My Father's Notebook (8 page)
Read My Father's Notebook Online
Authors: Kader Abdolah
According to family tradition, no one was allowed to break the silence yet. So the midwife gestured: “A son.”
Kazem Khan smiled so broadly that his gold tooth gleamed. A while later the oldest woman in the house took Ishmael in her arms and took him into the guest room. No one spoke, because the first word, the first sentence to reach the baby’s unspoiled mind had to be a poem—an ancient melodic verse. Not a word uttered by a midwife or an aunt’s joyful cry, not an everyday word from the mouth of a neighbour, but a poem by Hafez, the medieval master of Persian poetry.
Kazem Khan stood up, took the volume of Hafez, closed his eyes and opened the book. At the top of the page, on the right-hand side, was the proper poem to be chanted into the child’s ear. Kazem Khan brought his opium-scented mouth to Ishmael’s ear and whispered:
Bolboli barg-e gol-i khosh-rang dar menqar dasht
wa andar-an barg o nava khush nalaha-ye zar dasht.
Goftam-ash, “dar ’ayn-
e wasl in nala o faryad chist?
”
Goft, “mar-
ra jilva-ye ma’shuq dar in kar dasht.”
A nightingale once sat with a bright petal in its beak
,
But this memento of its loved one merely made it weep
.
“Why bewail this token of your heart’s desire?” I cried
.
“It makes me long for her all the more,” the songbird sighed
.
The first words to reach Ishmael’s brain were about love, sadness and the longing for a loved one.
Then Kazem Khan handed the child to Aga Akbar. “Here, your son!”
The women uttered a cry of joy.
Kazem Khan’s voice was the first voice Ishmael heard. Or so he thought. Years later, when he was trying to decipher his father’s notebook, he discovered that things hadn’t happened quite that way.
Ishmael had always had trouble with his left ear. His father knew why. He’d tried to tell his son something about the midwife and the book and the ear and the stupidity of a new father, but Ishmael hadn’t understood.
What actually happened (according to Aga Akbar’s notes) was this:
I was sitting with the men. I didn’t know if the baby had been born
yet. Suddenly I saw Kazem Khan’s gold tooth gleam. I knew then that the baby had been born. My aunt came in with the baby in her arms. I was afraid the baby would be a deaf-mute like me, and I wanted to see if he was deaf. I know it was wrong, but suddenly I stood up, ran over to my aunt, took the baby from her, put my
mouth to his ear and spoke into it. The baby screamed and turned blue. Kazem Khan snatched him from me and shoved me out of the house. I went and stood at the window. Everyone frowned at me. I had shouted into the baby’s ear. Everyone said it would be damaged for good. It was stupid of me, stupid. Akbar is stupid
.
Damaged? No, not really, but whenever Ishmael was sick, or under stress, or feeling discouraged, whenever he fell down and had to stand up again, a voice shouted in his ear. His father’s voice. Aga Akbar was always inside him.
Ishmael is in doubt. He isn’t sure he can
get his father’s story down on paper.
After long hesitation, he picks up his pen.
A well-known Dutch classic begins like this:
I am a coffee broker, and I live at No. 37 Lauriergracht,
Amsterdam. I am not in the habit of writing novels or things of
that sort, and so I have been a long time making up my mind to
buy a few extra reams of paper and start on the work which you,
dear reader, have just taken up, and which you must read if you
are a coffee broker, or if you are anything else. Not only have I
never written anything that resembled a novel, I don’t even like
reading such things, because I’m a businessman. For years I’ve
been asking myself what is the use of them, and I am amazed at
the impudence with which a poet or story-teller dares to palm off
on you something that never happened, and usually never
could
happen. If I, in
my
line—I am a coffee broker, and I live at 37
Lauriergracht—gave a statement to a principal—a principal’s
someone who sells coffee—which contained only a small portion
of the untruths that form the greater part of all poems and all
novels, he would transfer his business to Busselinck & Waterman
at once. They’re coffee brokers, too, but you don’t need to know
their address. So, then … I take good care not to write any novels,
or make any other false statements. And I may say I have always
noticed that people who go in for such things generally come
to a bad end. I am forty-three years old, I’ve been on ’Change for
twenty years, so I can come forward if anyone’s called for who
has experience. I’ve seen a good many firms go down! And usually,
when I looked for the reasons, it seemed to me that they had
to be sought in the wrong course most of the people had taken in
their youth.
Truth
and
common sense—
that’s what I say, and I’m
sticking to it. Naturally I make an exception for the
Holy Scrip ture….
Nothing but lies! …
Mind you, I’ve no objection to verses in themselves. If you
want words to form fours, it’s all right with me! But don’t say
anything that isn’t true
. “The air is raw, the clock strikes four.”
I’ll let that pass, if it really is raw, and if it really is four
o’clock. But if it’s a quarter to three, then I, who don’t range my
words in line, will say,
“The air is raw, and it is a quarter to three.”
But the versifier is bound to four o’clock by the
rawness
of the first line. For him, it has to be exactly four o’clock, or else
the air mustn’t be raw. And so he starts tampering with the
truth. Either the weather has to be changed, or the time. And in
that case, one of the two is false
….
Nothing but lies, I tell you!
And then, this business about virtue rewarded! Oh, oh, oh!
I’ve been a coffee broker for seventeen years—37 Lauriergracht—
so I’ve seen quite a bit in my time; but I can’t help always getting
frightfully annoyed when I see God’s precious truth so shamefully
distorted. Virtue rewarded? If it was, wouldn’t that make virtue
an article of commerce? Things just aren’t like that in the world,
and it’s a good thing they’re not. For what merit would there be
in virtue if it was rewarded? So why do people have to invent
such infamous lies?
…
All lies, abominable lies!
I’m
virtuous myself, but do I ask a reward for it? … And the
fact that I
am
virtuous can be seen from my love of truth. That
is my strongest characteristic, after my devotion to the Faith.
And I should like you to be convinced of this, reader, because it is
my excuse for writing this book…. I am, let me say, a coffee
broker, 37 Lauriergracht. Well then, reader, it is my unimpeachable
love of truth, and my enthusiasm for business, that you have
to thank for these pages.
Reader! I’ve included this passage from Multatuli’s
Max
Havelaar
because what that coffee broker says has parallels to my story. Multatuli writes about a Mr Droogstoppel, a coffee broker living at No. 37 Lauriergracht. That same Mr Droogstoppel tells us, in turn, the story of Max Havelaar. And that’s how you end up reading a book about both a coffee broker and a man named Max Havelaar.
In the novel, Mr Droogstoppel is given a package—the writings of Max Havelaar. He uses it to write a book.
A few months ago, I, too, received a package—my father’s notebook. I’ve never written a book before, but I’d like to try and write one now, because, if it’s at all possible, I’d like to put my father’s writings into a readable form.
“Nothing but lies,” says the coffee broker. “All nonsense and lies.”
I admit that I’ve set about my work in the same way. I’m not a coffee broker and I’ve never been involved in the coffee trade. I’m a foreigner who’s been living in Holland for several years.
My name is Ishmael, Ishmael Mahmud Ghaznavi Khorasani. I don’t live at 37 Lauriergracht, but at 21 Nieuwgracht. And I don’t live in Amsterdam, but in the Flevopolder—the reclaimed ground that the Dutch have wrested from the sea.
I’m sitting at my desk in the attic, staring out of the window. Everything in the Flevopolder is new: the soil still smells of fish, the trees are young and the birds build their nests with fresh twigs. There are no ancient words, no ancient love stories, no ancient feuds.
Everything in my father’s notebook is old: the mountains, the well, the cave, the cuneiform relief, even the railway. That’s why I don’t dare put pen to paper. I can’t imagine writing a novel on this new ground.
I look at the dyke and see the sea. At least the sea is old, though, to be honest, it isn’t actually the sea anymore, but just a small part of it that’s been dyked-in by the Dutch. Much as I, a little patch of ancient Persian culture, have been surrounded by a Dutch dyke.
Maybe this ex-sea can help me.
The city in which I live is new, but the remains of ancient habitation are all around me. That’s exactly what I need.
Just as Holland invented this ground, this landscape, I can use my father’s cuneiform writings to invent something new.
There are poets in this polder and I know a number of them. We meet once a month in a new café and read our work to each other.
Here are a few poems from a collection titled
Flevoland
. Annemarie wrote:
Above this landscape
the wind breathes like a father
caresses the waves from time to time
and buttresses the voices in the land.
Tineke penned these lines:
Man and his machines have come.
There where wind and waves
played their powerful games
the tide was turned.
The sea bed has been laid bare.
And Margryt wrote this poem:
No language. No ancient tale that you can
fall back on. Land stretching into infinity.
A map, plotting a railway track, and bridges
connecting one blank space to another. Not a word
to assure us that this will be a safe place to live.
I’m writing my story in Dutch—the language of the Dutch classics and thus of the following long-dead writers and poets: the anonymous author of the miracle play
Mariken
van Nieumeghen
, Carel van Mander, Alfred Hegenscheidt, Willem van Hildegaersberch, Agathan Marius Courier, Dubekart, Antonie van der Woordt, Dirck Raphaëlsz Camp huysen, Caspar van Baerle, also known as Barlaeus, and, in more recent centuries, Louis Couperus and Eduard Douwes Dekker, also known as Multatuli.
I write in my new language because that’s what refugees do.
I begin:
Every one of the blind men in the village had a son. A coincidence? I
don’t know, but I suspect it’s nature’s way of making up the balance.
The sons became their fathers’ eyes. The moment the baby
started to crawl, the blind father placed the palm of his left
hand on the baby’s shoulder and showed him how to be his
guide. The child soon realised that he was an extension of his
father.
The sons of the deaf-mutes had an even more difficult task,
since they had to serve as the mouths, minds and memories of
their fathers. The families and the other villagers did their best to
teach these boys the language of adults. The imams even taught
them how to read the Holy Book at a very young age. They had
little contact with other children, since they were always with the
men. They were expected to fulfil family obligations and to be
present at both feasts and funerals.
In the deepest darkness of my memory, a baby crawls over the floor. A hand appears, takes hold of its head from behind and gently turns it upwards and to the right. This is followed by the words “
Negah kon. Negah kon. An-ja negah kon
”—“Look, look up here.”
The baby looks up at a mouth, at a man, at the father who smiles.
Another scene hangs like a black-and-white photograph in the strong-room of my memory. I’m sitting on my knees on a carpet beneath an old almond tree, with my head bent over a book. An aged hand appears and points to a verse in the book. I can’t see which poem it is, but the smell of opium suddenly fills my nostrils, and I recall the love poem of the medieval Persian poet Hafez:
Gar che sad rud ast az chesh-e man rawan.
Yad-e rud zendeh-kar an yad bad.
Tears of longing roll down my cheeks like a hundred rivers,
And remind me of the river flowing through my home town.
Otherwise I remember very little. But in the next chapter
our belongings are being loaded into a covered wagon. We’re moving. I was only seven or eight years old, and yet the scene stands out clearly in my memory. I see my mother running to the house of Kazem Khan. I hear her call: “Uncle! Help! Akbar’s gone mad!”
Then I hear the clatter of hooves as Kazem Khan’s horse gallops into our courtyard.
“Where’s Akbar?”