Kader Abdolah - My Father's Notebook

“I can’t,” I signed back.

He panicked. “She’s going to die. I can tell. My mother felt hot, then all of a sudden she turned cold. She was dead. You’ve got to take Jamileh to a doctor.”

It was the first time I’d ever seen him so upset.

“My first wife, too. She was also hot, very hot, then suddenly cold.”

“Take it easy. Calm down,” I gestured.

But he didn’t. “You’ve got to drive her to the hospital, now !”

I stood there helplessly.

Suddenly my father had an idea. “Let’s take her to our house,” he signed.

“What?”

“I’ll carry her home. Then I’ll go and get a doctor.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t explain.”

“Talk to Tina,” he signed.

“Tina?”

“Yes, why not?”

I was going to have to share my secret with Tina. All the doors were closed, and Tina’s was the only one I could knock on.

“OK,” I signed. “Go and get Tina.”

I didn’t know how Tina would react, but I was sure the news would make her gasp. She had done her best to shield my sisters from my political activities. She wanted her daughters to find good husbands, leave home without a hitch, have children, buy a house and live happily ever after. And here I was, knocking on her door with the legendary Jamileh.

Tina realised instantly that this was an emergency. I hadn’t seen her in more than a year, so I thought she’d start by moaning, “Where have you been, son, why haven’t you come to see us?” But she didn’t. I thought she’d hug me and exclaim, “My, how you’ve changed!” But she didn’t. She bustled into the dusky lean-to and shot me a quick glance. At first she didn’t recognise me. Then she saw Jamileh, stretched out on the ground. I briefly explained what was going on. She grasped the situation immediately.

She was silent for a moment. Then another side of her came to the fore. Not the weak Tina, but the Tina described by Kazem Khan, the woman who cleared the snow from the roof and refused to let him in. To my great surprise, she knelt calmly beside Jamileh, took her hand and felt her stomach. Then she picked up a candle and peered more closely at her abdomen.

“I’m taking her back to the house. Then I’ll go for a doctor.”

“Tina,” I said, “she escaped from prison.”

“But she needs a doctor.”

“You’re right, but if the police … Oh, I see. Nobody knows who she is. You can simply—”

“I’m going to take her home and say that she’s my niece, on a visit from Saffron Village.”

Tina had found a simple solution to a difficult problem: Jamileh was sick, so Jamileh had to be examined by a doctor.

She wrapped her in a chador. “Carry her over your shoulder,” she signed to my father.

I helped him lift her.

“Let’s go!” gestured Tina.

She kissed my forehead. “Don’t look so sad. It’ll be all right!”

I stood and watched until they vanished into the darkness. There was nothing more I could do.

The man who reads leaves the well.

Tina weeps.

We might even go with the faithful to

the holy city, where the mosques

have golden domes.

Jamileh stayed in my parents’ house for a month. For thirty-four days, to be exact. On the last night, Tina escorted her to the big mosque in the centre of town, where a taxi was waiting beneath an old tree to whisk her away.

Tina had taken good care of her. In her autobiography, Jamileh described the month she spent with my family as a wonderful and safe period in her life. To protect people, she didn’t use real names in her book, except for Tina’s. “Though there are many I would like to thank by name, the safety of those individuals depends on my discretion. Even so, one person deserves my undying thanks: the courageous Aunt Tina.”

Jamileh had stolen Tina’s heart and left behind a wealth of unforgettable memories. Tina couldn’t stop talking about Jamileh, who was unlike any woman she’d ever known. Tina had taken good care of her and cooked delicious meals, so Jamileh had even put on a little weight.

“Jamileh sang and skipped around the garden,” Tina told me later. “At first it seemed a bit out of character, but actually it wasn’t. Sometimes she’d ask me questions …”

“What kind of questions?”

“About that country, that island. Quub or Qube, or something like that.”

“You mean Cuba?”

“Yes, that’s it. Jamileh asked me if I knew where Cuba was. I’d never heard of it. She told me about the lives of the people there. She said that they were healthy and that medicine was free, along with milk for children and old people’s homes — all free. She told me that women had lots of rights. For example, if a woman didn’t want her husband, she could kick him out of the house. She said that most of the bus drivers were women and that they even drove great big trucks. She was always talking about that man, what’s his name? The one with a cigar in his mouth and a rifle over his shoulder.”

“Castro?”

“Not him, the other one, the man with the beret.”

“You mean Che Guevara?”

“That’s the one. She told me about his adventures. How he fought and barely escaped with his life. And sometimes she told me jokes about the shah. You know, how even his soap was made of gold, and how he went to the bathroom with a clothespin over his nose rather than admit that he was making that awful smell. Oh, we had such good times when she was with us. She also got along well with your father.

“He showed her his old pictures, the ones of him and Reza Shah standing by the rock with his pick-axe on his shoulder. And he told her his stories of the cuneiform relief and the time the villagers cleared a path through the mountains for the train.

“Even though she didn’t understand our sign language, she listened patiently to your father. Sometimes she tried to answer in sign language, but she never really got the hang of it and we roared with laughter.”

Tina could go on and on about Jamileh. There was no end to her reminiscences.

After the clerics came to power, however, she saw Jamileh’s stay in a different light. She believed that it had destroyed the lives of her daughters.

Regardless of Tina’s opinion, one thing was sure: Golden Bell thought of Jamileh as her role model. For thirty-four nights, she had shared a room with Jamileh. Her visit was a turning point in Golden Bell’s life.

Before the revolution, Tina had the usual expectations. She dreamed that two normal, decent men would come and ask for her daughters’ hands in marriage. She didn’t include Golden Bell in her daydream, since she had no control over her youngest daughter anyway.

Tina had always longed for the quiet life she’d never had. She dreamed of becoming a grandmother, of holding her grandchildren on her lap and telling them stories. Then Jamileh shattered her dreams.

The two men Tina had been waiting for appeared. When they asked for her daughters’ hands in marriage, however, her daughters refused to marry such ordinary men. They longed for another kind of man. Tina wept.

“What do you want ? Who on earth are you waiting for? A Castro? A Che Guevara? A man with a cigar and a beret? God help me, I don’t deserve this.”

Only after the revolution did the men her daughters were waiting for finally appear. They were hardly Castro or Che Guevara, though they did have Che Guevara posters above their beds. And while they didn’t smoke (cigars were too expensive anyway), they did stick an occasional cigarette in the corner of their mouths and talk about the revolution.