My Father's Notebook Page 12

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Come here. Give me the bread,” he signed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He snatched the bread from me and walked off hurriedly in the direction of the mountains.

  “In the old days,” he signed, “lots of men used to sneak through my almond grove. I gave them bread. After that they went into the mountains.”

  A year after Mossadegh’s arrest, a long train whistle rang out over the mountains. The train stopped in Saffron Village, which it had never done before.

  “What are we in for now?” people said to each other.

  The answer was sugar. American sugar. Sacks of sugar with an English word stamped on the front: sugar.

  The old Persian word qand had to make way for “sugar”. It was the first English word to reach Saffron Mountain. It was followed by another word: “cigarette”. The traditional pipes gradually made way for cigarettes.

  The age-old word kad-khoda, for the headman of a village, disappeared and was replaced by another word: bakhsh-dar. The bakhsh-dar was a man in a tie who drove up and down the village in a jeep.

  One day the bakhsh-dar, accompanied by the local imam and the village elders, stood on a chair and nailed a picture of the shah to the wall of the mosque.

  That’s what happened and that’s how the son of Reza Khan came to be the shah of Persia.

  In school, we learned nothing about Mossadegh, but everything about the shah. We learned that he was the son of Reza Khan, who was the son of an earlier shah, who was the son of an even earlier shah, and so on through 2,500 years of history, all the way back to Cyrus—the first king in Persian history, the man whose story is chiselled in cuneiform in the cave on Saffron Mountain: My name is Cyrus. I am the king of kings.

  The Tuti

  The shah has a son.

  A dead parrot falls out of a tree.

  These two events alter

  the course of the story.

  Sometimes I think I’m writing this book out of guilt. The guilt of a son who failed his given task, who escaped halfway through the job and left his father to his fate. Maybe that’s why my father comes to me so often in my dreams, why he never looks at me, but avoids my glance and averts his head.

  Now that he’s dead, I can’t turn back the clock, I can’t make it up to him. I can only hope that he’s forgiven me and that the next time he appears in my dreams, he’ll look me in the face.

  I’m writing this book mostly for my father, but also to convince myself of the inevitability of my escape. To assure myself that events caught up with me, that I was no longer in control, that … how shall I say it? … that he was the reason I fled the country.

  I can’t explain it, other than to say that I’m sitting here now, struggling with another language, precisely because I’m the son of Aga Akbar.

  Despite the fact that I later used my father to achieve my own goals, I’ve always served him faithfully.

  For example, even now, when I’m writing this story, it’s his book I’m trying to decipher and his words I’m trying to put into a readable form. I’m not complaining. I accept it as my fate. I have no choice—the story must go on.

  The son of Reza Khan divorced his first two wives because they failed to produce an heir. The third one finally bore him a son, a crown prince. His dream had come true.

  I was about ten or eleven, I think, when the crown prince had his third or fourth birthday. In the larger cities it was celebrated with great joy, but in our smaller, more conservative city it mostly escaped notice. In the schools of Tehran, bare-legged girls performed a dance. There was singing and everyone was given a banana as a special treat. Where I lived, nobody had even seen a picture of a banana.

  The National Archives in Tehran have a collection of newspapers from that era, with photographs of schoolgirls slipping on banana peels. There’s also a picture of the queen and her son visiting one of the injured girls in the hospital.

  The mayor of our city did his best to promote the crown prince’s birthday. He ordered our school, which occupied a forlorn and forgotten building on the outskirts of town, to organise a celebration. The mayor was to bring an “important” guest and the principal saw an opportunity to climb a rung or two up the bureaucratic ladder.

  The principal would no doubt have loved to ask a Tehran girl to dance bare-legged for the mayor, but even he knew that that was beyond the realm of possibility.

  “Ishmael!” the principal tapped me on the shoulder one day. “Come with me. I want to talk to you.”

  In his office—normally off-limits to students—he offered me a biscuit and even showed me a skinny little banana. He started talking about the shah and then about our ancient Persian kingdom and its first king, Cyrus, the king of kings. Then he moved on to our present-day country, which was rapidly becoming a modern society. You could see progress everywhere, he said, except in our backward town, which was in the clutches of the clerics. And now, with the mayor and an important guest coming to our school, the principal needed my help.

  “Me? Help you?”

  “Yes, Ishmael, you have to help me.”

  Just thinking back to that day makes me cover my face in shame. Why me? Why me, of all people?

  The principal leaned forward and said that I wasn’t like all the other students. That I read books and knew a lot about the world. That the others were farm boys who didn’t know the first thing about modernisation. Then, in strict confidence, he explained what he wanted.

  I didn’t have to do anything out of the ordinary on the crown prince’s birthday, he assured me. All I had to do was show that I was every bit as cultured as a schoolboy in Tehran and just as modern as a boy in Paris.

  The red-letter day arrived. The mayor ushered in his important guest and the two of them sat in reserved seats in the front row. I peeked out from behind the curtain to get a good look at the important guest and the crowded auditorium. When the curtain went up, I would dance. I would dazzle the mayor and the students and show them that we, too, were modern. No man in my family—from Adam to Ishmael—had ever done such a thing before.

  When the curtain went up, I would lift my arms in the air, move my hips a bit, bend over and straighten up again, exactly as the mayor had taught me.

  Just before I was about to go on, however, the principal suddenly appeared with a dancing-girl’s costume and a wig. “Here, put these on!”

  Only God and the principal knew that the costume and the wig hadn’t been part of the bargain. All I was supposed to do was dance like a Parisian schoolboy. That in itself was a huge step, a giant leap forward, in this ultra-conservative town.

  “Quick! Take off your trousers!” the principal said.

  “What?”

  “Put this on!”

  The principal would never have dared to pull such a dirty trick on any other schoolboy. He knew that the boy’s family would kill him. He’d picked me because he figured that my disabled father wouldn’t be a threat.

  I fought them off, but the principal held me down while the vice-principal pulled off my trousers and shoved on the skirt. Then he jammed the wig on my head, applied red lipstick to my mouth and pushed me out onto the stage.

  The musicians burst into loud song.

  I stood on stage, not moving.

  “Dance!” the principal hissed at me from behind the curtain.

  I looked at the audience. The students were astonished, but nobody recognised me. The mayor smiled and clapped his hands. The musicians played even louder.

  “Dance!” the principal hissed again.

  I began to dance.

  Even now the thought of it makes me break out in cold sweat. I look out of the window at the sea, at the pent-up sea banging its fists against the dyke.

  My short skirt billowed up to reveal my white cotton underpants. There were laughs, cheers, and catcalls. The mayor slapped his knees in delight.

  Suddenly I saw my father striding towards the stage. Th
e policemen were hard on his heels, hoping to stop him. Even though he was sick, he pushed everyone aside and climbed onto the stage. He picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and leapt to the floor. Then he lost his balance and the two of us fell. The policemen pounced on my father and beat him with their clubs.

  Out of respect for my father, I’m not going to tell the rest of the story. Only this: imagine me standing bare-legged, with a trace of lipstick on my mouth, behind the door to the examining room, while a doctor and his assistant stitched up my father’s head wounds.

  This, too, shall pass, as does everything. The Persian kingdom no longer exists, nor does the shah. And where’s his crown prince now?

  One night I caught sight of him on TV. When Princess Diana died, all kinds of famous people came to her funeral: Hollywood stars, musicians, politicians, and princes and princesses galore.

  Dozens of BBC cameras focused on the guests. One of them zoomed in on the face of a muscular young man staring into the lens with the military bearing of a solider. Who was he? Where did I know him from? And then I recognised him.

  He, too, was a refugee, just like me.

  For years I’d managed to block out this entire episode, then this morning it came flooding back to me.

  What had brought my father to school that day? Where had he suddenly come from? How had he known that his Ishmael was in trouble? Was it all a coincidence?

  It couldn’t have been. He couldn’t have recognised me with that wig on. Somebody must have told him. But who? Who could have known what the principal was up to?

  Maybe the janitor, the pious old janitor. It must have been him. In my imagination I now see him running to our house.

  “Allah! Hurry!”

  My father just happened to be at home. No, it wasn’t that much of a coincidence: he was sick a lot back then, so sick that he sometimes spent a week in bed.

  That day changed my life and my father’s life completely. For years afterwards, the boys in my neighborhood never gave us a moment’s peace. They even chased me in my dreams. I ran away from them, panting, but they always caught me and beat me to a pulp. I couldn’t fight back because I had to hold my belt with all my might to keep them from pulling down my trousers. They wanted another look at my bare legs. Whenever they ran into my father, they pointed at the scars on his head and unbuckled their belts. He tried to catch them and they threw stones at him.

  These scenes are too painful to remember, much less write about.

  Those were the years in which we took a detour on our way home to avoid running into the boys. Those years of humiliation for me and my father were golden years for the shah and his crown prince. That crown prince is now living in exile, too, and both of us have lost our fathers.

  Later he and his father suffered countless humiliations, especially when the son could find nowhere for his father to die and after that nowhere to bury him.

  He finally found a grave for his father in Egypt.

  • • •

  I resigned myself to my fate. As soon as school was over, I raced home and sought refuge in books. In novels from the West.

  I don’t know what that thin, worn book was doing in our house or who had left it there. Maybe my father had found it somewhere and brought it home. At any rate, it was a real eye-opener. It wasn’t like any book I’d ever read. What was it about? I’ve forgotten, but if I go for a walk and think back to that time, I should be able to remember.

  I discovered a bookseller in our area, an old man who not only sold newspapers and magazines but also had a bookcase full of well-thumbed mysteries. I borrowed a few every time I went there and read them at night under the blankets. Then one day he had no more books for me and I thought I’d read all the books in the world.

  My father started bringing books home.

  “Here! For you!” he’d gesture.

  I’d take them from him, flip through them and set them halfheartedly in my bookcase. They weren’t books you’d read for fun. One old book he’d found at work, for example, was about cotton and thread. Another was filled with numbers and tables.

  In the beginning it wasn’t a problem: he’d bring me a book and I’d put it in the bookcase. But later he started asking me if I’d read it. “No, not yet, I’ll read it later,” I’d say.

  Once he brought home an old company manual and wanted to know what it was about. “Numbers,” I explained. “It’s about one, two, three, four. And about angles and circles.”

  “So, it’s good for you?” he said. “Yes, thank you,” I said and slipped it onto the shelf beside the other books.

  Sometimes he sat a few feet away from me, not doing anything or saying anything, just quietly watching me read. He was fascinated by books and reading. He wanted to know what it felt like to sit or lie so still and read a book.

  Now that I’m working on his notebook, I can see that his life consisted of several phases. We’ve now landed in the book phase, which lasted for almost two years.

  “Where do you get those books?” I once asked him.

  “I buy them,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t do that. You can’t buy just any old book. If I need a book, I’ll buy it myself.”

  He didn’t listen to me and went on buying more and more books. One night Tina cried so long and hard that she fainted.

  “Are you happy now?” I shouted at him. “Why can’t you listen?” It didn’t help.

  Meanwhile the boys in our neighbourhood had discovered a new game. As soon as they saw my father coming home with a couple of books under his arm or in his coat pocket, they crept up behind him, snatched one of his books and ran off. He chased after them but the boys just tossed it back and forth.

  The turning point came when he arrived home with torn trousers and a stack of mud-splattered books.

  “What’s this?” I asked angrily.

  “Nothing. Those boys in our street,” he signed and smiled.

  “I don’t want any more books,” I screamed.

  “No? No more books?”

  I yanked one of the books out from under his arm and threw it against the wall.

  “No books! You understand that? No more books!”

  Afterwards I realised that I’d done a very mean and ugly thing. How old had I been at the time—twelve or thirteen? And yet I felt as if I were sixteen or seventeen, because in those two years I’d suddenly grown more than the other boys my age.

  Then I did something even meaner. My father leaned over to pick up the book, but I beat him to it. I snatched it up and threw it and the rest of the books onto the roof, one by one. “Finished!” I signed angrily. “They’re all gone! Now go inside!”

  My father didn’t say a word. He went inside and went to bed. (Oh, what a terrible, awful thing for me to do!)

  That evening I felt like crying, but I couldn’t. How could I make it up to him? What could I possibly do?

  After a while, I had a flash of insight. I finally realised why he bought those books. I lit an oil lamp and woke him up.

  “Come with me!” I signed.

  “Where to?”

  “Up onto the roof!”

  At first he thought there was a full moon, that he’d forgotten. He looked out of the window, but no, there was a new moon.

  I was his Ishmael, he had to listen to me, so he got up and followed me.

  With the oil lamp in one hand, I climbed the ladder.

  “You, too! Climb up here!”

  My father hesitantly climbed up onto the roof.

  I handed him the oil lamp and started collecting the scattered books.

  “Give me the lamp and come over here,” I signed, then sat down by the chimney.

  “Pick up one of those books. We’re going to read together.”

  He picked up one of the books and sat down beside me.

  He didn’t know what I had in mind. I didn’t really know myself.

  He picked up the biggest book and handed it to me. It was The Rose Garden by the medieval poet Sa�
��di. The beauty and power of the Persian language leaps off its every page. Its stories, or hekayas, are a testimony to Sa’di’s virtuosity.

  Translating the master’s rich poetic text into my father’s simple sign language would be quite a feat, but I had to attempt it, because he and I were perfectly attuned to each other: I immediately understood what he said and he immediately understood what I said. I was almost capable of reducing the big wide world to a few small gestures. We communicated not only by signs, but also by using our eyes, lips and bodies. In addition, we had a little help from my father’s god—the god of deaf-mutes.

  I flipped through the book in search of a short hekaya.

  “What … what kind of book is it?” he signed, which I took to be a conciliatory gesture.

  “How can I explain it? You see, it’s a … uh …”

  “Does it also come from up above?” he asked.

  “No, this isn’t a holy book, it’s different. It’s about … well … youth … and old age. About kings. About the heart, love, death and … yes, it’s about love, kissing a woman, holding her, touching her, looking at her, or… wait, here’s a hekaya about a centipede.”

  “A what?”

  “A centipede, you know, the insect, the little insect with lots of legs that crawls so fast … hold on, I’ll bring the oil lamp a bit closer.”

  I drew a centipede in the dust with a stick and made a rapid movement with my finger.

  “I’m going to read it slowly, so you can lip-read the words, then I’ll explain it to you. Watch carefully:

  “‘Dast o pa-ye berideh-i, hezar pa-i be-kosht’. In other words, ‘A man whose arms and legs had been chopped off swatted a centipede to death.’ Did you get that?”

  “Didn’t you say the man had no arms and legs?” Akbar signed.

  “That’s right, they’d been chopped off. Now listen: ‘Praise be to Allah. Not even with a hundred legs could the centipede escape a man with no hands or feet when its hour of death had come.’ This is going to be hard. I can’t explain it, because I don’t really understand it myself. You’ll have to work it out on your own.”