Love on the Road 2015 (13 page)

Kaveh Mirzaee was a miniature artist from
Ā
b
ā
d
ā
n – that small island city between two rivers that flow into the Persian Gulf. The people of
Ā
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ā
d
ā
n love their city; it is a garden of palm trees edged with old wooden boats rocking in the surrounding waters. In
Ā
b
ā
d
ā
n, one can smell the sea in the breeze and in the bounty of
hammour
and shrimp in the open fish markets. But Kaveh Mirzaee now lived away from
Ā
b
ā
d
ā
n on the top floor of his building and kept to himself.

Being from
Ā
b
ā
d
ā
n was not information he volunteered easily for he had seen the garden that was
Ā
b
ā
d
ā
n torched and its oil refinery flaming red and black into the open skies of the gulf. Besides, the jokes that were made about people from
Ā
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ā
d
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n – with their Ray-Ban sunglasses, cowboy boots, obsession with soccer,
bandari
music, and a sweet tooth entirely devoted to doughnuts – was something he wished to avoid, even in jest. This, plus a host of other reasons, was behind his refusal to take part in an Eid progressive dinner with his neighbours.

Of course, it was absolutely true that, in his younger,
motor-biking years, he had been in possession of a second-hand pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a pair of black, lace-up Western boots that had matched his Kurdish riding pants. And that he had long harboured a dream of donning the yellow-and-blue uniform of Sanat Naft FC and celebrating match victories in a
bandari
den. Then the First Persian Gulf War had begun with the September Siege of
Ā
b
ā
d
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n in 1980 and had dragged on for eight years. Nothing had remained the same after that war – it had ravaged the nation like leprosy ravages the body and leaves indelible marks.

This is how he had found himself living on a war-vet allowance in a government-subsidised studio miles away from
Ā
b
ā
d
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n. His home was on a tree-lined street that meandered its way up to the Tochal look-out point in Tehran. The street had narrow
qanats
on either side, in which water ran down from the surrounding mountains, irrigating sycamore trees that towered as high as the buildings before branching out in a green profusion that arched over the street below. Traffic peaked in the early morning and evening hours, but it was ten o’clock now, and the traffic had eased out considerably, leaving the street to a group of construction workers, who were completing an old apartment block close by.

Such grand incompleteness this was: gray stone and concrete under scaffolding that had been weathered by Tehran’s alternating harsh winters and summers into something of an old frock. ‘Everything in the world,’ the building seemed to say to Kaveh Mirzaee, ‘is as incomplete as I am in this old frock that beats in the wind like a Qashqaee nomad’s tent in the mountains. I wait out the winters like the nomads with their horses and cattle and sheep do in the valleys and then
hide away from the summer’s high sun up in the mountains, seeking whatever grasses remain on the mountain slopes and harvested wheat fields. Look around you and you will see other incomplete buildings in this lull, Kaveh Mirzaee – even incomplete people, for that matter, with incomplete lives and incomplete hearts and incomplete memories. Should not the construction workers be set on this inherent incompleteness?’

The construction workers were mainly young Afghan men who laboured in Tehran at the onset of spring and wintered back home – ever on the road from one place to another. Kaveh Mirzaee was seated at his desk, painting, the adjacent window open to let in some fresh air, and could hear these seasonal Afghans steeped in their work.

During the Siege of
Ā
b
ā
d
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n, he had been taken prisoner and held till the end of the war in a
shabestan
in Ramadi, Iraq. The silence of the underground colonnaded brick
shabestan
, which was all arches and domes, was only broken by the howls of frequent gusts of wind that buffeted the tower above and the slow, shuffling steps of the old man who brought him food each day. It was for this reason that Kaveh Mirzaee was a man attuned to sounds and smells. The noise that the Afghans were making in the street below did not disturb him at all. He listened to them hammer and drill and lift and drop and call out to each other in all their youthful zest, while that old frock of a scaffolding beat in the wind and baked in the sun. In the midst of it all, he also heard pigeons cooing in the sycamore trees close to his window.

Sometimes he left little pieces of bread on the windowsill and he would watch the birds wheel down and peck at them. When skies were red over Tehran, blighted by fierce
sandstorms blowing in from the deserts of Iraq, the pigeons not only pecked at the bread, but sometimes ventured in as well. They did so because they did not fear Kaveh Mirzaee – he had the stillness of the brick
shabestan
he had lived in for eight years within him; this stillness ran through his soul like the crescent dune fields of Rig-e Jenn in the Great Salt Desert, where not even the ancient caravan roads had ever crossed and nothing but wild spirits and onagers lived.

It was there in the way he moved. While neighbours hurriedly barred their windows and doors as the sandstorms blew in, Kaveh Mirzaee did so slowly, letting the pigeons in until the last minute. Then he would sit back with the pigeons about him and listen to the sand-laden storm toppling potted plants and garden statues from the balconies of his neighbourhood. There was nothing one could really do when it came to the storms and even less when it came to the fine sand they carried. It always found its way through all the barred doors and windows, seeping in through the finest of cracks. Later, one would find specks of sand on silk prayer rugs, under the fridge, in a barley sack, amongst rice cookies stored in a closed tin box in the larder, and in the pockets of winter coats stashed in the farthest corners of wardrobes. Kaveh Mirzaee moved quietly, hardly fretting, in the midst and aftermath of all this. Yes, so it was there in the way he moved and in the way he spoke – on the rare occasions that he did speak.

Because Kaveh Mirzaee had not yet stepped out to buy some bread this morning, there were no pigeons hovering at his window to be fed. He had hit his stride in his work and did not want to interrupt it with a walk to the bakery. He, instead, brewed some imported black Kenyan tea,
which he usually purchased in small packets from the building’s corner shop, and sweetened it with brown crystallised sugar.

He had been working for three straight hours when hunger set in. So he decided to take a shower and then head out to the bakery. Taking a shower was a ritual for Kaveh Mirzaee. When he had been unchained from the
shabestan
to be handed over to the Red Crescent for repatriation, his keepers, an elderly Iraqi Kurdish couple whose Ramadi country home and services had been requisitioned by the Iraqi army, had prepared a bath for him in a thick olive tree grove. He had cleansed himself under broken sunlight with rose-scented water and goat-milk soap, in a shelter of Ba’shiqa olive trees.

The elderly Kurdish couple had two sons: one had emigrated to Palestine, while the other had fallen in battle fighting for Iraqi troops. Kaveh Mirzaee had dressed with an assortment of these sons’ clothes and left, a free man, in the Red Crescent van. From Ramadi, he had carried with him the stillness of the
shabestan
and everything that the old Kurdish man had taught him about miniature art. In memory of this day of freedom, Kaveh Mirzaee had decorated his Tehran bathroom with an olive-tree tile mosaic and used nothing but goat-milk soap for his skin, which had grown too sensitive for anything else.

These were the recurring memories occupying his mind when he stepped out of the bathroom, his trim black hair – shot through with silver – still wet, his pale skin moist, and the scent of goat-milk soap in the now humidified air. His bare feet had just touched the yellow Azarshahr travertine tile floor outside the bathroom when he noticed a sudden
movement, only to realise that he had narrowly missed stepping on what looked like a snake.

He quickly stepped back into the bathroom, his equilibrium rattled. From behind the bathroom’s glass door, he now saw that it was, indeed, a snake – a black snake with white marks around its nape. For a moment, he wondered how the snake had gotten into his studio. Then he realised the window facing his work desk was wide open. The snake must have gotten in through there by perhaps crossing from the overhanging sycamore tree branches to the open window’s metallic frame. He could still hear the young Afghan men working and the pigeons cooing, but they would not be of help.

Eventually, the snake moved, sliding and slithering across the travertine tiles, towards his work desk, under his antique wooden chair, and, finally, onto the small, Kork wool rug underneath which it coiled. It took a long while to do this, and Kaveh Mirzaee patiently watched it as his hair and his skin dried out and the humidity in the studio dissipated and the young Afghans and the pigeons outside carried on as before.

When he felt safe enough, he opened the bathroom’s glass door and hurried across the studio to his bed, where he had laid out his clothes. He got dressed much faster than usual, his eyes never leaving the snake. It seemed content, even peaceful, on that oval rug from Qom, which was patterned with white lotus flowers and green silk highlights. Kaveh Mirzaee put his sandals on – again, much faster than usual – and left his apartment without turning the key in the door. He had no clear plan for how to deal with the snake.

At a corner, on the way to the elevator, he bumped full speed into a woman. She was holding a brown grocery bag against her black
manteau
. The force of the impact made her drop the bag; spilling out, as if from a magician’s hat, came a cascade of ripe tomatoes, eggplants, onions, potatoes and green herbs, and a huge packet of shredded Mozzarella cheese – menu ingredients, no doubt, for the Eid progressive dinner. The tomatoes, as ruby as Jupiter, radiated out across the floor like billiard balls, and Kaveh Mirzaee, momentarily embarrassed and clumsy, stepped on one and then the next.

‘Madame,’ he cried, ‘I’m so sorry!’ He squashed another tomato under his leather sandals, kicked at an eggplant like he was a marionette out of control, and was nearly undone by the hardness of a potato momentarily under one foot. ‘Madame …’

She adjusted the matching chiffon
hijab
on her head and then assessed the damage done to her groceries – several of her tomatoes splayed out like starfish on the white linoleum floor, and Kaveh Mirzaee trying his best to get the rest of her groceries back into the bag.

‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the bag from him. ‘You shouldn’t worry …’

He looked at her face then and saw that it was as brown as the seeds of a Persian walnut. Her forehead was round and her lips were full and she carried the scent of
oud
about her.

‘I will pay for this,’ he said, dropping his gaze onto the wet redness on the floor, while feeling about for his wallet and not finding it.

‘You are a war hero,’ she said. ‘You have already paid.’

He looked up at her, startled.

‘Everybody in the building knows this, Kaveh Mirzaee, even those of us who are merely passing through.’

‘I should pay, nonetheless,’ he said, making his way back to his apartment for his wallet.

At the door, he, however, remembered the snake, momentarily forgotten amongst the red tomatoes and the woman with a brown face the colour of Persian walnut seeds. She is beautiful, Kaveh Mirzaee thought to himself, one hand on the doorknob.

She was watching him.

He stood there and did not open the door.

‘They took away your family and everything that was dear to you in
Ā
b
ā
d
ā
n. And yet you live, like a true
pahlevan
,’ she said. ‘The wind is in you, Kaveh Mirzaee – you shouldn’t pay.’

‘Oh … the wind … it must be coming from my window. I left it open.’

‘I am from Lashar,’ she said, ‘and we hear the winds of Lashar just like my ancestors heard the winds of Africa. The wind I hear is
inside
of you.’

Kaveh Mirzaee looked into her eyes. They were deep in colour like dates from Bam and soft like only dates from Bam are.

‘There is a snake in my apartment,’ he said, when he could find his voice.

‘A snake,’ she said, with a growing smile. ‘What colour is it?’

‘Black … and white.’

‘Open the door and let me see,’ she said.

Kaveh Mirzaee opened the door and pointed to his work desk. The snake was still there, coiled on the oval rug.

She came to the open door and followed his gaze.

‘It is a rat snake,’ she said. ‘You see them in the mountains … sometimes they find their way into people’s houses and gardens. They are not poisonous.’

‘They are not?’

‘No, they aren’t,’ she said, putting down the grocery bag. ‘They are like me – just passing through.’

She walked into his apartment like she was part of it. The snake on the rug did not move, and the hungry pigeons hovering on the windowsill did not flutter away. She knelt on the travertine floor and picked up the snake by its head without any hesitation whatsoever. It coiled around her arm like it was coiling around an old familiar tree branch, and stayed there – peaceful.

‘See,’ she said. ‘It means no harm.’

There was nothing he could say.

She looked around his home and then at the samples of complete work on his desk: an old Sufi mystic, an antique silver teapot, a red lotus flower, the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, and a rendering of Vis and Rāmin in their love epic. Then she looked at the piles of camel-bone tiles with nothing on them, a drying palette of mixed water paints, liquid mother-of-pearl glowing in bottle and his array of tiny brushes made from the finest cat hair. She even turned the pages of his sketchbook, given to him by the old Kurdish man in Ramadi.