by Ali Araghi
At his seventieth birthday, the University of Tehran celebrated Ahmad Torkash-Vand’s fifty-five years of literary accomplishment in a hall with a lit stage and rows of seats upholstered with red velvet. Four guests talked about his work and life, then Ahmad stepped onto the stage and mouthed as someone read from his most recent work. Ahmad looked out at the audience, his daughters and Maryam with their families in the front rows; colleagues, men and women of words here and there; and many he did not know, whose faces in the unlit back rows he could not make out without his eyeglasses. Men were in suit and pants, the younger ones in shirts, and the students in T-shirts and jeans. Women, still covered in manteaux, with scarves or shawls covering their hair, wore less dreary colors than when Ahmad had first come out of the prison: brown, olive, cream, navy. All sat in their seats listening carefully and clapping enthusiastically. As his eyes flit from face to face, he thought he saw someone familiar. He took his glasses out of his breast pocket and looked again. But he was mistaken. It was not Homa.
Ahmad lived for six more years and died two autumns before unrest broke out once more in the country. I don’t know if he would have blamed the cats for the batons that went up and came down again, for the clicks of handcuffs, or for the young bodies that were dragged on the asphalt by their legs. He scooped spoonfuls of his lunch on scrap paper and stepped outside of the publisher’s building to feed Rosie, the furry, gray street cat with a pink nose who reclined on the concrete edge of the flower bed in the sun. The cats were no longer fighting. They shared the streets and alleys with people. They ate trash without fear. They took naps on park benches. They traipsed around, the flaneurs of the city. Never did Ahmad ever see them fly again, or use their fangs and claws for a purpose.
When Ahmad wrote to his secretary about his decision to publish his previously unpublishable poems, she was more than eager to type them up for him. In the evening, she opened Ahmad’s wardrobe and stood with arms akimbo in front of stacks of old trays before she started hauling them by the armful down the elevator and dropping them into the trunk of her car with a loud clatter. Three days later, the bell rang and there at the door, she pulled a bunch of papers out of her purse. When the sun was setting behind Ahmad’s windows, as the orange stretched over the city with no ends, Ahmad sat at his desk and looked at the neat stack of poems in front of him that once set fire to any paper. Outside, the crows cawed misery as they circled in the sky.
Sitting in his chair, fingers drumming nonstop on the armrest, Ahmad looked for a long time. There were only three crows left flying in the sky when Ahmad’s fingers stopped their unrestful rhythm. He pulled the drawer open and took out a piece of paper. He uncapped his pen and started to copy out his poem of the Revolution. Curve after graceful curve formed, word after slow word. No flame sputtered from the tip of his pen. The paper did not turn brown. Not even a faint light blinked under the letters. Then he came to the last word. He paused for a few seconds before he put the pen back on the paper and wrote.
In the last of the daylight Ahmad looked at the poem. Homa’s name, which had burned holes in steel, sat on his desk drab and docile. Twirling his pen between his thumb and forefinger, Ahmad realized that the words were of the past, impotent, extinguished, and nullified. Once true and fiery at the core, they were now just lore.
