ADNAN

2

The scent of burning cedar, aspen and pine seeped into the cobblestoned streets on Shiraz Road for days. It got in the wooden doors of the teahouses and even the tea itself; it tainted the linen sacks of flour in the market alleys; it was in your hair and even in your skin.

It was the scent of autumn as they burned the dead leaves every year in an open field far from the river.

As a boy, Adnan liked to sit out beneath the balconies in the shade and watch the roads. They had lived on Shiraz Road for as long as he could remember. A wide street with low tenements and scattered shops in the midst of Ifsharan, it was marked by carved latticework balconies jutting out over the paths.

At the corner across from his mother’s apothecary, there sat an old man on a threadbare rug selling ripe oranges. Adnan would see the man every morning setting up his corner with his crates of fruit. One or another of the cats that roamed Shiraz Road would lie snoozing on the orange seller’s lap as he pet them.

Adnan would sit out there and wait for his father to come home. During those days, they never quite knew where he was, or when he would be back. He would appear and reappear like an apparition, day or night — there was never any certainty, no rhythm nor pattern. The one constant, of late, was that odd gaze in his eyes.

It reminded Adnan of the fallen tree log he had once found by the edge of the river: the outer surface was thick with striated grooves; but inside, it was dark and hollow. Sometimes he found water beetles or hoverflies emerging from it, or aged moss burrowed inside. And if he looked all the way in, he could see to the other side of the trunk where the hollow ended, opening back out onto the riverside. But from the hollow of his father’s eyes, nothing emerged; and Adnan could not find where it ended.

He did not know why he still sat out here in the scent of the burning leaves. He knew people loved the scent of it. But he thought that it could possibly par with burning flesh. He had never smelled such a thing, not human at least – but if he did, this is what it must smell like. Rot, decay, burnt away in the heat of flames.

Cleansing, purity – that is what Ifsharan associated with autumn. Perhaps this was the reason for the tradition of the burning – perhaps it had been so all along and he had been ignorant of its origins. He had never thought much of it when he was younger, for they had smelled worse things in those days. And the taste of alcohol constantly in the air in his house ensured he could not smell much else. It numbed the senses, and maybe it had numbed more along the way – his capacity for feeling, for example.

For he did not think he could feel much at all. There was merely the sensation of a blank nothingness: dull, like the edge of a blade that had not been sharpened since the old dynasties; like the artifacts in his father’s collections found buried beneath the valleys of his childhood.

No, Adnan thought, perhaps he had certainly lost his emotions somewhere, fallen by the wayside, left behind he knew not where.

Just the other afternoon, for example. He was practicing in the Shahmat. Adnan knew that his brother watched him practice in the yard every afternoon from his perch by the window.

Adnan whirled, striking down one dummy after another that charged at him, his body moving with the fluidity of water the way his father had shown him when he was a boy. In the end, Adnan stood in the center of the shattered mess. He breathed, finally lowering the sword and letting it fall next to him.

The skies above were an unsightly grey. Beyond the yard rose the sounds of the streets, shouts of fruitsellers and chai-wallahs. Mothers called in their children as the skies gave way and it began to drizzle. Adnan’s gaze turned from the skies to the house; from the window of his brother’s room, Hasan met his eyes.

Hasan looked straight at Adnan, and he knew that Hasan resented being a prisoner to his own body. And he knew, most of all, that Hasan resented him in the very moment that Adnan looked away from the window. He turned away from his brother’s gaze, put away the steel and went out of the back gate into the streets.

Yet — he felt nothing.

Sometimes, there was a mere echo of irritation mixed with some regret, as if his body knew he should at least feel that. Otherwise, what kind of a deformed monster would he be?

Certainly not one that would ever be seen very much in daylight, for he was a creature of the night; he shied away from the eyes of Ifsharan as much as he could; eyes curious, full of wonder and hope, roving over his dark eyes and the dark shoulder-length hair that he refused to cut, the hazel features that he was so often told was like his mother Aliya’s. They all knew his mother, the whole damned city, the whole damned towns and remote villages at the border of Ifsharan, he was sure even in the outskirts of the realm, they all whispered her name and held their tongue in reverence of her.

So every time he stepped out, he held his head low, covered his face as much as he could with his hair or a scarf tied about his mouth as his parents would do when they went out during the days of the disease. But, mostly, when he was not in the teahouse with Sakeem and Hawar, he walked the darkness of night, safe in its cover, in its anonymity. It was best this way, to be left unknown, unheard, un-anything at all, so that he did not have to think or be told to feel. This way, he was in control. He was free, in the purity of the night.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

When he was younger, his father had returned home with a wound just over his heart. Nanu Mihreen treated him in the apothecary’s surgery room under candlelight, speaking low so as not to wake the boys sleeping upstairs. Adnan watched from the edge of the doorway.

“Harun, I don’t know what you are doing,” Nanu muttered. “But you can’t keep going on like this. Don’t you think it has been enough for them to lose one parent? You forget, son, I lost my daughter, and they lost their mother.”

But Harun merely sat there mute, as Nanu Mihreen bandaged the wound. From the corner of the doorway, Adnan saw his father turn to the window, looking out into the night on Shiraz Road.

There had once been a time when he would sit Adnan and Hasan down on the floor and read page after page of Verses with them. His hand would gesticulate out the stories, his arms expanding outwards as he demonstrated the expansion of the universe, the alignment of the sun and the moon: suspended, all of it revolving on their axes, rotating constantly in motion.

He would tell them of his days in the Asman Valleys with Aliya and their friend Imraan. Everyone in the village knew who the culprit was whenever the animals in the pens were gone, only to be found an hour later in a frenzy. The farmer was always running around after the three of them with a stick — their father would tell them, wheezing in laughter. The sun filtering through the windows would light up his hazel eyes, liquid-bright as he told the stories. The boys pestered him with questions, demanded more stories about their mother. Hasan would tug at his father’s sleeve, and their father wouldn’t be able to resist.

But then there were other times: when his eyes would recede away from them; when the hands that drew the stories in the air would crumple beside him, immovable.

On the nights when their father returned home, Adnan and Hasan always carefully noted, there were two possibilities that could occur. He might pace back and forth: rapidly, like a pendulum, as if he wanted to become the very mechanism of time itself; or he would be still, lie in his room with his eyes open, staring straight up at the ceiling for hours.

The boys would try to solve the mystery. Hasan, barely eight years old, would lean on his crutches by the doorway and bet that their father was “listening for God” up in the sky. If he was right, Hasan said, Adnan had to get him a piece of kanafeh from Mamun the sweet-seller at the bazaars. “Where am I going to get the money for kanafeh, Hassan?” Adnan would mumble and shove him a little.

Adnan thought that in these moments, his father was somehow in the place he always called the ‘true realm,’ where their mother must be — wherever that was. That terrified Adnan, and he was not going to admit that to his brother. So Adnan merely rolled his eyes at his little brother, as they stood together at the edge of the doorway, watching their father fall asleep.

But he had long ago ceased trying to solve the mystery.

Adnan stumbled into his house long past the hour of civil life. His muscles felt drunken as if he had spent the night at a forbidden liquor house instead of at the teahouse playing tavla and drinking endless cups of cha’a.

The apothecary lab was dark. Glass bottles of chemicals and solutions, the strong smell of antiseptic from the surgery room, brass scales and tongs, tall stone ceramic jars storing dry ingredients of dried herbs, roots and barks.

Machines and tools to cut, heat, and press ingredients into different forms, compounding medicines from botanical and mineral bases, transforming elements from one into another as if by supernatural forces. A set of brass mortar and pestle sat at the center of the tabletop as if Nanu Mihreen would return at any moment to pound the mixtures again. Engraved around it was a cypress tree, its trunk thick and wide, its vast branches winding and twisting around each other. It was the Cypress of Abarkuh, Nanu Mihreen told him, known for its powers of healing.

He felt his way around the worktable in the center, his fingers moving like a blind man seeking redemption.

The wood was rough against his skin, then he felt over the cold glass jars where they kept the finished medicine stored. His hands fell upon something at the corner of the table: a carved wooden stand, and then something brittle and chalky.

Sakina had always kept a battered old copy of the great Abu Saran’s The Canon of Medicine in the apothecary, held upon the intricate wooden stand like those used for the Holy Interpretations. The pages were yellowing, and every time Adnan touched it, he wondered where the traces of her fingerprints lay invisible. He was trying to reach her across dimensions, across death. But Abu Saran had no answers for such a thing. His book was only for the living.

Adnan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and shapes slowly loomed out of the depths of the room like phantoms.

He remembered peering over the smooth grains of this oaktable as a boy: Watching his mother measure chemicals, distill and extract solutions. Sometimes she would explain things to him, but all he remembered were words, vaguely dissolving into air like the chemicals themselves: sulphur, acid, mercury, phospates.

But during the days before her death in the days of the Wraithknife disease, she stopped explaining. She worked frantically, trying to recalibrate some measurement or another of some chemical; sometimes she shoved everything away from the table and buried her head. Sometimes she would only gaze into nothing. Adnan went to her in those moments and put his hand up to her forehead in the way she did to him when he was sick.

"Ma, are you sick?"

She would pull him onto her lap. "I am trying to make sure that no one else gets sick, beta, so that you and father and grandmother don't get sick. So that Hasan can…get better."

During the Wraithknife disease after the war, he and Hasan weren't allowed to play out in the streets. Beyond the small courtyard in the back of the tenement, the rest of the world was prohibited. If he saw anyone approaching down Shiraz Road who was bleeding black from their eyes and mouth, he was to stay as far away as possible, and run inside or tell his parents.

“But you and Baba go outside,” Adnan had protested.

“That is different, Adnan.”

Only in the aftermath of the Wraithknife did he understand that his mother had been developing the cure in secret, and died for it.

Salman the Emir had never returned the body, he learned after. She had merely disappeared, possibly tortured, certainly dead.

Adnan should protect his little brother from the bitter feelings he sometimes harbored, he knew. He had to let Hassan be cocooned in the idealized images that the masses beheld of Aliya al-Ismani now: the savior of Khardin.

But he could not help himself from asking the question: if she had saved Khardin, why could she not save herself?