Wet Night of Deliverance

A short story by Alireza Mahmoudi Iranmehr

I felt like I wasn’t done after I had cut off his head. Could it be this easy? He didn’t have a name yet, but ever since I ran off with Reza seven years ago, I had always wanted to name my son Arash. I believe someone named Arash will never sleep with his own daughter, or set himself on fire with a gallon of gasoline.

Six days ago when he was born, it felt like I had found buried treasure. It was worth the pain of delivery. In the prison infirmary, when they told me it was a boy, it was as if my 5,300 tomans had won a black Mercedes in Tejarat Bank’s raffle.

But then they said that they had to take Arash away. The judge had not allowed me to keep him. I didn’t want them to take away my treasure. So what if my HIV positive blood is running through his veins? This is only stronger proof that he is mine. He doesn’t belong to any of the thousands of people who meet you for a night, do their thing, and are gone forever. He is a piece of myself, outside, that I can hold in my arms and look at. It was the first time that someone had slept so peacefully next to me.

I stole the razor from inside Mrs Taghavi’s prayer book. She secretly uses it for shaping the eyebrows of the other girls. This was the last night I would put my son to sleep next to me. When Bulky Shaheen’s bed started creaking, I undid my blouse and nursed him. It had been years since I had felt so light-headed from a touch to my breasts. Then I held his mouth tight until he stopped breathing and began to cut off his head with the small razor. He didn’t make a sound, and barely moved. The blade was dull and broken and kept cutting my fingers. I was thinking that a person couldn’t die this easily; that he may still be alive even if his eyes are shut. I didn’t want them to take away my treasure in such a completely perfect state, even if his eyes were shut. Maybe tomorrow he would open them in another room, would nurse at another woman’s breasts, breathing just like he does as he suckles mine. I had kept my eyes shut the entire time when the nine of them were going at me all night long in that house north of Piroozi Square, but I hadn’t died. All through that snowy February night, when I slept in a covered ditch at the intersection of College Avenue, I kept wondering about how a person dies. The rats ran through my hair. Their bodies were cold but they were alive and constantly moving all over me.

Bulky Shaheen’s bed was seriously creaking now. I liked how the blood from my fingertips mixed with my son’s. I had had a similar feeling as he was growing inside me. I sharpened the razor using a stone I had found in the prison yard. The rubbing of the blade over the stone sounded like the breathing of an innocent animal in the dark. It reminded me of the story of Abraham and how, to cut off his son’s head, he had sharpened his knife on the mountain rocks, and yet the knife still wouldn’t cut. But my razor blade, no bigger than a fingertip, cut really well.

I wanted to see the shape of his heart, a heart that was beating inside my own body until only six days ago. What does a person’s life look like? I remembered the poems I used to read for Reza next to the Bosphorus. We were waiting to fill a book with them. In all my poems I used the word ‘heart’ over and over again. Removing Arash’s heart with that tiny, slippery blade was difficult. Each time I pressed harder the blade kept cutting my own fingers. But when I finally removed it and held it in my hands, I saw that just like his birth, it had been worth the trouble. It was moist, small, and slippery, and shone in the dim light coming in from the corridor. It was as if he had been born a second time.

I held his heart in my hands and looked at it and wondered how can a person die? I had asked this question on many nights. The refrigerator seller at the corner of Amir Hozoor Street, who used to pay me 200,000 tomans to let him put out his cigarette in my belly button, used to say that one doesn’t die from these things. But Reza died very easily. They stabbed him with a knife in front of the bakery in Istanbul, he held his stomach, fell to the ground, and died. It was so quick that he didn’t even have time to wonder about how one dies.

Woman in Qom, Iran.

Credit: Omid Salehi

Omid Salehi: A Photographer’s Journey through Iran is published by Beyond Art Production, roseissa.com

I squeezed my son’s small, moist heart in my fist. Maybe this is where a person’s life seeps out. Or maybe it is buried in a different place. One of the inmates was cursing in her sleep. I could smell the cigarette smoke from the students’ cell all the way over here. I had taken my university exam books with me when I left for Turkey with Reza, but then I threw them all away. Later I wanted to find a book that explained how a person dies. I felt that I must search further inside his chest, like a book that you want to read to the very end.

He didn’t even have time to wonder about how one dies

Forty-three nights after Reza died, as I was returning from Istanbul, I wished that I could find a part in my body that I could squeeze to end it all. That night, for the first time, I slept with the bus driver who bought me a sandwich and let me ride in the back of his bus all the way to Tehran. His breath smelled of cigarettes and sunflower seeds. His movements sometimes became one with the motion of the bus. But I just kept staring at the plastic heart that spun around hanging from the ceiling. I thought the heart kept getting larger and larger, and then smaller again. Near daybreak, when the driver returned to his seat, I pulled aside the velvet curtains. I stared at the sky through the red stickers that spelled out something on the rear window. The last stars were disappearing in the light of dawn.

A dim white light was shining into the cell from the small opening near the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if it was daybreak or if someone had lit the gas lamp in the prison yard. Someone was snoring in her sleep.

Bulky Shaheen was finally silent. A faint singing could be heard from a distance. My fingers were burning. My hands were wet all the way to my wrists. I had lost the blade among the small pieces left of my son. But now, no one would be taking him away. No one could hurt him. I had no more dreams left. After running away with Reza, this was the first thing I had done for myself. This wet night of deliverance was worth the burning feeling in my hands, and the loss of a small razor blade.□

This story is dedicated to Soraya. It was inspired by the sensational trial of a woman called Soheila in Iran. She was accused of killing and dismembering her five-day-old baby, who had Aids. She said that she killed the baby because she did not want the infant to suffer the same bitter fate as her. She was also accused of working as a prostitute. During the trial, she said repeatedly that she had worked as a prostitute because she had no choice and in order to earn a living.