Missing Soluch (2 page)

Now, Soluch’s legacy was only this unfinished, cracked granary. Was there a skilled granary builder in the place where Soluch had gone?

Abrau, Mergan’s second son, with his big ears and his wide and sleepy eyes stepped across the doorway into the yard and went straight to the ditch beside the wall. His mother passed him and disappeared inside the stable. To Abrau, his mother’s coming and going was different than it usually was. Today she was aimless, erratic. She couldn’t stay still. She came out the door and went to the porch, beside the clay oven. She seemed uneasy. Unconsciously, she made circles around herself, poked her head into this hole and that one, mumbling to herself.

“Gone. Fine! Gone … Gone. Ha! Let him go! Let him go to hell and back! Go. So what? What do I care? Go!”

Abrau looked at his mother and asked, “Who’s gone? Whom are you talking to?”

“He’s gone to hell. Gone to find his father there. Where that bastard came from. He’s gone to stop by his mother’s gravestone. What do I know? Gone. Just gone. Don’t you see? He’s not here. Before, when he’d leave, there’d be something of his left here. Somewhere around here. But today, there’s no sign, nothing!”

“What did he have to leave here every day? What could he take? Just his donkey skin, which he had with himself every day.”

Mergan was silent and confused. Anxiety was winning her over. She shook her hands uncontrollably, flapping them like a hen with its head cut off. She said to herself—and in response to her son, “I don’t know, myself. I don’t know. But it seems to me he’d always leave something of himself, something, behind. Didn’t he?”

“Like what?”

Mergan screamed at her son, “What do I know? What do I know? I don’t know. Maybe his cloak. His cloak!”

Abrau washed his hands and rose from the edge of the ditch. The cold water dripped from his fingers; he slid his hands under his armpits and went to continue talking to his mother. But Mergan was already leaving. She exited through the gap in the wall and walked up the alley facing the dry wind. Where should she go? Where was she going? The alley outside was empty, as all the alleys in the village were. The dry cold rose from the open fields and scraped its rough body against the walls and doorways of the village of Zaminej. The dogs, and only the dogs, were wandering the alleys. Skinny, sickly dogs. Pell-mell, barefoot, with only a thin shirt to warm her, Mergan made her way toward the house of the Kadkhoda, the village headman.

When she reached the central square, she saw Karbalai-Safi, the old father of the Kadkhoda, who was leaving the baths and sauntering up the alley. Karbalai-Safi was one of the whitebeards of Zaminej. Seeing him, Mergan had to stop and wait. She stood by the wall and said hello. Karbalai-Safi came forward, holding his side with one hand, caught his breath, and said, “Ah Mergan! Where to this early …? Afraid of something?”

Mergan suddenly realized she was shaking, so she hid her slim and drawn hands beneath her armpits while shuffling her feet. She said, “Soluch’s gone, Karbalai. He’s not here. Gone. Lost. Gone.”

Karbalai-Safi, not looking at Mergan, passed her while saying, “Wherever he’s gone, he’ll come back by himself. Where is that fool to go? Where could his feet take him to, anyway?”

Mergan followed along with Karbalai-Safi, and continued, “He’s not here! Not here, Karbalai. I know in my heart he’s gone. He leaves every morning early on, but today it was different. It’s as if he were never there.”

Karbalai-Safi stroked his beard for a moment without speaking and then pressed his thick and twisted fingers against the large, termite-marked door. The door opened with a dry, cold sound, and Karbalai-Safi entered the stone-floored vestibule, crossing to the courtyard with silent footsteps.

Mergan wasn’t sure what to do. She stood there, looking at the back of Karbalai-Safi’s head. He put one foot onto the brick stairs, lifting his rather heavy body carefully before disappearing across the veranda into the house. Mergan waited for a moment and then quietly entered the yard, sitting in a corner by the threshold of the doorway. The thought that the Kadkhoda was likely still asleep, and that she would have to wait there for him to wake up, stung at her. Despite this, she saw no other way. She’d
have to stay where she was until something happened. Eventually someone came out, and a voice called out, “God is great.”

The sound of Karbalai-Safi’s prayer arose in the air. After that, Moslemeh, the Kadkhoda’s wife, began to make sounds as she did her chores. There were sounds of pots and pans and the clang of a basin. The sounds of plates and copper placemats scraping, mixed with the grumbling of Moslemeh, clashed against the tenor of Karbalai-Safi’s words.

When Moslemeh woke up every morning she’d begin to grumble to herself, and her furrowed brow wouldn’t let up for even a second. She’d speak to no one, instead acting as if she were angry with everyone. Some would say, “It’s like telling your own tail, ‘Don’t follow me because you smell!’ She’s so full of herself she can hardly fit in her own skin!”

The people of Zaminej came to understand Moslemeh’s nature and slowly began to look at her with a more jaundiced eye, as if she were different from everyone else, like a kind of crazy woman. And they found the evidence for this in her brother and father. Moslem, her brother, who was in fact mad. Moslemeh’s father, Hajj Salem, was himself considered to be nearly so by the villagers.

“Ay! What are you sitting there for, girl?”

It was Moslemeh. She had a pot in one hand and was standing facing Mergan at the bottom of the steps. Mergan rose from the corner of the yard and said hello. Moslemeh went in the direction of the stable, saying, “Come and help me. Come! Let’s get this calf to take a few pecks at his mother’s teats. Come. The cow won’t give us any milk until she’s licked the tail of her calf. Stingy cow!”

Mergan followed Moslemeh into the stable. It was still dark inside. The outline of the cow was only barely visible at the
other end of the stable. Its glassy eyes glistened; its head was tilted to one side. The cow was at ease, and as the door opened, it took a step forward.

As their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, Moslemeh slid her pot across the smooth and worn floor of the stable and directed Mergan. “Grab its neck and bring it here!”

Mergan brought the cow over and turned the animal so that the pot was positioned beneath its swollen teats. Moslemeh brought a decrepit stool forward from the edge of the stall. Her shoulder leaning against the cow’s belly, she sat on the stool and began playing with the engorged tips of the cow’s teats. She smacked her lips and began milking.

“Don’t be stingy, now. Don’t be stingy. Ah, that’s it. Ah … Ah … Ah … Give us a little, stingy! Give us, my dear. Give us some. Ah … Praise God … Give a bit … Give some … Give a bit more.”

The cow was dry. Teats that size should be pouring milk like a spring shower, and each nipple should be streaming milk like a fountain into the pot. But the cow’s milk wouldn’t come out. Its large head was still tilted and its glassy eyes were looking toward the other end of the stable, at the eyes of its henna-colored calf held behind two pieces of railing. The delicate and beautiful ginger-hued calf was stretching itself over the railing toward its mother and braying softly, a call its mother responded to with her own half moan. Moslemeh was slowly losing her patience.

“Nothing. You could kill yourself just to get a cup of milk out of her. Let the calf out, so it can come over here and eat me up!”

Mergan opened the latch on the gate, and the calf brought its head over to the underbelly of the cow, nuzzling at the full teats of the mother. Moslemeh wasted no time putting her fingers to work at milking.

The cow’s milk was now flowing, and the pot was slowly filling. Moslemeh, who had propped her head against the belly of the cow and was hard at work with her nimble fingers, shouted, “Get it, the bastard! It’s like it’s lapping milk from the spout of a watering can! Grab it! What’s wrong with you!”

Mergan placed the head of the calf beneath one arm and struggled to detach the calf from its mother’s teats, but the calf wouldn’t let go. Helpless and ashamed, Mergan said, “It’s stronger than me—somehow it’s grabbed a nipple and …”

“You can’t handle it? Haven’t you been raised on bread? Grab that muzzle from that nail and put it on the calf. It’s there. In the corner. Next to the lantern.”

Mergan took the muzzle from the nail and brought it over. Moslemeh stopped milking the cow and together they wrested the head of the calf from under the cow, and Moslemeh tied the muzzle on the calf’s snout.

“Now let it go!”

Mergan let go of the animal’s neck, and the calf headed back to its mother’s underbelly. Moslemeh returned to the old stool and went back to milking. Now Mergan had nothing to do. She sat on the edge of the stall watching the calf as it rubbed its nose against its mother’s teats in vain, while the cow licked the calf’s tail. The work was going smoothly now. Now that Moslemeh was no longer distracted by the calf, she asked, “So, what’s brought you here at the break of dawn?”

Mergan, jolted as if she’d been awoken from sleep, said, “He’s gone. My children’s father is gone.”

Moslemeh said, “Gone? So what if he has! He won’t find anywhere better; he’ll come back himself. Where’s he going to go to?”

Mergan didn’t say anything else. Speaking was pointless. Moslemeh didn’t continue the conversation either. She was busy with milking and used various techniques for drawing the milk out from the cow’s teats. When the pan was one finger’s measure before overfilling, she rose, tired and satisfied, and pushed aside the old stool. She carefully raised the pan, and as she left by the stable’s door she said, “Take the muzzle off the calf.”

Mergan took the muzzle off and returned it to its place on the nail and left through the doorway. Moslemeh had set the milk on the ground and was waiting for her outside. Mergan picked up the pan and carefully and gracefully placed it on her head. She adjusted the pot on her head and evenly walked to a door leading to a room beneath the stairs. The room was a pantry, where Moslemeh made yogurt from milk. Mergan had worked for Moslemeh many times before and was familiar with this room and all of the nooks and crannies of the house. As she reached the doorway, she lowered the pot from her head, set it in a space in the wall, and straightened her back. Moslemeh placed a cover over the pot and left. She said, “By the time you take a water jug and fill it from the water cistern, the Kadkhoda will be up. It’s over in the corner of the veranda over there. I’m always worried that the jugs will crack, so I cover them with rags.”

Mergan took a jug and left the house.

The alleys were still deserted, as if people hadn’t even begun to think about leaving their houses. A cold wind licked at her, winding its way around her body through the holes in her dress. Her dry fingers were sticking to the handle of the water jug. She held it fast against her shoulder, so the wind would not catch at it and lift it. The wind and its coldness brought tears to
her eyes. But she was still not thinking about herself, as her eyes involuntarily darted back and forth in case Soluch, or some sign of him—whatever it could be—would appear. But the alley, the doorways, and the ruined houses along the way were all so lonely that Mergan’s hopes were not to be raised. Despite this, she went along peeking into this ruin or glancing over that wall. When she reached the cistern, she walked around the domed structure, looking at all the corners and crevices. But it was clear that Soluch was not to be found there either. She then descended the stairs to the water, filled the jug, and began to return back to Kadkhoda Norouz’s house, walking with her back to the wind. As it was blowing in the direction she was walking, she walked a little more easily, putting less effort into it. Yet she still struggled to keep the jug even on her shoulders. The wind blew in gusts, as if aiming to dislodge the jug from its place. The most difficult span was the open square that separated the cistern from the alley where the Kadkhoda’s house was. As soon as she made it across and reached the alley, she sought cover against the wall, dropping the jug from her shoulders. She propped the belly of the jug against her thighs and for the first time registered the pain that was coursing through her fingers. She held her hands under her arms and squeezed her elbows, then brought her hands out and rubbed them against each other. But her dry and frozen fingers would not be warmed so easily. But it was enough that she could still open and close her fist. So she grasped the handle of the jug, threw it back on her shoulder, and set out again across the cold ground.

On the way, she saw Hajj Salem and his son, Moslem, as they walked toward her. Hajj Salem had still preserved his mind and sanity enough to expect a greeting from anyone of a
lesser standing than him. Mergan, her head bowed, offered a salutation, and Hajj Salem responded with a grunt from the depths of his throat. Meanwhile, Moslem fixed his wide white eyes on Mergan and said to his father, “Water. Water! Papa, I want water!”

Mergan did not falter. She had no patience to tarry with the father and son. She turned a corner and moved away, while Hajj Salem’s old voice echoed around the wall, saying, “Manners! Learn your manners, boy! You haven’t even eaten your morning bread, so how are you thirsty? Whatever you happen to see, you want, foolish boy! Even if it was on the shoulder of a stranger, you’d still want it? Manners!”

Moslem responded, “So, I’m hungry. Bread, bread! I want some. I’m hungry!”

Hajj Salem said, “Manners! You beast, learn some manners!”

They moved out of Mergan’s range of hearing. She arrived at the house and placed the jug on the porch. The Kadkhoda had just washed his hands and was walking up the steps. Mergan adjusted the jug’s position, then turned and said hello. The Kadkhoda raised the edge of his cloak, mumbled a greeting to her, and stepped into the room. Then he said, “Come on in. Let me hear what your business is, Mergan.”

Mergan followed the Kadkhoda inside, standing by the door. Kadkhoda Norouz dried his wooly hands on the edge of the curtain, then went over to the hearth and sat down, covering his legs with a blanket. He called out to one of his sons, who was still sleeping beside the hearth, “Wake up and get yourself out of the way! Come sit and warm your hands, Mergan. Come, you’re shaking.”