This Translation Tuesday we present an excerpt from celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh’s The House of the Edrisis, a novel about the perils and pathos of a world remade by revolution. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries. Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh’s story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.
The emergence of chaos is not sudden in any house; a soft dust settles in the cracks of the wood, the folds of the sheets, the seams of the windows, and the pleats of the curtains, waiting for a breeze to find its way into the house through an open door, and release the components of dispersion from their place of entrapment.
In the house of the Edrisis, life went on as usual. The wall clock with its engraved frame and its top covered with the images of birds and flowers, the work of Bukhara turners, struck ten times.
Leqa looked at her wristwatch, adjusted it forward, and got up from the breakfast table. She swept up the breadcrumbs to feed the fish.
Vahab, the young man of the family, took the last sip of tea from a lapis lazuli–colored Sèvres cup, swallowed his yawn, and turned toward Mrs. Edrisi. “He feels better today.”
The elderly lady shifted her glasses on her nose; her eyes behind the glasses were a cloudy blue. “Nothing that he does is clear.”
The fog came halfway down the arched windows, rubbed against the windowpanes, spun, and went toward the pine and spruce trees. From the end of the entrance hall came the sound of the washing of dishes, the opening of the faucet, and the bubbling of the samovar. In the kitchen, Yavar, occasionally coughing, dragged his feet when he walked.
The elderly lady, Mrs. Edrisi, knit her brow. “The poor man has gotten old—his lungs are ruined. He smokes the clay pipe too much.”
Vahab leaned with his hand on the edge of the table and stood up.
“I am going to the library. I read something about the city of Nisa. It was once a huge place, which has been buried under the ground.”
Mrs. Edrisi sighed. “What cities have not been buried? Our city will also be buried someday.”
Vahab closed his eyes, turned his back to her, and slowly walked away.
The people in the household always tried to make little noise when they walked, ate, or conversed.
Vahab was thirty years old, but he looked older. Thin drooping shoulders, a withered pale face, and serious lusterless eyes. He had studied in boarding schools in England. When he talked or moved, he sensed an invisible whip over his head. He ate little, and he took a shower before noon. He clipped and filed his nails every week. Due to sleeping so little, the skin under his eyes had turned dark. Occasionally, he sat in front of the mirror in the bedroom and counted the white hairs in his soft, otherwise black hair. Up to a few days earlier, he had twelve white hairs. He would not leave the house. He said that he wanted to have some protection. Twice a month, he dropped by a familiar bookstore. The man would set aside the new books for him. He would pick them up, knot his brow, close his lips, pay for them, and return home.
In the afternoon, if the weather was suitable, he sat on a chair by the reflecting pool, turned on the jetting fountain, gazed at the sprays of water, and recalled the past, his childhood and teenage years, which were far away from him.
With nightfall, dreams slowly became faint. In the garden, birds flew between the branches. At the end of the alfalfa field, limp from the heat of the day, milk cows mooed. On the second floor, his oldest paternal aunt, Leqa, would sit at the window, place her hand under her chin, and stare at the mulberry trees, adobe rooftops, and gable roofs until the lights in the surroundings came on one by one, and the curtains were drawn shut. She would not turn on the light. She would lie down on her bed and close her eyes. Occasionally, in the darkness behind her eyelids, a blue and yellow image, like a glass flower, would expand. Such images were entertaining to her.
Mrs. Edrisi rested in a rocking chair, facing the dusty walnut door. She applied perfume behind her ears. The scent of bitter jasmine extract wafted in the air. Occasionally, outside the windowpane, she saw an apparition of her dead husband in a cotton summer suit, a white bow tie, and salt-and-pepper sideburns. In a voice husky from smoking cigarettes and opium, he would whisper, “Mmm, what an aroma!” When she would gaze into the darkness outside again, she could hear the moaning of the hinges of the downstairs doors. Yavar was walking in the entrance hall. He turned on the chandelier hanging from the dome-shaped ceiling. The light shone on the ceiling’s plasterwork, the grapevine leaves, the morning glories, and the clusters of grapes. The wind shook the chandelier, and the chains groaned. The rainbows of the prisms glimmered and moved up and down on the patterns of the carpet, the two winding staircases, and the curved banisters.
The first story had three parlors, an immense entrance hall, a library, and four bedrooms. The second story had ten rooms side by side around a wrap-around interior balcony surrounded by balustrades. The doors of all the bedrooms, with the exception of three, were closed.
Before noon, when Vahab would get tired of reading, he would rest on an old sofa made of flower-printed crushed velvet. Ears entrusted to the squeaking of the springs, he would place a few pillows with peacock and parrot images between his forearm and elbow. He would drink a cup of coffee, light a cigarette, and, staring at the unending drops of rain, he would yawn, feeling a slight pain in the marrow of his bones. He would shake his legs and think about the past, mostly about Rahila, his paternal aunt, who had died in the prime of her youth due to some mysterious fever. After her death, Mrs. Edrisi’s hair had turned white overnight. Vahab had been ten years old.
They had just betrothed that girl to a corpulent man with a red face and cowlike eyes. He was a widower landowner by the name of Moayyad. They said he had a palace and a very impressive stable. His favorite chestnut horse would be sold for three thousand rubles. He used to come hastily with four servants, the sound of his shoes resonating on the stone floors. Rahila would sit on the edge of the bed, not moving from where she was, her hands limp on her white satin skirt. Proud and tired, she looked on. In the corner of her rosebud lips, a smirk of contempt fluttered. She would hold her head high, keep her almond-shaped eyes half open, the shadow of her eyelashes falling on her cheeks, the color of moonlight, and her sleepy eyes. She was tall, carefree, mysteriously self-restrained, and indifferent. Nothing made her happy.
In late spring, she would sit on a moist bamboo chair under the arbor of blue jasmine flowers in the outer courtyard and drink tea. White doves walked around her feet and flew under the arbor. It would rain. She would stroll in the garden. Her clothes and hair would get wet. She would raise her head toward the clouds, as though she were waiting for someone. She had no friends. She would never respond to letters, exchange visits, or answer messages.
Vahab would look at her through the window. Rahila would hold the corner of her skirt up and jump across the stream. She would tiptoe softly on the soaking-wet grass, pick a rosebud, smell it, and stick it in her hair. She would close her eyes and open them. She would walk around the garden for hours. When she got tired, she would sit under the shade of the thick branches of an elm tree, build a little house with pieces of rock, and pull out a stem of grass from the root and squeeze it between her teeth. When she would get up, she would destroy what she had built with her foot, and the pieces of rock would slide down the slope of the lawn.
Remembering all this, Vahab would suddenly feel upset. Rahila’s room was at the end of a long interior balcony in the corner of the north wing of the building. It had two large windows, one window facing the garden and the other toward the outer courtyard and the arbors.
The voile curtains smelled of dust and had the scent of snowdrop flowers. Vahab would see his face in the mirror of the dressing table. The image was alien. He would close his eyes and wish Rahila were alive, that she would let her long soft hair cascade down, and, when she combed it, strands of hair would glide over one another as soft as silk and make a spark. He would wish to be a little boy who would grab her skirt, and the young girl would push him away impatiently, her eyes alluring yet as cold as ice.
He would open the drawers of the dressing table and arrange the bottles of perfume in front of the mirror. There were Parisian ones from the 1900s; others from Moscow; Italian, Chinese, and Indian perfumes; lasting scents from the other side of the ocean—musk, Damascus rose, myrtle, and black ambergris. Of cosmetics, other than perfumes, she had nothing, a few bottles in each drawer.
The man would bend over the table, take a deep breath, open the door of the closet, and bury his face in the lap of white clothes covered with spots of mud, everlasting flowers, dried grass, and yarrow thorns. In the darkness, the sound of the cracking of termite-eaten wood could be heard from the back of the closet. He would pull his head back, close the door, return the perfume bottles, straighten the pleats of the curtain, and pull the cotton bedspread under the pillows with lace and embroidery covers. He would leave the room, lock the door, walk around in the semidark interior balcony on the polished floor, and then go into the library.
He had a few magazines in a drawer that he would take out and thumb through. He would look at the biography and photos of Roxana Yashvili, a stage actress who had performed brilliantly in such plays as Maxim Gorky’s The Petty Bourgeois, Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird, and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. They referred to her as “Wildflower.” The rays of a creative willpower shone in her eyes. Critics believed that she internalized spiritual images and transmitted them to audiences. She and Rahila were so similar, not a hair’s difference between them. Vahab would look at Roxana’s pictures in the costumes of Normandy women, under the arbor in a black velvet dress with a fan in her hand, or at the breakfast table with the male actor playing the role opposite her. Painters had painted portraits of her; the poems that poets wrote in praise of Roxana would fill a volume. She had been living with Marenko, a famous poet, for six years.
There were no pictures of Rahila in the house. By looking at Roxana’s slanting molten eyes, long black hair, and slender figure, Vahab would recall Rahila. She was from Tbilisi, with a particular temperament, famous for being rebellious. Vahab did not like her arrogance. He would not read her interviews. He only looked at pictures of her.
Precisely at twelve o’clock, Leqa would walk down the crescentshaped staircase and enter the parlor. She was wrinkle browed, sour faced, broad shouldered, and tall. Her lips were dark and usually closed, and she had a sharp pointed chin and a drooping nose. With her two gray eyes, probing and lusterless, she would watch everything around her, and the corner of her lips would wrinkle. She often felt a shooting pain in her spine from revulsion. She was adversely sensitive to pumice stones; she was even afraid of their shapes and the name. A few years earlier, to tease her, some relatives had placed a pumice stone in the corner of the bathroom. Screaming, she jumped out naked and passed out on the floor of the interior balcony. Mrs. Edrisi, grinning sympathetically, covered her hanging breasts with a sheet.
The odor of men revolted Leqa. When laborers came for a few days to tend the flowerbeds, trim the trees, and dig out the weeds, she would stay in her room and not come downstairs. Any waft of the smell would send her off to the washroom, where she would vomit repeatedly. She would open the rows of windows facing north and south. A breeze would blow in from both sides, rolling up the curtains and pushing them toward the ceiling. The chandeliers would shake, and the wind would howl beneath the high ceiling. She bathed twice a day, washing herself with soap and water. She smelled of alkali and soapsuds. At night after dinner, she took out petals of dried orange blossoms from a painted can, poured hot water over them in a cup, and stirred them with a long spoon. The veins of the petals absorbed the water, expanded, and changed color. The steam from the cup smelled of shaded places, large rocks, and gloomy plains. She sipped the herbal tea so slowly and deliberately that even her lips would not get wet. Wearing a flowered robe, hair woven in a single braid, she would get up from the table, say a cold goodnight, hand on the banister, and climb the stairs until her doughy profile disappeared into the darkness of the staircase landing.
Translated from the Persian by M. R. Ghanoonparvar
Find out more about The House of the Edrisis, which has just been released by Syracuse University Press, here.
Ghazaleh Alizadeh (1947–1996) was an Iranian poet, novelist, and short story writer. The House of the Edrisis was awarded a prize for the best novel of “Twenty Years of Fiction Writing” by Iran’s Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance in 1999. Her short stories include “The Crossroad,” “After Summer,” and “The In-transitory Journal.”
M. R. Ghanoonparvar is professor emeritus of Persian and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian. He is the translator of In the Alley of the Friend: On the Poetry of Hafez.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: