It seems like yesterday. In the middle of the night, they freed me. What didn’t matter to me was where I was. It was Parkway though. All around me was dark. I heard the sound of water, peacefully passing by. I put my feet in the water. I thought this was life and all the rest was literally nothing. I sat at the stream bank and looked at water kink around my shin and thought I was finally free, free to sit there all night and free to walk home. I sat there till dawn and then I took a cab home. I had nothing with me except my underwear in a plastic bag which as sun rose I let the water took away. Then I stood up feeling old but with more energy than ever. I walked all the way down to Enghelab Street and watched the city wake up; get haunted with its own desires, tied in them, and when I finally got home it was eleven. Father opened the little green door. He hugged me and dragged me in the yard. We were silent. He told me to wait and ran into the kitchen. I never forget how mother’s eyes came out of darkness in the doorway but can’t remember the rest until after I entered what was once my room. It was no more my room. There was no book there. I could guess where they were, so I went to the yard. Mother said that they’re not there, that she had not buried them and that she had burned them. This was when I felt hopeless at once. For me, who never experienced love, her only picture, hidden in Akhavan’s Winter, was the only trophy, a trophy which was now burnt.
The days after, I spent as much time as I could with mother and father though all the while I thought about the streets and what went on there. And then one day as we were having breakfast mother asked me why I was worried? I’m not, I said. But she continued. Go out, see what people are doing. You won’t miss us more than when you were in prison.
I went out that day. It was like I had never been away. I found out how much I had been preoccupied with them already that nothing was missed. So with two books I got back home. It was sundown and father was sitting in front of his aquarium staring at the fish mother was feeding. I tried to look at them from their eyes but instead, what I saw was the black hole of the mouth of the fish stuck to its glass walls. There she was; transformed as a fish. She was not the picture my interrogator showed me: naked with the trace of noose on her neck. She was done with god, done with power, with religion and with Moloch finally. It was me at last, gazing at life, facing the hours and the walls. These walls which now I am giving another birth to.
When they died, in a short time after we had moved to Gisha, I started covering all the walls. Mother died because of a heart attack while she was asleep and father died out of heart attack two months later, staring at his aquarium. I had just opened the bookshop. It was summer 1988. Of my friends no one was left, they were either hanged, killed, murdered -whatever you may call it- or had fled to other fucking countries. I stood in the middle of the street one day and all I could see was myself standing somewhere on the deserted street. Gone was the soul of the world and gone was everyone. And I felt the teeth of that lion eating my body, starting from my hands. Words of Ginsberg’s Kaddish started eating my hand right from my fingers up to the wrist, up to my arm until my body was an empty corpse. I hardly understood what he said but there was the echo of Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet in the empty room I carried everywhere with me. That empty room once Kafka wrote about. I was broken, that I confessed while I sleepwalked back to my bookshop. Somebody had left a painting of a cellist. I took it out of the shelf, on the books and sat on my wooden stool. There was something about it, something unreal yet more real than the realistic paintings. With the man looking at me, I knew he was talking to me, and he was showing me his hands telling me to look how deformed they were. Telling me hey look I can’t even take the cello the right way and with the right hand. And at a moment of clarity he pointed at the nada behind him, the nada with a vague similarity to a kind of prison wall. I took it home and installed on the wall. And it was only the start.
Now that I’m taking all of them off the walls I have a feeling like after 21 years I’ve passed the phase. However I think I’m giving birth to new walls for I’ve already started putting some pictures of Baader-meinhof group on the walls. And now Ulrike is staring at me, dissolving in the darkness behind her, sad-eyed, new companion.
I could not; I could not any longer –
the sound of the street, the sound of the birds,
the sound of tennis balls being lost,
the fleeing clamor of children,
the dance of kites, like bubbles of soap,
climbing aloft at the tip of a stem of string,
and the wind, the wind, as if panting at the bottom of love making’s deepest dark moments,
pressed upon the walls
of the silent citadel of my confidence
and through the ancient fissures
called my heart by name