Disoriental Read online

  Pause. I can never remember how Montazemolmolk summoned the servant boy. Did he yell his name? Did he open one of those six doors and ask him to come in? Did he send someone to look for him? Sitting in my chair against the wall in Cochin Hospital, I ransack my memory in the hope of finding the forgotten fragments. No use.

  I often try to remember that part of the story. Like when I’m at work, standing behind the mixing deck, smoothing out the rough sound of some unlikely rock group. Or at home, lying on the couch, Tindersticks playing in the background. Like a grade-schooler stumbling over a poem he’s memorized, I keep starting over, telling myself the whole thing from the beginning, hoping the words will flow out automatically. But I always stop short at the edge of the same black hole.

  I could call Leïli or Mina, but I don’t. I know, thanks to the sharp intuition that comes from long years growing up beside them, that neither of them remembers the details of the story. My sisters remember other times that I’ve completely forgotten. Summer nights sleeping on the roof of Grandma Emma’s house under a patched-up muslin mosquito net; the books Sara bought us before long vacations; trips to the hammam with my aunts and cousins in the villages of Mazandaran. On the rare occasions when the three of us are all together, without their husbands or children, having dinner in a restaurant chosen by Mina (who has been a vegetarian since THE EVENT), they always end up talking about those times. It’s usually toward the end of the meal, when the wine’s begun to take effect, softening the edges of our differences and easing the weight of the present. Then they warm up, and laugh, and cut off each other’s sentences, and repeat the same sentences as if no others could possibly be used to describe those moments. Sometimes I wonder if the actual purpose of these get-togethers is to get to that point. To those neglected memories at the end of a path that’s become otherwise inaccessible. To the little girls that we were back then, lost now in the meanderings of our fragmentary and fiction-generating memories. The adults that we have become need those dinners to access the children we were, to believe they ever really existed.

  Well, back to the waiting room. Despite my annoyance, I decide to skip over the missing fragment. I have to face facts; that part of the story has been worn away by time. It’s not important, I tell myself, as long as the rest stays intact.

  Play: So the ugly, clumsy young servant is there with Montazemolmolk . . .

  “ . . . who said to him, in his harsh and commanding voice, ‘Go and see if they are obeying my orders, and report back to me. Be discreet, do you hear?’ But the words were barely out of his mouth before he regretted them. No stranger, even a prepubescent one, would be able to enter that hive discreetly! Montazemolmolk averted his eyes from the boy’s face, which was red with shame and excitement, and shooed him out. He was angry with himself for speaking such nonsense, revealing his fears, even though this virginal boy, stupefied at having the key to paradise in the palm of his hand, surely hadn’t guessed anything. And yet after the youth left, he was even more nervous than he had been. Half an hour went by; the wind intensified, and the boy didn’t come back. Impatience turned into fury, and that fury spread like wildfire through Montazemolmolk’s huge body. He seized his coat and his astrakhan hat, deciding to go and see for himself what was happening on the other side of the courtyard. Because now he was certain of it—another scandal was brewing in the halls of the andarouni.

  “No one who crossed paths with your great-grandfather in the vast, humid corridors of the birouni dared to stop him. He was the master of the place, the Khan,2 with a six-syllable name that proclaimed his rank and half of Mazandaran as his heritage. But more than all that, he was extremely stubborn. Everyone knew that to try to make him deviate from his chosen path was pure suicide. It was said that even the animals understood that once Montazemolmolk hitched them up, there would be no escaping him. This character trait was often commented on and lamented, in both the andarouni and the birouni. Everyone was afraid that his obstinacy would lead one day to his death. And if he died, who would take care of them? The truth is that, in those days, when Nasseredin Shah-e-Qâdjar was king, feudalism was still alive and well in the North. The great families, bound by multiple alliances, governed the land and the people. And in return for their labor and loyalty, the lords protected them, took care of them, and arranged marriages for their children. But that’s another story . . .

  “Your great-grandfather pushed with all his strength against the heavy iron door. But soon the wind got the better of him, and shook him like a father shakes his arrogant son. The door was ripped out of his hands. His astrakhan hat flew off. His coat caught on the branches and tore. But Montazemolmolk didn’t give up. He fought with rage that equaled that of the storm, his wild hair blowing into his eyes. Inch by inch, he arrived, exhausted but valiant, at the door of the andarouni.

  “When he finally managed to get inside the building, he was struck by the silence. It’s true that when he went there, it was always quiet. But that was the familiar and delicious stillness of unknown promises, of women with kohl-rimmed eyes and pink lips holding their breath in the hope of being chosen. He was the subject of that silence, the creator of it. The quiet that surrounded him now was dense, and as disturbing as the silence of the tunnels dug beneath the mountains. He took the spiral staircase two steps at a time. Worried, he was proceeding toward the second floor—where the servants and the children lived—when a voice stopped him in his tracks: “And just where do you think you’re going?” Relieved to hear the voice of Amira, he turned around and opened the door of her chamber.

  “Lounging on multi-colored woolen cushions and enveloped in a turban of smoke, Amira gazed at him through half-closed eyes. Her sarcastic smile was heavy with a whole life lived in this place, with more than half those years—since Montazemolmolk’s abandonment of her—spent in this room, drinking tea, eating dates, and smoking opium. Amira had passed so many nights waiting up for your great-grandfather that she could have picked out the sound of his footsteps from among a thousand other people’s. Even though Montazemolmolk had discarded her in favor of other, younger women, he respected her more than any other—because she was his first wife, and the mother of his oldest son (and three daughters, all as ugly as boiled heads of cauliflower). For her part, Amira, who was as tall and strong as a fortress, no longer respected him in the least. She didn’t call him Khan anymore, but rather ‘Sir,’ and used the informal ‘tu’ when she spoke to him.

  “‘If Sir wants to know what’s happening,’ she said, ‘he should go into the sitting room behind the kitchen. Go on, you scoundrel, before I gobble you up raw!’ And Amira’s crazy, rasping laugh followed Montazemolmolk’s hurried steps as he fled from her once again.

  “Montazemolmolk pushed open the door of the sitting room and stopped. They were all there! Normally, so many women together chatter as if they were in a hammam, but tonight, none of them was making a sound. Some of them were gathered around the young servant boy, who had fainted while peeping through the keyhole. He had seen things that no man ever saw—a young, half-naked girl, her legs spread, racked with pain, emptying her insides into a basin. Now, the women drew back to let Montazemolmolk pass. The blood had been cleaned up and the basin was gone. The girl’s legs were no longer spread. She was dead.

  “Your great-grandmother couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. I can’t describe her face to you, because from the moment she was wrapped in the shroud, no one ever spoke of her again. Where did she come from? Who was she? What was her first name? Neither you nor I will ever know. Frozen with shock, Montazemolmolk stared at the inert body, vaguely remembering that he had once spent a few minutes grasping her to him behind a shrub. Suddenly, a tiny bundle swaddled in a white cloth was shoved into his arms. ‘It’s a girl, Agha Khan!’ were the first words that banished the silence and death. For the first time in his life, Montazemolmolk held a newborn in his arms.

  “In order to avoid disappointing or disgusting
him, his twenty-eight other children had been solemnly presented to him a full week after birth, their faces smooth and their cheeks rubbed with orange-flower water. Their mothers had all given them first names (which Montazemolmolk promptly forgot) by that point. It must be admitted here that, driven by competitiveness and the desire to enchant their husband, as time went by the mothers invented more and more complex names, which they often ended up forgetting themselves.

  “Staring at the wrinkled face of the baby, he was horrified by its drab color. But suddenly, the bundle was wrenched from his arms and another put in its place. ‘The second! The second one!’ Knowing nothing about matters of reproduction, Montazemolmolk couldn’t figure out at first what kind of game they were playing. Startled, he turned to the old midwife, whose face was tanned like leather. ‘Twins, Agha Khan! Other than Almighty God, no one knew that the poor girl had two buns in the oven. One life for two: that is how He desired it to be.’ Suppressing his shock, Montazemolmolk nodded his head in acknowledgment of the aptness of the thought. Even though, since he had spent some time in Russia—and for reasons taken to the grave—he seriously doubted the existence of God, he continued to let everyone else believe in his faith; it was easier that way.

  “In any event, Montazemolmolk looked down at his thirtieth child: your grandmother. Unlike her twin, who was as dark as a prune, she had white skin, and the fluff on her head was blond. But above all—Montazemolmolk bent over her face, looking closer just to be sure—she had his blue eyes. The astonishing blue of the Caspian Sea, not a hint of which had yet surfaced in any of his other children. At forty-eight years old, Montazemolmolk finally held in his arms the child he had secretly dreamed of, the one whose eyes would forever be a reminder of his own.

  “A feeling greater than posterity flooded through him; an unexpected joy to which the women, eaten up with bitterness, were witness. This emotion didn’t simply soften his features and bring a proud smile to his lips; it welled up into his throat and became a syllable, which became words, and those words burst out into the air like a slap. ‘She will be called Nour,’ exclaimed Montazemolmolk, his eyes never leaving the baby’s face. Nour. Light. Ill at ease, the old midwife tried to ease the disastrous impact of this announcement on the other wives. ‘And what will you call the other one, Agha Khan?’ she asked, hoping he would get the message. ‘Call her whatever you like.’ A terse response that forever ruined . . . ”

  At this point in the story, Uncle Number Two would pause. The tears that would flow later, after numerous digressions and dramatic tangents, were already choking him. He’d jump up and open one of the packs of cigarettes that sat on every table in his house, take a cigarette out, light it, and draw on it deeply, puffing out his cheeks. Then, after a few restless paces, he’d sit down again, sighing heavily and looking at us with sadness and compassion, as if he were getting ready to tell us some awful news that would turn our lives upside-down:

  “ . . . forever ruined Mother’s childhood.”

  Mother.

  That was what her sons called Nour, emphasis on the “M” to draw out the name, to stretch it, to bestow on our paternal grandmother the status of an icon.

  Uncle Number Two’s tears would really start flowing when Mother reached her fifth year. At that point, all the mistreatment meted out by the stepmothers, their hearts poisoned by jealousy and resentment, would flow out of his mouth in one long, heartbroken wail. Having to go to the well for water; having to wait on the women at table alongside the servants; being forced to sleep outside; not being given warm clothes in winter, going without food; being shut up for whole days in the latrines and in the cellar; dragging carpets outside by herself and beating the dust out of them; being sent into the forest alone to look for roots to macerate . . . it was a long list. He cried and talked, talked and cried. And finally, made effusive by grief and love, he gathered us into his arms so that we could console each other mutually, while outside, curfew fell in Tehran.

  On the other side of Uncle Number Two’s living room window, the Revolution was in full swing. Soon, taking advantage of the power blackout and the cover of night, the Tehranis, like a united army of angry ghosts, wove their way up the staircases to the roofs and shouted out forbidden slogans. North to south, east to west, cries of “Death to the Shah!” and “Allah Akbar!,” insolent, despairing vespers thrown in the world’s face, rang out and echoed. It took a few minutes, maybe a quarter of an hour at most, for the sound of machine guns to follow, and repression to take hold of the city again.

  And at those times, while I dreamed of escaping that room to join the night and the rooftops, of adding my voice to that revolutionary and melancholic chant, Saddeq clutched us against the beige sweater he’d bought at Galeries Lafayette (pronounced Gahloree Lahfahyehd) in Paris (Pahrees) and wept over a grandmother I’d never even known. I was seven years old, and only the blind, unquestioning respect all Eastern children feel for adults kept me from shoving him away and making a run for it.

  1 To make things easier for you and save you the trouble of looking it up on Wikipedia, here are a few facts: Mazandaran is a province in northern Iran, 9,151 square miles in area. Bounded by the Caspian Sea and surrounded by the Alborz mountain range, it is the only Persian region to have resisted Arab-Muslim hegemony and was, in fact, the last to become Muslim. To imagine it, you have to picture the lush landscapes of Annecy, Switzerland, or Ireland—green, misty, rainy. Legend has it that when they first arrived in Mazandaran, the Muslims cried, “Oh! We have reached Paradise!”

  2 Title commonly given to one who holds political or feudal power. It may be preceded by “Agha,” which means “Sir.” The “kh” should be pronounced in the back of the throat, like the Spanish “jota.”

  2

  UNCLE NUMBER TWO IS DEAD

  Yesterday afternoon I was standing on my front doorstep, about to leave for work, when Leïli called me.

  “Uncle Saddeq,” she began, in the same flat tone she’d used to announce the deaths of all our uncles, and our dad. I should have known something was up, for her to call me so late. Leïli only calls me really early in the morning, when she’s rushing to be somewhere, stressed out and breathless, always apologizing right away for waking me up. Some kind of mental block keeps her from acknowledging that I only get a few hours of sleep a night, and even then, it’s with one eye open. She does mention my insomnia when we’re around other people—usually as a lead-in to talking about her own desperate need for sleep, which has been stymied for years by her family life and her job. But when she’s alone with me, denial sets in. More denial, I mean.

  “He died this morning. Around eleven o’clock.”

  At that very moment, I noticed a cockroach running along the baseboards in our foyer, weaving in and out of a crack. My attention was drawn to that gleaming black spot heading toward the bathroom. The apartment’s been infested with them for several weeks now; it’s the restaurant on the ground floor. Despite the hours I’ve spent cleaning, spraying every nook and cranny with ever-more toxic products, it seems impossible to “stop the invasion”.

  As Leïli talked, I managed to step on the roach. I’d pressed down so hard with my foot to keep myself from thinking about Uncle Number Two that I actually thought I could hear the squishing sound of its guts bursting on the parquet floor.

  “Are you listening to me?” Leïli had demanded, annoyed.

  “Yes,” I’d lied, wiping up the remains of the roach with an old handkerchief I’d found stuffed in my pocket.

  I’d wanted nothing more than to hang up. But I could hear that Leïli was crying. That was Leïli, I’d thought at the time. Swimming in her white coat, undoubtedly standing at one of the tall windows in her ophthalmology practice in the 4th arrondissement, her collarbones jutting out, the tip of her nose ice-cold; demanding, as always, to be consoled. Leïli, my older sister, delicate and fragile as old lace. I’d searched my mind for something to say, tryi
ng without much hope to comfort her, but before I could find the magical phrase that would have reminded us of Uncle Number Two and allowed us to smile, I blurted out:

  “Are you going to tell Mom?”

  Since she got sick, I’ve started calling her Mom. I don’t know how it happened, or the exact moment I stopped using her first name. I don’t know if my sisters have noticed, if they’ve talked to each other about it. If so, they’ve never said anything to me. They still call her Sara.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if Sara—” Leïli stopped. Like a tune you recognize immediately from just the first few notes, I knew that dry silence that came just before the weeping. That silence that sums up, all in itself, everything that Sara was, and everything she no longer is. And then Leïli sobbed.

  Sara was tall (five foot eight) and thin (126 pounds)—a SophiaLoreni build, as they say in Tehran. Her hair and eyes were black. Her eyebrows were carefully plucked. Her nose had a slight hump at its base. Her mouth, which had the same shape as that of her mother, Emma Aslanian, would have tipped you off—if you were an ethnomorphologist—that she had Armenian ancestry.