A Persian Requiem

  Seyyid broke off to take a puff. Then he continued. “Early that morning we’d gone to the store-rooms. The master broke the seals on the doors with his own hand and distributed pulses and dates and flour among the peasants. He teased them and joked with them. He told the women that if they sold their share to buy gold bracelets or go on a pilgrimage, he would disown them. He told the men that if they dared convert their provisions into money to buy new bedclothes and new wives, he would know what to do. Everyone was happy. The master was the happiest of all.

  “Before lunch we went up to the upstairs room in the old fortress. The master sat on his cushion. We’d rolled away the mosquito-net. Elias brought the hookah and set it down next to the master. I asked, ‘Shall I remove your boots?’ He said, ‘No, I’ll smoke a pipe and we’ll go down to the plain.’ Then he asked, ‘Has the camel-driver come?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. Elias said, ‘Sir, this agent of Singer’s is back again.’”

  Abol-Ghassem Khan’s voice interrupted Seyyid’s narrative. “Everyone who came here tonight told me to hush up the matter completely, that the situation is very dangerous. The whole thing comes from the very top—” And Zari wondered how a man who had been howling with grief only a moment ago could possibly speak like that now.

  Ameh’s irate voice didn’t let Abol-Ghassem Khan finish his sentence. “Bless my soul!” she exclaimed, “Now they want to blot out the blood that’s been shed! Brother, listen to me. Hire a lawyer. If you don’t, I’ll do it myself.”

  “Sister, I thought you were about to leave for Karbala?” said Abol-Ghassem Khan sarcastically.

  “Now my Karbala is right here,” said Ameh with a cry in her voice. “Happy is the martyr whose blood is one night old. For us, it hasn’t even been one night yet.”

  “Sister, you women are not aware of the things that are going on here,” Abol-Ghassem Khan said gently. “Let’s say I engaged a lawyer. Who do you think they’ll charge with the murder? I’ll tell you: Kolu and his uncle … or some other miserable peasant, or perhaps even this very Seyyid here. They’ll manipulate things so that eventually we forgive the scapegoat ourselves, or else Kolu will turn out to be the murderer, and he’s a minor. Isn’t that so, Seyyid?”

  “If any court decides to act so unjustly,” replied Seyyid, “I’m willing to go out there and rouse all the peasants, single-handed. In the whole village, the master was—”

  “But what’s the use? The little money my brother’s orphans have left to them will be wasted. Besides, what if they arrest you first? Do you think they can’t?”

  “Uncle,” Khosrow said, “in that case Hormoz and I will go and round up the peasants for action. Mr Fotouhi will help us too. And if our money is wasted, it doesn’t matter. I’ll earn my own bread. Of course I can’t do that now. For the time being our mother might have to sew for a living until I grow up”—and suddenly he broke into tears.

  Zari wanted to come down from her bed and embrace her son so that they could cry together, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t even able to open her mouth to say, “Don’t cry, my love.” What had Khanom Hakim’s shots done to her?

  Ameh cursed away. “O Lord,” she said, “why did you create me a wretched, veiled female? If I were a man, I’d show them the meaning of manhood.”

  Zari expected Abol-Ghassem Khan to lose his temper, but he merely complained quietly, “All right. Go ahead and insult me by saying I’m not a man. But what else can one do besides surrender and consent?” After a pause he added, “Well, all right. These are problems for later, anyway. Give me some time to see what I can do.”

  Khosrow turned to Seyyid Mohammad and asked, “Isn’t Singer’s agent that fat man with the pock-marked face?”

  “Yes, that’s him,” Seyyid answered. “After Elias announced him, he came up to the top room of the fortress. First he conveyed Captain Singer’s greetings, then he said, I’ve been told to ask you to be sensible. What’s the use of distributing wheat among the peasants? Peasants don’t think of tomorrow. They go and sell it for several times the price on the black market.’ The master laughed—that was the last time he laughed—and answered, ‘Go and tell Singer that instead of him and his sort getting fatter by the day, let our peasants get a little richer.’ The agent said, ‘Captain Singer thinks your best interest lies in not touching the rest of your provisions.’ The master answered, ‘Since when do I ask Singer about my interests?’ I remember every word of that conversation. The agent then said, ‘Captain Singer says they can break the locks on the storerooms and take the wheat. Not only the wheat, but also the barley, the pulses and dates that they need. They have a written mandate from the Governor too. After all, they’ll be paying you cash. Is that such a bad deal?’ The agent went on, ‘At a stretch they’ll buy the provisions second-hand from the peasants, and they won’t be losing on it either. The government has doubled the exchange rate of the pound.’ Then the agent bent over and whispered some things in the master’s ear which we couldn’t hear. But the master lost his temper and shouted, ‘To hell with all of them! Don’t threaten me with gendarmes either, I’m not afraid of them. If you dare, go and break the storeroom locks with your gendarmes. You have the mandate.’ Then he calmed down and said, ‘At this point in time provisions have nothing more to do with their war. It’s fallen in the hands of their trading company, and the trading company deals in food supplies.’ The agent wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, ‘Sir, I beg of you, don’t be stubborn. Don’t fall out with these people, they’ll harm you.’ Then he asked, ‘Aren’t we from the same town?’ The master replied, ‘Yes, unfortunately we are.’ The agent said, ‘These people aren’t really in need of your provisions, but they’re afraid of the example you’ll be setting.’ The master said, ‘Actually, that’s precisely my intention. In Hamadan people closed their shops and didn’t allow a grain of wheat to leave the city gates. Here they’ve wrecked the Darvazeh Quran gate …’ Again the agent whispered in the master’s ear for two or three minutes. When he’d finished, the master went deep into thought. He seemed upset, but stayed resolute. He just said, ‘Tell Singer I give Sohrab provisions, not weapons.’ I was about to go. I had barely crossed the threshold when I heard a gun fire. I turned around, saw the pipe fall over and the master tip to one side. Blood started to gush. Mohammad Mehdi and Elias ran inside … they gave a hand, but the agent didn’t budge. I yelled at him and told him to get lost.”

  “Maybe it was Singer’s agent who shot him,” said Khosrow.

  “No, that man is such a coward, he would fall over if you said ‘boo’ to him!” Seyyid said. “We moved the master off the cushion. I lifted it. They had dug a hole under it the size of my hand. The master was still conscious. He opened his mouth to talk, but he couldn’t. I brought my head close to his. He said, ‘Kolu … Kolu … take him … to his relatives … Zari … Zari … my children.’” Seyyid paused, then continued, “I sent a messenger to Kavar to tell Malek Rostam, and I sent Kolu along with the messenger before any fools got their hands on him to tear him limb from limb. I took the camel-driver and Mirza Agha Hennasab with me down to the plain and I waited until they loaded the camel with provisions. I got a receipt from the Mirza Agha and came here. Here’s the receipt. I don’t know if I did the right thing. But I know if the master were alive, that’s what he would have done.”

  “What was Mirza Agha Hennasab doing there?” It was Ameh’s voice.

  “He’d come with the camel-driver from Malek Sohrab,” answered Seyyid.

  With an effort, Zari managed to sit up. “I wanted to raise my children on love and non-violence,” she said. “Now I’ll raise them on revenge. I’ll give Khosrow a gun.”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Abol-Ghassem Khan. “What they’ve done is unforgivable. But you can’t wash away blood with more blood. We have to wait and see what happens.”

  Zari lay down again and fell asleep. She began to dream that a strange tree had grown in their garden and Gholam was watering it with blood from a small watering-can
.

  21

  Zari was awake. In her mind, someone seemed to be talking. Saying nonsensical things. Things that Zari knew she had heard or read somewhere. Sentences followed each other, but she was not expecting them. Where had they been suspended in her memory to be appearing now?

  “My, but all our wise men have abandoned this town …”

  “O Dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon … it’s me Eilan-ud-Dowleh, it’s me Veilan-ud-Dowleh … I’m burning, burning, burning. There’s enough fire within me … but because you’re younger, you can’t take it … how this painted dome, the world, reeks of mischief …”

  She squeezed her eyes together to block out the flood of sentences plaguing her, but that only made it worse. Now the painting that one of the mental patients had done in the asylum kept appearing before her eyes. The painting depicted a butcher’s shop. An icon of the Imam Ali and the image of the young butcher with his hand cut off could be perceived against the shop wall. The shop itself was filled with giant hooks as far as the eye could see, but instead of mutton, there were people hanging by their feet from those hooks, and blood was dripping from their throats.

  She opened her eyes. It must have been well after midnight because there was no electricity and they had lit candles. She saw Abol-Ghassem Khan sitting on the carpet, hugging his knees. Ameh was sitting across from him. Khosrow was there too, as well as Malek Rostam. Seyyid Mohammad was standing in the doorway of the basement. The smell of opium, cigarette smoke, alcohol and charcoal mingled in the air. She could hear the steward’s voice in her state of semi-consciousness. He was talking about the funeral and his voice seemed to have gone hoarse as if he had just come down the Mortaz-Ali mountain carrying a jug of wine to go to the grave of the Seven Sufi Saints. Now he opens the tap of the jug and starts to drink. Red drops spill from his thick moustache on to the nameless graves. He puts the jug under the cypress tree and sleeps on a cold slab of stone. When will the jug of wine turn into holy wine? By dawn? By the time the sun rises? “Gone are the days when people could find a purified drink to use for attaining a mystical state of mind like Hafez,” Zari thought in her reverie. “Now they have to swallow gunpowder instead. Gone are the days when they sat humming by a stream and reflected quietly on the passage of time, content just to be with a rosy-cheeked young lover. Now they have to stand next to the dam of life, with its flood charging straight at them, slapping them so hard in the face, they’re left reeling for good. By the way, what was the word for shouting from the guts? There was a good word to describe it … but it had to somehow convey piercing or boring. You see, if a person can’t let out a certain kind of scream when they’re hit with the flood, the thunderbolt, or the thrashing of life, their heart is punctured instead, and then all those people with riddled hearts go for each other’s throats trying to destroy one another until they’re sent off to prison. Or else it goes to their heads, and they lose their minds. Meanwhile, a spoilt, silly, pampered young woman is taking bread and dates to prisoners and lunatics every Thursday. She has a vow to fulfil. But that woman herself is perhaps struggling on the verge of lunacy at this very moment, which is why her mind is ticking so. So fast, she can’t stop herself …” And suddenly Zari was seized with fear. “Am I going mad?” She tried to sit up, but it was as if she had been nailed to the mattress.

  When she lost consciousness, she would dream. Awake, either someone would be talking randomly inside her head, or she would intensely relive bygone incidents drawn out from the recesses of her mind. She no longer distinguished past from present. Sometimes random events materialized before her which she didn’t recollect ever having seen or heard. She strained to keep her eyes and ears open, to assure herself that Ameh and Khosrow and the others really did exist, and she could recognize them and hear them. But her eyes and ears would only stay at her service for a short while, and then sooner or later they would drift away from the present reality again.

  She could hear Ameh’s voice, “How did Ezzat-ud-Dowleh manage to get here with those leg-pains of hers? I suppose she came to satisfy her curiosity and see what’s going on. Her eyes really lit up whenever she looked at Zari. I told myself how happy poor Zari had made her enemy.” And she broke off, crying.

  Then Malek Rostam was saying, “Ezzat-ud-Dowleh asked after my brother Sohrab. At first she said she’d heard he was under siege. ‘Where did you hear that?’ I asked her. She seemed taken aback. ‘Well they’ll get him anyway,’ she said, ‘and then Lord have mercy on poor Bibi Hamdam. Whatever you suffer, it’s at the hand of your children!’ And she burst into tears. Because of her connections with the Governor’s family, I thought she might know something, and I tried to prise out of her where she’d heard that Sohrab was surrounded. But she eluded me and said, ‘When did I say such a thing? I just said his friends gave him away …’ Anyway, she changed her story a hundred times … she said Malek Sohrab was tired, that he had no food or water, that he’s turned himself in. When I was helping her into the cab, she said, ‘I’ve heard Bibi Hamdam has begged the Governor for mercy for her son, and now she’s gone to bring Sohrab on his own feet to be executed!’ I nearly tore off her wig, I was so angry, and wanted to beat her up as much as she could take. But all I said was, ‘Khanom Ezzat-ud-Dowleh, if you have any specific information, please tell me.’ I even made her swear by her darling son Hamid, but she denied knowing anything and pretended it was all rumours. I got into the droshke with her and afterwards rushed to Bibi’s house. No-one would answer the door. What if the major-general’s promise of a pardon was only words and he’ll go back on it … what if—”

  “Forgive me for saying this,” interrupted Abol-Ghassem Khan, ‘but considering the hell Malek Sohrab raised in the battle of Semirom, I doubt if they would give him a pardon. It’s like the story of the husband who said to his wife, ‘I told you to dance, but I didn’t mean you to overdo it!’”

  Yet all Zari could see, clear as day in her half-awake state, was a vision of people coming at dawn to the Baq Takht square, carrying rolled-up rugs on their shoulders. The women were wearing ordinary chadors with face veils, or the large, wide chador with a thin face-cover. The men were crawling on all fours. O Lord, have the townspeople gone stark raving mad? Wasn’t this Shiraz, the town where angels bent down to kiss its very soil? I must remember who it was who wrote a eulogy of Shiraz … Sounded like … Mohammad-ibn-Yusef Saqafi. I memorized the title. Yes, this is the land which will nurture many thousand men of bounty. It’s the seat of the Sufis, the wellspring of our country, the essence of our Imams’ spirituality … oh my, oh my! So where have they gone? Where are these people that are not coming forth now? I’ve heard a hundred times myself that all our wise men have abandoned this land … they asked a sparrow why he didn’t come in winter; he replied, “What good did you do me in summer that I should come again?”

  And now here’s Nana Ferdows. There’s a small rolled-up rug inside the bath bowl she’s carrying on her head. And here’s Ezzat-ud-Dowleh leaning on Ferdows, limping along. Oh dear, look! Ezzat-ud-Dowleh sits down on the rug in front of all those people without her veil, and her gaudy hair is showing. No. It seems as though she’s wearing a wig like a turban. Here’s Hamid Khan, her son. The bastard reaches out and pulls at Ferdows’s breast. He’s pulling very hard. Ferdows gets up to go about her business. Her legs are tapered and shapely in those transparent stockings. Everyone is staring open-mouthed at Ezzat-ud-Dowleh and her son and Ferdows. Then they burst out laughing.

  Where has Ezzat-ud-Dowleh’s husband been all this time and why is he arriving only now? Maybe he’s escaped from the grave. He’s been dead for a long time, you know. Oh look, he’s wearing a cashmere brocade cloak and a brimless hat in this heat. His hat is very, very tight and it’s squeezing his forehead. There’s a perforated hole in the corner of the hat too … Oh I know! He’s back to kill Massoud Khan all over again. He reaches under his brocade cloak and brandishes a long pistol which he aims at Massoud Khan and bang … bang … bang … he d
rags the corpse on the ground and abandons it on the green by Seyyid Abol-Vafa’s shrine. But it seems as if Massoud Khan isn’t dead. He rolls in the grass among the cucumbers and the pumpkins and eggplants. He opens his eyes and stares at all the people who’ve come to watch him. “Water!” he moans. Soon there’s pandemonium in town. Massoud Khan is dead. He died in Haj Agha’s arms in the droshke. There’s no-one to calm down the crowd. They’re about to raid the Jewish quarter. They’re charging into the houses. People are running to the roof-tops and hoisting a British flag to proclaim that they’re under the protection of His Majesty’s British government. What chaos! The men who are on the roof-tops jump down quickly to the ground. Each man is carrying a basin on his head. They put the basins down on the ground. In each basin is a severed head dripping with blood. What a lot of noise they’re making!

  They’ve tied Malek Sohrab’s hands behind his back, but he’s laughing so hard he could fall over. He staggers to the left and right. Children follow him, clapping and chanting, “Bring him here! Bring him here! Give him to the bride!”

  Now they’re erecting a gallows in the middle of the Baq Takht. What a loud hammering! Why didn’t they do all this earlier so Malek Sohrab wouldn’t have to wait? The men’s eyebrows have grown so bushy, they cover their eyes. The men push back their eyebrows so they can see better. The women, sitting on the rugs, are straining to see what’s going on. There’s room for everyone. But they all have a problem with their eyes. How the eyeballs spin around! Maybe their eyes have rolled to the back of their heads! No. The men had their eyes under their eyebrows, didn’t they? But the women are so wrapped up in their veils, you can’t tell where their eyes are.

  They bring Malek Sohrab to the gallows, but instead of putting the noose around his neck, a soldier with a gun on his shoulder comes and ties him to the stake. Malek Sohrab gives the soldier a surprised look and says, “Gently! Not so tight—you’re hurting my foot.” And then he says, “That’s better now.” And he laughs. He laughs so heartily, it echoes all around the Baq Takht. The same soldier tries to blindfold Malek Sohrab with a black handkerchief but Malek Sohrab says, “There’s no need for that! Pull the trigger as quickly as you can. On the temple, between the eyes, in the heart, aim wherever you please. It doesn’t make any difference if you do it sooner or later. I’ll be standing right here. I’ve been waiting here for you for a long time. You can even chop me up with an axe.”