The Age of Orphans by Laleh Khadivi

Author:Laleh Khadivi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

PALIMPSEST

AS IF HE has never known the mountains, the boundless winds or the calm of countless stars, Reza dissolves into the maculate city. Now accustomed to the heat and incessant motion of cockroaches and buggies and street sweeps, he sleeps peacefully in the filthy boardinghouse on Jamsheedi Street where the beds are stacked and full with cadets. For meals he eats charred tripe sold by the street vendors, who give it to him two for one and pour and pour his douge without solicitation. In the afternoons he makes his way to the rooftop teahouses on Abadaan Street, where he smokes the short cigarettes and listens to the men’s easy talk of war that rages among the Euro peans, rising oil prices, the latest Egyptian belly dancer in town for a three-week stint at Hamedi Palace.

Another chai for our brave sarbaz!

The old men order tea for him until evening, when it is time for the long pipes that Reza and the men smoke down to the dottle and all conversation stops as they sprawl about the rooftop on cushions and rugs, lost in thoughts and afterthoughts, absorbing the dusk into their skin. At dark they smoke the short cigarettes again, fast and harsh now, and take tiny glasses of arak and sherbet and the talk turns to the shah’s latest window smashing, the best bathhouse boys or the effects of French cologne on lovemaking when applied just there. Reza waits until the night is black enough and then walks to the Armenian whorehouse where the door opens just a crack and soldiers slide in and out, one after the next. He sits patiently in the hyatt with the other cadets, all with shined shoes and shellacked hair, to make polite conversation about the madam’s tasty tea and the madam’s salty nuts and the madam’s lovely garden until the old lady blushes at their compliments and summons them to the back.

The hallway is an anticipation all its own. Reza has come to understand the city as sex and the bodies of these unclaimed women as his new landscapes: enigmas of flesh both powerful and barren. He slowly walks the eight-door distance between the hyatt and his bedroom and leans in without guile to spy at the rooms, peek after peek, and catch sight of the random pairs of men and women, in couplings at once animalistic and contrite, where the disheveled manflesh devours womanflesh that is already bored and resigned. Door after door he stands witness to the lure of the city and its sex: a system in constant equilibrium, the same parts give and take, deposits and withdrawals from the bank of secrets, ego, shame, pride, joy and crave. By the time Reza arrives at his own door he is eager for the exchange, eager to play the zero-sum game of fucking in rooms cavernous and dim where his soldier and shadow, cadet and orphan come to settle all accounts of fury and fear at their most naked, heavy and blank.

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