Aria Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2019 Nazanine Hozar

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hozar, Nazanine, author

  Aria / Nazanine Hozar.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345811820

  Ebook ISBN 9780345811844

  I. Title.

  PS8615.O96A75 2019 C813’.6 C2018-905698-3

  C2018-905699-1

  Text design: Jennifer Griffiths

  Cover design and art: Jennifer Griffiths

  v5.3.2

  a

  For my mother, Toba

  I saw many things on the face of the earth.

  I saw a child who was smelling the moon.

  I saw a door-less cage in which brilliance was fluttering its wings,

  a ladder from which Love was ascending to the roof of Heaven.

  I saw a woman pounding light in a mortar.

  SOHRAB SEPEHRI (from “The Footsteps of Water”)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  prologue

  1953

  part one

  ZAHRA

  1958–59

  part two

  FERESHTEH

  1959–68

  part three

  MEHRI

  1968–76

  part four

  ARIA

  1977–81

  epilogue

  1981

  prologue

  1953

  Mehri opened her eyes. She was lying on a mound of carpets. “Does he look like his father?” she asked.

  The old man, Karimi, was holding the baby. “She doesn’t know?” he whispered, turning to his wife.

  “She feels it,” Fariba said, glancing at Mehri. Fariba was much younger than her husband, and she was Mehri’s one friend.

  “I can tell she doesn’t know,” Karimi insisted.

  “Keep quiet. Are you massaging the baby like I showed you?”

  “Yes, yes.” He rubbed the baby’s chest and back.

  “What have we got ourselves into?” Fariba said. “Keep rubbing.” She grabbed a chunk of meat from the cooler and put it in a frying pan. “It’s for the mother. Not for you,” she said to her husband. She glanced back at Mehri. “She ruined her life the moment she laid eyes on that man. I told her to work for you, here at the bakery, instead. But she said she’d rather be his wife. Now look what’s happened.”

  After a minute, Karimi asked, “Wife, why doesn’t the baby make a sound?”

  “Because her eyes are blue,” Fariba said. “And she’s cursed, like her mother.”

  * * *

  —

  MEHRI HAD STAYED motionless under a blanket for hours, her back against the wall. She was ashamed to look at her friend.

  “I warned you about marrying him, didn’t I?” Fariba said. “How many times did I say he’d beat you?” At last, Fariba wrapped the baby, pressed her against her own breast, and approached Mehri. “Don’t you want to hold her?” she asked.

  Mehri said nothing.

  “You can’t pretend she doesn’t exist. Yes, she’s a girl. But it’s not so bad.”

  “He’s going to kill me,” Mehri said.

  Karimi was leaning against the wall, too, his face hidden behind his paper. But his hands trembled. They ached from helping Mehri give birth. And now he was embarrassed to look at her.

  “You know, husband, if we had a radio, you wouldn’t need to read the paper. You can barely hold it up,” Fariba said to him. “They say there are so many things to hear on the radio. Little plays. Would be nice to hear one of those.” She turned away from Mehri and lit a match to the coal in the stove.

  Karimi pushed his reading glasses to the tip of his nose and folded the paper. “Nonsense,” he said. “You worry about your little radio when most of those northerners are showing off their televisions. And all those years ago I taught myself to read—so why shouldn’t I read the paper? Nobody else back then knew how to read. Not my mother, not my father. I was the only kid up and down these streets who could do it. Figured out the letters on my own, and you—”

  “What’s a television?” Mehri asked suddenly, looking up. She caught a glimpse of the baby’s hair under the light. It was a reddish brown, like the father’s.

  “A movie screen, only smaller,” Karimi said, without looking up. “It’s small enough to fit in a room. They have them all over the North-City. Mossadegh was on one the other day.”

  “Why was our prime minister on television?”

  “To show he was alive. Somebody tried to kill him. Probably the filthy British.” Karimi turned back to his paper. “Damn them all. If it isn’t the communists, it’s the English, and if it isn’t the English, it’s those darned turban lovers thinking they’re as good as God. If it isn’t—”

  Fariba slammed down the kettle. “This poor girl nearly died tonight, and you worry about your politicians?”

  “None of your scolding in front of her,” Karimi said. “And dammit, nobody loves this country anymore. Except him. Mossadegh is great. Great, I’m telling you!”

  Mehri closed her eyes again and pretended to sleep.

  “This is a woman’s matter,” Karimi added, more softly, nodding at Mehri. “You want the neighbours to talk? We can’t keep her here.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Karimi,” said Fariba, “you just sit right there and drink your tea and read your paper. Just think about what your great Mr. Mossadegh would think of you.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT two days, Mehri refused to hold the baby, even when the father, Amir, kicked at the door of Karimi’s bakery downstairs. Fariba hollered at Amir from the second-floor balcony that his son was no son, but very much a girl.

  Amir said, “Then bring her down so I can kill her.”

  “You need to name her,” Fariba said, turning to Mehri. “Now.”

  But by the end of the day, the infant was still nameless. And Amir still sat at the door, waiting to kill the child.

  “He barks at people when they walk into the bakery,” Fariba said. She bounced the baby in her arms. “I had to feed her dry milk, you know. Not good for her.” Fariba shifted her weight where she sat on the Persian rugs covering the floor. She gulped down the last of her gin from a tea glass. When she was finished, she slapped the glass on the rug. “There’s always your brother.”

  “He won’t help,” Mehri said.

  “You’ve always said that, but you don’t know. And that boy Amir would rather kill his daughter than pay for her. Got anybody besides your brother?”

  “No.”

  Karimi entered the room and sat beside his wife. “You still unwell, child?” he asked Mehri. His voice was kind but weary. He had known Mehri since she was thirteen, a younger friend of Fariba’s, who was five years older. He could hardly bear to see her pain.

  Mehri covered herself with her veil and cast down her eyes. She bit into a soft corner of the material. It hadn’t been washed for weeks. Sometimes when she walked the streets she wondered if others could smell her.

  Fariba unfolded her thick legs and stood up, the baby in her arms.

  “Wife,” Karimi said, rising as well. “Put the baby down and come here.”

  They whispered as they walked into the next room. Mehri could hear them—only pieces and bits, but enough.

  “I can’t do it,” she heard Karimi say.

  “Are you ready to pay their way?” Fariba said.

  “This is my house. Don’t you forget where your place is, woman!”

  “She’s my friend. I do what I want with my friends. And I know that girl. She’s lying about her brother.”

  “The government won’t do anything for a family like that,” Karimi said.

  “That’s their people’s burden, then,” Fariba said. “I don’t know what to tell you, husband. If it weren’t for the laws—”

  “Other than the laws, what do we do about him?”

  “Him, we’ll figure out later. I’ll cut off his orange-haired head if I have to.”

  * * *

  —

  THE BAKER AND his wife were still talking when Mehri picked up the baby and stepped out through the back door. In the snow, she loosened her veil and pulled out her hard, blackened nipple. Her breast ached in the frozen air. She brought it to the baby’s lips, but the milk dripped away. She was cold, but the baby’s skin was even colder. Above, a cloud hid the moon. A veil of snow had begun to cover the city. She felt wet blood dripping down her legs. It made a trail behind her. Amir could find her if he followed it, like a lone wolf trailing its prey.

  But Mehri knew how to outmanoeuvre him. As a beggar-child she had made her way in Tehran’s northern streets, where the rich lived, and where some of them had given her something to eat. Most days she had received nothing, unlike her brother. But he was the boy.

>   When she reached Pahlavi Street, which connected the south to the north and divided worlds and existences, she found it changed from what she remembered: almost empty, almost silent, its ghosts were speaking and its rich were long asleep. By the light of the street lamps, she could see the snowy roads that rose to the tips of the Alborz Mountains, twenty kilometres away. As a child, she had dreamed of reaching those mountains. She would open her arms and fly to them, just like the phoenix in the old tales. She used to wonder if, from up there, one could see the city’s secrets. Once past the city’s valleys, did the mountain people breathe more freely? She would imagine the rich on their picnics along the mountain’s slopes and beside its rivers.

  After three hours of walking, she was somewhere in the city centre. Her legs shook. They ached and ached and ached to the beat of war drums, her muscles pounding against bone. Her entire body ached. Her sex ached most. She wondered what would happen if the baby fell from her arms. Would it freeze and become a message to the future world: beware of birth, beware of life, beware if you arrive and are unwanted? If the baby fell, would its skull explode? Would all its bones break? Or, just like it had done in birth, would the child overpower everything around her and force her body into the world?

  As Mehri walked, the city revealed itself to her. Structures and freeways unfolded and laid bare the world of the privileged. Here, in the city centre, the buildings grew taller; seen this close, they were as vast as the mountains that framed them. On one side of the street stood the tallest building she had ever seen. There was a picture of an old man on it: the prime minister, Mossadegh. She recognized him. Everyone knew his face now. She looked at it for a while, then carried on, past the parked cars and the few vehicles driving gently through the night. Even the shapes of cars had changed since last she had been here, she thought. They were more streamlined now, and in colours she hadn’t seen before.

  Now the streets and sidewalks widened. Mehri’s toes hurt from the cold. The baby was oddly silent, as if she knew what her mother was about to do. Mehri touched her sore thighs, shuffling her hand past and through the veil’s three layers, one for piety, one for culture, and the third for warmth. She picked up a handful of snow, cupped it under her veil to where she had been torn open and tried to wash the stain off, but the cold only stung her more. Blood stained her fingers. She put her nipple into the baby’s mouth again, but the baby still wouldn’t drink.

  She walked another hour before reaching the centre of a major intersection. At the edge of the street, strands of grass tried to push through the snow. Mehri looked around. Everything was new here, everything was modern.

  From this cross street there were four directions in which to go. She could walk back south, go north, or stay here on the streets that led east and west. To the west, there it was again—the picture of the old man, this time on newspaper pages glued to brick walls. Eastward the street was narrower, flanked by small trees that had lost their leaves for winter. One was different. It was a mulberry tree, which she recognized from her childhood, having spent hours picking fruit from one with her brother. They would collect thousands of mulberries in tin cans and leave them to dry and turn sweet before selling them. By nightfall they would have enough money for food—perhaps some meat to keep their muscles working.

  Mehri had never imagined herself becoming a mother. Life had never seemed as if it could last that long. But now life had sped toward her, crashed into her, developed in her organs, between her muscles and veins, month after month, and then exploded out of her in the form of the being she now held in her arms. She wanted badly to bring the baby closer, even to kiss her. Instead, she touched her hand to the bark of the mulberry tree and felt its grooves. The baby whimpered for the first time, as though in protest, as though begging for some mercy.

  Mehri walked on. She saw another mulberry tree, and beside it, an open alleyway. From within the alley came a stench of waste. She covered her face with her veil and entered. Paper garbage bags had been left out on either side. Holding the baby in one arm, she walked between the rows, searching for the right place. She felt nothing and had no awareness of time. The baby hardly stirred as Mehri placed her on the ground. For several minutes, neither mother nor child moved. Moonlight shone on the infant’s face, and for the first time Mehri looked clear into her eyes. She and her baby shared the same eye colour, as Fariba had said. She bent down and caressed the baby’s cheeks, her chin and brow. In the moonlight she saw that blood from her fingers had stained the baby’s face. But there was nothing she could do about that now.

  At last, Mehri stood and turned around. She walked away—so far that not even the moonlight could help her see her daughter again.

  * * *

  TRUCKS RUMBLED ALONG the gravel road in the dead of the night, vibrating like a line of ants, thick tarpaulins shaking as engines whirred and wheels lifted dust, fogging the cold February air. Behrouz Bakhtiar closed his eyes. A film of dirt coated the skin covering the thin bones of his face. He watched by moonlight as four eight-wheelers filled with young men from the provinces rolled away.

  He would not be driving the young men home as usual. This was the first night of his four days off. He would instead place a cigarette in his mouth, light it with the last match he had in his pocket, and walk home down the red mountain, where earth mingled with snow, then stride through the city from north to south. This was his Tehran, and he was its secret guardian, the angel perched on the mountaintop counting buildings, trees, lights, and people who walked about like insects, unaware of being watched.

  Strange how people are, Behrouz thought, the cigarette between his thin lips. And he began his walk down and through the city just as he had planned, just as he had been anticipating all day.

  He slid down the slopes effortlessly, taking a drag from his cigarette every once in a while. He whistled when the mood struck him. He had walked this path many times, since he had first learned to drive up the mountain. How old had he been, seventeen? He was thirty-three now, so that made it sixteen years. With time off multiplied by sixteen, that made about four thousand times he had walked up and down the slopes of Darakeh.

  Sometimes, of course, the generals gave him permission to drive down and save himself the three-hour walk. And when Behrouz first got married, the general in command had not only encouraged him to drive, he’d let him off early to encourage husbandly duties—but not without reminding Behrouz how old his new wife was. “Think that wife of yours’ll be able to handle fresh little you?” the general had said.

  Behrouz had married Zahra when he was nineteen, upon his father’s urging. “The Prophet was a boy, his wife was forty when he took her,” his father had said. But Zahra was no prophet’s wife. She was thirty-six, had never married, and had a son, Ahmad, who was the same age as Behrouz. Ahmad hadn’t come to the wedding. That night, when Behrouz asked his new wife where her son was, Zahra replied, “Somewhere in the prison halls.” Then she had forced herself on him.

  When he’d first started driving trucks in the army, Behrouz had been more talkative. The soldiers liked him. They would reveal themselves, telling him about their lives on the farms or in small towns. If they were Tehrani boys, they talked about their schools and their girlfriends. The only one who had never opened up was a member of the royal family—a cousin of the king. But Behrouz supposed that was different. He had been ordered not to look the boy in the eyes.

  Behrouz had begun learning to drive at sixteen because he wasn’t strong enough to fight, or smart enough to read. His father had taught him the basics. He could have sold bread on the streets like his father, or worked the oil mines like his uncles. But the one time he had suggested this, his father slapped him so hard, Behrouz saw stars for days. And that was the end of that.

  Now, as he walked, the red dirt beneath his boots remained frozen. Three nights ago there had been a storm. But now the snow had settled and was packed along the path. The walk wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. He swiftly made it down Darakeh, to the northern tip of Pahlavi Street. Here there were cobblestone roads and the houses were old. He’d heard that the king’s father once lived here.