Dear Steemians here are some photos I got the other day from Siena, Italy. It was a misty and mysterious day. That's my feeling and it lead me to write part of my novel which by the way happens in Iran. However it more or less takes place in such atmosphere.
I’m cold and dark when they arrive. Small drops of rain are filling my gutters. Wind is blowing through my streets and alleys. When they pass the corner of a window with lights on, their hands are entwined like tree roots. In my alleys there are junkies gathered together though they are apart. They sit up in the ruins of old houses not knowing the one beside them is dead or dozing. The two lovers walk my alleys waiting for light, waiting for warmth. They light cigarettes and pass the creatures lost in timelessness of impure morphine and the hysteric fixes in their guts. Mary pulls her lover’s arm till it’s finally dawn and they get to find the way to my beach. I’ve always hesitated whether to consider the sea a part of mine or a place of its own. They however get a room with the view of the sea. The girl shares with him her darkest thoughts in bed, after they make love. She asks him if he gets angry if she died. He doesn’t answer. She says it’s her right, it’s everybody’s right. He touches her lips with his tender fingers. I can’t forget, the more I try the more vivid it comes to my eyes. His fingers move on her fragile shoulders. I saw that. She never talked about it but she knew I saw. Seeing him was shuddering. My father’s brother. My uncle. I was so scared of him I never got close to him even though he always wanted to cuddle us. She takes his hand and kisses it. She then lies on her back with her eyes looking at the clumsy plasterwork of the ceiling without seeing it. With the waves in his ears he tries to find a word, a sentence, something to soothe her but he can’t. Outside the room they have rented, clouds are ruling my sky. It’s our first time here but I feel like I’ve been here before. I feel the moderato cantabile of the clocks and I’m the child who’s forced to learn it, who thinks she should be ashamed of the love her mother has for her uncle.
Do you know more now, or not?
In the afternoon they walk on the rocky beach. There’s no cathedral bell, neither no smoke from a factory’s chimney. They walk against the wind hearing the voices of the children on the docks. My mother didn’t squeal with joy. She was full of shame. He was the only man she ever loved but she never enjoyed making love to him because I was there, because she was afraid at the moment of making love, because it was not to be called making love.
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Now on voyait le soleil dans la mer beyond the clouds, in the flaming sky; us, all of us. They walk past the ruins of an old roofless house covered with ivy leaves. He stops to take a photo of it. She tries to register it in her mind like all other images of life. It was then that my mother went silent and drew those things and put them in our school books. It was then that those lines started scratching her skin under her eyes, around her lips.
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He moves to her left to hear her voice better. Just imagine Proust’s narrator in that short story where all at once his mother sees him being fucked. Remember how he wished he was dead out of shame. Was that a he or a she? I don’t remember, does it matter? No, not really.
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When he, years later, gets here, he carries with himself the absence-existence of his friend. As a city I have never experienced nought. For this reason when he comes out of the room in the middle of the cold night, I see his friend watching him, listening to him with his famous warm smile, like always.
Do you know more now, or not?
This is a Kaddish ceremony for you Alireza. Remember when you said “literature will lose, sunlight will win. Don’t worry” Oh sparrow, limping past on your bone crutch, I’m in the cemetery now, at the edge of town, how did I get here? Remember how on those shore rocks we sat drunk and sang all those children songs and emptied the bottle and got back to the suite leaning on each other and slept with the waves in our heads. Remember how we silently danced on our toes on these very rocks but loudly sang our hopelessly chirk songs to the waves rolling for an encore, who took a bow, who knew their place. The wind blew in our face, and just like now it has always been one second to twelve, when the hands touch and furrow deeper. Yes dear, history repeats itself. Now in this dark at such ominous night remember how you cried the tortoise walk of those old wo/men in Kieslowski’s movies realizing how we suffer. Remember with how much pain and excitement you read the Nada paragraph in Hemingway’s A clean Well-lighted Place. Remember how loud we prayed it to the dark waves. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
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Remember how in silence, as if talking about a secret, we looked at Van Gogh’s last painting, at the three ways leading nowhere. Remember how when we first saw Scream we only breathed it out in the cold crowds of Tehran. Remember you were right and love whatever it was, an infection; but know that once again we’ll meet, we’ll sit in that cool shadow behind your house, happy as we were once, calm as you always were and we’ll laugh at the slain time, the slain time that took us apart and gifted us a loss we could never compensate with words.
Do you know more now, or not?
Yes you want to know more. Let me tell you what came in the future. In the future Amir came back to me, this time with Nina. He rented the same suite. All the way to me Mitra drove. When they entered me, Amir was drowned in his dreams, Mitra was thinking about how hard it was to love someone who never loved you back. But the fact was they didn’t come to me for a love affair. They journeyed to me because they wanted me and because I felt lonesome without my heroes and in return I gave them all the past, present and future.
Do you know more now, or not?
Mitra sleeps under the bedsheets. I clear out my alleys from the noises by making my people choose other ways to their destinations. Amir walks to the shore, lights a cigarette and tries to remember how the feeling of being in me once intoxicated him. He feels nothing. I blow a cold wind through my lanes; I make the wind scratch his face, his hands and his eyes. His impotency to conceive what love means drives him to the state where things are tasteless. He walks back to their room, sits on the bed and murmurs: “Dear friend Truman, where are you? Read this item in a medical dictionary. Death by hanging is caused by asphyxia by fracture of the cervical vertebrae by laceration of the trachea”
Why are you repeating it? I don’t know.
He stands up and goes to the kitchen. While he is making tea her voice comes from behind. Do you ever feel guilty? Guilty for what? For his suicide. No. Liar! He turns around and looks at her standing in the doorway with her long white dress. I always thought we could remain friends if we had no love affair and you’re right I think we failed, all of us. I should’ve been with him. Maybe if I were with him, he wouldn’t have killed himself.
Now my streets are full of people. My gutters are getting filled with small drops of rain. They walk on the rocky beach with their hands in their black raincoats. You couldn’t help him, because you couldn’t get out of the country. You had to attend the military service. How he wished she said these. But she didn’t. So he said it himself.
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You left Iran for a better life, right? Right, so? What is a better life to you? More freedom maybe. What if you find out there’s only different types of control. I don’t get it. Alireza left because he was sure he couldn’t find freedom here in Iran, not after the 2009 Coup. Not after being tortured by sitting in front of his interrogator every week. Not after being fired from everywhere he worked, being imprisoned at home with a controlling mother who wanted to tell him what to do, where to go, what to eat, how discreet to be, who to talk to and who not to. Mitra stops to look at the ruins of an old roofless house covered with ivy leaves. She opens her mouth absentmindedly: In Germany there was no such thing as control. You think?
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Amir’s hands tremble when he wants to light his cigarette and so he can’t. Mitra lights a cigarette and gives it to him. He puffs on it. I can’t believe you didn’t know. I didn’t know what? That he loved you. I didn’t know. Come on Mitra! You knew it and you did touch me like that that night. I didn’t know Amir. You did know. This is so unfair. No, you know what’s unfair? Repelling him. I did not. You went to Germany with his help. When you were at the hospital he was the only one who took the train from Duisburg to Aachen to stay with you. Yes Amir, and you were the only one he wrote that letter to. Which letter? Dear Truman… Shut the fuck up.
Do you know more now, or not?
All the way, on the bus, from Tehran to Shiraz, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t sleep, all I thought was that I was going to see him dead after all these years. His younger sister texted me not to let their father and family know he had killed himself. Oh god, honey I understand.
Amir tries to see the sea behind the café window but what can he see except the dark? At the mortuary, I saw the rope’s trait on his neck, I touched it. I touched my friend’s face, eyes, hair. We covered it with camphor. Oh god! You shouldn’t have gone to the mortuary hon. I had to, I had to say goodbye in private. I couldn’t say goodbye when I was standing in the grave with him and with all those people standing around the grave, looking at us from above, thinking he didn’t want to get back to Iran, thinking how great was that if we were together here too. Shut up, don’t you dare say that again. I saw his father’s eyes, for the man who always had a written prescription for every situation, here, at that moment there was none. I could see more inquietude than lament.
They puffed on the hookah and said nothing for quite a long time. Then as the café is getting less crowded, they start talking again. Mitra pours tea in their cups. Amir’s eyes are fixed on the flowers of the teapot. He starts talking in rather a low voice. You know what his sister told me at the airport when she was leaving? What? That his father was worried about the death of the line and his name. Mitra’s playing with Naseroddin shah’s moustache on the hookah glass. She then says that she has once seen his sister in Frankfurt. She told me I was the reason and that she’d never forgive me. She told me I had left him because he had not fucked me well. She told me I was such an opportunist slut. Naseroddin shah is getting blurry. She said that she had recovered his phone data and had read all our messages.
I make the wind hit the café window glasses. She cleans her tears with her cuffs. You know not one thing, all of you. You don’t see a simple reason why I asked him to be friends just like before. Amir’s eyes are wide open. And what’s that? Forget it, what’s the use when you simply don’t buy it. Say it Mitra, I’ll try to understand. Ok. So the very morning after, we got up, I played the music and was making breakfast. He was sitting on the bed. I wanted him to do something, to show he is happy. I said that I thought breakfast was the coolest thing in the world. And he answered with disbelief: Really? Do you really think so? That’s it. That is just it.
