Thirty Shadow Birds, page 10
What does she have to hide? Yalda thinks. She is sure Afi never appears naked or even half-naked in the living room. Little wonder Afi, raised in a provincial, fanatical family, is faithful to this Eastern style of secrecy. Yet Yalda tends to attribute it to Afi’s life in team houses, the secret homes of guerrilla fighters. That such a life was an odd twist of fate rather than one Afi chose doesn’t make any difference.
When she pulls back not only the velvet curtain, but also the lace one, Yalda feels a trace of shame. As if the light of day, even a pale day with no sun, reveals that she is condemning Afi in a malicious way. To redeem herself, she considers going to the nursing home to visit with Afi. She had intended to wander the streets, recalling faded memories of being a single mother whose son’s hand in hers gave her hope.
“When hesitating between two options, choose the third.” The advice of Piruz flashes through her mind. She listened to his advice when she chose to flee abroad rather than to stay married or get divorced. She takes her eyes off the bleak sky and turns towards the room. Now she can see that the room is the same as it was years ago, except for the tenuous touch of age. The old sofa with its luscious cupcake-like cushions catches her eye. Instead of going to Het Plein in search of lost time or visiting a terminal patient, she’d rather enjoy her coffee in solitude.
Yet solitude doesn’t bring serenity. The doctor, in his heyday, with eyes shining under thick eyebrows, is staring at her. If a guest had the right to change her host’s decorations, Yalda would remove this gilded picture frame. “It’s not trendy at all to have family photos in a public room,” Yalda says to herself, wondering if she’s fooling herself or the host. Not a trace, but a wave of shame runs under her skin. Looking down, she mutters, “Sorry, Doctor. I’m not an appreciative guest.”
The confession makes her courageous enough to look at the doctor’s face again. It’s hard to connect this handsome face on the wall to the palliative patient in a bed. It occurs to Yalda that Afi couldn’t have fallen in love with the doctor when he was healthy or handsome. When they met, he had already needed care-giving. Sipping her coffee, Yalda thinks that this hypothesis, along with the fact that the doctor no longer had money, refutes the assumption that Afi approached the doctor to take advantage of him. With a sigh of relief, Yalda smiles at his picture. “Otherwise, how could she have taken care of you for all these years?” she asks the doctor staring back at her from the photograph.
Nonetheless, the idea fails to prove that Afi is a saint; rather, it highlights the brutality of destiny. “Well, I can’t say more than that, Doctor.” Yalda takes her eyes off him and turns to her smiling friend in a thin wooden frame, right below the doctor’s, on the bookcase.
The photo is of Afi and Nader. It is familiar, for Yalda has a copy of it among her disorganized pile of papers and pictures that have been constantly relocated over the years. Whenever she happens to see this photo, she tends to focus on little Nader and his frown. This time, though, it is Afi who catches Yalda’s eye. For the first time, she notices something in Afi’s smile that had been invisible to her. Afi, her arm around Nader’s shoulder, is looking at him with deep affection. Yalda knew about Afi’s feelings for her little Nader, and about her own longing for a child. From the moment she met them at the airport, Afi showed great interest in Nader, who was reluctant to make friends with strangers. No, what Yalda was blind to was that Afi’s affection, love mingled with regret, showed traces of envy as well.
“You should appreciate your child-free life, Afi,” Yalda grumbles, closing her eyes to little Nader.
Taking a big gulp of her lukewarm coffee, she recalls how Afi’s expression changed when she noticed Nader was not with her on this second trip to The Hague. On the way from the airport to the house, after trying to decide on the right excuse to explain his absence, Yalda ended up saying, “Afi, dear, my son is not a predictable boy.”
A flood of reproach, coming from Afi, made Yalda change her mind about telling her friend the truth.
“But I wanted to tell you, Afi, how harrowing this hidden wound is,” Yalda whispers to the photograph. Blinking, she lets her teardrops fall, feeling glad that Afi is not here to see her.
18.
“YOU CALLED ME, BIRDIE, DIDN’T YOU?” She utters the words loudly enough to be heard by both her ears and the bird’s. The street, shining after the early morning drizzle, is reserved for early birds. Standing still on the sidewalk, Yalda waits for a response.
She wonders if it might be a vireo. The bird doesn’t resume its warble. It would be useless to repeat the question. Yalda is sure it’s around, perching on a topmost twig or a roof edge, or squatting somewhere in the hedge. She’s heard the song, distinctive among the intermittent sparrow chirps, robin chirrups, and cardinal cheeps. She is also positive that she can’t make the bird call to her again. For a while, she gives up on her hearing and turns to her sight and smell. Right in front of her, the narrowing view of the street with rows of blooming crab apple trees along each side looks like a heavenly corridor. Greedy for the sweet scent of May, she inhales the fresh air and keeps walking to the point where the two parallel lines might meet.
No, she won’t repeat her question. And the bird may not sing again. Yet it was the question that made her get out of the bed, pass the closed door, and leave home for a walk in the early Sunday morning. Otherwise, how could she overcome the acute back pain after a six-day work week, hunching over the drafting table. It was the question that made her resilient not only against pain, but also against the depression that was part of her morning routine since that horrible Thursday of last October.
Of all her dreams last night, she can’t remember anything other than the familiar question repeating itself, detached from any images or thoughts. With no bird song, or even a dream of her Little Bird, the question doesn’t make much sense. Nonetheless, it was uttered with her own voice, a message coming from nowhere, or an intrusive signal from the off-duty part of her brain to the on-duty part.
Here and now, awake and away from home, it makes sense, though. If the bird hadn’t called out to her, she would have been stuck in front of the door of Nader’s room. Its call was a buffer against the disappointment of seeing that door closed to her, Nader’s code for “incommunicado.” This morning, she lingered for a moment at the door, recalling Nader’s last word to her: when she had asked him to accompany her to The Hague, his response had been, simply, “No.” The frustration of this latest failure was overwhelming enough to knock her down. But the question, the bird’s early morning call to her, began to beat in her mind and enabled her to pass by the door and run to the bathroom, where she washed her face with water.
Out on the street, the delicate touch of a May breeze rouses her, helping her to ignore the fresh wound of a Nader who is not little anymore. She pauses and closes her eyes to let her skin be caressed. A flash of fantasy makes her feel like she is being touched by the soft tips of her Nader’s fingers. The pleasure may soon be replaced by a lurking agony—it is almost the anniversary of the loss of her Nader, which cannot be ignored.
But Yalda has learned how to deal with this particular sorrow over the years. After forty days madly mourning for her Nader, she stopped grieving his loss. With no tears in her eyes, no cry in her throat, no energy in her body, she had found a devastating hollow inside herself that threatened not only her being, but also the memory of her Nader.
Then, out of the blue, a stranger, a girl in blue jeans and a long-sleeved men’s shirt, had appeared at the threshold of her room, claiming she had a message from Nader Yeganeh.
“You don’t look like a jinn,” she said with a hoarse voice hardly above a whisper.
“My name is Afi,” she said, with a clear and pure tone. “My brother, Ali, was in the cell with your Nader for his last days.”
This was how Afi had entered her life, on a hot sunny day. Unlike her hamzad, Afi was calm, detached, yet patient enough to ignore Yalda’s melancholic behaviour and keep coming to visit her for a couple of months. She disappeared when Yalda had gotten over her bereavement.
It was Afi who helped her fill the hollow inside herself caused by the absence of her Nader. Not that Afi had any plan or method. During her short, unexpected visits, Afi, cautious not to give any information that might cause problems, would talk only about herself, a subject that, at the time, made Yalda’s eyes glaze over. Born in a small northern town, she found herself in a team house of leftist guerrillas in Tehran simply by following her older brother, who in turn was following his friends. Her brother, like Yalda’s Nader, survived the Shah’s jail and got caught in the new regime’s trap. Years later, Afi described how she fell in love with Nader, a man she had never met. Her brother, who had been his cellmate, talked about and praised him often, and Afi felt like she knew him well. This part of the story, which back then had struck Yalda as a childish love story of a naïve provincial girl, later helped her to develop the capacity for a long-distance relationship with a partner beneath the ground.
Stopping for a minute to take a deep breath, Yalda considers how a relationship with a dead beloved, despite its dark moments, has its benefits. First among them is that such a love, unlike a love with a living man, can last as long as she likes. There is another advantage, though, that attracts her the most: it is accessible. Although ashamed about this selfish attitude, Yalda can’t give up the advantage of her Nader. Awake or asleep, she always calls upon him whenever she misses him: in her lonely, desperate moments; in fear and anger; even in joy and pleasure. She’s been with her Nader not only in the loneliness of her bed, but also in the presence of another partner.
“Or maybe you come to me, wanted or unwanted, my Nader,” she wonders with a faint smile on her face.
With arms wide open, she steps towards the convergence point, where the two sides of the street appear to come together. Although the sides will never meet, the fallacious point at the end of the street will lead her to the right spot, where she will find a weeping willow at the entrance to a ravine on the corner.
“Don’t we always rendezvous under a willow?” she asks, walking more quickly to feel the light wind beneath her arms.
The May breeze had played with Yalda’s dark free-flowing hair as she sat on a bench under a young willow in Niavaran Park. She was about to have her first date with her first boyfriend. In the short phone conversation with Nader, a fine arts student who taught painting part-time in a private school, she had suggested this park as the right place for a rendezvous. Later on, when Nader was no longer a stranger but her Nader, she disclosed to him that Niavaran Park, the city’s newest park in the city’s far north end, came to mind as the safest place from the reach of Dadash Yunes, who was living and working in a small town.
“So, little girl, are you afraid of being caught by your older brother even when he is far from Tehran?” Nader laughed lightheartedly.
“First of all, I’m seventeen, not a little girl, but I’ll always be a little sister to him…”
“And second of all?” he interrupted her, still laughing.
“Second? I won’t say anything unless you stop laughing at me.” She frowned and waited for him to change her expression with a stealthy kiss.
“And second of all, my Nader, Dadash Yunes can come to Tehran any time to visit me without notice. Who else does he have in Tehran, other than a parentless little sister who doesn’t give a damn about the advice of relatives?”
“You’d better not be a bad girl, sweetie,” her Nader murmured, trying to braid a few strands of her hair with a willow twig that was hanging down over her shoulder.
The shadow of a passing cloud slides over the momentarily vivid image of the past and leaves no trace of it behind. Having stopped for a minute to let her tired arms fall to her sides, Yalda blinks to acknowledge that the image is gone. Now, instead of the point of convergence, she sees the intersection where roads and lines meet and depart. She keeps walking, her pace steady, her eyes sliding past the trees on each side of her. She lets her mind return to the past.
As the May breeze played with the light green, free-flowing hair of the willow, Yalda sat on their bench underneath it, awaiting her Nader with great excitement. She was going to celebrate the good news by having a romantic night with him. He had told her on the phone that he had asked her brother for his approval, and Dadash Yunes had given it. In the two years since they started dating, both of them, in different ways, had been worried about Dadash Yunes finding out about their relationship. That his little sister was dating a man she wasn’t engaged to would not sit well with his fixed mindset.
Yalda dreamed of living with her Nader under one roof, but he was reluctant to take that step before marriage, and the more she persisted the more hesitant he became. “You’re reading all that junk revolutionary stuff, but you don’t have the guts to ignore these stupid conventions,” Yalda scoffed.
“I’m going to be an artist, not a politician. I read revolutionary literature just to know what’s happening in our world.” Her Nader blushed with anger. “This aside, I love you enough to want to make the right decision.”
“Is it wrong to be together, my Nader?” she asked in a loving voice.
“You may rebel against tradition, but I can hardly believe you can ignore your brother’s feelings.”
“My Dadashi is not going to hurt his little sis,” she stated with conviction.
“We’re not going to hurt him either, Yalda.”
She was sure that her Nader must have applied some kind of diplomacy in handling her family, by promising to tie the knot soon. In any case, she’d held her breath as she waited for her Nader to appear on the narrow path in front of her.
“But the road remained vacant, my Nader,” Yalda says under her breath and stops for a minute to sigh deeply.
He didn’t show up until the following year, when some angry mobs stormed the Shah’s prisons.
Closing her eyes, Yalda tries to remember her Nader’s face, but it refuses to appear and brighten her mind’s eye. She looks up to the sky and sees the sun, behind dense clouds, is barely giving any light. She keeps going towards the three-way intersection and continues her inner conversation with him.
“Sitting on our bench until the daylight disappeared, I thought of so many horrible things. But I never considered that you had been arrested by SAVAK for carrying forbidden books in your bag,” she says out loud with a bitter smile.
Seven days of wandering around the city, searching restlessly for the trace of a missing man; seven nights rolling over in bed feeling butterflies in her belly, bruises under her skin, and a disturbance in her head.
“Yet we both survived that first tragedy, my Nader,” she murmurs, “not knowing another one was on its way.”
Feeling the gloom of an overcast sky, she takes brisk steps and decides to avoid reliving the second tragedy by interrupting her inner talk with her Nader. She notices that the birds have fallen silent. She can tell that a second rainfall is coming soon and that she will get wet. Reaching the intersection, she turns left, down into the ravine.
Along a short stretch of a sloped path, the tree appears in the rain. Letting the drops run over her face, she smiles and whispers:
“Hey, willow, fellow
Why are you weeping? My love is arising
Oh, willow, fellow
Birdie is coming. Stop crying!”
19.
BEFORE TURNING THE KNOB, SHE LEANS her forehead against the wooden door with the devotional feeling of a pilgrim who has reached a shrine. Touching wood makes her feel restful. Instead of prayer, she heaves a long sigh. Another no-overtime Saturday work day is done and she feels satisfied rather than tired or pissed off as she usually does. When it comes to her job the glass is definitely not full, or even half full. She’s simply watching the glasses of others.
Yalda wonders if her son is home. She feels her heart rate pick up. Through all the days of this restless month of June, glistening threads of hope have crossed along the surface of the hidden sea of her anger and despair, and have finally appeared in her consciousness.
When she opens the door, she doesn’t see the familiar sign of his presence: his bulky boots right in the middle of the hallway. The carelessly removed shoes, now a promising sign, used to drive her mad and make her curse under her breath as she put, sometimes threw, them in the closet. The rough boots, an awkward reminder of his “rough and tough” dream job, are now simple evidence of his presence.
Still, he may be home but asleep, she thinks, perhaps without taking his boots off.
Putting the takeout box on the kitchen counter, she glances towards his room and notices that the door is half open.
This may mean a change, she thinks. Her hands busy transferring food into dishes, Yalda counts off the months by clattering her teeth, stopping at eight. Well, after eight months of encountering a closed door, it’s no wonder that she thinks a half-open door is a good sign.
Passing by the door and peeping into his room, she finds his bed empty. Yalda forces herself to ignore the messy room, reminding herself that she’s picked her battles.
“His damn rotating shift work schedule has ruined my appetite,” she mumbles as she puts the food in the fridge, “and my plan, too.”
Driven by a desire for revenge rather than a sudden craving for alcohol, she grabs the bottle of Martini Rosso that she got from the duty free store in Rotterdam. She smiles nervously when she finds some dried white mulberries in her beloved turquoise ceramic bowl. Despite Nader’s absence, she’s going to have her exclusive Iran news fest.
C’est la vie, she thinks, turning her eyes away from the table that was supposed to be set for him. After putting her laptop, her martini, and the bowl of mulberries on the side table, she collapses into her rocker.
