The Afternoon Nightmares of Dr. G

Maryam Sepehri

The river Zayandeh had run dry and a herd of mangy goats were licking the riverbed with their long pink tongues to get at the salt. The salty crust was what was left of the good deeds Dr. G had consigned to the river. 

He’d always heard that the poet recommended “Consign your good deeds to the Tigris.” But he’d used the river in his hometown because the Tigris was too far away, and anyway the nearby river had been running full. 

The wind-up alarm clock rang for four o’clock, and Dr. G felt for the worn metal button and hit it with his index finger. “No one gets ahead by lying in bed,” said a voice in his head. Through the sleep in his eyes he could see the hairpins cutting into the fat on his wife’s forehead. He touched his slipper and its coldness offended him. The juicer sounded like a drill and the coffee maker hissed. One hollowed-out orange half was full of coffee grounds. 

Dr. G plunged his arm into a bowl of bright green slop and squished mustard-colored slush into it. The metal bowl was icy and touching it disgusted him. The colorless corpse twisted and called out. The menacing tenor voice of the gigantic corpse awoke him before the alarm clock could ring for four o’clock.

The school anthem was being sung, as usual. “No one gets ahead by lying in bed.” No one, absolutely no one. Another day when he triumphs over lying in bed. G sat up straight on his bed. The alarm clock with its epaulettes was like a short and stocky army officer that had frightened G since childhood. The dwarf officer clock was the one from his childhood but over the years the fear had morphed into something else. G touched his wife’s face. The long black pins were cutting into her fleshy forehead and cheeks. With his usual languor he stuck his puffy pink toes into his leather slippers and when his feet, squeaking on the leather, were fully inside, he stood up. He tightened his biceps and turned his head from side to side. The juicer spun round and round. The hollowed-out orange halves were stacked on one another. The drone of the juicer woke his wife, who was usually awakened before that by the alarm clock. After G gulped down the orange juice he put the empty glass in the sink. He swallowed the two round cookies before the prostate medicine. The bitter smell of coffee filled the air and coffee grounds filled the topmost orange half. After this obsessive afternoon ritual, G set out along the path by the river, breathing deeply. The breeze carried the smell of fried liver, the traditional dish of Isfahan. As he approached his lab, searching among his keys for the square one that would open the door, he remembered the shocking and malodorous afternoon nightmare. His secretary was off that day, and the empty waiting room made him uneasy. The first thing that came to his mind was the pink tongues of the goats.

Once, some time ago, on a crisp autumn day when the orange leaves were falling, P, a beloved teacher, had tucked his leather-covered notebook under his coat to protect it from the wind that clawed and pushed at him, and turned onto a canal walk. Along the way, he’d bought some nougat and a bottle of wine and put them in a paper bag, and gone to Rudroff’s carpentry shop. On autumn afternoons, the carpenter felt nostalgic. As lightning flashed in the sky, P took out his Old Spice-smelling notebook. His long, feverish fingers turned the edges of the soft, cheap paper that was rippled from contact with his body. He knew how to open the notebook at the right page with his thumb. He read poetry as the carpenter smoked and watched a raindrop make its way down the sawdust-covered window. It was not only the clouds that opened themselves up that day; Rudroff too opened himself up to P. 

P, the newspaper-wrapped maplewood frames tucked under his coat and the story he’d been told weighing on him, was damp from the rain and half drunk. He could smell the wet adobe as he headed through the rain. 

Dr. G was well-built and kept himself in shape; he had a striver’s personality, believed in science and ridiculed the metaphysical. He was the elder son of a businessman well-known in Isfahan, to whom he had a debt of gratitude, unlike his younger brother, who had chosen a crooked path through life. G, after years of rivalry and jealousy, had become an anatomist like his classmate at Heidelberg University, Gunther Gerhardt. Unfortunately, he couldn’t practice his profession for religious reasons; instead, he ran a medical lab called Hippocrates by the river Zayandeh. 

Janusz Rudroff smelled of erasers and sawdust. He would stick the stub of a pencil behind his left ear. He kept his graying red hair very short. When he was shy or sleepy or lost in thought he would rub his neck. Before he began to saw, he would make sure the pencil stub was behind his left ear. Behind his right ear was a cigarette waiting to be lit. The shrieking saw in his low-ceilinged workshop turned out log after log. He would stroke the cut surfaces. He would take a sawdust-covered record from the table that held the coffee things and send a warm puff of air over it and pull out the record player with his big, skillful hands. He would rub his neck and check the pencil stub behind his pink ear and carefully position the record. He would lower the needle onto the grooves. The record would start to spin and lay itself open to the needle’s bite. Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, sung by a countertenor who sounded like either a man or a woman, rose like a wave to the skylight. It overflowed into the cone of light filled with dancing sawdust. The saw would shriek, the needle would spin and the singer’s sad voice would get lost in the noise. When he turned off the saw, it was a relief. The voice and the instruments could be heard; the sawdust would slow in the bluish light. The voice enchanted P. They would drink wine, they would eat nougat. Eleni’s homemade wine was expensive but it was seductive. When the record stopped, when the saw was turned off, P would read to Janusz from Ketabhafteh, a literary magazine that is no longer published. Janusz made all kinds of things out of wood: balusters, Polish chairs and frames for the nastaliq calligraphy of Mr. Moadeb (not Mr. Moadab, as people often said). And, recently, a swing for Eleni’s apricot tree.

“Excellence is the result of discipline and hard work.” This saying was written in nastaliq calligraphy by Mr. Moadeb (not Moadab). It was in the maplewood frame made by Janusz which had been ordered by P, along with a larger and more elaborate frame. For years these frames had decorated Dr. G’s office in the lab. The second frame held a reproduction of a painting by Rembrandt. The proper composition of the non-Farsi words excellence and discipline was challenging for Mr. Moadeb, but in the end he managed to come up with something for P’s sake. What he did was a genuine contribution to the art of calligraphy, though Dr. G took credit for it, and for other things as well. In fact, G could take credit only for insisting that excellence and discipline appear as transliterations, not as their Farsi equivalents. He thought that transliterations were superior, more excellent and disciplined; in addition, they showed that he knew English as well as German. P did not disagree about not translating the words into Farsi. In his incessant desire to make people happy, he paid Moadeb to write out the saying and gave the frames to his brother to mark the opening of the lab.

The fact was that the extensor originates at the lateral epicondyle and the flexor originates at the medial epicondyle. But Rembrandt drew it the other way around; he had it backwards. The painting, entitled “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,” framed in maplewood and hung next to Moadeb’s calligraphy, had provided him with much food for thought. Fault-finding anatomists had long compared the tendons in the painting with those of an actual corpse. Dr. G, who had for years been aware of the mistake, would have liked to be the first to notice. He’d missed the boat on that one, and didn’t want to miss the boat again. He wanted to make a breakthrough in medical science. Since the afternoon when he found out about the fault-finding anatomists, he spent part of the time when he should have been relaxing before his nap thinking about reviving his rivalry with Gunther Gerhardt. 

What really made G angry was that the saying about excellence and discipline was right next to the painting of Rembrandt’s mistake, and the two framed pieces had been a gift from his brother. He wondered if P was intentionally mocking his excellence. Or if P wanted the contrast between the inspirational saying and inaccurate anatomy lesson to be obvious to everyone in the waiting room. This was when they started: his rivalry with Gunther Gerhardt and his desire to take revenge on his brother. 

P and G seemed to be made of entirely different materials. G had once blinded a magpie with his slingshot, while P would take in lame cats. Everyone who knew them remembered these things, and G was surprised that people held onto these insignificant facts. Nobody remembered his unequal struggle with the bone-chilling cold of Heidelberg or with Gunther Gerhardt. Why did no one remember how they’d worked on a research project together and then that shameless man published the results under his own name? During the brief time he was in Iran for his father’s funeral, it became obvious to him that he shouldn’t leave his father’s successful business in the hands of his unreliable little brother. P was perfectly capable of wasting money on arty get-togethers where his poet friends would drink wine and eat nougat and get inspired about causes both political and romantic. Who cared about those causes? His insignificant little brother was very popular, more popular than G, even in the days after the government had removed him from his teaching job and he was working as the manager of the Hippocrates Laboratory.

It was a stunning proposal that would have made G proud during his retirement. Gloriously proud. When he smoked an afternoon pipe in his office or when he attended a funeral, distractedly stroking the sleeve of his cashmere coat like a bad-tempered Cold War-era politician, he could gloat about that proposal. His accomplishment would be astounding. Doctor’s good deeds, Dr. G, elder son of Fakhraldin G, who was one of the greatest businessmen in Isfahan (which, according to the proverb, was half of the world) … with these thoughts he fell asleep.

A swarm of pink butterflies was ahead of Dr. G on the Bridge of 33 Arches. A man was under the tall old trees along the river, singing “Go to Isfahan,” a famous song from the 50s, in a voice like that of Dr. G’s brother, P, and a large group of people were applauding him. Dr. G put his hands over his ears because he didn’t want to hear it. The man’s voice echoed under the arches of the bridge and the vibrations got under his skin. Dr. G pressed his hands against his ears. The pink butterflies were swirling in front of his eyes and fluttering around his head. The harder he pressed his hands against his ears, the better he could hear the voice. On the far side of the bridge there was a man with an easel painting that embryonic screaming figure. G screamed out loud because he didn’t want to hear the voice singing that song. The lyrics told him to go to Isfahan and learn something about art, art, art, and he could smell that there was something rotten in his throat. One of those pink butterflies was pushing its fleshy wings against his throat because it wanted to get out. Dr. G had swallowed the butterfly or the butterfly had flown into his throat, and it smelled like rotten meat. He vomited out the butterfly. The swirling pink butterflies were heavier than real butterflies, and to keep themselves aloft they had to beat their wings, that were like sliced sausages. Dr. G was trying to wave the butterflies away. The alarm rang for four o’clock. He felt for the worn metal button and hit it with his index finger. 

Dr. G couldn’t forget that horrifying day, the mixture of fear and happiness, the senseless way he laughed with fear. He couldn’t forget the way the telephone rang during his ritual afternoon nap. He’d forgotten to unplug it. The ringing telephone and the school anthem filled him with fear. The call was from the morgue, outside of working hours. He felt terrible when he heard the news. He was shocked to feel lighter, as if a familiar load had fallen from his shoulders. He took a deep breath. The unfamiliar lightness and emptiness gradually became unbearable, as if a weight that had kept him attached to the earth had been sucked away. He asked for details as if he were interested in them, and he pretended to be sorry. Accepting that news was unbelievably hard; the ember of happiness inside him was smothered by the ashes of denial. When you don’t accept a death, it’s not really death, he said to himself. What did they want from him? Was it a game or a nightmare? First, he had to accept it. The death. The fate of that wandering corpse depended on the decision made by Dr. G and the others. The earth had rejected the corpse, and the river Zayandeh had spit it out. This was the way it had to be. Every ethnic group had its own rules. It was not Dr. G’s fault. He was not the earth. It is the earth that decides whom to accept and whom to reject. Dr. G was there to practice medical science.

Summer, hot and oppressive, was trying to rob P of energy and leave him at the mercy of his suffering. Lately, P had been nowhere to be found. In the corner of the box room in his grandmother’s house his thoughts were going round and round like the ice water he was stirring in the bluegreen enamelware bowl. The melting ice tinkled against the sides of the bowl as it fled from his hot fingers. The redness emerged from the bottom of the bowl. The wall was dark red, the color of the dregs of rosé wine. The tablecloth was red, made of heavy cotton, printed with big blooming irises. In the middle of the table there was a footed bowl full of apricots, and three fallen apricots on the redness of the cloth. The wine in the parchment-colored carafe was the essence of the woman who had made it. She was looking down, picking at the tablecloth. Outside the window, on the lone apricot tree in the backyard, birds were singing, full of fruit. Late afternoon, a day in that awful summer. Her heart raced all night long and slowed only at daybreak, before the man left.

The ice cubes were melting and P, feverish with anxiety, put his lips against the edge of the bluegreen bowl. He could hear his grandmother talking on the phone downstairs. He was embarrassed to be daydreaming about beautiful images. He tried to visualize his grandmother wrapping the phone cord around and around her finger. Lately he’d been hearing bad news, which often left him breathless with fear. His mother had asked his grandmother not to tell G where his brother was. Grandma would keep her mouth shut. He thought about the purple irises on the red cotton tablecloth. About two irises blooming on the woman’s breasts, one on each side of the man’s head. He thought about the bright yellow pollen on the woman’s fingertips when she sat down at the piano. About the yellow traces left on the piano keys when she played the unfinished piece in B minor. The piece didn’t end until daybreak. Every time the man touched his lips to the woman’s bright yellow fingers, he traded sawdust for pollen. The last time the summer had been this hot was thirteen years ago, in the 70s. P drank the water from the bluegreen enamelware bowl. Now he found the sound of the ceiling fan distracting. There was no good time for writing poetry. He crept back up to the attic. His grandmother was still on the phone.

The workshop had caught fire. The dry and dusty fall, the cigarette butt, the wood shavings waiting for a spark. There was the smell of burning wood and smoke, and flying debris that turned into ash, and magpies cawing nearby. There was nothing suspicious, nothing odd. No enemy, no insurance, no heir.

They removed the man’s body. Suffocated; not a mark on him. He’d suffocated. Now the ambulance, which had been delayed, could get stuck in traffic and take its time. The driver could stop by his place and take a shower, smoke a cigarette, sing a song to himself. As Khayyam observed, the man was just as dead as if he’d died seven thousand years ago. Death is forever. That’s why P quoted to Janusz one day, “I always drink the first glass of wine to life. May your life last as long as your death. And may our friendship to last much longer than this wine.” That day P, bewitched by the singer’s voice, revealed strange things to Janusz and lost a bet to buy a winter’s worth of Eleni’s wine.The singer was a man. Janusz had known this from the beginning; it was P who’d insisted on betting. He’d wanted to lose to the carpenter, and he lost. Wine for the whole winter. Eleni’s homemade wine was expensive but it was seductive. Wine with a sawdust appetizer. When Janusz was drunk, he would dip his finger in sawdust and taste it, and talk to P. “There was man who’d been visited by the Angel of Death many times. Each time he’d get dressed and go to the bar, drink himself blind, and then stumble home and wake up fine the next morning…” And P would laugh. They enjoyed reciting all the lines from their favorite movie. That night, while the countertenor, the singer they’d bet about, was singing about the suffering of the Virgin Mary, Janusz turned off the saw in the middle of a cut. Swirling sawdust filled the cone of light under the skylight. He moved the pencil behind his ear and said, “Like a stranger, like someone in a dream, she came through this door. I told her that I make things to order, I don’t have anything readymade. She told me she was going to place an order. I gave her the address of a toy store. She didn’t want a toy, she said it wasn’t to play with. So I made a horse that wasn’t a toy, but only the head.” The horse’s head with its long, tangled mane was on top of a carved pillar. The wood was soft and the cuts went deep. The strokes were sure, made by a skilled craftsman. Everybody who saw the head recognized the real horse it was modeled on. A wild horse for young Eleni.

Three weeks later, Eleni came back to pick up the horse. She didn’t expect to see a horse head. Red Star’s head sat on top of the carved pillar. No legs, no body. Eleni stood there, stunned. Janusz was scared; she could get mad and turn around and leave the head with its maker. But Eleni stayed, inside the frame of the mirror. In the photo stuck between the mirror and the frame, across from the one of Janusz and his mother. Janusz with his big bright eyes, round face, and short red neck… in a sailor suit and sailor hat, looking eagerly at the camera. His mother with an ambiguous smile and the marcelled hair of a silent film star, her cheek against the little boy’s.

There was a big three-paned window that looked out on the back yard. Underneath the apricot tree a worn white tablecloth covered with red-freckled apricots was waiting for more fruit to fall. Sargon was hurrying back and forth. It was high noon. He was out of breath because he’d been bringing out the empty bottles from the shed in the back yard, and lining them up against the adobe wall under the bright sun. They were green, dusty purple, and brown. Eleni was in the living room turning her coffee cup upside down on the gold-rimmed saucer. She called to Sargon, “Your coffee’s getting cold.” She took the two big rollers out of her curly bangs and stuck the hairpins into the mesh. Coughing, Eleni looked through the wavering flame of her lighter at the pattern made by the coffee grounds that had been stuck to the wall for years, and told her father’s fortune for the thousandth time. Sargon came in from the yard sweaty and dirty. He wiped the sweat from his red mustache with the back of his hand and kissed Eleni’s arm. Teymurkhan was purring and waiting for Sargon to pay attention to him, and Sargon put his hand under his belly and lifted him up playfully. The cat had grown old smelling the fermenting grapes on Sargon’s hands as he held him in front of his honey-colored eyes, feeling Eleni’s painted nails awakening his skin by raking through his fur. Those feelings and smells were the secret of Eleni’s home. The cat knew he was getting old because lately he hadn’t had the dream about the tree full of sparrows; all that mattered now was purring and being petted by Eleni and Sargon. Sargon had just taken his spring exams. It was the beginning of his season; there was a romance waiting for him around every corner. In those days Eleni was inexplicably happy, which Sargon found confusing. He was strong and red-haired and thick-necked. Before the rain put an end to the grape harvest, he went to the vineyard every day before sunrise. It sometimes rained very late and he could go there until the middle of fall. If it rained the grapes would split and the wine wouldn’t be fragrant. The pickup pulled into the yard under the apricot tree and Sargon unloaded the wooden boxes. Auntie Yvette and her husband and some other neighbors were there to help. 

That year the harvest was good. The grapes were so healthy and blemish-free, so fragrant and heavy, that they made the vineyard giddy. Under the tireless sun, the tired, ripe grapes had taken the first step toward fulfilling their destiny. Sargon was in charge of the next step, taking them off the stem, wiping them clean and spreading them on the white tablecloth in the shade of the apricot tree. In their turn, the heavy apricots on the sunny side of the tree had already fallen onto Auntie Shamiran’s embroidered violets. Eleni put her hands on her hips and looked at the tablecloth. She turned it so that the drying grapes were in the shade. Occasionally an apricot that had stubbornly held on would fall onto the grapes. Eleni would leave it there. She had already made wine out of the apricots that had fallen from the sunny part of the tree onto the embroidered violets. By the time of the grape harvest, that wine was ready to drink. It was reserved for special guests; it was not, in fact, for sale. It was the grape wine that had for many years provided Eleni and Sargon with a living. They didn’t lack customers. Eleni’s homemade wine was expensive but it was seductive. G was one of her customers; he would send the secretary of the Hippocrates Laboratory to pick up the wine. She drove a beat-up Renault and Eleni would take the copper coffee pot down from its hook when she heard the car coming up the drive. When the secretary came into the yard the fragrance of coffee made her dizzy. By the time Sargon had loaded the wine into the trunk of the Renault, Eleni and the girl would be eating apricot pie, and Eleni’s hazel eyes would be examining the coffee grounds in the bottom of the cup. The girl’s heart would race and Eleni would reassure her that her numbers were three and seven. The girl would stick her finger into the coffee grounds and make a wish, and wait for Eleni to tell her that she was going to be happy, and look at the coffee grounds on the wall. She had often tried to ask about them, but each time a laughing Eleni would make light of fortune telling. She was like the big wave that turns sand castles into bubbles; the girl never did find out whose story the pattern told.

Eleni could see herself at eighteen through the wavering flame of the lighter. Her father was sitting at the table, his farseeing eyes looking at nothing, his blood pounding like aged wine in his silvered temples. His jaw was clenched with the effort to hide his anger. He shouted, “Eleni.” He hadn’t seen her but she was already there, halfway into the room, her shaking hands carrying the tray with a glass of water and a pill and a cup of coffee. She knew that today the usual pill wouldn’t stop his migraine. She knew that even if she had played well that day, even if Schubert himself had played, it wouldn’t have made her father better. She put the tray on the table and put her hand on his hot forehead. After that day, every time Eleni put her hand on a hot forehead she saw the image of coffee raining against the wall, saw the droplets of coffee flying to the wall from her father’s tiny cup. The cup turned upside down and fell to the table. It had spun between the ceiling and the wall, and coffee had poured like blood from the tangled hair of the woman painted on the cup. Fragments of the china woman landed on the table.

Eleni didn’t see her father put his hand around the cup as if it were a little bird and throw it against the wall. Eleni was pregnant. Her mother was preparing for the visit of Dr. G’s family, and her father was aware of her secret.  

The corpse was furious. Every time G looked at it, it turned into something else. Two deep frown lines stretched from its forehead to its chest. Dr. G was using his finger to stuff the slush into a clear plastic tube on the metal examining table, and the corpse was behind him.

The intestines were filled with slush. Dr. G put them on a wooden board and rolled them in spices. Peppercorns, which weren’t peppercorns, in fact, but protruding pupils. They were black and clear, like the eyes of his brother, gazing at him. As the tubes rolled, covered with peppercorns, his brother’s eyes were Janusz’s eyes.

The wind-up alarm clock rang for four o’clock, and Dr. G felt for the worn metal button and hit it with his index finger. A voice was reciting the proverb, “No one gets ahead by lying in bed.” G sat up in bed; he was worn out and clammy with sweat. He’d decided to put an end to this. He was going to get a piece of paper and a pen, and write. He would perfect the text and then enter it into the computer. It shouldn’t take very long. A decision like this should be made fast and decisively. The juicer spun round and round. The coffee spurted into the top of the pot. G sat at the table and wrote to Gunther. 

To Gunther Gerhardt von Hagens, my old classmate and friend, with my sincerest respect: 

I have to say that I am happy, very happy indeed, to hear of your continued success. You may wonder why it has taken me so long to write, more than thirty years. It is not surprising, for nothing in this world is surprising anymore. The pioneers of anatomy would have been surprised at your exhibition in Japan, but science today is beyond surprise. The technique you invented can make a human corpse eternal, in such a way that all of the organs are visible to those who are interested in medical science. Imagine that my oldest son, a medical student in Washington D.C., could link me your photos and your essays, and the news of your success while we were talking face-to-face over a distance of thousands of miles. Then I could click the link and you appeared after nearly forty years, wearing that weird hat. (You always liked weird hats, Gunther.) You and your weird hat are there among the three million visitors who waited in line to look at your plastinated corpse. Those people were very eager to see organs and parts of human beings like themselves with their own eyes, and admire you, the great scientist. Nothing is surprising anymore, even after forty years without any news.

I know that you’re a well-informed scientist, you keep up with world news. In Iran, everything turned upside down. Maybe you don’t remember my crazy brother, the one who was supposed to go with me to Heidelberg and study philosophy after my father’s death. Maybe you remember that he was a romantic. After Father’s death, the business failed. I became the guardian of my younger sisters. You can see, dear Gunther, how much I didn’t tell you. Years passed, and things calmed down. Everything was under my control, until the war. Before the war ended, something happened that changed my life completely. P disappeared. We never knew if he went to war or if he was arrested. in those days this could happen in any family. After he disappeared, everything in our family revolved around him. His glasses, his lighter, his books, even his arty friends, became sacred. It’s useless for me to talk to you about these things. We didn’t like each other. It was rumored that things were so bad between us that I might have turned him in. When I heard those rumors, Gunther, I felt terrible, but I had to put up with it. I want to go back to the world of medicine, Gunther, to our lab. I want to be your rival. I will prove that it’s not too late.

Your old friend,

G

He smelled fried liver, touched the square key to the lab, and part of the nightmare dragged itself into his consciousness. There was a cutting board with the signature of Janusz the carpenter on the handle. It was the only part he remembered.

On that sunny day in late summer, Eleni shone. It was first time that year for trampling the grapes. Her long auburn hair was parted down the middle and braided and the braids were wound over her ears into two buns. The seamstress had done a good job with her dress. The wine-colored bodice had a square neck; the color wouldn’t show stains when they trampled the grapes. A row of tiny pleats around the neckline framed her soft milky skin. Two round shell buttons closed the bodice over the curve of her breasts; under it, the same fabric printed with green clovers fell into a full skirt. Eleni was turning forty-two, though the number meant nothing to her. There were tiny wrinkles under her eyes and the fine lines on either side of her mouth were starting to deepen. Sargon was in high school. Her grandmother was alive, and she was all dressed up and sitting on the wooden swing and chattering. She pulled out a color of embroidery floss and handed it to Sargon to thread through a needle. For years, Eleni’s mother had taken no part in the wine-making; she had gone to Tehran. As she herself said, “Eleni and I lead separate lives.” Though Eleni’s father was no longer there to carry Sargon around on his shoulders and tickle his face with his mustache, there were other people to give a hand with the wine-making late in the summer. Eleni’s gloved hands, Sargon’s hands, the hands of Yvette and her husband and of Auntie Shamiran, and Janusz’s strong hands were joined in the effort of pressing the grapes. P was among them. After the grapes were pressed, Sargon went inside to his grandfather’s piano. Outside, in the alley, the neighbors were enjoying their share of the serenade and the smell of fermenting grapes. In the alley and behind their garden walls, where talking about fermented grapes was sinful. P and Janusz came together. P and Eleni’s fathers had been business acquaintances. The one-way love affair between G and Eleni had been talked about in the city, and then Eleni disappeared and was rumored to have married a man of her own religion. P was at the wine-making not because of that affair, but because of his friendship with Janusz.

The story that Janusz had told on a crisp autumn night was so fascinating that P, romantic as he was, couldn’t wait to see this new Eleni at the wine-making. P didn’t know that he wouldn’t be able to attend. His grandmother was the only witness to the attack on her attic, and she died a few hours after the collapse of her belief that blood is thicker than water. That was why people believed he had simply disappeared. While Sargon was playing, Eleni and Yvette and Shamiran wrapped plastic bags around their feet and legs, and slid into the wooden tub. They trampled and spun, lifting their skirts up to their knees to keep them out of the pool of grapes. Janusz always brought a gift made of wood. They poured the wine into clay jars. Grandmother’s apricot cake was covered with lighted candles. Janusz sang Happy Birthday in Polish. Eleni had revolved around the sun one more time and was one year older. But that year everything was different. P had disappeared. Janusz, half-drunk, whispered, “Once there was a man whose brother was in exile. Every night for thirty years he set the table, turned on the light, went to the gate, and came back alone.” And then he heard P whispering, “Once there was a man who put a bottle of wine, a knife, a cross and a noose in the four corners of the foundation of his house…” And he remembered the movie dialog that they used to recite together. P had written his last love poem hunched over in the attic. When P was burning newspapers and books with his grandmother, and the smoke was getting in her eyes, she repeated the old saying, “Blood is thicker than water.”

The poem was inspired by the image of a beautiful woman and he was embarrassed by that intrusive image. The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, naked, a white towel wrapped around her head. There was a musical phrase playing over and over in her head. She held up her hands and let the light shine through them. Then she went out into the garden and exposed her naked body to the sun. 

It had been a few weeks, and there was no news from Gunther. The afternoon nightmares had left G exhausted. During this period, G expected to hear at any moment from one of the cemeteries, which were multiplying in his mind, but no answer was forthcoming from the Armenian council about burying the carpenter. G was experiencing an eerie kind of happiness; he was filled with a combination of bliss and pain. The Polish embassy had not responded. Janusz was one of those Polish children who had sought asylum in Iran, along with his mother, from Siberia. They had gone to Iran via the Caspian Sea, to Anzali and then to Isfahan. But the Polish embassy had no record of his name; according to their records, there was only one person of Polish descent in Isfahan, and it was a woman. It was not Janusz the carpenter, for sure. The morgue had written a letter to the Assyrian Catholics asking for their help, but they forwarded the request to the Assyrian Orthodox and the Assyrian Protestants, who also said no. After a final negative from the Nestorian Church, there was no ground left that might receive Janusz. Some of the participants in the pointless afternoon meetings at the morgue were in favor of burying the body at midnight in an unauthorized graveyard in Ahwaz. G was agitated.

G poked his thumbnail through the foil on a packet of pills. Tcht! The top of the pill popped up. They were Janusz’s eyes. G was frightened. The nightmare sausage factory was so big that G was like an insect under the ribbed ceiling. Every scary detail was visible. In his sleep G felt for the worn metal button and hit it with his index finger. The alarm clock rang over and over: “No one gets ahead, no one gets ahead, no one gets ahead.” G was standing under the enormously high ribbed ceiling and the sound of the alarm clock was echoing in that space but it didn’t wake him up. When the ringing hit the ceiling, pieces of meat started to flutter down like heavy pink butterflies. The alarm had rung for four o’clock but G couldn’t get himself out of that factory. He touched the worn metal button with sweaty fingers. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. One of his leather slippers was lying across the other; his wife would say that it meant he was going on a trip. He thought that maybe a trip was a good idea. The garden he had outside the city was the only place he could flee to. The nightmares left him exhausted. The juicer was whining. G didn’t notice that there was greenish mold in his glass. When he was pouring the coffee grounds into the hollowed-out orange halves, the greenish mold reminded him of the cold bowl of bright green slop. 

According to Gunther, the body wouldn’t decompose or lose its shape; it would stay flexible, exactly as it had been. The strong hands wouldn’t get brittle; formaldehyde would do this under freezing conditions. The body would take a bath in acetone and, under freezing conditions, acetone would replace the water in every single cell. The corpse wouldn’t bathe for very long, because a vacuum chamber would then remove the acetone and replace it permanently with liquid epoxy. Or maybe with some kind of wax. It was not G who would make this decision. The acetone would evaporate rapidly, and the wax would remain. Now everything would be in its place, immortalized, just as the corpse deserved. Gunther had finished his explanation by saying: “Heat is necessary to close the polymer chains and harden the epoxy.” Gunther could use light or ultraviolet rays instead of heat. G thought that after the freezing cold Janusz would need some heat; it comforted him to think this. The rejected corpse would be sent to Kazakhstan and Gunther would plastinate it according to his method. Or, Gunther would slice it like a cucumber, or like a log, and send the slices to research labs in the United States. All these details came from Gunther’s first letter. 

The second letter:

To my old friend and classmate G:

As I told you before, I’m very interested in having that body. China, Kazahstan and now Iran. G, you can be my third representative in the world. The carpenter’s body could be exhibited in the act of sawing. In this way, the flexor and extensor would be contracted. 

Gunther

The third letter:

Dear G,

Please do the necessary paperwork as soon as possible. We have a urgent request from North Carolina, and we may need to cut the body into slices. 

Gunther

The fourth letter:

 G,

We’re running out of time. The Center for Health Research in Boston is in urgent need of a pancreas. We can’t plastinate the whole body; we have to slice it up. We really need to collaborate with the Center.

Gunther

G broke his silence. Gunther agreed to return a part of Janusz to Isfahan in honor of G’s contribution to keeping the light of science burning in that half of the world and, under that condition, G gave permission to allow the body to be sliced like a sausage.

The silence in that room was heavy. Beate went to the window and took Teymurkhan from Sargon, hugged him to her and left the room. Sargon was lighting a cigarette and left soon after. G, agitated, left also. Eleni, her hands flat on her knees, let the light fade around her. G returned, shivering, and knelt before her. Beyond the big three-paned window where the old apricot tree in the back yard was watching the sunset, silence and darkness were spreading. The color of the leaves was fading in the dying light. Frail fingers of reddish light brushed the top leaves one last time. The light faded around the people in the living room. Nobody dared to turn on the light on the table. The room got darker and darker. They were like cut-outs moving in front of the window. Beate leaned against the wall with her arm across her body and stared at the ghost tree. Behind her the wall was stained with coffee. Eleni sat on the wine-colored velvet sofa with her hands flat on her knees and stared at Beate. Sargon was petting Teymukhan by the window with his back to the room. G alternated between German and Farsi. He said to Beate, “How important is science to you?” And, right away, “Have you ever thought about organ donation? Do you realize what your uncle has done for science? Maybe you say that he didn’t donate anything, I did. But he didn’t have any heirs, right, anybody who cared about him? Where have you been, young lady?” And then to Eleni, “What do you think, Eleni? Am I to blame for this, like for what happened to P? You’re the one who should be questioned. Of course, there’s no court that would find you guilty, but you killed my love. You killed me, Madame Eleni.” And then he added in a lower voice, “Maybe it’s better to say you betrayed me.”

Beate Rudroff was of medium build, about thirty years old. The Polish embassy had summoned her to Isfahan to claim the body of the uncle she didn’t know. She wanted Janusz’s body intact. Janusz, the charming carpenter whose strong hands could make anything, whose immortality had been reduced to slides of his body parts in a histology lab, passed from student to student. One clumsy adjustment from a student could break a slide on a microscope, and a layer of Janusz’s heart or liver would disappear from the universe.  

Half-burned photographs were swirling against the leaden sky, as light as dandelion clocks. A young horse was staring into the camera with its ears raised. On its back was a dark-skinned woman wearing a vest decorated with coins, her cheap plastic sandals on the ground at her side. It looked to be Eleni who was holding the reins in the other half of the photo, but the face was unclear. In his thirties, with a drooping mustache, Sargon found the burned pieces when he was wandering around the remains of Janusz’s workshop and put the two halves together.