The Drum Tower Page 8

  “He’s all yours now,” I told her. You know the rest.

  Tehran. Drum Tower. Summer 1322 A.H. 1943 AD.

  Look what has become of me, Papa! Of me and of the house. I’m only twenty-eight and my hair is graying. I’ve lost all my French and the grand piano hasn’t been opened for a decade. The key is lost and no one calls someone to make a key. But even if they open the piano, who will play? Who, in this house of gloom, can remember the happy tunes of the days gone?

  My hair is graying, Papa, but thank heavens I still have it. My heart is barred in a cage, but I’m light-footed like a deer, and healthy like a village girl. I can work in your house like a hired maid.

  Don’t feel sorry for me, Papa. Don’t say that my flower is working like a servant girl and no miracle will ever happen. There is hope. There is always hope. I sold that half crown with rubies around the rim, the gift from Akbar Shah of India to your ancestor. I sold it a few months ago in an auction. I had to do this when the university reduced my husband’s teaching hours. We’ve lived on this money ever since, and it will last us for a few more years. There are more things to sell in Drum Tower and I’m not worried at the moment. The day that the last sellable object leaves the house, my life will end, Papa, unless our fate turns between now and then, and something unexpected happens.

  But I don’t have any hope that my husband’s income will ever increase. He’s not a man, Papa, I didn’t marry a man. Do you know this? So what is he? you may ask. Why is he so aloof from our lives and our pressing needs? Why does he reside on a mountaintop half of the year and return with a sack of papers, a bird’s feather, or a pair of dried talons? Have I married a man or an otherworldly creature? A ghost? A bird? Or maybe an angel who doesn’t know human needs?

  I curse the day you enrolled me in the university to be the first woman in our family to attend higher education. I curse the day you sat me in this man’s class to learn literature and philosophy. What did I want all this nonsense for? If knowledge is meant to remove one from real life, it’s unnecessary and even destructive.

  But the past is past and I’m not blaming you for my marriage. Didn’t I have my own brain and my own heart, my own womanly instincts, to realize that this professor was not made to be a husband for me or for any girl, for that matter? Couldn’t I see his detachment from the tangible and his occupation with the strange, the nonexistent? Couldn’t I break the engagement that very first month, the very first week when he carried a bag full of papers with little green scribbles on them, like live worms, to the restaurant where we sat in candle light? He didn’t even touch his food, or notice the candles and the roses. He didn’t hear the violins playing for us on the terrace. Instead, he read long passages from his damnable manuscript that turned into the nightmare of our lives. He read for me as if I cared how many cursed poems were written on the subject of a bloody bird that had talons as big as human fists, lifted live elephants, lived one thousand years, and didn’t even exist.

  No, I won’t let you feel sorry for me, Papa. It was meant for me to become unhappy. It was meant for all of us. It was the way the stars were patterned and the planets were aligned when we were born. It was meant to be that the damned Shah, that illiterate peasant with the borrowed English crown, would take your seal and confiscate your lands. It was fated for our fortune to turn its back on us. That Mother must die and leave you alone in your old age. The garden, your paradise, must burn in ruthless summers and then you must perish under a mosquito tent on a folding bed, leaving me with two half-sane spinster sisters, an insane husband, an ignorant maid, these boys, and the torment of the girl’s hair which was all that remained of her, floating, floating like strange sea weeds that could choke—

  And now, sitting here, on this porch, in the dark, I look at my sons on top of the tower. Their kites rise in the evening sky, and the boy, one year older than my oldest, stands at the foot of the tower, watching them.

  I swear to all the sacred ones, to your dear soul, Papa, I swear to my mother’s innocence, that I’ve never forbidden this boy to join my sons’ games, to mingle with them like a brother, to eat and sleep with them, but it is as if he feels something, senses something unsayable. He is a strange boy, Papa—clever, cunning, and calculating. He knows where his place is. He stands at the foot of the tower where he belongs.

  Tehran. Drum Tower. Summer 1332 AH. 1953 AD.

  I made a high wall, finally, to keep from looking at the bottom of the tower. I told them I couldn’t bear to see the garden dying—a lie. I’d seen the garden dying since I was twelve. I could go on witnessing its decay. What I couldn’t bear to see was the foot of the tower, that fresh, smoothed soil, that small area between the tower and the honeysuckle bushes, where nothing grows.

  For twenty years, Papa, as if I’d lost my wits, or was under a strange, stupefying spell, I sat every single evening on this porch, faced the tower and the fresh brown soil at its foot, watched the honeysuckle blossoms falling, covering the earth. I sat like someone hypnotized, and it never occurred to me that I could raise a wall and conceal the earth at the foot of the tower.

  Now the bricklayers are laying bricks on top of bricks, raising the wall, hiding the garden. Your boy is twenty now. He doesn’t look like anyone in the world. I can’t describe him the way you expect me to. He is lame—born lame—but he is strong and hard-working, like a mule. He has rolled up his sleeves and the bottom of his pants, has jumped on top of the half-built wall and is helping the mason. Again, no one has asked him to do this. He wants to work, without caring about the purpose of the job. This must be his peasant blood. Is he stupid? Oh yes, he is, but then no, he is not. I’ve said this before. He didn’t stay in night school, he can’t read and write well, but he is not ashamed to talk. He is oddly opinionated and capable of taking care of himself—unlike my sons.

  My husband is away again. He is writing chapter eight or nine of his cursed book on top of one of his mountains. Except for small excerpts published once in a while here and there, in magazines that normal people never read, nothing of the manuscript is published, and he is thinking about retiring from the university to be able to speed up his work.

  Sina helps him. He sits in his father’s study, sometimes till morning, copies the chapters, and listens to his endless, insane lectures on the subject of the bloody bird. I’m worried for my son. When he leaves the house, he mingles with the vagabond youth that gather in the corner cafes, discussing cheap politics. No plan for the future, no interest in a career. He scribbles meaningless poems on cigarette papers and matchboxes and then loses them. I collect these square pieces of wrinkled paper from all around the house. I force myself to read what is written on them, but they don’t make any sense. He is my first born, Papa, my dearest, handsomest, kindest son. He has your delicate ways, your gentleness, and your gallantry. He has your tall and erect posture, your wide shoulders, your dark, calming eyes. But at eighteen he is vain, absent-minded, and fragile, like the stem of a fresh eglantine. I don’t understand my son, Papa; his head is wrapped in blue clouds.

  At the end of the second decade following your death, Papa, I have no good news for you, except that Kia, my second one, might win a government scholarship and go to France to make something of himself and save us from future misery. He is the ambitious one. Studies day and night and teaches himself French and German. He plans to pursue the family trade—court politics! Imagine! He says he wants to become Prime Minister one day, and by God, he is so capable. But all I want from him is to pursue his studies in France and get a respectable job. I must have someone sane to support me in my old age, someone reliable. Am I wrong, Papa?

  The condition of the house: long ago I dismissed the gardener and his wife. The woman would just sit around in the kitchen with Daaye, gossiping and creating all sorts of horror stories about Drum Tower. I got rid of the couple, mostly because of the woman. If the garden is dying, no gardener can save it. So once a month I hire someone for a day to pull the weeds and trim the bushes and I f
eed fewer mouths.

  I closed up the whole third floor, finally. It was a waste of time and energy to keep it clean and Daaye is getting old and slow. I emptied the rooms, brought some of the furniture down, and auctioned off the rest. I noticed that certain objects were missing. Didn’t we have an hourglass, Papa—a gift from the minister of somewhere? It’s lost. And the gold-framed oval mirror is missing too. If anything small is lost, I’m not aware of it. But how could these objects leave the house?

  And the last news: I’m five months pregnant and not ashamed. I look at least ten years younger. But how did this happen? Did I invade the saint’s study while walking in my sleep one night? Or, like Holy Mary, was the seed of God planted in me when I was drifting in my nightmares? My third will be like a child to its older brothers, Papa. This was meant to happen. This child is destined to save us all.

  Tehran. Drum Tower. Summer 1342 AH. 1963 AD.

  I hate to ruin my anniversary letters, Papa, with the report of my ongoing misery. But how can I not talk to you? Who else do I have?

  That lunatic left a week ago and I’m relieved but unhappy. How can I ever feel happy, seeing my son melting like a candle inside that rose arbor with his package of cigarettes and a bottle of wine? Didn’t I tell him three years ago, when he brought this loose woman to my house, that she was not his kind? One glance was enough for me to see through the girl. My son could pick any of this type on the grounds of the university campus and he picked the worst of the kind. A weed among flowers, an unknown, unnamed wild grass that grows at the edge of the gutters in any rotten alley of this infested city. He brought this soft-brained trash to my house as his wife, so what could I do when the deed was done?

  But you know the rest, Papa; I’ve written to you many times. I’ve written about her night walks, her wild cries, loud laughter and wine drinking, her Gypsy dances and her long conversations with herself, as if she’d been raised by fiends or demons. And she has left two girls, one a year and a half old, running in the long corridors, screaming and calling her mother, the other just a few days old, starving in the crib, no voice rising from her weak lungs. The first one might very possibly be my son’s, but I swear to your dear soul, Papa, that the second cannot belong to us. How could she? The whore stayed out of the house every night, or if she was inside, she didn’t let her husband share her bed. Since the first one was born, Sina has been sleeping in his old room.

  But can I throw the two orphans out, Papa? Would you do this if you were in my place? I know you wouldn’t and I won’t. Didn’t I keep your boy in Drum Tower? I’ll shelter the girls too. This is my destiny, to run an orphanage in my ancestral house.

  And Kia is not coming back. Four years of studies at the Sorbonne turned into ten years of wandering in Europe, and now he has a hybrid wife I’ve never met. He phones me from the Alps or other frozen mountains and his voice is as cold as the countries he’s calling from, and as remote as it could be. With a tinge of an accent, he tells me that he’ll come only if the Ministry offers him a high-level job. How did I ever assume that this one was going to protect me in my old age?

  The old man is lost on top of Mount Ghaf, buried under hundreds of pages of his Chapter Eleven. The bird has finally taken over. There is no hope. The Simorgh will sooner or later devour him. Now he is using the tiny hand of my nine-year-old Vafa to copy his chapters for him. Sina gave up long ago, realizing only too late that his mad father had wasted his time.

  From where I’m sitting on my accustomed place on the porch, in the exact spot that I set your mosquito tent thirty years ago, I can see the tall wall that conceals the garden. Most of the tower is hidden and only the top is visible. The servant boy is up there with a long broom, sweeping the dry leaves and cleaning the balcony, as if the drummers were going to come and beat their drums to announce the time. Thirty years have passed since you abandoned me, Papa, but it is as if you are dying in my arms now.

  Tehran. Drum Tower. Summer 1352 AH. 1973 AD.

  I dream, Papa, I dream. I take my dreams to dream interpreters and they don’t make head or tail of them. But I know my own dreams better than any dream reader. I see myself on top of the brick tower, not in the hollow balcony where the drummers used to stand, but on the very top, on the roof of the tower where no one ever climbs. I see myself bending down, looking at the earth below, at that patch of perpetually fresh earth in which nothing grows, and on which only the dead blossoms of honeysuckle fall and rot. I bend down, looking at that patch of earth, and it opens a crack. Then it opens more; the crack widens, and some strange, sucking power, gravity a hundred times intensified, pulls everything inside the earth’s dark womb. It wants to suck in the whole tower. I feel myself falling, being pulled into the earth, but with a very slow, lingering motion, as if it will take me all my life to get there, yet I have to witness my fall, suffer and bear every second of it, a lifelong fall from the top of the tower into the dark crack of the earth in which someone else is lying, and I know who she is. And why should I sink into the same spot? I reason this way with myself but this reasoning does not change anything at all.

  Now something strange happens, Papa, something that takes even me by surprise. While descending, I look up for a split second, and in the indigo sky I see the Simorgh, as large as a passenger plane, each of her talons the size of a big man’s hand. She is sapphire blue, glittering in the last rays of the sun, her rainbow-feathered wings hanging long like a woman’s hair, extending to the earth. She hovers above me as if wanting to lift me up. In my dream I wonder if she is here to save me, and I wake up somewhere between the earth and the sky, my fate undecided.

  It’s madness. I know. It’s sheer madness. My insane husband has driven me mad too. Sina is gone, Vafa is gone, Kia has not returned, my sisters are gone. They’ve all left me. I’m here in Drum Tower with the old man, the maid, the orphan girls, and the lame one who is my sole companion now.

  The girls live their school life together and spend most of their time with their grandfather. They resent me and they don’t hide it well. Now they copy the bird pages and sit all night listening to this eternal madness. Meanwhile, the lame one and I rest on this porch each day at dusk, crack sunflower seeds like the old parrot, and chat like washerwomen squatting by the stream after a long day of hard work.

  The key to the grand piano remains lost. My French vocabulary is lost. I search the abandoned third floor and I don’t find my playroom—the almond-shaped room. That red locomotive and all the little houses are lost.

  This is forty years after your death, Papa. And I’m still falling.

  Reunion in the Tower

  It rained, the wind shifted from west to east, and hail hit my window like small pebbles. If it wasn’t for the rain, I could hear everything, but the sound of the storm and Boor-boor’s constant screams covered the voices of the house. All I could hear was Khanum shouting, Taara crying, Assad saying something, and Khanum screaming again. Then, above my head, I heard Taara running onto the porch, then down the steps to the courtyard. For a second I thought she was heading to my room to throw herself into my arms and cry on my shoulder, but she ran out of the courtyard to the dark, wet garden, toward the tower.

  “Stay up there all night, you ungrateful brat,” Khanum screamed on the porch. “Is this the way you appreciate what I’ve done for you? Why did I raise you? Why did I sacrifice my life for you? Who obliged me to bring you and your sister up? To feed you, to keep you warm and give you love? And now when it’s your turn to show love and respect, to think about my old age, you betray me, you stab me in the back. You want to lose this once-in-a-lifetime chance and ruin us all! Am I trying to marry you off to an old, toothless man? To a cripple? Or to a young, handsome, noble man? Who do you want as a husband, anyway? Huh? A vagabond? A street person? A good-for-nothing? Go to the tower and stay with the birds and bats! I wash my hands of you, as I did with Vafa! Go!”

  She banged the door but kept shouting inside. Her voice was muffled now and most of her words were
lost among Boor-boor’s screams, Jangi’s angry barking, and the rain that hit the windowpanes like small rocks.

  Neither Daaye nor Assad brought a dinner tray for me and I realized that upstairs it was still stormy. So I waited for the lights to go out, then picked up a flashlight and an old blanket and left the room. Boor-boor was a wet ball of shabby feathers, shivering in her gilded cage. Busy with the commotion upstairs, they had forgotten to cover the bird—something they would never forget on other rainy nights. But I didn’t feel sorry for my prison keeper. Let her catch cold and die! Let the damn parrot perish!

  It had been a while now that Jangi became friendly with me. All those untouched meals I’d fed him had done their work. He was even fond of me, wagging his tail to get my attention, to please me. So I squatted in front of the huge gray dog and stroked his wet, wooly hair. I put a sugar cube in his mouth; he chewed and licked my fingers greedily. I told him, “Jangi, go to your crate!” He obeyed.

  I held the blanket over my head and walked through the wet garden, following the flashlight. Ghosts don’t exist, ghosts don’t exist. I chanted Baba’s phrase. When I found myself at the foot of the decaying tower guarded by the bushy dryandra, I felt more secure. Nothing would happen to me by the Simorgh’s tree.

  One hundred and thirty-five stone steps. As a child I’d climbed these steps many times, alone or when playing with Taara and Vafa. But now I breathed heavily, my knees buckled, and I felt shaky and weak. Months of medication, lack of exercise, and feeding my meals to Jangi had weakened my body. I held my hand against the cold, mossy wall and climbed the steps to the tower’s balcony. Taara sat holding her legs in her arms, gazing at the moving clouds. She was not weeping.