Shazdehpoor froze. He had laughed exactly at the moment in the mullah’s story where Imam Hussein’s baby boy was dying of thirst. Madjid leapt to his father’s defense. “Haj-Agha, this story is so terribly sad. Father was stifling a sob. Not laughing.”
Shazdehpoor put his hand to his forehead for good dramatic measure. The mullah eyed him and, once satisfied, went back to his sermon.
Madjid now listened to the cleric in earnest. Shazdehpoor watched the sweet expression on his boy’s face—an expression that so resembled that of his mother’s that Shazdehpoor was overwhelmed, once again, by the loss of his wife. No one had been beneath his wife’s sympathy. She used to gather leftover food from their meals to give to the prostitute who, years ago, had been forced out of business by the mullah. The prostitute lived out by the sand dunes in a one-room shack. Every so often she would get some business from an out-of-towner but those occasions were few and far between and she had been left destitute.
Each week, Shazdehpoor’s wife arranged the leftovers into a proper serving and left the food at her door so as not to shame her by making her acknowledge the handout. She mended her old chadors for the woman and made sure she had toiletries. All these she also left at the door. They never once spoke.
Shazdehpoor would have never known of this if the prostitute had not come to his wife’s funeral. She was too afraid to walk among the mourners and waited for him by the backyard entrance. Once everyone had left, she knocked on the door and told him everything. She never once looked into his face, nor did she ask for his help. She only asked if she could see a photograph of his wife. The prostitute had never seen her face before. She had once followed her home and that was how she knew where she lived.
Shazdehpoor went into the living room where all the family photographs had been displayed for the mourners. He picked out a small black-and-white photograph of his wife, holding Madjid, which had been taken in the orchard many years ago. He handed it to the prostitute. For a few minutes, she looked at it and smiled. Then she asked, “What was her name?”
“Saba.”
“And the boy is your son?”
“Yes. Madjid.”
She thanked him and began to walk away, then turned back and said, “I had a son once too.”
The sun was growing dim. The final chapter of Friday lunch. The women came out of Bibi-Khanoom’s room, breaking up the mullah’s sermon. One by one the guests expressed their gratitude to their hostess, said their farewell, and started up the path to home. The mullah led the way, then Ghamar, grumbling under her breath about an upset stomach brought on by too much food. Her husband followed a half step behind and then Nasreen, holding the midwife’s arm. Madjid walked at the end of this line, admiring Nasreen’s effortless gait while feigning interest in conversation with his father. Shazdehpoor had suspected that there was something between the two young people and now he was certain. He looked at the space between the young lovers and could almost feel the love between them and he thought, in that moment, that if they were to metamorphose into musical tempos, she would be allegro ma non troppo to his grave con brio. Shazdehpoor hummed along, batting stones out of his way with his mahogany walking stick.
The mullah beckoned him to the head of the line. Shazdehpoor picked up his pace. “Did you know that every thirty-three years the lunar and solar calendars overlap?” said the mullah.
“The mysteries of the cosmos! There will be a full solar eclipse as well, I have heard.”
The mullah looked sternly at his nephew. “It’s not a mystery. It’s a war. Chaharshambeh Suri falls on the same day as Ashura. If I catch one person celebrating that pagan ritual when they should be mourning, they will have to answer for it.”
Shazdehpoor did not believe that the Zoroastrian fire-jumping ritual was an affront to the day that Imam Hussein was killed in the Battle of Karbala. Zoroastrian rituals from Chaharshambeh Suri to Nowruz were so much a part of the culture that they were celebrated by all Iranians regardless of their religion. Shazdehpoor hated Ashura, though. He hated anything related to Shi’ite Islam. Every year during Ashura he would hide in his salon and drink his cognac, while the weeping processions of people beating themselves passed by outside his door.
For him, the great tragedy of Iran had been the arrival of Islam. For him, its infiltration into the everyday life of the people was a descent into the dark ages. The public demonstrations of grief for, as he once put it after one too many cognacs, “an Arab who died in the middle of the desert thirteen hundred years ago on his way to seize power” was the lowest a nation could stoop, and to add insult to this injury was to be told to submit, three times a day, to this contrived narrative in Arabic, a foreign tongue which was, for him, the end of Persian civilization. He turned to the mullah and said, “I am sure people will be respectful of the serious and unique nature of the overlapping of the calendars.”
“Things are changing and people will have to start answering for their indiscretions.”
Shazdehpoor knew full well what the mullah was alluding to. He spent every evening in his salon listening to the BBC. The rumblings of unrest in the cities were growing stronger and stronger. It was just a matter of time before it ruptured the ground beneath his feet. No matter how quietly and elegantly he sat in his club chair trying to drown it out with adagios, andantes, and allegros.
Golden hour descended upon the orchard and the sun bowed in long shadows cuing the moon. The insect chorus raised their evensong to praise her ascent then sank into soft vespers under her gaze.
Bismillah-e Rahmani Rahim. Bibi-Khanoom whispered with her eyes closed, standing on a small carpet with nothing but a prayer stone from Karbala. She knelt and bent to this stone and touched it with her forehead where a small mark had formed from years of prostration.
After a few lines of prayer, she raised her palms to the sky, then knelt again and put her head to the stone.
The words she whispered were spoken by rote in Arabic, a language foreign to her but whose strictures allowed her to enter a space where she was alone in the presence of God. Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil’alamin. Words as a means for invocation. She repeated the same gestures several times, and when she was done she folded her prayer rug and put it away.
Mirza had finished his work in the kitchen and walked back to his shack with his kerosene lamp, the sound of the gravel beneath his feet. Marsh frogs rhythmically croaked and chirped their mating calls along the streams. Eagle owls hooted in the trees before taking off on their silent hunt. Mirza sat down on his carpet, the glow of the kerosene lamp enlivening the room. He flipped back the edge of the carpet and took out a photograph hidden beneath it. It was of a smiling woman and a small boy no more than ten years of age. His wife and son. The two were killed in a market square bombing one sunny afternoon during the family’s shopping excursion in his Afghan hometown. He had just called out to his wife to come smell the cherries he had purchased for her to make jam with, when a car rammed into the kiosk where she was standing with their son—and exploded.
Stunned into silence, a piece of shrapnel lodged just under his left eye, he began to walk, with only the bag of cherries in his hand, until he reached home. There he collected a small satchel and kept walking until he crossed the border, resting in the byroads and on highways along the route. By the time he reached the town square in Naishapur, the cherries had rotted and the shrapnel had formed a bluish cataract in his left eye. Before, he had been a Farsiwan medical doctor from Herat who went by his given name, Mohammad Ali Khan. Now he was Mirza, who cooked and cleaned in the orchard.
He had come to his work only by walking through the open doors. There, under his tree, sat the judge. He sat next to him. They did not speak for an hour except for the offering of tea. After taking tea, he had turned to the judge and asked if there was work to be done and he had remained there ever since.
He