Poets and Pahlevans by Marcello di Cintio

Author:Marcello di Cintio [Cintio, Marcello Di]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36892-8
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2006-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

I stopped into Hotel Kuhrang to thank Hassan for pointing me towards Saragh-Seyed. “I sent the police to look for you,” he said. “I thought you would come back after one night.”

I smiled at his concern and told him I was having a good time. “You were right, the people were kind.”

“I know,” he said. “I thought so. I just wanted to be sure you were all right.”

10

WEAKNESS

A wrestler’s body offers few perfect holds. The top of the wrist where the arm narrows before the hand is one. Catch a man here, compress his tiny wrist bones, and you own his entire arm. The back of the neck is another; wrestlers reach here first, finding purchase where skull meets spine. The peak of the pelvic crest, alive with nerve endings, seems designed to grip. So, too, the pad of flesh that hides behind the knee. There are champions and losers, small men and titans, but all wrestlers share the same flaws. The best a man can do is know where he is weak.

Three large circles, drawn with flour on a trash-strewn field, outlined the battleground for the annual loucho championships. Kamal, Jamshid and I arrived early from Babolsar and passed the time inside a ramshackle tea house assembled out of plastic tarps, chicken wire and scrap wood. A set of rickety bleachers offered reserved seating for officials and honoured guests in front of the wrestling field. A few men milled about setting up the judges’ tables and PA system, while four fat sheep, one for the winner of each weight class, nibbled on the grass.

Spectators, all men, began to arrive and sit around the perimeter of the field on empty rice sacks and flattened boxes. Trucks and tractors, parked in a ring behind them, formed an impromptu second set of stands for those who climbed onto the hoods and roofs to get a better view. The men were farmers and labourers from the surrounding villages with stubbled faces and calloused hands. Before long, the crowd grew into the hundreds, and nearly everyone munched on long black sunflower seeds. A black circle of spit-wet husks formed a second, unofficial boundary around the wrestling field. Through the clouds of their cigarette smoke I could smell the Caspian Sea.

I had arrived in Babolsar the previous morning, after passing over the Alborz Mountains to the coast. As I walked along the beachfront road towards my hotel I was startled to hear someone call my name. A few metres ahead a young man was leaning out of a car window. I didn’t recognize him until I’d walked up to the car. It was Kamal, whom I’d met on the Lake Van ferry in Turkey two months before. I couldn’t believe he remembered my name. I shook Kamal’s hand. “How are you?”

“I am well,” he said. He pointed to the man driving the car. “This is my friend Jamshid. He speaks English.”

“Hello,” said Jamshid, an Iranian Rasputin with blue eyes and an unruly black beard. “Welcome to Iran.

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