A Persian Requiem Read online

  Our Haj Agha felt the time hadn’t come for his beliefs. So he decided to retire. But he was never one to put up with injustice either. During the fighting between the police-chief and Massoud Khan, almost every household hung up a British flag to show their loyalty to the police-chief and to prevent raids on their homes. My father not only refused to put up the flag, but he even helped, side by side with the chief Rabbi, to carry the Jewish wounded from the poorest quarters to a doctor. He did his best, too, to prevent the armed men from plundering the Jewish quarter, but to no avail. Those men had been well paid.

  They had shot a Jewish mother as she was nursing her baby. The baby was still suckling when she passed out. When Haj Agha arrived on the scene, he quickly tucked the baby under his cloak and rushed straight to Dr Scott, the European doctor at the Missionary Hospital. And who was this Dr Scott? None other than the special physician to the police-chief and his family, who refused to visit those wounded by the police-chief’s cronies. Single-handed, my father had the hospital closed down that day, forcing Dr Scott and several Armenian nurses to visit the wounded mother and other casualties in the Jewish district. The mother recovered. Do you know who she is? Our very own Tavuus Khanom who still comes to see us regularly and brings wine for Yusef.

  I remember Felfelli, a drummer with Musa’s musicians, had been among the wounded. They brought him to our house and stretched him out at the entrance on the doorman’s bench. Blood was gushing out of the wound in his thigh like an open fountain, covering the entire entrance. My father happened to be away and Bibi, my mother, fell sick at the sight of all that blood. I grabbed my veil and ran to Dr Abdollah Khan’s office in the Arab quarter. I didn’t stop for breath until I got there. Between you and me, they hadn’t put up the British flag either.

  Dr Abdollah Khan’s father was the well-known Haj Hakimbashi, who was still alive then. He had four sons, three of them doctors and the youngest a pharmacist. They owned a pharmacy too. God rest their souls. Only Dr Abdollah Khan is still with us. In his office that day you could hardly move for all the wounded and dying. I resorted to tears and pleas before the doctor agreed to come with me. They used to say he was quite a healer, despite his youth. But as fate would have it, Felfelli was already dead by the time we arrived, and he had been covered with a bedspread. His relatives were crowding into our house and raising the roof with their wailing and mourning. Bibi had fainted. And now where do you think our house was? Right opposite Ezzat-ud-Dowleh’s father’s house. Ezzat had just married, and her husband—none other than the police-chief’s son-in-law—had actually moved into her parents’ home. All the trouble had been started by this very son-in-law. Now what if they had heard the din in our house?

  Of course, Ezzat-ud-Dowleh and I had taken an oath to be sisters, but in those troubled times people hardly thought of their real sisters, let alone their sisters by oath. No, it was respect for Haj Agha that prevented them from raiding our house, especially since they were afraid he might decree a holy war. All this happened well before my father became a recluse, you see.

  I’m sure Haj Agha had the kind of power it took to hypnotize people, if he wanted to. He would stare right at the space between your eyes, and who could resist him? Imagine a man like that letting himself be enslaved by an Indian dancer and break our Bibi’s heart! Oh Lord, don’t put us to the test! Bibi knew what was going on, but she never said a word. It’s all over with now, but she never even confided in me, her own daughter. Haj Agha and Soudabeh were the talk of the town, but my mother, the only one that mattered, remained silent.

  At least my father had the decency not to bring Soudabeh and Mohammad Hossein into the house until all the family had moved away. I was married first, then Abol-Ghassem Khan found a wife. Finally Bibi went off to Karbala. My husband was a textile merchant who traded with Egypt and India. He and his father imported a delicate fabric known as ‘miyur’. It was even finer and more beautiful than silk, and quite often used for underwear or babies’ clothes. Nowadays you can’t find it anywhere. But my husband was an unhappy man and he committed suicide. One day, at sunset, he dashed himself on horseback against the pillars of the British Consulate building. Because of our son, and because of an unjust society that made life unbearable for him. You see, Haj Agha could retire when he felt the time wasn’t right for his ideas. But my poor husband was still a young man. Just like Yusef, God forbid. Yusef is ahead of his time, too. That poor soul used to say, like Yusef, that we had to change the times. But he was just beating his head against a stone wall—as he literally did in the end. Let’s face it, these are times for double-dealers like my brother Abol-Ghassem Khan. When will it be time for people like Yusef, I wonder?

  I’ll never forget, after my husband and child died, Yusef wrote me a letter telling me to stand on my own two feet. He said if I fell, no-one in the world would bother to help lift me up. One could only rely on oneself, he said.

  Thank God Bibi was not around to see my unhappiness. When she made up her mind to leave, she invited the entire family to dinner. That night she kept staring at us as if to engrave our faces on her memory. Only Yusef wasn’t there because he had been sent abroad for two years to finish his education. Actually, when Abol-Ghassem Khan complains that our father never spent any money on his education, he isn’t telling the truth. Haj Agha wanted to send both of them away together and Abol-Ghassem Khan turned it down of his own free will. He asked my father to give him what his education would have cost in land, and that’s what Haj Agha did.

  Anyhow, Bibi bid us farewell that evening, supposedly to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Hazrate Massoumeh in Qom, and from there to Mashad. She said she would be away for a month or two. But unbeknownst to us, she had arranged to have herself smuggled over the Iraqi border to Karbala. All she had in the way of worldly possessions was some money Haj Agha had given her, and some women’s trinkets, a suitcase and her ewer. Her emerald earrings she left in my care, in case something should happen to her on the journey. I was to keep them for Yusef to give to his wife on their wedding night.

  A month later a letter arrived from her telling us not to worry, that she was in Karbala where she planned to stay permanently as part of a religious vow she had taken. Only much later did we discover—and please don’t let this be known—that she had ended up being a maidservant there—to a Khanom Fakhr-ol-Sharia. All the time she was in Karbala, Bibi never asked for money, nor did my Haj Agha offer to … no, perhaps three or four times on our insistence he did send her some in one way or another. Whether she received it or not, I never found out. She wouldn’t write, you see. In that first letter she stipulated that we were not to write to her, since she wanted no distractions from her religious calling.

  But I’ve been digressing. I was talking about that dreadful night, wasn’t I? Yes, I was sitting right here by this brazier, prodding the ashes with my tongs. There wasn’t much of a fire left. I was counting my sorrows in the dark, with Soudabeh sitting next to me the whole night. What a woman she was! A pity she broke our mother’s heart.

  That night I asked Soudabeh, “I never understood why you, with a thousand admirers, should have chosen my father, driving my mother out of her own home?” She said she couldn’t help it; she knew she had ruined the reputation of a Shi’ite clergyman of the highest order, and made an innocent woman homeless. But it was out of her hands, she claimed. “Sometimes, in a previous life,” she said, “you’ve lost a person you’ve been very close to. Once that has happened, you keep coming back to this world to find him. You bear the waiting, the separation. But when you finally find the person again, how can you possibly let go of them? It’s like two intertwining plants at first, where one withers and dies, then in a later life they happen to be two migrating birds, who return once again as two loving deer—and perhaps one is shot by a hunter—and so on. They could be father and daughter, sister and brother … who knows? And when they find each other at last, they can no longer be separated.” She often used to say things like that. Sh
e would say these things and yet she never agreed to marry our father. She just stayed with him until they grew old.

  After my husband’s untimely death, I decided, as Yusef had advised me, to stand on my own feet and run the estate I had received from Haj Agha as my wedding gift. I’d straddle my horse in my breeches, cover the poppy fields from one end to the other on horseback. How old do you think I was then? Twenty-eight. I even used the bastinado on my peasants, God forgive my sins! Bibi had been gone then for about three years. The poor woman was only forty-four when she died. One day, Fakhr-ol-Sharia telegraphed my father to say Bibi was ill. To his credit, Haj Agha made every effort to get exit permits. He cabled Yusef to go to his mother at once, but decided not to say she was on the point of death. Which is why Yusef only arrived after we had buried Bibi in the shrine tomb. Abol-Ghassem Khan had gone to great lengths, paying quite a bit out of his own pocket, to get permission for the body to be placed in the shrine, even though we knew the moment our backs were turned they would take the corpse out to a public graveyard. Still, even one night in such a holy place was quite a blessing, and Bibi’s wish had been fulfilled.

  O merciful Lord, what a tragedy it was! My Bibi in the throes of death in a room two feet square, on a torn straw-mat covered by a ragged quilt … she cried out from the heat, but there was no cool basement, no iced water for her. Fakhr-ol-Sharia would call on her for service, for a hookah, for this or that without the least consideration or respect. Oh Lord, no Khanom, no title! My mother’s name was Fassih-ol-Zaman, meaning ‘eloquent one’. An eloquence which never uttered a word of what had happened to her! Even the story of her becoming a housemaid was told us by Fakhr-ol-Sharia herself, who talked about Bibi as though she came from a long line of devoted servants. I’ve never said a word of this to anyone. Not even Yusef. There was no point. He was only twenty years old, he couldn’t have taken it. Is he ready to bear it now, at forty? I doubt it.

  We never did find out how Bibi got herself to Karbala. We merely heard that when she arrived, she fell into the clutches of a certain Sheikh Abbas Qomi who used to disguise himself as an Arab and frighten illegal pilgrims by threatening to denounce them to the authorities unless they bribed him. When he confronted my mother, she was so panicked she dropped her suitcase, grabbed her ewer and ran away! As it happened, her birth certificate was in the suitcase. With the hundred tomans Haj Agha had given her, she managed to obtain a dead person’s birth certificate from a worker at the mortuary.

  Khadijeh came out to the verandah to ask: “Aren’t you having any dinner tonight?”

  “We’ll call you when we’re ready,” Zari answered.

  “No, that’s enough for now,” Ameh intervened. “I’ve talked too much and I’ve given you a headache. Let Khadijeh bring us a bite to eat, then we can go to sleep and see what tomorrow will bring.”

  7

  Early next morning, Zari instructed Gholam to tell anyone coming from the Governor for anything that Khanom was not at home, and that nothing could be given away in her absence. If the person still insisted and mentioned a horse, Gholam was to feign ignorance and say they had come to the wrong house—they used to have a horse, but it died. At a pinch, he was to give them the chestnut horse.

  It was watering-day for the garden, and Zari went outdoors to watch the trees and the grass thirstily drink in the water, sharing their refreshment and feeling revived herself by breathing in the smell of moist earth. Gholam and the gardener, shovels against their shoulders, trouser-legs rolled up, crossed the garden barefoot from one end to the other, opening or closing the flow of water in the narrow irrigation canals. Mina and Marjan wanted to stay around, but kept getting in the way. Finally Zari had to coax them into building a mudhouse under the big elm near the stables. She told them they could plant flowers in it, and have a wedding for their dolls. But she warned them that if they didn’t stay in the shade, the sun would scorch their lovely soft skin.

  Mina started to draw a plan for the house, making room for a little pool, a cupboard, and a cold furnace. Marjan completed the plan by adding the stables. Then, with a lot of squealing and fuss they caught a toad which they put in the stables, but it soon leapt away. Still, there were plenty more in the garden.

  Gholam directed the flow of water towards the elm trees, and before long the children’s mudhouse was flooded. Water ran into pools around their feet, and they squatted down in it. Zari called them away, all the while listening for a knock at the door so she could hide in time from the Governor’s messenger. Mina shouted at Gholam for having ruined their mudhouse:

  “You meanie!”

  “It was just a flood, sweetheart,” was his reply.

  All that day and the next there was no messenger from the Governor, and Zari felt reassured, thinking that they must have changed their minds. Even Ameh commented, “Thank God! So much needless worrying. They must have just mentioned something in passing, and Abol-Ghassem Khan made them a promise to curry favour, as usual.”

  But early in the morning on the third day, Zari had just got out of bed when there was a knock at the door. Gholam went to answer while Zari kept watch from her hiding-place. She saw a gendarme greet Gholam and embrace him, handing him an envelope. Gholam brought the envelope to Zari.

  “It looks as though you know him,” she said.

  “Yes, he’s from my village,” he replied. “From Bardeh. He always wanted to become a gendarme, and now he has.”

  Zari went to the verandah and waited until Ameh Khanom had ended her prayers before opening the envelope. Then she read out loud the neat handwriting addressed to herself:

  My dear Madam,

  If I were not certain of Shirazi hospitality and of the generosity of your respected family, I would never make the following request of you. Recently, my daughter Gilan Taj was so badly afflicted with typhus that the doctors had given up hope. But God’s mercy was with us, and my child has recovered. My daughter enjoys horse riding, and despite carefully searching this town, we have not been able to find a horse gentle enough for her use. I assure you the general sent us two of the best horses from the army stables, but they were large, headstrong animals not suited for a child who has just left the sick-bed. Our honoured friend, Abol-Ghassem Khan has promised to send us your son’s colt. I hear he is away on a trip. I humbly beg you to loan us the young horse belonging to your respected son for a few days by means of this messenger. The moment Gilan Taj tires of horses and horse riding, we shall return it.

  Yours sincerely

  Since the signature of the Governor’s wife differed from the rest of the handwriting, Zari decided the letter must have been written by someone else.

  “Now what am I to do?” Zari turned to Ameh.

  “They’ve taken us by surprise,” she replied. “We can’t give the colt away, and yet we can’t refuse either. If we give them the colt I know Yusef and Khosrow will be up in arms. If we don’t, well, you remember Abol-Ghassem’s outburst the other day? There will be endless quarrelling. If he isn’t made a deputy one of these days he’ll blame it on us and our pettiness.”

  “And now that they’ve stated their request clearly,” Zari added, “I can’t even send them the chestnut. What should I do?”

  “Just sit in a corner and think, I suppose,” said Ameh with a sigh.

  They asked the messenger to come in and sit on a chair by the pool. Khadijeh brought him some breakfast which she placed on another chair. The gendarme took off his hat and put it on his knee. Zari watched him empty the sugar-lumps from the bowl into his pocket and gulp down his unsweetened tea on top of huge mouthfuis of food. Gholam was sitting opposite him on the edge of the pool.

  “Are you the guard at the entrance to the Governor’s estate?” Zari asked him.

  “Hmph!” grunted the man with his mouth full, and then he quickly swallowed his food.

  “Do you have a wife and children?”

  Grinning widely, he answered in a thick accent: “I wed me cousin last New Year’s.”

>   “When will you return the horse?”

  “The lieutenant gave me a mission,” he said. “His honour said I’m a good lad. But he didn’t say anything about bringing the horse back.” And again he grinned from ear to ear.

  “But it’s not mating season yet, brother,” Gholam intervened.

  The gendarme dug a hand into his tunic pocket and produced an envelope which he presented to Zari, saying: “Agha Mirza, the governor’s secretary, gave me this. He said it’s eighty tomans.”

  Zari took the envelope, opened it and began to count. It really was eighty tomans. She whispered to Ameh: “They imagine they’ve paid for it, too.”

  “Let him take Sahar away for now until we think of something,” said Ameh.

  “Gholam, go and bring Sahar out of the stables,” Zari ordered.

  “Khanom, I swear what they’re doing is wrong,” Gholam protested. “Mating season is over now. Besides Sahar is too young …”

  “They don’t want him for mating,” Zari explained wearily, “the Governor’s daughter has taken a fancy to Sahar …”

  Gholam took off his felt hat. His bald head was flushed and sweaty. He said, “Khosrow Khan has left Sahar in my care. Now you ask me to give him away to someone else? Never!”

  “Gholam, can’t you see they’ve sent a gendarme?” Ameh said.

  “What makes you think this poor fellow’s a gendarme?” said Gholam. “He’s just a simple, honest lad.” Turning to the gendarme, he continued, “Listen brother, go and tell your master that the horse was dead. Khanom here will give you your tip.”