The House of the Mosque

Sayeh

Aqa Jaan had seen Zinat slip out of her room at night sometimes like a sayeh — a shadow — but he had no idea where she went. Zinat’s bedroom was on the second floor, and to reach the stairs, she had to go past Fakhri and Aqa Jaan’s bedroom.

Late one evening, Aqa Jaan was reading in his study when he heard the door at the top of the stairs open. He thought it was Fakhri, but when he didn’t hear any footsteps, he looked out through the chink in the curtains and saw someone stealing through the darkness.

He opened the door and stepped into the courtyard, just in time to catch a glimpse of a black chador by the stairs. It might be Zinat, but what was she doing up so late at night?

He went back inside. Suddenly the crow screeched.

The crow’s warning reminded Aqa Jaan of the woman from Sarandib:

Once upon a time there was a merchant from Sarandib, whose wife was named Jamiz. She was so beautiful that people could hardly believe she was real. Her face glowed like the day of victory, and her hair was as long and as dark as the night in which you wait for a lover who never comes.

Jamiz was secretly having an affair with a famous artist who could do magical things with his brush. She slipped out occasionally to visit him, and together they experienced the most beautiful of Persian nights.

Then one night she said to him, ‘It’s becoming harder and harder for me to steal away from my house, and even harder for me to have to wait so long. Think of something, so I can visit you more often. After all, you’re an artist!’

‘I have an idea,’ said the artist. ‘I will make you a veil. On one side, it will be as clear as the reflection of the morning star in a pool of water. On the other side, it will be as dark as the night. At night you can wear the dark side of the veil, so that when you come to me, you will blend in with the night. In the morning you can turn it round to the clear side, so that when you go back home, you will merge with the morning.’

With the grandmothers away, the house entered a new phase. The rhythm they brought to the house had been broken. A sure sign of this was that the antique clock stopped ticking. When the grandmothers were at home, the kitchen was abuzz with activity, the crow cawed to announce the arrival of visitors and the library was always neat and tidy. But those days were over.

It was the grandmothers who woke the children and helped Fakhri Sadat clean her room. It was the grandmothers who told Aqa Jaan what was going on in the house. And it was the grandmothers who kept an eye on Muezzin’s studio. While they were away, their tasks were left undone.

No one could fill their empty shoes. If the grandmothers had been here, they would already have followed Zinat to the roof.

Aqa Jaan was satisfied with the substitute imam. Janeshin carried out his work with enthusiasm and seemed to be happy. During their initial talk, Aqa Jaan had noticed that he was ambitious, but had doubted that he would accomplish much.

The man still couldn’t talk about anything but rural matters, though he did that well enough. Not long ago he’d criticised the Minister of Agriculture for doing too little to help the poverty-stricken villages.

Janeshin had never been to Tehran, but in one of his sermons he made a remark that was quoted on the front page of the local paper: ‘I’ve been told that everyone in Tehran has a telephone in their home, and yet hundreds of mountain villages are without a single phone. If you cut your finger in a kitchen in Tehran, you can call an ambulance, but what am I supposed to do if I find my father on his deathbed? I’m warning you, Tehran! Take heed! We are all equal in the eyes of God.’

The secret police smiled at his innocent barbs. They valued such criticism; in fact, they even encouraged it.

Janeshin’s remarks were becoming increasingly popular and were often quoted in the local paper. Aqa Jaan was so satisfied with him that he gave him a bit more leeway. One time, after the paper had printed a photograph of Janeshin and an excerpt from one of his sermons, a colleague of Aqa Jaan’s had observed, ‘The man’s naïve, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head.’

Never before had the paper printed a picture of an imam. A photographer had been sent to the mosque, and Janeshin had been photographed on the roof, standing between the two minarets.

The next day, when the imam saw his picture in the paper, he was so excited he couldn’t sit still. His dream had come true. Ever since he was a little boy, he’d dreamed of speaking in a big mosque. Now that his sermon and his picture had appeared in the paper, he was suddenly a local celebrity.

According to the laws of the sharia, Zinat and Janeshin were doing nothing wrong and didn’t need to be so secretive. If a Muslim is away from his lawfully wedded wife for any length of time, he may take a temporary wife, a sigeh. But Janeshin knew that it was risky and that Aqa Jaan would send him packing if he found out.

Zinat was uncomfortable with her status as a sigeh. She was ashamed of herself for going to bed with Janeshin in the same mosque in which her husband and dozens of his predecessors lay buried. She refused to come to him every night, as he begged her to, for fear that Aqa Jaan would find out.

When she saw Janeshin in the daylight, she found it hard to believe that she had let him undress her and make love to her. It was different in the dark. She couldn’t see him then, she simply felt his hands, his shoulders, his back, his thrusting hips. He was as strong as an ox.

The moment it was over, Zinat would snatch up her chador and scurry home, wanting nothing more to do with him. She couldn’t bear to hear him utter another word. But the next night, after she’d turned off the light and crawled into bed, she missed his body.

Alsaberi, her late husband, had never kissed her breasts or bitten into her buttocks in an animal frenzy. Janeshin, by contrast, brought her to such blissful heights that she forgot everyone and everything.

Recently he’d taken her down to the crypt, where he had undressed her and made love to her on the cold hard tombstones. She had protested, spluttering that she didn’t want to do it on the tombstones, but he had insisted, and she’d thrown her arms around him, clung to him and surrendered herself.

‘I’m never going to do it again, I’m never going back to that man,’ Zinat always told herself as she tiptoed back to her room. ‘It’s over. I’m lucky no one has found out. I have to stop, and I will. I’ll go away for a while, I’ll go and visit my daughter in Qom and stay with her for a few weeks. I’ll go to Fatima’s tomb to show my remorse and beg for forgiveness. Yes, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll leave tomorrow, I’ll pack my bags and go.’

But she hadn’t gone and was now on her way to his room again.

Janeshin heard her walking softly towards the steps. For a moment she was swallowed up in the darkness of the stairwell, then she emerged to wash her hands in the mosque’s hauz and splash some water on her face.

Janeshin wanted to take her down to the crypt again, but she refused. Then he put his big hands around her waist and lay his head between her breasts, and she melted. He scooped her into his arms, opened the door to the cellar and carried her downstairs.

Deep in the darkness a candle was burning on top of a tall headstone. He took off her clothes, her shoes and her socks and led her barefoot into the candlelight, where he took off his imam robe and laid it on the headstone. Out of nowhere he suddenly produced a bunch of purple grapes, which he placed on her breasts and ate one by one. The juice ran down her breasts and over her belly, and when he lapped it up, Zinat thought she’d die of ecstasy.

They were so engrossed in what they were doing that they didn’t notice the person striding past the cellar window with a lantern.

Janeshin was drunk, from both Zinat and the grape juice. As he lay on top of her he recited the Al-Falaq surah:

I seek refuge with Him,

The Lord of the early dawn,

From the evil He created,

And from the evil of the night,

As darkness falls.

He spoke and Zinat listened with her eyes closed, unaware that a man with a lantern was coming down the cellar stairs.

Suddenly she saw a flash of light and heard footsteps. She pushed Janeshin off her, grabbed her black chador and hid in the darkness.

Janeshin wheeled around and saw a silhouette holding a lantern high above its head.

‘Imam! Pack your bags!’