The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  * * *

  —

  BY THAT TIME AHMAD HAD built friendships with a number of influential figures in the government and parliament, the power near the center. He began to learn about the familial connections of the people in the sensitive positions and when toward the end of the calendar winter Ahmad’s sister asked him to find Majeed a job, he was in a situation to help.

  He is what, twenty-five?

  “Just twenty, brother,” Maryam said.

  Just?…

  As Lalah and Leyla circled around their aunt, Ahmad made a phone call, then sent a message. His condescending behavior, if not new to Maryam, was more evident, but she was always certain there was a heart in him more sympathetic than he showed. She wondered what was in his head. No doubt he was comparing her boy with himself when he was twenty. By that time, he had published a number of poems and worked in that forge. He was only thirty-two and he was in the parliament and all that he had done without speaking a word. Maryam’s son had not even finished high school. He had wasted his life working in this and that shop, every time leaving after a few months until his father found him another. Maryam felt ashamed.

  “He wants to really work this time,” she said. “If he can find some clerical position, he will stick to it. He has promised me.”

  What does he want to be?

  “Anything. He will stick to it. He will make his life with the money. And he wants to do poems, too. Just like you, brother.”

  The next day Majeed went to work at the Railways Company. They sent him to the support and maintenance department, office of evaluations. Although the trains were still running across the country, they had put work in the headquarters and administrative offices on a hiatus because of the snow. From the second week on, Majeed went to his office an hour before noon until two hours after lunch. At the cafeteria, and after complaining about the quality of the food, one of the people at his table asked him what his “line” was. Soon Majeed learned that a job at the Railways Company meant connections to the top brass. He found himself surrounded by a number of ambitious writers and poets, and one painter by the name of Shaapoor who said he had got there through his father’s acquaintance with an army general, but behind his back, they said he was connected to SAVAK. The Railways Company was the place to make decent and steady money for little to no work.

  With his first salary, Majeed rented a house with a large basement and put his reels in a corner against the wall. He had never gotten to finish the movie that the tank had interrupted. But first, there was much work to do. He dusted, wiped the floor and walls, and had the whole place painted. A few days later, he descended to the basement and tested the paint with the tip of his finger. It was dry. All that was left was the projection system. He found one secondhand at a shop near the Cannon Square. With the help of the lorry driver, he moved the projector and table in. He could not wait for that magical moment when he would flick the switch on and see the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 on the white sheet. The machine whizzed to life and the bright rectangle appeared on the wall. The image was nothing compared to those in the real cinema; it was blurry and pale and there was no sound of course, but he sat in his short metal chair and watched from the beginning again reel after reel. Pinned to the thin sheet, Majeed’s eyes followed the young man falling in love with the girl at the café and despairing at finding out that she already had a suitor of high financial and class standing. The young lover wandered the streets moping. Who was he? A nobody, just a nobody in love. What love added to him was not good for anything. And who was he to deprive the girl he loved of a bright future with another man? The man said goodbye to his love in the brisk dusk after a ride in a pedal boat shaped like a white swan.

  “I need sound,” Majeed said to the Railways guild of artists, as Shaapoor called the group of six that dined together at noon every day, “and a video camera. Maybe I’ll make a film myself.”

  “Phenomenal!” said Shaapoor, the painter. He kept a trimmed beard and left his top two shirt buttons undone no matter how many jokes the other guys made about his chest hair curling out, which they called “wool.” “Do you know photography? I have a camera. I’ll bring it tomorrow. Cinema starts with photos just like literature starts with words.”

  “Just like painting starts with strokes,” Short Poet said. He had received his nickname not because of his height, but because he wrote short poetry. “Just like every felt hat starts with strands of wool.”

  They laughed.

  “No, of course not,” Shaapoor objected, not minding the joke, “that’s different. Painting is a continuum. It can’t be broken up. I didn’t expect to hear this from such an intellectual mind as yours.”

  “Watch out for that rat,” Short Poet said to Majeed later after Shaapoor left.

  The first thing Majeed recorded with the camera was the snowy New Year. White spring was not without precedent in the memory of parents and grandparents. Majeed’s own father remembered the year in his childhood village when an unexpected cold froze the water in the hoez and the goldfish in the bowl out on the veranda. His mother remembered Uncle Ahmad digging tunnels in the snow with his friends, shortly before one New Year. Khan had a handful of cold spring memories in his mind and Agha was not surprised at all. One year the cold had not left until one month into the spring. He did not remember when it was, except that the king had traveled to Europe for the first time.

  “And I still had some hair then,” Agha said smiling.

  * * *

  —

  TOWARD THE MIDDLE OF THE last summer before the snow, the gofer brought Mr. Zia a message. He opened the envelope right at the door as usual. While the red moped idled on its centerstand, the boy waited for a reply. Trying not to look at Mr. Zia too brazenly in the face, he played with his cap in his hands and threw furtive glances at the man so he would be ready when spoken to. He knew the letter contained something important when Mr. Zia’s eyes opened in surprise behind his glasses. The man suddenly felt a confusing urgency. For a few seconds, he did not know what to do. He read the note again, then put it in his breast pocket and closed the door. The gofer shrugged to himself with raised eyebrows, then pushed his moped off of the centerstand and got on, but Mr. Zia opened the door again. “Thanks,” he said, handing the boy his tip. The boy shoved the bill into his pocket without looking at it out of reverence, then throttled away. When he turned onto the main street, he took out the money. It was the biggest tip Mr. Zia had ever given him. The bluish bill fluttered in the wind. The boy kissed it and shoved it into his pants pocket.

  Mr. Zia shaved and took a shower, then got as close to the mirror as he could with a fine pair of scissors and made sure there was not a single extra hair sticking out of his nose or ears. He combed his hair and eyebrows and decided on brown for his suit and cream for his shirt. He paced his room for an hour until he could not stand the wait anymore.

  He arrived at the park half an hour early. All the way he had thought of the day he had cried in front of Ahmad. Sitting on a bench, he craned nervously lest he miss them. Off of his temples he wiped sweat that was not from the summer heat. When he saw them coming, he sprang to his feet and hid behind a tree. Hand in hand with her father, Leyla traipsed in the dappled shade of the trees that lined the pathway, a dead ringer for her father and a completely different person at the same time. If there was anything childlike in her, it was her stature and the bright yellow of her skirt and the small red bows on her hair. The father and daughter walked slowly to the empty playground. Leyla touched the slide and swing and withdrew her hand quickly. They sat on a bench in the shade and talked, one gesticulating, mouthing, and writing in his damn notepad, the other serene, saying things that Mr. Zia knew would be nothing but perfect words of intelligence and sweetness at the same time. Later, after they were gone, after he had followed them for only a few steps and watched her saunter away, almost hovering as if on clouds, Mr. Zia looked at his watch and could
not believe an hour and a half had passed.

  From then on, Leyla would ask her father to take her to the park on the weekend and look for an opportunity to call the message boy and give him the message. She would spot Mr. Zia at a distance, at times with sunglasses, at others with a hat, coat, and scarf, and on other days with wool gloves, his breath clouding before him. She would throw him an acknowledging look and a fleeting smile, then turn to her father and prolong the stay as long as she could.

  When the two men met, Ahmad could feel the tension under Mr. Zia’s skin, the surge of words blocked at the last moment before leaving his mouth, congealing on his lips. In his head, Ahmad lauded the man’s composure. The facade of indifference Mr. Zia raised, in spite of the ten years Ahmad had put in front of him, was impenetrable except to Ahmad who saw the thousands of entreaties quivering in his eyes. Those, he decided, were the signs of true love. Unaware of her own daughter’s plots behind his back, he thought he had protected Leyla by leaving Mr. Zia to the vulnerability of love.

  “Is there anything else I can do but wait?” was all Mr. Zia could muster the courage to ask, and he felt the authority that Ahmad exuded when he shook his head no. Among the naked bushes of rose, they walked for some time without a word. “We’re diverging,” Mr. Zia said. “We had the illusion we were going to the same place, but I got sidetracked by a nine-year-old girl and you by your own hubris. This is a slippery road, Ahmad. Don’t run so fast you can’t keep yourself upright.” Ahmad stopped and wrote in his pad. Are you threatening me? Mr. Zia put his hand on Ahmad’s shoulder. “I’m bound to you. There is nothing I can do and you know that. If there is one person who wants you well, it’s me.” Ahmad took Mr. Zia’s hand from his shoulder. I think we should end our relations, Ahmad wrote. It’s in everyone’s interest.

  That evening Ahmad pulled open the top desk drawer in which Homa had put his poetry. All of it was there: copies of his three books, his poems clipped out of magazines, as well as all the drafts of unfinished works. She had wrapped them in thick, brown paper. Light shot out from the stack when he unwrapped the bundle. He flipped through those early writings and saw himself young and raw, his poems dull and dark. He still remembered the first one that had faintly shone. As he leafed through, the poems brightened. Then, with a sweep of his hand, he brushed everything back into the drawer, took out a pen, turned off the light, and started to write poetry again. The words he put on the paper glowed, though faintly, still as reassuringly real as the paper they appeared on. He had not lost it. He crossed out the lines that faded for new ones that made the poem shine until he had to squint at the paper. It was a game of light and dark. At that moment the door opened and Homa came in with the girls. Standing by the desk, the kids watched, mesmerized by the light that shot from the paper onto their father’s face. Homa jumped up and down on the bed before she let herself flop down. She spoke nonstop for an hour. “Are you starting a new book? This one will be even better than the other ones.” Lying on her side, she propped up her head on her palm. “When the New Year comes, we should take a trip. No, two trips: one with the four of us, and one with my family. And this time you’re coming too.” She said they had to go skiing before the winter ended. And she told Ahmad what she had planned to do in a few years when the girls would be a little older. “I’m going to go to university.” She had contemplated it through and penned down her long-term plan. “I can’t be a housewife my whole life.” In the course of two or three years, she would decide what she wanted to study and prepare to take the entrance exam. Ahmad smiled and nodded. “And I can’t wait to read your new poems to my parents.”

  In the middle of the night, Homa woke up feeling the sun had come up too early, then she saw Ahmad hunching over his desk, working, the shadow of his head stretching across the ceiling like a dark ghoul looming behind him. Ahmad turned his head, eyes half-closed, smiled at her, and turned back to his work. For five days and nights, Ahmad did not leave his desk and Homa slept in the girls’ room. He slipped each full sheet into the drawer, rubbed his eyes, and took out a new piece. The first day, Homa brought in food and water and took back the cold, untouched plate from Ahmad’s desk. He would not answer, as if he could not hear her. “You’ll go blind,” she said shaking him on the shoulder. She tried to pull him out of his chair, but with a swing of his strong, blacksmith’s arm Ahmad brushed her off like a bull’s tail a fly.

  On the fifth day Ahmad was writing around dark-red spots on the page that, to his eyes, were ink black. When she opened the door and saw the red streaks on Ahmad’s cheeks, Homa screamed and ran to the phone.

  The two days Ahmad spent at the hospital were filled with visits, short and unidirectional, from politicians of both sides, the progovernment and the factions critiquing the Shah. Mr. Zia came the first day.

  “Listen to me, Ahmad,” Mr. Zia said, “I have some bad news for you. The New Iran Party will withdraw their support for you. My uncle won’t do much either. I don’t know why. Either they think they can’t get what they want or something else is going on.” He looked at Ahmad’s long face, a week-long beard on his cheeks, still on the white pillow, tilted up toward the ceiling with the white squares of bandage over his eyes. “Do you hear me?” Ahmad’s light nod was free of consternation. “I keep trying to get to the bottom of this. I promise I’ll do whatever I can for you. Even if you don’t want it, you can always count on my friendship. I promise you won’t see me anymore.”

  In the dark, Ahmad listened to ten or fifteen voices one by one, on his left and right. To some he could not attach a face. One such voice was the deputy of the Ministry of Publications and Information who offered him a position. Ahmad listened in silence. “I am familiar with your literary endeavors. This is government, Mr. Torkash-Vand. This is where you can fly, if you already have wings that is, and I know for a fact that you do.” A sad, white light shone into the room from the blanket of snow that covered the flat roofs and the tops of walls outside. On a parked car, cat footprints drew a line from the roof to the hood, continued on the ground, and faded out in the snow over a flower bed. The deputy minister left his number on Ahmad’s bed. Some time passed in silence. Ahmad wished he could see the snow. He listened to the sounds of the hospital: the clicking of shoes on the hard floors echoing along corridors, indistinct words spoken by indistinguishable people, and the irregular moans of someone in pain. He created the world of the hospital in his head: the nurses in white uniforms with white hats; doctors with longer uniforms and polished shoes; metal beds with clean, white sheets; a medicine cabinet somewhere full of bottles and vials; a little girl in the waiting area whose high fever was melting the metal chair she was sitting on; the smell of formaldehyde; a faint whiff of stale flowers somewhere; and suddenly a familiar smell that was alien for a second. It was the smell of apples and fresh soil and new shoes. It was the smell of his mother, then the smell of her hands that ran on his face and in his hair and shortly after, another smell: Khan’s. But Agha’s smell was absent. Where is Agha? Ahmad mouthed. Is he okay?

  Pooran looked at Khan, not sure what to answer. “He’s home, son,” Khan said, laying a hand on Ahmad’s hand. “They don’t allow wheelbarrows in here.”

  At the end of the visiting hours, all the sounds and smells left but Pooran’s, which stayed through the night.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE MIDST OF HIS darkness on the second day, Ahmad heard high-heeled footsteps enter the room. Then came the rustle of a bouquet of flowers before he felt the weight of it beside him on the bed. Their smell camouflaged the strangely familiar scent of the woman barely recognizable under the perfume she wore. Ahmad turned his anticipating head toward her. “I haven’t heard from my brother in eight months.” It was Sara. “I fear they might have caught him. I wouldn’t have come to you if I had anywhere else to go. Ahmad, you know Salman, he’s not as strong as he makes himself seem. Can you put in a word? Ahmad, my father can’t take it anymore.” Ahmad g
roped for his pen and pad on the table by his bed, scribbled blindly, and handed the pad to Sara. The disarray of crooked words still had some beauty to it. How is Ameer?

  “He’s good.”

  Just good?

  “He’s taken after his uncle. We’ve got to make sure he won’t do anything stupid, me and his father. He does things, I guess, that he hides from me.”

  Ahmad wrote on the pad with force. Who’s his father? He waited for an answer. None came. He waved the pad in the air where he thought Sara’s face was, but she stayed silent. He scribbled again.

  I want to see him. When they open my eyes.

  “I’ll try to manage it.” Ahmad heard the rustling of a tissue. “I should go now. He’s waiting. Will you help me?”

  Ahmad sat up in his bed. He wrote.

  Ameer is here?

  “Yes. He drove me.”

  Ahmad gesticulated to Sara before he realized he had to write. Bring him in.

  When Sara went out, Ahmad combed his hair with his hand and pulled at what he had on to straighten any crinkles that might be there. His mind traveled back to the night in Sara’s house where he went for Raana, that faraway girl. He heard the footsteps and Sara’s voice almost at the same time. “This is Mr. Torkash-Vand, your uncle’s friend.” The emphasis on “your uncle’s friend” was without a delay and unmistakable. Ahmad turned his face toward the sound. He could feel the presence of two people; the rustling of clothes was audible, their mere gravity palpable. “They were friends since childhood.”

  She did not say “we.” She hid from her son what she had boldly talked about in front of her husband that day in her house. Ahmad heard what might have been a shifting of weight from one foot to the other.