by Ali Araghi
One late night, at a time when visitors were not expected, the sound of a stifled knock wound through the house. Ahmad opened the door to Salman, who slipped in silently and gently closed the latch bolt behind him. He had a present in his hands. Homa opened the box and took out a pair of small red girl shoes. The three of them sat with the tacit agreement not to discuss the fugitive in the living room, but the friend who slapped his thigh and laughed when Homa told him how, when Ahmad had his fedora on, Leyla would cry in his arms, not recognizing him as her father, but broke into a hesitant smile when Ahmad took the hat off, only to pout again when the hat was back on.
Homa brought fruit in a basket and put on the kettle to make tea. Ten minutes later, before the tea was quite ready yet, a short high-pitched whistle sounded in the street. Salman sprang to his feet. “Goodbye ladybug,” he said to the sleeping baby in her room. “Grow up soon.” With a confident calm in his movements, Salman rose from by the crib, hugged Ahmad, congratulated Homa again, and climbed the stairs up to the roof of the house. That was the first time Ahmad and Homa had Salman in their home and the last time anyone called Leyla “ladybug.”
Khan was enamored with the baby. Even when no one was busy, he volunteered to look after her. He had a room built specifically for her on the roof next to Nana Shamsi’s. The baby and whoever looked after her would rest in those quarters, and when she grew up, she would know she always had her own private shelter no matter what. Parveen was so excited to have a cousin that when they told her she was too small to let the baby sleep on her legs, she offered to wash her dirty diapers.
Parveen would climb up an empty tin bin to reach the clothesline. After she was done, and when no one was in sight, her brother, Majeed, took the pins off and left the wet diapers to the mercy of the breeze. Later, Parveen picked the white pieces of cloth from the ground and branches of the trees, shook them, then washed them again.
“Do you want to play count the kitties?” Majeed asked Khan. Patting baby Leyla on the back while rocking her in the garden, the old man tousled the boy’s hair and sent him away.
“Some other time maybe. Have you done your homework?”
* * *
—
MAJEED BECAME A WA NDERER. WHEN he found the opportunity, he would skip school and run to the movies to be mesmerized by the bright rectangle. Before he could gather the money for a ticket, he would squat for days on the sidewalk across from Cinema Royale and stare at the large painted poster above the entrance. In the foreground, the likeness of the lead actress revealed ample legs from under a miniskirt in a coquettish pose. In sizes proportionate to their fame, the mustachioed actors occupied the rest of the painting touching the brim of their fedoras with a thumb or looking off into the distance. Street vendors sold food and drinks in front of the theater to the stream of people that came and went. When he ran out of patience, Majeed waited for his father’s loud snores at night, stole out of the bed, tiptoed to the coatrack, and pinched coins out of his father’s pants pockets. Amidst the loud cries of men rising from their seats to swear at the characters they did not like and the crackling of roasted sunflower seeds breaking open between teeth, Majeed sat rooted in his seat, hugging his school bag, swinging his short legs, enchanted by the black-and-white images that danced before him: the love scenes, the flirting scenes, scenes of cheating, scenes of fighting.
* * *
—
THE NEW BABY HAD CHANGED Majeed’s park excursions into crusades for his mother’s attention. Maryam, Homa, and Pooran gathered with the children in Khan’s house every Friday and set off for the horse tram station with baskets and bundles. Once in City Park, Majeed walked, hugging his ball and watching his sister circle around Homa and Leyla, trying to take the baby’s hand or hold her in her arms. Majeed kicked the ball as high as he could and tried to catch it before it hit the ground. One day a man came to the park pushing a Ferris wheel. The rickety structure wobbled and squeaked along the paved paths, slow like an ambivalent proof of divine presence, before coming to a stop by the side of the playground. Once it was secured in place with rocks that the man wedged under the wiggly wheels, Majeed approached. Painted red, green, and yellow, the thing was an assemblage of four metal seats, shaped like simple rockets, attached to two circular rings that formed the main frame of the wheel. The wheel man lifted the kids and sat them two per rocket seat—to earn more per round—then he turned them round and round by holding the frame rings with both hands and using his thin body’s weight as the motor, pulling down, springing back up to grab the frame and pull down again, like a well-designed, clockwork power system. Before long, a line of eager kids formed. Majeed ran to the blanket where his mother sat leaning against a tree, talking with Grandma and Aunt Homa, rocking baby Leyla on a pillow she had put on her outstretched legs. He asked if he could go on a ride.
“You said you wouldn’t want anything again if I bought you the ball,” Maryam said, “remember?”
“But I don’t want the ball,” Majeed said, stamping a foot on the ground. “I want to ride.”
“With Mom’s permission,” Homa got to her feet, “I can take the kids.”
Maryam fixed her reproaching eyes on Majeed for a little while. “What do you say?” she asked the boy.
“Thanks, Aunt Homa,” he said and ran toward the line. “I want my own rocket,” Majeed told Homa once their turn came. “Me, too,” Parveen said. But Majeed would not ride if Parveen also had a separate seat. In the end, Parveen agreed to share a rocket with Zeeba and let Majeed have his own.
With her eyes pinned to the unseeable in the distance, Zeeba gasped as she went up and swooped down. One hand holding tight at the side of the metal thing and the other clutching Parveen’s arm, she could hear the happy laughs of the children around her and the ecstatic cries of Majeed that came now from above now from below. She could not hear Parveen, and had to call out her name to check on her. Parveen did not answer. She wanted to get off, but something in her stomach kept falling and churning. If she opened her mouth, her heart and stomach would spill out. Majeed was ecstatic. Waving a hand in his mother’s direction, he called out from the zenith of his climb like he was coming back from a years-long journey across foreign waters and soils. Maryam turned an acknowledging head but soon reverted her attention to Pooran and the baby who flapped her tiny arms and legs on the blanket. Intoxicated with a sense of flying, Majeed would from then on grab any opportunity to get himself to the park and drop a coin into the palm of the man who ran the Ferris wheel. Every coin he pulled out of his father’s trousers was laden with the weight of an imminent decision: the movies or the wheel?
* * *
—
AHMAD’S FIRST BOOK WAS A success for a young poet. Half of the two thousand copies were sold in three months and by the end of the year, a second printing was in order. Soon after the book was out, he was invited onto the editorial board of the weekly magazine Our Times. The first evening he came back home from work, Homa was ready, dressed in blouse and skirt. “We’re celebrating,” she responded to Ahmad’s questioning look. “Finally out of that forge.” They rode a cab to the restaurant where Homa had made reservations. In the post-Mosaddegh time of caution, when certain things could not be told, Ahmad published his political essays in Our Times with such audacity that if it had not been for his growing, but controversial, fame as the inventor of a new poetry form, the owner of the magazine would have shown him the door after his first editorial. With the increase in the regime’s intolerance for critical opinions had come a time of disappointment. Defeat and despair dominated literature. Ahmad’s essays were his way of expressing his rage, though diluted so as to be printable. Anxious, Homa would ask if he was being too risky. They were parents now. Ahmad would shake his head and write that he knew what he was doing. “But I will not read them anymore, okay?” Homa said one night. “I don’t know why you can’t stick to your poems. You’re not even good at this.” She went
to the baby’s room thankful that Ahmad could not continue the conversation.
One spring morning two agents came for him. Surprised and nervous, Ahmad half-stood, not sure whether or not to extend his hand. They closed the door behind them and started politely. The first man asked about Ahmad’s writing, the references in his poetry, and the true meaning of some of his symbolism. He recited excerpts of Ahmad’s poems and essays from memory, asking for clarification. Trying to remember everything he had written, and to be consistent, Ahmad made up explanations, hoping the vagueness he had put into his verse would help him get away with what he truly meant. When the first was done, the second agent changed the subject to Salman. Salman was a killer, a fugitive, and the member of an illegal communist party, but guided by Salman himself, Ahmad knew there was one route to go: the truth, and of that he did not know much. “Are you sure?” was all the man asked when Ahmad wrote he did not know where Salman lived and that he had not seen him since shortly after his baby was born.
When Ahmad went to work the next day, someone else was sitting at his desk and the editor was not in his room. I understand your trepidations, Ahmad wrote, but I regret having worked for a coward. He slapped the note on the desk and left.
“Once a blacksmith, always a blacksmith,” Oos Abbas said when Ahmad walked back into the forge, yanked the sledgehammer out of his hand, and began such pounding that the little mirror on the wall rattled. A few weeks later a flatbed trailer squeaked to a halt in front of the forge and Ahmad had the workers unload a number of new hacksaws, a heavy red welder, and an electric sander. “Progress, ha?” Oos Abbas said and plugged in the welder. From that day, they started making doors and windows. With the growing number of cars in the streets, demand for horseshoes had already fallen to almost nothing. In the coming years, orders for spades, axes, and pegs also vanished; it was doors, windows, and banisters that kept the forge going. The day Ahmad bought the tools for the forge, he did not think he would one day call Oos Abbas to fit his window with bars to put his mind at ease, and that the old blacksmith would arrive with that same welder.
With wrath still brewing deep within him, and immensely affected by the beauty of the small human being in his arms that was his daughter, Ahmad finished his second collection of poems in a year. He was invited to read at the University of Tehran by some students interested in contemporary poetry. The event was denounced by many of the professors of literature as profane. Few, if any, were inclined to recognize the arrhythmic, unrhymed havoc that called for the abolition of the classical form. Ahmad sat in front of the audience as a junior in literature read the poems out loud to the students and those who had come from outside the university and found not only a poet who wanted change, but also a tender, fatherly voice who saw the world as if with the eyes of a newcomer, innocent, incredulous, and curious. They liked Ahmad.
* * *
—
WHEN LEYLA TOOK HER FIRST steps, there was purity and daring in the immensity of the effort she used in placing one foot in front of the other and the magnitude of joy she received from the fulfillment of her endeavors. Ahmad and Homa followed her closely, ready to catch her if she were to run into furniture. After Leyla dropped back onto her hands and knees, Ahmad wanted to witness that majestic moment again. Nothing in the world could rival the ambition with which life survived and thrived. I want another, he mouthed to Homa. Their second daughter would be born two years later. They would call her Lalah.
Soon Leyla was zooming out of one room and into another, stopping and pointing at the furniture. She would look up at her mother and make a sweet sound. “Table,” Homa would say. “Yes, it’s a table…That’s a shoehorn…No, no, no touching. It’s dirty.” Then one day a bolt of panic struck Homa when she realized Leyla was not speaking. Ahmad tried to console her, writing that his affliction had not come down to him from his father, but had been the result of an incident. But all Homa saw was her husband writing with his head down and a daughter who, when Homa called her, would look up at her mom—her brown, wavy hair curling up around her head—but would not make a sound. “Say Ma,” Homa urged the girl, “Say Daddy.” Homa’s mother fed her granddaughter raw pigeon eggs three times a week. Pooran boiled sheep’s tongue, which Leyla ate with a healthy appetite, looking at her grandmother for more, but never saying a meaningful syllable. The noises she made, with which she had broken the house’s piercing silence, were now so painful to Homa that she had to leave the room when Leyla babbled as she played with her dolls or drew on the walls with her crayons. Homa took her to a doctor who did not find any abnormalities or disabilities. Once again, the apartment was becoming a void from which there was no refuge. When Ahmad came home from the forge, Homa not only found no solace in his presence, but felt helpless in the face of the horrifying duplication. “Say, Mama,” she shouted at the girl, holding Leyla’s tiny shoulders in her hands, her face red with anger, frustration, and fear. “I said say, Mama.” When Ahmad was around, Leyla followed him like a duckling, as if scared of her mother. A second doctor did not see a problem either. “Don’t worry,” said the third, “she’ll talk your ears off soon.”
Visiting new doctors became a weekly ritual. When she had seen them all, Homa started over again and after a few months she resorted to the physicians who had found healing in ways not known to the world of science. Boiled herbs and concoctions proved ineffective. Leyla refused to drink from a vial with an olive fluid that reeked of rotten fish. Homa clamped her between her knees and force-fed her the viscous remedy. Leyla ran a burning fever for four days straight. You shouldn’t have given her so much trash, Ahmad wrote on his pad sitting by the side of Leyla’s bed. Look what you did to her! Homa crumpled the note and threw it into Ahmad’s face. For the next four days Ahmad tried to mouth an apology or write her a note. Homa would either turn away or drop the unread notes into the trash can. Finally Leyla’s fevers subsided and she sat in her bed smiling, opening her arms for her father. When Ahmad walked out of the room with Leyla in his arms, Homa looked at him long enough for him to mouth his silent sorry! Then Homa went and bought a prayer.
A few days before, she heard the name of Haji. “You’ve never heard of Haji?” a woman in the neighborhood asked with a hint of condescending surprise. Haji was a prayerwright. His name began circulating around the city after two incidents. To a merchant who was almost bankrupt with cockroaches that had infested his rice he prescribed a combination of four short prayers to intone in the warehouse and blow in the direction of the grains. After two days, word had it, no matter how deep he dug into the bags, nothing came out in the merchant’s cupped hands but, grade A, clean, pure rice—almost pearls. A few years later, he had built himself a mansion that was only second in magnificence to the Shah’s palace due to a purposeful demonstration of humility. As the story of his great fortune made the rounds in the city, so did fame and deference for Haji. One day a young man asked him to prove the power of his prayers. Haji said that well-spoken words could even make someone invulnerable against bullets. “I’ll try it,” said the young man. Haji penned a two-line prayer. “Say this and God willing no harm will come to you.”
On a crisp morning some days later, whispering under his breath, the man stood in front of a crowd. They had heard the news and come out to witness the test in the barren lands outside of the city. Close to some unfinished buildings, someone pulled out of a gunnysack a rifle he had inherited from his grandfather. The hum of the crowd standing a short distance behind the shooter subsided when the rifle rested on his shoulder. For a few seconds everything lapsed into a delirious stillness. One man on one side, and facing him, a crowd of people and a loaded gun. The gun went off. The man collapsed to the ground as if his strings had been cut by an unforgiving slash. They buried the body and walked back to the city whispering about what had happened. In response to someone who questioned the prayer, a woman said maybe the man did not say the words right. By the time the sun set on the city, there was almost no d
oubt in the hearts of the witnesses. Only a handful expressed their cynicism. “Well, we’ll never know,” they said. In fact, the faithful were right. The man never got to utter the prayer. Tongue-tied by the horror that loomed before him, he could not move, he could not open his locked jaws. No matter how much he tried, he could neither remember a word of what the turbaned man had given him, nor could he move his lips to cry that he had changed his mind, that he no longer wanted to take bullets in his heart. The whole city heard about Haji overnight, not as a phony, but bona fide.
Homa whispered the prescribed prayers with meticulous attention and blew at her daughter, waiting for the unspecified day when, as Haji had said, she would say her first sweet word. One morning when Ahmad was in the yard and Homa was chopping herbs for lunch, Leyla walked into the kitchen, looked up at Homa, and asked, “Mother, what is SAVAK?” The night before, Homa had been talking to Ahmad about the new intelligence department the Shah had established to improve national security, wondering how important it would be in the long run. Ahmad was worried, but Homa was hopeful this would be an insignificant addition to the structure of the government. Years later, before the Revolution shook the grounds on which palaces stood upright, SAVAK would become the name that sent shivers down the spines of most, except for the dauntless for whom down with the Shah was not just a slogan, but an effervescent desire bubbling up from the rarely plumbed depths. But the day Leyla asked about SAVAK, Ahmad and Homa did nothing but revel, one blushing in hushed joy, the other in fits of ecstatic laughter and tears.
From that day on, Leyla talked with the fluency and accuracy of an adult and the sweetness of the child she was. When in Khan’s house, she spent long hours in Agha’s room, chin resting in her palms, listening to the old man’s unending stories. But when Ahmad learned about it, his breathing quickened. Don’t leave her with Agha alone EVER again, he wrote in his notepad with such force that Homa suppressed her questions into a hesitant nod. Agha kept calling Leyla’s name when she played with the other kids in the garden. Leyla would look in his direction, not sure whether to listen to her heart or obey her mother’s new rule.
