Serial Monogamy (21 page)

“Does the story end there?”

“Well, the Prince had several more adventures before he takes the form of a man again, but I find I am growing tired. So, there you are. Don't ever get stuck living in a cave with an old genie.”

“Or trust a young prince to save you.”

“That too. But the genie does rather have the upper hand over the Prince, being magical and all.”

“I suppose so.”

“I don't think the baboon part was in the story I used to tell you?”

“No. It was a different story altogether.”

“S
o, the storyteller can't help himself.” Jonathan sounds unch­aracte­risti­cally thoughtful over the phone the Thursday morning after I email him this latest instalment. “And finally he tells her the truth.”

“Yes. I guess that's right. Or acknowledges reality. Which is a way of saying sorry, I suppose. Anyway, one more to go. Your big death-bed scene.”

“Oh, ignore what I said. I was just joking. Finish it however you want. I trust you.”

“Thanks.”

The phone rings again a few hours later. It's Frank.

“I love it,” he says. He's read the latest bit in
The Telegram
's computer system, over Jonathan's shoulder, so to speak. “Did they tell you how we are doing?”

“They don't tell me much at all. Last I heard, we'd hit seven thousand copies. Seven thousand extra, that is.”

“I heard nine thousand last weekend. Stanek must be kissing your feet.”

“I haven't heard from Stanek, but Jonathan seems a lot more relaxed.”

“Oh yeah, he would be. You are selling newsprint, Sharon, reams and reams of it.”

“That's good, I guess.”

“Sure is. I don't know if I told you this; I probably didn't want to spook you when you were just starting. The publisher took a flyer on newsprint; he got a great price two years ago on a ten-year contract.” There was a moment's silence as he let this sink in.

“Ten years' worth of newsprint? He thinks print will last till 2020?”

“That's what he bet.”

I laugh. Here I am worrying away about Dickens and
The Thousand and One Nights
, and apparently after all that I am just greasing a cog in the fish-wrap industry.

The next morning, I look over anxiously at Al and Saturday's thick stack of newsprint sitting on the kitchen table. Once he's finished reading, he begins with academic nitpicking.

“I think Nelly's objection to Rosa Bud is anachronistic. Victorian literature was filled with pure docile heroines of that kind; she wouldn't have seen her as unusual.”

“Maybe not. But my Nelly wants a heroine with agency.”

“A princess who will run up the stairs.”

“Yes.”

“But in the end neither Catherine nor Nelly resisted.”

“No, they didn't.”

He looks down at the paper in front of him. “ ‘The Second Dervish's Tale' is a pretty ugly story to tell the woman you love.”

“Yes.”

“You're really enjoying this, aren't you?”

There's a pause between us. I summon up my courage and ask, “Did I go too far?”

“No,” he replies. “I think it's the best one yet.”

I
f I have a vivid memory of Tehran, an almost physical recollection that proves I lived there once, then that memory is of the sound of the fountain in my grandparents' garden.

They lived in a house on a small street in North Tehran with a view of the Alborz Mountains if you craned your neck out the bathroom window. The main windows of the house all looked southwards toward the growing city. A few streets from greater homes and larger gardens, it was a modest but magic dwelling, two rooms downstairs, two rooms up, a charmed place that my father was expected to inherit and would have, if things had turned out differently. Meanwhile, we lived a bit farther south in generous accommodations in a recently built block of flats. We had well-proportioned rooms and a balcony where my mother nurtured various flowering shrubs in plastic pots, watering them profusely during the dry summer months and bringing them indoors to clutter up the living room during the winter.

But my grandparents, they had a real garden, a little courtyard with enough sun that my grandfather could grow jasmine and cherry trees, planted in china urns and arrayed on either side of the blue-tiled fountain. Our school holidays at Nowruz, the Persian New Year that falls in late March, were celebrated with new clothes, spring cleaning and bonfires in the streets, but what we anticipated the most was the turning on of the fountain. My cousins, my sister and I would be invited over for tea or lemonade and cakes, maybe even ice cream if my grandmother were to indulge us, and my grandfather, with much huffing and puffing, would oil the valves and check the washers. After all his deliberations, he would finally say, “I believe we are ready,” and the youngest, or the one who was about to graduate high school, or the one who had broken his leg skiing that winter, the special one deserving of a treat, would be invited to turn the spigot that would start the flow of water for the first time since the autumn before. We would listen, we children: could we hear the water in the line? We would wait and wait. Sometimes, there was a problem, a complication that would send my grandfather back to the source, turning taps, fretting a bit, scratching his head and then, always, miraculously, just as we were beginning to fidget and poke one another, water would issue forth. At first it complained, groaned a bit, then gurgled and finally gushed, bursting forth into the still cool air of spring. After that first effort, it would settle down and run along happily with the soft tinkling that formed a
perpetual backdrop to any spring afternoon, any summer evening, the continual dancing of water on tile that played a theme song to my childhood.

The Old Persian term for a walled garden,
pairidaeza
, is the source of the word
paradise
. And indeed, we lived in some kind of heavenly state in those days. My grandfather was a rug merchant with a small but profitable export business down in the bazaar. When not engaged in sales or tending his garden, he composed verses in the Persian tradition that he read out loud to my grandmother, whether she wanted to hear them or not. Such was his success in business, his only son, my father, could aspire to make scholarship not merely a hobby but a profession: my father was engaged in a lengthy research project tracing the Persian threads in the Arabic tapestry of
The Thousand and One Nights
and taught literature at the University of Tehran. Continuing a family tradition, he read to my sister and me from the classic texts and prodded us about our homework, insisting we read not only Farsi and Arabic but also English and French. My mother, on the other hand, expressed no opinion about school other than to remind us we had to arrive there on time. A quiet soul who deferred to my father in all things, she kept the apartment, watered the shrubs and made the kebabs. I woke to her soft voice each morning; it was her sweet smile that greeted me every day when I came home from school and her quick kiss that sent me off to sleep. If she had some other ambition, some larger
interest than to care for my father, my sister and me, it would be many years and other continents before it even occurred to me to consider what that might have been.

In this happy, balanced world, I was the neighbourhood marble king. Having beaten all the local boys many times over, winning off them their agate and alabaster spheres, their tiger's eyes and their biggies, I had amassed a collection to rival the treasury of a shah. I carried it—or at least the part of it not so precious that I couldn't take it into the street and risk it in play—in a cloth bag my mother had sewn for me, with a braided cord for a drawstring at the top. I took it everywhere with me, even to church on Fridays, despite my father's stern if unenforced prohibition and my mother's gentle pleading. Even if I could not play marbles on those days, merely the sight of that bag was enough, if I passed a schoolmate or neighbour on the street, to remind him of my prowess. Back at home, I would take them out and spread them on the floor, counting, categorizing and admiring. On weekdays on the way home from school, I would prowl the streets looking for a game, although increasingly the other boys refused to play with me since they knew they would lose theirs to mine. I didn't care; my position was secure and some days, to prove my magnanimity, I offered to play free games for the mere fun of it, without penalties for the loser and loot for the winner.

I still have my marbles tucked away somewhere; it has been years since I have taken them out and admired
them. In truth, I find them almost unbelievable, a tangible link to the intangible, a physical thing whose incredible existence is somehow more painful, more troubling than the faint memory of the sound of water in the garden on a summer evening.

Because this was a perfect world and we, its inhabitants, lived in it without sorrow, fear or deprivation, of course, I thought it rather dull and was convinced that somewhere else was better. The place I thought was better, the place I longed for, was England, or at least what I thought was England. I had an image of it, misty but persistent, in my mind's eye. It was London under snow, at Christmas, with a goose and plum pudding on the table and a tree in the parlour; it was a country road and a coach inn where the landlord might stir up some hot punch; it was Tiny Tim on his father's shoulders, Oliver Twist in the orphanage and Mr. Micawber fully certain that something would turn up.

I believe my introduction to Dickens was
A Christmas Carol
. Our Christmases in Tehran were small and private things; we were a handful of Eastern-rite Christians in a Muslim world, and we kept our beliefs and our practices to ourselves. Our celebration was merely a midnight mass in an ancient stone church and a supper afterwards during which the exhausted children inevitably fell asleep once they had opened the small gift or two provided by my parents or my grandparents. One year, in the midst of this personal, almost secret holiday, someone, I think
perhaps it was one of my aunts, gave my sister and me a battered copy of
A Christmas Carol
, saying if my father was so insistent on us learning English, here was a lovely book we could read. In those days of the Shah, the Americans were our good friends and it was fashionable to study English. So, I did read it, haltingly, uncomprehendingly in places but gradually piecing together its fabulous story with my limited skills.

And from there I was launched. I was ten or eleven, and I read all the early Dickens:
The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist
and
The Old Curiosity Shop
. As the hot, dusty summer of the plain swirled around us, I dreamt of cozy pubs, ramshackle antique shops, gabled houses and cobblestone streets. I thought I saw in my grandmother's chador-wrapped cleaning lady the decency of the Marchioness or in the sleepiness of a heavy-breathing classmate the narcolepsy of the Fat Boy. I dreamt I was Oliver himself and imagined my outraged protests against the injustice of the orphanage, the exploitation of Fagin and barbarism of Billy Sikes. By the time the revolution arrived, I was reading
David Copperfield
.

At first, my father welcomed the revolution almost gleefully. Indeed, it was all my mother could do to stop him from running downtown to join the students in the streets. It was hypocritical perhaps, or maybe just foolish, since we profited from the relative economic security the Shah had delivered and we supported the Westernization of Iran, but my family members were all quietly opposed
to the regime. Whatever the Shah had achieved, he was a dictator kept in power through intimidation and violence, aggrandizing and enriching himself at the expense of his people. The thuggery practised by his security forces, the personality cult surrounding his reign and the unearned wealth accumulated by the royal circle sat badly with my literate, middle-class family. For my father, justice was now being served; the people were finally getting their say. For him, it was a time of heady optimism. For me, on the other hand, it was a time of uncertainty and dawning fear: during the days, my parents would argue about whether or not my father should go in to the university; at night, my sleep was disturbed by the eerie calls of “Allahu Akbar” that resonated from the rooftops across Tehran as citizens denounced secularism in spontaneous, invisible protests the security forces were powerless to find and stop.

When the Shah first fled, my father was jubilant: finally we might get a government that did something for the poor. I think my grandfather was more aware of what lay ahead; with his headquarters down in the bazaar, he knew the gossip, saw how the bazaari, who had once backed the regime, had swung their power behind the ascendant clerics. As Christians, we were a minority among minorities; we were not even Armenian, like most of our Christian neighbours, but part of a yet smaller group of Orthodox Persians. We were largely invisible but also expendable. We needed to keep our heads down. My father, however, was not to be dissuaded from
attending the ongoing protests and also, most dangerously as it turned out, from making classroom speeches about freedom and passionate assertions that it did not matter whether his female students covered their heads. He did not last long in the new Islamic state: it was only a matter of months, as the new government took control of the university, before he was hauled before a committee of colleagues he had once considered friends and summarily fired. He sat at home, unable to understand how a country he loved could not make room for his kind of patriotism, how a people he so trusted could choose a new kind of tyranny. My grandfather, seeking a solution for him, decided he needed to expand his export business to Canada. He worked his contacts at the bazaar, convinced the right people it was best if my father left and got papers for the four of us. In 1980, nine months after the revolution had swept the Shah from power, we boarded a plane with as many rugs as we could possibly fit in our bursting suitcases and left Iran for good.

I remember, arriving in Montreal, that we marvelled at the broad streets and the huge North American cars, my sister and I ate hot dogs and watched TV, and all those things that today are so familiar and banal were novel and exhilarating then. How quickly the beauty of Persia was lost to us, and as a young man I did not seem to regret it at all.

But now, sometimes, I think differently. On winter nights in Toronto, I will sit cuddling with my daughters
around a wood fire, kissing the tops of their little heads and marvelling for the thousandth time at the blond hair they both inherited from their mother. How did I produce such creatures? My eyes will stray to the floor, admiring the reds and blues in the thick pile of the Persian rug that my forgiving father gave us as a present at my second wedding, and for a moment I will think I hear a fountain playing softly somewhere not far away.