Kader Abdolah - The House of the Mosque

The grandmothers sat in the kitchen, talking and weeping silent tears. The man they loved was about to die. When had they first met him? One afternoon more than a half-century ago, when they were young girls and the poet Kazem Khan had come riding into the courtyard on his horse. Before that time they had never even heard a poem. A few days later Kazem Khan had written two poems, one for Golbanu and one for Golebeh. Poems about their eyes, their long plaits, their smiles and their hands, which were pleasantly warm when they lit the fire in the opium kit. The next time he came to the house, the two women were his for all eternity.

Am Ramazan appeared in the doorway. He was the man who looked after the garden. Every day at dusk he stopped by to see Muezzin in his studio. He kept track of the clay and ordered a new supply when Muezzin was running low. Am Ramazan lived alone; his wife was dead and he had no children. All he had was a donkey. He earned his living by mining sand from the river and transporting it to his customers on his donkey.

Am Ramazan whispered a greeting to Aqa Jaan, who returned his greeting and motioned for him to come in. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Kazem Khan hasn’t had any opium for a while. His body is crying out for it. The grandmothers are going to prepare the opium kit. If you could smoke the pipe and blow the smoke into his face, it might give him some relief.’

Am Ramazan smoked opium from time to time, but couldn’t afford to buy it for himself. He was delighted to accept Aqa Jaan’s offer, because he knew that Kazem Khan smoked the best opium in the mountains. Am Ramazan and his friends smoked a dark-brown opium that stank to high heaven, but Kazem Khan smoked a yellowish-brown opium that smelled of wildflowers.

Aqa Jaan handed half a roll of opium to Am Ramazan, who slipped it in his pocket and went outside to help with the fire.

Before long Golebeh came in with a pot of tea and a brazier filled with glowing embers. She looked at Kazem Khan with tears in her eyes and set the brazier on the floor. Am Ramazan stuck the pipe in the hot ashes and cut the opium into thin slices.

When the pipe was hot, he put one of the slices on the tip, secured it with a pin, picked up a glowing ember with a pair of tongs, and held it up to the opium. He started out with a few gentle puffs, then inhaled more and more deeply. For a moment he forgot he was smoking the opium for Kazem Khan. Then his eye caught Aqa Jaan’s and he stood up, holding the pipe in his left hand and the tongs with the glowing ember in his right hand.

Leaning over Kazem Khan, he heated the opium in the pipe with the glowing ember, then inhaled deeply and blew the smoke in Kazem Khan’s face.

He smoked patiently for half an hour, until the room was filled with a dark-blue cloud of smoke.

The door opened and Crazy Qodsi came in. The grandmothers tried to stop her, but Aqa Jaan gestured for them to leave her alone. She walked over to the bed, leaned down, peered into Kazem Khan’s face, mumbled something and tiptoed out, without saying a word to Aqa Jaan.

‘That’s enough,’ Golbanu said to Am Ramazan. ‘If you would care to leave, we’ll read to Kazem Khan from the Koran.’ Aqa Jaan, having grown a bit drowsy from the smoke, roused himself and left the room along with Am Ramazan.

Golebeh took the Koran from the shelf and sat down on the floor beside Golbanu. Reading ordinary books wasn’t a problem, but the Koran was much more difficult. Fortunately they both knew a number of surahs by heart. Golbanu opened the book and stared at the page, then began to recite a surah by heart, while Golebeh repeated the words after her:

By the pen and by what you write.

We put the owners of the gardens to the test.

In the morning they called out to one another:

‘Go early to your field,

If you wish to gather the fruits.’

And they set off early,

But when they saw it they said:

‘We must have lost our way.

No, we have been dispossessed!’

Golebeh brought her mouth to his ear and whispered, ‘Kazem Khan, you have begun your journey. Sooner or later we will follow. We have a secret. We aren’t supposed to tell anyone, but we’ll tell you. A few weeks from now we’ll be going to Mecca. We owe it all to the Prophet Khezr. We were planning to go to Jirya to say farewell. I kiss you, Kazem Khan. We both do. You made us happy.’

Golbanu and Golebeh kissed Kazem Khan on the forehead and left the room.

On the third night Aqa Jaan noticed that Kazem Khan’s end was nearing. He went into the room alone, shut the door and kissed his uncle on the forehead. ‘You can let go now,’ he whispered. ‘We will remember you always. I will put your shoes and your poems in the treasure room. I’m here beside you, holding your hand.’

Shahbal tiptoed in and remained standing by the door.

‘Would you bring me a glass of black tea and a spoon?’ Aqa Jaan asked him.

When Shahbal returned with the requested items, Aqa Jaan put a slice of opium in the glass and stirred it until it dissolved. ‘Here,’ he said to Shahbal, ‘put a spoonful of this in his mouth, his body craves it. This way his soul can depart his body more peacefully.’

Shahbal carefully spooned the yellowish-brown liquid into Kazem Khan’s mouth.

Aqa Jaan put his hand on his uncle’s bare shoulder. ‘He’s going,’ he said, and he leaned down and kissed Kazem Khan again on the forehead. Slowly, the life ebbed out of the old man. ‘He’s gone,’ Aqa Jaan said, his voice filled with sorrow. ‘Will you let the others know?’

The grandmothers were the first to enter the room. They offered their condolences to Aqa Jaan and stood quietly by the bed. The next to arrive were Fakhri, Zinat and Muezzin, all crying. Aqa Jaan gathered up Kazem Khan’s shoes and his poems and carried them through the darkness to the mosque.

The mosque had a treasure room, a secret chamber in the crypt, where items of value to the house had been stored for centuries, such as deeds, parchment rolls, letters, the robes and shoes of the mosque’s imams from the past to the present and hundreds of journals filled with mosque reports written for centuries by men like Aqa Jaan. Every object had been arranged in chronological order and placed in chests.

The treasure room was a gold mine of information. You could trace the country’s religious history in its archives. Many personal items that had belonged to the residents of the house were also stored there.

The archives and personal items should probably have been given to a museum for safekeeping, but they constituted a unique — and more importantly — personal history of the house and the mosque.

The head of the household was obliged to carry the key to the treasure room at all times.

The only other person aside from Aqa Jaan who knew about the treasure room and its contents was Shahbal. Aqa Jaan had told him about the journals. ‘When I die — and God is the only one who knows when that will be — you will become the keeper of the key,’ Aqa Jaan had said to Shahbal. ‘You will write in the journals, and you will decide what happens.’

He himself had been a mere twenty-seven years old when he entered the treasure room for the first time.

After the death of his father, he’d taken a lantern and gone down to the crypt in the dark of night. With trembling hands he’d inserted the key in the ancient lock, opened the door and gone inside.

He had felt as if he were in a dream world, for that vaulted room was like nothing he had ever seen before. An old pomegranate-red carpet had been laid over the stone floor. One corner contained a chair and a table, on top of which stood an inkpot, a quill pen and a journal, opened to a blank page. The wall was lined with dozens of pairs of dusty shoes, each labelled with the name of the deceased imam to whom they had belonged. Across from the shoes were rows of coat-racks, and on every hook was an imam’s prayer robe and black turban. Next to some of the coat-racks were walking sticks and small chests, in which the personal belongings and important documents from that particular imam’s era had been stored.