The Drum Tower Read online

  “I could never dance, Baba. I’ve never hummed a song, either. I don’t know how to whistle. ‘You’re a sad, sad child,’ Assad tells me. ‘Talkhoon is a bitter herb,’ Assad says. ‘You’re sharp and bitter.’

  “’Talkhoon is originally two words,’ you said once, ‘talkh’ and ‘khoon.’ Talkh means bitter, khoon means blood. ‘Bitter blood.’ That’s what my name means.

  “Assad named me bitter blood. This was when everybody was busy and didn’t have time to name me. They were fighting, or talking to the ghosts. You were writing the book of the bird. Why didn’t you name me, Baba? You’d find a bird name for me, wouldn’t you? Rokhy, Anka, Garuda, Oshadega—

  “You didn’t name Taara, either. Grandpa Vazir did. His ghost, I mean. He said to Khanum, ‘Name her Taahereh, for purity!’

  “No one was around to name me. Assad took me to the kitchen in his arms. I’m sure his shirt smelled of onions and his mouth stank of vodka. I was named in the kitchen, above Daaye’s cabbage soup. Talkhoon. Tarragon. Bitter blood.

  “Where is the feather, Baba?

  “I looked inside all your sources. ‘My sources,’ you used to say. ‘Organize my sources, Talkhoon. Write their names on these cards.’ I did all that when I was only six. Remember? I learned to read by reading your classic poets—Nezami and Attar, Hafez and Rumi. I can’t find the sapphire feather, Baba. You lost it!”

  Now I walked barefoot through the house, roamed the rooms, stepped on cold tiles and slippery marble until a chill ran up my spine. I walked on soft silk carpets, opened doors, closed doors, and breathed in the scent of the lost ones. No one dusted Vafa’s room after I stopped. His football trophies were under a layer of dust on top of his bookshelf. The pages of his books were yellowing. The pencils he wrote with were in a cup full of dust.

  No one had cleaned my room, either. Since I’d been banished to the basement a thick layer of gray powder sat on everything. I was among the unwanted, the ones Khanum didn’t like or had liked once, but now resented. She took revenge on us by not dusting our rooms, by letting our rooms decay. She left the objects alone to die. Nothing was worse than being buried under the dust. She knew it so well.

  My parents’ bridal bed. Their closet. My mother’s hats, shoes, dresses. Father’s suits. All hanging. Khanum-Jaan didn’t give things to charities. Didn’t help the beggars. Didn’t donate them to thrift shops. Objects stayed where they were, for years, centuries, buried under the white dust. Objects aged and died a natural death. Khanum wanted to see their decay. She wanted to see Sina’s suit dying, Vafa’s tennis shoes dying, my ninth-grade books stacked on the desk, dying.

  I wanted to wear my mother’s long soiree gown—a dark blue color. She must have worn this at the Shah’s Coronation Ball, because this was the fanciest dress in the closet, with shiny beads all over its wide collar. But I changed my mind. I was not pretty. My hair was thin and short. I didn’t even have breasts. Instead, I put on Father’s suit—navy blue with white stripes. I posed in front of the tall mirror and frowned like an angry man. Too large and too long. I rolled up the bottom of the trousers and roamed around the master bedroom. Satin lining felt slippery and soft. Now I was invisible. No one could see me.

  I stood in front of Great Grandma Negaar’s portrait. As usual, she had a reproachful look. Silly girl! How silly you are, Talkhoon. Take off that suit! But I didn’t listen. Damn you! You’re a ghost. But how real they’ve painted you, Great Grandma! I touched her white gown. It felt real, rough and bumpy, like lace. But now something happened. Something strange. Who could imagine Grandma Negaar’s tall picture would be a door and would open?

  I stepped into an L-shaped room. It was carefully furnished. The best furnished room of the house. The floor was covered with a silk carpet—soft green with cream-colored aigrettes all around. A large tapestry covered the wall: The story of Leili and Majnoon, the legendary lovers. His torso naked, love crazy, Majnoon with his long hair hanging down to his waist cried in the desert. Leili’s father had married her to another man. Miserable lions and leopards sat around Majnoon, weeping with him. Leili was in the right corner, in a long wedding gown, her hair wavy and dark, sweeping the floor. She wept for Majnoon. Two maidens fanned her with wide peacock-feathered fans. They wept too.

  This room was cozy and fancy at the same time. The best room of Drum Tower had been hidden from all of us. Cushions lay against all the walls—each cushion cover, a needlework made by a tasteful ancestor. Low tables were set in front of the puffy mattresses. A polished silver samovar sat in a corner surrounded by gold-rimmed tea glasses and a china sugar container full of sugar cubes. The samovar was filled with water and dry tea leaves were ready to be brewed in the china teapot. Someone had prepared everything for a tea party.

  In the short extension of the L there was a round oak table and five chairs. There was no dust in the room. This was the tearoom, where children had never been allowed. Oh, Vafa, what fun we could’ve had in this room, if we’d only discovered it! We could’ve toppled the samovar and burned this silk carpet too. We could’ve done mischief.

  I turned on the electric samovar to make some tea for myself and searched the room for the sapphire feather. But why would Baba-Ji hide the feather here? He might not have stepped into this room at all. This secret place belonged to Khanum’s ghosts.

  I gave up searching and sat on the cushions, looking out a wide glass door. This was a greenhouse. Large, pink, Damascus roses and miniature rose-shaped eglantines were surrounded by green, feathery ferns. English Ivies hung from the ceiling of the greenhouse. Water gurgled in a small turquoise fountain. A canary sat in a golden cage. But the bird was still and quiet.

  Water boiled. I made some tea, poured a glass and left it to cool. But now I heard voices from behind the wall. My heart pounded in my throat. In panic, I ran to the greenhouse and hid behind the flower pots. Soon, the tapestry-covered wall rotated and Khanum-Jaan, the aunties, a pale-looking woman, and Sayyed Mirza in his black suit and red fez entered. My grandmother led her guests to the oak table and went to the samovar to prepare some tea.

  She saw the water boiling, the tea ready, and one glass already poured. She screamed and clenched her chest, as if to keep her heart from bursting. The women gathered around her, fanned her and talked at the same time.

  “Papa Vazir is here. My father is here!” Khanum mumbled in tears. “He knew we wanted him today, and he came even before we called him.”

  The aunties wiped their tears and talked at the same time.

  “He’s poured himself a glass of tea,” Aunty Puran said and wept.

  “We came in and scared him. He must have left,” Aunty Turan said.

  Now Sayyed Mirza urged the ladies to calm down and sit. The black tassel on top of his red fez dangled when he talked. The women sat. They all held hands and murmured something. Khanum-Jaan wept all through the prayers. She was beside herself.

  Hiding behind the tall, crawling roses, crazy winds loose in my head, I saw how the top of the oak table turned like a wheel and the women cried.

  A while after the séance, after Khanum and her sisters talked to their dead father and the pale lady shook and shivered, foamed at the mouth and spoke with the ghost’s thick voice, a long time after they all left, I went back to the tea room and collapsed on the cushions. Although I knew it was I who’d made the tea, not Grandpa Vazir’s ghost, the effect of the whole ritual had shaken my weak nerves.

  It was dark outside. Any minute now, Daaye would go to my basement room with the dinner tray to find me missing. Any minute now they would realize that I was lost. In haste, I ran to the wall and pressed the tapestry, but nothing happened. I pushed every single spot of the picture and it didn’t move. A long time passed and I became dizzy from hunger. I ate all the sugar cubes and drank cold tea. Now I needed to pee. But there was no toilet around. I peed in the fountain and tried to find a way out again. At last I heard voices rising from behind the wall: “Talkhoon! Talkhoon! Where are you?” But soon the v
oices faded away.

  I lay down on the cushions and through the glass door of the greenhouse followed the moon’s slow motion, floating in the lavender sky. The winds blew in my head and I covered my ears to keep from hearing them, but they grew louder. Now the sky became darker and I feared the ghosts. What if Grandma Negaar in her wheelchair rolled down here to visit her husband? What if they saw me and got mad at me for entering their territory?

  Ghosts don’t exist! Ghosts don’t exist!

  I wept and the people of the tapestry wept with me.

  The next day, I made some tea. I had nothing to eat and the tea was all I had to drink. No one called my name anymore. I held my breath and heard the house breathing quietly. I daydreamed all day and the winds blew in my head. I touched and studied every single object carefully. The greenhouse canary was made of painted wood. The ivies, roses and ferns were all made of silk and plastic. Khanum-Jaan’s greenhouse was a fake.

  The fountain bubbled real water. I peed in it.

  At the end of the second day, the wall rotated and Khanum came in. She found me in my father’s suit, sleeping under the picture of the crazy lovers. Sugar crumbs and tea stains had ruined the embroidered cushions and the empty samovar had heated almost to burning. The plastic leaves were plucked and the fountain gurgled yellow, smelly water. One shout was enough to wake me up.

  She grabbed my right ear and lifted me in the air. I hunched over in case she wanted to beat me, but she didn’t. She cursed my mother and said if I was really crazy I belonged in a crazy house. Now she took me to the garden through a door in the greenhouse (which I hadn’t noticed because it was concealed by a fake fern). We walked among tangled trees and dark passages in silence. Khanum’s slippers got soiled when we stepped in a puddle of muddy water and she cursed again and prodded me. We reached the walled courtyard. She took her key chain in her hand and searched among the many keys. It was dark and her eyes were bad. At last, she opened the narrow wooden door and we entered the courtyard. She pushed me down toward my basement room and waited for me to change and give her back my father’s suit. She grumbled some more because the bottoms of the pants were muddy.

  I knew why she’d taken me to my room from the garden and not from the tapestry-covered door. She didn’t want my sister to see me. She protected her little Taara from the crazy one.

  The same night she sent Uncle Assad to my room to watch me. I stayed in the closet the whole night. I watched Assad, instead of him watching me. Through the hole of the closet door I saw him stealing my underwear, stockings, and hair ribbons, and shoving them into his pockets. Now he played with my childhood dolls, caressing their plastic hair and smelling their rubber bodies. At last, he fell asleep on my bed and began to snore loudly. I dozed in the closet, but every few minutes I opened my eyes in panic. All through the night I watched the room through that narrow hole.

  In Search of the Sapphire Feather: Khanum-Jaan’s Closet Room

  At the end of a spacious bedroom in which neither of my grandparents slept, a door opened to a walk-in closet. No one remembered when exactly Khanum began to use this small, windowless storage room as her solitary confinement.

  In her cell, my grandmother slept on a narrow bed covered with a woolen gray blanket, the kind soldiers use. Next to the bed stood a small table on top of which rested a large, black marble box, almost as wide as the table. A closet with sliding doors extended along the right wall. There was nothing more. No mirror, no window, no flower pot, no radio, no shaded lamp, no bottle of cologne, no clock, no calendar. Nothing. This was a soldier’s temporary residence, a poor student’s dormitory. A nun’s room.

  On my second trip in search of the sapphire feather I looked around Khanum’s room, then opened her closet. Black silk blouses and black crepe skirts hung in a row like a dozen headless mourners on the way to a funeral. There was no color other than black in my grandmother’s closet except for a long, gray, fur coat (probably her mother’s) at the very end, wrapped tightly in a plastic cover full of mothballs. On the floor, identical black shoes sat in a row, all flat soled, ugly and gloomy. Only one pair of golden slippers with three centimeters of iron heels glowed among the mourning shoes.

  I wore a silk blouse and a crepe skirt and wished I could arrange my hair in ringlets, the way Khanum did when she had company or was invited somewhere. Now I sat on her narrow bed and set the heavy black box next to me. The box didn’t have a lock, so I opened the lid. As if I was about to see a severed head, my heart hammered and almost broke out of my chest. I was searching for the sapphire feather, I told myself. But would Baba ever ask Khanum to hide it? And if Khanum stole it, wouldn’t she destroy the instrument of sorcery, as she’d always called Baba’s research material? So I knew the feather was not here or anywhere in Khanum-Jaan’s room, but still I opened the box. What had Grandmother hidden here?

  Stacks of envelopes. Five stacks. Neatly organized and tied separately by narrow red ribbons. Under each stack and in between, dried rose buds scented the letters. The buds, once red, had faded to yellow and turned to powder when touched. There was nothing more. No sapphire feather, no Simorgh’s yellow egg, no priceless family gem, no severed head, no mystery. Just stacks of white envelopes, dried rose buds in between.

  These five stacks were divided by decades. On the first envelope she had written with red ink, “1933-1943,” on the second, “1943-1953,” and so on. I wished I could read every single letter, but I didn’t have enough time for even one stack. So I decided to read the first letter of each stack to satisfy my curiosity.

  Letters to a Dead Father

  Tehran. Drum Tower. Summer 1312 AH. 1933 AD.

  It was in this ominous season, this summer of burnt star jasmines and loose ghosts in the garden that you left me. You left me with the burden of your loss and the weight of this old, decaying house on my narrow shoulders. Now, at the end of summer, all I can write to you is the account of your death. You died in a hellish heat that choked your jasmines before they could ever bloom. The dry garden smelled of burned leaves those days and the house was a furnace. You were perishing, Papa.

  So we set the tent—your mosquito net—on the porch and the girl sat behind the transparent wall with that wide bamboo fan in her hand. You rested on a narrow canvas bed, listening to the sounds of the garden, moaning or whispering something inaudible. You never cried; you didn’t curse the pain, or your bitter fate. You bore your anguish majestically, like a prince, Papa. But I knew your agony and felt it in the marrow of my bones. I burned with fever and shivered with chills with you.

  I sat on the edge of the narrow bed that night, held your hand, and listened to the sounds of the garden and your faint moans. The girl behind the net fanned you, switching hands or using both. Her face had no expression. The girl’s face was always as blank as a wall.

  You opened your eyes, squeezed my hand and brought it to your cold lips. But you did this with much effort, as if lifting solid stone. You kissed my hand gently, as you always did, then you whispered to me to go to bed and rest; you said you were fine. But you were not fine, Papa. You were dying and I sat with you as long as I felt your pulse under my fingers.

  The house was empty at that time. Daaye was in the village, trying to find a husband for her daughter, and I was alone in the house with the girl and the ghost of my mother who roamed around in her squeaking wheelchair, knowing that you were going to join her soon.

  You remember all this, don’t you? Can you remember things in that realm, or is it all oblivion there? You remember that I was alone with you all summer; my sisters were in Europe with Mademoiselle Marie and they didn’t even know that you had fallen ill. Their letters came once a week, but I never wrote them of your illness, because I didn’t want them to return. I wanted you all for myself; the girl didn’t count. How could she ever be counted—Daaye’s daughter, a servant, a child barely fourteen, an ignorant, peasant girl who walked barefoot around the house in her cotton pajamas, with her callused feet and unwashed hair? That ha
ir, hanging down her back like a long, thick rope, sweeping the floor, became the everlasting image of my nightmares, Papa.

  I never blamed you for what happened. So there was no need to forgive. But in the last minutes, just before dawn, just before the dim light of the sun penetrated the transparent net, you whispered, “Forgive me, flower!” I laid my hand lightly, like the caress of a feather, on your mouth to silence you. I didn’t want Hessam-Mirza Vaziri, the Minister of War and the son of many ministers back to the Great Nader Shah, to ask forgiveness from his eighteen-year-old daughter for something that was a common practice for a man of his status. Who sought forgiveness from anyone? From his own child, for that matter? So you whispered into my warm hand as if I were not your daughter, but your beloved wife, Negaar, and as if she, Negaar, not I, had seen you from the crack of the pantry door, on the rough burlap sacks of rice, lying half naked, unbraiding that twisted rope–that boa–to cover the girl’s small body with a blanket of unnatural hair—that mass of hair that became the torment of my dreams in the dark nights of my future life.

  “Forgive me” was the last thing you said before you left, and believe me, Papa, at that exact moment, the moment of your departure, the restless, wandering wheelchair stopped squeaking under the willows and dawn invaded our tent like an unwelcome guest.

  All I wanted was peace and darkness, but the ruthless sun sent its arrows down from the top of the tower as if a war was breaking out. The girl stopped fanning and stood. She felt it. She saw me bending over your body, heard me weeping, and stood outside the tent like a shadow, round in the middle, small and spent, at age fourteen—a question mark with no phrase before and no comment after, a vague thing, a shade. I wept for a while over your cold body, closed your lids with my fingers gently, so as not to disturb your peaceful departure, and left the tent.