The Drum Tower Read online

  I stayed up all night, eavesdropping behind the pantry’s closed door. I wanted to hear Father’s voice. I wanted to store it in my head. He talked with Grandmother for a long time and at the end asked for money. I heard Khanum-Jaan’s softest voice, the voice she used only once in a long while when she called Taara “the light of her eyes.”

  Now Father went to the garden and drank some more with Assad in the rose arbor. The rest of the night I sat on the windowsill, looking out and listening. All I could see was the top of Father’s head and his fingers running through his salt and pepper curls. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but at one point Assad broke into loud laughter. Now there was silence, and a minute later Father recited a poem. I sharpened my ears, but the night breeze took his words away, leaving only the music behind. The lines all ended in long “a”s: baa, raa, saa, maa, daa.

  When dawn broke, I ran to Taara’s room to see Father through her northern window. Assad hid him under a blanket on the back seat of the Cadillac and took him away in the foggy twilight.

  The day after father’s visit, a few hours before New Year’s Eve, Taara and I put on our new dresses and headed toward Baba-Ji’s room to help him to get ready. We knew he couldn’t button his shirt or knot his tie.

  Taara’s dress was emerald velvet and it changed the golden specs in her eyes into pure green. Mine was cherry-red velvet, a bit too long and too large in the shoulders. Our dressmaker, Madame Abulian, had confused my measurements with Taara’s. My dress looked like a borrowed one. We both wore our gold chains, held hands as we did when we were little, and went to our grandfather’s room.

  When we entered Baba’s study, we found the lights out. Baba sat in his recliner, his back to us, facing the window that framed the blue-purple dusk. We turned on the light and approached him. He had fallen asleep. We called him, but he didn’t answer. We touched him; he didn’t wake. We listened to his heart—it pumped. We shook him, but he didn’t respond. We realized that our grandfather’s soul had moved somewhere else, somewhere cold, shady, and remote.

  I ran out to the garden, a scream rolling in my throat, but not rising. Boor-boor saw me running and shouted, and Jangi barked his loudest bark. I ran to the end of the garden where the tower was and climbed the stone steps to the balcony with four portholes on the sides. Facing the evening sky, I screamed from the bottom of my lungs, shouting words that had no meaning. I made unknown sounds, sounds beyond language. I thought I was calling Baba, calling him to the tower to play the Simorgh game with me. I thought I made sense and that this shouting would work, this made-up language would bring my grandfather back. I thought these utterly meaningless sounds would bring a miracle.

  Soon Assad came, lifted me in his arms, and carried me to the house. Doctor Shafa bent over Baba’s recliner, feeling his pulse. Khanum-Jaan, Daaye, Taara, and Assad circled around the doctor and my sleeping grandfather. Daaye sat me in a chair, rubbed my neck, and murmured prayers under her lips. The doctor said that neither he nor any doctor in the world could bring Baba back. He had to return himself. Now he injected something into my vein and I fell asleep, my head resting on Daaye’s arm.

  I’m not sure how long I slept, but when I woke up my head was full of cries, sometimes faint and confused, sometimes loud. When the cries became louder, I had to cover my mouth with my hands so as not to let the sounds out. If someone were to approach me, he would hear muffled moans rising from behind the wall of my throat.

  Lying in my room, I saw my sister through the open door standing by the window, hitting her head against the hard wooden frame. Taara, don’t! Taara, stop! I wanted to urge her, but no sound came out.

  This was when I sensed the oncoming winds blowing sand in the air, twisting and approaching our house, rippling among the now useless branches of the dryandra tree, whistling in the hollow brick tower. Doctor Shafa called my condition “shock and depression,” and recommended rest and strolls in the garden.

  Every day I walked around the pool where the willows grew tiny lettuce-colored leaves. I no longer feared the ghost of my great grandmother Negaar. That night on top of the tower, I had screamed out all my fears. I sat on the cold bench inside the rose arbor under the dried twigs of the crawling bushes, waiting for the winds to come. I didn’t go to school anymore. A few times a day, Assad visited me, bringing a jacket or a cup of warm tea. He sat next to me, smoothed my hair, and talked sweetly.

  “It’s cold, Talkhoon. Come in and eat something. I’ve made you cabbage soup. The kind you love! Guess what I’ve dropped in it?” He paused for a second and said, “A big bone full of marrow and a huge chunk of meat sticking to it. Red pepper to spice it up! Yummy! My mouth waters!”

  I didn’t respond, but Assad kept talking. He reported that Grandmother had locked herself in her room, not eating, not speaking a word. Doctor Shafa was concerned about her nerves. The aunties, he said, had taken Taara to their house because her final exams were approaching and she had to study hard. Daaye and he took turns sitting next to Baba’s bed just in case he moved his body or began to talk. They fed him liquid food with a small spoon, as they would a newborn baby. But the doctor believed that if he kept sleeping for too long, he would have to be connected to a tube.

  “Let’s go home, Talkhoon,” Assad insisted. “It’s cold here and my soup is steaming.”

  Diving in the Dusk

  A while passed—I have no idea how long. Taara came back from the aunties’ and moved to the only room on the vast asphalted roof. This small, square room was built by the first Grandpa Vazir for his armed watchman, and a watchman occupied it until the Vaziri dynasty collapsed. It was Khanum-Jaan who stopped hiring a guard. She installed barbed wire on the walls to protect the house.

  In spite of everything that had happened in the house, Taara had to take her final exams in May to graduate from high school. In two subjects she didn’t need much work, in the other two she needed tutors.

  Soon Khanum freed herself from her self-imposed prison and came out to take inventory of the household furnishings. She said she had dreamed that in her absence the grand piano had disappeared. So, click, click, click—she roamed around the house and took notes with a red pencil in her black notebook. The piano was there, but a pair of gold candlesticks and a gold-framed mirror with carvings around the rim—Great Grandmother Negaar’s wedding set—were lost.

  In this way life in the Drum Tower went on.

  In April a long season of rain began. The storm I’d foreseen approached and pushed the flood’s yellow water madly against the oak door. Strong winds blew in my head and I lay on my bed and held my head to keep it from spinning. When the winds calmed, Taara’s music dripped from her rooftop room. She played for long hours, day and night, and her books remained open, unread. It was as if she protected herself with her songs. She didn’t want to hear, to think, or to remember.

  It rained every morning and Taara in her black and white school uniform came down to her old room beside mine, looked out the northern window and smiled. I could read in her glowing face that something behind the curtain of rain filled her with joy. Now she came to my room, kissed my cheeks, and said good-bye. I stayed in bed, listening to the sounds in my head. I didn’t have a desire to scream anymore, nor did I want to roam in the wet garden. People who came to see me and talk to me and those who avoided me were all shadows—obscure and unreal.

  Khanum-Jaan didn’t talk to me anymore. After Father and Grandfather left us, her silence became absolute. She knew I was not well and had stopped going to school, she knew I was taking medication, but she never came to my room. In the last seance Grandpa Vazir must have finally removed her doubts about my origin. He must have announced that I was not her son’s daughter. Assad sat by my bed and nursed me the way he had when I was a baby and my mother had disappeared.

  So every evening, between the glare and the gloom, when the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared above Alborz Mountain, while Daaye prepared dinner and Assad fed Baba and Khanum sat in her nun’s cell,
writing a letter to her dead father, the winds howled loud and wild in my head and I played with the thought of climbing to the roof of the tower where I could see the whole world. But what would I do next? I did not know.

  At last, one evening, unable to stand the sweet smell of the purple hyacinths, the New Year’s blossoms with which Assad had decorated my room, I gave in to temptation and rushed to the garden. I walked through the thick dusk barefoot on the wet ground, and climbed the tower’s stone steps as light-footed as a ghost. I looked at a city I did not know—the turquoise minarets, the blue domes of the mosques, and tall buildings with glass walls glaring in the last rays of the sun. I saw the fresh green of the spring trees glowing in the fading light. I looked at the darkening garden and the winds told me to jump. A curtain parted a crack—Taara looked out and sighed. Behind the kitchen window, Daaye bent to lift a heavy pot. Assad turned the lights on and in the darkest moment of dusk, the house’s presence gripped my throat. Jump! the winds commanded. The city lights turned dim, the garden sank in darkness, and the winds prodded me. With a vague memory of Taara and myself as small girls wading in the pool, flat torsos naked, I held up my arms like a diver and, head first, I dived toward the ground.

  Confession

  Because I hit the feathery branches of the dryandra tree instead of the garden’s hard ground, Daaye announced the Almighty’s miracle, wore her mothball-smelling black chiffon dress, covered herself with her rose-water-scented chador, and walked all the way from College Intersection to the Shah’s Memory Square to her favorite mosque. She threw her savings in the dead Imam’s purse and walked all the way back, muttering prayers. Now she cooked sacred halva and saffron rice pudding and fed the beggars of the College Intersection who sat in all four corners.

  Khanum-Jaan, who hadn’t taken my sickness seriously at first, was alarmed and afraid. She sent me to the basement room so that I wouldn’t be alone with Taara. Doctor Shafa injected me with something that filled my head with puffy, white clouds and consoled Khanum by saying that I was not the only adolescent who had developed certain “conditions” after a family trauma. But Khanum saw everything in the only way she could.

  “Bad blood runs in her veins,” she said. “Her mother was crazy too. If dirty blood starts acting up, there is nothing any doctor can do about it. She tried to kill herself, didn’t she? No one, ever, in the Vaziri family, has attempted suicide. Trace our family tree back to the first Vaziris and see for yourself. We’ve always been brave and resilient. This is her dirty blood. And she’s going to hurt herself or someone else again. Now wait and see!” She said this and forbade Taara from visiting me in the basement room.

  But at least three times a day she sent Assad to check on me and keep me company. When he approached, I heard his plastic slippers scraping the courtyard’s brick floor. He limped to my room with a tray of food, a cup of warm tea, or a few wet pansies plucked from the flowerbed.

  “Go, Assad, go!” I heard Grandmother’s voice from the porch above my room. “Go, but don’t stay too long. Your jam will thicken!”

  Dizzy and numb with Doctor Shafa’s pills, I lay in my bed, looking at the long, narrow window that stretched almost to the ceiling. Boor-boor whose gilded cage was right behind my window, cracked sunflower seeds patiently and made little hills of husks on the cage’s floor. Now and then she sharpened her hard beak on the iron bars or hung upside down like a monkey, staring at me from this strange position.

  Lek, lek, lek—I heard the sound of Assad’s plastic slippers, closed my eyes and wished he’d vanish. But I knew he was bending over the flowerbed to pluck pansies for me. Jangi barked at him, demanding food. I heard Assad kick the dog and curse him. When he came to my room, he put the tray on the table and lay the moist blossoms next to my pillow. He sat, sighed, and rubbed his thighs like an old woman. Now he talked about this and that, reporting the news of Drum Tower.

  Taara’s young tutor, an engineer fresh from America—the same man who’d danced with her at Vafa’s wedding—had fallen in love with her. Khanum had eavesdropped behind the study room and heard him proposing.

  “Khanum is excited, Talkhoon. She approves of the boy’s family. She says it’s time for Taara to get married and bring some good blood to the family.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and added, “And, of course, some money! The boy’s father is one of the Shah’s top Generals. What do you think? Huh?”

  I kept looking at the ceiling, wishing Assad would vanish. But he stayed and laid his hand on my forehead to see if I had a fever. He touched my cheeks with his rough, kerosene-smelling fingers, sighed and said, “Poor girl, what would you do without me?”

  I pretended to fall asleep, closed my eyes and breathed deeper. But he continued to sit and talk, now in a different tone.

  “Talkhoon,” he whispered. “Talkhoon! Do you know who named you? You were three days old and your parents fought so much that they forgot to name you. Daaye was busy in the kitchen, so she sent me to change your wet diapers, to rock your cradle and put the pacifier in your little mouth. I held you in my arms, girl, and rocked you. You were a tiny, brown thing and you had a grassy smell. You were thin and delicate like the skinny leaves of a green herb, like a leaf of tarragon.

  “So I went back to the kitchen one day with you in my arms. I told Daaye, ‘You know what this little baby’s name should be?’ She said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Talkhoon!’ She said, ‘What nonsense! Talkhoon is an herb, like mint or basil. Here, I’ve picked some from Baba’s herb bed and I’m rinsing them for his lunch.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know, Daaye, look at the thin, needly leaves of this bunch of tarragon! This is how this baby is and she smells of the herbs, too.’ Daaye said, ‘You love this baby, silly boy!’ and laughed.

  “So I named you and fell in love with you when you were in your crib. Your mother vanished and then your father left, and Khanum kept busy with Taara, who was a year and a half old and as pretty as a little doll. She talked baby talk with her sweet tongue and took all of Khanum’s time and attention. Daaye cooked all day and I was left alone with you. I fed you, rocked you, and called you Talkhoon until everybody else called you Talkhoon, and this is where your name came from.

  “Now let me tell you that no other girl in the whole world is called Talkhoon. You are unique, and it’s all because of me. Now you’re sleeping and you can’t even hear me, but I still love you, child. When you dropped from the tower and I carried you all the way home in my arms, my heart banged against my chest like a huge drum and I wanted you in a crazy way—a way I’ve desired only one woman in my life. And that was very long ago. So they sent you down here and this made me happy. Because now I could nurse you as I did when you were a baby. No, I don’t want you to be sick. I want you to be healthy and come out of this basement room, but now that you’re sick, you’re all mine. You little girl—you tiny, needly, tasty, tarragon leaf.”

  He crept under my blanket, sniffed me all over, jerked in a crazy way, and panted like a dog.

  After that I stopped pretending to be asleep and avoided taking my pills, so as not to feel numb. I stayed alert and tolerated the tearing winds in my head. Assad came to my room and called, “Talkhoon! Where are you?” Knowing very well where I was. I was in the closet watching him through a hole I’d made in the door. He thought hiding in the closet was part of my craziness and he didn’t force me to come out. He sat in the middle of my messy room, chewed salted chickpeas, and fondled my things. He thought I couldn’t see him.

  “So you like to be in the closet now? Okay, I can wait. I’ll wait till you come out. I’ll wait till you recover. But I’ll wait for what? You may ask. I don’t even know. I’m going crazy too. Am I really your uncle? Are you Sina’s daughter? Am I Baba’s son?”

  He mumbled these things, touched my underwear, and left. But the next day he came back again, and I ran into the closet and heard him talking to himself. I had no doubt that it was Assad who had gone out of his mind, not me.

  In Search of the Sapphire Feather: The Tea
Room

  In my windy mind, Soraya and the Simorgh were somehow connected. If I found the bird’s feather, if I burned a barb, my mother would appear. So once a month when everyone went on the day-long shopping trip, I left my room in search of the sapphire feather.

  In front of the window, on his threadbare recliner, half-sitting, half-lying, Baba-Ji was left to himself. A transparent tube connected a hanging bottle to his vein. They didn’t feed him real food anymore.

  I gazed at Baba’s pale face and saw a shadow lingering above it. I pressed my fingers to the thick vein in his neck—it pulsated. I took a comb and brushed back his white hair, the way he liked it. I sprayed his favorite cologne on him and fixed the crooked collar of his pajama coat. Now I pushed his recliner forward, closer to the window, and adjusted the pillows in case he opened his eyes. Outside, at the bus stop, Taara and a girl talked. A man in a white raincoat craned his neck to see her.

  I talked to Baba-Ji the way I did when he was awake.

  “Where have you hidden the tail feather, Baba? Huh? Please! Just one word. Where? In the pages of your Golden Book? Your Tales of the Beasts? Your Conference of the Birds? Where is the sapphire feather, Baba?”

  I cleaned the Firebird record with alcohol and gently laid it on the gramophone. I turned the volume up. “Let the ghosts get disturbed. Damn them all. Damn Grandmother and her ancestors’ ghosts! Am I not right, Baba-Ji? Damn the damned ghosts. Let them get disturbed.”

  The strings went crazy and I remembered that Taara had once opened her arms and danced the bird dance. I tried to move, leap, turn and hop, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t a dancer.