The Drum Tower Read online

  Then Baba taught him the alphabet, and he read at the third-grade level with difficulty and wrote clumsily and that was all the education he received in the house of Professor Anvar Angha, the well-known scholar.

  But who could deny that Assad was a compulsive worker? We always saw him fixing the broken faucets, scrubbing the algae from the pool’s walls, stirring Daaye’s seven-herb soup, or ironing Grandmother’s silk blouses. He did tough and delicate jobs equally well. His thick, callused fingers, greasy after repairing the car’s carburetor, could hold the thinnest, tiniest needle and stitch Khanum’s skirt hem. He was the one who pickled small cucumbers and herbs in tall, glass jars and made cherry and quince jam for the winter. He was a perfect housekeeper and Khanum-Jaan needed such a capable worker in Drum Tower. Daaye was getting old, her hands shook and she forgot to add salt to stew and sugar to jam.

  Three Theories of Soraya’s Disappearance

  “She vanished in a wink!” Daaye said when I was still living upstairs in a room next to my sister’s. She snapped a green pod, took out three lima beans, and dropped them in a bowl. She sat cross-legged on the carpet with the bowl of beans in front of her and I sat on the bed, still in my pajamas, a plate of rice pudding on my lap.

  Daaye couldn’t read or write, but she’d learned how to spell one word. On the golden, smooth surface of my rice pudding she’d written ALLAH with powdered saffron. I dipped the big spoon into the pudding, dug out a quivering chunk of cool dessert with all the letters of ALLAH, and put it in my mouth. The heavenly thing melted at once.

  “No one had ever known someone to vanish like this,” she said. “I went up to their room to tidy up, as I did every morning. The bed was untouched.” Snap, snap. Lima beans in the bowl, empty skins in the tray. “She must have left sometime during the night, before even going to bed.” Snap. “You were a week old, in your crib, next to your parents’ bed. You were whining. Hungry for your mother’s milk. Your sister, Taara, was one and a half, baby-walking around the house, falling, crying. But your mother had vanished. Just like this!” Snap.

  “Where was my father?” The pudding was gone. I cleaned the edge of the bowl with my finger, licking it.

  “As usual, in the rose arbor. Whenever they quarreled he sat on a bench amid the roses, drinking and smoking. Then Assad joined him and they got drunk together. He was there that morning.”

  “Why did my mother disappear, Daaye?”

  “Do you want me to tell you the truth?”

  “Nothing but the truth!”

  Daaye lowered her voice so that no possible eavesdropper could hear her, and then, in a whisper, said, “She hated the house! She said Drum Tower was alive, breathing and even talking to her, like a person, a monster. She wanted your father to take her out of here. But you know that your father couldn’t leave his mother.”

  “But he finally did.”

  “Too late, though. Not when his wife was around. Once, when he mentioned leaving the house and renting an apartment for himself and Soraya, your grandmother had one of those famous fits. But this time when she passed out she didn’t come to for an hour. Then your father stopped mentioning the apartment. Your mother insisted some more, then threatened your father that she’d leave him. But he didn’t believe her. They loved each other a lot, you know? But their love was poisoned.”

  “Still, I don’t understand why she left.”

  “She was scared of this house. She set herself free.”

  Daaye snapped some more beans in silence, then stopped and just sat rocking herself gently to right and left, as if she had a baby in her arms. Her eyes had a hollow gaze, looking at nothing.

  “I don’t blame Soraya a bit,” she said. “I’d do the same if I were her. We’re born only once!”

  Uncle Assad never knocked. I heard him scraping his slippers on the corridor’s tiles, dragging one foot. He opened the door, came in and sat down in the middle of my room, looking around. He looked at my clothes scattered on the bed, at my schoolbooks and toys. He fumbled with my things, picked up a doll, looked at it carefully, pulled up its tiny skirt and investigated what was underneath. He chuckled to himself and put the doll aside. Now he took a fistful of salted chickpeas out of his pocket, stuffed his mouth and, while chewing, told me his own version of Soraya’s story.

  “Your Mommy is in Bandar. My friends have told me. The Big Sheikh’s men kidnapped her and took her to Bandar. The Arab fell in love with her at the coronation ball and had his men kidnap her. If you want to know where your Mommy is, I’m telling you, she’s in Bandar. She’s the Sheikh’s last wife.

  “Khanum kept telling her, ‘Don’t walk alone in the streets at night. You’re pretty, something bad will happen to you! She didn’t listen, and this happened to her. She ruined your father’s life altogether. Ruined your life, Taara’s life, and above all, Khanum-Jaan’s life.”

  You lie, Assad! You lie! I wanted to scream and throw him out, but my voice didn’t come out.

  “Maybe you think I’m lying,” he said, as if reading my mind. “But why should I lie? Huh? How do I benefit in all this? I’m just trying to solve the mystery for you. Maybe you’ll feel better if you know the truth about your mother. You’re growing into a sad child, Talkhoon. I keep telling Khanum, let me take Taara and Talkhoon to Bandar and show them where their mother lives, maybe they’ll feel better. But she doesn’t listen to me. She constantly consults her papa’s ghost and the ghost says, ‘Leave the bitch alone!’

  “You know where Bandar is, don’t you? It’s a harbor town. On the Persian Gulf. The deep south. The end of the country. Soraya is the old Sheikh’s last wife. Safe and sound. The flower of his harem.”

  Khanum sat on her folding chair on the porch while Taara and I played quietly behind the dusty maple that had grown by itself next to the brick wall. Our dolls were sleeping on their spreads next to a small set of cups and saucers. We were waiting for the girls to wake up and have their afternoon tea. Whenever people came out and sat close to where we played, we talked in whispers and played quietly in order to eavesdrop.

  Khanum-Jaan knew we were behind the maple, but she didn’t lower her voice. She and Assad were talking about our mother.

  “I warned Sina, didn’t I, Assad? You must remember how I warned him. I told him this girl didn’t belong to our class. She didn’t have good blood. I could tell just from looking at her. She was pretty, all right. But she was dark-skinned, like a servant girl, and she was a bit crazy. Weird. Wasn’t she, Assad?”

  “She sure was, Khanum,” Assad said from the flowerbed. He was digging the earth, taking pebbles out. “She was wild like a stray cat, and stubborn too. Didn’t listen to anyone. Her skin was dark. You’re right,” he said, panting a little.

  “She wasn’t a pure breed. Her father was a Baluch, her mother a Kurd, or the other way round. She could never become a lady. She hadn’t been brought up the way we had. I warned my son when I saw these signs, but I wish I’d known earlier that she was loose. Had I known she was loose, I’d never have let that marriage happen.”

  “Now you’re hurting your nerves again, Khanum! Didn’t the doctor tell you to take it easy and not think about the past? Why bother about the dead and gone?”

  “Dead and gone? No one is dead and gone, Assad. I’m left here alone to raise their brats. Am I not? He comes and goes every two years, as it pleases him. He’s gone mad; he’s ruined and lost. He is a majnoon, a wanderer of deserts! And she’s not dead, either. Didn’t you say she’s married to an Arab emir?”

  “That’s what people say, Khanum. People have seen her in Bandar.”

  “Well, let me tell you what I’ve been thinking all these years.” Khanum bent forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Soraya wasn’t kidnapped against her will, Assad. She went with the Sheikh. At that damned coronation ball, the Sheikh fell for her and she, who was itching for an Arab, went with him. She betrayed Sina and left her babies behind. Even the second one, who was probably not my son’s—”


  “Hush, Khanum! The girls are behind the tree,” Assad said, and shoved a pansy into the dirt.

  “But how could the second one be my son’s if they hadn’t slept together for more than a year?” Khanum tried to say this in a whisper, but it was loud enough for us to hear. “Didn’t Sina sleep in his old room after the first one was born? Do you remember, Assad?”

  “I remember, Khanum. Everybody remembers. We were all under one roof. But let’s not talk about it now.”

  “If she hadn’t gone with the Sheikh, she would have ended up in the streets. She’d have become a prostitute and then how could we raise our heads? But the big emir is like a shah. Richer than the Shah, or maybe as rich. I swear to my God that all these years whenever a relative asked me what happened to your daughter-in-law, I said, Well, they divorced, like many young people do these days, and thank God she’s married to the Big Sheikh, the emir of Bandar. You see how I try to save face?”

  “You do the right thing,” Assad said wiping his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “We have to keep our faces red, as they say, even if we need to slap our own cheeks once in a while!”

  “But the crazy bitch took my Sina away from me. I wish she’d die and the curse would be removed. Sina—the flower of my sons—the kindest, the handsomest, the light of my eyes.” She wiped her tears and added, “I dreamed, Assad, I dreamed . . .”

  Uncle Vafa

  In the absence of our father, who was a wanderer of the deserts, as his mother said, and Uncle Kia, who was abroad all through our childhood, Uncle Vafa was the only young man around. Taara and I neither saw Assad as a man nor considered him an uncle. He was always there, but we never counted him as family.

  I was seven years younger than Vafa and when I was between three and eight, I spent long hours playing with him. The list of our mischief is long and these are just the highlights: We burned a silk Persian carpet while setting fire to plastic soldiers that we were pretending were the army of Alexander the Great. Trying to study history for his sixth grade finals, Vafa had arranged the whole war scene on Grandmother’s antique carpet. Neither of us received allowance for one full year, but this wasn’t even one thousandth of the price of Khanum-Jaan’s carpet.

  We broke into the storage room on top of the tower one summer afternoon to see if it was so that there were real drums stored there from hundreds of years ago. It was true—we saw the dusty war drums with our own eyes, banged on them and tore a couple. We awoke the whole neighborhood from their afternoon nap and Khanum locked us up in our rooms for twenty-four hours.

  Once, angry with Grandmother who didn’t allow us to watch TV, we broke into the guestroom where the set was locked up. Khanum-Jaan was hospitalized for an appendectomy and the key (the set had sliding doors) hung on her neck. We broke the lock and watched television for four consecutive nights, five hours a night. We began with the cartoons, watched grown-up shows, a couple of black-and-white American movies, the news, a late comedy show, the Quiz Show, and then passed out in front of the oak set when the National Anthem announced the end of the evening programs. When Khanum was released from the hospital, we accepted our punishment with grace and without much fuss.

  And there was more. We ran the two hundred thirty-five stone steps of the brick tower up and down many times a day to check the hollow space and see if the Simorgh had nested there. We stole fresh meat, bread, and pastry, and left it for the bird, but it all rotted and Assad had to clean the tower, and of course tell on us. We peered through the dark hole of the water storage tank to see if it was true that human skeletons were at the bottom of the abandoned pool. We played with the ghosts. Vafa made ghost sounds to call them, and when we heard the squeak of the wheelchair under the weeping willows, we screamed and ran for our lives. Once, escaping from Grandma Negaar’s ghost, Taara fell in the pool and almost drowned. Assad was the only grown-up around, but he was lame and didn’t know how to swim. Vafa dived into the slimy pool and fished her out.

  “Talkhoon and Vafa are the devils,” Khanum announced at the dinner table. “They bring my poor Taara into their schemes.”

  But what we shared the most was the Simorgh. We repeated Baba-Ji’s stories for each other and added our own imaginary ones. We sat for hours in Vafa’s room, cracking sunflower hulls (stolen from the old parrot), and made up Simorgh stories. Taara preferred to practice her setar. When the weather was pleasant, we sat under the dryandra tree, Taara played, and Vafa and I wove fantastic tales for hours. Baba-Ji saw us from his window, came down and sat with us. He admired our tales and encouraged us to weave more.

  When he was fifteen, Uncle Vafa outgrew the Simorgh stories. He stopped copying for Baba and being a friend and playmate for me. He left our work-play team unnoticed. But before he replaced the Simorgh book with the Book of God he went through a long period of silence. He stayed out after school and crept into the house at dusk. He locked himself in his room with the lights out. He hardly ate. He didn’t answer Khanum’s questions when she interrogated him, and didn’t react to Daaye’s pleadings to eat. He didn’t go to Baba’s room when he called, and stopped walking with Taara and me to school. When I asked him to read to me or play with me, he gave me a faint, distant smile and patted my head as if he were an old man and I were just a baby. He dismissed me in silence.

  At seventeen, Uncle Vafa became a stranger in the house. Khanum and her sisters sat around the oak table, searched for their fortunes in cards, looked inside coffee cups, and read astronomers’ charts. They even called Sayyed Mirza, the ghost man, for a séance. Grandpa Vazir’s ghost appeared and told Khanum that Vafa was possessed by evil forces from outside the house. Daaye prayed to her favorite holy one, Imam Reza, that if Vafa would become himself again she’d cook saffron rice pudding for one hundred beggars who sat in the courtyard of the Imam’s Mosque. Neither Khanum’s fortune telling and séance nor Daaye’s vow brought Uncle Vafa back.

  One Friday morning Baba-Ji came out of his study and went straight to his son’s room, knocked on the door and, before hearing anything, entered. Taara and I ran barefoot out of our rooms to eavesdrop. Baba had never left his study to go to anyone’s room before. From behind the tall Indian vase containing peacock feathers, we saw our young uncle lying on his back, his sunken eyes wide open. Baba said, “Son, if you want me to tell you that I don’t need your help with my book anymore, I’m here to say so. You’ve done your job, as your older brother did. He left—you may want to leave too. You’re free. You don’t believe in my book? Find your own book, or write one. But don’t hurt yourself and your family. Get up, eat, and live again.”

  Soon after Baba’s visit, Uncle Vafa took the Koran to his room. This was the fat, hard-covered black Koran with golden letters and a faint smell of rose water rising from between its pages. No one had ever read this book for the simple reason that the only believers in our house were Daaye and Assad—the first, illiterate, and the second, half literate. So the Holy Book was used only once a year when Baba-Ji and Khanum-Jaan placed fresh bank notes between the pages to give away as New Year presents.

  Vafa taught himself Arabic and read the thick, black book day and night. Like a Chinese monk, he grew a thin beard with a few long strands hanging from his chin. Five times a day, he adjusted himself diagonally toward the corner of the wall (facing Mecca) and prayed aloud. He was still quiet and somber, but he ate with the family and kept his door unlocked.

  In the month of Ramadan—so far observed only by Daaye and Assad (who stopped drinking vodka for the whole month)—Vafa fasted with them. At four in the morning we heard the three of them eating in the kitchen, whispering and praying. Daaye, who now believed that Vafa was the only saved soul in the family, cooked the promised saffron rice pudding, and on the last day of the month, the Sacrifice Day, Assad drove her to Imam Reza’s Mosque and they distributed the food among the beggars who were scattered in the courtyard with their empty alms bowls.

  Now, gradually, Uncle Vafa’s friends came for meetings. In his room, they recited Ar
abic prayers, interpreted them and discussed the political events of the day. Once, I caught Khanum-Jaan eavesdropping behind Vafa’s door, pressing her ear against the cold wood to hear what her son and his friends were saying. Noticing me, she pretended that what she was doing was absolutely justified.

  “Just reading books,” she whispered. “I thought they were drinking liquor or something. But they’re just reading! You stay behind this door, Talkhoon. When the boys are about to leave, run and call me. I want to look at them and see who they are. One glance and I can tell if they’re vagabonds.”

  Soon Vafa finished high school and left the house. He lived with the same friends in a rented room and, before long, joined a religious organization under the leadership of a young doctor. He became an anti-government activist. Baba-Ji, who believed in myths and legends more than religions, or thought that religions were no more than myths, had secretly hoped that Vafa would return to him. Now he lost hope, became sulky, and didn’t perform the Simorgh rituals anymore. Khanum-Jaan, who associated all political activity with the lower classes, cursed her son and banished him.

  Uncle Vafa’s banishment lasted for five years. We never saw how he changed from a boy to a man and how his thin beard thickened. His room stayed untouched—a seventeen-year-old’s room. Daaye was forbidden to clean it, but I sneaked in once a week with a damp rag and wiped the dust off every single object. I cleaned his football trophies, his toy soldiers, the stuff on his desk and his books in the bookshelf. Khanum never found out that I cleaned Vafa’s room.

  I kept telling Taara that one day Vafa would stop us on the way to school just to see us and say hello. This never happened.