My Father's Notebook (18 page)

“If we don’t take her to the hospital,” my father signed, “she’ll die.”

I didn’t answer.

“She smiled yesterday,” he went on. “I made her some soup on the stove. She held my hand. But when I brought a spoonful of soup to her lips, she suddenly fell asleep. You’ve got to take her to a hospital.”

“I can’t,” I signed back.

He panicked. “She’s going to die. I can tell. My mother felt hot, then all of a sudden she turned cold. She was dead. You’ve got to take Jamileh to a doctor.”

It was the first time I’d ever seen him so upset.

“My first wife, too. She was also hot, very hot, then suddenly cold.”

“Take it easy. Calm down,” I gestured.

But he didn’t. “You’ve got to drive her to the hospital,
now
!”

I stood there helplessly.

Suddenly my father had an idea. “Let’s take her to our house,” he signed.

“What?”

“I’ll carry her home. Then I’ll go and get a doctor.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t explain.”

“Talk to Tina,” he signed.

“Tina?”

“Yes, why not?”

I was going to have to share my secret with Tina. All the doors were closed, and Tina’s was the only one I could knock on.

“OK,” I signed. “Go and get Tina.”

I didn’t know how Tina would react, but I was sure the news would make her gasp. She had done her best to shield my sisters from my political activities. She wanted her daughters to find good husbands, leave home without a hitch, have children, buy a house and live happily ever after. And here I was, knocking on her door with the legendary Jamileh.

Tina realised instantly that this was an emergency. I hadn’t seen her in more than a year, so I thought she’d start by moaning, “Where have you been, son, why haven’t you come to see us?” But she didn’t. I thought she’d hug me and exclaim, “My, how you’ve changed!” But she didn’t. She bustled into the dusky lean-to and shot me a quick glance. At first she didn’t recognise me. Then she saw Jamileh, stretched out on the ground. I briefly explained what was going on. She grasped the situation immediately.

She was silent for a moment. Then another side of her came to the fore. Not the weak Tina, but the Tina described by Kazem Khan, the woman who cleared the snow from the roof and refused to let him in. To my great surprise, she knelt calmly beside Jamileh, took her hand and felt her stomach. Then she picked up a candle and peered more closely at her abdomen.

“I’m taking her back to the house. Then I’ll go for a doctor.”

“Tina,” I said, “she escaped from prison.”

“But she needs a doctor.”

“You’re right, but if the police … Oh, I see. Nobody knows who she is. You can simply—”

“I’m going to take her home and say that she’s my niece, on a visit from Saffron Village.”

Tina had found a simple solution to a difficult problem: Jamileh was sick, so Jamileh had to be examined by a doctor.

She wrapped her in a chador. “Carry her over your shoulder,” she signed to my father.

I helped him lift her.

“Let’s go!” gestured Tina.

She kissed my forehead. “Don’t look so sad. It’ll be all right!”

I stood and watched until they vanished into the darkness. There was nothing more I could do.

Jamileh stayed in my parents’ house for a month. For thirty-four days, to be exact. On the last night, Tina escorted her to the big mosque in the centre of town, where a taxi was waiting beneath an old tree to whisk her away.

Tina had taken good care of her. In her autobiography, Jamileh described the month she spent with my family as a wonderful and safe period in her life. To protect people, she didn’t use real names in her book, except for Tina’s. “Though there are many I would like to thank by name, the safety of those individuals depends on my discretion. Even so, one
person deserves my undying thanks: the courageous Aunt Tina.”

Jamileh had stolen Tina’s heart and left behind a wealth of unforgettable memories. Tina couldn’t stop talking about Jamileh, who was unlike any woman she’d ever known. Tina had taken good care of her and cooked delicious meals, so Jamileh had even put on a little weight.

“Jamileh sang and skipped around the garden,” Tina told me later. “At first it seemed a bit out of character, but actually it wasn’t. Sometimes she’d ask me questions …”

“What kind of questions?”

“About that country, that island. Quub or Qube, or something like that.”

“You mean Cuba?”

“Yes, that’s it. Jamileh asked me if I knew where Cuba was. I’d never heard of it. She told me about the lives of the people there. She said that they were healthy and that medicine was free, along with milk for children and old people’s homes—all free. She told me that women had lots of rights. For example, if a woman didn’t want her husband, she could kick him out of the house. She said that most of the bus drivers were women and that they even drove great big trucks. She was always talking about that man, what’s his name? The one with a cigar in his mouth and a rifle over his shoulder.”

“Castro?”

“Not him, the other one, the man with the beret.”

“You mean Che Guevara?”

“That’s the one. She told me about his adventures. How he fought and barely escaped with his life. And sometimes she told me jokes about the shah. You know, how even his soap was made of gold, and how he went to the bathroom with a clothespin over his nose rather than admit that he was making that awful smell. Oh, we had such good times when she was with us. She also got along well with your father.

“He showed her his old pictures, the ones of him and Reza Shah standing by the rock with his pick-axe on his shoulder. And he told her his stories of the cuneiform relief and the time the villagers cleared a path through the mountains for the train.

“Even though she didn’t understand our sign language, she listened patiently to your father. Sometimes she tried to answer in sign language, but she never really got the hang of it and we roared with laughter.”

Tina could go on and on about Jamileh. There was no end to her reminiscences.

After the clerics came to power, however, she saw Jamileh’s stay in a different light. She believed that it had destroyed the lives of her daughters.

Regardless of Tina’s opinion, one thing was sure: Golden Bell thought of Jamileh as her role model. For thirty-four nights, she had shared a room with Jamileh. Her visit was a turning point in Golden Bell’s life.

Before the revolution, Tina had the usual expectations. She dreamed that two normal, decent men would come and ask for her daughters’ hands in marriage. She didn’t include Golden Bell in her daydream, since she had no control over her youngest daughter anyway.

Tina had always longed for the quiet life she’d never had. She dreamed of becoming a grandmother, of holding her grandchildren on her lap and telling them stories. Then Jamileh shattered her dreams.

The two men Tina had been waiting for appeared. When they asked for her daughters’ hands in marriage, however, her daughters refused to marry such ordinary men. They longed for another kind of man. Tina wept.

“What do you
want
? Who on earth are you waiting for? A
Castro? A Che Guevara? A man with a cigar and a beret? God help me, I don’t deserve this.”

Only after the revolution did the men her daughters were waiting for finally appear. They were hardly Castro or Che Guevara, though they did have Che Guevara posters above their beds. And while they didn’t smoke (cigars were too expensive anyway), they did stick an occasional cigarette in the corner of their mouths and talk about the revolution.

Tina’s two oldest daughters didn’t go to jail, but their husbands were arrested and imprisoned by the secret police of the new regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran. When they were finally released a few years later, they were broken, both physically and mentally. It was years before they could function normally again.

The revolution had begun. The masses had risen up against the shah. But it came from a totally unexpected direction.

One night, when I was in my father’s shop, he said, “The man who reads is gone!”

“Who?”

“The holy man who sits in the sacred well and reads.”

“Gone? What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

Perhaps I should refresh your memory. The Shiites have been waiting nearly fourteen centuries for the Mahdi, the messiah figure who would relieve the world of its suffering and meanwhile waited in a well, reading books.

Reza Shah had covered up the well. He wanted to strike a blow for modernisation and, at the same time, curb the power of spiritual leaders.

But the mullahs refused to be suppressed. They stepped up their fiery resistance to the Pahlavi kingdom.

My father was more interested in the Mahdi’s kingdom.

“Someone smashed the stone that used to cover the well,” my father signed. “The sacred well is now open. The holy man is gone.”

The well was located in a place of strategic importance: a military zone. Obviously, the fact that some religious fanatic had broken it open was not a coincidence. Something important was going on. The mullahs were declaring war on the shah.

“Do you know who smashed the stone?”

“Allah,” he signed, pointing at the sky. “The Holy One himself. He wants to fix things. I’ve seen His footprints.”

“What did you see?”

“I was in Saffron Village. I climbed up the mountain with the villagers and saw, with my own eyes, the imprint of his bare feet in the rocks.”

“Footprints in stone?”

“Yes, you could see that he’d stepped out of the well and gone into the countryside. The villagers knelt and kissed his footprints. I kissed one of them, too. It smelled heavenly.”

The holy man was free. One day the Mahdi, and not the leftist movement, would conquer the cities and overthrow the dictator. He had come to help the poor, lift up the weak, heal the sick and comfort the mothers who had lost their sons and daughters.

“People cried,” my father continued, “and people laughed. They put the Holy Book on their heads, gathered at the foot of the mountain and turned to face Mecca. Then they split into groups and followed the footprints.”

“Where did the footprints go?”

“To the city with the big, golden-domed mosque. To the city where the women all wear black chadors, the one where so many imams live.”

He meant Qom.

So the Messiah had gone to Qom—the Vatican of the Shiites. I immediately drove back to Tehran.

In the days when the holy city of Qom was in an uproar and believers flocked to it from every corner of the land, Tehran was undergoing a revolution of its own. Parties that had been suppressed for decades were springing back to life and letting their voices be heard. Everywhere you looked you saw flyers and posters, which had been distributed during the night and pasted on the walls.

The political prisoners, realising that the revolution had begun, went on a mass hunger strike.

In Qom, the situation had spun out of control. As soon as it got dark, the laws of the shah could no longer be enforced, only those of the mullahs. No policeman dared show himself at night. In other cities, as well, people began to speak out.

Saffron Village had its own story. From all over the country, the blind, the deaf and the lame were on their way to Saffron Mountain, so they could touch their foreheads to the Mahdi’s footprints and beg to be healed.

Because the sacred well was inaccessible, the local imam had ordered that a makeshift shrine be built at the foot of Saffron Mountain. The sick, the deaf, the lame, the mute, the blind and the otherwise afflicted tied one end of a long rope to the bars of the shrine and the other end around themselves, and lay down twenty or thirty yards away. They fasted and swore not to break their fast until the Mahdi came and relieved them of their burdens.

It was unbelievably crowded. The deaf lay side by side and wept, the blind sat in another cluster and begged, the sick groaned incessantly and the retarded roamed in and out of the wailing masses.

The voice of the imam of Saffron Village blared over a loudspeaker, urging believers to pray to the Mahdi and beseech him, from the bottom of their hearts, to come quickly to their aid.

Golden Bell and I were hunting among the deaf-mutes for my father. We didn’t know for sure whether he’d gone to Saffron Mountain. Golden Bell had phoned to tell me that he’d suddenly disappeared and our search had brought us to the crowd of pilgrims.

“I see him! He’s over there!” Golden Bell exclaimed.

My father was lying on the ground with his eyes closed. Around his right ankle was a long rope, tied to the shrine like hundreds of others.

He had lost weight and let his beard grow, which made him look older. I sat down beside him and took hold of his wrist. He opened his eyes, surprised to see me.

“What are you doing here?” he gestured weakly.

“What are
you
doing here?”

For an entire week he had fasted and had drunk almost nothing. His lips were cracked and blistered. The imam came by, placed a wet, fragrant-smelling handkerchief on his forehead and murmured, “The Mahdi will soon come and bless you, my poor man!”

And then he moved on to the next one.

“Come on!” I said to my father. “We’re going home!” I offered him my hand so he could pull himself up.

He refused to take it.

“Listen,” I said, “you could die of thirst. Golden Bell, help me lift him up. I’m going to have to carry him.”

He didn’t want me to. He’d never resisted me like this.

“I’ve read him so many books,” I said to Golden Bell. “About the universe, the earth, the moon, mankind. And now he’s lying here like an illiterate peasant, like a deaf-and-dumb old man. He won’t even look at me.”

Golden Bell stroked his forehead, wet his lips with a damp cloth and shook him gently. “Come, Father. Let’s go home. It pains me to see you so weak. Please open your eyes.”

He opened his eyes.

“Tina’s been crying,” she signed. “Come home for a few days. You can always come back here again if you want to. Come, it’ll be better this way.”

He stopped resisting.

“Take his shoes,” I said to her. Then I carefully lifted him up and carried him to the car, which was parked a mile or so away.

I laid him on the back seat and drove to Senejan. Ever since the revolution had begun, I’d been visiting my family from time to time, so now I drove him home myself.

Tina promptly made him some soup, moaning all the while, “Oh, the misery I’ve suffered because of that man. What did he think the Mahdi was going to do? Teach him
how to talk? I hardly have any peace and quiet as it is. God help me if he starts to talk.”

“That’s enough, Mother,” Golden Bell protested. “You shouldn’t talk about Father like that.”

“Why not? What am I supposed to say when my husband comes home half-dead?”

“Stop it, Mother, or I’ll—”

“Or else you’ll what? You aren’t exactly an angel, either. I can be just as hard on you, if I have to. You’re ruining my life. Now that your brother’s here, I want to make a few things clear. Ishmael, I’ve lost control over your sister.”

“Mother,” Golden Bell replied, “why are you suddenly different now that Ishmael’s here?”

“I’m no different from usual. But I need to say something to him before he rushes off again. Ever since that Jamileh came to stay with us, Golden Bell has been—”

“What’s Jamileh got to do with it?” sputtered Golden Bell.

“—growing away from me. There, now I’ve said what I had to say.”

I felt like an outsider. I wanted to take Tina in my arms and say, “You’re right, but now you can stop being so scared. The years of hardship are over. I’ll be coming home more often. Everything’s going to be fine.”

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I realised that my heart had hardened.

“Tina,” I said, “let me give Father his soup. We’ll talk later.”

I spooned some soup into my father’s mouth, while Golden Bell wiped his chin with a handkerchief.

“Are you going crazy, Father?” I asked. “Why on earth did you tie yourself to that shrine?”

He said nothing, just smiled.

I slept at home that night for the first time in years. It felt strange. As if I were a stranger. My other two sisters were
still at home; they weren’t married yet. They had always thought of me as more of a father than a brother, which is why they didn’t come sit by me as readily as Golden Bell did. If we’d had time, that would have changed, but we never got the time.

My father’s grey beard made me realise that the revolution was taking him away from me.

The next day I talked to him and tried to explain that the Mahdi didn’t actually exist. I should have saved my breath.

My father told me that, after his first wife died, he saw the holy man in the well with his own eyes. And the day before yesterday he’d seen a miraculous cure. “A blind man went to bed and when he woke up in the morning, he could see. The holy man had come and cured him in his sleep.”

My father no longer wanted to be an illiterate deaf-mute. He wanted to learn how to read.

“OK, I’ll teach you how to read,” I said. “If you can wait a year, or half a year, I’ll come back home and teach you myself. I promise.”

But my words no longer had any effect. He was completely bewitched by the footprints in the rocks.

A few days later my father grabbed a cane and went out again to look for the holy Mahdi.