ArteEast Quarterly: Gardenia (fiction)

July 1, 2007

Gardenia (fiction)

Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Translated by Faridoun Farrokh

All those years that my mother forced me to take afternoon naps, I didn’t really sleep. I stayed awake imagining things and going through strands of memories. I would press my fingers on my closed eyelids a while and then open my eyes fast and see a stream of stars rush in through the small window of our room and scatter on the mat where I lay. I would listen to the horsefly buzzing as if challenging me to kill him. Then I would imagine picking up a fly swatter and hitting him hard three times. When I didn’t hear the buzz, I would assume that I had killed him.

In those years—when I was about five—I married. I married an imaginary girl next door who was older—and bigger—than I. We had a child, a boy, and I would take him for a stroll in the drowsy solitude of those afternoons. We would ride a merry-go-round, spinning in circles, going up and down. I remember that for a long time I called him Sandals. He had blond hair and could read books—something I couldn’t. That’s why Mr. Nosrat, our Kurdish neighbor, would hug him at the bottom of a staircase in the entrance hall of his house and admonish his little daughter to be studious like him. I had named my wife Zary and she was prettier than my unmarried aunt, pretty like a mermaid, although I couldn’t decide the form of her eyes and eyebrows. But she had gleaming white teeth and long, braided hair. She wore my aunt’s flowered taffeta dress and went to the mosque with my mother, leaving me and Sandals at home with Grandma whom we would mimic as she went through her namaz. (1)  Or we would stealthily thumb through my uncle’s fourth-grade reader. The letters all looked alike to me but the pictures were fascinating.

Those were fantastic years when I was both a child and a grown up. I had no father, but I was myself a father. To preserve my paternal stance, I wouldn’t cry when my mother spanked me in the presence of my son. I would let Sandals dash through the streets to buy lollipops without heeding the passing cars. I would let him run around and play with foul-mouthed, ill-mannered street urchins.

Those were fantastic years when I had hundreds of wives. I saw them in the arms of their mothers in the bus that brought my mother home from work at the hospital. “Sweetie,” my mother would say to some of them affectionately. “Wanna be my daughter-in-law?” Many of them I did not like, not even the one with curly hair and crumbs around her lips from the cookie she always seemed to be munching on. Nonetheless they were my wives for that afternoon and three afternoons following, and they all bore me the same son, Sandals.

My aunt liked her sandals. “They are more comfortable than shoes and my feet don’t sweat in them because they are open all around,” she would say. “They make you want to fly.”
Sandals and I would also fly, Sandals, my son. He was just a fraction of an inch shorter than I, but he was so light I could carry him in my arms when I flew faster than pigeons over the rooftops, landing on whichever roof I fancied. From up in the sky all the gardens looked the same size and shape as ours—with brick pathways and the reflecting pool, its water green with algae, and tiny worms squirming at the edges. The worms bothered me, gnawing at me like morbid thoughts.

I remember my mother being jealous of Sandals, ignoring him altogether, as if I did not have a son. “Clean up the mess you made on the floor,” she would order me, intending to humiliate me in front of him. But I carried him under my shirt and took him wherever I went. I would secretly feed him from my plate and keep him abreast of whatever happened in the house. I never had reason to punish him.

He listened to what I told him and we understood each other. I had ordained that he not wet his pants, and he never did, and that his hands and face be always clean, and they always were. I wanted him to stand next to me in the tub when my mother gave us a bath, and he always did.

My mother never knew that despite her injunctions we poked at the colonies of mosquito larvae as they wiggled near the edge of the pool, although we were both equally repulsed by their slimy, squirming mass. She never knew that afterwards we would put on our T-shirts and play hide-and-seek until nightfall when the gardenia opened up its petals, sending forth its sweet fragrance as a tribute to the budding roses (2) across the yard.

For me Sandals was a good son and I was very pleased with him. But my mother was unhappy with me and forced me to take naps in the afternoon, although I would quietly get up and part the curtain to stare through the fly-specked window-pane at the yard awash in the muggy, stifling afternoon heat, with its algae-infested pool and the gardenia stretching its limbs on the wall facing my room. I would drink and drink water to make my tummy swell out like a balloon. And then I would give birth to Sandals, over and over again. How could my mother know? She was asleep.
 
 

Mohsen Makhmalbaf gained recognition as the most conspicuous figure among the group of young writers who identified themselves with the Islamic regime in Iran since its inception in 1979 and became the collective mouthpiece of the clerical oligarchy. Soon after he made his mark on the literary scene by the publication of a novel followed by a collection of short stories, Makhmalbaf pulled away from the pack, both artistically and ideologically, and distinguished himself not only by writing fiction but also by making films. Since then he has attained a global reputation as a director and film-maker and his literary past is for all intents and purposes relegated to oblivion.


Faridoun Farrokh is a professor in the Department of Language and Literature at Texas A&M International University. He can be reached at ffarrokh@tamiu.edu.
 
 

1  An elaborate Muslim prayer ritual performed several times a day.
2. In the Iranian tradition a highly fragrant variety of the rose, from which rosewater is extracted, is associated with the Prophet and members of his family.
 
  All images and text are copyrighted material owned by either the artist and/or writer and are reprinted with explicit permission for ArteEast Online and cannot be reprinted without consent of artist or author.