Letter XIII

My dear teacher,

Hello.

I don't know whether this letter will reach you, now that you are no longer among the living. Though here, too, these days, life runs thin. In any case, I believe that words are the most enduring form of memory, and if I write to you, perhaps something of this strange simultaneity with you will be preserved: the memory of a great tree's shadow falling across the burning skin of a traveler in the middle of summer.

I first found you at the arts school. Summer of 1385, Tehran, Sureh Girls' Arts School, theater workshop.

We were sitting on the cool mosaic floor of the classroom, doing a read-through of Sunset in a Foreign Land. I was the demon, and I read:

"But the storytellers, from that very day,
spoke of ugly people in their tales,
who enchant birds and men with the playing of a flute!
And wither ponds and flowers!
And if a man killed his companion for two coins in that wasteland, he returned to the city and said: I saw an ugly man tear him apart, a man who cast spells and drank blood and howled and sharpened his teeth.
We had been born into the world, into the world of stories, and into the world!"

Story had been with me long before you, of course. In those childhood years, whenever I read a tale, I would change the ending to suit myself and write it again. Being a writer didn't seem like hard work then.

But theater began for me with you. I remember buying Divan-e Namayesh with my father on Enqelab Street, the sixth of Ordibehesht 1386, at Ketabsara-ye Nik. It is still full of my handwriting throughout, the marks of the important discoveries of those days, pressed into the body of the book. Sometimes I open the Divan and see the handwriting of a girl who doesn't yet know that years later she will carry that book with her to somewhere far beyond Enqelab. She doesn't yet know that some books are not only books: they are a piece of a city, a piece of a collective memory, a piece of home, a piece of a homeland that can be carried with you.

One of those adolescent days, sitting on the wooden benches with the sound of the swamp cooler filling the room, I arranged my maqna'e like a half-crown over my disheveled hair and became Lady Negar from Sultan-e Mar, and I read, as if for days that hadn't yet arrived:

"Farewell, joys of youth. Worthless gold and ornament, be the portion of those whose worth is yours. Unruly hair, be undone! And soft limbs, be blessed with the torment of a coarse garment! Let these walls be lifted from before my eyes, and let the desert reveal the roads that have been lost inside it! I who have known nothing but a soft pillow will rest my head on your stones, and the thorns of the wilderness are now my bed."

I understood later that some sentences arrive before life does, and wait somewhere in the future to find their meaning. Perhaps this was one of the things I learned from you: that theater doesn't end on the stage. Some sentences are performed again, years later, somewhere inside a person's life. Perhaps this is how theater is made. One person tells a story, another believes it, and in the end one person remains to play the part.

In my final year at the arts school, I adapted Majles-e Zarb Zadan. Qatameh was not one woman for me; she was seven women, and one of them was in love.

After the review, Mr. K. said:

"Qatameh cannot be in love."

And he did not grant a performance permit. Perhaps I still didn't know that day how many times these "cannots" were going to repeat themselves throughout a life. I wanted to become a great writer. I wanted to learn from you. I imagined there were years ahead: you were there, I was there, the city was there, and theater, however difficult, would find its own way. But you, too, like the demon, were driven from the city and ate the golden apples of the orchard of knowledge alone.

The last time I saw you in the city was at Vahdat Hall, the production of Afra, or the Day Passes. In those days I didn't understand what "the day passes" meant, that this was the last time, the last performance in Iran. A person usually doesn't know which encounter is the final one, and if they did, they would look more carefully.

Then you left. And from the time you left, it seemed there was nothing but "a fierce wind and the clamor of grief and sorrow." After university, I left too. After writing three plays and being denied a permit for yet another production, after Zhale, I left. In those days I thought leaving meant changing geography. I didn't know that a person carries things with them that no customs office can weigh: Enqelab Street, for instance, the wooden benches of the arts school, the sound of the swamp cooler, books with folded corners, plays that were never performed, sentences that were never permitted to be spoken. And now it has been years that I, too, am that demon, in a foreign land and clinging to the roots of this ancient tree. But it is strange: the farther I went, the closer some things became.

Here I never lost the pleasure of watching your productions. At Stanford and at Berkeley, the roots pulled me toward Iran, toward seeing what remained of the homeland for me. A homeland that was sometimes neither soil nor border, condensed into a few hours of a darkened hall and a light coming on over a stage. I remember, on the last day of the run of Chaharrah, in the corner of that restaurant, we sang to you:

"The world has no one like you, no one, it cannot bring another..."

And believe me, it doesn't, Mr. Beyzai. That same evening I sat across from you and I wanted to say all of this. About that class, about the demon, about Lady Negar, about Qatameh, about that ancient tree, and about how you had been my teacher for years without my ever having sat in your classroom. But I didn't say it. I didn't know where to begin. Now I am saying those unspoken words.

At the second performance of Dash Akol, I could not believe that the demon of death was standing full height beside your slight body, and still you stood above that balcony, hand on your chest, and bowed before the applause of the audience that was us, watching.

I had heard that in the days of the hospital you kept your eyes closed, except when someone spoke to you about the production, about the audience's response. That theater was the air you breathed.

The day you left, I could not be witness to that earth receiving "the pure champion asleep in the day." Near spring, though, I came with a hyacinth. I sat on the grass, beneath the green of that tall pine tree with a bell hanging from its branch. When the wind blew, the bell rang out and promised the coming of the old herald of Nowruz. It promised that "the day passes."

Right there I listened to your voice:

"From cradle to grave, force and force again.
May the lord of force be brought down to the grave.
Why must one begin with a curse?
For what do your two eyes hold their tears?"

Now your signature remains between Where is Hezar Afsan? and Theater in Iran, and this great weight of being Iranian on our shoulders. Now your voice comes from between the pages of books, from within this room, so far from Iran, reading "Siah" aloud:

"Break, let it break, break!
I will not break, break!
This place is a prison, break!
A sea of blood, break!
The world is ruins, break!
Grief is plenty, break!
Thunder and rain, break!
This is the sky, break!
Break! Break!"