The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  It took Khan two more months to come with his most accurate estimate for the big happening: two thirds into the summer, the next year. He compared his calculations with Sergey’s scratchings with a smile of satisfaction: he had the time and the place.

  “Now we’ll have to wait and see, Sergey. We’ll have to wait and see, my friend.”

  * * *

  —

  AHMAD’S APARTMENT, BOTH ROOMS COMBINED, was smaller than the smallest of the rooms in Colonel Delldaar’s large house, but Homa saw it as the modest start of a quest to build a better future. Homa’s mother refused to visit her daughter in “that rat hole.” Homa swept both rooms and dusted everything from ceiling to floor. She rearranged things to her liking and replaced some old furniture with new pieces. She tried to converse with the landlady in her spare time, when Ahmad was at the forge, or when she used the kitchen in the yard. Meek and reserved, the old woman was afraid of an imminent imaginary war. She refused to touch onions since the day two messengers from the army had brought back the remains of her son in an onion sack. When the home was spotless, and she had prepared for dinner, Homa would walk down the alley to the main street to grab a buggy or a taxi, if she could find one. Most of the time, she would take the horse tram and go over to her father’s house, trying to ignore her mother’s self-righteous pity for her miserable new life. Homa would come back home in time to make the dinner, all ears for when Ahmad would open the door and step in with shopping bags in his arms. She bought a few balls of yarn and stole a pair of needles from her mother’s basket and knocked on the landlady’s door.

  “Will you teach me?”

  For a couple of weeks, Homa sat with the landlady knitting and talking to her and making tea for the two of them until she was tired of the meaningless repetition. Then she went to Ahmad’s bookcase and started reading until the smell of fresh bread wafted into the apartment. Homa went to the window and watched Ahmad cross the yard. She took the bread and bags from him and hurried to get clean cloth. “We can spend less, if we have to,” she said wiping blood off of his face, “if it’s what it takes for the fights to stop.” Ahmad shook his head. Homa unscrewed the Mercurochrome bottle. “My father can pull some strings. I’m sure he would find you a job somewhere if I asked him.” Ahmad shook his head, smiled at her, and went to the forge the next day.

  It wasn’t the fights but the silence that Homa had underestimated. Having soon lost its novelty, Ahmad’s quiet grew louder every day until Homa could hear it clear and boisterous. She plugged the radio in and turned the knob until every corner of both rooms were filled with human voice. Ahmad turned the volume down when he came home. He motioned to remind her the landlady had warned them, albeit timidly, that the sound was troubling. Homa then became garrulous. She told him the minutest details of her day. Her shopping, her knitting, her preparing the food, all she had heard on the radio, the book she had read, and her visits to her father’s house. She went as often as she could, seeking her premarriage life in which things were familiar. The silence and loneliness exhausted her to the extent that her mother’s snides became tolerable. The family trip to her father’s villa by the sea in the North was what Homa looked forward to the most, the two-week trip the family took every summer.

  A week before the trip, Homa could talk of nothing else. She described the villa in detail. A two-story white house with a gable roof and working fireplace, and a view of the sea. She would sit Ahmad down on the narrow mats they had spread on the rug at the foot of the wall and plan how they would build a fire on the beach, put potatoes in it, and watch the waves wash over the sand. She brought a leather suitcase from her parents’ and started carefully folding her clothes, unfolding to straighten out a few last creases and refolding before putting them in. She pulled three books from the bookcase and placed them on the clothes, topping them all with her sandals. Two days before the trip, she closed the lid and buckled the straps.

  One evening Khan knocked on the door. “Give me one last chance to prove the cat story is true,” he told Ahmad when Homa was down in the yard washing tea glasses in the kitchen. Khan leaned forward to put a hand on his grandson’s knee with a gentleness that revealed a humility coming from earnestness. “Something big is happening. I know the exact streets. Come with me and I’ll show you. It should be any day now. My maps match what Sergey says.” It was the ardor with which Khan had thrown the wedding, the meticulousness with which he had bought himself the new black suit and a pair of patent leather shoes, and the fastidious way in which he had folded his square pocket that had left no doubt in Ahmad’s heart that Khan loved him beyond what he believed in or objected to. That was why on that evening, he decided to give his grandfather another chance.

  When Ahmad handed her the paper, Homa fell silent for a long while. She read the note and pouted the way she did when she was deep in thought.

  “You can’t tell me why?”

  Ahmad shook his head and saw disappointment in her eyes. I’m sorry, he mouthed.

  Sitting cross-legged on the ground playing with the edge of her skirt, Homa was silent for a long time. “You know my mother will say so many things about you,” she said, raising her eyes to Ahmad, “but if you can’t even tell me why you can’t come with me, you must have a good reason.” She was not angry. She got to her feet and straightened her skirt. “But I’m going without you.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS AFTER HOMA had gone, Oos Abbas was drinking tea in his chair when Salman walked into the forge holding a little boy’s hand. It was Sara’s boy. Salman had promised to take care of him for a few days while she was away with her husband in another city to meet a doctor, but an emergency Tudeh Party meeting had been called. “Things are touch and go,” Salman said in a hushed voice. “They couldn’t have waited a day; they set the meeting for tonight. I have to be there.” With his wavy, brown hair, the boy looked up at Ahmad, a lively glint in his eyes. Once again Sara had come out of the blue into Ahmad’s life—this time through that little boy—from a past still alive in memory: from the days of simple words and childhood games; from that confused night when Raana did not come; from that other night when Raana did come, when Sara was absent, but her presence was gossamer over the surface of the painted walls, light as air, gliding as shadow. Ahmad shook his head. “It’s important, Ahmad,” Salman said. “Just for tonight. I’ll make arrangements tomorrow. I’ll pick him up first thing in the morning. He’s a sweet boy.”

  Ameer was not two yet. He amused himself at the forge with a top and a few rocks Oos Abbas gave him to play one ghoal, two ghoal with. “Let him run around and play,” he said, “and he’ll drop as soon as you take him home, sleep all night, and they’ll pick him up tomorrow. Easy.” The boy had his mother’s eyes, deep and penetrating. After he became bored in the forge, he went out and ran after the grocer’s three chickens that pecked at the dirt in the flower bed. Ahmad wondered if the boy had his mother’s cunning, her exuberance and audacity, too. Sara had been the one to read Ahmad’s correspondence aloud to Raana. She knew all that had passed in the deep recesses of Ahmad’s heart, and she had risked ignominy and disgrace by letting the sinful encounter unfold in her house.

  “The boy’s a spitting image of you,” Oos Abbas said to Ahmad as he left the forge in the evening holding Ameer’s hand. Ahmad smiled at the joke. At night he played with Ameer, gave him a chickpea to turn in a copper mug. Ameer climbed the mattresses and blankets folded and piled in a corner of the room. Perched on top of the wobbly stack, swinging it back and forth, he made as if he was riding a horse. Then he climbed down and teetered to the window. “Can I go out?” Ahmad lifted him into his arms, took a long and high step through the window and onto the balcony, and climbed up the metal stairs. In the yellow light of a bare incandescent bulb, Ameer ran around the roof laughing loud, then tried to look over the parapet. Ahmad hoisted him and held the mesmerized boy in front of the flickering lights of the
city at night. As the night dragged on, Ahmad watched Ameer play and get tired. The realization came to him when Ameer was drawing in a notebook, fighting sleep. The similarities between the boy and himself were more than a joke: high forehead, long fingers, oblong face, little earlobes one wanted to flick at for hours. How could Ahmad not have seen those big black eyes in Ameer’s little face at first glance? He got up, took the notebook from Ameer, and put him to bed.

  Salman did not come to pick Ameer up the next morning. Homa came back in the afternoon and fell in love with the boy at first sight. I think I have something to tell you, Ahmad wrote on his notepad. Homa played with the boy in the yard and reprimanded Ahmad for not having ever invited Salman, Sara, and her family over. Ahmad crumpled the note in his hand.

  * * *

  —

  KHAN HAD BEEN MISTAKEN BY about ten days. The two men roamed around where Khan was expecting things to happen. They drank tea in a coffeehouse. Ahmad bought a newspaper from the stand and leafed through as they waited. They smoked a hookah, but nothing disrupted the calm of that beautiful day.

  “These things cannot be predicted to the date,” Khan turned to Ahmad on the bus to explain the failure of his prophecy. He threw sidelong glances at the other riders and leaned in to whisper into his grandson’s ear. “Those animals are shrewd. They can change plans like that.” Ahmad smiled at him and put his large hand on his thigh as if he, and not the older man, was the consoling grandfather who reassured him that everything was all right. Khan was not surprised when ten days later he could not convince Ahmad to go with him again.

  This time, Khan witnessed his predictions come true. Holding his maps in his hand, ebullient, he was present at the exact streets where a coup unfurled: a coup that those ignorant of the ways of the felines would later claim was backed by that far-off country by the name of America. Contrary to what the Prime Minister’s opposition claimed, Mosaddegh had not organized the Coup, but was the victim of it.

  On that day, before Ahmad left home for the forge, there came a banging on the door, the type that announced trouble was waiting outside. Ahmad climbed down the stairs and opened the door. Salman sprang in. It was Mash Akbar, his father. A crowd of thugs and laats had attacked his butchery. Ahmad bounded up the stairs two at a time, briefly explained the situation to Homa in a note, and ran out of the house after Salman.

  As they got closer to the main street, the din of the demonstrators reached him. Before they turned onto Lalahzar Street, Ahmad could make out the Death to Mosaddegh! and Long live the Shah! slogans from the confusion of shouts and cries. Thugs streamed along Lalahzar Street waving clubs and machetes. Most of the stores were closed. The ones open, either caught by surprise or underestimating the gravity of the situation, had their windows smashed. Fruit rolled on the sidewalk and got squished under leather soles. A car rode alongside the demonstrators laden with men riding inside and on the roof, like a metal porcupine with human spines. One man held a framed portrait of a decorated young Shah in a uniform. Negligibly small groups of Mosaddegh supporters were being beaten as the sticks and clubs rose in the sky and paused for a short moment at their apex before swooshing back down. Many escaped and many watched from behind windows, cracked doors, or farther away on the sidewalks.

  Ahmad ran past Café Lalahzar and saw in a glance the broken chairs and tables, and the shards. Many a nervous evening he had sat in those chairs trying to look confident when the young woman two tables away turned her eyes on him. Following Salman, he darted through the crowd on the sidewalks and, after a few turns into narrower streets and alleys, slowed to a stride. A small group of people were gathered in front of Mash Akbar’s butchery watching the laat Asghar Rostam and his three novices drag Salman’s father out. Asghar Rostam was one of the most feared laats, who wore his long scars across his face as his badge of honor and boasted how he had stabbed the One-Eyed Reza in the left eye. They had thrown Salman’s father on the ground out front and circled him in their black suits and fedoras like three crows. Asghar Rostam accused him of lying, of fraud, and of selling meat that would send the eater to hell. Two of his novices went inside the shop and came back out grinning, carrying two dead cats each on their shoulders as proof of the man’s culpability. Their eyes closed, the cats lay as if peaceful and content on the shoulders of the novices.

  Among the crowd, as the novices dropped the cats on the ground in front of Mash Akbar, Ahmad was wondering how the dead cats had ended up in the butchery. “You are a godless piece of shit just like your communist son,” Asghar Rostam shouted at Mash Akbar. Ahmad looked around. Salman was gone. Saliva drooled from the lips of tongue-tied Mash Akbar kneeling at the foot of the laat. Asghar Rostam picked up a rock and hurled it through the window. “Feed him the cat,” cried someone in the crowd. The grin that appeared on his face showed the laat had liked the idea. He picked one of the dead cats from the ground. Two of his novices held Mash Akbar as Asghar Rostam shoved the lifeless animal in the butcher’s face. Mash Akbar sobbed with clenched teeth. In vain Ahmad looked around for Salman. The thugs in the crowd whistled and waved their sticks and fists. Asghar Rostam’s jackknife flashed open. “Someone’s losing an ear today,” he shouted, pointing the knife in Mash Akbar’s face. “Is it going to be the cat or you?” Then suddenly, with the ferocity of a ravenous wolf, Salman’s father tore off the cat’s ear in one bite. He chewed with saliva dribbling from his mouth onto his shirt. The thugs roared.

  The shots were fired at that moment.

  Asghar Rostam’s pierced body dropped on the street and the panicked crowd dispersed. The bullets that Salman fired from the roof of the house across from his father’s butchery marked the beginning of a long period during which the Tudeh Party saw its demise. The Shah’s intelligence service cracked down on the party, hunting out its members in clandestine branches of the army and top government positions. The prisons, with the passing years, became places of savage torture of the sort that engendered dread and rage. The bullets that pierced the laat’s body that day blazed at their core with flames of a revolution.

  In the confusion that ensued, Ahmad rushed to Mash Akbar, put his strong arms under his unconscious body, and lifted him. Panting as he swerved among men running in different directions, he half-ran, half-walked to the nearest hospital while the demonstrators converged upon the Prime Minister’s house. Soon the doors broke open and the mob poured in. The traitor was arrested, his house turned to ruin. As Sergey had shown. As Khan had predicted.

  * * *

  —

  AHMAD GRABBED A FOLDING CHAIR and sat by the hoez beside Khan. The night was warm and heavy with low, sparse clouds that veiled the half-moon from time to time. The city was closing its eyes with the hope of forgetting what it had seen that day. The Prime Minister had been put in prison. Soon he would be sent away to his hometown, locked in his house until the last day of his life. I believe you, Ahmad wrote, today I saw how they worked, even when dead. Khan waited for a wandering cloud to float past the moon before he read the paper. He turned to Ahmad and put a serene hand on his grandson’s shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. But there’s no winning this. I can’t spend my life tracking cats. I need to believe in life.

  Lying by Homa under the mosquito net on the roof, Ahmad wrote what he saw as a poem of hope for the future. He rolled over and brushed Homa’s hair from her face before he kissed her on the cheek. Her face was bright with the light from the paper. The crickets chirped. He wanted to wake her up and tell her all about Ameer. He touched her on the shoulder, brushed away hair from her closed eyes, and shook her gently. “No,” she said and turned her back to him. Ahmad could not sleep the whole night. He perfected the poem to an arrangement of words that shone even after the first rays of the sun smote the sky.

  In the wake of the Coup, a number of papers, supporters of the fallen Prime Minister, were shut down. Among the journals were those that had published Ahmad’s works. Now the explicit references to oppr
ession and injustice in Ahmad’s writing frightened editors into rejecting his work. Faced with obstacles and closed doors in the outer world, Ahmad redirected his search to the world of words. He deliberated on his poetry and saw, as if for the first time, the form of his writing, the classical: lines of the same length, the same number of syllables, each line divided into two equal half lines. For over a thousand years, high literature had been constricted by those laws, the slightest divergence from which would not be fathomable. It came from an age-old system of deep-rooted oppression and control. Poetry was in rigid blocks, circumscribed in rectangles: prisons for words that translated into prisons for people. Why did poetry have to be forced into predetermined rhythms? The rhyme diverted speech from the freedom that natural conversation and thought enjoyed. His attention was drawn to the poet Nima of Yoosh who for the first time had broken the law of equal lines a few decades before. But even Nima of Yoosh was still confined with rhythm and rhyme. Was there a way, Ahmad asked himself, grandiosely, to break free?

  Seeing Ahmad’s struggles at his desk, Homa tried patiently to create a calm atmosphere at home. After dinner and tea, when Ahmad opened his books and grabbed his pen, Homa picked up her yarn and needles and went downstairs. Having heard the young woman’s footsteps, the landlady opened the door before Homa knocked. Sitting in armchairs, the two women knitted and talked while the radio played music from the top of a low wooden table in the corner of the room. The old woman would make herself coffee on a low gas stove and then brew some tea for her guest. “The sooner, the better, honey,” she would tell Homa from time to time. “You should have as many children as you can while you are young.” Under the mosquito net on the roof, Homa would read Ahmad her favorite poems before sleep, some of which were Ahmad’s. When she did so, Ahmad threw a tightly muscled arm across her chest. Listening to the sound of crickets, Ahmad thought night after night whether he should tell Homa about Ameer, that lovely boy who looked too much like him, but then he consoled himself by remembering that Homa had seen Ameer, and was not struck with the similarity between the man and the boy. Then he would fall asleep.