The Drum Tower Read online

  Baba-Ji lost himself in ecstasy when he recited the Simorgh poem. He stretched his voice at the end of each line and moved his hands in the air to make the epic more exciting. At the end, when he read the closing lines and his voice fell, we raised our heads and saw Uncle Assad’s dark shadow squatting outside in the dim corridor, peeking through the crack of the door. He was listening to the tale of Simorgh. We could not tell if Baba-Ji knew that Assad was hiding in the dark hallway, but Taara and I, who saw him hiding and eavesdropping, didn’t invite him in.

  Now, thinking back, I realize that the years of the bird, the years before the winds in my head, Uncle Vafa’s divorce from the family and devotion to God, the years before Taara’s elopement and Baba’s descent into silence—all the years before I was sixteen, were the best of my life. It was in those days that Grandfather retired from his teaching job at the University of Tehran and worked on the book sixteen hours a day. Every few weeks, when a chapter was ready, he called the three of us in and read his writing aloud. Most evenings, Taara, Vafa, and I helped him copy the manuscript. Taara, who had the best handwriting among us, copied the last version with black ink and my uncle, Vafa, who was the strongest and could press hard on a thick stack of paper, used three carbons and made copies for the files. I put the notes in order and organized them alphabetically. Our work took many hours of each night.

  I liked the atmosphere of Baba’s study, the sound of pens scratching paper, Vafa whistling a tune in a low pitch, Baba-Ji’s breath wheezing as he wrote. Sometimes, he put one of his old, heavy records on the record player. The tunes of a symphony filled the room—Schubert’s “Unfinished,” Berlioz’s “Fantastique,” Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” But his favorite was “The Firebird,” which had a strange, mesmerizing mood and was about the Simorgh. When the strings went crazy, Baba lifted his head from his manuscript to see how we reacted. Once, Taara, unable to stand the excitement of the Simorgh music, jumped to her feet, whirled around the room, leapt and flapped her arms like the Firebird’s wings. Her curls disheveled, her long skirt twisted around her body, she laughed wildly, as if drunk. Baba-Ji smiled with delight and shook his head with admiration.

  “We’ve neglected your dancing talent, Taara. You could’ve become a ballerina!”

  All through “The Firebird Ballet,” I stared at the large tapestry covering one of the walls, showing the rainbow-colored bird opening her four wings. Two of the wings were strong and majestic, two were soft and silky, like extended ends of long scarves, or the hanging braids of a woman sweeping the earth. The Simorgh, the Bird of Knowledge, flew toward the Tree of Knowledge, embroidered with meandering shades of blue and green on the left side of the tapestry. In the top branches of the legendary tree, the naked Prince Zaal sat. The prince’s hair was snow white like an old man’s and he had extended one arm forward to greet the Simorgh that had brought him fresh meat for nourishment.

  After the bewitching music ended, Daaye tiptoed to our room with a tray full of delicious snacks—halva, walnuts, feta cheese, and hot, freshly brewed tea which she poured into three small, narrow-waisted glasses for us and into a tall, fat glass for Baba.

  I raised my head now and then from my book, looked at Baba-Ji and sighed with relief. He was well and alive! What else did I want in the world? Baba-Ji, a Simorgh himself, glowed with knowledge and spread wisdom around.

  It was hard then, and it’s harder even now to decide if my grandfather was going insane, if he really believed that the Simorgh existed. Baba-Ji might have been playing with us and amusing himself when he felt exhausted after a long day of work. Or, he might have been half-serious, or even dead serious, pursuing a goal. He might have begun with collecting the legends and facts, but gradually came to believe that the bird was real. All I can say now is that in his massive book, my grandfather was trying to prove that there was no evidence to indicate that the enormous bird ever became extinct.

  The happiest moments of those years were our regular picnics under the dryandra tree. When he was deep into his research on the Chinese version of the Simorgh, Baba frequently took us to the garden. We sat in the shade of the umbrella-like branches of the dryandra and Taara played her setar. Ancient Chinese believed that if someone played a string instrument under a dryandra tree, Feng Huang, who was a male and a female bird in one, would appear.

  There were always the three of us, Vafa, Taara, and I. My sister played the setar, Vafa and I held our breath and listened. We knew that it was all a play-game, but we had a secret hope that if we listened wholeheartedly, we could hear the flapping of the Simorgh’s majestic wings from far above.

  The picnic culminated in a delicious lunch of bread, cheese, and herbs that Baba provided from his small herb bed. He picked basil leaves, tarragon twigs, mint and leeks and made us cheese and herb sandwiches. Now he told us how every thousand years the Simorgh flew over the earth, dropped the seeds of knowledge, and spread her wisdom around. We looked up, absentmindedly, to check the sky.

  When Baba-Ji was working on the Angha, the Arabian version of the Simorgh, he encouraged us to steal cinnamon sticks from the pantry room. We took all the sticks and powdered cinnamon to the tower and mixed them with dry twigs of willow and left the scented mixture for the Simorgh to make her nest with. Angha, or Cinomolgus, made her nest from cinnamon, as Baba’s research had proved. So, on hot summer afternoons, Taara, Vafa, and I tiptoed to the pantry, stole handfuls of cinnamon sticks and ran to the tower. Baba, in his blue pajama pants and white undershirt, red in the face, sweat running down his temples, waited for us in the damp tower. Talking in whispers all through the work, as if the bird were hidden somewhere nearby and would fly away if she heard us, we helped him make the nest.

  The Indian version of the Simorgh, Garuda of the Mahabharata, was a bird whose beak had holes like a flute and who played music each time she took a breath. Baba had found the evidence of the bird’s existence in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, a twelfth-century mystical book he used as one of his sources. I remember that Taara and I had memorized the lines about the Indian bird and chanted them while hopping around the dryandra tree:

  In India lives a bird that is unique

  The lovely phoenix has a long, hard beak

  Pierced with a hundred holes, just like a flute

  It has no mate, its reign is absolute.

  Each opening has a different sound; each sound

  Means something secret, subtle and profound

  But the most colorful memory of my bird days belongs to the ritual of the sapphire feather and this happened three times during the last year of Baba’s wakefulness. Khanum-Jaan, who had tolerated the setar-playing under the dryandra tree and hadn’t raised much hell about the cinnamon theft, now screamed her lungs out, called her husband a wizard and told him that in his old age he had gone out of his mind.

  “Have you lost your mind? Are you driving these children crazy, too?” she shouted at Baba. “Instead of making a fool of yourself, put that damn book together and try to sell it. How long should I wait for this cursed book of yours to end?”

  But Baba, as was his lifelong habit, ignored his wife’s sharp tongue. He held the sapphire feather in one hand, a match in the other, and headed toward the tower. Taara, Vafa, and I followed him like a file of geese rushing behind their mother.

  I remember that Baba-Ji took his portable record player to the tower and we all sat in that small, square space, listening to “The Firebird.” Baba turned up the volume and that eerie music with the explosion of its many strings echoed in the garden. It was twilight, when Baba believed the bird would choose to appear. When the last bangs of the percussion ended the music, Baba plucked one barb of the feather and burned it with a long matchstick. We sat, held our breath, and gazed at the indigo sky. The smell of burned feather in our nostrils, the volcanic music in our heads, and the orange of the clouds blending into the darkest blue in front of our eyes, we sat motionless waiting for the bird’s descent.

  But, of course, the b
ird didn’t descend, and maybe Baba-Ji knew it wouldn’t. So he said, “Well, I think we have to wait until the next time. We still have plenty of these blue barbs left on the feather. But we didn’t lose anything, did we?” We all shook our heads. “We listened to fantastic music, enjoyed the sunset and meditated a little, too, didn’t we?” We all nodded.

  Once, in his youth, Baba traveled to England to see the thirteen-inch egg of the Rukh in the British Museum. Rukh was the seventy-foot bird Marco Polo had heard about in Madagascar. The natives had sworn they had seen the bird preying on elephants, snatching the gentle beasts in their talons, lifting them into the sky, dropping them and feeding on them. Wasn’t the Rukh the same Simorgh of the Persian epic who carried leopards in her talons to feed the king’s albino son? Wasn’t the Rukh the same multi-colored beast-bird of the Arabian Nights from whose claws Sinbad the Sailor hung? Baba raised such questions in his book.

  But my grandfather’s enormous book which contained the scientific, the mythical, and the literary aspects of the bird and included folkloric tales, paintings and their interpretations, analyses of ancient works of literature, photographs, charts, graphs, statistics, and a massive bibliography (itself the size of a book), was destined to remain unfinished. Baba’s rough draft, written in his tiny archaic cursive in green ink, was missing most of the last chapter, as was the revised copy, which he had begun when our father was in high school, copying for Baba, and had been continued with Taara’s handwriting in black ink, and the carbon copies in Vafa’s handwriting.

  Chapter thirteen, which was supposed to contain the conclusion, and to create a finale for Baba’s long symphony, was never completed. It was as if our grandfather had spent all his life weaving a vast carpet with pure silk threads, but had never been able to put in the last touches, to give the carpet a shape and make it into something usable. His bird, whose origin was so carefully sought, was transfixed in midair, unable to fly. Baba had never decided if the Simorgh was pure legend, a shared symbol among nations, a bird that was still around, or the Savior.

  I remember that finally the copies in the binders and the manuscript in the box, each containing twelve chapters and one small section of the thirteenth, sat idle, the pages yellowing, the ink fading. The marvelous words of the book died slowly as the memory of the joyful work vanished in time. “The Firebird,” uncovered on the record player, was left to gather dust, and the sapphire tail feather, with its many barbs still unburned, was forever lost.

  Grandmother’s Companion

  I kept telling Taara that Khanum-Jaan had hammered nails into her slippers’ heels to annoy us, to let us know that she was in every single spot of the dark house, spying on us. But Taara never liked the joke. She loved our grandmother.

  Click, click, click, click . . . Khanum’s golden slippers sang something like, “I’m here, here, here, here . . . I can see you, see you, see you, see you . . .”

  Uncle Kia had sent her these tiny strapped slippers from Paris and she wore them day and night, roaming around the house, doing her endless chores, complaining that her feet ached.

  These were the chores Khanum had created on purpose to torment herself, but mostly to annoy us. After she walked for hours, climbing three stories many times, taking inventory of her antique objects, the lost ones and the existing ones, she lifted up her legs at the dinner table, to show her swollen ankles and her spider web veins. She pressed her joints hard, traced the strange purple lines with her fingers and moaned from pain. She complained of her chores and lamented the poverty and misery that awaited her in old age. Then she sulked because of her family’s lack of compassion and appreciation, and became quiet.

  In old times, when Grandmother hadn’t stopped going to her husband’s room, she took her complaints to Baba-Ji’s study, interrupting his work, showing her swollen ankles, whining. We heard Baba’s calm and serious voice telling her, “Don’t work, Khanum! Just stop working! Why are we paying half a dozen people in this house?”

  When she sat with her sisters, she said, “Didn’t I have a room for myself? I don’t mean our big bedroom where Mademoiselle Marie stayed with us, what I’m talking about is my own play room, the one with a train set Papa had brought me from England. Remember?”

  One of the aunties would say, “Oh, you mean the sun room, the one attached to our parents’ bedroom, where they played checkers together.”

  “It wasn’t called the sun room, Puran, it was called the almond room and it was my own play room. You two were older and spent most of your time in the study with your tutors; the almond room was mine. The red locomotive ran around and around, passing all these little houses, trees, and small people. It whistled too. I remember the whistle very well. What happened to my almond room, huh, sister?”

  When Grandmother wasn’t with her sisters, reading Turkish coffee grounds, spreading tarot cards around, looking at astronomy charts, studying each other’s palms, gossiping and reminiscing, her companion was Assad. Assad and Khanum-Jaan always took a break on the porch, had tea together, chatting and enjoying the gurgle of the small fountain in the middle of the square flowerbed. Since she had raised the wall between herself and the garden, all Khanum could see from the porch was the courtyard and a small flowerbed any low-class family could manage to have. Assad planted a dozen marigolds in the autumn and a few pansies in springtime. And this order never changed.

  Grandmother sat on her folding chair—an old sun-washed beach chair—took off her golden, strapped slippers, and rubbed her sore feet. Assad limped and scraped his plastic slippers on the floor, carrying a small tray with two glasses of maroon-colored tea, a china teapot, and a saucer full of thin, coin-shaped honey candies, and sat on the lower step of the porch, rubbing his bad leg. They always spoke about the same subjects, as if they had never talked about them before.

  “Tell me, Assad, how much does it cost to fix the garden, huh?”

  “A zillion, Khanum,” Assad said with a fake indifference. “Don’t even think about it. If I were you, I’d level the garden and build apartment houses here. That’s where the money is.”

  “Nonsense!” This was Khanum’s favorite word. “I haven’t fallen this low! Have I? You’re expecting the daughter of Hessam-Mirza Vaziri, the Minister of War, the descendent of a dynasty of ministers, to become an innkeeper? A slum lord?”

  Assad chuckled and shook his head. Khanum’s case was hopeless.

  “Don’t laugh, Assad. I’m serious, how much does it cost to fix the garden? The pool smells, the water storage houses snakes, the tower is about to fall. How can we get rid of this ugly tower, Assad?”

  “The house of the Simorgh?” Assad said teasingly.

  “What nonsense! The Simorgh! That damn bird and her endless story—.”

  “You’re jealous of the Simorgh, Khanum, because Baba spent all his life with her!” Assad teased her again.

  “How can I be jealous of a damn bird that remains invisible? It’s not jealousy, Assad, its hatred! I hate the monster’s guts! She choked my husband in her claws!” Saying this, Khanum made crooked claws with her stiff fingers, and shook them in front of Assad’s face.

  Now she began telling Assad for the thousandth time how when she and Baba married, she was only eighteen, an orphan girl who didn’t know better. The man was already married to his books. He took long trips to the mountains and came back all bearded, with bags of papers.

  “Tons and tons of them, Assad. His books and papers covered the bed. I had nightmares, seeing myself under an avalanche of them. And then, before you knew, he lost his appetite for any kind of earthly pleasure. At age forty-five! And how old was I? Only thirty!”

  “My father is a saint!” Assad said and filled his mouth with salted chickpeas.

  “A saint!” she mimicked him. “The books ate him up. The dark books. He broke from real things, and went inside those pages. The unreal world.”

  Although Assad had heard all this and Khanum had said all this, they took new pleasure each time they repeat
ed the conversation. These were Khanum-Jaan’s main topics: Baba-Ji neglecting her; her sons, Sina, Kia, and Vafa, abandoning her; Sina’s wife (our mother), the crazy bitch, taking her son away from her; and finally, the stars not lining up in the sky for her.

  They sat on the porch during the mild autumn days, breezy spring days, summer evenings, or sunny winter afternoons. They talked and when Khanum raised her voice to curse, the old parrot, Boor-boor, screamed from the bottom of her lungs and Assad laughed, and in this way the strange bond between the woman, the servant, and the parrot became stronger as time passed and they repeated the same stories.

  But if you’d tell Khanum-Jaan, You’ve made your husband’s son a servant of the house, she’d shake her head so hard that the dyed ringlets around her face would quiver, and then she’d tell you that the boy wanted it. Assad wanted to do the chores.

  “I sent him to school, bought him books, even tutored him myself. But he wasn’t interested. Assad’s head was full of chalk, if you want to know. Nothing went through. Clay and chalk! I told my husband, Let’s send him to a trade school, let him become a carpenter, a roofer, a plumber or something, but Anvar was always too busy to think about anything outside his books. He neglected him.”

  But Daaye, who had been in the house even before Khanum-Jaan was born, said that Baba was the one who insisted that Assad should go to school. When Khanum argued that she needed him around the house, he suggested the night school. And this was when the boy was already twelve years old.

  I overheard Assad many times saying to people that he was twelve when they sent him to night school. They were all grown-ups in the class and he felt embarrassed to sit with them. That’s why he quit after a few months.