This is a story that goes back a while, to an earlier time in a person’s life, a time that you and I may still be experiencing. Nevertheless – and I might as well say that – I have intended to give you a bit of the great sense of nostalgia that is very likely to, sooner or later, come to us in our lives, regardless of who we are or how good we have been to people and things around us.
A World Behind
My childhood memories are no better shaped by anywhere than a mansion where I used to live with my family in Mashhad for some time. We still own that mansion, though we moved away some thirty years ago. The idea of a revisit to the house came to that part of my brain which is mysteriously controlled by my unconscious. I never asked myself why I tended to go there now, after three decades, just as I never asked myself why I never felt like doing so during this time. To me, it seems like some appalling enigma, some call from the underworld.
The mansion is in an old area of the city then called Darvazeh-e Ghoochan (The Gate of Ghoochan), now renamed Tohid St. The premises in the neighborhood have always been alike; they intertwine at every turn of the old dead-end alleys in the whole area. It is a hot summer afternoon when I find myself there again, back to rediscover the time, to give way to some unknown urge from within me.
Things seem the same, as if some spell has kept them still. The narrow path leading to the main entrance of the house is accompanied by a long narrow lawn along the wall of our house on one side and the wall of the neighboring house on the other. I can’t recall much of the neighbors, for I was still a kid when we left. The green grass is still there, and its fresh scent is first to take me back in time to the days when I roamed around playfully, ignorantly. And the crows; I notice they still live in the vicinity.
Standing straight but tired, the mansion is in mere harmony with the memories I hold. A few more steps and I am in front of the big white door, patched brown by particles of rust.
My hand is stretched, out of control, to touch the doorbell. On the spot, I remember how I waited those days for the time I was tall enough to reach the bell, how I wished to be a man.
The key turns in the latch and I find myself at a staircase that surges up. How I feared the dark staircase late at nights! Now it is light, due to the colored beams flooding in from the red and yellow and blue and green window panes on the high walls. The windows open onto the yard of the neighboring house, and they were always kept closed.
The rooms are now empty, except for some drapes, outworn, still hanging from some of the large windows. I head for my room. It is in a corner at the back of the house. I need to go past the dining room, the big living room, the TV room, my parents’ room, and my sister’s room. The polished wooden doors now look old and stained. Along the way to my room, there is an aura of nostalgia. The hall is bare and the walls are exposed. There it is. My room.
The doorknob breaks the spell cast on old memories, happy and sad, and vague. The door creaks open and I squint as rays of sunlight lying on the naked room now turn, interrupted, in anger and distrust, to see the intruder. Upon stepping in the three-by-four room, I quickly recognize the proportions of the place where I lived fully. As I turn around in the deserted room, I catch a glimpse of the ceiling in a corner where it meets the walls. Brown with moist, now.
The closet in the room always had in store a whole lot of mysteries. It was big and reached high. My mother used to hide my toys somewhere up there when I was being naughty. And I could never reach them, in my own room! I open it now and look carefully in. And I feel relieved.
The windows are still there. The curtains float with a warm breeze, but soon fall silent as the door behind me snaps shut with the currency of air. The large window opens to the garden. My next sure destination.
Stepping down the few stairs, I enter a world that I so much tended to associate with heaven itself. Three figs rising to the sky, having dropped their fruits on the cold wet ground, are parts of the tableau. From the many-hued flowers that once used to live around the trees, there is nothing left. But can’t I see them? The soil in the flowerbeds is bare and dry. Does it still bear the dead chickens I buried in it? How I wish to dig in and see!
The brick walls of the garden look heated, covered by the ivory leaves mounting them. The ground was once colored red by the pelargonium buds in vases in a row. And as I remember that, I sense an enchanting scent of the buds with another soft warm breeze.
On the far corner of the garden, there is a pathway that leads to a door. We always kept that door locked and used the main entrance. Just before the door – I reminisce – was a pile of unwanted ware, a wooden ladder, a wheel-barrow, a watering can, a rake, and other gardening tools that a young gardener who came to our house those days used to employ. That pile was like a reservoir of mysteries to me. I always felt an urge to fumble through the odds and ends and find something – I never knew what. I take a peep to find out they are all gone.
On a corner of the staircase to the yard, I sit, leaning against the bricks, staring at some blank point on the ground. A few minutes go by, and I start to feel a mixture of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. And then, I decide to leave. I seek to get back to the present life, smooth, though hard and cruel, and indifferent. I have already chosen the present.
The memories – I know – will always stay there, as well as somewhere unreachable within my own heart.
And it is so that the mansion gets smaller and smaller in the front mirror as I drive away. There is a world that I leave behind. Gradually, I choose not to see.
(Written April 27, 2008)
