle would say later, hoping that by some improbable miracle Homa would change her mind.

  “It was a disaster,” Colonel Delldaar cried out after the door clicked shut behind the suitor and his family.

  When the phone rang a week later, Homa’s mother looked at the clock. She knew Pooran was on the other end of the line calling to hear the bride’s answer. She had called right on time, as she had promised. Homa’s door flew open and out she ran, book in hand, her index finger bookmarking the page she was on. Standing close by, an expecting smile on her lips, she waited for her mother to answer the ringing phone. Homa’s mother placed her hand on the handset. The phone rang again. Homa’s mother looked at her with raised eyebrows, her inquisitive eyes fixed on her daughter as if questioning for the last time if she was certain of her decision. Homa breathed a frustrated sigh that her mother read as her not wanting to discuss the issue anymore. The phone rang again. Homa’s mother shook her head and picked up the headset, an affected smile involuntarily appearing on her lips as she said hi to Pooran.

  Yes.

  * * *

  —

  FROM THE CHEST IN HER room Pooran took out the fabric she had set aside years ago for the dress she would wear to Ahmad’s wedding. Large, red flowers sat on a background of light cream among lavish green leaves that grew from waving branches. Folded into a square and carefully bundled in a piece of brown canvas, the fabric had lain there since Ahmad was five, the year Pooran’s mother brought it from the hajj pilgrimage. When Pooran closed the chest and unwrapped the canvas, a cloud of green moths flew out like water sprouting from a fountain, some fluttering out the open windows, some pinning themselves on the curtains, others alighting on the cream walls, wings slowly opening and closing. She pinched the edges of the fabric and held it up in front of her and saw the holes. All that was green had gone, the leaves no longer attached to the branches. For the first time she went to Seyf Zarrabi’s fabric shop. In a clean and pressed suit and tie, the man hastened from one shelf to the other behind the counter and took long looks at Pooran’s face as she evaluated the fabrics. She sewed dresses for herself, Nana, Maryam, and Maryam’s baby girl, Parveen. Mohammad Reza, Maryam’s husband, became Khan’s right hand. He rented chairs, dishes, and cutlery for the wedding dinner and found a proper orchard for the wedding day. Khan hugged Salman when he came in with the cauldrons and ladles. What was broken to pieces in Pooran was being fused back together with the happiness her son’s marriage brought to her heart. The only thing she regretted was that the festive event had not happened sooner. If she had told Nosser that his son would have a wedding, he may have stayed longer, at least until after the ceremony, or come back to be there.