Rahmim
At home, my mother read poems, helped with our studies, sat with us by the oil heater in winter months, fed us pomegranates, held sunflower seed-eating competitions among us, and told stories. Her tales filled me with guilt and fear. Not that she intended them to, but she, as many of my family, perhaps many Middle Easterners, is a natural teller of sad tales. She does not say I love you but tells a story of love lost. She does not say Be careful but recites a poem on childhood dangers. I remember a long poem she recited about a mother searching through the forests and the mountains for her lost son. She walked days and nights, asking the white clouds and the wind and the Earth for him, and none knew. When she found him, her beautiful boy was torn apart, half eaten by a horned demon and left in a well, and the clouds grew dark and cried for her pain, and the Earth shook and sealed the well, and the wind blew the land into a desert. My father did not tell stories. He worked long hours as a pediatrician, read the newspaper, and slept. Much of my joy during those years came from school: studying, friends, school trips, games in the yard, and even the ride back and forth on the school bus. I remember our driver well, Mr. Tahmasbi, an ancient man with a thick mustache and parched and deeply cracked hands. He was a great storyteller who every morning, as we sat riveted, recounted the previous night's ten o'clock radio soap opera and would do the same again in the afternoon on the way home. Students early in the afternoon drop-off route begged him to drive slowly so they could hear more, and stepped off the bus reluctantly. I was one of the lucky ones as our home was a few miles from school and so I heard each episode twice. My grandmother's house, on the other hand, was closer and I missed part of the stories during the year I lived with her. NES!N, OFTEN IN transit to prison or exile or award ceremony, never seemed
to lose his own place. Sometimes his countries would be nowhere and his people unknown men, as though these were fables, but they were not. From here he would go forward and show the absurd, and the absurd seemed familiar to the reader-but not enough, usually, to land Nesin in jail. His people were every one of us and the places, our own city, our neighborhood, our institutions. We were all actors in a farce, both laughable and painful.
From what the people call the "madhouse" and from what doctors, if they are in official positions, caU the Mental Hospital, five madmen, pardon, five mental patients escaped. The date on which the hospital personnel learned that the five mental patients were no longer in the hospital was accepted as the date on which the five patients ran away. 34
FUGUE#29