He ate sparingly, looked healthy and enjoyed life. He had seen everything, done everything and lost a great deal, but there were three things in his life that never changed: his love of poetry, his love of opium and his love of women.
The moment he arrived, the grandmothers dropped whatever they were doing and catered to his every whim. They had an uncanny ability to sense when he was coming, and the first thing they did was to air out the Opium Room.
Next they got out a special teapot and placed it on a tray so they could serve him a glass of freshly brewed tea. As soon as he crossed the threshold, they heated his opium pipe, sliced the opium, arranged the slices on a porcelain plate and set the plate beside the brazier, in which a pile of cherry twigs burned with a soft, blue flame.
When Kazem Khan came for a visit, the grandmothers put on their best clothes and daubed themselves with scent. Everyone knew they did it specially for him. Then they waited to be summoned. When they heard him call out ‘
Khanom!
’ – the Persian word for ‘lady’ – the grandmothers went to his room. Not at the same time, but one by one. Golebeh stood guard outside the door when Golbanu was inside and vice versa.
It had been that way from the beginning. They had known Kazem Khan since they were girls, and had been brought down from the mountains to work in the house as maids. Kazem Khan had promptly claimed them both. In those days how could any girl have resisted his charms? The first time they’d met – when he entered the house in the company of his horsemen – he had laid his hands on the two maids and received them, in turn, at night in his bed.
The hours they spent with Kazem Khan were the happiest the grandmothers had ever known in that house. In their younger years, they sparkled when he was there, skipping across the courtyard and singing as they worked in the kitchen.
Now that they were old, they could no longer be heard giggling in the kitchen, but if you looked carefully, you could see the smiles on their faces and smell their delightful rose perfume.
After Kazem Khan had rested for a while, eaten a bit and smoked enough opium to relax him, he got up and went into the courtyard to greet his relatives. First, however, he went up to the old cedar tree, poked the trunk with his walking stick, inspected the branches and touched the leaves. Then he went over to the
hauz
and recited his latest poem:
Del-araaie del-araaie del-araa,
Samman-qaddi, boland-baalaa, del-araa . . .
Darling, darling, my darling,
My tall, jasmine-scented darling,
The clouds are crying lover’s tears,
The garden is a sweetheart’s laugh.
The thunder grumbles as loudly
As I do at this early hour.
The children raced over when they saw him standing by the
hauz
. He patted them on the head and read them a new poem, which he’d written specially for them:
A deaf man thought:
I can sleep a bit longer,
Until the caravan passes by.
The caravan passed by,
In a billowing cloud of dust,
But the deaf man didn’t hear it.
Kazem Khan provided the children with a brief explanation: ‘The caravan is a symbol of fleeting time, and the deaf man represents people who fritter away their precious time.’
At the end of the poetry session he handed each child a banknote, pausing longer by the girls, who were encouraged to give him a kiss, for which they received an additional red banknote.
Then he turned to the women. Fakhri Sadat, the wife of Aqa Jaan, was obviously accorded the most attention. He always had a poem for her – the beauty of the house. He handed it to her and she smiled and tucked it in her sleeve.
Eyes that strike your soul like the lash of a whip.
And so green that they look like apples.
Your eyelashes have stolen my heart.
Your lips speak of justice, but your eyelashes steal.
Now you demand a reward for the stolen goods.
How odd: I, who was robbed, must fence them for you?
The cats were addicted to Kazem Khan’s opium. A row of them always sat up on the roof, where they could keep an eye on him. The moment he headed towards the Opium Room, they jumped down and waited expectantly by the door. Every time he took a puff, he blew the smoke in their direction. The cats were overjoyed by the clouds of smoke.
Today, after his afternoon nap, Kazem Khan went down to the cellar to pay his customary visit to Muezzin. He liked to go down to Muezzin’s studio to have a chat and drink some tea.
‘My greetings to Muezzin!’ he boomed in a poet’s voice as he entered the studio. Muezzin stood up, but because he was up to his elbows in clay, he didn’t come out from behind his pottery wheel.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘And how’s your son Shahbal?’
‘Also fine.’
‘And your daughter?’
‘She leads her own life, now that she has her own family.’
With his acute hearing and keen sense of smell, Muezzin didn’t miss much. Some people claimed that he wasn’t blind at all, that from behind his dark glasses he saw everything that went on. But Muezzin had been born blind. He never went anywhere without his sunglasses, which Nosrat had brought him from Tehran, or without his hat and walking stick.
‘How’s your clock?’ Kazem Khan asked him. ‘Is it still ticking?’
‘Yes, thank goodness.’ Muezzin smiled.
The odd thing about Muezzin was that he always knew what time it was. It was a gift. He had an internal clock that was extremely accurate. Everyone in Senejan knew about it. ‘What time is it, Muezzin?’ people asked when they ran into him. And he always told them the right time. Children especially enjoyed asking him for the time when they saw him out walking. ‘Do you know what time it is, Mr Muezzin?’ the boys and girls would ask, and then burst into giggles when he told them the exact time.
He considered it his duty to share this divine gift with others.
Muezzin was the official muezzin of the mosque, but he spent most of his time in the cellar making pottery. It wasn’t his job; it wasn’t his hobby – it was his life. If it weren’t for his clay, he didn’t know what he’d do with himself.
From time to time Shahbal would deliver his father’s wares to a shopkeeper in the bazaar who sold them on consignment. Muezzin was the only traditional potter for miles around, which may be why his vases, pots and dishes sold so well.
He had made the huge flowerpots in the mosque’s courtyard as well as a giant vase in the square outside the bazaar, which was filled with red geraniums in the spring.
Pottery-making kept him from being bored. And yet there was something else that made his life even more meaningful: a transistor radio.
He kept it hidden in his pocket, since radios were forbidden in this house. They were thought to be unclean. A true believer would never touch a radio, which was looked upon as a propaganda tool of the shah. A radio didn’t belong in the house of the mosque, but Muezzin had kept it tucked in his pocket for so long that it felt like a part of him.
Nosrat had given it to him.
Nosrat was an unusual man. Nobody knew what he did in Tehran. Some said that he worked in a cinema, to his family’s great shame, while others claimed that he earned his living as a photographer. Nosrat was well liked. He always had some news to report and was forever coming home with novelties. He surprised them all with his strange lifestyle, showing the residents of the house a side of life they had never seen.
Once, during one of his spring visits, he saw Muezzin going down to the river before the sun was up and wondered what he was doing. He followed him, staying well back so Muezzin couldn’t hear his footsteps.
Muezzin crossed the bridge and hurried through the wheatfields and vineyards on the other side. It was still dark, though dawn was not far off. He kept walking until he reached the almond grove, where the boughs were sagging under the weight of the blossoms.
After a while Nosrat lost sight of him. He stole through the almond grove as quietly as he could, but didn’t see Muezzin anywhere. He stopped by one of the trees. All was still. Then a glimmer of light pierced the darkness and thousands of birds began to sing. A moment of great beauty.
Suddenly he saw Muezzin, standing motionless amid hundreds of almond trees, his head cocked to one side as he listened to the birds.
The air was filled with the scent of the blossoms and the birds were welcoming the morning with their song. Muezzin, still clutching his walking stick, stood transfixed, like a man of stone, in the middle of the almond grove.
When the first golden rays of light struck the almond trees, the birds stopped twittering and flew off in a rush of wings towards the mountains.
After the birds had gone, Muezzin returned home.
That evening Nosrat went to his room. ‘Have you got a moment, Muezzin?’
‘Come in. I’ve always got a moment for you.’
‘I’d like to show you something. Or rather let you listen to something.’
He took a radio out of a bag and plugged it in. A small green light went on. Nosrat turned the knob, searching for a station. Suddenly the room was filled with music. Nosrat closed the door and said, ‘Listen to this.’
Muezzin listened. You could see him straining his ears, trying to discover where the sound was coming from. When it came to an end, he took a deep breath and asked, ‘What was that?’
‘A symphony! What you heard this morning by the almond trees was a symphony, too – a symphony of birds. What you heard just now was a symphony made by people. I saw you standing by the trees this morning, listening to the birds. I think you need a bit of music in your life.’
The next time Nosrat came home, he brought Muezzin a transistor radio. Late that night he slipped it into his brother’s hands. ‘Now you can listen to music whenever you want to. And to the news and to other people.’
‘A radio in this house? What would Aqa Jaan say?’
‘You’re a grown man,’ he said. ‘Put it in your pocket and don’t tell him about it. You don’t owe anyone an explanation! I have something else for you, too, something no one in Senejan has ever seen.’ And he handed him a tiny gadget with a set of wires.
‘These are earphones. When you want to listen to the radio, you put them in your ears. Stand up and I’ll show you how they work.’
Muezzin hesitated. Nosrat put the radio in Muezzin’s pocket, threaded the wires under his sweater, stuck the earphones in his ears and switched on the radio.
‘Can you hear it?’
‘Yes!’
‘Excellent! And remember, if anyone asks you what it is, don’t answer!’
Ever since then Muezzin had gone everywhere with his earphones in, and when anyone asked him what those things in his ears were, he didn’t answer. After a while everyone got used to them and assumed they were some kind of extension to his dark glasses.
At the end of the forty days of mourning, the men of the family gathered together in the Opium Room. They sat round the brazier and smoked with Kazem Khan.
The grandmothers had taken seven opium pipes out of a trunk in the cellar and had warmed them in the embers.
The men smoked opium, sipped tea, sucked sugar crystals and reminisced about Alsaberi while the smoke spiralled up out of their mouths and drifted through a half-open window.
The women were in the dining room, smoking a hookah. Zinat was the only one who wasn’t there. Ever since Alsaberi’s death, she had spent hours in the mosque’s library, reading. Aqa Jaan was aware of it, but had decided to let her cope with her grief in her own way.
Before it got dark the men took a walk by the river, then went to the mosque to hear Khalkhal speak.
During the last few weeks, Khalkhal had spoken in the mosque every Friday. As these sermons were intended to let the worshippers get acquainted with him, he had deliberately chosen neutral topics. He was waiting patiently for the right moment to show the men of the bazaar what kind of a man he was and how the pulpit could be used as a weapon when the need arose. But the time was not yet ripe. Until the shadow of Alsaberi’s death had passed and he’d won everyone’s trust, he had to keep a low profile. Tonight he was planning to talk about Alsaberi and focus on the long history of the mosque. Aqa Jaan had provided him with the necessary documents a while ago and he had examined them in detail.
After their walk, the men performed their ablutions in the
hauz
and hurried over to the mosque. It was customary for the men of the family to stand at the door and welcome the guests.
The grandmothers had repeatedly warned the women that it was time to go, but they were still in the dining room, eating fruit, drinking tea and smoking the hookah. After Aqa Jaan had issued his final warning, the grandmothers bustled into the dining room. ‘The prayer, ladies!’ they chided. ‘Hundreds of women are waiting for you in the mosque and you’re sitting around smoking a hookah! Hurry, or Aqa Jaan himself will come and fetch you!’
Fakhri Sadat flung on her black chador, and the rest of the women followed her to the mosque. Zinat emerged from the library and trailed along behind the others.
The only person who had so far failed to arrive was Nosrat. Still, he usually turned up unexpectedly: he never phoned, he never knocked, suddenly you’d see him standing in the middle of the courtyard or strolling past the rooms, snapping pictures of everyone when they least expected it.
He hadn’t come to Alsaberi’s funeral. They hadn’t been able to reach him by phone and the telegram had arrived too late. But he’d let Aqa Jaan know that he would be home tonight for sure.
Now that everyone had gone to the mosque and the house was quiet, the grandmothers washed their hands and face in the
hauz
and sat down on the bench, beneath the lantern.