Cinema Dezhban

You come off Berlin Street into Lalehzar with your cap off as always, the coarse dust-colored army shirt hanging loose over your trousers, walking slowly toward the stop of the green double-decker buses at Tupkhaneh Square. Most of the shops are closed, but the peddlers have spread their wares along the corners of the sidewalk. There is nothing worth a second glance: secondhand electrical goods, glass-fronted boxes crammed with cheap perfumes, oversized rings and switchblades. A few have pinned posters of landscapes and foreign movie stars to the rolled-down shutters of the closed shops.

You are standing before a poster of Charles Bronson in Red Sun, his revolver aimed straight at you and a foolish grin on his lips, when, reaching the photographs of Alain Delon, you notice the military police, the dezhban, on the far side of the street. Quickly you put on the army cap and bend its visor down over your forehead. The old man pasting posters to the walls stops working and stares at you. In fact the whole sidewalk is watching you, as if they already know what is about to happen; perhaps they have watched soldiers seized by the MPs many times before. One of the MPs points you out to his partner, and only now do you remember that you have left your leave pass back at the barracks. For a few moments the images line up in your head: arrest by the MPs, the cells of Central Dezhban, your sister's worried face, she who sits by the front door every Friday waiting for you to come, and her children, who always spot you from far off and run toward you with joy... The taste of the chocolate in your mouth turns bitter and more bitter, and suddenly you decide to run. The MPs, for whom this seems to be routine work, read your hand and break into a run. You step off the sidewalk into the street and run toward Tupkhaneh, shouldering past pedestrians, deaf to their curses, still running, when suddenly a hoarse voice rings out across the street:

"Mashallah! Bless those lungs... you're leaving them behind, champion!"

It sounds like the old poster-seller. When you enter the cinema you are ready for anything except hiding in that little room to escape the stubborn MPs who have found themselves a fine catch. You walk in. The ticket booth is closed, but the big glass door has been left ajar; you slip through the gap, and the cleaner appears before you like the angel of death with a wet, filthy mop, sliding the big rag-like strips stapled to a rusty pole across the red mosaic tiles toward your boots, and asks, sour and cutting: "Where to, slop-eater?"

Slop-eater is the hateful word officers and NCOs use to humiliate conscripts. Sometimes the senior soldiers use it on the new arrivals too, so that, as they put it, a man knows this is no free-for-all and the old-timers have their rights of seniority.

When you leave the barracks, one of those old-timers sticks his head out of a second-floor window of the dormitory and yells: "Watch out for the MPs, slop-eater!"

And you only wave your cap at him. It is a signal. With that gesture you remind him of a month ago when, on Jomhuri Street, he fell without warning into the hands of one of these same MPs, capless at that, and of the three days of extra duty that have sat on his file ever since like a brand of shame. Warrant Officer Mollashahi has promised to wipe the extra duty of all the boys in the services unit, but nobody believes a word he says; he has fed the poor conscripts so many lies and fleeced every one of them with some promise or other. The rumor everywhere is that before the revolution he was a SAVAK informer inside the army and that any day now he will be purged. And how lucky you are that, as he himself puts it, his soap has never yet touched your skin! After days of guard duty and drudgery you need a long rest, and where better than your sister's house in Tehranpars, and the room that is always tidy and that her children have named after you.

He pulls you along toward the stairs that climb to the cinema balcony. You go with him, no questions asked. He is a stranger, yet something in his manner and his gaze reminds you of someone who was once your whole world. He grips your hand firmly, and you go along like a suspect who has confessed to his crime. You glance behind you; still no sign of the furious MPs. You turn toward the balcony, and he all but shoves you, pulling you with him into the projection room.

"It's safer here, soldier!" He does not wait for your answer and goes back as fast as he came. No doubt to scout around.

The projectionist is no more than forty. He says so himself.

"I saw you out there with the MPs after you, but I didn't know you'd come into this cinema. Truth is, you did right. Even if you'd run all the way to Tupkhaneh they'd have caught you. It's what they do!"

And then, with a smirk: "Well! What can you do?! Every man has his trade!"

He passes by you where you sit on the leather couch and loads the big film reel into the idle projector. When he flips the switch, the frames wind onto the empty reels, and all you can see are fleeting shadows on the moving strip of film. The people on it keep changing places, as if they too were fleeing from one another. He lifts the teapot off the smoke-blackened kettle, pours himself a glass of straight dark brew, and grins at you.

"Tea?"

He does not wait for your answer, fills a glass halfway for you, and lifts the kettle from the Aladdin heater. The kettle is empty. Annoyed, he tosses it into a corner.

"No help for it! You'll drink it strong and dark!"

Beside the saucer he sets two or three sugar cubes, draws a small plastic bag from the breast pocket of his checked jacket, and laughs again, this time a little sheepishly.

"This stuff is my Plato's elixir!"

He pinches off a piece of the opium paste, drops it into his glass, downs the tar-black tea in one breath, then closes his eyes in a particular way, savoring the bitterness of the little piece of shireh in his mouth.

He takes your glass away.

"It's gone cold, let me change it. Tea must scald the lip, seal the lip, and brim over the lip." He laughs again. The back of his tongue is coated with a blackish film and his tartared teeth have gone yellow. From a silver tin he takes an oval Homa cigarette, taps it twice on the back of his hand, lights it from the heater's flame, takes a hard drag, and offers you one.

"Not a smoker, are you?"

You answer with a shake of your head.

"Well! Thank God! It's a wretched poison, this damned smoke; it blows a man's life to the wind!"

You sit facing him like one big question mark, asking yourself why this man should help me without even knowing me. Who is to say he has no schemes in his head? Major Qamari's words ring in your ears: "Outside the barracks, trust no one! Enemy spies are everywhere. They have fine methods for draining information out of you; they come close like an old friend and soften you up with their talk, and then the trouble begins... the soup untasted and the mouth already burnt!"

The projectionist cracks the door open and calls the cleaner.

"Hey! What happened? Are they gone?"

The cleaner's answer from down below is unintelligible. The man comes back into the room, upset.

"Damn the luck!"

He sets the full kettle on the heater and stubs his cigarette out in the saucer.

"Mammad says they've gone into the hall. They must be searching the whole place."

You go with him to the small hatch that opens onto the auditorium. The usher walks ahead with a flashlight and one of the MPs follows behind. In the darkness you can see only the shadow of one of them. He stops beside a spectator who looks like a soldier, takes the usher's flashlight, and checks the man's papers. Your heart is in your mouth. You turn and say to the projectionist: "Now is the best time to run!" He cuts you off.

"Think you're dealing with a pair of fools?! No, brother! They know their business; one of them is posted at the cinema door so that the moment your foot touches the street he can collar you right there!"

You look at him in despair.

"Then how do I get out of here?!"

He turns down the heater's flame and wipes his nose with a small handkerchief.

"You'll have to wait till the film ends."

Only now do you notice the film on the screen. You look through the same small hatch: Faramarz Gharibian and Nematollah Gorji are in the frame. Gharibian drags his bloodied hand along the wall of Badr High School. The projectionist comes closer and opens the hatch all the way. Gharibian steps out of a taxi and sets off toward Lalehzar. Seyyed's voice comes over the loudspeaker, touting the Barbad Theater.

"Hurry, hurry! Tonight and every night, the musical spectacle Hitler's Wrath, or The Cheeky Maid!"

Ghodrat, in that American field jacket, with the mustache and the glasses, looks more like a guerrilla than a thief. Seyyed, who has not recognized him, looks him over.

"You want something, brother?! At your service! What is it? Need anything?"

Ghodrat introduces himself. Seyyed is stunned. They embrace. Ghodrat wants a place to hide, and Seyyed answers: "I've got a room, a ruin really... it's yours!"

The projectionist takes his eye from the hatch and points to the reel gliding over the sprockets.

"It's The Deer! Masoud Kimiai made it. His work is something else! Especially his Qeysar. Have you seen Qeysar?"

"No! But deer I've seen, back in our own town; plenty of times!"

He lights another cigarette and shows you the poster of Ghazal.

"Kimiai made this one too, but I didn't care for it. It wasn't like his other films. His biggest mistake was putting Fardin in front of the camera looking like that! Fardin was always clean and sharp, face shaved and trim, not wrecked like that! I remember at the first showing, the audience tore up all the seat covers in protest. They wanted their own hero, you see? I'd seen Fardin up close myself, on Arbab Jamshid Street. In the old days most of the studios and film companies were there; on Arbab Jamshid, the film-struck haunted the pavements and the teahouses day and night."

When he speaks of Arbab Jamshid, his eyes shine. His gaze is on the hatch, and he seems to be talking to himself.

"My misery began on Arbab Jamshid Street. I'd come with one smart suit to become a movie star. Those first days I didn't know who was who; I was just happy to see in the flesh the actors I'd only seen on the screen. The moment one of them stepped out of a car, the crowd would climb all over him. All they wanted was extras, and mind you, even the extras had their own pecking order.

"A few months on, our turn finally came. I was to take a beating from a policeman in some film. The day before, the director told me: you've got the look and the build! Made for action pictures! And I was floating in the clouds. The next day I went to the shoot with a few of the neighborhood boys. That's where I saw how heartless the cinema is: at lunch they'd got us flatbread with a scrap of halva while they gorged themselves on chelo-kabab soltani with Coca-Cola!

"The actors treated us like lepers; no respect, no courtesy. The one decent soul among them was Miss Pouri Banayee, a real lady. I heard from the boys that on set she was forever thinking of the extras and the stagehands, and in grace and dignity she stood head and shoulders above the rest... In the end it was she who told me I'd best go back to some work I knew, some craft I had... But well! We'd never had proper schooling; that's how we ended up idle and without a trade, a dead weight on society!

"Anyway, not to bore you. It was the seventh or eighth day when my turn came, and off I went before the camera with every blessing, but the director hadn't yet called action when the actor, that same policeman, laid into me and beat me black and blue. And I, disgraced in front of my friends, I don't know how it happened, but I ducked in, caught his leg, and slammed him to the ground! I'd been a wrestler in my youth. Don't judge by the state of me now! In short, in the middle of the shoot such a riot broke out as you've never seen. It turned out the man playing the policeman really was a policeman; so they sent me packing on the spot, and I wandered back to Lalehzar, adrift. For a while I was a cleaner at Cinema Alborz. My father, God rest him, from the day he learned I'd gone into the cinema, had said: you'll not set foot in my house again! So at night I slept right there, in the cinema; until at last, with my laborer's wages, I bought a motorbike on installments and became a film-runner, carrying reels between cinemas. That trade didn't suit me either. One day on Ferdowsi Street I collided with an army truck and lay a whole month in the hospital. When they discharged me I went straight back to Arbab Jamshid, but no one would give me work anymore. They all somehow thought me a jinx. Hard days those were; until through an acquaintance I was introduced to Mr. Manouchehri, the true owner of this very cinema, light rain upon his grave! A gentle soul he was... Oh brother! This one's settled in for the night; it seems catching you was only his excuse!"

You half rise from your seat. In the right corner of the auditorium, just beneath the small exit sign, the MP, whose big white cap betrays him in the dark, stands watching the film, so lost in it that he seems in no hurry at all to leave. You sink back onto the couch in despair. The projectionist sets another reel on the projector, turns it by hand, threads the strip of film through the sprockets with matchless skill, and takes up his talk again.

"Even Lalehzar isn't the old Lalehzar. It's gone quiet and dark. Plenty of the cinema owners went bankrupt. Some got their permits, knocked their cinemas down and built shopping arcades in their place. This cinema's on its deathbed too. When the films are no good, a cinema can't thrive. A few months back we ran The Senator. A good film. And honestly, it sold! But that Rifleman, the one with Fakhimzadeh and Davoud Rashidi, didn't sell at all. On the fifth day, when we came to run the show, the ticket man told us he'd sold exactly twenty-four tickets! You can't screen a film for twenty-four people in an eight-hundred-seat hall. It doesn't pay; we did the sums and found that even the electricity this projector burns wouldn't come back."

Again he leaves his sentence unfinished and hurries out, leaving you alone in the half-dark room. Carefully you open the hatch. Seyyed and Ghodrat are sitting at the spread cloth. Ghodrat watches Seyyed with devotion. Seyyed, his face sweat-soaked and wasted by the fire of the opium, stares at the ground. Ghodrat says something and they both laugh, but Seyyed, caught between weeping and laughter, says: "When I cry, I begin to hope there's still life in me."

And you, heavy with sleep, sprawl on the couch. The projectionist returns. Seyyed raises his glass.

"Anyway, you've brought joy with you!"

"To the old days!"

That is Ghodrat.

You shift on the leather couch and say, ashamed: "I've been a real burden on you!"

He sets the film reel on the table.

"Burden? What burden, I'm at your service! Make yourself at home! You're dead on your feet; plain to see they've worked you to the bone."

Seyyed examines Ghodrat's wound. Ghodrat keeps gazing at his old friend, tenderly following his every movement. Seyyed draws the shirt back from the wound.

"That's some wound! At your service, faithful one!"

The projectionist sets a small box of pastries before you.

"Go on, sweeten your mouth, brother!"

You turn and look at him with affection. He flees your gaze and busies himself splicing pieces of film together, and you go back to the hatch to watch the rest of the picture. Perhaps you also mean to drive the sleep out of your head. Seyyed goes after the dealer, and in the long half-dark corridor, with his white-handled Zanjani knife, he finishes Asghar's business. Asghar the dealer lies dying beside the courtyard pool. His wife screams and runs toward him. Seyyed sits beside Ghodrat and tells him what has happened. Ghodrat keeps smiling at him. The MP is no longer in the auditorium, and you are glad to be rid of him at last.

Seyyed nears the house. A large detail of policemen stands ranked along the alley, and Seyyed, without fear or dread, passes through them to reach the door of the big house. Someone kicks the door of the projection room, and you know it must be that MP who stood watching the film in the hall.

The blows grow harder. Seyyed reaches the courtyard and calls out to his friend. Ghodrat does not want Seyyed to throw himself into this deadly game. The policemen lie in ambush on the surrounding rooftops. The pounding on the projection-room door grows louder. The projectionist stands, reel in hand, and motions you to keep silent. You rise from your place, and your own voice echoes in your ears:

"Don't bring trouble on yourselves! It's me they want."

Seyyed, shot now, still insists on reaching Ghodrat.

"No, brother! You don't seem to understand, this is my home! I've long wished my end would come some way that counts."

The pounding on the door grows fiercer. Someone outside shouts, threatening the projectionist. This time your mind is made up. You put on your cap, straighten your uniform, and make ready to go, and the projectionist plants himself before you, barring your way to the door.

Seyyed, his body torn, throws himself into Ghodrat's room.

"Brother! You've sold us far too short! Our bodies are ruined; our friendship's gone nowhere."

At the roar of the explosion of Seyyed's house in the film, you stir on the couch and open your eyes. You see the projectionist standing over you. He smiles: "Soldier! The MPs are gone...!"

When you step out of the cinema, you feel fine drops of spring rain on your face. Night has fallen, and the beautiful reflection of light and color on the asphalt of Lalehzar reminds you of a film you watched once, though you cannot remember in which cinema.