The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  17

  LTHOUGH HE HAD JOINED JAMAAL’S GANG for mercenary reasons, Ahmad now realized that he had continued not for money alone, but for the bonds that fighting abreast of one another had tied between the four of them—and also for the fight itself, the thrill of dodging a kick and then landing a punch, the panting, the racing of his heart. One last time, he wrote to Homa at night.

  Jamaal understood. “You’re becoming a father soon.” At his last fight, Ahmad attacked with a religious devotion and single-handedly took four men, one with a machete. It’s okay, it’s over, he mouthed to Homa who looked at the wound on his arm with horror. But it was not okay. The open wound would not close. In a few days infection built up like a small painful pillow and Ahmad could not leave the bed. Homa called a cab. The driver slung Ahmad onto his shoulder like a sack of wheat and lay him on the back seat, then pulled him onto his shoulder again at Khan’s door and, with the guidance of Pooran, took him inside and put him on the bed in his old room. Agha had crouched as far into the corner of the bed as he could before the driver dropped Ahmad down. He looked at Ahmad’s pale face as if he could not believe the young, healthy man who had wheelbarrowed him down the Tajrish alleys was lying there with eyes closed and mouth half-open, panting as if his body anticipated a fever. The doctor came to the house, but was unable to treat the wound. The next week, he recommended amputation. “Or it will kill him.” Ahmad was losing weight by the hour. His eyes sunk into his tired, sweaty face. He was so pale it was as if blood had congealed in his veins. Colonel Delldaar suggested they take him to France, to knowledgeable physicians who were also equipped with the latest developments in medicine.

  The first thing Pooran did when she heard the word amputation was write a letter to Nana Shamsi who was out of town. Come soon, Mother, I need you. She went to the Abdol-Azīm Shrine in Rey. The Smoky Machine she had taken with her children and husband years before had been put out of service; instead there were buses. After kissing the old wooden doors, she entered the big courtyard and bowed toward the domed building. Inside, she inched ahead through the many chador-clad women to touch the gold- and silver-plated shrine. “I want you to give me my boy back,” she whispered. But she was too distressed to wait for the dead saint to grant her wish. She took the bus back from the shrine to an herbal physician some neighbors had told her about. She boiled crushed lavender, saffron, and rotten turnips and poured the foul-smelling elixir into Ahmad’s half-open mouth.

  Agha had panicked from the first day they brought Ahmad in. He evacuated Ahmad’s room, which he had settled in since they brought him to the capital, and moved to the living room, shouting with alarm from time to time so someone would take him to check on Ahmad, although he could not bear to be taken into the room. In Pooran’s arms or on Khan’s back, he would cover his face with his hands and steal a look at his favorite boy through his fingers and soon turn his face away. He could not sleep at night. As if stricken by the sheer weight of an imminent death for the first time, Agha, who had seen countless people die during his innumerable years, would cry out Khan’s name in the middle of the night. “Go check on the kid,” he instructed an exhausted Khan, with bloodshot eyes wide-open, gesticulating toward Ahmad’s room, “I can’t hear him breathe.” Khan assured Agha that Ahmad would survive. “Do something,” Pooran begged Khan. Like a maniac, she went from one neighbor to the next, from one acquaintance to the other, and asked if anyone knew of any cure.

  Seyf Zarrabi, the owner of the neighborhood fabric shop, sent word that his father once had an infectious leg when he was young. A doctor from a neighboring village had cured the infection with an ointment, the recipe of which he had given Seyf. “I’d go far for my dear customers,” Seyf told Pooran in his shop, “miles more for an esteemed lady such as yourself.” He ran his palm on the few waxed strands that crossed his bald scalp. “My pen and paper are in there if you don’t mind.” He locked the shop from inside and lead Pooran to the small room in the back. “Are we ready for the recipe?” he asked, running a gentle hand along Pooran’s back. Closing her eyes and listening to the buzz of the teal Westinghouse refrigerator in the corner, Pooran memorized the recipe as a passionless vertigo swept across her.

  But the shopkeeper’s prescription proved ineffective. When fever and delirium seized Ahmad, Homa locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed for an hour. Then she came out and said, “Let’s do this. From now on I’ll be his right arm.” The night before they planned to take him to the hospital, a knock on the front door echoed across the yard and into the house. Without saying a word, Nana Shamsi walked, taking one short, deliberate step after another, across the yard and straight to Ahmad’s room, where he lay in his bed, his face streaked with sweat, his undershirt stuck to his chest. “The next time I see you,” Nana bent over and whispered in Ahmad’s ear, “you will have both your arms. The next time you see me, I won’t be breathing.” Then she put her hand on Ahmad’s forehead for a short time and left the room. Within a week, the wound stopped secreting pus and healed. When Ahmad swallowed his first spoon of soup, Pooran hid her face in her scarf and left the room. Moved by joy, and by contrition about what she had done at the fabric seller’s, she cried in the kitchen.

  No longer willing to be without Nana for even a day, Pooran wrote to her, and a few days later, the old woman arrived holding her granddaughter’s hand. The girl’s other hand groped along the door and the walls as she walked in. “I like this house,” she said with blue eyes that looked at no one. Zeeba had lost her sight after she ate an herb in the wheat fields outside of her village when she was little. Her golden hair shone in the fall sun. Khan had a room built for Nana Shamsi and the girl on the roof of the house. The workers wheelbarrowed in brick-and-mortar and soon a rug was spread across the floor. Khan designed an elevator that worked with ropes and pulleys to take Nana Shamsi from the yard to the roof. The wooden platform could be lowered and elevated by turning a handle that was set on the elevator itself. Zeeba soon learned to operate the elevator and help her grandmother up and down. She felt her way around the house for a few days, but by the end of the second week she was playing hide-and-seek with Majeed and helping Maryam take care of Parveen. With the permanent addition of Nana Shamsi and her granddaughter to the house, Maryam brought her kids over more often. Zeeba knew each member of the household by their footsteps and maneuvered through the halls with such ease that the only sign of her blindness was the fixed gaze that lanced past everyone.

  Khan would not listen to Agha’s pleading to take him back to his tree. “It’s my home,” he said, “I miss it.” But Khan said no. “Then make me a room on the roof,” he said. Khan rejected his request. Ascending to the roof to tend to Agha would be too much trouble for Pooran. “Nana has a room,” Agha said. “I want a new room.” Khan heaved a sigh, and the next day workers wheelbarrowed in bricks and built a small room with a big window in the corner of the garden. They asked the old man what color he wanted his room painted and he picked light green. “Can I have a swing?” Agha asked. Khan made holes in a big bronze tray, passed ropes through them, and hung it from the ceiling. When they sat him in the tray, the smile on Agha’s face took on a calming depth as it sank into the creases of his skin.

  * * *

  —

  AS HE WALKED THE STREETS now to keep an eye on the cats, Khan felt that his legs were not as dependable as before. He had to stop from time to time, sit on the steps of a building, and give his knees some rest. Once he almost fell when he stepped into a hole in the sidewalk. He avoided another fall by holding onto a young tree. When the third time, he managed to land on his hands and brush off the dust from his trousers unhurt, he made up his mind.

  “Shaft, beech, single piece. Handle, oak,” he ordered, “carved.”

  Three days later at the carpenter’s, he turned his cane in his hand and examined it from the brass tip and the thin rubber at the very end up the varnished, simple but elegant shaft, to the derby handle that at th
e end morphed into the head of a roaring lion, mouth wide-open, fangs intimidating in their miniscule, wooden ferocity. Cane under his arm, Khan strode toward the tailor. He tried on his new suit and pants and squinted into the mirror. Then he marched toward the hat shop, donned an Astrakhan, and examined his reflection to see if the hat could replace the old one that the hatsnatcher took years before. Clad in all new clothes, with a light-blue pocket square tucked in his breast pocket, Khan held the handle of his cane tight, thumb resting on the head of the lion, and put the tip on the ground for the first time. From that day, he took his cane with him on his walks for cats, as an assurance that when the time came, he could lean on it. But he walked faster and with longer steps as if to prove to the passersby that he did not need the cane. As a result, he walked more and spotted more cats in the streets. “Kill them,” was all Agha said rocking in his tray. But even if he did that, how many could Khan kill single-handedly?

  “By the way,” Agha added one afternoon when Khan came back home and knocked on Agha’s door to see if he wanted anything, “you look good.”

  “Thank you,” Khan said standing outside at the door.

  “And your cane,” Agha said eyeing Khan as if with admiration, “it has made you look younger.”

  “Thanks. I’m going in now,” Khan said and started to turn around.

  “I want to marry Nana,” Agha shouted before Khan had time to take his first step. Khan turned around and looked at him lightly swinging.

  “No, you can’t,” Khan said surprised.

  “Why? I have my own place and a purple wheelbarrow.”

  “You just can’t.”

  “Are you saying I’m old?”

  “No,” Khan said, but did not know how to complete his sentence. “Wait a minute, have you talked to her already?”

  Agha shook his head, then said in a drawn-out, child’s voice, “Will you?”

  “No, Agha,” Khan said, his initial surprise turning into irritation. “This cannot happen. It is not customary and it is not right. This story ends here.”

  He closed the door behind him and went in.

  * * *

  —

  SERGEY DIED IN THE WINTER. Khan went down to the basement but did not hear the cat move in his cage like he always did when he heard Khan’s footsteps. He opened the curtain and found the cat lifeless in his cage. Khan buried Sergey under the pine tree in the yard. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said as he covered the body with dark, wet soil. “Please forgive me.”

  That night, Khan could not sleep. From his window, he looked at the small mound under which Sergey’s body lay, a brown spot in the snow-covered flower bed that glistened in the night. He ruminated over the memories of the past all night, and so it was that when the first rays of the sun shot into the sky, he was awake to hear the noises from Agha’s room. Khan got up from the edge of his bed, hastily put on his sandals at the veranda, crossed the yard on the paths the kids had stamped into the snow, knocked gently, and went in. In the dim light he saw Agha was swaying, but he was not sitting in his tray. He was hanging from his neck. Somehow the old man had dismantled the swing. Khan dropped his cane, hurried to Agha, and hugged him hard, taking his weight off of the rope. He did not know what to do. “Help!” he shouted. “Help!” He could not cut the rope on his own without letting the old man dangle. “Help!” he shouted louder and as he waited for someone to come, he buried his face in Agha’s frail body and cried.

  “It’s okay,” Agha said, stroking Khan’s white hair, his high-pitched voice consoling. “It’s not working. I’m too light now.”

  SALMAN MANAGED TO DODGE THE Shah’s intelligence system for more than nine years. He showed up at Oos Abbas’s forge one late spring afternoon, hugged Ahmad, and gave him a letter for Sara. He could not risk a second visit anywhere and had already been to Sara’s house two weeks before. Oos Abbas made tea and the three of them sipped as the young men exchanged the latest. Salman stuck to the personal. His father had closed the butchery after his recovery and stayed home until Salman could not continue to support him any longer. Sara wanted to go to work, but her husband did not allow her, so Salman worked longer hours—he was an electrician. Then Sara went to Mash Akbar and said he was too young to retire or mope, not too old to remarry, and honestly that was unviable. Mash Akbar went out and became a hand in a grocery store. Ahmad knew Salman’s not talking about politics or the Tudeh Party meant something, but could not help asking, How are things? and by that both of them knew what Ahmad meant. Salman had met a girl, a petite woman whose energy was inexhaustible “and her tongue unstoppable,” he joked. Ahmad concluded that the girl must have been a fellow party member, or someone Salman shared political beliefs with, someone Salman walked the streets with. Perhaps they worked or even lived together. Do you live in a commune? Ahmad meant to ask, but he did not. The furnace ticked cool. Salman told Ahmad agents might come to him. Ahmad could, and should, tell them the truth, that Salman had been here. He left without saying where he was going and when Ahmad might hear from him again.

  The letter was the perfect excuse for Ahmad to see Sara. Ahmad had long wished for the encounter, although he did not dare arrange it himself, for fear of finding out to be true that which he hoped was impossible. That, he told himself, was the reason he had not divulged the secret of Ameer to Homa. He hoped against hope that when he faced Sara, her incredulous looks would say, Are you crazy? Of course this is not your son. He hoped that Ameer would leave his life as unexpectedly as he had entered it. He hoped to see the boy again and find him as similar to his father and mother as nature could make manifest. Sara’s husband, Salar, a middle-aged man, although rather reserved and reluctant on political issues, seemed happy to meet Sara’s childhood friend. They sat in the living room, leaning against poshtis, tea glasses steaming in front of them on saucers. “This is Ahmad,” Sara said with a smile, playfully introducing and reminiscing. “He ripped my shirt open once when playing tag.” Salar tried to banter away the boldness in Sara’s recollections. She did not shy away from Ahmad. Were those knowing eyes revealing a shared secret to Ahmad or was this just an old friend delighted to relive innocent memories?

  Ameer walked out of his room and without looking at the guest took his short steps to his father, where he sat cross-legged and bent his head. “Kids these days grow fast,” Salar said, “like weed.” The boy had grown. More than Ahmad would have thought. Nestled in his father’s lap, Ameer was a boy of three in the body of a five-year-old. While Sara told her husband how Ahmad had taught her to read and write, Ahmad’s eyes flitted from Salar to Ameer, and the fewer similarities he could find between the two, the more distracted he became. How he wished to be alone with Sara and put a definite end to his doubts once and for all! But even then, how could he bring himself to ask Sara if her son was a bastard, if she had tricked Ahmad into sleeping with her on a dark night, passing herself off as another woman? When Ahmad was leaving, more doubtful than when he arrived, Salar did not offer the common formality of inviting Ahmad to visit again. Something in his face showed a hatred for the silent man, as if he knew the secret, as if he knew he was raising Ahmad’s boy.

  18

  OMA GAVE BIRTH TO A GIRL. They called her Leyla. She was a perfect mix of Homa and Ahmad and worked miracles. With her first cry, she expelled the silence from the two cursed rooms. Colonel Delldaar ironed his uniform, polished his shoes, and welcomed his granddaughter while standing at attention with a stern face, but welled-up eyes. When he saw the newborn, Homa’s Great Uncle abandoned his idea that a man had to earn what he possessed and gave Ahmad and Homa the present of a small house. Before the baby was a month old, Homa had rejected the landlady’s offer of a decreased rent five times. When the moving day came, she had to talk her away from the door with the promise of weekly visits.

  “What about no rent?” the old woman whispered in Homa’s ear as they hugged.

  The new house was not grand, bu
t it was located in a calm neighborhood. The front door opened into a short corridor that led to a large living room. The kitchen could house a six-seat dining table and still leave Homa enough room to freely walk from the cabinet to the sink and the stove. The windows in the larger bedroom opened to the small but cozy yard. Homa bought all new pots and pans for the kitchen. She did not protest when her mother made the final decisions about where the furniture would go, or when she shook her head and decreed that the curtains Pooran had sewed for the new house would not go with the armchairs in the living room. With the baby so little and fragile, Homa could not bring herself to lose the little of her mother’s affection and interest that she had won after the birth of Leyla. Pooran was offended when she saw the orange curtains draping over the windows, but said nothing. The new house, the baby, and the constant visits from both her family and Ahmad’s brought a healthy rose to Homa’s cheeks within two months. Even the baby seemed to like the new house. Lying on her back in her bed, she gurgled and smiled at everyone.