My Father's Notebook (6 page)

But people discovered another route, another way to reach the sacred well. Not everyone was cut out for it. You had to be young, clever and strong.

In the past only a handful of men had been able to reach the well. In the meantime their numbers had grown. Young men and boys now risked everything to obtain the coveted green scarf. It was a great challenge. A supreme test. Perhaps the most difficult test they would ever face.

They climbed up the mountain to the place where the barbed wire came to an end. Then they waited in the dark for the train and jumped on its roof as it went by.

That part was fairly easy. It could be accomplished by almost anyone who dared to jump on top of a moving train. The decisive moment came after about fifteen minutes, when the train made a sharp turn. You had to run across the roof as fast as you could, then leap onto a rock.

To land on exactly the right rock, you needed perfect timing, agility and courage. If you missed it, your broken or dead body would be loaded on a mule the next day.

Anyone who managed to land the jump and keep his balance, gripping the rock with his toes, like a tiger, was supposed to signal his success to the villagers down below, who were watching anxiously from their rooftops. The moment someone waved from the rock, an archer would light a torch and fire it into the air.

The rest of the trip was relatively easy. To reach the sacred well, all you had to do was scale seven tricky mountain walls. Almost everyone could manage that.

Early the next morning, when you made your way back down the mountain, girls and boys and old men climbed up part of the way to greet you. They all wanted to embrace you
and to touch your eyes, because you had seen the well and the holy man in the well, reading his book by the light of an oil lamp.

The situation had got out of control. As we have seen, Reza Shah was determined to modernise the country. After he banned the use of chadors in public, his agents began snatching veiled women off the streets of Tehran and throwing them in prison. He had thousands of hats sent from Paris.

His dream had been realised: the Trans-Iranian Railway now stretched from one end of the country to the other, from north to south and from east to west. Reza Shah had no doubt. The time had finally come to do away with the imams, with all that superstitious nonsense, with all those holy men in wells reading books.

“Get rid of the well!” he ordered. “Cover it up! Fill it in and send the pilgrims packing!”

Who would dare to do such a thing? To destroy the sacred well and send the pilgrims home? No one. If you so much as lifted a finger against the pilgrims, someone would set your house on fire.

But the shah insisted. No pilgrim would be allowed to climb the mountain ever again.

The pilgrims didn’t listen. They kept coming, carrying the sick and the lame to the sacred spot, where they prayed.

Then, one day, a couple of armoured cars drove up. Dozens of gendarmes leapt out with their rifles cocked.

“Go home!” they ordered.

No one moved.

“If even one mule starts up that path, I’m going to shoot. Go home!” screamed a gendarme.

An old man began to climb. The gendarme aimed his rifle at him and fired over his head.

“La ilaha illa Allah,” someone shouted.

“La ilaha illa Allah,” hundreds of pilgrims shouted in response. Then they set off towards the well.

The gendarme fired a few more shots into the air.

The pilgrims kept climbing. Finally, another gendarme dared to fire on the crowd. Two men fell to the ground. At that point the crowd turned on the gendarmes and the terrified men raced back to their armoured cars and roared off.

The next day the holy city of Qom was in an uproar. The ayatollahs who had been thrown in jail ordered the Muslims to close the bazaars and go on strike.

Reza Shah was furious.

“Plug up that well with cement!” he ordered.

Who would dare to carry out his orders?

No one.

“Then I’ll do it myself!” he said.

Early in the morning the whistle of a special railway carriage rang out over Saffron Mountain. Everyone knew immediately that something unusual was happening. No one had ever seen such an odd-looking train before. They all went up to the rooftops to see what was going on. The funny little train slowly wound its way up the mountain and stopped at the familiar curve where the young men always jumped off the train. Reza Shah got out and, with some assistance, climbed up to the sacred well. Five trained mountain climbers plodded up after him, carrying shovels, water and cement. He took off his army muffler, laid it down on a rock and went and stood with his boots planted firmly on the edge of the well. In the thirteen centuries since Mahdi had hidden in the well, no one had ever done such a thing.

“Bring me that big stone!” he said. “Set it down right here!”

The five climbers picked up the stone and, with trembling hands, laid it over the opening of the well.

Then they plugged it up with cement.

The shah declared the area a military zone. From then on, only the royal mountain goats would be allowed in.

That same evening he flew to the holy city of Qom, arriving in the middle of the night. The striking shopkeepers had gathered in the golden mosque, where a young imam was delivering a speech against the shah. When the shah heard his inflammatory words, he issued an order: “Arrest that man.”

Everyone was arrested. Everyone, that is, except the clever young imam, who was named Khomeini. He managed to escape over the roof.

At that moment, not even the devil himself could have suspected that, fifty years later, that very same imam would destroy Reza Shah’s kingdom.

During the second World War, the Allies forced Reza Shah to leave the country. He was sent to Cairo and there he died.

Then those same Western governments helped his son (who would later be known as the shah of Iran) onto the throne.

While all this was going on, Aga Akbar was living in Saffron Village. Several years had gone by since the death of his young bride, but no one had been able to find him a suitable wife. He went back to sleeping with the young prostitute. Kazem Khan didn’t like it, but he couldn’t stop him. Then he came up with the idea of sending Aga Akbar to Isfahan.

The Dutch poet P. N. van Eyck (1887–1954) believed that life was good and beautiful because it was filled with mystery and sorrow. One of his well-known poems is “Death and The Gardener”:

A sombre poem. A sombre story. A sombre Akbar rode on horseback with Kazem Khan to a deserted station, where he left for Isfahan.

His uncle wanted him to leave Saffron Village for a few months, or even a few years. He had arranged for Akbar to stay with a friend of his in Isfahan.

Kazem Khan wanted to free him from the isolation of the village, which he thought was a suitable place to live only if you happened to be old or ill or an opium addict. It was time for Akbar to move on and meet other people. But where was the best place to send him?

Being an opium addict wasn’t easy. No matter where you were, you had to have a pipe, a fire in a brazier, a teapot, a special tea glass, sugar, a clean spoon, a carpet, and a safe but quiet place looking out over trees and mountains or some other pretty landscape.

That’s why the opium addicts needed each other. That’s why they kept in touch. All over the country they had friends and acquaintances with whom they were always welcome to smoke a pipe.

Kazem had many friends, especially poets and famous carpet designers. Men with high social standing. One of these men lived in Isfahan.

The train came in and Aga Akbar climbed on board. It was his first train ride. In his pocket he had all the information he needed: the name and address of his contact in Isfahan, his own address in Saffron Village and even the telegraph number of the sergeant in charge of the local gendarmerie.

Imagine leaving your birthplace for the first time and going directly to Isfahan, the city referred to as “half the world”. The city containing Persia’s oldest mosques. Centuries ago the builders had covered these mosques with beautiful azure tiles. The mysterious designs, numbering in the thousands, are so mesmerising that when you look upon them you no longer know where you are or what you’re doing there.

Behind the magical Naqsh-e-Jahan Square is an ancient cemetery, with tombstones dating back to the time of the Sassanids. This is the burial place of the Persian gardener, the one mentioned by the Dutch poet. On his tombstone, it is written: “Here lies the gardener, the man who momentarily escaped Death’s clutches.”

If you look to the left when you’re standing by the grave, you can see a tall cedar off in the distance. If you walk towards it, over an ancient stone path that meanders through a rose garden, you’ll eventually come out near a bazaar—the oldest in the country and the most beautiful in the Islamic world. That’s where you can see the most amazing Persian rugs. Hundreds of them are piled high in every store. In the rear there’s always a workshop, where an old, experienced weaver plies his trade.
He doesn’t weave new carpets, but mends old ones. Expensive rugs are for sale in the bazaar. Sometimes these unique works of art get damaged, so there’s always an experienced carpet-mender—a craftsman—on the premises who can perform wonders with a needle and a few coloured threads.

In one of those stores there was a well-known carpet-mender named Behzad ibn Shamsololama. He had pure magic in his fingers. He also happened to be the man waiting for Aga Akbar at the station in Isfahan.

After twenty-three hours the train finally reached its destination.

Aga Akbar got out.

“When you get off the train,” his uncle had told him, “don’t go anywhere. Wait right there until an old man with glasses and a cane comes to get you.”

And that’s what must have happened, because years later a black-and-white photograph of a bespectacled man with a cane stood on the mantel in Aga Akbar’s living room. If you examined the picture closely, you could see faint traces of the word “Isfahan” on the wall behind him.

Aga Akbar lived in Isfahan for a year and a half. He worked from sunrise to sunset in the workshop at the rear of the store. When the store closed, he went to his sleeping place on the roof.

Isfahan made a lasting impression on him. In the years that followed he never missed an opportunity to broach the subject. If he happened to see an Isfahan carpet, he would say, “Look, this carpet comes from Isfahan. Have you ever been there?”

Or he would talk about the mosques. He would point up at the sky to describe the blue tiles of the Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque. A dome located defiantly opposite the dome of the universe.

To express his admiration for the ancient Jomah Mosque, he would pick up a brick, then drop it. This was his way of saying that the tiles used in the mosque had come from heaven.

When he talked about the bazaar, he would put his hand over his mouth and look around in astonishment. What he meant was that the magic carpets unfurled by the shopkeepers made your jaw drop in amazement.

But how could he explain Isfahan in his simple sign language? Nobody understood what he was trying to say. He needed a son, an Ishmael, to turn his words into a language people could understand.

“What else did you do in Isfahan? I mean, in the evenings and on the Fridays you had off? Tell me what you did when you weren’t mending rugs.”

“On Fridays I went to the mosque to pray. There were lots of people.”

“And afterwards?”

“I stayed there until it got dark.”

“And then?”

“And then I went up to the roof to look at the sky.”

“What else did you do?”

“When?”

“On the other nights? What did you do on the other nights?”

“I looked.”

“What do you mean? Did you spend every evening on the roof looking at the sky?”

“You see, here in my chest, on the left side, I felt something. I don’t know what, a kind of pain. No, not a pain. Something else. A feeling … how can I explain it? I wanted to go home.”

And at last he was allowed to go home.

“I got sick. I couldn’t mend carpets anymore. My head hurt. I used the wrong threads. Green instead of blue. That was bad. I went to the old man, laid my forehead on the back of his hand and wept.”

The old man brought Akbar to the station and sent him home. After a long trip the train stopped in the middle of the
night at the station on Saffron Mountain. The conductor tapped Akbar’s shoulder to let him know he’d reached his stop. He got out and climbed up the mountain to begin a new life.

He started to go home, then suddenly took another path. After an hour of walking up steep mountains and down into deep valleys, he arrived at the house of the prostitute.

He knocked on her door. She didn’t open it. She was afraid it might be a drunk. He knocked again. Still she wouldn’t open the door. He called to her, “Aayaa yayayaya aaayaya ya ya aya aya ya.”

“Is that you, Akbar?” she called from above. She opened the door, threw her arms around him and led him inside. He spent the night with her and all of the next day. Only when evening came did he finally go home.

The next morning Aga Akbar stood in the town square and talked to the men about Isfahan. They stared at his fingers. The dyes that had discoloured his fingertips were very different from the ones they used. Isfahan’s blue had taken on the colour of its sky, its yellow had been borrowed from its ancient stones and its green was not at all like the grassy green of Saffron Mountain. Everyone realised that Akbar had learned new techniques, that he’d picked up Isfahan’s styles.

Later he applied these techniques to his business. People now welcomed him into their homes more than ever.

Had an ember fallen on your rug? No problem, Aga Akbar will mend it, he’ll work his magic and make the hole disappear. Had a rat gnawed its way through the bride’s dowry carpet? Don’t worry, don’t cry, we’ll go and get Aga Akbar!

People received him in their homes as if he were an aristocrat. He behaved like a true craftsman, a man who was proud of his work. He never went anywhere without his leather satchel, the one he’d brought with him from Isfahan. He rode with it slung over his shoulder. When he went into someone’s
house, he tucked it under his arm, exactly as old Shamsololama had always done, threw back his shoulders and gestured, “Where’s the carpet?”

One time Ishmael asked Kazem Khan, “Why did you make my father learn that particular craft?”

“You see, my boy, carpet-weaving wasn’t actually a suitable occupation for us. Even the women in our household didn’t weave. It was the kind of thing that ordinary villagers did, farmers who had nothing else to do on long winter nights. I thought it would be the right job for him, but I soon realised it would make him miserable. He had to be free, he had to be able to get away. He wasn’t the kind of man who could spend years working on a single rug. He needed a job that could be done in a few hours, so that he could just get up and leave. That’s how I hit upon the idea of having him become a carpet-mender. It’s not boring work. In fact, it’s quite interesting. You have to use your head. You have to be an artist. Do you know what I mean? And I knew that your father had an artistic mind.”

“An artistic mind?”

“Yes, that of an artist, or a designer, or a … How can I explain it? People didn’t think in such terms in those days. You were supposed to work, weave, mow, plough, earn a living. What would you have done if you’d been in my position? Carpet-mending, my boy, that was the best kind of work he could do. There’s always a damaged carpet somewhere. He got to travel all over the place. It allowed him to earn a living and to express himself as an artist: to weave, dye, embellish and design. He could work his thoughts into the carpet.

“Your father was an illiterate, deaf-mute poet. I’ve told you that before. He needed to channel his thoughts into something, whether it was a cuneiform notebook or a hole in a carpet.”

And so, with his notebook in his pocket and his satchel on his back, Akbar rode from one village to another.

No one knew when he wrote in his notebook, or what he wrote about. He and his notebook were inseparable. It had become part of him, like his heart, which went on beating though no one paid any attention to that, either. Only Ishmael knew when his father was writing in his notebook. He knew that his father needed to write about the things he didn’t understand or wasn’t able to explain in sign language. Inaccessible, incomprehensible, intangible things that suddenly struck him and caused him to stare helplessly, or to stand transfixed, or to sit down and ponder. Death, for example, or the moon, or the rain, or the sacred well, or love, that indescribable process going on in your heart. Or else incidents that had marked him for life. One of these incidents had taken place when he rode into the village of Sawoj-Bolagh.

Aga Akbar often told the story to Ishmael, who had a vague idea of what it was about. But he still couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened.

One time, when he was about ten or twelve, his father took him along on one of his walks.

“Where are we going?”

“Hurry up,” his father signed. “A friend of mine lives up there. He can tell you the story. He knows all about it.”

“Which story?”

“The story about my military service. You know the one I mean. Hurry up, the faster you walk the sooner we’ll get there.”

To tell you the truth, Ishmael didn’t really want to climb the mountain. After an hour and a half, they reached a village, but Akbar kept going. Darkness was falling and the villagers were starting to light their lanterns.

“Now where are we going?” Ishmael moaned.

“Hurry up. We’re going to that farm. Can you see it? Over there, where that light is.”

Akbar hadn’t realised that the climb might be too difficult for Ishmael. That a city boy might not be as good a hiker as a village boy.