More Excerpts from my latest effort:
They lined up at the Formica counter for their breakfasts. Naan and watery tea. Then they sat at their assigned seats at the rows of tables. Six tables, Reza counted; each seating nine kids without mothers and fathers. His multiplication wasn’t very good, so in class he had added nine to itself six times and had come up with fifty-four. Fifty-four kids without mothers and fathers. Nasty kids, most of them. Except Fereshteh, which means angel in Farsi and which he thought was the perfect name for her. She didn’t care if he was quiet and to himself and looked either angry or sad. She would usually just sit by his side during recess and stare into space like he did. And every so often they would talk in a near whisper, as if the words passing between could not be shared with anyone else. Their secret little kingdom of whispered words and feelings.
Today was no different. Nine a.m. class came and went, and Agha Mansur yelled at him because he was staring out of the window, watching a pigeon feather fluttering about in the courtyard at the mercy of the breeze. Like he was at the mercy of Agha Mansur and The Proctor. If only he could fly like a pigeon. If only… He smiled to himself, thinking if he were a pigeon, he would fly in circles over all the horrid kids who taunted him and over Agha Mansur and The Proctor. And then he would plop droppings on their heads and fly away.
“Reza, if I catch you daydreaming again, you will receive six strokes in front of the class.”
Six strokes of a swooshing stick to the palms of his hands. They didn’t hurt that much, though, because he had grown calluses from when he once labored in the gardens and from the beatings, which he received two or three times a week. I’ll tame you yet, Agha Mansur kept telling him, but the more the beatings, the less they hurt. Besides, for some reason pain to him was like any other unpleasant sensation; no better, no worse. Like hunger or thirst. Since That Night, sensations had become strangely number. Everything had become strangely number except pleasure. It had vanished.
At 10 a.m. recess, he went into the courtyard, a square of cement with weeds growing between the cracks, strewn with wastepaper and dirt and bird droppings. Once a week, Agha Mansur gave one of the kids a broom to sweep up the place, and often he picked on Reza. He didn’t mind though, because he could busy himself and no one would bother him. An old swing set, the ropes broken, was at one end of the yard. Some of the boys would hang on the ends of the ropes and swing around in circles and yell, look at me, I’m Tarzan! Reza didn’t know who Tarzan was and he didn’t care. Fereshteh once told him ropes are bad things because they hang people from them. He asked why. Because the people they hang did bad things. What sorts of things? They killed, or stole, or said horrible things about the Shah. How do they hang them? From their necks until their necks break and they can’t breathe. Where did you hear all this stuff? Here and there. Do they do the same to kids who are bad? I don’t know for sure, but maybe.
Abdullah, one of the older kids, stepped in front of him as Reza leaned against a wall and daydreamed of life outside the walls of the Mansur Orphanage. “Did you wet your mattress again last night, batcheh—child?”
“Gom sho.” Get lost.
Abdullah kicked him on the shin. “Pedar-sag!” Son of a dog!
Reza dove at him, and they rolled to the ground, fists and dust and sweat flying. The bigger of the two, Abdullah landed more blows and bloodied Reza’s nose. But Reza fought back like a crazed animal, clawing, kicking, biting. As the other children stood in a circle and watched, Agha Mansur stepped in, grabbed the fighters by the collars, and jerked them to their feet. He slapped them both, dismissed Abdullah, then stood before Reza, towering over him like a mean giant.
“This is the third time in a week you’ve been involved in a fight,” he growled. “What is your explanation?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“You have a bad temper. And I will correct it along with all your other distasteful traits.”
“What are distasteful traits, sir?”
Six strokes of the cane to each palm. Agha Mansur was big, and everyone at the orphanage was scared of him. He had a scar on the right side of his forehead, and someone started the rumor that the scar was from a sword fight, which Agha Mansur won by beheading his enemy. Reza didn’t care where the scar came from. In fact, he cared about little else except escaping from that jahanam—hell.
He shuffled to a far corner of the yard and sat next to the woodshed where Agha Mansur kept the cleaning tools. Slumped against the woodshed, Reza gazed at the mud-and-straw walls surrounding the courtyard and at least twice his height. He imagined if he had a pickaxe, he could easily make a hole in it, big enough to escape. Escape to the desert beyond, to the mountains beyond the desert, which he often saw from the window of Otagh-e Zendan, the Prison Room on the top floor where bad boys and girls were locked up for being bad boys and girls. Alborz, the mountains were called, and on a clear day he could see them even when he lived in Bagh-e Sevom. His only friend at the Mansur Orphanage, Fereshteh, had seen them too when she was last thrown into the Prison Room for sticking her tongue out at The Proctor. She said mountains were near the sky, close to heaven. Mama had said almost the same thing about them; she said they were heaven. Reza asked Fereshteh, have you ever been to the mountains? She replied, no but I once saw close-up pictures of one. Tell me about it. She said, snow covered the top of the mountain like a white hat, and mist wrapped around the middle of it like a gray, wooly shawl. And you could see everything floating upside down on a lake below. Tell me about the lake. The water was blue and it was as clear as the glass window in Agha Mansur’s office. What was in the water? Fishes and other stuff, I suppose.
Someday he would live in those mountains with the white hats and the gray shawls and the blue waters below, where no one could find him; bother him. Where he would be near the sky. And near heaven. But as he thought more about it, he wasn’t so sure he would be allowed into heaven. Baba kept telling him that it was a place for good boys, respectful boys. Jahanam was where bad boys ended up, and Baba often called Reza a bad boy.
“Can I say something, Reza?”
He turned to face Fereshteh, who had quietly settled next to him by the woodshed and he hadn’t noticed because his mind had been floating somewhere over the horizon of mountains. Fereshteh was pretty, like his mother was pretty before the broken nose and broken teeth. Fereshteh’s black hair fell like a waterfall over her shoulders, and her brown eyes were enormous, in a mournful sort of way. Quite frail, Fereshteh was; pale with bony hands and feet and shoulders and with a constant cough. One time in class, Reza saw her spit her cough on the cement floor and he noticed it had a streak of crimson in it. After recess, he asked her if she often coughed up blood, and she told him to mind his own business; in a joking sort of way. She hardly ever touched her food, but they didn’t get much to eat at the Mansur Orphanage because Agha Mansur said the government didn’t give him enough money to buy more and better food. Or to get the children clothes and shoes that didn’t have gashes or holes or patches in them. We need a better government, he kept saying; a government that knows how to manage the economy better. Someone asked him what economy means, and he told her to look it up.
“You can say whatever you want,” Reza now told Fereshteh. “I won’t stop you.”
“I think you’re planning to run away from here.”
He stared at her, wide-eyed. “Can you see inside my head or something?”
“No, I can just feel what’s inside it. Was I right?”
Reza didn’t respond.
Fereshteh twirled a lock of hair around her forefinger. “If you run away, they will catch you and punish you severely. Lots of strokes, lots of cleaning chores, no break for recess. Oh, and no Friday treats.” Friday treats were watermelon slices. Sometimes persimmons.
“I don’t care. Anyway, I didn’t say I was running away, did I?”
“You will run. I just know it.”
He hesitated. “Want to come with me?”
She shook her head, her hair waved about, and he wished he could stroke it or bury his face in it.
“Why not?” he asked her.
“Because I’m going someplace else.”
“Where?”
“Heaven.”
As I thought about the horror stories coming out of my country of origin, I concluded that the Islamic Republic of Iran is no place for freethinking human beings. But then I had another thought. What if every freethinking Iranian arrived at the same conclusion? What if they all fled the country, as hundreds of thousands have done, and hundreds of thousands more will follow? Then Iran would forever become a land of no debate, a land of baaing sheep herded by the lunatic fringe of self-proclaimed moralists, Svengalis who would hypnotize the nation into stamping out all progress made before the Revolution. And then the nation would be left to twist in a vortex of despair, bereft of its glorious past when it was ruled by the likes of Darius and Cyrus and Jamshid, intrepid emperors of a Persian Mount Olympus who brought not only hope and glory to the nation, but a rich, proud culture and tradition.
Some would say I'm living in the past with thoughts like those, but I wasn't around at the time of those emperors. But who knows? Maybe in the end, Iran will settle down to a bit of theocracy, a bit of autocracy, a bit of democracy, and a lot of business as usual.
I pledge allegiance to no flag, no nation, no religion. Henceforth, my allegiance is to humanity.
Those are the final words of the last tea-stained page of Father’s handwritten memoirs. They complete our story, which until now was a hodgepodge of mosaic pieces, without pattern or meaning. They tell much about Father, and therefore much about me. They tell of his strife-filled life, of the years spent in prison and mourning the decline of his beloved homeland, Iran.
And they tell of his feelings, conveyed in deeds and in words. The years of solitary confinement changed him. And as he changed, I changed. We traveled a circle in opposite directions, but we ended at the same place. Along the way, we encountered numerous obstacles forcing us onto treacherous detours; detours that reminded us we are father and son.
From where I lie on the hammock, I see him walking along the shore, his head high, his chest out, his steps assured like those of the army general he was a lifetime ago. But now the soldierly façade is just that: a façade.
Draped over his shoulders is my son, the little arms wrapped tightly around his grandfather’s neck.
Waving at me, Father shouts, “Get up and walk, Sohrab! Have you become a sack of potatoes?”
