My Father's Notebook (10 page)

“Sewing numbers,” Tina sighed.

“Why sewing numbers?” I gestured.

“I don’t know. A lot of people in the shop sew numbers on carpets. Then they load the carpets into a truck and take them to the train. And the train brings them to … I don’t know … far, far away.”

“May Allah protect us,” Tina said. “Aga Akbar, the magician, has become a seamstress!” She went into the storeroom and locked the door.

A week later I started school. The arrangements had been made by one of the men my father worked with. The school was on the other side of town, about three or four miles away. Because no buses went that way, I had to walk, like all the other children.

As soon as school was finished, I went straight home. I was
worried about Tina. Kazem Khan had told me to keep an eye on her, because there was a wild animal inside her—a wolf.

One afternoon I came home to find my sisters playing quietly. Tina was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know why, but suddenly I sensed the presence of the wolf.

“Where’s Tina?” I asked.

They didn’t know. I opened the door to the storeroom and peered into the darkness. There was no sign of Tina. I ran over to the neighbours.

“Hello, is Tina here?”

No, she wasn’t. So far, she’d had little contact with the neighbours. I raced home and went back to the storeroom. I stood in the dark for a while, but I still couldn’t see her. Then I listened intently and heard a sound. It was Tina. Or not really Tina. The gleaming eyes of the wolf stared back at me from the darkest corner of the storeroom. God help me, I didn’t know what to do. If we’d been in the village, I would have jumped on the horse, ridden straight to Kazem Khan’s and cried, “Come quick! The wolf is back!”

But we weren’t in the village and Kazem Khan wasn’t here.

So I took a step backwards, as I had seen Kazem Khan do, and called softly to my sister, “Go and get the Holy Book!” She snatched the book off the mantel and handed it to me.

I knelt by the storeroom door, turned to the wild beast, kissed the cover, closed my eyes, opened the book to a page and began to chant:

As I recited the sura, I quietly took one step forward, then another. Reciting all the while, I held out my hand to her and saw the light go out in the wolf’s eyes. I went on until I felt Tina’s hand seek mine in the darkness. “Come, Tina, come!” I whispered. “Let’s go eat.” She struggled to her feet and then walked into the living room.

I look out my window and I see the wolf running through the Dutch polder.

Let it run, let it go, let the wolf lose its way on this new ground, so it will never be able to find its way back to Tina.

I’m sitting in my attic again, but it’s hot, almost too hot to work. I read … no, that’s not really the right word … I run my pencil along the words, the phrases, in my father’s notebook, then feed them—or, rather, whatever fragments of text I can understand—into my computer. It’s not an easy job. I’m forced to base my story on the frequently indecipherable and incomprehensible thoughts of another person. Usually I keep working until a headache forces me to stop.

The attic is my office. I sit up here nearly all day. My daughter goes to school and my wife works part-time in Lelystad. On her off days I go to my classes in Dutch literature at the University of Utrecht.

I get headaches because I don’t know how to proceed with the story. A couple of times I’ve thought about quitting, but in the end I always go on.

I hear children playing in the schoolyard. They’re giggling and shouting, “Stop, stop!” I go over to the window and see the teacher spraying the kids with a hose. They grab the hose and turn it on her, until she’s soaking wet. She runs, laughs and takes off her shoes. The kids chase after her. She runs, laughs and takes off her wet blouse.

It’s hot. Everyone’s sitting in the shade of an umbrella or under a tree. Trailers are parked up and down the street, since everyone has just got back from their holidays.

I didn’t go on holiday this year, though my wife and daughter spent a few weeks in Germany with friends. I chose to spend my time working on the book. I need to find the right form for the story before the autumn semester begins.

I go outside and do something no one else is doing in this heat: I run a few laps. To hell with the computer and Aga Akbar’s notebook.

I run to get away from the story, but, as it turns out, I meet it head-on. I run down a path that used to be the bottom of the sea, then climb to the top of the dyke. Off in the distance are becalmed sailboats. I run to the end of the dyke, with beads of sweat dripping from my forehead. My headache has finally disappeared. I know how the story should continue.

I sit on the couch and watch the news. Prince Claus, the husband of the Dutch queen, was giving a speech at an award ceremony, when he suddenly took off his tie, urged men to liberate themselves from “the snake around their necks” and tossed it into the air. The camera shows the tie in slow motion, sailing up in a high arc, then fluttering gently to the floor.

Prince Claus is right—ties are a thing of the past. You can see it in clothing stores. Men’s ties are always on sale—first 50 per cent off, then 75 per cent off, and finally marked down so much that you can buy a good green silk tie for only a guilder.

A few months before the student association’s party at the university, I bought myself a tie. On the big night, I put it on and went to the party. One second after I entered the room, I put my hand over the knot and headed for the gents’. Everyone was dressed in jeans and T-shirts. I was the only one in a suit and tie.

It was my first time to wear a tie as an adult, but the second time in my life to furtively take one off and stuff it in my pocket. The earlier occasion had been in my childhood, soon after we moved to the city.

One evening my father came home with two ties: a grassy green one for me and a bright red one for himself.

First he knotted mine, then he went over to the mirror to tie his own.

“Why do we have to wear these ties?” I signed.

“I want to take you into town.”

“Why with a tie?”

“All the men in town wear a tie,” he signed back.

Tina wasn’t home. She and my sisters were visiting a woman who’d recently moved to the city. Clearly, my father didn’t want Tina to know about the ties. That wouldn’t be a problem—from the day I was born, my father had been teaching me not to divulge his secrets.

We walked to the heart of the city, to a street I’d never heard of. Men were strolling around a square, lit by multicoloured electric lights. There were a few women, too, though none
wearing a chador. Everything was different—the people, the cars, the newspaper boys shouting, “The latest news! Read all about it!”

A couple of men with a record player were selling records. The magical voice of a Persian singer rang out over the square.

Whose voice did I hear that evening? What song were the record salesmen playing? I don’t remember the lyrics and there aren’t any Iranians in my area who might know. So I close my eyes and open my ears. No, I can’t hear the words, my memory has erased the lyrics, but I do hear an old melody:
baradam, baradam, baradam
, which seems to go with the following song:

There were men selling ice-cream cones and walnuts, and there were men wearing ties. Most of them walked around with a newspaper or stopped beneath a lamppost to read. My dear father, who couldn’t read a word, suddenly pulled a rumpled newspaper out from under his suit, tucked it under his right arm and started strolling around the square like all the other men. I followed him, curious as to what he would do next, but he didn’t do anything special. He walked around for a while, then stopped beside a lamppost, unfolded his newspaper, held it up to the light and pretended to read. I thought
he’d gone mad again. Kazem Khan was right: my father was crazy, my father was a fool.

After a while he tucked the newspaper back under his arm and continued his stroll.

How could I have known that my father was head over heels in love?

If I’d been in his place, I think I’d have fallen for one of those women, too.

The women in the square were not at all like the women we were used to. I’d never seen women do anything but work. Women wove carpets and cooked and prayed; women had children and cried and got sick and had a wolf inside. Now I saw women prancing around in high heels.

At a certain moment a young woman wearing a hat walked into the square from a side street. My father’s eyes lit up. He walked over to her, gestured, then pointed at me with his newspaper: “My son. He can talk, he can hear, he can even read a newspaper.”

“What a clever boy!” the young woman exclaimed and leaned closer. “What’s your name?”

“Ishmael,” I said, instantly on my guard.

Did my father actually know what love was? Was he aware that he was “in love”? I mean, was he capable of knowing that he’d entered the domain of love? Would he be able to explain his longing? His desire to be with her, to hold her hand, to smell her hair, to possess her?

Unless you’ve read about it, heard about it, or talked about it, you have no way of knowing what’s happening to you.

An old Persian classic describes the travels of a man named Hodjah Nasreddin. To understand the meaning of life, he travels through the world on foot. At the gate to Hamadan, he sees a crowd—men, women, children, camels, donkeys, horses, goats, chickens—all racing after a young
man. The young man dances, weeps, mutters, flings himself to the ground, gets back up again, weeps some more, laughs, runs and pours a handful of dirt over his head.

Nasreddin stops an old man. “Please, brother, what’s got into that young man?”

“He’s in love. We’ve all come to watch, so we can learn what love is.”

My father took me to the square every evening. The woman in the hat usually arrived later on and the three of us would go sit on a bench, with me in the middle, to act as their interpreter.

Who was she? How had they met? I had no idea.

My poor father had trouble concentrating on his work. He sewed wrong numbers on the carpets and created chaos in the account books and warehouses. One of the employees dropped by to warn Tina: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but if he doesn’t snap out of it, he’ll be fired.”

He didn’t snap out of it and he was fired.

He was absent-minded at home, too. He stared out of the window, or tried to find a quiet place where he could write in his notebook. Tina warned the family, “Help! Akbar has fallen into disgrace!”

As a Persian, you don’t actually need to have been in love yourself. You can read about it in Persian stories, in Persian myths and even in the Koran. Like every Persian, Tina must have known the story of the sheikh and the
tarsa
(Christian).

The sheikh, an elderly Sufi leader, sets out on foot for Mecca, together with thousands of his followers. Months go by. Then, in one of those foreign cities, the sheikh sees a beautiful
tarsa
in the bazaar and immediately falls in love with her. It couldn’t get any worse—to be headed for Mecca and to fall in love with a Christian! The sheikh abandons his plan and sets off, barefoot, in search of the beautiful
tarsa
.
The entire Muslim world is horrified. “The sheikh has fallen into disgrace!” they cry.

My father and I had donned our ties again. We were sitting on a bench in the square, beside the woman in the hat, when suddenly, off in the distance, I thought I saw two of our horses. How could that be? How could the horses we left behind in Saffron Village now be trotting towards the square? Then I recognised our wagon and, moments later, heard the voice of my oldest aunt as she talked to my other aunts and uncles.

The horses stopped in the glow of a nearby streetlamp.

My oldest aunt got out and marched over to my father. She grabbed hold of his tie and dragged him over to the wagon, like a cow.

My aunts held him down, while my uncles undid my father’s red tie and tossed it to the ground. Then my oldest aunt bustled over, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me over to the wagon, too. “A fine job you did, my boy!” she exclaimed. “A fine job of looking after your father!”

We all got in and the horses trotted off.

I could hear my father crying. I couldn’t see him very well, however, since he was sitting behind my aunts, with his head bowed and his hands over his face.

I looked back at the square. The woman was still there, standing in the lamplight and clutching her hat as if there were a strong wind. She watched us go.

The next day my aunts and uncles loaded our belongings into the wagon and took us to another city—Senejan. I have no idea how they did it, but the arrangements had already been made. We had a flat and my father had a job in a textile mill.

He spent all day walking up and down a row of looms and reconnecting broken threads. He wasn’t allowed to move away from the machines, not even for a minute.

I no longer saw my father in the daylight hours, since he left home before sunrise and got back after sunset. Tina immediately gave him his dinner. He ate in silence, sat for a while, held his daughters in his lap, drank one last cup of tea and went to bed.

When I think back to him at that time, I always picture him asleep.

Sometimes he didn’t even bother to take off his work clothes. He’d lie down for a short rest, then fall into a deep sleep from which we couldn’t wake him.

“Ishmael, pull the covers up over your father,” Tina used to say. Another memory from that time. I knew I was supposed to cover him up, but I always waited for Tina to ask me. Maybe that’s why this particular phrase has stuck in my memory.

The woman in the hat had arrived to split my father’s life in two. She ended one phase of his life and ushered in another. Otherwise she had nothing to do with us and we had nothing to do with her. She came, did her job, and left.

Aga Akbar had once been a highly respected carpet-mender, who had galloped on his horse from one village to another with his head held high. His hair had been black and his white teeth had glowed in the dark. After our move to Senejan, his hair turned grey and he looked ill. All he did was work, work, work.

I leaf through my father’s notebook with hopes of finding out more about that time. Since the pages don’t have numbers, I pencil them in on the lower right-hand corner of every page. On page 134 I see a few tiny sketches. I assume they represent the phases of the moon: a new moon, a quarter moon, a half moon, a three-quarter moon, a full moon, and then suddenly a dark moon and a red moon.

He clung to a habit he’d acquired during the first period of his life: no matter where he was or where he went, he always came home by full moon. When night fell and everyone was asleep, he would set the ladder against the wall and climb up onto the roof. He’d sit on our roof, stare at the moon and hum.

Hum?

What on earth could he hum if he didn’t know any lyrics or melodies? If he didn’t know the songs of the lovesick medieval poet Baba Taher and had never heard this famous Sufi leader’s love poems?