“I can’t hear you. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there’s an American Indian here.”

“An American Indian? In Astara, Iran?”

My imagination filled with mounted warriors unleashing battle cries, painted faces, and smoke billowing from scorched huts.

“Come on up, and we’ll see what you have to say then!”

I closed the window. The rain slapped against the glass. I cleared the newspapers off the chair for Morteza. When he knocked, I opened the door. Morteza and the cold of Astara entered the room together. The cold smelled like fish, and so did Morteza.

He said hello and went straight for the chair. His face was full of lines and creases, which all fishermen in those parts had around their noses, even the young ones. Grabbing the back of the chair, he moved it over to the carpet, next to the heater.

To be honest, Morteza wasn’t exactly a real fisherman. He was a fisherman’s son, and in winter, the mildew under the arms of his coat revealed from a distance that he spent his summers sweating.

The fishermen’s sons don’t go to the ocean to catch fish, though they do go to rivers. They play on the sand beside the ocean, whose waves rise up to form its gaping, foamy mouth – you’ve seen it. They pace or sit around until the fishermen come out of the water with their nets. Heave... ho... heave... ho... they pull the ropes, and the fishermen’s sons dump their catch out of the nets onto the sand. Writhing on the ground, the fish smack their tails against the earth until they bleed. Their eyes, too, fill with blood before they die since, you know, fish don’t blink – they don’t even have eyelids. The fishermen throw back the ones they can’t keep, tossing the white fish to one side, carp over there, on the sand. Just like that. All of them. Until all the fish grow still.

Strange that fish don’t know how to scream. On rainy days, they take a long time to die. In their final moments, drained of energy, they flop their tails, unaware that their scales grow warm. Only we humans realize when we’re dying, of course. A few drops of water push death two or three paces farther away. Not unlike the way a smoker dies, really. The fisherman paces aimlessly back and forth until the rain stops.

Morteza scrunched himself up in the chair, as if the cold outside had chewed him up and spit him out. He didn’t say a word until he put his arms around the warm heater. Once warm, he swore he’d seen an American Indian at Bivak Aga’s coffeehouse drink three cups of black tea, one after the other, without putting down his suitcase made from a material that was not buffalo skin. Then, on the icy sidewalk leading from the coffeehouse to the Caspian Hostel, the Indian kept lighting matches for his cigarette, which was damp from the snow. He tossed the cigarette butt and opened the door of the hostel with the toe of his boot, very gently. So gently that no one heard the sound of the boot on the wood.

“Look here, Morteza,” I said. “Do you know what it means to tell a lie after you’ve sworn?”

“No... I don’t know,” Morteza replied. “Me? Lie? No way, I swear on my father’s grave it’s true.”

“Well, what was his name?”

“What was the Indian guy’s name? Merojinmo... yeah, his name was Merojinmo.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means a man who rides by on sobbing horses, distancing himself from his years of tears.”

“You’re joking!”

“You better believe it.”

“How do you know?”

“He said so himself. I went to the guesthouse and we talked. I helped him tie his hair back, and I had a little bit of weed, which we smoked together. He gave me this bottle as a souvenir.”

Morteza pulled a small glass vial the size of a bottle of cough syrup out of his coat pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A potion.”

Morteza’s coat smelled like smoke. His eyes were glazed over from smoking a cigarette containing some weed.

Nine years later, the day I heard that Morteza’s body had been buried outside Astara in an unmarked grave, next to the river delineating the border between Iran and the USSR, I walked over to that guesthouse, where no Indian had ever opened the door with the toe of his boot.

I stood there as the sleet came down, and I stared at the balcony Morteza had shown me years ago. A quilt hung over the railing. The alley smelled of wet cotton.

“Is there anybody there?” I said.

“He’s gone... he left last night – went to Russia,” Morteza replied.

“So the American Indian was Russian too?”

“Russian? No, Merojinmo is American, an American Indian born and bred, and a communist from a tribe that got broken up. When did I say he was Russian?”

I wanted to punch Morteza in his yellow teeth, right in that smile he had plastered on his face, which some people force when they’re hiding something. Now that crazy boy with spindly arms and legs was going to climb up the sap tree. He said the Indian had opened the guesthouse balcony window, which looked out over the snow, and asked, “Moscow is around here somewhere, right?”

Then he said he couldn’t remember anymore how many years it had been since McCarthy’s funeral, or where all the Senator’s cronies had ended up.

“They split up my tribe. My grandfather was buried in Oklahoma, and my mother bought an empty plot in the Dodge City cemetery. Every Sunday she’d go there and pull up all the moss around the grave with her fingernails.

“During the years of the senator’s reign of terror, when they were arresting left-leaning Indians at random, my mother sold the plot and fled to Mexico with the money from the land. Had Grandfather been buried there, she would have been obliged to remain there until Judgment Day. Before his injuries, Grandfather was well over 6 feet tall. Of my dad’s three brothers, two of them repaired so many old worn-out flush toilets and read the Bible so much at night that finally the Parole Board agreed to transfer them to the Holy Maria Church to be priests. That way, the church’s sewage problem could be solved, and the Messiah could see his Native American followers up close and personal.

“My third uncle would paint his face for the movie studio and earn his keep by throwing himself off his horse when he heard blanks fired from Winchester rifles. Of course, once in a while his shoulder or elbow would get a little torn up, but in the evenings he could afford to buy a piece of beef and stare at it with a gaze even more admiring than a gaze drinking in the Mona Lisa.”

“Did you believe him?” I asked.

“Of course I believed him,” Morteza said. “Have you never bought a steak?”

“Morteza, please. I’m begging you, have a snack and then go take a rest for an hour.”

“The Indian went on,” Morteza said.

“In 1947, two days before the Americans attacked our valley, that fateful migration of children, women, mules, and old men of the tribe began. It led to a valley, closed in by mountains that were covered with jagged, sacred stones.

“The young people stayed behind to lie down on the road by the river in the middle of the valley. That way the infantry carriers stuffed with Eisenhower’s troops could not get near the stones.

“At that time I was twelve years old and had never seen an airplane before. Just before we got to the jagged-edged stones, I heard a sound pass over my head, a distant sound. It was as if thousands of corpses wailed atop the mountain, their mouths closed.

“Grandfather got down from his mule. The rest of the tribe stopped and stared at a patch of sky with eyes full of some kind of religious terror. I held up both my hands to block the sun beating down on my face. Finally Grandfather yelled, ‘There they are! Over there!’ Issuing no command, the chief stretched his right arm towards the sky, and a few patches of black descended from the blue just beyond Grandfather’s fingernails. The tumult kept growing louder until it burst.

“Spooked, the mules listened, their eyes growing wide, and the whole pack scattered. I don’t remember if anyone fell off their mount or if they had all dismounted beforehand. The women began to scream, screams that were nothing like the cries they let out as they danced around the ritual fires of gratefulness. Among those chaotic shrieks I heard the sputtering of airplanes. Grandfather yelled, ‘Take the women behind those stones! The wounded... tend to the wounded!’ Someone cried out, ‘No one’s been hurt, Chief!’

“‘What?’ Grandfather called.

“The sounds returned. This time from the center of the sky. The place where the sun reached its noon height.

“Years later I realized that only firing automatic rounds could create such rattling noises, and that the sudden exploding sounds were called bombs.

“‘Turn back.’ I don’t know where the voice I heard came from. ‘Turn back. Go back to the valley.’ By the time we found the mules and got ourselves back to the valley, it was dusk. A red dusk that had descended on the earth ... or rather, on the water. There was no sign of the trucks or infantry carriers there, nor were we able to find any tire tracks by the bodies of the young people near the river. Grandfather told us to gather up the corpses on one side and have the adults go pick up whatever burnt hair and flesh was left of those who no longer had faces. They were to pile it up in another spot, much farther from the river.”

“Mind if I roll a cigarette?” Morteza said.

“What do I care?” I said.

I went to the bathroom and stuck my head under the tap. I left the water running until my head filled up with the Astara cold, and I thought of Morteza’s lower lip and chin, which trembled as he mixed tobacco and weed. A person has to be messed up in the head to listen to anything Morteza says. According to Morteza, the American Indian said:

“We gripped the bodies by their underarms and dragged them, their feet trailing in the dust, towards the mules. Some were very heavy. Especially the ones the river soaked when the water rose up. But the ones that smelled of burnt flesh were lighter.

“Grandfather ordered the women to collect firewood and he lit it all himself, using cotton husks to get it going. He sent his cousins to bring some huge cauldrons, fill them with water and put them over the fire. By now it was night. A dark night so dark we could not even recall the color of our own skin. Only the eyes of those who were beside the fire flashed red, and the dark red of flame mixed with smoke shone on their bare arms and chests – a red that reminded us of the blood which we had seen that very day by the stones of the river, big and small. The blood which had started to stink under the sun. That night the women sat on the sand and ground up the seeds and dry leaves of plants, whose names I no longer remember, by turning the wooden handles of hand-powered mills. Just like those stone mills we Persians have. The ground-up mixture slid over the edge of the stone onto a white cloth. My cousins were picking it up in handfuls and putting it in huge cauldrons.

“The smell of the cauldrons, which was mercilessly bitter, had enveloped the valley by the time the elders were able to put the young children to bed and we had lined up the panchas beside the bodies. A pancha is a kind of glass bottle, slightly larger than your average kitchen glass, with a metal cap. Grandfather said, ‘The women will go in the huts, and the cousins and I will go to strip the bodies.’ On some of them, their bloody shirts had dried to their skin.

“Now, whether it was their skin we pulled off or their shirts, I can’t really say. Then Grandfather came and, in between prayers that he recited through his tear-stifling rage, he lifted each one of the bodies and put them in the cauldron with sorrowful reverence. Two or three to a cauldron. Just as the sun came up and the morning’s slimy cold clung to our bodies, the flames died down over the ashes. With dawn having barely arrived, we laid the cool cauldrons on the sand and sat down to watch Grandfather. He plunged both his arms into the cauldrons up to his elbows and pulled the bodies out one by one, or sometimes two at a time, and put them each into a pancha. The heads of the wet corpses had shrunk to the size of walnuts, and their arms and legs to the size of safety pins.

“The white and black of their eyes had turned to water, and their skin was wrinkled, like when you get out of the bathtub. We put the panchas under the sun until noon, then for three straight days we walked around them, sat beside them and sometimes danced for hours at a time. It was a kind of dance of desperation – a one-sided conversation between our arms, legs, and bodies and God. The women touched their hands to their ankles, then reached towards the sky and wailed:

“Eeloo... Eeloo... Anita nayamunara,

Non anita naya unara.”

“What does that mean?” Morteza asked the Indian.

“It means,” he replied, “O God, O God, we ask you for our children, not any other children, but these very ones.

“Anita nayamunara,

“Non anita naya unara.

“On the third day, the women went to Grandfather’s hut and asked him with great embarrassment if he would give all the mothers permission to cut off their hair. This way, their femininity could be shaved off, and maybe they could shed their grief along with their hair. Maybe they could shed their grief. When the women came out of Grandfather’s hut with their white heads and their bewildered faces a mix of femininity and despair, the men turned away. They would have to pace outside the hut for years if they were ever going to embrace their wives again, their long hair flowing over their shoulders and breasts. At this moment, each of the men picked up one of the panchas, turned towards the sun and stared at our dead, which were now light, dried and shrunken, encased in glass. The next day we placed the vials in the mules’ saddlebags and we went far away from the valley. So far that none of us could hear the sounds of the river.”

“I asked the American Indian—”

“All right, Morteza, that’s enough,” I snapped. “Why should I listen to your bullshit?”

“Bullshit? Why can’t you get this through your thick head? Eleven years later they took Merojinmo and put him under arrest. You know why? Because when the police looked through Merojinmo’s bag, they found a pancha in there, along with Lenin’s books.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“A few years ago, when Merojinmo got out of prison, they gave him back his books, but not the pancha.”

“I know they didn’t give him the pancha back,” I said, “because you’re making it all up.”

“Merojinmo asked me, ‘Do you know what happened to Communism in the end?’ And I said, ‘No, how should I know?’”

“Yeah, how would you know?’ I said, “You’ve totally lost it.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Morteza.

“No American Indian can speak Persian!”

“Can’t he, though? Can’t he? That guy... he’d been living in this country for years! When everybody was getting arrested, he hid out in Kurdistan.”

“So what?” I said. “What did he go to Kurdistan for?”

Now Morteza had moved away from the heater and towards the window. The snow draped its chilly blanket over top the buildings behind the glass. Wisps of smoke rose from his cigarette in the ashtray a few paces away as he coughed.

“He went to Kurdistan, you know what I mean? You’re so out of touch you don’t even get what I’m saying. He went to teach the Kurds what to mix together in the pestle and how to grind it, then how much of it to pour into a cauldron so the heads of their dead would shrink to the size of walnuts. He went so the skin of the Kurds would crinkle up too, so anybody could put a dead body in a pancha, and put the pancha in his coat pocket. He went to tell them how to dry their tears with their coat sleeves. Get it? Now do you get it, you idiot?”

Nine years later, when they brought me the news that Morteza had been buried without a headstone beside the boundary river, I went to the corner of my room and pulled out a potion.

It occurred to me that the bottle was the same exact size as that cough syrup bottle Morteza had once shown me.

I opened it and smelled it. Then I dumped the potion in a basin, and poured water over top. I put my hands in. An intense cold gripped me – not the usual cold of Astara and its alleyways, but a kind of cold that starts behind your forehead, shivers through your bones and takes with it everything you love, washes it away and takes it down.

As soon as I pulled my hands out of the basin I saw my palms, my fingers – oh, God! What had I done? My fingers were so small I had to bring them up to my face to see them. I didn’t even have fingers anymore!

That is, I had fingers, but each was the size of a safety pin. This is why… everything that I remember about Morteza, about the American Indians, about the Kurds, I’m telling you now. Write, my dear Parvane, I’m begging you to write it down. You see how my hands are. Parvane, I’m begging you to write it down!