Shaghayegh Akbari – The Generation of Naseen (English)
I am enamored with Naseen, especially when I park my van by the alley and she comes to stand beside me, making herself endearing. Before Soodabeh, I thought I was half in love, in love with everything except the Earth itself! Anything on Earth, but not counting the Earth as a being. After her, I understood what true infatuation meant!
For a while, even walking displeased me because I had become infatuated with Bach, the birds and their world, obsessed with flying and freeing myself. In a crazed cycle of reincarnation, I was caught between Jonathan and Azarbad.
When I walked, I stood on the tips of my toes, trying to lift my weight, to flap, to soar and escape the confines of the Earth.
I detested the sleepwalkers suspended in the nightmare of the world. Reluctantly, I would step on the cobblestones until the first time I saw Soodabeh and heard the call of the wild, clearer than Jack London.
Some days I would stand in front of Meshed Abbas’s teahouse, and when his daughter Soodabeh performed her storytelling, I would stare at her as if I had been blind before that. I forced myself to go inside and have a cup of tea, and then when Soodabeh came forward to bring the second cup, I would say to her: “Who pushed my legs to go there?”
She approached. When I saw her eyelashes fall and separate as she blinked, I heard the sound of my heart’s capillaries being torn from that stone ventricle in decline.
In her gaze, hundreds of Turanian cavalry charged at me, Arash’s arrows struck stone, igniting thousands of Siavashes, and white fortresses crumbled.
I had not heard her voice, even when she let all of herself go into her voice and narrated with fervor and fluid passion.
I understood her voice when I asked her name and she replied: “The one who threw Siavash into the fire.” Then I was certain I had become a dove that “will see no other abode.”
After that, not every day, but all day, I would see her. I sat tightly in the corner of the teahouse, savoring the contours of her body as she passionately spoke of myths.
At night’s end, Meshed Abbas would go into his room, and Soodabeh would close all the doors. We would clink our tea glasses to the health of the Simurgh and speak of Rudabeh, how she pulled Zal up through the tangles of her hair without him falling, of Sohrab’s tragedy, mourned for Siamak, and raged against Ahriman while slamming our tea glasses on the table, their dregs splattering around like the dregs of wine, then we would burst into laughter and fall asleep in each other’s arms in a world of drunken delirium.
She also had a little Naseen, with a gray body and black spots, a pure and ethereal breed of Naseen, just like Soodabeh herself, with her own special charm and a crazy hope that injected life into my emptiness.
She was learning to walk on her legs; hesitant, eager, and joyous. When I asked what the wisdom of her being Naseen was, she laughed and said: “Perhaps because she knows how to tell a story like dear Naseen!”
I wasn’t surprised because I knew cats, even if they don’t tell stories, at least have a flamboyant tale of their own which they cherish generation after generation! Like my Naseen, who is of the breed of Soodabeh’s Naseen and if she could speak, oh what tales she would tell of her own chained sorrow and mine, after Soodabeh…
The first gift from Soodabeh was a lingering kiss that knocked men off their feet, and amid it all, “Never underestimate an animal,” from Aziz Naseen, and she herself said: “I’m not here to stay, take care of her!”
One of those nights, she said she wanted to start her Simurgh society. In that society, I became her first compatriot. She slapped stories into people’s ears to wake them from their slumber. She took my hand and led me through intersections, dead-end alleys, nursing homes, arcades, and even hospital courtyards. Sometimes we spoke of the East and tales of the Arabian Nights, and other times we delved into the West and Dante’s dark inferno. The money people gave was spent on the society, building homes for stray cats, and buying food.
Gradually, among her storytelling sessions, she would issue statements, not fierce and confrontational, but calm and intoxicating, so much so that even the opposition’s hearts would melt, and mine too.
I stared at Soodabeh’s ever-surprised and stubborn red lips, more than they fell on mine, they spoke quickly and unabashedly of not giving up and cried out for freedom and peace.
I was afraid, she laughed and said: “We don’t argue, we sing.” She would flee but return and sing her song again. I wasn’t myself, I knew they cage the songbird, I knew the demons would pounce on my Soodabeh; they charged… Ahriman clutched my Soodabeh to his cruel breast…
Soodabeh’s departure was like her arrival, a law of the wild world, the law of recurring fears and the intolerance of those who shine in darkness, the intolerance of Soodabehs. She had said to write on her tomb: If time must kill you/What nobler death than in the heat of battle…
Although, I never knew where Soodabeh’s tomb was or if it even existed, but after all these years, even now, as I softly wrestle with my inevitable old age, every month, I go to the newsstand at the corner that also brings used books, taking Naseen in my van, placing her on the passenger seat, remembering her. Once, a man standing across, reading the headline of Kayhan, asked: “Haven’t you given up this animal play, Meshed Zekr?” Without turning my face from the faded books, I replied: “Never underestimate an animal.” And I whispered more softly: “Especially not the breed of Naseen.”
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