The Immortals of Tehran

by Ali Araghi

  “I’m starting to forget the last time it wasn’t cloudy,” Reza said, looking at the sky. “I hope the winter ends someday.”

  Lalah nodded.

  “And I hope you will accept my hand.” He said that without taking his eyes from the sky, as if it was a prayer he directed to the heavens. Lalah was scared by how her heart raced at the sincerity in Reza’s words. She decided not to see him when he came to tend to the elevator the next week. She stayed in her room and spied from behind her lace curtains as he installed a motor on the parapet.

  She called Ebi from the booth more often and held his hand tighter when they were together. “Are you not going to the demonstrations with me anymore?” Ebi asked her one day.

  “Of course I am. Why?”

  “Your hair.”

  Lalah touched her bangs. “Of course I am,” she replied. “I’ll cut them off as soon as something big turns up. I thought I’d make myself pretty in between.”

  Ebi smiled but did not believe her. Change was what he feared most, although it was also what he was fighting for. To him, a change on the outside was, without an exception, a manifestation of a change within. He himself had let his hair grow out after high school, once there was no longer a principal to check that the students’ hair was not long enough to be pinched between a thumb and forefinger. Ebi’s curly hair had become as big as a football, and he had kept it that way ever since, for the past four years. Impatiently, he looked forward to the next rally to see if he would find the old Lalah by his side, chanting the slogans, mimicking a deep, man’s voice. The opportunity arose when a university professor passed away of old age, peacefully in his bed. As his body was carried over the shoulders of his admirers out the gates of the University of Tehran, the gendarmes arrived and tried to disperse the crowd. In response, antigovernment slogans were chanted and soon two of the mourners lay lifeless on the street, not too far from the body of the professor. Word got around and the Seventh-night service was announced as the day of the next march, in front of the university gates.

  Without too much of a surprise for Ebi, Lalah decided not to go to that one. Afraid of what this change in her meant, Ebi delegated his coordinating responsibilities to a friend and suggested to Lalah that they go out instead. As time went on, he offered her more and more anxious dates. They ate at restaurants and cafés, looked at art in museums, and walked the streets and neighborhoods which were so close to where people demonstrated and yet so far. Lalah saw how Ebi grew ever more eager about going places, how he talked about the movie they just walked out of, or a painting they were standing before. He told her about the books he read. He took her to one expensive restaurant after another. Lalah tried to engage, but felt unable to pass an invisible barrier. She knew she was not a good actor, that Ebi saw her hesitation. How easy things would have been if she did not love that football-haired boy.

  At the end of spring, Lalah graduated from high school. With her mornings suddenly free, Ebi thought they would have more time to be together. But she did not call him for a whole week. He took the phone to his bed and waited all afternoon and evening. He picked up the receiver and even called her number a few times, but hung up before Pooran answered.

  “I’m sorry, I was very ill,” Lalah lied when she called at last.

  “Can we meet?” he asked.

  “I’m still weak.”

  That afternoon, Ebi walked up to his parents in the kitchen. They turned their heads to look at their son standing in the door.

  “There’s a girl,” Ebi said, trying to hold his hands still by his side. “I’m going to ask for her hand. With or without you.” His father glanced at his son’s feet and saw that he kept shifting his weight from heel to toe, rocking ever so slightly, as he did when he was nervous.

  Lalah did not call him for another week. She could find no resolution in her soul. If she was at first only doubtful, her heart now held two loves in equal proportion. She could not understand why the more Ebi approached her, the farther her heart wandered away from him. She felt guilty for not having told him about the suitors her grandmother had brought home from the beginning, while he had nearly abandoned his political activities in the past months to be with her. It was too late now. After he motorized the elevator, Reza had come to the house a few more times. He was the first person Pooran called the day Khan’s wheelchair broke, when the left back wheel locked one morning and refused to budge at Zeeba’s pushing.

  The next week Pooran called again and two hours later, Reza opened the trunk of his Nova to take out the tricycle Pooran had wanted, a gift for Leyla’s son, Behrooz. Never, from the very beginning, had Reza paid a visit without a tiny bouquet of flowers, even though fourteen years of winter had turned roses into items of luxury. Pooran made him stay for lunch or dinner. Ahmad drank tea with him and Khan found in him a backgammon rival. Reza had become part of the family even before Lalah could make any decisions. Everything had dragged on longer than its ideal course: Ebi had waited too long to propose; Lalah herself had failed to know her heart’s desire in time; the winter had lingered and lingered and lingered.

  “I talked to my parents,” Ebi said on the other end of the receiver the next time in the booth. “My mother will call your grandmother as soon as I ask her. When do you think is best?”

  At that moment, Lalah felt how lucky she had been years before when she stood on the other side of the door. She was never alone, she was free of concern, unfamiliar with the pain inside that yellow cubicle of iron and glass. She missed her sister. She missed her childhood. Overwhelmed, she did the thing she thought herself incapable of doing and told Ebi she had a suitor, someone her family approved of, someone well-off. A long silence fell. Seconds became minutes, minutes as long as hours.

  “Are they making you marry him?” Ebi was confused.

  Once again she had taken too long to hang up and now she was facing an even more difficult question: how could she be such a two-timing fraud? After she walked out of the telephone booth that snowy summer, Lalah never heard Ebi’s voice again. But even when there was not a strand of black hair left on her head, images of protests on TV or in the papers, anywhere in the world, reminded her of the boy who had held her hand and lead her panting along Tehran’s alleys, away from arrest and bullets. She could never again bear to take part in a demonstration herself, even during the last months of the Revolution when things happened that no one could have foreseen, when seven columns of smoke rose up from the city to the sky. Not even when the Shah flew away and Ayatollah Khomeini returned: the day the winter ended.

  Years later, her own daughter graduated from high school and went, without her knowing, to a fortune-teller to see if she would pass the university entrance test. Lalah scolded her daughter, but later visited the old woman herself to find out whether she knew how to take love out of one’s heart. “Just whisper his name into this.” The fortune-teller held out an old tin can, dented on the side, like the ones canned tomato paste came in. “I can hold my ears if you want, but I already know his name.” Lalah looked into the can, but decided she wanted that small love in the corner of her heart to remain.

  30

  ALAH’S ENGAGEMENT TO REZA was arranged for the fall and the wedding for a year after. It was during that year that the Air Force Arsenal was conquered. Intelligence had not been able to determine what kind of tool was used to melt the fence, but speculated it had to be some kind of oxy-fuel torch. The unending curfew that was announced did not help the government. Soon, Down with the Shah! appeared among the spray-painted slogans on the walls. Until then no one had dared say anything about the king himself.

  Even when the power cuts began, Khan defended the royalty with more and more conviction. Focused on Lalah’s imminent wedding, Ahmad would not answer the sarcastic remarks and bitter words that Khan threw at him from his wheelchair. With his thick glasses on, Khan shook the newspaper in Ahmad’s direction when he came home from work.
There was not a day that the country was calm.

  “Look what your felines have done this time? And you keep them warm in your room. In my house. I’ll kill them myself. I should have killed them from the start. Look what they have done.”

  Ahmad brushed the snow from the man’s hat and coat and wheeled him back inside. Knowing the hardheadedness in her family, Pooran was worried about Khan and Ahmad’s growing divergence toward the opposite ends of the political fight. She wanted the wedding to take place soon, before a catastrophe broke out. When the groom’s mother suggested postponing the wedding until the end of the curfew, Pooran replied that even if it rained stones, the wedding had to happen on its designated day. She hung up the phone and crossed the yard to Ahmad’s door.

  “My last wish in this world is to see my granddaughter in that white gown,” she told him from the doorway. She would not step into Ahmad’s room with all the cat hair. “I beg you, don’t let whatever is between you and Khan ruin the girl’s day.” Ahmad came to the door. Pooran bent over to kiss his hand, but Ahmad yanked it away and held his mother in his arms.

  I’ll let the cats go tomorrow.

  When he came back from the school the next afternoon, Ahmad did not see Khan in the yard. He went to his room to leave his bag and change, but he found the door left ajar. Inside, the cage was open. The cats were gone. Pooran rushed out of the kitchen at the noise and found Ahmad in the basement wildly throwing things around.

  “What is it?”

  Unheeding, Ahmad went out and ran up into the house. He flung Khan’s door open and stood in front of his wheelchair, panting, his mouth open as if in an inaudible cry. Khan said nothing. Arms on the armrests, smaller and older than ever, he had fixed his cold, unapologetic look on Ahmad. Pooran arrived.

  “What is going on?”

  Ahmad ran out of the room without answering.

  “What is going on, Khan?” Pooran asked again.

  On the veranda, Ahmad took a look at the snow and then he easily saw it: a new path half-heartedly plowed from Agha’s room to the hoez. He sprang down the steps and grabbed the first usable thing he could find: a frozen broom. With the long, wooden handle, he poked into the years-old mountain of snow in the hoez until he dug out a gunnysack, its mouth tied with a rope into puckering lips. Inside were hard, irregularly shaped objects clanking against each other. Ahmad knew what he would face before he untied the rope. He thought of burying the sack without opening it, but he had to see his kittens one last time. Frozen stiff, White Tail had his eyes open wide as if to an unimaginable horror. His brother looked as if he was lying on his back holding his pink paws up. Their sister had curled up the way she liked to do under Ahmad’s desk or, on the nights he forgot to put them in the cage, on Ahmad’s chest. It was as though at the last moments of her life, she decided against fighting. She had closed her eyes without hope and let the cold devour her.

  Contrary to what Pooran expected, Ahmad did not disappear or lock himself in his room. Instead, he put on his jacket and pulled a knit hat over his head and clicked the door behind him, his sack of frozen cats in his hand. He came back two hours after the curfew and never mentioned them again. In the gray hours before the dark, Pooran heard a loud continuous howling from the yard. Once on the veranda, she saw the lights in Ahmad’s room were on. By the time she reached to open the door, Zeeba was there, too, to see where the noise came from. Ahmad did not hear the door open. With his back to the two women, he was vacuuming the floor, holding the pipe in his hands, pushing and pulling, the blue-and-white cube roaring behind him on the ground. By the door was the box the new machine had come out of. Ahmad vacuumed all the cat hair and washed everything that could be washed so Pooran felt comfortable to come into his room again, after more than a year. Without visible remorse or bitterness, he went to Khan and wrote on his notepad, Would you help me throw a decent wedding for my girl, please?

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD BECOME THE TRADITION not to leave the pride of the family to whim or luck. So against the custom that expected the groom’s side to throw the wedding, Khan and Ahmad took charge. The groom suggested an orchard in the country as the venue. “There are a hundred guests from my side alone,” he said. But he soon realized he had little say. Khan’s workers arrived with sledgehammers on their shoulders. The three men tore down a section of the wall that separated Khan’s yard from the neighbor’s and built an archway in its place. Soon metal poles were planted in the ground and a tarp ceiling stretched over the two yards. The snow was wheelbarrowed out and the hardened ice cracked with pickaxes.

  In the midst of the work Pooran went to Khan and Ahmad, anxiously slapped one hand on the back of her other hand, and said, “We forgot about the power cuts.” Fuel shortage had been announced by the regime as the cause of power outages that began shortly after the curfew. They happened without a regular pattern in stretches of two to four hours after dark. Word circulated that it was during the outages that the secret service made its arrests of dissidents. “How can I look into that girl’s eyes again if her wedding is ruined?” Pooran said.

  When the night came, the whole area was lit by the glowing pieces of paper pinned to the underside of the tarp. Parveen’s children had cut up small squares with scissors and copied one of Ahmad’s poems 1,037 times. Later at school, they would do it as a trick, and soon their classmates would learn the words and write them out at home for their parents to see. Uncle Majeed stood on a stepladder and pinned the papers to the tarp. Then he went into the house and taped them to the walls.

  Together with Leyla and Mr. Zia, holding Behrooz’s hand in hers, Homa arrived in the morning when preparations were still underway. Her black hair, now dyed blond and tied up in a chignon, made her a new person, like a familiar old friend one is not sure would welcome a pat on the shoulder. She was in a skirt and blouse; her wedding clothes, Ahmad knew, were in the bag she held in her hand. They had agreed to be there together for their daughter. Once on the veranda, she looked around the yard and spotted Ahmad. He smiled at her and thought he saw on Homa’s face, before she led the little boy in, the shadow of a smile—one that said, that pat on the shoulder is really okay.

  The guests started arriving around noon and were seated at tables laden with large dishes of fruit and sweets. Pooran would shortly appear at the table to welcome the new guests, beaming, talkative, and happy, her lips painted a red too vivid for the younger girls, her hair now short and dyed hazel. Glass cups of tea circulated on trays over the hands of the women servants hired for the night. Pooran had not allowed any alcohol in the house. Anyone thirsty for more than tea or sweet drinks had to step through the arch into the neighbor’s yard where the bottles had been laid on a large wooden table.

  The pop band set up a keyboard and a percussion set, and when they started to play, Ahmad missed Maestro Shahnaz’s traditional music at his own wedding. He had persuaded Khan to allow the couple to select their own music. The guests danced, but only those drunk on vodka and youth; there was agitation and excitement in the music, but it wanted life. Half a dozen children packed themselves on the planks that formed the floor of the elevator and flicked the switch on and off, climbing up to the roof and back down to the yard, sometimes hanging in the middle, making loud noises as they watched the newlyweds step out of the building into the yard.

  Hand in hand, the couple went around the tables and offered their greetings to the guests before the next round of dance began. Walking next to Reza, reaching no higher than his shoulder, Lalah had to balance a confusion of feelings within her with the difficulty of walking in high heels as an uncontrollable avalanche of white lace skirt hung from her waist. She looked at her family, her father handsome in a coffee suit and pants with a tawny tie, walking straight with a hand in his pants pocket and smiling at the guests, her mother more beautiful than ever in a light-ocher dress, walking with Ahmad as if they had planned the color harmony; her sister unable
to hold back her happy tears; her grandmother walking proud; Khan, sitting in armchairs with the elders from Reza’s family; and all the new faces, smiling at her, congratulating, shaking hands with Reza, putting their hands on their chests and half-bowing to her. Beside her, Reza seemed in control of his feelings. He shook hands with everyone smiling an elegant smile, neither too eager nor too brief. He did not seem nervous. That gave Lalah relief and reassurance; she could follow him and she would be fine.

  When the time came, Ahmad and Homa stood beside one another behind Lalah, next to the groom’s parents, wearing smiles that made them look like a happy couple. Ahmad found himself flooded by memories revived by Homa’s perfume. When the mulla prepared the marriage contract and read it out loud to the couple and friends and family standing in silence, Ahmad did what Homa had done in that small postpartum room: he slipped his hand into hers. Homa did not pull her hand away. Ahmad felt her fingers close around his, tight like in those early years. He could see Lalah behind the white veil in the mirror, her large mascaraed eyes, her slender nose, her beautiful face, although a little hazy, as if through a fog, and he knew that she had not seen her parents’ hands.

  Just over the heads of the seated couple, Ahmad looked at Homa in the mirror, stared at her until she turned her eyes and looked back at him without shying away, and it was at that moment when Ahmad told himself, That’s my wife. After the mulla pronounced the couple man and wife, Ahmad took out his notepad and wrote.