The Painter of Baghan
Fiction by Houshang Golshiri. Translated from Persian by Samuel Thrope. “Isn’t writing like giving birth because, let’s say, at a certain moment a person is forced to write?”
This short story appeared in our Persian Literature feature in Volume 7.
We were six: me, my wife, our two children, the children’s uncle, and his wife, Mehri, who was seven months pregnant. We were heading towards Alamut. One day, three streets away, a missile directly hit a three-story building that just vanished—that’s when we decided to get on our way. My wife, Pari—her real name is Parichehr, but I call her Banu—organized everything, took an unpaid leave of absence from work, and let Uncle know. When I arrived, all I had to do was carry the suitcases to the front door, and help tie them down on their Land Rover’s luggage rack when Uncle and his wife arrived. I’m a writer, that’s clear. I write stories. Though it had been a while since I had written at all. I think a few years. Later I’ll explain why. This, what I’m writing now, is a personal report. Uncle is a civil engineer, but works in a commercial firm. He knows English and handles all their international business. Mehri is an artist, though she paints just for herself; the canvases keep piling up with nowhere to go. We’re the only ones who call her a painter. She once brought us one of her pictures as a housewarming gift, and we hung it on the wall of the living room. The subject, so she says, is a cottage, but all we can see is a half open door. The rest is just colors mixed up and jumbled together, as if we’re looking at the cottage as seen through a hurricane. Our son, Babak, was twelve that year, but our daughter, Sanam, was just ten. She has a scar on her left cheek that gives her face, in Banu’s words, a certain grace. Pari works for the oil company, and I just write, or—better—I wrote, and to make ends meet I teach from morning to noon. Officially, I’m not an educator, despite the fact that I teach at a college. At one—this is my usual schedule—I take a nap so that I can get up later and write something but, as I said, it had been a year that I hadn’t written. Now I want to write what happened.
We passed Karaj in the afternoon, and near Qazvin we turned towards Alamut. I drove until then, while Uncle slept in the back seat. He had told us to wake him when we reached Moallem Kalayeh. I didn’t drive very fast because I worried Mehri might miscarry, but when Uncle sat behind the wheel, he put the pedal to the floor. He said: We have to cross the pass in the mountains before nightfall, otherwise we’ll have to spend the night in a motel.
We thought it would be best if Mehri sat in front, in order to make the ride less bumpy. Uncle said: If it’s my boy, a few bumps aren’t going to shake him out.
When the dirt road began, Mehri vomited once or twice, but it passed in the end. The trees were in bloom, though a thin layer of snow had settled on them. Mehri said: If only we could stop somewhere and I could do some sketches.
Uncle said: I’ll stop anywhere you want once we cross the pass.
We reached the pass at sunset. There was fog, I mean the fog hung so thick that we couldn’t even see the valley to our left. To our right was the snow-packed wall of the mountain. Sometimes we stopped and squeezed ourselves right up against the mountain wall so that a car whose horn we had heard could come and pass us. Banu didn’t say a word, but I understood from how tightly her hand was gripping the headrest that she was thinking of the deep valley below. When the green fields of Rudbar finally appeared from behind the fog, she breathed deeply and loosened her grip. Uncle said: Okay, we passed it, now we can stop by the river and eat something.
Mehri burst into tears, saying: It’s so beautiful! I can’t even believe it.
He stopped by the bridge and we only had time to drink a single cup of tea. I also had a smoke, since if I smoked in the car Mehri would get sick; though perhaps Banu made that up in order to keep me from smoking too much. The children had gone down by the riverbank, and Mehri was leaning over the top of the bridge in order, as she put it, to see what shape the water made when it hit the piers of the bridge below. When we got on the road again it was already dark, and we were forced to drive slowly, to keep from passing the sign for the road to Baghan. Babak and Sanam called out the names on the signs before we even reached them. Mehri said: If the child wants to be born at seven months, then what do we do?
Uncle said: There must be someone in Baghan; you saw they have a clinic in Moallem Kalayeh.
We finally reached the village’s central square in the middle of the night. Uncle went and brought Mohammad, who he said was the brother of his firm’s tea and coffee server. He was sleepy, and apologized again and again, saying that his house was not worthy of us. We walked up a narrow alley and finally reached an iron staircase that led to a two-room house. No one was there, but seeing a five or six-year-old boy standing in the doorway, it was clear that Mohammad Khodabandeh had been forced to remove his wife and children, asleep and awake, so that we could sleep. I don’t remember what we ate. Banu says: I had prepared shaami kabob, and we ate it in the car.
Okay, maybe. I was dizzy from tiredness. I had woken up early that morning, and because Uncle didn’t stop talking about the decency and hospitality of this acquaintance, I wasn’t able to nap in the car.
We slept there that night and when I awoke, I saw that I was alone. Opposite me, above the heater, I saw a watercolor sketch of a bridge that I thought must be that same bridge over the Rudbar river. It was unframed and held to the wall by a tack. When I came to the doorway of the room, I realized that they had built the village houses in steps going up the face of the mountain, and, like the village of Masuleh, each house’s patio sits on the roof of the house underneath. The square was below, and from this far up Uncle’s vehicle could be seen parked next to a couple of cars and a minibus. Then I don’t know what happened; it was as if I had fallen into that same fog hanging in the valley. It wasn’t dizziness, no, I felt fine, but I understood that I didn’t exist. The square was still there, and the houses, and the flowerpot that they had set in a metal hoop fixed onto the banister, but all these were like distant memories, and I feared, too, that at any moment I would smash against the sharp rocks that I thought must be waiting for me below. In fact, it didn’t last for more than a moment. When I came to, I saw that I was gripping the banister, and I realized that the flowers in the flowerpot were geraniums, one or two buds of which hadn’t yet opened.
I said nothing to Banu, but at lunch I asked Uncle: Have you checked if there is a doctor here or not?
He said: If it’s my boy, he’s not going anywhere before he reaches five kilos.
Banu and Mehri had gone for a walk with the children to the highest house on our side, and said: There is a spring there that is so cold that you can’t keep your hand in the water long enough to pick up ten pebbles.
I said to Banu: Where is that Mohammad?
She said: Downstairs, right below this room. It’s his father-in-law’s house.
I didn’t say any more, but in the afternoon, having given the excuse that I was going shopping for food and cigarettes, I went down to the center of the village. The grocer said: There is a clinic and an Indian doctor who comes twice a week, but here we mostly take the ill to Qazvin. Until a few years ago we also had a gynecologist, but she passed away.
I ruled out the Indian doctor. I thought perhaps that one of the capillaries in my brain had become temporarily blocked, and then released. I decided that once we got back to Tehran I would go to a specialist, to see how many years I had left. When we got back, I didn’t go, there was no need. I know now that it wasn’t a stroke. In any case, that isn’t the reason I’m writing all this.
I also bought a few notebooks from the grocer, and a pen or two. I thought that beginning the next day I would stay in every morning with the excuse that I had a headache, and take the time to write.
That night we ate in our room. Banu cooked, but Mehri didn’t appear. Uncle said: It’s nothing.
Suddenly she appeared, her head bare and wearing her nightgown. The Uncle said: Didn’t I tell you to put something on your head?
She waved her hand in the air, like a person shooing a fly from his face, and said: Somebody drew just what I saw.
Uncle said: What?
She said: Come and see for yourself, it’s just like the landscape I saw on the way here, and that I thought might not be bad to draw.
I don’t know how it happened that her gaze fell on the watercolor painting above the heater. She said: There’s one here, too.
Perhaps she noticed it because of the way I turned my head. She said: Who painted these?
The painting in their room was also of the pier of that same bridge, just the way Mehri said she had seen it from the top of the bridge. Mohammad did not come that night, and when Uncle went to find him, his wife said that he had gone to the city. The children went to bed early, and we, I mean Uncle and me, built a fire in the wood stove in the yard and sat there talking on and on until midnight. He said: Last night a missile hit near the Alstom power plant.
I said: We came here so that we wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.
Then he talked about his company and, I don’t know, about that brother of Mohammad’s who has a good sense of humor and, of course, is a hard worker. Finally, the conversation turned to the women, and he said he was worried that Mehri’s behavior is going to cause us trouble.
I said: Did something happen?
He said: This watercolor is really upsetting her. She thinks that someone a long time ago painted exactly what she saw just yesterday evening, with the waves in the same shape, and even the same blot of cloud she saw in the water.
I said: So someone was probably looking into the water in exactly the same season at the same time from the same place.
He said: That’s what I said, too, but she had an answer for that: “When I looked at that cloud blot, it wasn’t where it is now; I thought it would be better to move it right against the shadow of the pier of the bridge.” That’s the reason she thinks someone standing in the place she stood, wherever he saw the cloud, thought that it would be better to paint it in such a way that it seems to be leaning against the side of the bridge, as if the cloud is gazing at the shape of the waves from above.
I said: Don’t worry, it will pass; when you’re first starting out, the contrast between imagination and reality is enough to frustrate anyone.
He asked: You don’t have those problems now?
I said: Tell me, has Pari said something to you?
He said: She might have hinted at something, but you said yourself that it’s been a while now that you haven’t been able to write.
I said: It happens.
He said: Do you mean that it can last so long?
I said that I’d written things that are all half-done. Then I told him that once I thought that by writing I could change something, but now I understand that a work of art doesn’t even influence its maker, much less society. That’s why I think art only really has an impact on society over the long-term and indirectly. Writing a manifesto, that’s something else, but real literature won’t spark a revolution.
We talked about other things as well that aren’t important. In any case, all these words were mostly just a cover to hide my own feeling of impotence. Then, all at once, we realized that Mehri had come out on the terrace. She said: I can’t sleep.
Uncle went and brought her over, and wrapped a blanket around her. Mehri asked: What were you talking about?
Uncle said something or other.
She said: I heard you.
Then she asked me: Isn’t writing like giving birth because, let’s say, at a certain moment a person is forced to write?
I said: Sometimes it happens like that, but the truth is that what you create isn’t like a child at all. You can’t say “it is what it is,” and not keep working on it.
She said: Then if compulsion isn’t part of it, why does a person have to spend all this energy just for the sake of leaving a few paintings after him when he’s gone?
Then she talked about the watercolor in their room, saying: This guy, whoever he is, painted it without any pain or even pressure, as if his hand did the painting on its own.
The next day, with the Uncle’s help, she went down to the village square in hopes of getting some Bristol board and other supplies. She was surprised to find that they had them, and even different types of paint and canvas. They also found an easel. After my afternoon nap, I saw that she was painting something on the terrace. She was teasing out a sketch of a flowering branch on a colored background when suddenly the paintbrush fell from her hand, she grabbed her head, and said: What’s going on?
I watched as she leaned forward and rested her head on the frame of the canvas, and I caught her as she was reaching out with her hand to grasp at something in the air. It was as if I knew that something like this would happen; I remember that when I had woken up confused from my nap, I had even sat there for a while, still half-asleep, wondering: how long before a missile lands near here?
Mehri was fine. When Banu came back, she went to see her. Then Uncle appeared. It was agreed that he would take her to Qazvin the next day. But in the morning Mehri said that she felt right as rain, that it’s all over, and that her dizziness was entirely behind her.
Mohammad also came and said: I heard that, as of last night, they haven’t fired any missiles at Tehran.
We also hadn’t heard any air-raid warnings on the radio. It was decided that Uncle would check, and if it turned out to be true that no missiles had been fired, we would get going in the afternoon. The truth is that I didn’t want us to go back so quickly. During the late mornings that I spent sitting on the terrace, the memory of that state of being suspended—like when in a dream suddenly there’s nothing under your feet—forced me to write; I wrote mostly colorless snippets of distant memories, and then put them aside for moments like right now, when I can write at leisure. In the morning Babak, Sanam, and I went up to visit the spring that they had told me about. Banu stayed with Mehri. Sanam said: In the village yesterday morning I saw that man we met sitting here by the spring that day carving a block of wood with a hunting knife.
No one was at the spring. We drank some water and each of us grabbed a few pebbles from the bottom of the spring, but we could never catch more than five or six before pulling our hands from the water. You could see the whole village from there. The houses rose up the side of the mountain in a perfect, if incomplete, circle. Most of the houses this far up were empty or entirely falling apart. We took the long way back and came down from the other side of the village. Uncle was in the square. He said: We’re waiting today, too, to see what happens.
At lunch, Mehri said that she had spoken with Mohammad about buying their paintings, but Mohammad said that the painting of the bridge’s shadow was part of his wife’s dowry, and that another one was his brother’s, and that it’s his to decide.
Mehri said: Mohammad’s wife said: “There’s one in most of the rooms here; no one bought them in order to sell them later.”
There was also one in Baghan’s village café. I forgot to tell Mehri, but I’m sure there was. When I went back this year, I saw it. From time to time I also saw a watercolor in the city that had passed from hand to hand and now was hung in some corner, out of the sight of guests, and even the owners. Until I would mention the painting, they would hardly notice it.
In the end, we returned that year on April tenth, but we hadn’t yet reached Karaj when we saw cars coming bumper to bumper towards us from Tehran.
I didn’t want to say all this. I also didn’t want to tell you that Mehri now has two sons, one three years old and the other six months. I didn’t even want to tell you about myself, it was only when I discovered a mention of that feeling of being suspended between earth and heaven among my papers that I found myself thinking about that year, and remembered the village of Baghan. Uncle said: Mehdi Khodabandeh, our tea server, doesn’t remember having seen a painting in that room.
Mehdi had said: When I visit the village next time, I’m going to bring a painting for Madam.
When Babak heard Uncle and me talking about Baghan, he suddenly remembered that the hunter by the spring had said to tell a certain someone, meaning me, that he sends his regards.
I said to Uncle: I want to go for a few days to Alamut, and if it works out I’ll also visit Baghan.
He said: Please make sure Mehri doesn’t hear about it. She’ll start nagging me again: What happened to that picture Mehdi said he was going to bring?
The next day, in the morning, I set off with one of my friends. On the way back from Alamut we stayed two nights in Baghan. Rahmat is a photographer and from morning to night he walked around taking pictures everywhere, inside and out. On that first day I stayed sitting on the same terrace as before. I knew that someone was watching me and I couldn’t write. In the evening Rahmat said: I saw him.
I said: Who?
He said: The person who’s been painting the pictures.
I didn’t believe him, but when he showed me where his house was, I realized that it must be the one just opposite ours and that he could see us from there. That evening, flashlight in hand, I set out to see him. There was no one home. The house had three rooms, and the terrace was built on two stone pillars. The curtains were closed, but the lamp was lit in the front room, which I supposed must be his studio. I sat for a while nearby. The murmurs of the village came up from below, and the lights were like the petals of a giant flower circling the square, riding on each other’s shoulders, down to the last row just below his terrace where the circle closed. In the square the next morning I heard from Elias, the owner of the village stationary store, that “he”—the epithet he used in place of the painter’s name—only came down very rarely, and must have been home the night before as well, since he rises early and paints until evening.
I saw him that afternoon. Rahmat said: He’s here! He didn’t allow me to take his picture. He said: “You know how superstitious we villagers are.”
When Rahmat said: What about you? He said: “I have no business with people.”
As I was ascending the stone steps I saw him standing on his terrace and looking through his binoculars. After I had approached and we had exchanged a few pleasantries, he graciously invited me in.
I said: I’m not bothering you, am I?
He said: On the contrary, you’re a blessing.
I ascended an iron staircase that was more like a ladder. He was a tall, old man who had tucked the legs of his overalls into his well-shined boots, and now was standing in front of an easel to which he was attaching a piece of paper.
I said: I was just passing this way, and I said to myself that I should come say hello.
He said: Please speak plainly. It’s been twenty years since I’ve heard these kinds of niceties.
He pointed to a cane chair on the other side of the easel, and said: If you’re tired, you can sit here.
When I passed behind him, I saw that he was adjusting a rectangle fixed to the railing of the terrace. It was sitting on a pivot, and it seemed as if it could be turned to change the view captured in the rectangle’s frame. He said: There’s tea in the pot. If you want you can pour yourself some.
The front room was a kind of artist’s studio, full of rectangular paintings leaning against the wall and piled on built-in shelves and on the round, wooden table, which had four folding chairs around its four sides. There was also a door facing the mountain that I presumed led to the kitchen. The other room had only a single bed and a few books discarded one on top of the other on the end table. His radio was sitting there, too, and his gas samovar was on a stool by the window facing a black rock. I found only one solitary mug, and no proper tea glasses. When I returned with the tea in my hand, I saw that he was busying himself with adjusting the rectangle towards the village. Finally he stopped and tightened the bolt.
He was sixty something, perhaps more. The wrinkles in his neck made him appear older, but when I remember his tall stature and the long, chestnut hair which flowed over his shoulders like a dervish’s, I presume that he must have been around fifty. I said: I saw one or two of your paintings in Tehran.
He said: Perhaps they were someone else’s.
I said: Why don’t you organize an exhibition and show them?
He said: You haven’t come here to write about me, have you?
I said: I don’t know.
He said: This July fifteenth it will be twenty-two years that I’ve lived between these four walls. Anyone who wants to can take these and, if he wishes, bring something in exchange; the villagers here bring sugar, tea and sometimes a packet of rice, and those who have become city dwellers give me my paper and paint, and sometimes even leave an envelope with money. When I was younger I, too, would go to Café Riviera, and, I don’t know, Naderi, and Ferdowsi, and even Café Salman, and drink and talk with friends; we would put on exhibitions, and gossip about each other, and, I don’t know, keep ourselves awake at night with jealousy. One year when I came here with my wife to do some painting, we got stuck and stayed. I’m still here, and I’m satisfied; the children, I mean my girls, are grown and have enough that they’re not looking for a handout. There is no one else in my life whose expectations would force me to sign the bottom of these and fix a price.
Then he talked about his wife. He said: She was a gynecologist and when she died we buried her in the cemetery on the road to Baghan.
He talked on in this way, and I’m not entirely sure if he said things exactly as I’ve written them. As he was talking he kept peering across the way through his binoculars. He said: My work now seems like closing a door today that we opened the day before, or perhaps the opposite.
Finally he came, took the mug from my hand, and asked: Do you want more tea?
I said: Perhaps later.
He said: I have several glasses. A traveler left a few here just yesterday in exchange for a night landscape that I painted last night from the spring.
I don’t know why I shuddered. Then I said of myself that I don’t have the heart to work. He said: It happens.
Then we talked about the difference between the two kinds of work we do. He said: I still read. From time to time someone from around here goes away to study, and when he comes to visit he brings me books. Once I’ve read them, I give them to Elias to do with whatever he likes.
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. He said: Excuse me.
Finally he got up and went to paint. I stayed sitting, looking at the square and watching from the corner of my eye as he readjusted the direction of the rectangle, when all at once I saw a rooster pecking at the ground on a corner by one of the narrow paths that leads to the square, then, suddenly, it wasn’t there any longer, or perhaps I wasn’t, and there, in place of the mud and straw wall below and the shrubs on the wall and the rooster, was a white, rectangular cavity that seemed to suck the air out of the path and the square. Terrified, I stood up and went to see what he was painting. The paper was white no longer. He painted the wall and those dry shrubs, and he painted the rooster on the top of the wall. He worked quickly, and with every brushstroke he looked up at the rectangle facing the corner. It was as if I was again standing suspended between earth and heaven; I was breathing shallowly, lest he realize that I was watching him paint from behind his back. When he cleaned the paintbrush with a rag, we both took a deep breath. I was looking at the corner, still empty as an open mouth, when I saw that had he plucked the paper from the easel and turned the rectangle to face the square. I looked, and the white void of the rectangle was there no longer, and now the rooster was standing on the wall, neck extended, just as he had painted it. Then, when I had sat down again and closed my eyes to try to remember what I had seen before, I heard the sound of his crowing.
That’s just what I saw, or what I can now write, now that according to Uncle the painter of Baghan has passed away and been buried beside his wife in the cemetery on the road to Baghan.