100… "Consciousness is a translucency beyond which one can behold things"… 110 "It is a gaze that cannot turn inward"… 120 "Words, gray gloves, the dust of imagination on lawn, water, skin, our names, between you and I"… 130 "A wall of emptiness has been built which no bugle can bring down" [1]… 140 I don't remember the rest of the poem. We are racing towards Tehran. I am still thinking of the camels and the desert sky, which stuck to the inside of my eyelids, and my eyes are fixed on the horizon, along the two ripped pupils, in the direction of that nexus I have never reached.

The boys are cracking seeds around me, and they drink and they crack seeds. The stereo has been playing the same old cassette for the past thirteen-fourteen hours, now producing a monstrous sound that reverberates inside my skull.

At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the afternoon. [2]

Three days and four nights we spent in the desert springtime, enjoying every moment, and now we are returning to the Tehran wintertime.

Today is the strangest day in my calendar. Each year at this time I review my life, fishing in the gray pond of my brain, torturing myself until the night comes and I pass out in the room, listless.

I got into a discussion with my traveling companions, more like an argument, and now we have all gone mute. We don't feel like talking. The stirring wheel slipped once under my fingers and the car slid to a stop on the edge of a cliff. Nima said: "The Left didn't sell out," and I said that I wasn't trying to lay blame. The tribe is going through a historical experience with its pasture and sheep. You and I will remain the same. We sow the same seeds and harvest the same crop. I am thinking of thirteen-fourteen year-olds who were showered with bullets under their mother's veil of certainty. Don't doubt it for a second, you and I would have been buried in mass graves had we been there at the time. Our bones would have provided nourishment to the earth, whether we were called liars or apostates. Nima said that everyone was after freedom. I said that freedom and forced ideology were incongruous, and my lack of faith in the forced democracy of today is due to the fact that I question why everyone remained silent while our children were disappearing. Add eight years of war to all this, and we are left with hundreds of thousands of dead people and no human rights defender has been able to do anything about it. "Human beings, my brother, are made of flesh and blood, and not made of iron, my brother." [3]

My heart started to ache without prior warning. I recall what was general said to Lorca: "… I prefer that illiterate worker in the dugouts who raises his fist in protest to that intellectual who locks himself up in his room and lays books for eggs. I execute the former respectfully but always kill the later with utmost glee." [4]

Well, this is how it played out. Those who had to go, left, and we are old enough not to be able to learn anything from it all. I have learned to go on rooftops and watch the city, give my lips to the moon, experience absolute freedom all by myself, and think of myself as that tiny plankton trapped inside the gills of that Little Black Fish [5] swallowed by a shark just pulled out of the oven and laid next to herbs and pickles on the table of AZHIDAHAK, the prince of darkness, thinking only of open waters.

Nima says loudly: "Where are you now? Didn't I ask you to drop us at Azadi Sq.?" I have no energy left to offer to take them to Evin. I push the pedal with the remains of my strength; suddenly, without willing it, I pull aside, get out and puke my heart out. I puke until all the peace that had filled me in the desert leaves me. My trembling hands search for a tissue in my pocket. I return to my seat and feel the pedal again. I murmur to myself:

We have tried our luck in this city
Now it's time to take leave. [6]

My lips are locked. I can't speak. The moon is full and when you pay close attention you can hear the voice of that poet from within the mass graves of that Forest:

Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true!
Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,
nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent.
Here I want nothing else but the round eyes
to see his body without a chance of rest. [7]

Nima says: "Do you know that in those days they recited this poem." I don't want to say that in those days many had chains around their necks and they thought the multi-polar world to be more democratic. Ten hours of driving towards Tehran is like returning to hell of a thousand years. Two nights ago we were picking stars around the fire and a poet friend living in Sidney said: "Marziyeh, I want to return to Iran. I like the Noruz of Tehran and…." I remember the poem of that disarrayed poet I read seven years ago:

I wrapped a scarf around the moon's head
I put bracelets around her wrist
I found the shoulder of a gypsy sky to rest my head on
and goodbye. [8]

Ah, {Granaz}, no one will buy our intrigues. We are all in ruins. How to build on ruins?

Bahar said: "Right here. We will get off here." As she was getting off, she laid a hand on my shoulder: "Be strong, don't mope." I didn't say:

When lies start to blow like wind,
How can we shroud ourselves in the verses of bankrupt messengers? [9]

Batting my eyelids, I say goodbye to her with bloodshot eyes. I push on the pedal. I pinch myself, "No, I won't become softer than soft. No, I won't be a jean-wearing cloud." [10] I put the gear in reverse. My lips are stuck. I honk. Bahar comes to the window, worried. I move the muscles of my frozen face, "Bahar, do you when the Evin [prison] was built and by whom?" "No," she answers.

I leave Bahar and think of the next scene of this drama. I pick up the shriveled fruit off the dashboard and bite into it. My beautiful friend {Ahoo} is leaving the country. Laughter and tears burst out together, like a clown's. Her poetry book just came out. She will leave her sad and self-censored thoughts behind with the rest of her gimcracks and just leave.

The unripe fruit
stayed on the branch for years.
It neither ripened
nor fell…. [11]

Still on the road, I watch the smog-ridden sycamores of MOSADDEQ Ave [12] in late winter and rummage my brain for a poem befitting the spring and life starting anew, lead in my nostrils:

Willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky…. [13]

Footnote

[1] From "Beyond Love" by {Octavio Paz}, translated by {Ahmad Shamloo}
[2] From "Cogida and Death" by Frederico Garcia Lorca translated Ahmad Shamloo
[3] From "Dar tasskhir" ("In Subjugation"), a poem by {M. A. Azad}
[4] Quoted from Shamloo's Hamcho kuche-ye bi enteha ("Like an Endless Alley"), P167
[5] Referring to the main character of "Mahi siyah-e kuchulu" ("The Little Black Fish"), a short story by {Samad Behrangi}
[6] A verse from {Hafez}
[7] From Lorca's "The Laid Out Body," trans. Shamloo
[8] From "Haraj" ("Sale"), a poem by Geranaz Musavi, in Paberahneh ta sobh ("Bare-footed Till Morning")
[9] From "Iman biavarim be agaz-e fasl-e sard" ("Let's Believe in the Coming of the Cold Season"), a poem by {Forugh Farrokhzad}
[10] Referring to a poem by {Vladimir Mayakovski}
[11] From a poem by {Ahoo Alagha}, in Miveh ("Fruit")
[12] In the early days of the Revolution, the main street of Tehran was named after the late prime minister of Iran, {Mohammad Mossadeq}, but later was changed to Valiasr
[11] From a poem by Octavio Paz, trans. {Ahmad Amiralaee}.