The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  Back behind the bars, Salman flopped on his bed and started shaking from head to toe. Big Boback’s round face appeared upside down from the top bunk and asked him what the hell the problem was with him, but Salman was unable to open his mouth. “Put your feet up.” Big Boback jumped down shaking the bed with his weight. He put his pillow under Salman’s feet and stirred a dash of salt in a glass of water and made him drink a few gulps. For a week Salman thought anyone in uniform was coming to take him. Any footstep in the corridors was the promise of leather straps and electric shocks, blood and sweat, blows in the stomach that curled him up on cold concrete, small, weak, and filthy. His fear was so great that finally he told Big Boback he could not take it anymore and they planned the escape: Salman, Big Boback, and two of their closest friends, Esi Goldfingers and Mamad Cucumber.

  One early evening, before lights out and after the sun had set behind the western houses of the city, the quartet snuck into the bathroom. Standing on the shoulders of Big Boback, Salman scratched the poem on the thick bars of the window high in the wall. In a few seconds the bars fell clattering onto the concrete terrazzo floor still red hot on the ends. “Get out of here!” Big Boback said in a hushed voice, his large eyes wide in amazement, his large hands holding Salman’s ankels. “This can’t be real.”

  Outside the window they found themselves in a narrow backyard scattered with trash and covered halfway in snow. Esi Goldfingers led the way. He had been there for twenty years and there was no nook or cranny of the prison he did not know. They army-crawled toward the end of the backyard where a sizable door opened into a storage room. Drawing heavy breaths, Salman got to his feet and etched the poem onto the rusty shackle of the padlock and lay back down on his stomach. The lock fell into the snow with a sizzle. In they went, Salman with Boback and Mamad behind him, but a few seconds passed and Esi did not follow. They looked at each other with questioning eyes until Mamad crawled back on all fours and stuck his head out to look. Esi Goldfingers was lying in the snow in his army-crawl position, hands knotted into fists, lips pressed together, eyes fixed ahead. Mamad Cucumber motioned for him to hurry, but Esi did not move. Even petrified, he was charming and handsome, his face fit, as they said, for the large screen. Esi’s lips quivered as he whispered something Mamad did not hear. “I want to go back,” Esi whispered, this time louder. Mamad put his finger on his lips and shushed him, looking around. Salman, too, crawled over to the door. He saw and heard Esi’s teeth rattling. Then the two men retreated to clear the way for Big Boback who crawled out the door—his abundant bottom wiggling like a black bear’s—reached out, and grabbed Esi’s wrists in his fat hands, then pulled him in like a frozen carcass. Once inside, they closed the door and tried to calm Esi down. Mamad Cucumber hugged him from behind, lay straight on his back to warm him, and whispered quiet words in his ear. The storage room was used partly as the prison arsenal and partly as repository for oil heaters, Jeep tires, toolboxes, ropes, and kitchen utensils. Located behind the sergeant officer’s room, it had three doors: one that the sergeant officer on duty had access to, one to the courtyard through which they had entered, and one that had fallen into disuse. That third door led to a short corridor at the end of which was the room to the sewage. The sewage was where they were going.

  Mamad Cucumber had changed from “short and fat” to “short and thin”—from Mamad Gourd to Mamad Cucumber—the first week they had brought him into the prison and that was why he lay on Esi’s back not as a heavy weight, but as a consoling embrace, like a quilt. Big Boback’s face opened in a smile when he saw Esi finally nodding to something Mamad told him. Salman breathed a silent sigh of relief and motioned for everybody to hurry up. Mamad Cucumber rolled off of Esi and they got back to work.

  Two padlocks, one from inside the storage room, and one on the other side, secured the disused door. They took off their shirts and piled them up on the floor to muffle the clatter of the falling padlock. Salman and Esi Goldfingers dumped handfuls of snow on the glowing lock as soon as it dropped from the door. The bigger problem was the lock on the other side of the door. They crawled back into the small yard. A barred window opened into the corridor behind the door through which Esi Goldfingers and Mamad Cucumber went to the other side; Esi because Mamad had told him he would be the first of the four to leave the place, and Mamad because he had promised Esi not to leave his side until the end. Salman and Big Boback went back to the storage room and waited. The minutes passed slowly. Behind the other door, Salman could hear two officers laughing. Big Boback wheezed as he looked nervously at Salman. They could barely hear the weak sound of scratching on the other side, but nothing happened. Salman tapped lightly on the door to transfer the anxiety and make them hurry. Then came some clanking. They were fidgeting with the lock. When he could not stand it anymore, Salman tiptoed to the backyard and army-crawled to the narrow window. The two had forgotten the last line of the poem. Esi Goldfingers had scratched his version on the shackle but it had only warmed up the lock and created a strong light. Mamad Cucumber had crossed out Esi’s last line and scratched his reworded version, which had proven wrong, too. Through the window, Salman handed them fistfuls of snow to soothe their blistering hands, and whispered the right order of words. But there were already too many wrong words and scratch marks on the shackle and the poem would not form.

  “Write it on the body,” Salman whispered.

  Esi and Mamad took turns scribbling the poem onto the rusted body of the padlock with a nail. A few minutes later there was a hole in the middle of the lock, but still it would not open. Big Boback came to the window, panting from exertion, with a fine screwdriver from a toolbox on a top shelf. With his directions whispered through the window, Mamad Cucumber pried the lock open after nervously running his hand across the crew cut on his round scalp a few times. Down the corridor and into another room they went until they reached the grate that covered the sewage. Drenched in slimy waste in the putrid dark, Salman, Esi Goldfingers, and Mamad Cucumber inched their way through the narrow tunnel toward the street. Big Boback got stuck and no matter how hard Salman pulled, he could not free the big boy. Big Boback was arrested in the morning and a week later, as the protests unfolded in the streets, he was suffocated in a tub full of excrement with his wrists handcuffed behind his back, the investigator’s gloved hand pushing his large head all the way down until his nose was crushed against the bottom of the tub.

  * * *

  —

  THE PRISON BREAK WAS A slap in the face of the new Prime Minister, a challenge to his inflated authority. The secret service raided the prison and confiscated all the belongings of the prisoners. Yard time was cut in half and the amount of meals was reduced. The few that raised their voices in protest were immediately taken away.

  Published in newspapers and circulating from mouth to mouth as one of the three fugitives, Salman’s name warmed Ahmad’s heart. He felt like he had made up for the speech that they said had started the crackdown. He threw the newspaper into Khan’s lap. By the headline he had penned, in large letters, I DID THAT.

  Khan put his glasses on and read without haste. “You’re helping those cats then,” he said.

  I helped my friend.

  “You’re wreaking havoc.”

  Ahmad found in himself no remorse for what he had done. Was it not Khan himself who had blamed the havoc on the cats? Had it not been he who had drawn the charts and marked the maps and done such persuasive calculations? He had predicted things and they had come true. The old man was now contradicting himself. His mental astuteness had begun to decline. His body was already worn out, his limbs were weak, and his hair had fallen out of his crest, leaving a band of sparse, white bristles around his head. The only remnant of the vigor, charisma, and power he had exuded years before was his mustache. He had not stopped waxing and twirling up the ends of his whiskers.

  “Come to think of it,” Khan said slowly, as if finding words had become a tax his bo
dy could not afford, “it was you who was for the law and against disrupting the order, no?” Khan’s sarcasm referred to Ahmad’s speech.

  I was, but how long can you bend your head?

  Khan held the paper close to his face and moved his glasses. “I can’t read this,” he said. “Write bigger.”

  I WAS, BUT HOW LONG CAN YOU BEND YOUR HEAD?

  Khan looked at Ahmad for a moment. “Did you see what the cats did to your mother?” he said. “She could have caught pneumonia.”

  You said the cats were doing all this and I believed you. If toppling the regime is what they’re after, I’m with the cats, then.

  Khan looked closely at the words jammed into the margin of the newspaper. “I can’t read this.”

  Ahmad took his notebook out of his inside breast pocket and started writing.

  “Why don’t you sit down? You can take that by the desk”—Khan pointed to a chair that leaned against the black, tarred wall—“or sit here on the bed. Do you want me to bring you the chair?”

  Ahmad shook his head as he wrote. Khan looked out the window. A sparrow landed in the persimmon three, shaking the snow off the branch. It jerked its small head to both sides for a few seconds before taking flight again. The naked branch quivered, but soon calmed back into the graceful stillness of the tree.

  You say the cats want to pull the Shah down, I say let them. I’m going to help them if I can. You say they wanted to kill my mother, I say I don’t know. Why would they want to do that? And even if so, what can I do? What did you do to prevent the cat attack, to hinder the catastrophe?

  Khan took the note. His eyes squinted behind his glasses.

  “I can’t read this.” He gave the paper back to Ahmad. “You know what, do what you want. I’m tired. Agha told us about all of this in his own way. I denied it. Then I saw it myself. I’ve been trying to make you see it too. You told me once you did, but you don’t. You go and do what you want.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE PROTESTS THAT FOLLOWED the raid of the prison, Lalah was busy making Molotov cocktails in her friend’s basement. She had taken up Zeeba’s responsibility of filling the heaters, so she could steal oil and have a reason to reek of it when she came back home. The second day after the prison break, she and Shireen made fourteen bottles. When Shireen brought the baskets, Lalah said, “I’m going with you.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Sheerin said. “Ebi might not come today.”

  “We’ll see,” Lalah answered putting the first bottle in the basket. They topped the bottles with armfuls of parsley that Lalah had bought at the neighborhood fruit and herbs shop. When the sun had just set, they draped chadors over their heads to look unobtrusive and set off. They walked for half an hour eastward, along sidewalks, across a number of streets, through a snowy park, out onto other sidewalks, checking out passersby, looking into grocery stores, electric shops, confectionary stores, clothes shops, and a defunct ice stand, and finally turned into the narrow street where the bottles were to be transferred to the boys. It was rather quiet, but there was no guarantee that eyes were not spying on them from the flanking houses. The boys were sitting in a parked Peykan. The girls walked past them, checking the car from the corners of their eyes. Lalah saw the older man, Ameer, at the wheel and another one of the guys, perhaps Comrade Bijan, beside him blowing into his hands. A little way ahead, they walked between two parked cars and swiftly put their baskets down on the ground, then walked away.

  “He was there, he was there,” Shireen said, pinching Lalah on the arm as she often did when her passion for Ameer was too much for her to bear. “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?”

  Although the man had never shown anything but politeness and appropriate behavior, Shireen thought she spotted a desire in his eyes. At Lalah’s suggestion, the girls rushed to the end of the street, turned into the next, and swiftly pulled their chadors off their heads, crumpling them quickly into their shoulder bags. Then they hurried back to where the boys were parked. But the car was gone. So were the shopping baskets.

  There was no visible sign of distress or frustration in Shireen’s face, but as they crunched the snow back home, now a little slower, hands in jacket pockets, she pinched Lalah on the arm and said, “I’m going to whatever’s happening tomorrow. I’m calling the guys tonight to ask. Are you coming?”

  By noon the next day, Lalah and Shireen were taking shelter behind parked cars with other people, almost all men, watching the protesters from a short distance, running here and there. The gathering had blocked a small roundabout. Cars soon turned around and left the arena to people. The slogans were about the Prime Minister, and the corruption in the government. They asked for the release of the political prisoners and for food and warmth. Soon the police arrived. The crowd dispersed but did not go away. The stores had closed as soon as the protesters started gathering. Ignoring the men who told them this was not a suitable place for girls, Shireen and Lalah drew farther forward until Shireen spotted one of the four boys. Soon an army truck brought reinforcement. Soldiers jumped out of the tarpaulin-covered back of the vehicle with rifles in their hands. After the shots that were fired into the air proved as futile as the warnings a colonel barked into a megaphone, a high school student was shot dead. His head tilted back as he collapsed to the ground with open arms, his blood spilled out of his chest and ran into the slush on the asphalt. Three young men sprinted to him with backs and knees bent to make smaller targets of themselves. When they picked up the boy’s body to carry him back, they saw a red tulip had grown where his chest had touched the ground. After the Revolution, that roundabout was renamed Tulip Square, the day celebrated as Student’s Day.

  The Fortieth-day service for the boy was held at a mosque full of people clad in black who, moved by the tragic death, took to the streets after the service. The police and army were deployed. In her heart, Lalah found an affinity with the movement, with the young men who, ebullient with gracious rage, stamped their determined feet into the snow and punched their fists into the air. At their next rendezvous, this time with Comrade Bijan and Jamsheed, a few weeks later, she found an opportune moment and said, “I want to be in the streets with you guys.”

  “That’s what we’re fighting for,” Comrade Bijan said as he closed the trunk. He had said a good thing, but in a bad way. And he had not gotten the point. And he had not combed his hair again. Lalah watched the red taillights fade away into the snow.

  A few weeks later when another protest was brewing in the city, she showed up in Shireen’s basement with a pair of scissors. “What are you doing?” Shireen asked, curious and a little anxious. Lalah grabbed her own braid in her fist and by the time Shireen stifled her short shriek and got to her feet, Lalah had snipped it off with a few quick strokes. She rolled the yellow hair band off and tossed the long tress into the trash can. “You idiot, are you out of your mind?” Shireen cried, her hand over her mouth. Lalah’s small face looked even smaller now with one braid sprouting on one side of her head and dangling over her breast. Lalah cut the second braid and rolled the band off onto her wrist. Shireen went to the trash can and took the braids out. “Look at this lovely hair,” she said. “Just look at it. Now what the hell was that about? What will your father say?”

  “Oh, he won’t say anything,” Lalah answered with a narrow smile and Shireen wondered for a moment what it would be like to kiss those thin, beautiful lips.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, WITH her short hair comfortably tucked under a wool hat, Lalah’s face looked like a big hazelnut. Zipping up her loose, army-green overcoat, Lalah watched Shireen pull up the pants that were loose enough, but also a bit too short for her. Shireen could not bring herself to cut her hair. If examined closely, her hat would betray the fullness of the bun underneath it. With heads bowed to avoid looks, and collars turned up, they walked up and down the streets unti
l enough people were gathered. As the crowd walked past them chanting slogans, Lalah jumped from the sidewalk, over the ditch, into the street and the next moment she was walking among them. Her heart was pounding. She could not hear what the men cried. All she knew was that she was surrounded by them, one with the current and none of them had the faintest idea she was a girl. No one was even looking at her. She closed her hand and threw her fist up in the air and soon found Shireen by her side.

  “I’m going to go find my man,” she said, joking about Ameer’s age.

  By the time the crowd was dispersed by the warning shots, Shireen had found Ameer. She had to introduce herself to him as they ran away into a back street. “You’re a changed girl I’ll have to admit,” Ameer said and Shireen became the third girl in his life at that moment. In her he admired a brazenness that the other two lacked. In the rather long interval of calm political atmosphere after that day, Ameer juggled the three. He postponed the wedding once. He found himself unable to detach from any of those women, but he knew the day would come when things could not go on like that anymore.

  To Shireen, he remained the fifty-year-old man that she thought he was. He made up a new backstory for her: a man with a history of resistance as far back as the Coup. He had had a difficult past and never enough time to think about women. He told her his memories of that historic day, how he had yanked the picture of the Shah out of the hands of a goon with a club and ran off. Shireen listened with credulity and curious questions that made Ameer’s story flourish with spontaneous details. “I wish you could be the mother of my child,” he told her one day at a cheap restaurant. Shireen blushed. The feeling in her heart told her she had found, if not the man of her dreams, a good man, a reliable and honest man, someone alongside whom she could fight and with whom she could eat cheap sausage sandwiches.