Perhaps Deleting Will Prevent Repetition

Translated from the Persian by Nasser Pooyesh, with editorial consultation from Mojtaba Ahmadkhan

“I fell.”

She said it in a way that was at once a report, a complaint, and a request for help. Her nose was covered in blood. It looked as though she had fallen face first onto the ground. When she saw me from a distance, she waved for me to help her. I approached her hesitantly. I had only just arrived in this neighborhood and did not know anyone. When I reached her, the old woman said, “My foot caught on something. I fell.”

I did not know whether to stay or leave. When you are in an unfamiliar place, things can easily give rise to suspicion. Besides, I was in a hurry. I had to get to a work appointment. I was already very late, and now I was standing over an old woman who had fallen, her nose had hit the ground, and was bleeding.

“I want to go home.”

The only thing I said was, “Don’t get up.”

What if she had had a stroke? What if she was dying? What if she died? I would have to explain it to the police too. I was a stranger in this neighborhood. I told myself, “At least she is still in her right mind. So she hasn’t had a stroke.”

“Ma’am, where is your home?”

She glanced ahead out of the corner of her eye. She said nothing. I thought she was not fully conscious. If she did not know where her home was, then the matter could become complicated. I looked around me. There was no one. A car passed us but did not stop.

“Why didn’t it stop?”

If no one was going to stop and help, why was I still here? I told myself, “Keep walking. Just go.”

I asked, “What’s your name?”

She did not respond. Her face was contorted with pain. She stretched out her hand again. I sat down. I took her hand. The coldness of her hand was the same as the temperature outside. The weather had become bitterly cold over the past few days. She gestured for me to help her up.

“It’s not advisable for you to get up. We should call an ambulance.”

The whites of her eyes had turned red. Perhaps it was the reflection of the blood on her face. Her gaze was pure complaint. I thought old age was a terrible pain. She had come out to take a walk around the neighborhood and return home. But her legs no longer had the strength they needed. Perhaps her foot had caught on the raised edge between the alley and the sidewalk, or perhaps she had slipped. She pulled her hand away and placed it on the ground. She supported her body with her other arm, resting on her elbow, and lay there like a four-legged creature, like a dog or a cat, while her cane had been thrown one or two meters away. I noticed the blood from her nose spreading around her. The more I looked, the more disturbing it seemed.

“Don’t move.”

What a ridiculous sentence! Of course she could not move. I scolded myself: why are you just standing here, doing nothing, wasting time?

“Get up, keep walking, go.”

I looked around me. Surely on a Friday morning, on one of the cold days of winter, everyone was asleep, and it was the ridiculousness of my work that had me making a work appointment on such a day. Otherwise I would have been home now and would not have encountered such a thing. The old woman was no longer looking at me. Instead, a cat standing a few meters away was staring at us. A car sped down the adjacent street. The sound of its music lingered in the street and alley for a while. I wished I could see myself in a mirror. Once, our mystics saw their faces in clay bricks, but now they put clothes in refrigerators. One of my mystic friends does this. I call it mystical Alzheimer’s.

The street seemed to stretch on and on. My thoughts ran everywhere and stopped nowhere. The sky was cloudy and it could rain at any moment. When I had woken up that morning, I had spent some time, before getting out of bed, thinking about our photographs. Beside that famous bend on the mountain road. We had put the phone on a rock and kept changing poses, taking ridiculous pictures and laughing. It rained. The windshield wipers made the road a little clearer for me. I had forgotten my glasses. Everything was slightly blurred. The smell of rain was washing away the images of that damned bend. I had deleted the photographs from my computer, but I had no key for deleting them from my mind.

It is ridiculous. It has always been ridiculous. In physical romantic relationships, one misplaced sentence, one stupid gesture, one blind act is the beginning of a storm, and once the weather turns stormy, things do not return to how they were before until it is over. I want to explain, but even in explaining I fail to say why that bend became a bend whose memory itself is bitter and tormenting.

Beside the road there was a place where several cars could stop, with several large and small rocks from which one could see the road below as well as the sea. It was almost halfway along this mountain road. I loved this road, and whenever we came to this city, we always ended up at these bends. You did not fall from the cliff at that bend, you did not betray me at that bend, you did not leave me behind at that bend, that bend was not even the last place where we saw each other. But things were always repeated for me there. As though every time, something was left behind there. The last time we went there, I do not know how it happened that your foot caught on a rock and you fell face first onto the ground. Long before you, two bends farther down, there was a small prison where I had been imprisoned for a while… The hatred had taken shape in me long before him. I do not remember since when. I only know it was after I understood love. Some things are simply repeated. With different people. It is not a long story. I have made a habit of not telling it.

After you, I wrote: Permanent deletion. Like what happens to information on a computer. I doubt that human beings will ever be able to do such a thing in real life. If they do, perhaps the desire to delete will become so strong in us that from a fifty-year life we will keep only a few months. A memory may remain for me while you have deleted it. Then there will no longer be any shared memory.

And later I wrote: Perhaps if one day it becomes possible to erase memory, stories will become shorter too. Perhaps no memory will last long enough to turn into a story. Films too… But even so, perhaps deleting will prevent repetition.

My wife said, “Tell your story. Why the philosophical reflection?”

I hid. I was sulking. I did not want them to see me. Although I could see them. It had started with something very small. The same old promise that never became reality: buying a bicycle. For several years, my father had been promising to buy me a bicycle. And every afternoon throughout the three summer months I would sit waiting, and my father would come back empty-handed.

“Dad, you didn’t buy it?”

While he was locking the car, his mind somewhere else:

“What?”

And he would walk past me. Just to get me off his back:

“Tomorrow… tomorrow.”

And he would go inside the house.

It began on the day he bought a bicycle for my younger brother. Because I insisted, he said that if my end-of-year grades were good, he would buy me one. That year my grades were good. Every summer day passed one after another as I waited for the bicycle, but the bicycle never came. The first year passed. The second did too. I do not know exactly how many years passed. But one summer afternoon I hid. In the tree beside our house. In my nest of solitude. The same one I have written about several times. After a while my sister came and called for me, then went inside the house. Then my brother came. Then everyone came outside, and each person ran in a different direction. Besides my own family, several neighbors had come outside too. The worry and anxiety were clear in the tone and words of all of them. At first, I enjoyed it. In this way I had managed to take revenge on them for all those years. But when I saw my mother crying, I actually surrendered.

But the situation had become so complicated and chaotic, and worry had given way to anger, that fear prevented me from calling down from above them, “I’m here. Don’t worry, Mom.” At least Mom should not have been worried because she was not at fault, but now she was both crying from worry and hitting herself. She thought something had happened to me. But my father’s and older brother’s anger was not of the same kind as my mother’s worry. They were thinking more about my return and how they would give me exactly what I had coming. This fear prevented my mother’s crying from becoming more important to me. I had never been caught in such a situation before. Although I knew this game could not continue for very long. The game that had begun was no longer a game. It had turned into an alarming reality.

Two or three times I wanted to jump down from the tree and hug my mother, but there was no doubt that I would be met with a harsh reaction from my father and older brother. Although my father had never beaten me. But violence is not limited to physical contact. One heavy look is enough to carry this anxiety and fear with you. I had no choice anymore. A long time had passed since I had started sulking, and now almost the whole neighborhood was outside. I even heard one of the neighbors say, “Maybe someone has kidnapped the child.” The matter had now become a police matter. They wanted to notify the police station. I could no longer drag it out.

My mother’s foot caught on the step at the entrance to the house, and she fell face first onto the ground. I jumped down from the tree. Suddenly everyone stared at me. My sister, who was standing beside the tree, her eyes wide with astonishment, happily said, “Nosrat is here!” My mother screamed with joy. But I saw the blood on her face. My sister came toward me, my father went over to my mother, but my older brother charged toward me and I had no choice but to run. With all my strength, as far as I could. But my older brother caught me halfway there…

It was night. It was night when I entered the prison. Those unfamiliar faces, more criminal-looking at first glance than at any other time during my imprisonment. My idea of prison had always been this: a bunch of murderers and smugglers who had to be kept away from other people. So from the moment I entered, a strange fear had taken hold of me. As though everyone was lying in wait to strike the newcomer. The officer who had brought me to the ward said, “Crossing the border.”

One of the prisoners, an older man, shook my hand and led me toward a ward.

“Everyone here is like you.”

And he left. Everyone in that ward was like me. Almost my age. All of them had been arrested while trying to cross the border. The prison was in one of the cities near the border, on a sharp bend in the road. It was very small. The prison had one corridor and several rooms. Only our room was always crowded.

One of the unbearable hardships of prison is that a prisoner has no solitude. A prisoner is not even alone in the bathroom. Solitude is a blessing a prisoner is never granted. A prisoner wakes amid the noise, eats amid the noise, sleeps amid the noise. At that time, they did not even provide prisoners with books. My only daydream was about what lay beyond the high walls. Because they had brought me in blindfolded. One of the guards, with whom I had become somewhat friendly, would tell me about the view beyond the walls when it was his turn to stand watch atop the tower nearby:

“A winding road that… has two or three bends, and at the end of the road you reach the lake. You can also see two settlements in the distance on the right.”

If he was in the mood, he would also tell me about the migrating flamingos. Although we never saw a flamingo in the prison sky. But the dampness of the lake and its humid air always stayed with me, so much so that even now I hate hot, humid weather and cannot stand it.

After living for about a hundred days in such a place, they took me blindfolded to solitary confinement in my own city. Going from all that noise into a completely individual space and solitude, in a space one meter by one meter, was full of terror and anxiety. Like the sauna baths where, after a few exhausting minutes in a dry or steam sauna, we would suddenly dive into a pool of ice-cold water. Later this method was abandoned because apparently several people had suffered strokes and died, and we did it as a display of courage. A method of relieving the spirit and body. Later I heard that this change in temperature from hot water to cold was a form of torture used by the Nazis in Germany.

The light was never turned off. Behind the peephole in the door, there was always an eye watching you. I felt like a laboratory mouse: at any moment they were going to pull you out of your little room, subject the prisoner to every kind of torture and confession to things he had never done, and bring you back again. And all of it at hours when the body is completely limp and exhausted. Like two in the morning. An interrogation usually lasted an hour, and sometimes when you returned to your cell, while anxiety was still running through your veins, they would take you back for interrogation again half an hour later. And this could continue for months and even years.

Next to my solitary cell was an old man who cried every afternoon. The guard would open his solitary cell and speak quietly with him. I realized that he had been there for about eight months. And instead of calming him, the guard would tell him, “Why are you crying, old man? If you haven’t committed a crime, you’ll surely be released. This crying makes a person suspicious.”

While his crying was for his innocence, and beneath his sobs one could sense his childhood and the sincerity of his tears. Sometimes his voice would break in his throat. As though his whole body had gathered into the sobs in his throat, he would say, “What suspicion? Why don’t you believe me?… I’m tired. I’m going mad… I’m dying… I wish I were dead…”

But this is not a place where such things can be taken as a measure of anything. Here everything depends on the interrogator and on how he interpreted these tears and words.

After twelve days they took me blindfolded back to the previous prison. During this time, some of my cellmates had been released. Until one night, contrary to expectation, they released me. Usually prisoners received their release orders before noon. Before the noon call to prayer. But my release came at dinner time and after the evening call to prayer. I made my way back to my city at night, with difficulty, during those years of war. It was close to midnight when I reached home. Throughout those four months, only one question kept repeating: Why did you come back? And I never found an answer to it.

At the beginning of the street leading to our alley, a shop was open. I got out on the pretext of buying cigarettes. I asked him about the old woman.

“They took her away in an ambulance. I don’t have any new information. Why do you ask?”

Is the old woman alive? What about the man who took me into the ward? He must now be the same age as the old woman. Around eighty. His words repeat themselves: “Everyone here is like you.” My father and mother and all the dead leaf past before my eyes like the pages of an album. Like old photographs, blurred and haloed around their frames. I go out onto the balcony and light a cigarette. My daughter and my wife have gone to sleep. I go back to the living room. It is three in the morning. I go to the refrigerator. I am thirsty. My pencil and notebook are inside the refrigerator. Perhaps my daughter put them there. I put on my blindfold. I am used to sleeping in complete darkness. Tomorrow I have to wake up at eight. I have a work meeting on a holiday.

“It is the ridiculousness of my work that I should have a work appointment on such a day… anyway, perhaps deleting can erase repetition…”