The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
I got up from the driver’s seat.
— Very well. Apparently our bus has become a time machine as well as a form of transport.
The donkey brayed from the back seat.
— You stay where you are for now. If you try to come down those wet steps with your weight, this love story will turn into an accident report.
Lena got off. The woman in red and I followed her out of the bus. Coco had already jumped out ahead of us and was standing beside the cart.
The old woman rested her hands on its handles. Rain settled on her grey headscarf. The small wooden cart had two metal wheels and was covered with dark cloth.
Lena took a few steps towards her.
The old woman raised her head.
— You still hold your umbrella crooked.
Lena stopped.
For a moment she looked like someone who didn’t know whether to laugh or was even sure she had the right to cry.
— Do you remember me?
— There are people we remember not by their faces, but by the burden someone once laid on their shoulders.
— I hope nobody remembers me by my debts, I said. — The list is longer than this street.
The old woman looked at me and seemed to enjoy the joke. The corner of her mouth rose; for a moment, the lines on her face seemed brighter than the rain.
The woman in red touched my arm gently.
— Let Lena speak.
— I was only trying to stop it feeling like an interrogation.
Lena knelt beside the cart and lifted a corner of the cloth.
Inside were several loaves of bread, a large flask, a few plastic cups, two folded blankets and a parcel of books.
— Almost the same things you carried in it back then, Lena said.
— People still get hungry and cold, and sometimes they need a book. I saw no reason to change what I put in the cart. This cart is my love: a love I have to push with my own hands if it’s to reach anyone.
— What’s its story? asked the woman in red.
Lena drew the cloth back over the supplies.
— Years ago, when I was young, I worked for a time with a group of workers and students. Strikes, protests and meetings were a large part of our lives. We believed that if social conditions changed, people would become freer, more equal and kinder.
— And this woman? I asked.
— She wasn’t an old woman then. Every day she brought bread, soup and tea to the striking workers in this same cart. Sometimes she looked after their children so the mothers could attend a meeting. At night she took the books she had collected around to people as well.
— You took one of those books and never brought it back, said the old woman.
Lena smiled.
— I still have it.
— At least you were an orderly thief.
— Well, we’ve finally found a theft the Department of Death doesn’t know about.
Coco circled the cart, following the smell of bread. For him, historical discussions seemed to matter only when they led to something edible.
Lena went on:
— Around that time I fell in love. Or at least I thought I had. There was a man who could talk for hours about freedom, equality and the society of the future. We handed out leaflets together, went to meetings, and imagined our love was part of building that future.
— Wasn’t it? asked the woman in red.
— It was, but that wasn’t the whole truth. At meetings he argued for equality between men and women. Afterwards he expected me to cook, put his papers in order and set aside all my own needs whenever he was tired or upset. He carried patriarchal habits with him, the very habits he denounced in his speeches.
— So the new world was being built, I said, — but its domestic services were still run according to the old one’s rules.
The old woman burst out laughing. Her laughter rang along the wet street, and raindrops slid from the edge of her scarf.
— Exactly, said Lena. — For a while, I didn’t object. I thought personal problems mustn’t distract us from the main struggle. I thought talking about my emotional needs or my exhaustion would make me an individualist.
— You ignored yourself for the sake of an ideal? asked the woman in red.
— Yes. My generation, those of us born in the Iranian 1350s, grew up hoping for great changes. For many of us, love wasn’t merely a private relationship. We connected it to freedom, equality and a better future. There was value in that, but sometimes we made the mistake of sacrificing our lives today for a tomorrow that hadn’t arrived. We fought for freedom in the world, yet sometimes forgot that freedom must begin between two people as well.
The old woman took a loaf from the cart and handed it to Lena.
— Do you remember that day?
Lena took the bread.
— I’ve never forgotten it.
— What happened? asked the woman in red.
— One night after a meeting, I had a row with that man. I told him he couldn’t speak of women’s freedom in the street and expect obedience from a woman at home. He said it wasn’t the right time for that discussion, and that there were bigger issues.
— ‘Now isn’t the time’ is one of history’s favourite sentences, I said. — Usually spoken by someone benefiting from the present arrangement.
Lena continued:
— I came out of the building. It was cold and raining. I saw this woman pushing her cart, with a wheel caught in a crack in the road. I helped her. When she realised I was upset, she didn’t ask me anything. She gave me a piece of bread and said, ‘If one person always carries the weight of a relationship, call it what you like, it isn’t an equal love.’
— That’s a good line, said the old woman. — Pity I can’t remember whether I said it myself or stole it from somebody else.
— Never mind. Most of the best lines in history have passed through several hands before being credited to whoever had the better pen or the bigger platform.
The woman in red turned to Lena.
— Did you leave him after that?
— Some time later. Not just because of that argument. I understood that a love which stops one person growing and being free cannot be made humane by any grand slogan.
The woman in red was quiet for a while.
— I belong to the next generation, the Iranian 1360s generation. We didn’t grow up with your great hopes. We faced more defeats, disillusionment and mistrust of collective promises. Perhaps that’s why we saw love as something more personal: a place of calm, a way of knowing ourselves and of saving a piece of life from the world’s turmoil.
— I understand that, said Lena. — Your generation wanted to reclaim the right to a private life, a right my generation sometimes postponed until the future.
— But I still don’t think love can be explained only through social conditions. Two people may have a home, jobs, safety and freedom yet be unable to love each other. And two people in the hardest circumstances may build a deep love.
— That’s true. Social conditions don’t produce love, but they can give it room to grow or choke it. Poverty doesn’t tell anyone whom to love. But tiredness, anxiety, homelessness and financial dependence enter a relationship. They don’t wait outside the door. They come in, sit at the table and sometimes even sleep between two people.
— Hunger might not be in love, I said, — but it usually turns up at the dinner table uninvited.
The old woman opened her flask and poured tea into four plastic cups.
My eyes settled on them.
Their plain shape, their lightness and the thin little sound they made when set down suddenly carried me back to my years in prison. For a moment, the rain-soaked walls of London fell away and the cold walls of the prison wing rose before me. The smell of weak tea, the sound of keys and the long wait behind locked doors came back from somewhere far away.
But I didn’t let the image carry me off. I drew a breath, collected myself and returned to the street, the rain, the cart and the people beside me.
— Our comrade is still on the bus, I said. — If he finds out this meeting includes refreshments, he’ll probably break a window.
The donkey brayed inside the bus.
The woman in red laughed.
— I think he’s found out.
I took one of the cups and set it on the bus step.
— Tea for you. But you’ll have to negotiate with Coco about the bread.
Coco raised his head and gave me a look that suggested negotiation was, in his view, merely a polite word for unconditional surrender.
The woman in red turned to Lena.
— Perhaps the difference between us is that you come to love through society, while I come to society through love. Or perhaps you came to the search for relief from pain through pain itself, and I came to recognise pain through an apparent absence of it.
— Perhaps. I ask under what conditions people can love freely. You ask how love changes them from within.
— Don’t we need both questions?
— Yes. If we speak only of external conditions, we reduce people to numbers, classes and incomes. If we speak only of inner feelings, we forget that love also needs time, a home, safety, independence and equality.
The old woman said:
— You two explain love very well. Just be careful you don’t spend so long explaining it that you have no time left to live it.
— That’s the danger facing every intellectual. First we analyse life; then we realise it has happened and gone without asking our permission.
Lena divided the loaf in two. She gave one half to the woman in red, then broke the other into pieces and held one out to Coco.
— Love is a little like this bread, said the old woman. — If you only talk about it, nobody is fed. If you keep all of it for yourself, someone else goes hungry. And if you never eat any yourself, eventually you’ll have nothing left to give.
— Then what is love to you? asked the woman in red.
The old woman put her hands back on the cart’s handles. For a while she studied its wet wheels, which seemed to have carried bread, books, exhaustion and hope from one street to another for years.
Then she raised her head, looked at the woman in red and smiled.
The rain had eased.
But before she could answer, the bus horn blared through the street.
The donkey, apparently unwilling to hear a definition of love on an empty stomach, had pressed his muzzle against it.
— All right, comrade! I called. — We know your definition of love is a fair share of the bread. Let the old woman have her say too.
She gripped the cart’s handles more firmly.
— You can’t answer that question standing beside the road. Some answers have to be found while you’re walking.
She pushed the cart a little way forwards.
One of its metal wheels dropped into a small pothole, but before the cart could stop, Lena and the woman in red both put their hands to it.
I picked up my cup of tea and followed them.
Coco went ahead of everyone with a piece of bread in his mouth.
And the cart of love set off again beneath the gentle London rain.
To be continued.
The story continues in Part Twenty: A Love Born a Decade Too Late.
Naser Kamali
London, a beautiful Greenwich evening, beside the river and alone with my thoughts.
Translator's notes
- Iranian decades: References to the 1350s and 1360s use the Solar Hijri calendar, corresponding roughly to the 1970s and 1980s. The distinction between the two generations is part of the dialogue.
دیدگاهتان را بنویسید