Missing Soluch (39 page)

Mergan said, “I was busy. Anyway, I thought I’d go and get it closer to the winter, when we really need it.”

From the corner, Karbalai Doshanbeh said, “Good for the Sardar! Good for him! It seems he’s become fair in his accounts. It used to be that it caused him pain anytime one of
his herders came to ask for his wages. Well, God bless him! He’s finally become a man!”

Abrau had become more conscious of Karbalai Doshanbeh; a moment before, as he was lowering the bag of flour, he saw him but did not want to display any reaction. But now he had no choice but to look at him. He was sitting, as always, straight against the wall in the spot he always sat in, with his head lowered. When he was quiet, it was possible to forget he was there at all. He would still be there, but quiet and introspective, a heavy presence. He would sit against the wall, his elbows on his knees, with his hands busy fingering his worry beads. This man, this old man, did always have a kind of presence. But his silence was as if he were absent, and one could imagine that he could stay in his position against the wall for years, fingering his worry beads. He was short of words, but his words always had an impact, and now he was mocking the Sardar. It was of no real importance to him that the Sardar had sent a bag of flour to Mergan. Anything the Sardar did gave him a pretext for a clash, and so he would invariably attack. Whatever the cause, he would attack. But Karbalai Doshanbeh didn’t attack anyone in particular. He had the temperament of a scorpion and walked like a tarantula, with his bowed short legs and his long and crooked arms. His shoes were torn. His scarf was oversized and stained. His pants were too short, and when he walked, his overcoat’s edges blew to and fro. When he began to laugh, whenever he had shown up someone, his cheeks would turn red and his eyes would fill with tears. He was an old man, and he looked like he’d seen both good and bad in his lifetime. He was proud of this, proud that he had lived in places far from the village, and also that he had spent time in prison.

But others who knew him well considered his experiences outside the village, and the episode of his imprisonment, as a point of disgrace for him. The story was that he had been wrongfully arrested in Eshghabad, and in fact on the day he was to have been released, someone else was mistakenly released in his place. The story was that the officials had mistaken Karbalai Doshanbeh for one of the affiliates of Khabir Khan, the famous profiteer and smuggler, and had arrested him. It was nearly a year before it came to light that he was not the person they had been seeking. When the wardens called his name in the prison to release him, by the time he heard them and reacted, another convict had quickly presented himself by that name and had been released. So Karbalai Doshanbeh remained in the Eshghabad prison until the day that they called someone else for release. The person they named wasn’t there, but the officials found Karbalai Doshanbeh lying in the far corner of the prison looking at them silently. Only then did they realize what had happened. They picked him up and dragged him out. One of the local officials slapped him on the back of the head, and then they threw him on the street.

This version of the story was told by Karbalai Doshanbeh’s old traveling companions and the people who went out in caravans with him, people like Molla Aman and the Sardar. But rarely did he tell his own side of the story from beginning to end. Mostly he’d make elusive comments about the experience, and if he discussed it, he would only speak in general terms. There were a few people who had heard him tell the entire tale, but they were very few in number.

Abrau had become used to seeing Karbalai Doshanbeh, as recently he had begun to come by their home more and more
often. He would sit, drink tea, and mutter comments under his breath, occasionally saying a couple of words out loud. If lunch or breakfast was offered, he’d eat. Eventually he’d get up slowly and then just leave. He clearly had begun to see himself as part of their family, or as one of their closest friends. At times, he even would make a joke or lightly poke fun at something, just to have a laugh. Even if, in the end, he was the only person to laugh at the joke. In any case, Abrau saw that the old man’s feet were leading him to their home more and more often. He didn’t approve, but he had no choice but to just bear it quietly and not say anything. The main reason for this was that Karbalai Doshanbeh was Zabihollah’s uncle, and Zabihollah was a close partner of Mirza Hassan’s. Abrau was, at this point, significantly indebted to Mirza Hassan. The issue at hand was Abrau’s livelihood and his relationship with Mirza Hassan; all it would take would be for them to fire him from the job with the tractor and his life would be over. So Abrau felt he had no choice but to accept the indignities and not say anything. Abrau’s inability to say anything, and Abbas’ continued silence, not to mention Mergan’s confusion over what to do, all gave Karbalai Doshanbeh an arena to continue to make his advances unchallenged. All that was left was for him to go and put his bedding on his back, bring it over, and move into Mergan’s home permanently.

Let’s just see what will happen …

This was what Abrau told himself.

But what about Mergan? What was she thinking and feeling?

Mergan acted indifferently, as if she didn’t care if the world were washed away in a flood. When you’re caught inside a
typhoon, you don’t worry if you’ve remembered to button up your collar or not. You don’t worry that dust is getting into your eyes. You’re in the middle of a typhoon; you can’t be worrying about whether or not your throat is dry. You’ve just endured a deep dishonor, and you’re going to get upset that Karbalai Doshanbeh is practically moving into your house? If he decides to, so what? Why worry about it? Let others say what they will. What can they say? Nothing. They can’t say anything. Mergan is the only person who can say something about this situation. Freeing yourself from others is actually quite easy. What is difficult, perhaps impossible, is to free yourself from yourself. That’s why Mergan was unable to find an answer for herself. It wasn’t out of a fear of what others might say. What worried her was not that the word would spread that Karbalai Doshanbeh had made himself comfortable in Mergan’s home. No, the looming disaster was that Mergan’s own confusion made it difficult to even consider her own feeling about what others were saying. The weight of Mergan’s thoughts, and the opinions of others about her, were so far from each other that she had somehow lost herself in between the two points. She was lost, rudderless. She kept hitting her head against her frustration, and she wished she could tear off the skin of lies clinging about her with a single scream.

Ah! You’re all wrong, fooling yourselves!! The only thing that’s true is what I am saying—this is the truth. Mergan, don’t wallow in lies either! Your heart is right here; see where it is. So why are you shooting arrows at a fantasy of your own making?

To have screamed this out loud may seem easy enough, but Mergan couldn’t see herself doing so. How could she thrust the
knife of hostility into her own chest? What would result from this? Will others set aside their ideas about you? If they do set aside their fantasies, will your spirit truly be at peace? No, of course not! It will seek out some other excuse. Your spirit will just become more adept at finding excuses to be unhappy.

What if I don’t say a word?

This feeling will still torment you. It won’t let you be. The only hope is to try to forget. But is it possible to try to forget? To forget everything? No … Especially since you’re held back by the sack of flour. So, no, it’s not possible to forget everything. It may be possible to forget your poverty, but the clash of two inner instincts, no. The violent clash of two trees breaking in a typhoon. No, there’s no easy solution. It’s impossible to digest it. It’s not a knot that can be easily opened, whether by hand or by teeth. The more you think of it, the less clear it becomes and the less you can discern it. It becomes more convoluted, and if you try not to think about it, it exhausts you even more. It’s like a tack that sticks in the sole of your foot. It incites you. It calls you to itself. It makes you dizzy. It cuts your breath. It fogs your eyes, agitates your look, your face. You look but don’t see. You laugh, if you have laughter left within you, but you don’t know why. You feel you could have cried instead. You’re turned upside down. But if you do think about it, you’re no better off. The pain comes from the fact that you have not been able to face what has been unleashed within you and come to a decision about it. To have a clear idea about it. To either brush it off, or to feel victimized by it. To drive it away from yourself, or to accept it within you. You’re pulled from all directions. You don’t know which direction to turn, where you are going. You’re
caught in a dead-end facing the unthinkable. A violent pleasure has overrun you. A violent pleasure has planted the seed of a wild violence within you. You’re caught in the middle. On one hand, you’re a woman; on the other, you’re supposed to be chaste, pure. You are free and tied up at the same time. At peace and yet tortured, open and yet closed. The two are caught in one thought, which twists in the nooks and crannies of your mind. At the same time, need and desire also flicker within you, evident despite the mighty struggle that tries to repress them. They twist within you. In the recesses of your mind and in your deepest thoughts, in the unspoken, hidden, and undiscovered moments of your life, desire moves and even tries to break down the walls of social propriety with its horns. A cow overflowing with a lust and desire is ramming its horns within you. You are a woman. There is no escaping this. And a mother; again, no escaping it. You have a man, and yet you don’t. Soluch exists, and yet he doesn’t. His shadow and his face come and go, but neither is actually him. They aren’t Soluch. Is he alive or dead? Will he return or not? The flames, questions made of flames. Where is there an answer? There is no answer. The struggle of two lives in one. The Sardar, Soluch. Torment, desire, and rejection. Struggle. The lashes that scourge your spirit. You’ve been ploughed through and through, oh dry earth, oh barren land. They’ve ploughed you and pillaged you, oh earth. But you are both the land and the land’s protector, the guardian of the land. And the land and its guardian are two different things. A fertile land is ploughed, and that is what it desires, in its essence. But the land, Mergan, has been pillaged. Plundered. Ravaged. So where was she, Mergan, the guardian,
to protect Mergan, the land, from her pillager? What sort of protector has she been? Shame and a sense of dishonor. What is dearest to you has been plundered!

This was what was tearing Mergan apart inside. This was the division within her. The fabric of her soul was torn. A fabric that before had only been marked by work and pain had now taken on a new color. This new color that tinted the fabric of her soul had cast a shadow over her actions and thoughts, over her face. An unspoken color, however new it was.

Abrau could not understand any of this, other than to note it.

She’s different now; somehow she’s changed!

Yes, she had changed. She was uneasy and often lost in her thoughts. But not thoughts about a decision. Clearly, something must have happened to her. But what? One could surmise almost anything, anything but the truth, which only Mergan knew!

“See what it’s doing?!”

This was Abbas. He had risen and, like an insect, was trying to pull the sack of flour toward his corner in the room. It was as if he wanted to spend a night in peace, sleeping beside the sack of flour. However difficult it was, he dragged the sack to the edge of the wall under the eyes of his mother and brother. His forehead was covered in sweat. He knelt beside it. Weak, he fell to panting. He set his elbows on the sack of flour and held up his forehead in the palms of his hands. It looked as if his head was spinning and his eyes had gone to black. His hands shook and it seemed as if his neck was holding his head up only with difficulty. His fingers scampered like little crabs through the mass of his hair, scraping at his scalp.

Abrau was sitting across from his brother, leaning on the opposite wall. The two brothers had not spoken a word to each other after that night. Abbas had fallen into his own silence, and Abrau didn’t know what to say to him. He was hindered by the question of whether or not he could speak to him at all. He felt he couldn’t. The wall that had gone up between them was growing taller and stronger day by day. So much so that it would seem that soon they would be unable to see one another over it. This had driven Abrau to take his own course in life, to some extent. It was the sense one has when one has lost something and wants to make up for it in another part of one’s life. So he became more and more committed to his work. He would spend more and more time working with the tractor of Mirza Hassan and his partners. He had become a part of its nuts and bolts. Eventually, riding on the tractor’s running board, he’d seen all the farmlands of Zaminej from the machine. Along with the driver from Gonbad, they would plough sections of the land and take the money they’d be paid and hand it to Mirza Hassan. Although the farmlands of Zaminej were owned by different landowners and weren’t all the same, still Mirza Hassan’s tractor had ruined the market for ploughbearing cows in the village. Farmers who had been able to secure a loan that would simply cover the rental of the tractor had thrown away their old yokes and ploughs. So it became rare to see cows, donkeys, or camels that were pulling a plough with an old man walking behind. The slicing blades of the tractor cut the heart and belly of the earth out, transforming wild grassland into a field of rubble. Even the strongest cows from Sistan would never be able to do this. In Abrau’s estimation, Mirza Hassan’s tractor was omnipotent.

Eventually, Abrau was allowed to sit behind the wheel of the tractor on his own. For different lengths of time, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes even an hour. At least long enough for the Gonbadi driver to smoke a cigarette or wet his mouth with water. Sometimes long enough to drive the tractor to and from somewhere. Mirza Hassan had also given Abrau the hope that he might give him the job of driving the tractor sooner rather than later. He told him it could happen as soon as the water pump was installed. This would give enough time for Abrau to be trained. Mirza Hassan didn’t want to lose the Gonbadi driver just yet, but it was clear that his time in Zaminej would be temporary. He was already homesick for his own town and area. He didn’t have the heart for the weather in Gorgon and the desert here; someday he would be leaving. So Abrau was an asset for Mirza Hassan. He would do the same work for less pay, and he would be less likely to complain or make demands. In fact, he loved the work. The only thing was, he lacked experience. The tractor wasn’t just a hulk of dry metal that could be driven by one’s fancy—it needed expertise. While he learned, Abrau kept his eyes open for any sign of the water pump’s arrival.