My Father's Notebook Read online

  Contents

  BOOK I:

  The Cave

  BOOK II:

  New Ground

  BOOK III:

  The Cave

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  BOOK I

  The Cave

  And so it went until the men of Kahaf finally sought refuge in the cave. “Grant us Thy mercy,” they said.

  In that cave We covered their ears and their eyes for years.

  And when the sun came up, the men saw it rise to the right of the cave. And when the sun went down, the men saw it set to the left, while they were in the space in between.

  They thought they were awake, but they were asleep.

  And We turned them to the right and to the left.

  Some said, “There were three of them, and a fourth watched over them.”

  Others, hazarding a guess, said, “There were five of them, and a sixth watched over them.”

  And there were those who said, “There were seven of them.” No one knew.

  We woke them, so that they might question one another.

  One of them spoke: “We have been here for a day or part of a day.” Another said: “Allah alone knows how long we have been here. It would be best to send one of us to the city with this silver coin. We must be careful. If they find out who we are, they will stone us.”

  Jemiliga then left the cave with the silver coin in the palm of his hand.

  When he reached the city, he saw that everything had changed and that he did not understand the language.

  They had slept in the cave for three hundred years and did not even know it. And some say there were nine more.

  This was God’s word, God’s story. And “The Cave” was one of the stories in the Holy Book in Aga Akbar’s house.

  We have started with His word before trying to decipher Aga Akbar’s secret notebook.

  There are two of us, Ishmael and I. I’m the omniscient narrator. Ishmael is the son of Aga Akbar, who was a deaf-mute.

  Even though I’m omniscient, I can’t read Aga Akbar’s notes, so I’m going to tell the story up to Ishmael’s birth, then leave the rest to him. But I’ll come back again at the end, because Ishmael can’t decipher the last part of his father’s notebook.

  The Cave

  From Amsterdam it takes a good five hours to fly to Tehran. Then you have to travel another four and a half hours by train to see the magical mountains of the city of Senejan loom up, like an age-old secret, before your eyes.

  Senejan itself is not beautiful and has no history to speak of.

  In the autumn an icy wind whips through the streets, and the snowy mountaintops form a never-changing backdrop.

  Senejan has no special foods or products. And since the Shirpala River has dried up, the children play in the riverbed to their hearts’ content. The mothers keep a watchful eye on them throughout the day to make sure no strangers lure them into the hollows.

  The city’s only poet of significance—long since dead—once wrote a poem about Senejan. It’s about the wind that carries the sand in from the desert and deposits it on the inhabitants’ heads:

  Oh wind, oh wind, alas there’s sand in my eyes,

  Oh my heart, oh my heart, half-filled with sand.

  Alas, there’s a tiny grain of sand on her lip.

  Sand in my eyes, and oh God, her rosy lips.

  The rest of the poem goes on in much the same vein.

  The rest of the poem goes on in much the same vein.

  Whenever a poetry reading was held in one of the buildings in the old bazaar, it was bound to be attended by old men rhyming about the mountains. Their favourite topic was an ancient cuneiform relief that dated back to the time of the Sassanids.

  An Anthony Quinn movie about Muhammad was once shown in Senejan. It was quite an event. Thousands of country bumpkins who didn’t know what a movie theatre was rode their mules through the mountains to stare in wonder at Muhammad, Messenger of God.

  Hundreds of mules were tethered in the marketplace. The authorities were beside themselves. For three months the doors of the movie theatre were open night and day, while the mules ate hay from the municipal troughs.

  Although Senejan didn’t figure prominently in the nation’s history, the surrounding villages did. They brought forth men who made history. One of these was a great poet, Qa’em Maqam Farahani, whose poetry everyone knows by heart:

  Khoda-ya, rast guyand fetna az to-ast

  wali az tars na-tavanam chegidan

  lab-o dandan-e torkan-e Khata-ra

  beh een khubi na bayad afaridan.

  Though I would never dare to say it aloud, God,

  The truth is that You are a mischief-maker,

  Or You would not have made the lips and teeth

  Of the Khata women as beautiful as they are.

  The girls born in these villages make the most beautiful Persian carpets. Magic carpets you can fly on. Really fly on. This is where the famous magic carpets come from.

  Aga Akbar was not born in Senejan, but in one of these villages. In Jirya. A village covered with almond blossoms in the spring and with almonds in the fall.

  Aga Akbar was born a deaf-mute. The family, especially his mother, communicated with him in a simple sign language. A language that consisted of about a hundred signs. A language that worked best at home, with the family, though the neighbors also understood it to some extent. But the power of that language manifested itself most in the communication between Mother and Aga, and later between Aga and Ishmael.

  Aga Akbar knew nothing of the world at large, though he did understand simple concepts. He knew that the sun shone and made him feel warm, but he didn’t know, for example, that the sun was a ball of fire. Nor did he realise that without the sun there would be no life. Or that the sun would one day go out forever, like a lamp that had run out of oil.

  He didn’t understand why the moon was small, then gradually got bigger. He knew nothing about gravity, had never heard of Archimedes. He had no way of knowing that the Persian language consists of thirty-two letters: alef, beh, peh, teh, seh, jeem, cheh, heh, kheh, daal, zaal, reh, zeh, zheh, seen, sheen, sad, zad, taa, zaa, eyn, gheyn, faa, qaf, kaf, gaf, lam, meen, noon, vaav, haa, and ye. The peh as in perestow (swallow), the kheh as in khorma (date), the taa as in talebi (melon), and the eyn as in eshq (love).

  His world was the world of his past, of things that had happened to him, of things he had learned, of his memories.

  Weeks, months, and years were a mystery to him. When, for example, had he first seen that strange object in the sky? Time meant nothing to him.

  • • •

  Aga Akbar’s village was remote. Very little went on in Jirya. There wasn’t a trace of the modern world: no bicycles, no sewing machines.

  One day, when Aga Akbar was a little boy, he was standing in a grassy meadow helping his brother, who was a shepherd, tend a flock of sheep. Suddenly their dog leapt onto a rock and stared upwards.

  It was the first time a plane had flown over the village. It may, in fact, have been the very first plane to fly over Persian airspace.

  Later those silver objects appeared above the village often. The children then raced up to the roofs and chanted in unison:

  Hey, odd-looking iron bird,

  come sit in our almond tree

  and perch in our village square.

  “What are they chanting?” young Aga Akbar asked his mother.

  “They’re asking the iron bird to come sit in the tree.”

  “But it can’t.”

  “Yes, they know that, but they’re imagining it can.”

  “What does ‘imagining’ mean?”

  “Just thinking. In their minds they see the iron bir
d sitting in the tree.”

  Aga Akbar knew that when his mother couldn’t explain something, he should stop asking questions and simply accept it.

  One day, when he was six or seven, his mother hid behind a tree and pointed to a man on a horse—a nobleman with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

  “That’s your father.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes. He’s your father.”

  “Then why doesn’t he come home?”

  Using their simple sign language, she placed a crown on her head, stuck out her chest, and said, “He’s an aristocrat, a man of noble birth. A scholar. He has many books and a quill pen. He writes.”

  Aga Akbar’s mother, Hajar, had been a servant in the nobleman’s palace, where he lived with his wife and eleven children. He could see that Hajar was different, however, so he took her to his house on Lalehzar Mountain, where he kept his books and worked in his study.

  She was the one who tidied the study, dusted the books, filled the inkpot and cleaned the quills. She cooked his lunch and made sure he had enough tobacco. She washed his coat and suit, and polished his shoes. When he had to go out, she handed him his hat and held the horse’s reins until he was in the saddle.

  “Hajar!” he called one day from his desk in the study, where he was writing.

  “Yes, sire?”

  “Bring me a glass of tea. I’d like to have a word with you.”

  She brought him a glass of tea on a silver tray. (That very same tray can still be seen on the mantel in the house of Aga Akbar’s wife.)

  “Sit down, Hajar,” he said.

  She continued to stand.

  “Come now, Hajar, I’ve given you permission to sit, so take a seat.”

  She sat on the edge of a chair.

  “I have a question for you, Hajar. Is there a man in your life?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Answer me. I asked you if there was a man in your life.”

  “No, sire.”

  “I’d like you to be my sigeh wife. Would you like that?”

  It was an unexpected question.

  “That’s not for me to say, sire,” she replied. “You’ll have to ask my father.”

  “I’ll ask your father in due course. But first I’d like to know what you think of the idea.”

  She thought for a moment, with her head bowed. Then she said clearly, “Yes, sire, I would.”

  That same evening, Hajar’s father was taken to the nobleman’s study by the village imam, who recited a short sura from the Holy Book and said, “Ankahtu wa zawagtu,” declaring Hajar to be the wife of Aga Hadi Mahmud Ghaznavi Khorasani.

  Next the imam explained to her that she was allowed to have children, but that they couldn’t have their father’s name. Nor would they be able to inherit anything. Hajar’s father was given an almond grove, the profits of which were to be shared with Hajar: one half for him, the other half for Hajar and any children she might bear. When her father died, the entire grove would belong to Hajar and her children.

  Ten minutes later her father and the imam left. Hajar stayed.

  She was wearing a blue-green dress that she’d inherited from her mother.

  Early in the morning she’d gone to the village bathhouse and furtively removed her body hair. Then she’d dipped her toes in henna and her fingertips in the sap of the runas—a wild, reddish-purple flower—until it had dyed her fingers red.

  “I’ll be spending the night here, Hajar,” the nobleman announced.

  She made up the bed.

  Then Aga Hadi Khorasani slipped into the bed beside her, and she received him.

  • • •

  Hajar had seven children. Aga Akbar, the youngest, was born a deaf-mute.

  She noticed it before he was even a month old. Though she saw that he didn’t react normally, she didn’t want to believe it. She kept him with her at all times, allowing others to see him only briefly. This went on for six months. Everyone realised that the baby was deaf, but nobody dared to say anything. Finally Kazem Khan, Hajar’s oldest brother, decided that it was time to broach the subject. Kazem Khan, an unmarried man who rode through the mountains on horseback, was a poet. Though he lived by himself on a hill above the village, there were always women in his life. The villagers saw a succession of women silhouetted against his lighted window.

  Nobody knew what he did or where he went on his horse.

  When there was light in his house, people knew he was home. “The poet is at home,” they then said to each other.

  Nothing else was known about him. Yet when the village needed him, he was always ready to lend a helping hand. At such moments he was the voice of the village. If a flash flood suddenly turned the dry riverbed into a raging torrent and their houses filled with water, he immediately appeared on his horse and diverted the flow. If a number of children unexpectedly died and the other mothers feared for their children’s lives, he galloped up on his horse with the doctor in tow. And all the village brides and grooms considered it an honor to have him as a guest at their wedding feast.

  This same Kazem Khan rode his horse into the courtyard of Hajar’s house and stopped in the shade of an old tree. “Hajar! My sister!” he called, still in the saddle.

  She opened the window.

  “Welcome, brother. Why don’t you come in?”

  “Could you come to my house tonight? I’d like to talk to you. Bring the baby with you.”

  Hajar knew he wanted to talk to her about her son. She realised she would no longer be able to hide her baby.

  As evening fell, Hajar strapped her baby to her back and climbed the hill to the house that the villagers referred to as “a gem that had fallen among the walnut trees”.

  Kazem Khan smoked opium, a generally accepted practice in those days. It was even considered a sign of his poetic nobleness.

  He had lit the coals in the brazier, laid his pipe in the warm ashes and put the thin slices of brownish-yellow opium on a plate. The samovar was bubbling.

  “Sit down, Hajar. You can warm up your dinner in a moment. Let me hold the baby. What’s his name? Akbar? Aga Akbar?”

  She reluctantly handed the baby to her brother.

  “How old is he? Seven or eight months? Go ahead and eat your dinner. I’d like some time alone with him.”

  Hajar felt a great weight bearing down on her. She couldn’t eat. Instead, she burst into tears.

  “Come now, Hajar, there’s no need to cry. Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. If you hide the baby, if you give up on him, you’ll just make him backward. For the last six or seven months, he’s seen nothing, done nothing, had no real contact with the world. Everywhere I go in the mountains, I see children who are deaf and dumb. You have to let people talk to him. All you need is a language, a sign language that we can invent ourselves. I’ll help you. Starting tomorrow, let other people take care of him too. Let everyone try to communicate with him in his or her own way.”

  Hajar carried her child into the kitchen and again burst into tears. This time tears of relief.

  Later, after Kazem Khan had smoked a few opium pipes and was feeling cheerful and light, he came in and sat down beside her.

  “Listen, Hajar. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling I should play a role in this child’s life. I didn’t feel this way about your other children, mostly because they were fathered by that nobleman, and I don’t want to have anything to do with him. But before you leave, we need to talk about him and about your baby’s future. It’s high time that nobleman learned that Akbar has an uncle.”

  The next day Hajar took Akbar to the palace. Never before had she shown any of her children to their father. She knocked on the door of his study and entered with Akbar in her arms. She paused for a moment, then laid the baby down on the desk and said, “My child is deaf and dumb.”

  “Deaf and dumb? What can I do to help you?”

  A few moments went by before Hajar could look him in the eye.

  “Let my child bear your name.�
��

  “My name?” he asked, and fell silent.

  “If you’ll let him have your name, I promise never to bother you again,” said Hajar.

  The nobleman remained silent.

  “You once said you liked me, and once or twice that you respected me. And you said I could always ask you for a favour. I’ve never asked for anything before, because I didn’t need to, but now I beg you: let my child bear your name. Only that. I’m not asking you to make him an heir. Just to have Akbar’s name recorded in an official document.”

  “The baby’s crying,” he said after a while. “Give him something to eat.”

  Then he stood up, opened the window, and called to his servant, “Go and get the imam. Hurry up, we haven’t got all day!”

  Before long, the imam arrived. Hajar was sent off to wait in another room while the two men discussed the matter behind closed doors. The imam wrote a few lines in a book, then drew up a document and had the nobleman sign it. The whole thing took only a few minutes. The imam rode back home on his mule.

  “Here, Hajar, this is the document you wanted. But remember: keep it in a safe place and tell no one of its existence. Only after my death can it be shown to other people.”

  Hajar tucked the document in her clothes and tried to kiss his hand.

  “There’s no need for that, Hajar. You can go home now. But come and visit me often. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: I like you and I want to go on seeing you.”

  Hajar strapped her baby to her back and left. When she came down from the mountains, she knew she was carrying a child with a venerable name: Aga Akbar Mahmud Ghaznavi Khorasani.