Ghosts of Objects
… Madam, I’m going through worse times than you! I don’t want to trouble you too much. At the very beginning, he found a seashell next to the soap dish by the sink. He started a big row, demanding to know where it came from. “You probably brought it back from one of your drinking and debauchery trips to the coast up north and you’ve forgotten,” I said. He started shouting that he goes to the coast on important business assignments. I was about to say, Then go ask your dear and darling temporary wives. But I can’t wrangle with him too much. Sometimes he has a hand for hitting… I don’t know what he did with the seashell. It wasn’t ugly. There was a little green algae in the grooves on its surface, but its inside was like a pearl; it glowed.
Later, he found a sprouting potato in his bed. He has been sleeping apart from me for some time now. When he’s done, he goes to his own bedroom. He came home in the middle of the night. I was asleep. He started yelling, “You wench, why do you do these things?” I said, “Why would I ever do such a thing?” He railed at me that it runs in my family. “Didn’t your aunt go mad?” he said. I didn’t dare answer, Even if that poor soul lost her mind, it was because she had a husband like you… But the gentleman wasn’t going to let it go. Holding the potato, he blustered, “If you ever do such things again, I will make you suffer horrors that you won’t forget even in your grave.” Finally, I put a Quran in front of him, struck my hand on it, and swore on God’s words that it wasn’t my doing. I don’t think he believed me, but he calmed down until the time he found a dead scorpion in his shoe. He attacked me. He beat me. He beat me until his hands hurt. They really know how to hit without leaving a mark on you. He assigned a guard to keep watch on the house, to see who comes and goes.
I thought I should do something. I went to Haji Tavakoli and sought his help. He has visions. He knows about the invisible world. “Your house is haunted by jinns,” he said. He gave me a bottle of jinn-and-devil-repellent water, and seven or eight pieces of paper with prayers written on them. I put them here and there around the house. And I put one inside the cotton stuffing of his mattress. They didn’t work. May the devil be deaf, I’ve started wondering if their prayers are always the same.
A few days later, in the morning when he was leaving for work, there was a large black feather from a crow or, I don’t know, from a raven in his pocket. It looked like its tip had been chewed on. My troubles started all over again. He slapped me, harder than he had ever slapped me before. After he left I packed a small suitcase, and for the first time I went to mother’s house, sulking. I was free of him for a week, and then he came to take me back home. He seemed to have lost weight. As always, he was loath to speak from the heart. Mumbling, he finally said that while I was away, a few things had again appeared around the house. He admitted that he had been wrong believing it was all my doing… No! He didn’t say what they were. But the way he asked me to go back home made me feel sorry for him. He had never behaved in a way that would make me pity him. A day earlier I had consulted with my cousin who is university educated. He said he has to go to a psychoanalyst. I had no idea what a psychoanalyst does. I blurted it out right there at the front door. Again he became angry and shouted, “Are you suggesting I have gone mad? And how dare you call that lecherous cousin of yours?” He knows my cousin had asked for my hand in marriage.
What could I do? I went back home. It was two or three days after my return when, on the living room table next to the crystal fruit bowl, a pine cone with a piece of turquoise rope had, according to him, “made a nuisance of itself.” One of these pretty pinecones whose scales open up and they fall to the ground, and there are these tasty seeds between their scales, if the crows and sparrows leave any behind. Oh, they’re so delicious. I like them so much… He hurled it at the window. It was closed. The glass cracked. I didn’t say this to him, but I thought, One of these days he’s going to bring the roof down over our heads. He squatted on the floor and held his head in his hands. He kept growling at I don’t know who, saying, “This time, too, I’ll make sure you yourself confess that you’re a scoundrel.”
“Well, sir!” I said. “Have a chat with your fellows at the military base. Perhaps the same things have been happening to them, too.” He snapped back, “That’s all that’s left for me to do! They’ll make up stories about me being shell-shocked.”
He was bragging. As far as I know, this Guardian of Islam was never at the frontlines of war.
For a while, there were no more incidents at home. I said to myself, Thank God it’s over. The gentleman’s male virility returned. And he stopped kicking and punching in his sleep and shouting, “I will make you talk.” Naïve me, when it first started I would wake him up and ask, “Are you talking to me?”…
No! Still, nothing. The last doctor we went to conducted a lot of tests, and in the end said, “There’s nothing wrong with either one of you. You should be able to have children. Be patient.” I for one have been patient for so many years that my gut aches. Out on the street, when I see a young child walking hand in hand with his mother or running after her with sweet tiny steps, my eyes fill with tears. I said to him, “Prophet Shah-Abdol-Azim, may God preserve him, didn’t bless us with anything, let’s go to Qum to pray and make vows to God. After all, Prophet Massoumeh was a woman, she’ll understand our pain. There’s a hadith that says of the eight doors of heaven, three lead to Qum. I’ll even make kohl for my eyes with the dirt in its desert… it’s just its salty water that makes me ill.”
We went. He tossed five one-thousand tuman bills in the shrine. I thought, Look at him! When it comes to Prophet Massoumeh, he’s suddenly such a spender! He only threw in five hundred tumans at Shah-Abdol-Azim’s shrine. He makes me account for every single rial of the measly money he gives me for household expenses. But little by little I’ve been saving some on the side. I have vowed that if I bear a child, even if it’s not a boy, once a month I will cook a pot of food and take it to the orphanage for the children to have a proper meal…
But it didn’t happen, and things didn’t stay the same. One night, while we were eating, a pendant from the chandelier above the dining room table… Yes! For almost a year now the gentleman insists that we eat at a massive table. It’s because of complexes from his childhood that he puts on these airs. But it’s certainly not as pleasant as spreading the dinner cloth on the floor, sitting cross-legged, and preparing small bites with your fingers. Anyway, we were eating dinner when one of the chandelier’s crystal pendants fell down in the middle of the table. It shattered. I screamed and ran off. He just sat there and stared at the crystal shards. I had never seen such a look in his eyes — there was something strange that frightened me. He didn’t say a word. I swear to God, if I had any rights at all I would have divorced him. Madam! I just screamed. I screamed as much as I could. I clawed at my hair and screamed. He didn’t even open his mouth to say, Shut up wench. And then I sat and wept. What else can we do other than wail and whimper…
In the middle of the night I woke up with a start, and I went and saw him still sitting at the dining room table. He had gathered the crystal shards in front of him. Their shimmer reflected on his face and beard. His eyes, two cups of blood. Not that he had cried. “He wasn’t supposed to be holding anything,” he said. “It fell from his hand.”
“Who? What?” I asked. He didn’t answer me. From that night on, his talking in his sleep and barking military orders increased.
It was around that time when I decided to plant flowers in the garden, perhaps it would help change his frightening mood. I planted violets. Some other flowers that I had never seen before started to grow in between them. He asked me what they were called. I told him I didn’t know. I said the picture of the flowers on the package of seeds was pretty so I bought it, and the shopkeeper told me their name, but I forgot it. He realized I was lying. One by one he forced the tips of his Colt’s cartridges off their casings, all the while grumbling, “What you deserve is for me to shoot the bullets at you one by one, from your heels all the way up to your sinful depraved brain.” He poured the gunpowder around those flowers. In two days, they all dried up. Then he said, “Pull them out.” I swear, they were such pretty flowers. They were a sweet and dainty shade of pink that I had never seen before and have never seen since…
No! What odd questions you ask! No, they haven’t stopped. One that really tore at my heart was a baby’s swaddle. We were coming back from a party. It was clean, but it wasn’t new. It was right there inside the front door… He started cursing at someone I didn’t know. He said, “You want to rattle me, you infidel? This time, instead of a baton I’ll shaft you with a pole so big that a hundred carpenters won’t be able to take it out.”
I told myself, No matter what happens, I have to get to the bottom of all this. Time and time again I tried to trick him into talking, but he divulged nothing. His Colt is always with him. In the afternoon, or more often at night, when he comes back from work or from the home of one of his temporary wives, he immediately puts it on top of the television, within his reach. Even now that nothing is going on, he’s still afraid of being assassinated. He puts it under his pillow when he sleeps. One afternoon, around one o’clock, he had hardly been home for an hour when he frantically asked, “Where is my colt?” How would I know? I was in for it. Generally, whenever he comes home I also catch his nervousness. When he realized I couldn’t find his gun, he started looking for it too, suggesting as usual that I was incompetent and inept. He turned the house upside down and made a mess.
Madam! It was nowhere to be found. “Perhaps you didn’t bring it home with you,” I said. He searched his pockets more than ten times. He was frustrated. He searched my coverall and chador. When I realized we weren’t going to find it, I went to prepare his dinner. At night, too, he wants rice and stew, or rice mixed with herbs and vegetables. The day he came to ask for my hand in marriage, he was a handsome slender young man. May God not forgive my father for having forced me to accept his proposal. He said, “The country now belongs to the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, it will belong to you, too.” You should see my husband now. He has a paunch… Anyway, when I reached into the sack of rice, God save us! His colt was there. Wrapped in a piece of knitting — obviously unfinished. The yarn was blue. I took it and gave it to him. He looked it over and said it was not his Colt. “Then I guess it must be mine!” I said. He shouted at me and told me to get lost. “If you’re a real man,” I said, “tell these things that appear in the house to get lost.”
I have a stool in the kitchen for when I need to reach the top cabinets. He woke me up early one morning and, as if he knew what my answer was going to be, he asked, “Did you put this in the living room?” With no hesitation, I snapped back, “Have I gone batty and berserk to do such a thing?” These days, I talk back a little… Yes! And I just remembered: one day, he had barely been gone for two hours when he came back from the base completely crazed. He used to occasionally come home unexpectedly. He would come up with some excuse to check up on me and make sure I was not up to any bad deed. But that day he was totally riled. He had completely lost it. Apparently something had suddenly appeared in his office. He didn’t say what. All he said was, “The mother fucker has found his way into my office, too.” He went to the front yard, pacing and grinding his teeth. I took him some tea. He struck his hand under the tray. He broke my narrow-waisted gold-rimmed glass tea cup. My heart ached, I swear it really ached. The glass tea cup was part of my trousseau. He broke my heart…
This is how it was, until one night when he walked out of his bedroom, rasping. Alarmed, I ran out of my room. He didn’t let me go in to see what had appeared there. Just like someone burning with fever, he was sweating, trembling. He asked me to sit next to him so that he could rest his head on my shoulder. What?! He had never done any such thing! When he had calmed down a little, he started to talk… In short, this was all during the year when the anti-revolution prisoners were being executed in hordes. He said there were so many of them that for them to die on the gallows more quickly, the soldiers would leap up and wrap their arms around the prisoners, the communists or whatever they were, hanging from the noose, so that they would suffocate more quickly and make room for the others. He said the prisoners were not supposed to have anything with them, but one of them dropped something he had in his hand the instant the platform gave way under his feet. He said it was something that didn’t belong there, that it made a clanging sound. But he didn’t and still hasn’t said what it was. I don’t think he ever will…
What do you think it was?…
Translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili
Shahriar Mandanipour (Mondanipour), one of the most accomplished writers of contemporary Iranian literature, has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, Boston College, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He has been a visiting professorship at Brown University, where he taught courses in Persian literature and cinema. He also has taught creative writing at Tufts University. Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, and his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers. His honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran. Mandanipour is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays in literary theory, literature and art criticism, creative writing, censorship, and social commentary. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after 9 years of publishing was banned. Some of his short stories and essays have been published in anthologies such as Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Fiction and Sohrab’s Wars: Counter Discourses of Contemporary Persian Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories and a Film Script; and in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Short works have been published in France, Germany, Denmark, and in languages such Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish. Mandanipour’s first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (translated by Sara Khalili and published by Knopf in 2009) was very well received (Los Angeles Times, Guardian, New York Times, etc.). Censoring an Iranian Love Story was named by the New Yorker one of the reviewers’ favorites of 2009, by the Cornell Daily Sun as Best Book of the Year for 2009, and by NPR as one of the best debut novels of the year; it was awarded (Greek ed.) the Athens Prize for Literature for 2011. The novel has been translated and published in 11 other languages and in 13 countries throughout the world.