About the author

Shokoofeh Azar was born in Iran in 1972, just 7 years before the Islamic
revolution. Despite spending most of her childhood and early career in a
relatively hostile environment for independent writing, Shokoofeh’s early
interest in writing and art was sparked by her father who was an Iranian
intellectual, author and poet. She studied literature at high school and
university, later working as a journalist for an independent newspaper for
14 years.
As well as having numerous short stories, reports, interviews and articles
published in the Iranian media, her other publications include two
collections of short stories; one children’s book; and a Companion in
Writing and Editing Essays in the Persian Literary Encyclopedia, which
won the prize for The Best Book in Iran in 1997.
In 2004, Shokoofeh became the first Iranian woman to backpack and
hitchhike along the Silk Road: from Iran to Afghanistan, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan and India. Reports and photos of this 3-month
journey were published in the media to great acclaim.
In 2010, with independent reporting increasingly coming under threat,
Shokoofeh was forced to leave Iran, and was accepted as a political refugee
by Australia in 2011. She continues her writing and is also gaining a
reputation as an artist, with a number of successful exhibitions in Perth,
where she lives with her daughter.
Published by Wild Dingo Press
Melbourne, Australia
[email protected]
www.wilddingopress.com.au

First published by Wild Dingo Press 2017

Text copyright © Shokoofeh Azar
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners
and the publisher of this book.

Cover design: Debra Billson

Paintings by Shokoofeh Azar used for cover design: 1. The Poetry Night; 2. Two Birds; 3. Red Bird
and Moon
Translator: Adrien Kijek
Editor: Catherine Lewis
Typesetting: Midland Typesetters, Australia

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publications Data
Azar, Shokoofeh, author.The enlightenment of the greengage tree / Shokoofeh Azar.
ISBN: 9780987381309 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780987381316 (ebook)

Magic realism (Literature) Families—Iran—Fiction. Islam and civil society—Fiction. Iran—History

—Revolution, 1979—Fiction. Iran—History—1979–1997—Fiction.
Dedicated to all those I know: dead and alive.
I would like to thank my father for teaching me to fly in the sky of literature
freely. I owe a debt of gratitude to my mother, without whose support I
would not be living in the free country of Australia, able to write without
censorship.
I am profoundly grateful to the Australian people for accepting me into
this safe and democratic country where I have the freedom to write this
book, a liberty denied me in my homeland of Iran.
 1

eeta says that Mum attained enlightenment at exactly 2:35 p.m. on

B August 18, 1988, atop the grove’s tallest greengage plum tree on a hill
overlooking all fifty-three village houses, to the sound of the scrubbing of
pots and pans, which pulled the grove out of its lethargy every afternoon. At
that very moment, blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, Sohrab was
hanged. He was hanged without trial, and unaware he would be buried en
masse with hundreds of other political prisoners early the next morning in a
long pit in the deserts south of Tehran, without any indication or marker lest
years later a relative would come and tap a pebble on a headstone and
murmur there is no god but God.1
Beeta says Mum came down from the tallest greengage tree and, without
looking at Beeta who was filling her skirt with sour greengages, walked
towards the forest saying, “This whole thing is not at all as I’d thought”.
Beeta wanted Mum to explain, but Mum, as though mesmerised like
someone with forest fever—what I call forest melancholia—walked with a
steady step and hollow gaze into the forest to climb up the tallest oak where
she sat on its highest bough for three days and three nights in the sun, rain,
moonlight, and fog, looking with bewilderment at the life she was seeing
for the first time.
Just as Mum reached the highest branch, perched to view her own life,
the complex lives of family both distant and near, the events of that big
five-bedroom house in that five-hectare grove, Razan, Tehran, Iran and then
suddenly the whole planet and universe, Beeta ran to the house and
announced that though still harbouring a mania for fireflies, Mum also now
had a mania for heights! At first none of us took her new infatuation
seriously, but when midnight had come and gone and there was still no sign
of her, first I, then Dad, then Beeta carrying a lantern, went and sat down
under the tree. We lit a fire upon which we placed a zinc kettle so the
fragrance of our smoked tea would fill the Jurassic-age Hyrcanian forest—
the last of its kind—and lure Mum down. The fragrance of the northern-
smoked tea reached Mum’s nostrils as she was traversing the Milky Way,
watching the stars and planets spinning and orbiting with astonishing order,
every rotation of which split open a space in which scientists hopelessly
searched for a sign of God. From up there, perched on star dust, gazing
down at an Earth no bigger than a tiny speck, she came to the same
conclusion she had reached that day at precisely 2:35 p.m: it’s not worth it,
life isn’t what she had thought. Life is precisely that which she and others
were prodigiously killing—the moment itself. A moment carrying in its
womb the past and future; just like lines on the palm of one’s hand, in the
leaf of a tree, or in her husband, Hushang’s eyes.
Around five o’clock the next morning, Dad, Beeta and I woke up in the
thick morning fog to see the last foxes returning to their dens after hunting
Razan’s chickens and roosters, and to feel the wings of the hoopoe just
inches away. Mum had once again returned to the highest bough from her
peregrinations and passage of the planets and cities, villages, islands, and
tribes, in time to hear the song of thousands and thousands of sparrows, and
to see a hedgehog curl up and roll down the forest slope because Dad had
moved. We all took our places at the same time; us around the fire, Mum up
in the tree, Sohrab in the pit alongside hundreds of other corpses. After all,
the executioners were so overwhelmed by the mass executions, they had
been unable to bury the bodies in time as planned. But they had been the
lucky ones. In the following days, the number of people executed increased
so much that corpses piled high in the prison back yard and began to stink,
and Evin’s ants, flies, crows, and cats, who hadn’t had such a feast since the
prison was built, licked, sucked and picked at them greedily. Juvenile
political prisoners were given the good fortune to be pardoned by the Imam
if they fired the final shot that would put the condemned out of their misery.
With bruised faces, trembling hands, and pants soaked with urine, hundreds
of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, whose only crime had been participating
in a party meeting, reading banned pamphlets, or distributing flyers in the
street, fired the last shot into faces that were sometimes still watching them
with twitching pupils.
 It was mayhem, and the executioners were so overwhelmed by the stench
of loathsome death that filled the hall that they would go sporadically mad
and be transferred directly to a military asylum, only to vanish or be killed
months later. From July 29, 1988, when the first series of executions of the
People’s Mujaheddin and communist prisoners began, until mid-September
of the same year when more than five thousand people in Tehran, Karaj and
other cities were hanged or shot by firing squad, only three provincial
soldiers disobeyed firing orders. Their bodies, along with those executed,
became eternal hosts to three lead bullets. Midway through the second
month, of the dozens of refrigerator-lorry drivers, whose job had been to
haul bodies to the remote desert outside the city, four also ended up in the
asylum. The stench of putrefied bodies had so clogged their nostrils, they
thought it emanated from them wherever they went, and gave them away.
They suspected their wives could smell it, too, but didn’t let on, out of pity
or fear. They were frightened of the apprehensive looks they received when
standing in the long line for food ration coupons, bread, or pasteur-ised
milk. One of them thought the black crows gathering in ever greater
numbers around the corpse-filled trenches were stalking him. He thought
the stench of his own body had brought the crows to break him: now sitting
on house walls, perched on the power poles, and flying above the city. In
the smaller cities, two members of a firing squad, whose job had been to
execute political prisoners in the desert outside the city, were shot in the
back as they ran away from their duties. Meanwhile, due to their
‘excellence in carrying out duties’, hundreds of executioners and putrefied-
corpse transporters were promoted to become Revolutionary Guards,
interrogators, mayors, retribution executors and prison wardens.
When Dad called out with his cheery morning voice that it was time for
tea with kondak2 bread, he was sure Mum wasn’t going to forget her latest
craze. That’s why he added hastily, “If there is one thing we inherited from
our forefathers it’s this mania; a mania for new things. For impossible
things”. Then gradually the morning fog got thicker and thicker, blurring
out the three of us, with our lantern, fire and teakettle; and allowing Mum
another opportunity to travel through a world that contained a planet which,
despite all its vastness and countries and religions and books and wars and
revolutions and executions and births and this oak tree, she had just realised
was nothing but a minuscule speck in the universe.
 At the age of forty-four, Mum suddenly became old. Her hair turned grey
and Beeta, who was the first one in the house to see her in three days,
yelled, “An old woman just arrived!” When Dad and I ran to see her, Mum
had positioned herself on the living-room couch and was filing her left
thumb nail with mysterious calm.
Mum’s three-day enlightenment in the tree suddenly gave me an idea.
Mum had just begun filing her right thumbnail when I gathered all my
books from the bookcase. Smiling at all of them, I told them that if
something went missing from the house, to know it was I who had taken it.
Then, to an astonished look from Beeta, Mum’s otherworldly stare, and
Dad’s usual smirk, without a backward glance, I went to Dad’s workroom
and grabbed what I needed: a hammer, nails, saw and twine. It took five
days to build my treehouse the way I wanted, that is, where it couldn’t be
seen, at the highest point of the tallest oak tree in the forest—the same tree
that, until an hour ago, was the site of Mum’s ascension. It had a window
facing the sunrise and a door facing its setting, with a small balcony facing
the house, and a rope railing. A big tarp covered the roof and all the
branches, so that on rainy days and nights it would produce the same sound
I had loved all thirteen years of my life; a tarp that every summer, prior to
Sohrab’s arrest, was spread out over the wooden shelves and cellar floor for
silkworm production. There the worms spent a full two weeks eating
mulberry leaves till, dreaming of butterflies, they spun their cocoons and
then, unbeknownst to them, were drowned and boiled in a big vat. From
their cocoons, white silk threads would be spun that only some of Isfahan,
Naiin and Kashan’s3 wealthy carpet sellers could afford. Instead, they gave
this silk thread to destitute carpet weavers who couldn’t leave their dank
basements for even a minute during the day to greet the sun. They only
knew one thing: how to weave silkworm dreams.
Sitting on the green sofa across from Mum and looking at her absently
filing her nail, Dad thought that although he, a skilled tar4 player, was the
source of the family’s silkworm production and indisputable heir of the
ability to interact with supernatural creatures, he had never been fortunate
enough to see Mum in flight.

*
When Dad saw Mum for the first time heading down to Darband,5 she was
barely seventeen and in the throes of an impossible love; a love that, for the
first and last time, allowed her to soar over Nasser Khosro Street, over
passers-by and second-hand booksellers. Just six months before meeting
Dad, she had had another, significantly more exhilarating encounter, but
one without a future. It was so exhilarating that from then on, and for the
rest of her life, she heaved sighs like no other. They were long and deep and
as concealed as possible, but not to the extent that in all those years, Dad
hadn’t noticed. At twenty-five, Dad fell so intensely in love with Mum—
Roza—and at first sight, that at the end of that very same day, a night
among Darband’s foggy nights, he married her, in a daze and in the
presence of a passing mullah who, fearful of dark spectres and fog, was
muttering prayers as he rushed, oil lamp in hand, down the slope. Having
received his twenty Tomans and a tip, the mullah didn’t even linger long
enough to behold the young couple’s passionate first kiss. Dad placed a
dogwood berry in Mum’s mouth and said, “Let’s go and introduce you to
my family”.

Despite all of Mum and Dad’s strange qualities, my favourite family

member is my father’s little brother, Khosro. As I was building my
treehouse I recalled that he was able to turn any task into a mystical ritual.
The second of three children, each born three years apart, he had proven
himself to be the most befitting heir to the family mania. He spent a year in
prison under Mohammad Reza Shah, two years under Khomeini; married,
divorced; spent three years in self-imposed exile at home to study seventy-
nine volumes of Indian and East Asian mysticism and learn Sanskrit. After
spending three days and nights lying in an empty grave in a Tibetan
cemetery reading the Vedas, he levitated one metre above the ground while
practising Osho meditation; and lived for a month in a wooden boat in the
middle of a Siberian lake, as instructed by a shaman.
While weaving a branch in and out of the others to form a wall for my
treehouse and thinking about Uncle Khosro’s craziness, I was overcome by
a moment of despair—thinking there was nothing new and different left in
the world for me to do. We had to wait for Uncle Khosro because in any
case it was he who was the most likely to understand Mum. He was an
experienced searcher, the exact opposite of me and us. We were just
beginning.
 As I was building my treehouse and thinking about all Uncle Khosro had
done, and Mum’s unexpected enlightenment and ascension atop the
greengage and oak trees, a surprise summer rain began to fall that continued
for three days and three nights. It would have turned me into a scaly,
reptilian creature that feeds on algae, rotten fruit and moss if Beeta, like a
fallen angel with her orange umbrella and pleated sky-blue skirt, hadn’t
appeared, to take me back into the house. At sunset on the fifth day, in the
silence of the grove and awaiting the arrival of Uncle Khosro, or news of
Sohrab, my treehouse was completed.

1 In the Iranian culture it is common to tap a small stone against the headstone and say “there is
no god but God”. The tapping is to wake the spirit of the dead to hear the recital of this phrase.
2 A type of sweet bread eaten in Mazandaran.
3 Iranian cities famous for their fine carpets.
4 A type of Iranian stringed instrument.
5 A recreational area in the mountains north of Tehran.