A Persian Requiem

  Oh no, the ropes have turned into such snakes! Thank goodness Haj Mohammad Reza the dyer has arrived. He’s wrapped some felt around his hand, takes the snakes’ heads one by one, and thrashes them to the ground.

  And here comes Bibi Hamdam in her wide breeches. She shouldn’t have come. Why should anyone come to the hanging of her own son? Maybe Malek Sohrab’s first wife is being avenged this way. Weren’t Sohrab and his wife madly in love? Yes, they were. But Bibi Hamdam wouldn’t stop talking about infertility and childlessness. Wait! The Quran reciters are here too. There’s no need to count them. They’ll arrange their voices in unison and chant the Al-Rahman verse … Malek Sohrab’s poor wife used to say, “Bibi Hamdam, if you wouldn’t plague us about having children every minute, we wouldn’t worry about it ourselves and ruin our happy life together.” And she’d told the story of another barren woman. What a night that had been! They were in the village and Zari was pregnant with the twins. Her pregnancy had reminded Bibi Hamdam of her desire for grandchildren. None of them could sleep a wink. It was so hot. Zari’s hands and feet felt as if they were on fire. If she tried going outside the mosquito net, mosquitoes would attack her … She was parched with thirst. Further away, Malek Sohrab and his first wife were sleeping under their mosquito net. Bibi Hamdam had stayed indoors. There was a lot of noise; first the chanting of religious mourners, then the barking of dogs, next the tinkling of sheep-bells as the sheep stirred in their sleep, even the sound of crows quarrelling about whether the sun was coming up or not … and all Zari could think of was the story Malek Sohrab’s wife had told:

  “A woman who desperately wanted children went to a dervish. He told her to fast for forty days and on the fortieth day to go up on the mountain and wash her body under a waterfall. But there was one condition. She was not to think of monkeys. She was allowed to think of all sorts of things, but not monkeys. Five times the woman went up the mountain and stood under the waterfall, each time after forty days of fasting. Yet she could not rid herself of the thought of monkeys. Each time the one thing that crossed her mind was the image of a huge, hairy monkey. Finally she went back to the dervish and said, ‘Your remedy didn’t work. If you hadn’t mentioned monkeys, I would never have thought of them in a hundred years. But now that you have …’”

  And here’s Captain Singer with his short, pleated tartan kilt which he has embroidered all along the edge himself! He sits behind the Singer sewing-machine and sews away … But this is no time for sewing! How fast he treadles the machine! His eyes run from one end of the fabric to the other. He does a zig-zag stitch. No, it’s lattice-work. The material is as full of holes as a sieve. Now he’s standing up to make a speech.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “Give alms! We have brought you civilization as a gift.” His eyes fall on Zari, and he says with a smile, “When madam gives you hand, you kiss madam’s hand.”

  People are clapping, but not for Singer. They’re clapping for the little cherubs who are coming down sun-beam ladders with sacks full of stars. The cherubs come amongst the people and give each person his own star. Zari receives hers too. The cherub tells her, “Now it’s up to you. Our heavenly Master is weary. Very, very weary.” But Zari loses her star. Now she’s searching everywhere, rummaging in every cupboard, and throwing out all the rubbish from the attic. She hunts in every trunk in the store-room, but nowhere can she find her star. She is wandering in the garden. She looks on top of the brick walls and under the trees. She asks Khadijeh, “Have you seen my star?”

  A tearful voice says, “Now that you haven’t found any saffron, make some halva from chalk instead.” It’s Ameh.

  A doleful voice sighs, “You can make halva with chalk, but you can’t eat it.” This time it’s Malek Rostam.

  And again Ameh’s voice which sounds stronger, “Khadijeh, make some yellow-rose halva for my young flower who died … alas! alas! The tears dry up, but the sorrows remain.”

  The door slammed and someone entered. Zari opened her eyes. Seyyid Mohammad said, “They answered the telephone. His Holiness the head of the Sufi dervishes said we could have the memorial service in the House of Ali. The Imam’s house is open to everyone.”

  “Fancy being parliamentary deputy of this town and not being able to hold your own brother’s funeral in the Vakil Mosque! Ah! well, write it down, Khosrow … what date is the day after tomorrow?” Abol-Ghassem Khan had been speaking.

  “The thirty-first of Mordad.” It was Khosrow’s voice.

  “Write down, ‘On the occasion of the tragic passing away of our dearly beloved young …’”

  “Passing away?” interrupted Ameh’s voice. “Put down, ‘martyrdom’!”

  “Sister, I’d be grateful if you’d let us do what we have to do. I persuaded him with a great deal of difficulty to print the announcement, but the man set down a thousand conditions … one of his conditions …”

  “I think you should write martyrdom too,” said Malek Rostam.

  What a foul odour there was in the air! If only a passer-by would throw out the charcoal brazier. If only he would ask, “What’s wrong with your patient here; why is he lying like a corpse, like a dead body, on the bed? Let me take him to the garden underneath that grafted fruit-tree. Outside, the sky is full of stars.”

  Zari’s heart would race away and palpitate, then race away again. She would close her eyes and see a truck on fire, burning away. An officer comes and stretches out on top of a dead soldier in a trench.

  And again Ameh’s voice, “It’s cat-shit. They’ve left the top of the coal-bin open and the cat’s dirtied inside it. Khadijeh, come and take away the brazier. I don’t want it, after all.” Then she went on, “Have all the rooms been cleaned? Did they drain the pool? Did Gholam sweep the garden?”

  And now Zari sees a little girl with braided hair tied up in ribbons, standing by the herbalist’s store on top of the Moshir Hill. She needs seven ingredients to make black shoe-polish, by order of her physics teacher. Actually, that shoe-polish will never turn out properly; she’ll make a gel like black frog-spawn and no-one knows whose fault it is—the girl’s, the physics teacher’s, or the herbalist’s? The herbalist has gone to the back of the shop to look for the seven ingredients. It’s late afternoon and the girl is in a hurry to get back to school to make shoe-polish during the fourth lesson. Suddenly a man on horse-back approaches her. The rider is Prince Charming himself; he looks so handsome and erect on his horse. He has green eyes … they shine like emeralds in the sun. And now as he stands in the shade, they look moss-green.

  “Do you know how to get to the Sang-e Siah, my dear?” he asks. The girl panics. There is no-one around that afternoon. Still she ventures, “Do you want to go to the Sibavayh grave?”

  “No, my dear. I want to go to the house of Sufis, the Khan-i Qah.”

  “Are you a dervish, then? You want to go to the House of Ali?”

  The rider laughs and his white teeth glisten. “No, I’m not a dervish,” he replies. “My steward is a dervish. He’s ill and he’s staying at the Khan-i Qah. I’m going to visit him.”

  “Well then, go straight ahead. Then turn right. After that, turn left, and another left … But you can’t go on horseback. The little back-alleys are full of bumps and stones.”

  Now that she’s given him directions, why isn’t the rider going away? Why is he looking her up and down? Yes, I understand. He’s wondering why she, of all women, should be without a veil.

  “I must explain,” she thinks to herself, “or he’ll think I’m Armenian.”

  “My father was Mirza Ali Akbar Khan Kafar,” she says out loud; “he stated in his will that I should never wear a veil.”

  The rider takes off his hat. It’s a strange-looking one with a brim, but it’s not the new pahlavi hat. He bows to the girl and says, “I never asked why you’re not wearing a veil.”

  And he leaves.

  But what will? As if there had been anything to bequeath! That very afternoon, with the shoe-polish gel st
ill on her hands, there is news of unrest in town. The English headmistress lines up all the girls and tells them to put their face-veils in their satchels and that heavier veils would be brought for them from home. But unlike other times she doesn’t nag and say, “This country doesn’t deserve to be civilized.” Her glance falls on the girl with braided hair and ribbons, and she asks, “Zari, do you know how to wear a chador?”

  Whether or not she knows how to wear a veil is irrelevant, because there’s no-one at home to bring one to her. Khanom Hakim has been cutting up her mother’s breast at the Missionary Hospital, and that’s where they’re keeping her for the time being. Who knows how long it will take for her to get better? Her brother’s away doing his military service and he won’t be back for a long time. Their old maid-servant is too feeble-minded to find out what is going on in town and to bring her a veil. Well, everybody is leaving the school now. Nazar Ali Beg the Indian janitor agrees to fetch a chador and face-veil for her after all the other pupils have left. But it would take so long for everyone to leave.

  Servants arrive to take the girls home, bringing them the veils which they put on before leaving. But there she is still, all by herself. Now she is alone with Nazar Ali Beg and it’s getting dark. She’s afraid. Nazar Ali Beg has a long moustache which droops lower on one side. His face, too, is slightly crooked. He explains that ruffians have poured into the streets and alleys, tearing away at women’s face-coverings or men’s brimmed hats, and that eventually they’ll get to the school too, and break all the windows. She’s afraid of Nazar Ali Beg because he keeps saying in his funny Persian, “Khanom, good Khanom!” But at the same time, she doesn’t want him to go fetch her a chador, leaving her all alone in that vast school-building.

  Suddenly she has an idea. She decides to call the house of the head dervish and ask Mehri to send her a chador. She’s glad she’s had such a good idea. She prays the rider she saw that afternoon is still at the dervishes’ house. She telephones and then sits by the pool and daydreams. She dreams that she’s riding with Prince Charming on his horse; they’re galloping towards Baba Kouhi, the mountain dervish, and she’s singing for him:

  “The lips of the Turkoman maiden should not have been created so perfectly …”

  They’re knocking at the school-door. Yes, it’s him. The girl smiles when she sees him. But this time he’s on foot and hatless, and is carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper. He holds out the parcel and says, “Here, put it on. I’ll take you home.”

  “Sahib, good Sahib!” says Nazar Ali Beg.

  The girl doesn’t know how to keep the veil on properly, and it keeps slipping off.

  “Do you have a safety-pin?” the man asks Nazar Ali Beg. Nazar Ali reaches behind his coat collar and produces an ordinary pin.

  The girl walks off with the man, though she can’t really see where she’s going and nearly trips.

  “Why did they bother you …?” she manages to ask.

  “There wasn’t anyone else. The dervishes had disappeared into their little cubicles. Mehri Khanom, the niece of the head of the dervishes, asked me to deliver this chador to you on my way. She said your name is Khanom Zahra. My name is Yusef.”

  The headmistress of the English School had taught them, on being, introduced, to extend a hand, smile and say, “How do you do!” But how could she? Both her hands were taken up—one with her chador, the other with her books. The man continues, “I knew your father. I used to study English with him, until I went abroad. He was a great man, in his own right. He inspired noble ambitions in his students.”

  The girl remains silent. “Mehri Khanom has been telling me that your mother enjoys going under the surgeon’s knife,” the man says. “She enjoys having part of her flesh cut off and thrown away. Apparently every day she finds an excuse to go to the Missionary Hospital—one day it’s a bruise on her big toe, another day it’s a lump in her breast …”

  “You mean to say Mehri doesn’t think my mother has cancer and she’s wasting her time with all this surgery? I hope to God that’s true.”

  The girl is looking at the man’s shoes. She stops abruptly and says, “Your right shoe-lace is undone.”

  The man bends over and ties his shoe-lace. How quickly she’s become familiar with the stranger! It’s as if she’s known him for years. And what does the man think now? That she’s the kind of girl who comes away with him easily and even confides in him! Thank God she’s wearing a veil and face-cover, and no-one will recognize her. Thank goodness there isn’t a soul in the Jewish quarter. What if the man thinks she planned all this to catch him? Well, in fact she had. Mehri had realized this too and tried to help her.

  “Mehri’s face is as lovely as a flower, isn’t it?” she asks. The man smiles and says, “I didn’t see her face. She was wearing a veil.”

  “We were classmates up until the sixth grade. Every day we’d gather round the stove and she would teach us the Quran and religious law. Then she would tell us the stories she’d read in the Thousand and One Nights. She has a good voice too. She sang us Masnavi poems … the one that goes, ‘I sight the King in any guise …’ I’ve forgotten the first part.”

  “I want an eye to sight a King

  To sight the King in any guise.”

  The girl has to make an effort to control herself. She’s about to say, “I sight you!”

  That was really why she quoted the verse in the first place.

  “Has anyone ever told you your voice is as soft as velvet?”

  The girl doesn’t make a sound.

  “You were talking about Mehri Khanom …” says the man.

  “Anyway, she left school to get married … I don’t know why her husband divorced her after a year. The husband died soon after. They say her uncle, the head of the Sufi dervishes, had cursed him …’

  “Do they stuff your head with these superstitions at the English School?”

  The girl is hurt and stays silent.

  “What class are you in?” asks the man again.

  “Eighth grade in Persian and ninth in English,” answers the girl, still hurt.

  There is no-one in the back-alleys. No-one has lit the street-lamps. The girl wants to lift her face-cover but she doesn’t dare. It’s a good thing she knows her way home by heart and is familiar with all the bumps and ditches. She could walk home with her eyes shut.

  “Mehri Khanom talked about you all the time,” says the man. “She said you once dealt your headmistress a severe blow by reciting the poem about Samson’s blindness in front of the Oriental Missionary Council …”

  “The poem just happened to come to my mind. I didn’t mean to be cheeky or anything.”

  “You’re modest, too!”

  Now they’ve reached the bazaar and they’re both quiet. In the bazaar they have lit a few oil lamps which they’ve placed on stools in front of the shops. But all the shops are closed. There are seven or eight policemen roaming around. There’s quite a din but it’s coming from the sword-makers’ section. In the main bazaar itself, a few people are going on their way.

  “They’ve blamed it on them again!” mutters the man. The girl doesn’t understand what he means. Or maybe she didn’t hear correctly.

  They reach the vaulted passageway which is darker than anywhere else. The man takes the girl’s arm, and the girl flushes. Her whole body seems to be flushed, in a way she has never experienced before … Now they reach the girl’s house. She politely invites him to come in and have a drink, but she’s praying he won’t accept. He doesn’t come in.

  “I remember you had a winter-sweet bush in your house in those days,” says the man.

  “We still do.”

  “They’re hard to grow, but when they take well, they flower every year … and what long-lasting, fragrant flowers!”

  She both wants him to go and yet she doesn’t. She asks him out of the blue, “Have you done your military service?”

  “I’m going this autumn.”

  “It takes two years, doesn’
t it?”

  “Try to grow up as soon as you can.”

  And again Zari doesn’t understand his meaning. Later when she tells her mother the story, her mother agrees that God had sent the stranger to save her girl … and then … three years later, when that same man comes to ask for her hand …

  What pandemonium in the garden! She had been having good dreams. Obviously she must be getting better if her nightmares and delirium have left her in peace. Someone was roaring in the garden: “Ya Hu, Ya Haq, Ya Ali.” It was Seyyid Mohammad’s voice.

  “Khadijeh, what happened to the lemon juice?” Gholam asked.

  Zari thought he must be drunk. “Take him to the Seven Saints,” she said out loud.

  Ameh came towards her. “Did he wake you up?”

  Zari opened her eyes. Only Ameh was left in the basement with her. “They’ll wake the children with their noise. They’ll frighten them,” Zari said.

  “Don’t worry. Mehri is keeping the children tonight; she’ll keep them tomorrow too. I sent Khosrow up to bed on the roof after a thousand pleas.”

  The noise in the garden abated for an instant. From somewhere, the monotonous chanting of the Quran could be heard like a hum. Someone was retching. Retching. Someone else was cursing out loud and saying, “You’re sitting up there watching, are you? Why don’t you step down here for a second, taste your own broth which you’ve been giving our folks … I spit on the bloody—”

  Someone started to sing: