A Persian Requiem (11 page)

K
hosrow was back from his hunting trip, covered with sweat and dust. His gun was still hanging from his shoulder, and a few dead partridges dangled from his hand. He went to the howzkhaneh which had a small pool in it and which Zari was preparing for use during the hot summer days. He held up the partridges before his mother’s eyes as she was smoothing out the carpet.

“Look, I shot them myself!”

“I can see,” Zari replied, without looking up.

“Aren’t you pleased to see me?” Khosrow asked.

“Of course I am,” said his mother.

“I’ll give one to Sahar. He won’t eat it, he’ll just play with it.” Then he added, “No-one’s happy to see me back. Gholam was sitting in Haj Mohammad Reza’s shop; he almost ducked when he saw me. I came to you first and you didn’t even kiss me. It doesn’t matter.”

Zari bit her lip and said, “Take the partridges to the kitchen and give them to the cook to pluck. It’s warm weather and they’ll spoil. Tell him to serve them with rice tonight. Raisin rice, your favourite.”

As soon as Khosrow had gone, Zari cursed the whole universe—she cursed herself and her ancestors and her fears; she cursed her English schooling and her cowardice and Ezzat-ud-Dowleh. When she said goodbye Ezzat-ud-Dowleh had promised Ameh Khanom to send Sahar back to his old stable within three days. So what had happened? Zari sat by the small pool and turned on the fountains. At first the water came out in short, muddy spurts, then it cleared and rose higher. Soon after, the twins came in. They both sat down by the pool and held their hands underneath the fountain while
their mother reminded them for the thousandth time not to tell Khosrow who took Sahar, but to say instead that he was dead.

When Khosrow came back he didn’t even notice Mina and Marjan.

“Mother, where’s Sahar?” he asked.

Zari didn’t answer. Instead she busied herself washing the
children’s
faces with water from the fountain.

“My uncle was saying Sahar had caught the glanders disease,” Khosrow blurted, “and that glanders is dangerous. Is that true? Captain Singer said glanders has become epidemic. Mother, he even imitated father. I nearly hit him when he said to me, ‘This disease is yet another gift from the foreign army, as your father would say!’”

“Singer was with you all the time?” Zari asked, carefully skirting the issue.

“No, only for the first few days. There was a woman with him, too, who spoke good Persian. But she was just like a man. She even had a small moustache and wore boots. She rode well. Now tell me where have you sent Sahar?”

“Well, why did they leave?”

“Who?”

“Singer and that old woman.”

“How should I know?” Khosrow complained. “Why are you interrogating me? Now you’re probably going to ask me what we had for dinner, what we had for lunch … aren’t you going to tell me where Sahar is?”

“You went off and left us for so long. After all, you were the man of the house. Now that you’re back, won’t you tell your mother where you went? Who was with you? Whether you had a good time?”

“Well, we went hunting,” Khosrow answered impatiently. “On the third day when we came back after sunset, another foreigner wearing dark glasses arrived and took Singer and the woman with him. Uncle sent three armed men and one of his guides along with them. They headed for the mountains. Four-eyed Hormoz said, ‘You can be sure they’re off to see the tribe.’ Now tell me where Sahar is.”

Zari bit her lip. “God help us!” she exclaimed.

Mina got up from the edge of the pool. “Sahar was hurt and died!” she blurted out.

“Died!” Khosrow shrieked. “But why? Is it true, mother?” he asked through his tears. “I guessed it myself. I saw the flowerpots on his grave.”

“What could I do, my dear?” Zari said with a sigh. “It was his fate. Your uncle took you to the village on purpose so you wouldn’t see him die. At least he had a peaceful end. We buried him at the bottom of the garden just for your sake.”

Khosrow squatted by the pool and said, “I knew inside me right from the start that something was going to happen. I could tell from the way my uncle talked. He went on about how a person should be patient, and what you should do when you lose someone you love. And after that he kept talking about the glanders disease. That’s funny, you know, I dreamt last night that I was riding after game. Uncle and Singer were there too. Singer had spread a map on his saddle, and at the same time he was looking through his long binoculars for game. The first day of the hunt he was doing that, you see, and my uncle kept saying, ‘Look how these foreigners do everything with calculation, even their hunting’ …”

“Yes, especially when they’re hunting people …” Zari
commented
sadly.

“But I was riding Sahar, not uncle’s horse. We were coming down the mountain. Suddenly Sahar reared up. His front legs and mane froze in the air, and there I was hanging in space on horseback. The earth looked like a nutshell under my feet. In the morning I told uncle my dream. He said, ‘It probably means something has happened to Sahar. Now don’t you get upset! It’s not worth it. Pick out whichever of my colts you like.’ I said, ‘Uncle, that’s impossible. When we left Sahar was perfectly healthy. How could it be? No other colt will ever take Sahar’s place for me.’” Khosrow broke off, sobbing. “Now I remember. When we were leaving, Sahar was stamping his foot and digging at the soil with his hoof. Poor animal knew he wouldn’t see me again, but stupid me, I didn’t know. Mother, why is my stomach turning so? I feel as if someone’s choking me.”

Zari hugged and kissed her son.

“Wash your face with some cold water, my dear,” she said, “you’ll feel better.” Her own heart was brimming with sorrow. “Why don’t you invite your schoolfriends over this afternoon to a mourning ceremony for Sahar? I’ll bring out some tea and sherbet drinks for you.”

“Will you make some halva too?” Khosrow asked.

“Certainly, if you want some.” She paused and added, “Yes, I’ll make some halva. As soon as the smell of halva rises, Sahar’s spirit will know we’re thinking of him.”

“Can we come too?” Mina asked.

“No,” Khosrow answered, kissing each of his sisters in turn. “The ceremony is for men only.”

That afternoon, Sahar’s all-male ‘mourning ceremony’ really did take place in the garden. At least twenty children of various ages poured in. Gholam had swept over the make-believe grave, and covered it with a carpet. Watching from the verandah, Zari could see the children squatting silently by the grave. She noticed a small boy wearing a black mourning shirt, staring fixedly at something. When she looked more carefully, she realized that he was staring at his thumbnails. Probably to stop himself laughing. But finally he started to giggle and then burst out laughing. All the other
children
, besides Khosrow and Hormoz who was sitting next to him, joined in the laughter and the ceremony broke up. Zari couldn’t bear it anymore. She went to the parlour. Seeing a lot of flies buzzing around, she took a fly-swatter and attacked them, killing them left and right. She could hear the children playing in the garden and looking out from the parlour window saw that they were going at the unripe fruit on the trees. But Khosrow and Hormoz were still sitting on the carpet while Gholam walked toward them with some coffee and Khadijeh put the trays of halva on the ground. Hormoz whispered something in Khosrow’s ear and Khosrow slapped his forehead with a grown-up gesture, then covered his eyes.

When the children had gone, Khosrow and Hormoz came to the parlour. Khosrow’s eyes were red and Hormoz’s glasses all fogged up.

“Cheer up, my dear,” Zari comforted, “it’s not so bad after all. As Khadijeh says, the mare is young, she’ll give birth to another Sahar for you.” And she thought to herself, “If, as Ameh Khanom said, he ever sees that wench riding Sahar, then all hell will break loose! How we end up lying to our children!”

“I’m trying not to cry,” said Khosrow, “but I feel so unhappy …”

Hormoz took off his glasses. He took out a handkerchief from his
pocket and wiped them. His eyes were puffy.

“I keep telling Khosrow this is just the beginning,” said Hormoz. “We have a lot of ups and downs ahead of us. We mustn’t give up so easily. Besides, look how many people die of typhus or
starvation
each day. What’s a colt next to all these people?”

Zari looked at Hormoz. She wasn’t sure whether they were his own words, or he had learned them from someone else. In any case, he was four years older than Khosrow. She thought with bitterness, “The real death of humans next to the fake death of a colt! Certainly there’s no comparison.”

Suddenly her mind went back to that evening in the Missionary Hospital where her mother was spending the last hours of her life. Zari had had no idea how near the end it was, even though Khanom Hakim had told her, “Now the cancer be overtaking the whole body, and there be nothing more the knife can do.”

Her mother had looked at Zari out of the corner of her eye.

“Stay with me tonight!” she had said.

But how could she stay? Khosrow was only three years old and would not eat unless she fed him nor sleep unless she were next to him. Besides, they had guests. Yusef had invited a number of people.

“I have to go,” she had said. “We have guests. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?” her mother had echoed. And didn’t insist anymore. She merely asked for some sacred soil to be brought her by Ameh Khanom. By the time Zari had gone home and Ameh Khanom had finished her prayers and her opium-smoking, put on her outdoor dress with the long sleeves and her gloves and her scarf, the evening had drawn on and she was unable to go all the way to the hospital by herself. In any case, no-one would have thought a person who seemed so alert one minute would die the next.

Abol-Ghassem Khan had arrived before all the other guests and when he found out about the situation, offered to accompany Ameh Khanom. But he had no car in those days, and they couldn’t find a droshke. They managed to get there, nevertheless, though it was after eleven by the time they returned. Zari was serving dinner and Khosrow had not been put to bed yet. The guests were playing with him, taking turns holding him and listening to his sweet baby-talk. Zari didn’t even get a chance to ask Abol-Ghassem Khan how her
mother was. As for Ameh, she went straight to bed. Later, at dinner, Abol-Ghassem Khan drank so much vodka that he became completely drunk. Tears streamed down his face and he babbled on about his own mother. He smashed several glasses against the wall and then threw up violently, upsetting the other guests. Finally they took him to the bottom of the garden so he could vomit as much as he liked. When the guests had left, they told Zari her mother had died, that alas, she hadn’t received the sacred soil she asked for, that no-one had been at her bedside, except a foreign nurse who didn’t speak her language …

At that moment Mina and Marjan barged into the room, bringing Zari abruptly back to the present. Each of them was holding a doll.

“Uncle gave me this,” Mina said.

Abol-Ghassem Khan followed them into the parlour with Gholam in his wake, carrying two loaded sacks.

“It’s our first picking of lemons,” Abol-Ghassem Khan announced. At a sign from Zari, Gholam took the sacks to the storage-room. Abol-Ghassem Khan embraced Khosrow and said, “Shall I send for that colt of mine you liked in the village?”

“No, uncle, I don’t want a horse at all.”

Mina, still holding her doll, put a hand on her brother’s knee.

“Have you seen my doll?” she asked. “Do you want to have it?”

T
hat week Zari finished early at the asylum, for typhus had reduced the number of patients to slightly over half compared to the week before. The warden, a short fellow with a dark complexion who received her every alternate Thursday, would only allow her to distribute bread and dates among the inmates after taking adequate payment for himself and his nurses. This week he told her that the epidemic had hit them hard and that his patients had been refused admission to the town’s hospitals. “He doesn’t look too well himself,” thought Zari, as she handed over his payment. Not that he ever looked particularly well, dealing as he did all the time with mental patients. His eyes had sunk into their sockets.

When they entered the men’s ward, Gholam put the tray of food on the floor, but unlike other weeks, no-one seemed to show any interest. Zari looked around at the men, with their shaved heads and soiled white gowns, sitting silently in the room. They seemed to be listening to sounds only they could hear and to which one or other of them would occasionally mumble a reply. They took the bread and dates from Gholam absent-mindedly. Zari felt depressed. It was as if today her vow had not been fulfilled since she hadn’t made anyone happy. Downhearted, she began to distribute cigarettes and matches. One patient who claimed to be the Chief Commander of the World and who always asked for the Homa brand of cigarette, took an Oshno this time and without striking a match, listlessly put the cigarette to his lips. The sun poured in through the shutterless windows, and flies buzzed sleepily around the room, exploring every nook and cranny, as well as the untouched food in the patients’ hands.

“Ali!” summoned the head nurse loudly. Ali was Zari’s favourite patient, a tall German-looking young man who had attempted three times to escape from the asylum. Twice his relatives had found him, each time in the neighbourhood of the high-school where he had finished five grades. The last time Gholam had found him on the hill overlooking Yusef’s garden. Apparently Ali had followed Gholam like a lamb, allowing himself to be led back quietly to the asylum. Hunger had taken its toll. He had told Gholam:

“They tricked me. They whispered to me that the airplane is ready; please get inside it and go to Europe to your uncle. I came out and no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find the airplane. Maybe it left without me. I have many enemies, you see.” Later he confessed, “I’ve been drinking water from the gutter and stealing bones and bread from dogs. Yesterday I grabbed a piece of raw meat from a dog, and ran away with it. I washed the meat in the gutter and ate it. My stomach turned, and now I have diarrhoea. There’s blood in it too. I really looked everywhere, but I just couldn’t find our house. I know my father made our house get lost on purpose so I wouldn’t find it.”

From that day on, they chained Ali in the asylum basement. Zari would visit him there and take him bread and dates. He always smiled when he saw her. Once he had asked her for ‘Essential English, Part III’, and Zari had brought him one. Thereafter, he refused to speak a word in Persian, talking instead in a language no-one could understand.

Ali came in. He had lost so much weight that Zari felt distressed at the sight of him, and he did not recognize her. He threw her a blank look and, without using his invented language, proclaimed in Persian, “An attack of pliers equals typhus + famine + cheating in an exam. O madmen of the world unite!”

The Seyyid from the Arab Quarter was also sitting silently in a corner. Usually when he saw Zari he would reach under his belly and start scratching himself, saying, “Burning, burning, I am burning!” And then he would add, “It’s me Eilan-ud-Dowleh, it’s me Veilan-ud-Dowleh.” In exchange for Zari’s gifts, he would give her bits of imaginary paper with prayers of love and affection on them, or magical and occult charms or talismans.

“Our account is clear,” he would say, “but do wash your shirt with water from the morgue. Spread it out on a deadman’s grave
then have him wear it the next morning. Tiger’s whiskers and the brain of a black mule …”

Then there was another patient who tied his imaginary leg wounds with whatever bits of material he could get hold of, and would stretch out the leg and fan it. But today the fan had fallen away from his hand.

As Zari and Gholam, accompanied by the warden, were passing through the dried-up yard of the asylum, they saw a young woman stretched out on an old mattress under a pine tree. Hearing
footsteps
, the woman flicked open her eyes. Zari recognized her, even though her face had been drained of colour until it blended with the dust on the ground. It was the same woman who sometimes claimed to be the wife of God, and at other times God himself. Occasionally she would smear her cheeks and lips with some red petals from the Marvel of Peru flowers in the garden and say she was waiting for God. Apparently she would stare at the sky and repeat some mumbo-jumbo in a language resembling Arabic, saying God was waiting for her on the roof. But she herself wouldn’t go to him; she was a woman, and a woman could never take the first step.

‘God’s wife’ was now stretched out under the pine tree, her face twitching and her lips blistered. “She seems ready to join Him at any time,” Zari thought. “If only she would intercede with Him for the rest of her fellow sufferers …”

A sound escaped the woman’s lips. “Water!” she moaned, as her blankly staring eyes slowly closed. Gholam ran for some water.

“Why is she lying here?” Zari asked the warden.

“She’s got typhus,” he replied.

“Well, all of them catch that at one time or another …”

“All the better! It will be a relief for them. Their relatives pray that they’ll be released from their suffering. What’s the use of keeping them like this?”

Gholam came back in a rush, holding a glazed bowl full of water. He lowered the edge of the bowl to the woman’s lips. “Drink, sister,” he coaxed, but she couldn’t swallow. Zari took her handkerchief from her handbag, soaked it and rubbed it on the woman’s face and lips. Then she wet it again and placed it on her forehead.

They walked on. The warden followed alongside, offering
explanations
, “Three of our nurses caught typhus,” he said, “and are now sitting comfortably under the Tuba Tree in paradise. ‘God’s
wife’ will be on her way there too tonight.” Then, seeing Zari looking at him disapprovingly, he continued in a different tone, “It’s amazing. When their fever goes up, their madness seems to disappear. If only we could save them from this second disease, maybe they’d be cured of their madness too! But what’s the use? If they ever came to their senses, it would only be the beginning of their troubles. Their families have become used to their absence, and they would have no room or patience for them.”

In the women’s ward, Zari noticed the crippled woman who always managed to frighten her. “You fucking whore,” she would say, “are you back again? What do you want from my life?” This woman blamed Zari for her paralysis and Zari felt guilty at heart about it too. When the woman had had healthy legs, she had asked Zari for a pair of old slippers, or a sturdy pair of second-hand givehs.

“I’m a respectable woman,” she had said, “and I can’t go to the toilet barefoot.” Then, “May God strike Khanom Essmat dead! If she had spent my marriage portion and inheritance on me instead of on that goddam cuckold who sleeps with her, I’d never be grovelling for your droppings, you whore from Mordestan!”

But the following week Zari had been due to go to the prison, and the week after that she had forgotten all about it. By the time she remembered to buy the woman her new shoes, it was too late—she was already paralysed. Of course everyone knew her paralysis had nothing to do with the givehs. But every time after that when she saw Zari she threw unspeakable insults in her direction. Still, the nurses said she hugged the new shoes tightly each night as she went to sleep.

Zari glanced around for the young teacher with the glass eye. This one wasn’t particularly fond of her, either, and wouldn’t let her come close. Zari always left her share of bread and dates on the sill. Sometimes when the teacher was in a good mood she would say things like, “Look how much perfume this harlot’s used! Ugh! How lucky you are, my little servant, to have got this far. You remember you were the daughter of our dressmaker? I knew you’d finally give in. With that cab driver who had a wife in every town …” And she would put a finger under Zari’s chin and say, “You little coquette!” Then suddenly she would get angry and shout, “You’ve put rat poison inside these dates! You’ve taken out the pip and put ratsbane instead. What an offering!”

Apparently she used to teach first graders. One day, sometime after the veil was banned, the school was inspected by the
Governor
, the army commander and the minister of education. The minister had found out that this teacher would punish children by squeezing a pencil between their little fingers and laugh when they hopped with pain. He had made quite a fuss, but only about the issue of corporal punishment, yet the young teacher had fainted from humiliation at the sight of all those important people. She was immediately hauled off to the principal’s office where they revived her, but the shock had been too much. She had stared blankly at everyone, then calmly taken out her glass eye, holding it out in the palm of her hand for her bewildered audience to behold.

One day in the asylum she played the same trick on Zari. Until then, Zari hadn’t known that the woman had a glass eye, although she had noticed that the right eye didn’t move in its socket. The young teacher was agitated that day. When Zari came into the room she went over to her, reached out her hand, and said, “Take it!” Then she opened her fist into Zari’s hand, and there was Zari holding a large, shiny glass eye.

Now, on inquiring, Zari was told that the first fatality from typhus had been this very girl.

“At first we didn’t know she had typhus,” the warden explained. “Of course her fever was very high and she was delirious. She imagined she was putting on her shroud. She tied anything she could find around herself saying it was her shroud, and began reciting the Quran by heart. She was superb. But instead of cursing the Devil, she cursed the Cardboard Man. I believe the Cardboard Man was that same minister of education who fired her from her job. Finally, she said her last prayers and threw herself into the pool. She died that night.”

At the end of her rounds, Zari went to Khanom Fotouhi whose bed lay next to a window where she could constantly watch the yard, in the hope that her relatives would come and take her to the ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre garden’. Zari knew the Fotouhi family. They were well off. At the beginning of Khanom Fotouhi’s illness, they kept her at home. But when she finally drove them to desperation, they gave up hoping for her recovery, and passed her on to the asylum. Before the war, she had had a private room where she was visited regularly by her mother who would even take her home for a week or two sometimes. When she had
had enough, she would drag her daughter back to the asylum, leave her in the reception office and disappear. But the mother had died years ago.

Khanom Fotouhi’s brother was the well-known history teacher in town and something of an idol for its youth. The most he could manage was to visit his sister once in a blue moon. Now it looked as if they had all really abandoned her at the asylum. But Khanom Fotouhi never despaired. She was still waiting for them to come and take her to the ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre’ garden.

She was a sallow-looking girl with thick eyebrows that joined in the middle, protruding teeth, and grey hair. She never accepted food from Zari, as if it were too demeaning to show interest in something which others would grab at with such greed. When the fruit in her garden ripened, Zari usually took woven baskets piled high with apricots, sour apples, cherries, peaches and pears to the prison and asylum. But Khanom Fotouhi wouldn’t even look at these.

On several occasions Zari had prepared a special fruit basket for her and left it on the windowsill. But the nurses later said that the minute she had stepped outside, the other patients raided the basket. When they got to the sour apples they would split them in half, ask for some salt and sprinkle them until they were well ‘seasoned’ in the Shirazi way. It was enough to make anyone else’s mouth water. But Khanom Fotouhi would merely stare out of the window at the yard, waiting for her relatives to take her away to the ‘hundred and twenty-four thousand metre garden’. The other patients didn’t even spare the apricot pips which they would either split open with their teeth or bang with stones on the floor to get at the little kernels. After all, as the warden said, how could any of the patients get real sustenance on their pitiful daily allowance? Most of them had gone mad from poor nutrition in the first place.

When she had finished dividing the food, Zari would sit next to Khanom Fotouhi’s bed and listen to her complaints. Khanom Fotouhi hated all the other patients and never spoke to any of them. They, in turn, had nicknamed her ‘Princess’. The kinds of things Khanom Fotouhi used to ask for included the large-format
Iran
newspaper which was mailed to Yusef twice a week from Tehran, lined notebooks and pencils which she would accept from Zari, saying, “I have allowed you to contribute to the world of science
and literature.” She loved all the serial articles in the
Iran,
and the notebooks she would use for writing her autobiography—or so she claimed.

Each time she finished a notebook, she would hand it
ceremoniously
to Zari. “Rent a safe deposit box in the National Bank,” she would say. “Take the money for it from my brother and store my works there. We could have a fire here someday, and I don’t want to have my works destroyed.”

The first time Zari had believed her, and tried to read one of the notebooks only to discover that it was filled with some incoherent ideas written out in a language of the occult sciences. Wherever the handwriting became legible, it described a ‘hundred and
twenty-four
thousand metre garden’ with man-made waterfalls and lakes, blooming water-lilies, acacias and ash-trees. In one part she wrote about a well-built man with a wide forehead and white hair around the temples who hid behind an ash-tree while she herself, wearing a loose white chiffon dress which fluttered in the wind, stepped gracefully into the open air. Her shapely breasts and erect nipples showed through her dress, and the well-built man rushed out from behind the tree, capturing her in his arms and hugging and
embracing
her. At the end of her notebook she had written, “Thus endeth the sorrowful tale of the Fotouhi maiden in the Nai prison,” and underneath this sentence she had added, “Some verses by the Fotouhi maiden: