accepted practice in those days. It was even considered a sign of his poetic nobleness.
He had lit the coals in the brazier, laid his pipe in the warm ashes and put the thin slices of brownish-yellow opium on a plate. The samovar was bubbling.
“Sit down, Hajar. You can warm up your dinner in a moment. Let me hold the baby. What’s his name? Akbar? Aga Akbar?”
She reluctantly handed the baby to her brother.
“How old is he? Seven or eight months? Go ahead and eat your dinner. I’d like some time alone with him.”
Hajar felt a great weight bearing down on her. She couldn’t eat. Instead, she burst into tears.
“Come now, Hajar, there’s no need to cry. Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. If you hide the baby, if you give up on him, you’ll just make him backward. For the last six or seven months, he’s seen nothing, done nothing, had no real contact with the world. Everywhere I go in the mountains, I see children who are deaf and dumb. You have to let people talk to him. All you need is a language, a sign language that we can invent ourselves. I’ll help you. Starting tomorrow, let other people take care of him too. Let everyone try to communicate with him in his or her own way.”
Hajar carried her child into the kitchen and again burst into tears. This time tears of relief.
Later, after Kazem Khan had smoked a few opium pipes and was feeling cheerful and light, he came in and sat down beside her.
“Listen, Hajar. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling I should play a role in this child’s life. I didn’t feel this way about your other children, mostly because they were fathered by that nobleman, and I don’t want to have anything to do with him. But before you leave, we need to talk about him and about your baby’s future. It’s high time that nobleman learned that Akbar has an uncle.”
The next day Hajar took Akbar to the palace. Never before had she shown any of her children to their father. She knocked on the door of his study and entered with Akbar in her arms. She paused for a moment, then laid the baby down on the desk and said, “My child is deaf and dumb.”
“Deaf and dumb? What can I do to help you?”
A few moments went by before Hajar could look him in the eye.
“Let my child bear your name.”
“My name?” he asked, and fell silent.
“If you’ll let him have your name, I promise never to bother you again,” said Hajar.
The nobleman remained silent.
“You once said you liked me, and once or twice that you respected me. And you said I could always ask you for a favour. I’ve never asked for anything before, because I didn’t need to, but now I beg you: let my child bear your name. Only that. I’m not asking you to make him an heir. Just to have Akbar’s name recorded in an official document.”
“The baby’s crying,” he said after a while. “Give him something to eat.”
Then he stood up, opened the window, and called to his servant, “Go and get the imam. Hurry up, we haven’t got all day!”
Before long, the imam arrived. Hajar was sent off to wait in another room while the two men discussed the matter behind closed doors. The imam wrote a few lines in a book, then drew up a document and had the nobleman sign it. The whole thing took only a few minutes. The imam rode back home on his mule.
“Here, Hajar, this is the document you wanted. But remember: keep it in a safe place and tell no one of its existence. Only after my death can it be shown to other people.”
Hajar tucked the document in her clothes and tried to kiss his hand.
“There’s no need for that, Hajar. You can go home now. But come and visit me often. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: I like you and I want to go on seeing you.”
Hajar strapped her baby to her back and left. When she came down from the mountains, she knew she was carrying a child with a venerable name: Aga Akbar Mahmud Ghaznavi Khorasani.
The document turned out to be worthless. After the nobleman died, his heirs bribed the local imam and had Aga Akbar’s name removed from the will. Since Hajar hadn’t been expecting her child to inherit anything, it hardly mattered. She was satisfied with the name alone. Aga Akbar’s parentage was known. His father had roots that could be traced back to the palace on Lalehzar Mountain.
Akbar grew up, married and had children. And even though he was a simple carpet-weaver, he remained proud of his lineage. He kept with him at all times the document with his long name.
Akbar often talked about his father. He especially wanted his son Ishmael to know that his grandfather had been an important man, a nobleman on a horse with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
The nobleman was killed by a Russian. Just who the murderer was, nobody knew. A soldier? A gendarme? A Russian thief who sneaked over the border?
• • •
The mountain range where Aga Akbar lived and where his forefathers had lived before him bordered on Russia, known in those days as the Soviet Union. The southern part of the range belonged to Iran; the northern part, with its permanent layer of snow, to Russia.
No one knew, however, what that Russian soldier, or the Russian army, had been looking for in the mountains.
All that was left of the murder was a story that lived on in Aga Akbar’s memory.
When they were home by themselves, Akbar told the story to Ishmael, who was assigned the role of the nobleman on horseback. Akbar was the Russian soldier, wearing an army coat and a cap with a bold red insignia.
Ishmael, his wooden rifle slung over his shoulder, mounted a pillow. Aga Akbar put on his coat and cap and hid behind the cupboard, which served as a makeshift boulder.
Ishmael rode his horse—not too fast, not too slow, but sedately, as a nobleman should—past the cupboard. A head peeked out. The horseman went on riding for another few yards, then the soldier suddenly leapt out with a knife in his hand, took two or three giant steps and planted his knife in the horseman, who fell off his horse and died.
No doubt this story was largely a fantasy, but the death of Aga Akbar’s mother was very real.
“How old were you when Hajar died?” Ishmael signed.
Aga Akbar had no concept of time.
“She died when a group of unknown black birds perched in our almond tree,” he signed back.
“Unknown?”
“I’d never seen them before.”
“How old were you when the black birds perched in the tree?” Ishmael signed.
“My hands were cold, the tree had no leaves and Hajar no longer spoke to me.”
“No, I mean how old? How old were you when your mother died?”
“Me, Akbar. My head came up to Hajar’s chest.”
He had been about nine, Kazem Khan explained later. Hajar had been feeling ill, so she had gone to bed. Akbar had slipped in under the blankets and held his mother in his arms.
“Your mother died in your arms?” Ishmael signed.
“Yes, but how did you know?”
“Uncle Kazem Khan told me.”
“I crawled under the blankets. When she was sick, she used to talk to me and hold my hand. But this time she stopped talking, and her hand no longer moved. I was scared, really scared, so I stayed under the blankets, not daring to come out. Then a hand reached under the blankets, grabbed me and tried to pull me out. I held on to Hajar’s body, but Kazem Khan finally dragged me away. I cried.”
The next day the oldest woman in the family wrapped Hajar