The Drum Tower Page 10

  “I wish I’d never read the woman’s letters to her fossil father, Talkhoon! I wish I hadn’t read them. Fuck me! What a good life I had before I read the damn letters of the crazy, old hen—what a good, carefree life I had just a few days ago.

  “You may ask me, why did I want to read the witch’s dirty, damnable letters in the first place, huh? Is this what you want to know? The whole thing was for you, baby, just for you. I mean for me and you—for us. To see if we could, or if we could not—you get me? To find a clue. Where have I come from? Who the fuck am I? And you. To see if you’re Sina’s child, if Sina is my brother.

  “Sometimes I get mad at the old man for keeping it a secret. Where have I come from? Why does nobody tell the truth for a single minute in this fucking house? Do they want me to believe that I’m Baba’s child? Do they want me to believe that Baba cared for a woman at all? He was a man who even in his youth could barely satisfy his own wife, not to speak of having a mistress, or messing with a village woman. He went to the mountains to find his fucking bird, if you ask me, to see that gigantic damnation of the Simorgh that he was so obsessed with. So, do they want me to believe that he went to the mountains and there was a village woman on the peak of Ghaf, or Alborz, or Black Death Mountain, or wherever he went, and he planted his seed in her and I was born and he brought me in a bundle down to Drum Tower and handed me to his wife? Do they expect me to believe that he handed me to the witch and asked her to raise me like her own sons? Do they expect me to buy this fairytale? And Khanum—the old turkey, the hell-raiser, the head witch of the tower—wouldn’t she kick her husband’s ass for bringing a bastard baby into her crumbling ancestral house? No, I’ve never bought this, although they’ve fed me this tale since I was a child. Not him—he never talked. So he didn’t lie. She did. She sat her fucking bony ass on her folding chair on the porch, sweet-talked me for as long as I was a child and told me that Anvar, her beloved husband, had brought me in one cold winter when I was burning with fever because I had a disease called polio and that Doctor Shafa had cured me but that my leg had stayed crooked, and so on, and then she raised me with my half-brothers like her own son.

  “Like her own son? Do you see the lie? Be my judge, girl, for once. Do you call this, ‘like her own son’? They didn’t even send me to school until I was this tall. I was twelve years old and illiterate like a village boy, doing fucking hard errands around the house. I was a kitchen boy, Daaye’s assistant cook, the gardener’s hand, the garbage collector, the mail boy, the errand boy, the shoe polisher—name it. Then one day the old man said, Oh, my God, I’ve forgotten to send the poor boy to school! Do you buy this? And this was when Sina and Kia (their little brat, Vafa, was not born yet) wore starched blue uniforms everyday and went to this fucking French school. What do you call this, huh? Like her own son?

  “So what I’m asking is, who am I and where did I come from? I wouldn’t ask this if I weren’t in love, Talkhoon. I want you, because I saved you when you were an abandoned baby and I named you and now I claim you. You’re mine and I want to marry you and make everything legal in the house of God and in the court of law. But I want fucking evidence to show that I’m not their son, and have never been—so where have I come from?

  “That ‘s why I wanted the letters. I knew the old hen had been writing for years, saying everything to her long dead and rotten father. I wanted to see if there was a story about me somewhere in these letters. Or a document, a birth certificate, anything saying that I was not Anvar Angha’s son. Or maybe I was hoping to find proof that you, Talkhoon, were really a bastard, your mother’s daughter but not your father’s, as Khanum claims. But there was nothing about you or me. So what do I find instead? Treason and lies. Fake pride. Things that make me want to kill the woman with my own hands. All those ‘Assad is this and Assad is that. He is the cane for my hand, my only loyal son—’ was bullshit. You hear me? The way she talks about me in her damn letters is the real way she sees me. She calls me ‘the servant boy, the lame—.’ She says, ‘Who are my companions, Papa? Cooks and servants. Daaye and the lame boy.’

  “Oh, worse than this, worse. She calls me filthy and dirty and dumb and condescends to me all through the letters. Not even once, not once in the whole four fucking stacks does she call me by my name. She doesn’t say ‘Assad,’ she doesn’t say ‘son.’ She has more respect for Daaye, who has come from the backwoods, than for me who is supposed to be Professor Angha’s son!”

  Assad talked and talked, squeezed my nylon sleeping gown and wiped his tears with it until night fell and Khanum, from the top of the porch, called, “Assad, where are you?” He rose and left my room without a word.

  I opened the closet door and saw him passing outside the window, scraping his plastic slippers on the brick floor—lek, lek, lek, lek—his back stooped like an old man’s.

  Proposal

  A short while before the guests arrived, Taara, in her new turquoise outfit, came down to the basement room to get me ready. Her dress was too short, as the new fashion dictated, and when she sat her skirt slipped up and showed her thighs. Her honey-colored hair hung down like a wavy curtain to the small of her back, and a white belt curled around her narrow waist. White shoes with delicate openings in the front showed her pedicured, red toenails—little shiny radishes. She said that Khanum-Jaan wanted me to sit with the guests, smile, and carry on a polite conversation. Then she searched the closet to find something nice for me to wear.

  The guestroom was scented with freshly cut gladiolus and tuberoses, but you could still smell the mothballs which had remained under the carpets and in the cracks between the couch cushions. Khanum had finally agreed to open the room and uncover the furniture, but with much embarrassment about the dirty rugs and dusty chandeliers. I sat on a chair and prayed no one would talk to me.

  On the wall of the guest room, opposite the double oak door, Grandpa Vazir, the War Minister of the old Shah, stood erect in his red tuxedo, medals and decorations hanging from his pocket. His right hand, adorned with four large rings—two rubies, one jade, and one emerald—rested on a cane with the head of an elephant carved out of ivory at its top. He frowned and smiled at once. The frown was for his inferiors—the clerks of the Ministry and his house servants. The smile was for his wife and daughters, and of course for his superiors—the Prime Minister and the Shah himself.

  The General, tall and square, with as many medals and decorations as Grandpa Vazir’s, sat under the tall painting of the long dead minister. He didn’t take off his dark sunglasses, and when I said good evening, he nodded. His son, who had a bony nose dividing his face like a wall, didn’t even see me, or if he did, ignored me. The boy’s grandmother, a skeleton of a woman with flaming red hair freshly dyed for the occasion and set in the shape of a cabbage above her head, smiled at me and I smiled back. No one said a word and I was grateful for not being obliged to talk with them.

  Taara came in and served tea in a silver tray. Small, gold-rimmed tea glasses jingled in their crystal saucers as she walked, and when she bent slightly to offer sugar cubes, her skirt slipped up and revealed her shapely upper thighs. From where I sat, I saw how the General’s eyes, concealed behind the dark lenses, penetrated Taara’s flesh.

  From the numerous bottles of perfume sitting on her dressing table, Taara had picked a sweet, hot scent that smelled of overripe tropical fruits, burned opium, and sheer madness. When she moved, her legs rubbed against each other, silk caressed silk with a swish, and that crazy scent rose into the air. The men went out of their minds, lost their judgement and insisted on a date even earlier than May eleventh—what everyone had agreed on. But Khanum refused. May eleventh was the earliest she could manage. She had to prepare the house. At last they agreed on the eleventh and offered to buy a diamond ring for the future bride.

  In the absence of our grandfather and father, Uncle Kia was supposed to act as the patriarch of Drum Tower. But apparently he was stuck in the Ministry and showed up only when the guests were leaving. Kh
anum reported the date of the engagement to her son and he announced his agreement, as if it mattered at all. At the door, he and the General exchanged a few polite words and boasted about their sensitive positions in the government. Now the general kissed Khanum-Jaan’s hand, and the red-haired skeleton kissed her cheeks, as if she was already a close relative. Before leaving, the old lady pulled Taara to her bony chest, whispered something in her ear, and shoved a large gold coin into her palm. “Buy yourself a beautiful gown for the ceremony, my jewel!”

  The young man held Taara’s hand for too long and gazed into her eyes and I stood behind everyone, feeling awkward but grateful that the proposal was over.

  The minute the door was closed behind them, Taara ran down to my room and I followed her. She dropped onto my bed, put a pillow over her head and cried. Not having been able to give Assad the last stack of letters, she was sure he would not cancel the ceremony.

  “They liked me! They liked me!” she repeated and wept. “Vahid will never make up his mind in ten days. We’ve just started seeing each other. We need more time. But these people liked me. I could tell!”

  “Couldn’t you wear something longer and uglier, Taara?” I asked. “Why did you put on that crazy perfume?”

  But she ignored my questions, sobbed and talked about Vahid. “Most of the time he’s dreamy and doesn’t say anything.” She sat on my bed and wiped her tears. “Then he wants me to listen to his poems and when I talk about my life in Drum Tower, he looks at me with empty eyes and I know he’s not listening. No, I don’t think in ten days I can bring him to listen to anything serious like this. I need time, Talkhoon, I need more time. Assad won’t do anything to postpone the engagement, and the old, fat man liked me even more than his stupid son did.”

  “Taara, come up!” Khanum called from the porch. “Your Uncle Kia wants to talk to you.”

  “Who is this Uncle Kia, anyway?” Taara said with anger. “I haven’t seen this man more than three times in my life, and now he is acting as the family’s counselor!”

  “Khanum pretends she is a weak woman and needs a man’s advice,” I said.

  “You’re talking nonsense, Talkhoon! Do something instead of blabbering. The party will happen in a week and they’ll buy me a diamond ring—”

  “Taara!” Khanum screamed.

  “Coming!” she screamed back. “Damn you all,” she cursed and left.

  Now the week of lunacy began. Khanum-Jaan, overwhelmed with joy, wanted to make the impossible possible. Any work that had been postponed, neglected, or simply forgotten for the past decade needed to be done. She didn’t want the ugly brick wall to separate the courtyard from the garden anymore. She wanted it removed, and when Assad argued that the garden would then have to be made presentable, she wanted a gardener to fix the shrubbery that had been neglected for fifty years. All in one week!

  “Get the Shah’s gardener for me, Assad. Call the Marble Palace and tell them you want that Italian gardener.”

  “Are you joking, Khanum? Or maybe you’re out of your mind?” Assad asked. “That was half a century ago when those Italian guys came to trim your pines. Your Papa was a minister then. Who knows us anymore?”

  “Who knows us anymore, huh? I’ll show them!”

  Khanum was out of her mind.

  And she wanted new clothes for all of us (even for herself!). She wanted all the dull, dirty gold, silver, and brass to be polished, the walls to be painted—all in one week. She wanted to throw an engagement party that would restore her family’s lost status and forgotten reputation. With empty pockets, she wanted to recreate the glorious past. So she pawned more ancestral jewelry, humiliated herself and borrowed money from stingy Uncle Kia, or Uncle Counselor, as we referred to him—to repair and adorn the house, its furnishings, and the people of the house.

  For a whole week, Madame Abulian, the Armenian dressmaker, and her seamstress girls, three men from the carpet-cleaning company, the gold and silver shiners, the pool cleaners, the mason and his laborers, the wall painter’s crew, the gardener and his men (not from the Marble Palace, though), the ancient man from the clock repair shop, and several other workers—whose function remained unknown—came to the house early in the morning and stayed until sundown.

  Assad and Daaye were busy in the kitchen, cooking a week ahead for the party and feeding the army of workers. Every day Khanum clicked her slippers and walked herself nearly to death, giving orders, writing inventory, and calling long-forgotten acquaintances to get their addresses for invitation cards. For hours in the middle of the night, she sat at the dining table and signed the stack of cards with the picture of red roses and nightingales. One hundred cards were mailed out.

  One early morning, all of the house’s three clocks, having slept under a layer of dust for decades, awoke at the same time, rang, chimed, cuckooed and shook the walls of Drum Tower. Now I heard Grandmother’s clicking heels on the porch steps and saw her passing through the courtyard where the mason and his men were busy tearing down the wall. Since she’d found me in her tearoom and cursed my mother, she hadn’t talked to me, and that was a long time ago. She had talked about me, and behind my back, but not to me, and in such a friendly tone.

  “The poor parrot is lost, Talkhoon,” she looked at the window behind which she’d planted Boor-boor’s cage. “This stupid Daaye didn’t take the bird in and she was washed away with the flood—God knows where. I’m sorry for the poor thing. That was my own parrot, Talkhoon, a gift from the Ambassador of India who was our guest one time when I was a little girl. The parrot was a chick when this turbaned Indian Ambassador brought it to our house. A servant carried the gilded cage and walked ceremoniously behind the Ambassador. Papa said, ‘This parrot is for my little flower, hang it in the almond room.’ So they hung the cage in the almond room and I started to teach the bird to talk. But, as you know, the poor, dumb thing never learned a word, except to scream, ‘Boor!’ So we called her ‘Boor-boor.’ I think the bird had learned the Hindi language earlier and when we taught her our own language she became confused and lost her tongue altogether. Anyway, she lived a long life in this house and never talked. Then I gave her to you to keep you company in your sickness. Well, I hope the winds have taken her back to India! Who knows, huh?” She said all this in one breath, without looking at me, then glanced at the courtyard where the mason and his boy were breaking up the wall.

  “Now, thank God, you’re much better, Talkhoon. What a nightmare it was! And what a good time to feel better. Madame Abulian is here. I want her to make you a couple of new dresses. The hairdresser is coming tomorrow just for you, so you won’t have to go all the way to her salon. This is a new hairdresser, not that bitch who burned my hair with her smelly stuff. You definitely need to trim your hair, my dear—it looks wild. It’s your sister’s engagement party and you have to look good.”

  She looked around the room and sighed. “You don’t want to clean up your room? To start a new life? Bad days are gone, Talkhoon, good days are coming. We’re making the house nice and new like the old times when my Papa was alive. Clean up your room, just in case someone comes down. One hundred people are invited, my dear; it’s hard to control them. A good girl doesn’t hang her underwear on the chair!” She picked up my stuff and shoved them inside the overflowing drawer.

  Then she turned toward the door, but stopped and said, “I could send you to the aunties’, but I tell myself, Why should I hide her? She is feeling much better now and the boy’s family has already seen her. You didn’t open your mouth to say one pleasant word that day and they noticed that you were quiet. You know how people are, especially when they want to marry their son. They’re curious about all the family members, even the maids and servants. The old lady was asking me who Assad was. Can you imagine? Nosy people! I don’t like it at all. Anyway, thank God you’re not feeling that bad, or are you? You feel calmer, don’t you? Doctor Shafa believes it was just a passing crisis. Is he right, Talkhoon? Your silence worries me, Talkhoon, why don�
�t you say something?”

  The aunties had come to help but, instead, they sat at the table with their cards, a bowl of salted watermelon seeds, and cups of Turkish coffee. They saw everyone’s fortune and cracked seeds. When they saw me they almost screamed. Either my hair had really gone wild or I had lost a lot of weight. So when Madame Abulian stood me on top of a chair to measure the length of my skirt, the aunties told Khanum that she had better hide me in their house. “She doesn’t look that well, sister,” and “What if she acts out?” they said.

  “Nonsense!” Khanum said. “She just needs to fatten up a bit. I’ll tell Daaye to feed her lamb stew everyday.”

  “Yummy!” Aunty Puran said and clicked her tongue. “I wish this lazy Daaye would serve us some lamb stew today!”

  “You don’t need to fatten up, sister!” Aunty Turan said and laughed.

  “To be a bit chubbier than normal is always better than looking like a washboard!” Aunty Puran said. “This girl takes after her mother, that Soraya; she was a washboard. Remember, sister?”

  A woman came, sat me on a chair and trimmed my hair. She made me long bangs that tickled my eyelids and left me half-blind. Through the curtain of hair the whole world went blurry, and I looked like an eight-year-old. Now with a long, white string that she moved back and forth with her fingers, she plucked everyone’s facial hair. The aunties and Khanum didn’t feel the pain; they sat relaxed and chatted while the woman fluttered above them like a strange winged animal and plucked off their mustaches. But when it was my turn, with the woman’s first attack, my skin was on fire. I screamed, covered my face, and ran down to my room.