A Persian Requiem (16 page)

“Sister, ever since you’ve decided to leave for the Holy City, you’ve become quite a philosopher,” Yusef observed.

“Just a wise old owl,” Ameh sighed.

At that moment Zari noticed a car struggling noisily up the hill. Sahar, at the summit, neighed and shifted nervously from side to side. The girl grabbed at his golden mane, shrieking above the noise of the crowd. The mare and the chestnut horse neighed in response from the stables.

“I knew the first day they tried to ride him outside the four walls of their estate, he’d head straight back home,” Yusef said.

“A credit to that noble beast,” said Ameh, still busy with her sewing.

Suddenly a long black limousine drew up. The policeman saluted and the gendarmes presented arms. The driver jumped out to open the door, but the man in the back seat opened it himself and stepped out. Zari recognized the Governor. Then another limousine drew up behind the first. Singer stepped out, followed by two Indian soldiers. He and the Governor shook hands.

The crowd kept parting and re-assembling to allow for the random movement of the cars. The car which had driven up on to
the hill backed down noiselessly as if afraid of causing Sahar to shy again.

Zari couldn’t see her son as she strained to pick him out in the crowd. This was the time to act, so where was he? By now, the army commander’s car had drawn up as well. Out stepped the
commander
and three more officers, slamming the door loudly. The car moved on, veering closely past the other two limousines. The army commander took in the scene around him. The officers, with swords dangling at their sides, headed straight for the hill. The Indian soldiers saluted and Singer started to do the same, but the army commander prevented him as if to emphasize their warm relations. Then the commander turned and saluted the Governor.

Yusef had meanwhile fetched his binoculars, and he and Zari took turns surveying the scene on the hill. Sahar neighed several times. The girl was clutching at his mane, lying full-length along his neck. Sahar slipped several times on the rocky terrain, veering first to the left and then to the right. The army commander, holding a short, thick baton in his hand, left the Governor and Singer behind, and headed uphill.

“Gilly dear,” he shouted at her, “take your feet out of the stirrups, sit sideways and try to jump down.”

“I’m scared! I’m scared!” came Gilan Taj’s voice.

“What an ass!” murmured Yusef.

Zari couldn’t tell whether he meant the army commander or ‘Gilly dear’.

Sahar seemed to notice the gendarmes all of a sudden. One of them uncoiled the rope he was carrying and threw the noose at him, in an attempt to lasso the horse and its rider. Sahar backed off, the girl screamed, and both disappeared down the other side of the ridge. The crowd surged towards the hill. The drivers of those cars who had room to manoeuvre, jumped behind their steering wheels, revved their engines and drove away to the other side.

“Get back, you half-wits!” yelled the army commander. “You’ve frightened the horse. He was standing perfectly calmly …”

“If there was an ounce of brain in their heads,” Yusef said, “they would all go away and let Sahar bring the girl safe and sound back here.”

Suddenly Zari caught sight of Khosrow clambering up the hill. Her stomach began to churn. “Amen Khanom, pray for him, pray
for him!” She turned to Ameh and begged her. Ameh looked towards the hill, and her lips moved in prayer: “God’s protection upon him; He is the most merciful of the merciful.”

Khosrow had nearly reached the top. He put two fingers in his mouth and let out the long whistle he always used for Sahar. Whenever he heard that sound, no matter where he was in the garden, Sahar would come to Khosrow and sniff at his sleeves. The crowd fell silent. Zari looked at her husband. Yusef’s face was radiant with smiles and his green eyes were shining like two stars. Again Khosrow whistled. Sahar’s head appeared in sight, looking to left and right.

“Here I am, Sahar!” Khosrow shouted. “Don’t be scared,” he reassured the girl, “he won’t throw you.” The crowd was so silent, it was as if there had never been an uproar. Sahar neighed and slowly approached Khosrow. When he reached the boy, he lowered his head, as tamely as a household pet. Zari knew he would be sniffing at Khosrow’s sleeves and pockets, taking in the familiar odour. She knew how closely the animal’s existence was tied to familiar smells around him. Khosrow hugged Sahar’s head, kissed him and patted his mane. Then he held his hand to Sahar’s mouth, and Zari knew Khosrow had not forgotten the sugar-lumps.

Khosrow helped the girl dismount. She was wearing riding boots and jodhpurs. As she touched the ground, she collapsed. Khosrow held the bridle as he bent over to tell the girl something. She sat up and screamed. Khosrow stood in front of the girl and was obviously talking to her. Finally he gave her a hand and lifted her up and the three of them descended the hill. Sahar had brought his ears forward, as if to listen to Khosrow’s words. Near the foot of the hill, the girl left her companions and threw herself into the arms of her father, who had come forward to meet her. As the boy and his horse reached the crowd, people stood aside to make way for them. Then Khosrow mounted and galloped back home.

T
he mare was ready, saddled and bridled. Yusef was about to mount when Kolu dashed out of the stables and threw himself at his feet, begging to be taken back to the village. He was so altered after a haircut, a bath and some second-hand clothes! Or had he got thinner in the past few days? His dark eyes seemed sunken in his haggard face. Yusef tried to reason with him. “Listen son,” he said, “you’ll be staying in town, going to school, really be making something of yourself. You can learn a thousand things from Khosrow.”

But Kolu was deaf to the master’s words, uncomprehending, pleading only to be taken back to his mother and brother. Finally Yusef lost patience and boxed his ears. “I’m not going to your village just now! I’m going to Zarqan.” And he mounted. Kolu burst into tears and threw himself into the bushes, kicking and howling like a trapped animal. When Yusef bent over from the saddle to kiss Zari, he noticed tears in her eyes.

“Would you like me to take him back?” he asked.

“No, I expect he’ll settle down eventually,” Zari answered. “He can’t know what’s good for him, can he? Just remember, this time you’re the one who’s being charitable! What’s the use of helping this one out and adopting him when there are thousands of other peasant children like him?”

Over Yusef’s departing footsteps, Ameh Khanom splashed the customary water and orange blossom leaves from the crystal bowl she was holding, before going off to recite the An’am Surah for his protection and blowing it towards him with a symbolic gesture. What a curious creature a human being is! How easily a ray of hope or a happy event can renew his will to live! But when all around is oppression and despair, a person feels no more than a used-up
shell, abandoned by the wayside. Ever since Sahar’s return, Ameh had connected her life with the family’s again and had stopped repeating that nothing concerned her anymore.

Zari went over to Kolu who had rolled away as far as the middle of the garden path. She knelt beside him and stroked his hair.

“Now look how you’ve dirtied your new clothes …” she scolded him gently.

Kolu sat up and tore his shirt off angrily, screwing it up and throwing it in front of the master’s wife.

“Listen,” said Zari, “if you’re a good boy, I’ll ask Khosrow to give you lessons from tomorrow. When you can read and write, I’ll send you to your village to see your mother and show her you can read their letters and write letters for her, too.”

Kolu had calmed down. Either he was paying attention or he had tired himself out. “But no one writes my mama letters,” he said.

“Get up, child,” Zari urged, patting his sweaty back. “Go and wash your hands and face. Shake the dust off your clothes and put them back on.”

As Kolu didn’t budge, she asked, “What do you want me to buy you?”

Kolu burst out crying again and sobbed, “Send me home,
mistress
! I beg you on your children’s lives, send me back to my mother and brother. My brother’s sitting right now by the stream playing his flute. My mother’s putting oil in the lamp. I’d laid some traps to catch a few goldfinches, and now they must be trapped and there’s no one to get them out … I put my slingshot on the shelf—my sister Massoumeh will take it and lose it. If I was there now, I’d have pinched a few walnuts and I’d be cracking them and eating them.”

“Maybe the goldfinches will chirp a lot and someone will hear them and let them loose. I’ll send someone to buy you some walnuts: and you can sit right here and crack them. I’ll even get you some elastic and you can make yourself a slingshot.”

“You make slingshots with leather cord, not with elastic,” Kolu said with an unhappy smile.

“All right then, I’ll send out for some leather.”

Kolu’s lips quivered again. “No-one will go to the goldfinches. The traps are far away from the village.”

Zari tried to distract him. “Look,” she began, “the master is going to the village. Maybe he’ll pass by the place you set your traps. He’ll
hear the chirping. He’ll get down from his horse and take the goldfinches out of the traps and set them free.”

“But the master isn’t going to our village.”

Khadijeh’s voice came from the verandah. “Khanom!” she called out. “Telephone!”

Zari stood up. “Who is it?”

“Khanom Ezzat-ud-Dowleh.”

What could she be wanting, Zari wondered. Probably the woman wants to say what a huge favour she did us, and that she was the one who sent the horse back! When Zari came to the parlour, she saw Khosrow sitting idly by the window, staring out at the garden.

“For heaven’s sake, Khosrow,” she said, “go and play a bit with that poor orphan boy …”

He didn’t move. “Mother, don’t even think about my giving Kolu lessons,” he said.

Zari went to the telephone. It appeared that the very minute Ezzat-ud-Dowleh had set foot in her own home after their luncheon together, she had come down with a bout of her usual leg pains, confining her to the house. She had heard about her sister’s intended pilgrimage, and she longed to see all of them—including the twins—in the near future. They owed her a visit after all. In fact, fresh water was being brought for her private baths the next day, and Ezzat-ud-Dowleh wondered if they would honour her with their company for a bath and luncheon on Wednesday. Zari’s many excuses and protests were firmly turned down, and the date was set.

On Tuesday morning, Kolu went down with a fever. Zari darkened the pantry using reed blinds, and set up a bed in there so she could have him close at hand. Kolu would open his eyes wide and hold his fingers in front of them, straining to see. You could tell he was trying to focus, but wasn’t able to. Khosrow, Gholam and even Ameh Khanom were of the opinion that he should be sent to hospital. There was little doubt he had typhus, and that put them all at risk. But which hospital would take him? Even the town’s best doctors were down with typhus, and rumour had it that Khanom Massihadem and the three head-nurses at the Nemazee Hospital were in a grave condition. Khadijeh had heard from Sakineh, the woman who came to bake bread for them, that Dr Abdullah Khan, the town’s most skilled physician, refused to leave Khanom
Massihadem’s
bedside. He would soak two large white towels in ice-cold water, wring them out, and continuously cover the patient’s naked body with them. Sakineh, who had gone to visit Khanom
Massihadem
, had thought that she was already dead and they had spread a shroud on her. Before anyone could stop her, Sakineh was beating her head and searching for mud in the garden to smear over her hair in mourning. When they finally calmed her down and explained everything to her, she had rushed to the shrine of Seyyid Mir Mohammad to light ten candles in thanksgiving.

Nor was Sakineh the only one so concerned with Khanom
Massihadem’s
fate. Large numbers of men and women had covered their heads with the Quran at Mehri’s Rowzeh as a mark of urgent prayer for the sick woman, and had recited the Amman Yujib prayer for her deliverance. Akbar Khordel had circumambulated her bed with a sheep which he then slaughtered for her sake and distributed the flesh amongst the poor. The skin he had taken to the well-known mountain dervish, Baba Kouhi, so the old man would pray for her too.

Ameh Khanom made Zari call Khanom Hakim for a hospital bed. But Khanom Hakim merely said, “Unfortunately the beds of the Missionary Hospital be for the foreign officers and soldiers only and all the beds be full and even there be no place in the
corridors
.”

Zari hung up without saying goodbye. “Obviously the hospital was built for their own needs, not for the townspeople,” she told Ameh who was waiting to hear what the doctor would say.

They put their heads together and began their nursing. They gave him manna of Hedysarum, and they wrung towels in cold water and wrapped them around him. They plied him with watermelon juice which he accepted eagerly, being parched from the fever. They moistened fleawort, sewed it up in some thin cloth, and kept it immersed in cold water, to be dabbed from time to time on his blistered lips. Ameh Khanom resorted to the traditional rite of placing some item blessed at the Shah Cheraq Shrine next to the patient. In this case, she cut two hand-lengths of braided white cord from the shrine, tied it around Kolu’s neck, and sat by his bedside to recite the Hadith-i Kasa prayer. But despite all these measures, it was clear Ameh Khanom’s spirits were sinking again.

“Obviously the poor boy’s had a fever for several days and we hadn’t noticed it, putting it down as we did to homesickness,” she
had begun to criticize as soon as Zari noticed Kolu’s high fever that morning. “Yes, nothing can replace a mother’s loving care.”

Despite trying all day, they could not even get a doctor to visit Kolu, let alone a hospital bed. The boy was now semi-conscious and delirious. “Goldfinches in the trap … chirp, chirp. Chirp, chirp. Beak down and feet up … in the air … no water … no seeds …”

At sunset, Zari pleaded with Khosrow to go with Gholam to Khanom Massihadem’s and persuade Dr Abdullah Khan to drop by for a minute to visit their patient. But Khosrow refused. “I want to take Sahar out for a ride, and then go to Mr Fotouhi’s with Hormoz,” he said. “Father didn’t say I couldn’t go.”

“What a stubborn child!” Zari snapped, losing her temper. “Fotouhi is as crazy as his sister. All he does is to mislead other people’s children!” She was about to say that he was a paedophile, but stopped herself in time. Instead, she lodged a silent complaint, “May God forgive you, Yusef! Look what trouble you’ve landed me in! What’11 I do if this poor child dies on my hands?” And she vowed to send Kolu back to the village as soon as he recovered, whether Yusef liked it or not.

Meanwhile, she felt she had no choice but to turn to
Abol-Ghassem
Khan for help. Gholam had returned without much success from Dr Abdullah Khan who had said he was getting old and hoped the townspeople would allow him to retire. Zari resolved to go back to Khanom Massihadem’s herself and beg the doctor to attend to their patient if Abol-Ghassem Khan was unable to help. Surely a doctor couldn’t take refuge by one patient’s bedside and tell all the others that he’s stopped practising, even if that particular patient is very young and has served the townspeople.

Abol-Ghassem Khan was at home. He picked up the telephone himself. “Well, to what do we owe the honour, sister?” He was in a chatty mood and didn’t allow Zari to get in a word edgeways. “I hear Sahar came back to Khosrow on his own feet! I wasn’t in town that day. I had to escape to the countryside, away from my
honourable
constituents. Can you believe they actually think I’m about to represent them? They’ve already started with their petty requests. One of them wants to have a patient hospitalized; another wants to obtain his rights in a court of justice; one fellow wants to have his daughter registered at the Mehrain School for free, and so on. For heaven’s sake, this position as deputy cost me all of seventy thousand tomans! Anyway, it seems Sahar’s escapade was quite a
spectacle. Singer said my nephew charged into the middle of the crowd like a real hero wearing nothing but a pair of givehs and his shirtsleeves. Now sister, why wasn’t he dressed in some
respectable
clothes? Anyhow, Singer was saying that as soon as the horse spotted Khosrow, he came forward like a long-lost lover and started kissing and sniffing at the boy, nuzzling into his arms.”

With an effort, Zari forced herself to say, “Abol-Ghassem Khan, I beg you to help me. Kolu has come down with typhus, and I have him on my hands. I can’t get a doctor or anyone to come to him. All of them are so busy.”

“Which Kolu? Why does this brother of mine bring the village sick into town? And in his own house too! Has he no thought for his delicate children? Didn’t he always say that things must be changed at the root and our charities were of no use? I heard him say that to you myself.”

“That’s right, but this Kolu is our shepherd’s son and his father died recently. He didn’t have a fever when he first came. He’s fallen ill now.” Zari knew if she said anything about Yusef adopting Kolu she would receive a one-hour lecture on how another man’s son will never behave as one’s own.

Finally Abol-Ghassem Khan consented. “For your sake, sister, and for the sake of the children, I’ll arrange to have him admitted at the Missionary Hospital.”

“I’ve already called the Missionary Hospital. They didn’t have any room.”

“They’ll have room for me,” Abol-Ghassem Khan said grandly.

It was eight o’clock in the evening when Khanom Hakim called. “Why haven’t you tell me it be Abol-Ghassem Khan’s patient?” she complained at first. Then she added, “There be an empty bed ready in the corridor and this be separated from an Indian sick man by a screen. And the Indian man also be sick with typhus. I be setting aside some pills for the family of Abol-Ghassem Khan which those who contracted … contacted the patient must be taking.”

At the hospital, tents had been put up in the grounds to house extra beds. A strong smell of phenic acid penetrated the nostrils. Most of the patients were fair-skinned and fair-haired. They could not have been typhus cases because they were either sitting upright in bed with bandages around their heads or their arms in slings, or else lying down with their legs in traction. Four men were sitting around a table playing cards. Their fair hair shone under the light of
a lantern which hung from the tent-pole. They did not seem to be ailing or suffering in any way.

Gholam held Kolu all the way in the droshke and carried him to the bed prepared for him at the hospital. From behind the screen, the Indian patient could be heard crying, muttering words Zari couldn’t understand. “Seri rama! Seri rama! Krishna!” The crying became louder and he repeated names which Zari guessed must be those of his relatives, “Sandra! Sandra! Kitu!”

When Zari got home, Khosrow was still not back. At first she wanted to call Fotouhi, give him a piece of her mind and vent her anger. But she soon thought better of it. Why blame Fotouhi? These young boys were looking for a way to express their manhood. Fotouhi was merely a vehicle. She decided to wait until her son returned, and then interrogate him. She would be gentle at first, then give him a scolding, and finally raise such hell, he would have something to remember.