Children of the jacarand.., p.11
Children of the Jacaranda Tree, page 11
Another day went by, another day of uncertainty, of gathering every force in him not to run around the cell, holding his head in his hands, of constantly keeping an ear to the door and snatching everything into his pocket when the sound of slip-slap approached the cell.
He spent the next day making a string by unraveling brown threads from his own socks and those of Behrouz, who had offered his.
“My daughter’s being brought up by her grandparents,” Behrouz said, holding the socks in his hands. “Along with two of her cousins. The children of my wife’s sisters, who are also in prison. Do you think maybe one day they’ll be able to bring my daughter to me so that I can see her?” His eyes glistened with something like a plea, as if Amir had all the answers.
“They will, of course they will,” Amir said, looking at Behrouz’s worried face, thinking how fortunate Sheida was to be with her own mother.
• • •
Amir spun the threads around a toothpaste tube filled with hardened dough, which he used like a spindle to weave the threads. His forehead wrinkled with concentration, his lips pressed together tightly, his chin went up and down with every left and right movement of the spindle. He tried not to think. He had to distract himself and focus on the bracelet. If only he could finish the bracelet and be able to give it to his daughter, he would finally not be afraid of anything anymore. Then he could relax, thinking that there was something of him out there, from the inside to the other side, to freedom, to where his daughter would grow, knowing her father never gave up; that life never gives up.
Night fell. Amir went to sleep, keeping the nail and the string in his pocket. Feeling them close reassured him; half of the job, at least, was done.
The first thing he did when he woke up the next day was to wind his way through the sleeping bodies toward his jar. Let them be ready, he murmured under his breath. Dawn had not yet broken, and the room was filled with a stifling, lucid darkness. He couldn’t see the stones well; all he could see were small black lumps in the jar. He dipped his finger into the cool, slightly slimy water and picked one of them up. A warm breath slipped out through his half-open lips. It was time.
Soon after the Morning Prayer, he began drilling tiny holes into the thick sides of the stones using his screwdriver. As he drilled, he felt the fingers of the cramped cell begin to loosen around his neck, the nerves on his forehead to unwind, the tight muscles of his shoulders to relax. In every date stone he held between his fingers, he felt the haunting sense of vertigo begin to diminish. In every date stone, he felt one step away from the edge of the world, the precipice, where the earth came undone under his feet. Perhaps time was indeed on his side. Perhaps he would not lose everything after all.
When all the stones were ready, he began stringing them. Evening had fallen. The naked lamp had come on, suffusing the cell with what seemed for the first time like a gentle glow to Amir’s eyes. A hum of conversation surrounded him. From the corner of the cell, he could hear Behrouz and some of the other prisoners playing a poetry game, picking up the last letter of a line of poetry to start a new line.
Amir smiled as he picked up another stone. Every stone danced a little dance as it glided down the string. The last stone slipped down with a slight tremble. Amir shivered with excitement, like a marathon runner who could see the finish line for the first time.
It was almost dinnertime when he tied a finishing knot at either end of the string. Outside, the wind groaned as it blew between the naked bars of the courtyard. Amir laid the bracelet of date stones carefully on the carpet. He had injected his entire urge for life into it, and now he felt he had no strength left. He heard the doors of adjacent cells opening; the guards were getting closer. He quickly picked up the bracelet and hid it in his pocket.
The door of the cell squeaked open. A bucket of rice went from hand to hand until it reached Amir. He was in charge of dividing dinner that night.
• • •
Amir had to wait weeks before he could pass the bracelet to his daughter, weeks of impatience, solitude, and despair. Weeks when he carried the bracelet hidden in his pocket, like a cherished memory on which his entire being depended, a cherished memory that the guards were sure to tear into pieces if they discovered it.
At last, on a gloomy afternoon, he was granted a visit. This time, the visiting room was a long, narrow hall with glass screens marking the frontier where one life stopped and another began.
Maryam sat in front of him, behind the glass, holding Sheida on her lap. Sheida had grown. She bore little resemblance to the child Amir had held in his arms on that rainy afternoon. Even the color of her eyes had changed. They were darker, almost black. Her gaze fluttered around the hall, then settled on Amir’s face for a few moments. As soon as Amir warmed up to the idea of his daughter recognizing him, her eyes started to flit again, all around the hall, the hospital-green walls, and the glass screen.
Smiling, Maryam picked Sheida up and headed toward the door that led to the prisoners on the other side of the glass screens. Standing by the door was the guard whom they had seen during the first visit with Amir. The smile vanished from her face. Her steps took on a certain heaviness, as if she had forgotten how to walk.
The guard looked at her with a blank stare as she told him Amir’s name and number, tightening her arms around Sheida. He nodded and grabbed the girl. His hands looked surprisingly old. Maryam waved to her daughter as she disappeared behind the door in the arms of the guard.
On the other side of the glass screen, Amir was waiting with his hands strong but unsteady in the air. The bulging vein on his forehead throbbed violently. And Sheida came to his arms, crossing the frontier between life and death, time and purgatory, her baby feet dangling in the air, her eyes dancing like butterflies. Amir held her so tightly that she let out a scream. Maryam laughed and wiped a tear hanging from her new wrinkle. Sheida struggled to get up. Amir looked around him and hid the bracelet inside Sheida’s sweater.
The guard reappeared. He took Sheida, with her secret bracelet of date stones warm against her heartbeats, back to where life awaited her.
• • •
Amir’s second trial was also just a few minutes. Three years had passed since the first, during which Behrouz had seen his daughter once. On that day, Amir taught him how to make a bracelet, as a way of celebration.
This time, when Amir was called, he did not give the trial much thought. It did not worry him as a guard took him to a small room, where this time a mullah and two men in black suits with austere faces were waiting for him. I have already been sentenced, he told himself, I have only three more years to go. No one, he thought, could take that away from him.
“Do you pray?” The mullah raised his small, glaring eyes from a folder open in front of him. He looked tired, in a bad mood.
“Yes,” Amir said, having an inkling that this must be the right answer.
“Does your father pray?”
“Yes.”
“Do you fast during Ramadan?”
“Yes.”
The questions stopped. One of the men in a black suit wrote something down. No one said anything. They looked at Amir and called for the guard to return him to his cell.
A week later, sometime before dawn, Amir woke to the sound of rapid footfalls echoing in the corridor. He opened his eyes, listening to the noises outside, wondering what was going on. The door shrieked open, and Amir was seized before he had time to fully get up, along with a few others, Behrouz among them. They barely had time to speak to each other, even to exchange a glance. The blindfold once again covered shocked, confused, sleepy eyes. Handcuffs were fastened. He was dragged out, pushed left and right down the corridor. A door was unlocked; cold predawn air pierced the skin. Hurried incomprehensible murmurs were heard all around. Amir’s heart hammered violently, beating, beating, galloping. His blindfolded head constantly turned and twisted as he tried to look around. His mouth was dry. Darkness was inescapable.
“What are you doing?” he heard Behrouz shout. “Where are you taking us?”
No one answered him. His voice was drowned out by the shouting of others.
Amir was pushed violently forward by a pair of hands from behind. Then he felt the rough texture of the rope around his neck. He wanted to shout but couldn’t. And that was the last thing. Next, for just a moment, time froze, and then, as sudden as an avalanche, it was over.
2008
Tehran, the Islamic Republic of Iran
Two days before Maman Zinat died, she and Forugh ate a pomegranate together. Forugh cleaned it as Maman Zinat watched, sitting on a wide armchair wrapped hermetically in a floral slipcover. Her knees protruded from the pistachio-green blanket like two soft, round lumps. There was a fresco on the wall behind her, of white swans swimming down a blue river, surrounded by green trees and a clear sky with white bushy clouds.
Forugh held the pomegranate from the top, dug the knife right underneath its crown, and cut it in half. Scarlet-colored juice spilled onto the white tray, and there was a soft sigh as it sliced opened.
The television was on. A satellite channel run by Iranian expats in America was broadcasting a Persian music video.
“I like Mansour.” Maman Zinat turned up the volume. “He’s polite; not like the rest of them, jumping around the stage and screaming. He obviously comes from a good family.”
Translucent arils, like rubies. Forugh’s hands danced clumsily around them, her fingers soaked in the sticky scarlet juice. She looked up from where she was sitting on the red flowers of the handwoven carpet and glanced happily at Maman Zinat, at her smooth skin, the long silver hair fastened into a labyrinthine loop at the back of her head, the fold of pink skin falling over her eyes and giving her a sleepy look, at her hands, white and dry, folded on top of her blanket, their only luxury a quiet gold wedding ring.
Forugh had not seen her grandmother in over twelve years. And so she watched her with admiration, with love, with a mixed feeling of joy and curiosity. She was amazed by how little Maman Zinat had changed. The years had not taken their toll on her skin, on the palpitating youth in her eyes, on the composedness of her movements.
The pomegranate seeds burst under the pressure of Forugh’s fingers, and the juice splashed on her blouse. Her gaze caught Maman Zinat’s hand swiftly snatching the blanket away from the damage. Forugh laughed.
“I hope I have your genes, Maman Zinat.” She tried to clean the red spots on her blouse with the back of her unblemished hand.
“Why?” Maman Zinat asked with the smile of a woman who knew exactly why her granddaughter would want her genes. A woman who knew she was still beautiful.
“Your skin has fewer wrinkles than mine.”
“You don’t need my genes. You’re beautiful like a flower; like those flowers on the jacaranda tree.”
• • •
Morning light scatters across the horizon and trickles down on the narrow horizontal patio, shattering into the blue water of the porcelain fountain, spreading like moisture underneath Forugh’s skin. She stands underneath the jacaranda tree, looking up at the purple-pink panicles. She clasps her hands and draws her shoulders in. As she hangs her head, her tears drop on her yellow silk shirt, leaving salty stains. She crumples next to the fountain, where goldfish flutter restlessly before sleep. Half of her body on mud, half on the cobblestones reaching the edge of the flower bed. She weeps.
She feels a hand on her shoulder and lifts her red-rimmed eyes.
“Maman Zinat loved this tree,” Khaleh Leila says as she stretches her hand out to the leaves, caressing them.
“I should’ve come earlier. I came when it was too late.”
“You were with her during her last days. I’m sure she died happy. That’s all that matters.”
The last image Forugh has of Maman Zinat is of her cold body laid out on the bed, covered by a white sheet. Maman Zinat’s heart had stopped beating at dawn. Forugh removed the sheet to look at her. Maman Zinat was clinging to her chest as if she wanted to extract her heart and hurl it through the window. The back of her other hand lay motionless on her forehead, her mouth twisted in pain, her fixed gaze terrorized, incredulous, as if she could not believe death could be at hand so easily.
Forugh did not see happiness in Maman Zinat’s face, nor peace. She saw only pain. The pain of clutching at the heart when it suddenly ceases beating. The pain of having to face death before sunrise. Alone.
• • •
Dante places the trays of dates and halvah on the cement ground and rings the bell. The mild breeze is heavy with the smell of dust and cement that rises from the construction work in the house at the end of the alley. As he waits, he watches the door of the adjacent house open and a woman with a black chador appear in the doorway. A little boy almost pushes her aside and springs out of the house. He is clutching some money in his hand. He runs past Dante, toward the street. His mother calls after him, saying she’ll be right there, watching out for him. As he runs, one of his slippers slips off his foot. For a second, it seems like he doesn’t understand what has just happened, what has stopped him from running. He sees the plastic slipper behind him, close to the halfway stream. He slides his foot back into it and begins running again. He stops and turns to his mother. “Just soda, right?”
She nods, and he runs out of the alley and into the street.
The little boy and the way he runs remind Dante of himself as a child. He used to run like that every time Maman Zinat or Khaleh Leila sent him to buy something from the grocery store up the street. He’d run all the way to the store, get whatever he had to buy, and run back. He never walked. Little boys never walk. They run all the time, as if currents of time are after them, swirling and swishing about. His gaze trails behind the little boy until he goes into the shop.
The boy’s mother looks at Dante, who nods and says hello.
“My condolences,” she says quietly, tightening the chador over her face.
Dante thanks her as she skulks back into the house, disappearing from view. Although he can no longer see her, he knows that the mother is still there, behind the door, waiting for her son. That she is the first person her son will find when he comes running back to the house.
Dante returns his gaze to the blue door and rings the bell again. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t like funerals. He’s here only because of the two women with their gray hair and smell of the past. The two women who raised him, passing him from one warm embrace to the other, telling him love stories of Persian princesses and their poor beautiful lovers. The two women for whom he shed bitter tears when his mother, released from Khomeini’s prison, wanted to take him home with her.
Now one of these women is dead, but Dante can’t cry. He’s furious with the glorious sun in the white-blue sky. He does not understand why tragedies always happen on beautiful sunny days.
From the other side of the blue door comes the sound of high heeled shoes rapidly striking the cobblestones. Dante cocks his ears. These can’t be Khaleh Leila’s footsteps. Not the high heels. Not the rapidity. The approach of the battering alien echo unnerves him.
A woman opens the door. A heart-shaped face; audaciously long eyelashes framing brown eyes; curly black hair cascading over her shoulders. She tosses the hair back with a small hand and smiles. There is something about the light of her smile, the cut of her dress, the uninhibited flow of her hair that makes her look foreign.
Then he remembers. Forugh!
Dante stammers as he introduces himself while quickly picking up the trays from the ground. Forugh seems not to have caught his name. She looks distracted. Her eyes are disturbingly sensual with sorrow. She takes one of the trays from him but doesn’t introduce herself.
Dante follows her in, lowering his head in order to pass through the door. The house is silent. He wonders where Khaleh Leila is. He looks up at the house, his gaze involuntarily drawn to Maman Zinat’s room. He sees the closed windows, the drawn curtains, and a sharp pang goes through him.
Forugh walks in front of him. She is wearing a black dress that falls slightly below her caramel-colored knees. Her hair bobs on her shoulders as she walks across the patio like a proprietor, confident and at ease. It makes him nervous, the way she walks. He feels like she is going to dispossess him of something, though of what he can’t tell. The heels of her shoes tap on the ground like heartbeats.
• • •
In the house, whose old walls and low blue door make it look out of place among the newly constructed apartment complexes surrounding it, Leila and Maman Zinat lived together through Leila’s divorce and Aghajaan’s death, year after year, among shadows and murmurs. They were the last guardians of the past. This house was their territory, the relic of their youth. No one had been able to lure them out. No promise of comfort in a smaller apartment, no promise of money for a journey—to Mecca, maybe, or Germany to visit Forugh and her mother—could convince them. As long as the house stood and they were in it, they were mistresses of their own destiny.
On the day after Forugh’s arrival, Leila, holding a bright yellow silk scarf in her hand, asked Forugh to blindfold her. Maman Zinat laughed softly. There was an amused glitter in her eyes.
Blindfolded, Leila walked with short confident strides from one room to another, her fingers grazing the uneven surface of the walls, like a blind woman reading. She stopped accurately in front of every room and told its story. Where someone was born. Where someone had died. Where someone had spent his or her wedding night.
“Here,” she told Forugh, pointing to a door, turning her blindfolded head toward it, “your mother was born.”
She could not see Forugh’s face; could only hear her breath quickening. At the end of the tour, she took off the blindfold, smiling triumphantly. Maman Zinat applauded. Forugh laughed, perhaps thinking both of them mad. That was only a few days ago, before Maman Zinat’s heartbeats disappeared as lightly as a pebble in the fountain.
