Golden Years by Ali Eskandarian

Author:Ali Eskandarian [Eskandarian, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571321087
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2015-02-14T23:00:00+00:00

Shiraz

I salute the dead of the war that engulfed the better part of my childhood, the children especially, for they were the lucky ones. I on the other hand have never known luck and was spared. In the years that followed and through some fiendish thought process I was made to feel lucky to exist, but to my thinking the lucky ones were taken away with the bombs and the bullets, the gas and the missiles. They went right back to the eternal comforts of the spirit world.

Those bombs took my boyhood too. I will forever be frightened of their thunderously devilish sounds and monstrously hideous mushroom-cloud hellfires, which start blood red at the bottom, and centrifugally climb towards the heavens, only to turn black as night. A child can never understand war. Why then should a grown-up? Not the economic damage mind you, or the socio-political. Not the human loss or displacement factor but the incalculable spiritual damage, the marching backwards, the inverse growth, the atrophy. A child can mourn infinitely more than an adult can. A silent mourning, a feeble, all-encompassing, all-possessing, eternal mourning. A child understands only too soon what kind of a world he or she has entered, and no matter how many stupid faces the adults make the child finds it difficult to laugh. They only do so to indulge the dumb adults.

Back then, during the war, I used to wake up screaming every night. I mean hair-raising, top-of-the-lungs, parents-come-running-in, sweat-pouring-down-body screams. I must have been nine or ten and being the oldest took myself rather seriously for a kid. Forcing my mother or father to run in and comfort me every night wasn’t my idea of fun. We lived, for most of the war, in the city of Shiraz. My father was in the Air Force so we lived on base, on the fifth floor of an officers’ building. The building was supposedly bomb-resistant from the third floor down and so when the nightly warning sirens sounded at three or four in the morning, my mother would wake us kids up and take us down to the first floor.

Walking down the stairs, which were on the front of the building and exposed, you could see the anti-aircraft guns shooting their bright red loads into the night sky from many different locations all over the city, the shells rat-tat-tatting in a red glowing row upwards before exploding, one after another, a few thousand feet above us. These things never hit any planes as far as I could see since the enemy planes flew just above their range and dropped a few bombs then escaped as fast as possible to avoid an encounter with one of our fighter jets. Those particular bombs would damage a few homes or set fire to a whole city block because of gas explosions. It wasn’t like London in World War II or Vietnam, where a few squadrons of planes came every night, but one or two jets did come every

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