Mahmoud Dowlatabadi - Missing Soluch

He reached the stable door, while bending over in pain. He put the lock on the door and returned the same way. He mumbled painfully through his teeth, “All I have is mixed in the dirt and mud in the stable. How am I supposed to find it all? That sneak Abrau, I don’t trust him!”

Abbas, wrapped in his own pain and worries, didn’t notice Abrau returning. He crept into a corner bent over, and he hid the key to the lock inside the hem of his pants.

“Castor oil! Strained oil! Girl, go get our mother!”

He said this and then collapsed against the wall beside the stove.

Wearing Ali Genav’s long cloak and his big boots, Abrau looked like a dwarf. He had wrapped something around his head and his face. His face was purple and his lips were cracked. The cold had broken his weak body down. In the doorway, his body collapsed like an old wall crumbling, and he fell to his knees. Ali Genav slowly rose up, grabbed Abrau under his arms, and pulled him to the side of the room. Hajer didn’t wait a moment longer and ran out to get Mergan. Ali Genav set aside his shawl and began massaging Abrau’s frozen hand in between his own thick, dark hands. Abrau’s eyes were open, but he couldn’t speak. Ali Genav told Morad to light the stove. Morad left to bring back a stack of cottonwood from the oven outside. As he continued to massage Abrau’s heart and neck, Ali Genav asked, “So what happened? Did you bring him? The bonesetter?”

Abrau still couldn’t speak. He raised his head up. Ali Genav began to massage Abrau’s ears with his hands.

“What happened? What did he say?”

Abrau finally replied, in broken speech, “Cold … too cold … didn’t come!”

Abbas brayed from across the room, “Didn’t I tell you to send me? I told you not to trust him with that job! If I’d have gone, he’d be here. I would have brought him. Even if he was sleeping with his wife, I’d have dragged him out and brought him. Castor oil! I need some castor oil … You should have had someone capable do it!”

Ali Genav removed his cloak from Abrau’s body and loosened the laces on the boots, taking the boy’s feet out of them. He rose and was about to leave when Mergan entered the door with Hajer behind her. Just then Morad stepped in the room with his arms full of cottonwood. Ali Genav looked at Mergan as if he had a question he didn’t dare ask her. Mergan’s eyes had a shadow across them. What could he do? Finally he opened his mouth.

“Yes? Well?”

Mergan said, “She passed … God have mercy on her.”

“Who? Which one?”

“Your mother. Mother Genav!”

Ali Genav said with disbelief, “Now what the hell am I supposed to do? Night! It’s already night!”

He said it quietly, not directing it at anyone. It just slipped out. He put his cloak under one arm and his boots in one hand and walked heavily out the door.

Abrau pointed to Ali Genav as he left, and said to his mother, “My pay! My pay!”

Mergan sat between her sons. Abbas said, “Mama, dear! I need some castor oil! I’m dying. My stomach, my insides. My insides hurt so much! Give me castor oil. My insides are full of coins! Mama!”

Worried and anxious, in the mists of the morning, Abrau slid out from where he was. His bones had warmed a bit, and he felt as if he could walk. Quietly, he dressed and tiptoed out of the house. Sounds were still coming from behind the closed door of the stables. Abrau crept forward and listened. These were the last emanations from Abbas’ troubled stomach — he had locked himself in the stables last night and now, at the break of morning, wrapped up in his own pain and his own concerns, Abbas had locked off the stable. He had closed the door and would not let anyone else inside. The last light from the lantern flickered in the darkness of the stable. Abrau thought that Abbas must finally have found some relief in there. But Abrau wasn’t really concerned about his brother. He tied up the edges of his overcoat, drew the string around his waist into a knot, and then exited through the gap in the wall.

The alley was still dark. However, the snow’s light was beginning to break through the darkness. The snow was now covered by a sheet of ice. It had become dry and impermeable. The coldness was spreading, that cold that follows every snow. As the saying goes, “Worry not for the day of snow; worry for the day after!” But Abrau was relieved that on the day after the snow, meaning on this day, he had no major chores to see to. He had already made his contribution with his work on the day before. Even on the short distance he had to go, the coldness burned him. His eyelids couldn’t fight the harsh dawn wind, which rose off of the snow and cut through him. His hollow eyelids, which were pockmarked from childhood chicken pox, flickered open and shut. They couldn’t stop blinking. His nose began to run. His face, bitten by the cold, began to look withdrawn and bruised. Abrau felt frostbite beginning to numb his chin and forehead while tears gathered at the edges of his eyes. He hid half of his face in the collar of his overcoat as he passed before the door of the mosque. The door was half open. Abrau peeked inside. A casket covered by an embroidered sheet was set onto the winter cover of the pool in the courtyard, which was frozen stuck. One of the stray bitches from Zaminej’s wild packs had decamped beside the casket. Abrau guessed that Mother Genav was still lying inside the casket, since people aren’t buried at nighttime. So, there was no time to waste. He continued on his way, entering the alley leading to the town’s public pool. The pool was a solid square of ice. All around the pool, piles of snow were heaped on top of each other. The bath’s boiler room was just a ways farther on, at the edge of one wall of the town baths, next to the drain to the pool. Abrau circled the pool and headed step by step down an embankment along a narrow path. The path twisted and turned like a snake’s tail, leading to the low and broken doorway into the boiler room.

Abrau opened the door. Ali Genav was sitting on a slab of rock beside the water heater stoking the heart of the fire with a metal poker, occasionally tossing a handful or two of kindling into the fireplace. He has sensed Abrau’s entrance, but Ali Genav was calmer and more deliberate than to be drawn out of his own thoughts by a sudden movement in his surroundings. So, he remained focused on his work, as if no one else were there. Abrau shut the door behind himself, approached Ali Genav, and sat quietly in the comfortable warmth of the fire. How the warmth entered his heart! Without looking at him, Ali Genav handed the poker to Abrau and extracted a crumpled packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt. He took a cigarette out with his mouth, holding onto the end of it with his teeth. Then he took a burning branch from the fire, lit up, and exhaled a cloud of smoke from his nostrils. With a voice full of self-pity, he said, “I’ve not slept a wink since last night! The moaning and groaning of this damn woman stopped me from even shutting my eyes, damn her and her father and ancestors! She was swearing and moaning until the break of dawn. It’s as if she thinks she’s owed something. Infernal woman! She makes the world a salt-desert, bringing nothing good to it. If she’d die, I’d be free of her. Why should someone waste his wheat and bread on a woman who has nothing to offer and who brings no blessings! A female donkey would at least bear offspring once in a while, but this bitch won’t even bear a thistle bush so that one can at least feel the satisfaction of having left something behind! May her father rot in hell. What is supposed to give me hope in life? When I die, what will carry my name, except for a slab of stone?! When I die, it’ll be as if I never lived. So like some fool I came and went. So what? So I beat her once the first time she was pregnant and she lost the kid! Now what am I supposed to do with her? I lost my head and I beat her. Now what? She complained so much and harassed my father and mother so much that I couldn’t have a say in the house. And then this happened to my poor mother. I swear on this fire before me, she was the cause of all these problems. Otherwise, I would never have thrown my own mother out of my house to go and live in a ruins and to meet this kind of an end. Didn’t I suckle from my mother’s breast? How will she ever forgive me for what I’ve done? How? After all, she’s gone now!”