I am 19DB053, nothing more, nothing less!
I was born into a totalitarian regime. There was not enough air to breathe. Our lips, like fish, silently clung to the aquarium glasses. I remember almost nothing attracted me to the school. I always escaped from school because it was not a school for me—it was a prison. It always failed me.
It always escaped me.
Our boys’ school was located near a girls’ school, with a dark green police station separating us. Apparently, with this move, the government intended to prevent the girls and boys from being in contact with each other.
Furthermore, it shouldn’t go unsaid that the government would release girls an hour earlier than boys to avoid any type of meeting or communication with students of the opposite sex on their way home. Because of that, male students would often risk the danger of skipping the last two hours of class, fleeing. They would find a corner on the street and stand there, holding a newspaper, pretending to read under the watchful eyes of the constantly moving ‘110’ police cars, which seemed like death machines and offered no escape. Despite the danger, they lurked in their hiding spot, hoping for a glimpse of their loved ones for some moments or to exchange love letters with them.
In those days, due to the high demand for love letters, I had a small business at school. My job was to schedule students and write love letters for them so they could reach out to those girls they were besotted with.
Of course, for that I repeatedly was summoned to the office of the school principal, Mr Lahori, a single, middle-aged, stern man, where each visit concluded with an unusual punishment.
Eventually, after my long summons and their lengthy punishments, the school staff realised they were getting nowhere, gave up on me, and eventually they decided to leave me alone. Yet, a strange feeling inside me always compelled me to do something they didn’t want me to.
Due to the large number of customers, I had to group them, and the letters were divided into three different categories:
The first was a group called Limerents or High Sky Flyers, who were at the peak of love, whose hearts were in their hands, beating uneasily like restless sparrows. Warm hearts, cold hands, people. The second group was the Companions, who were in the midst of their journey, and the third group was the Losers, although they were not few.
I remember one day, one of my classmates named Dariush Alizadeh—who, I was later shocked to hear was brutally killed in the streets during the Women’s Life Freedom liberation movement—came up to me and said that he was going to join me to skip the last two hours of class together.
Escape wasn’t easy, and if you were caught, you would be in big trouble. For this reason, the escape process sometimes needed the cooperation of other children. Some would sign in for each other on the attendance list to avoid trouble the next day. However, since all the teachers knew me, this was not an option for me. They had given up on me.
It was a busy fall day, and because of the fall, the break up season, many customers who belonged to the third group, the Losers, had lined up in the schoolyard. With their heads down, drawn, deep in thought, they were waiting for the letters they had ordered. They usually came to me during school breaks to place their orders.
Of course, the price depended on various circumstances: sometimes it depended on the spring season or the exam period, and also, sometimes based on the girls’ hair colour, eye colour, and style (which, as they were all in the same dark grey uniform, was hard to guess), so prices would change.
The business was doing well, and most of the time, they would reach out to their loved ones. With the income I earned from writing letters, I would visit the old part of the city to go get lost in the old bookstores and delve into the world of vintage papers and black rats, searching for meaning in their depths. A dive into the damp undergrounds, where mute books and blind rats met each other.
Sometimes, as I lifted the books piled high like garbage, I would occasionally catch glimpses of rats with sharp teeth, rusty from chewing on old papers, which, with a sudden cat-like leap onto my hand and arm, emitted a scream-like message as if they were trying to protect their vintage intellectual realm.
It was through these bookstores that I saw Gilgamesh searching for the eternal grass, standing beside Odysseus, gazing at his mesmerised gaze as he thought of Penelope far from afar, I saw Dostoevsky, tired while the weight of the Karamazov brothers weighed on his shoulders, busy arguing with Freud. It was through these bookstores that I stepped into Borges’s mirrored corridors, a world in which mazes of time and dreams were slipping into each other, eventually leading me to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I saw Ritsos raising his glass to Kazantzakis; he, who was a flag-bearing solitary trunk of his time, accompanied him to eternity.
I saw Shamlou, Shirko, and Szymborska, sitting with Walt Whitman on the edges of poetry, discussing Khayyam and Hafez. Through these bookstores, I witnessed Patrick Pearse standing defiantly in front of a firing squad during the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, facing the British forces, whose English smoking rifles were embarrassed by his left-lit cigarette.
Almost all the bookstores in the city knew me. No, they weren’t just books; they were pieces of the world, lying in faded, colourful covers, nestled in great solitude. A world that sucked me within itself.
After purchasing the books, most of which were banned, I would cradle them warmly in my hands, brush off the dust from their colourful faces, and then wrap them in a newspaper to conceal the hidden worlds I clutched within my hand. Then I would flow down onto the streets and begin reading them madly. Isn’t it true that each book is a mute entity until you bring it to speak through reading? In this way, I read and began to discover unknown worlds.
The religious education teacher had entered the class and was fervently engaged in teaching the benefits and importance of fertilization when suddenly, a few frogs leapt out into the middle of the class from the woollen hat in which one of the students had hidden them. Chaos erupted throughout the classroom like a whirlwind. Everyone was jumping around, including the religious education teacher, who was furiously yelling at the students while jumping around grabbing at the frog in his hair, repeating, “You are all animals! You will all go to hell!”
I left the finished letters and a list of names to Aram, a friend who was my assistant, to give them back to the customers. I told Dariush, “Let’s go! It’s time!”
Since the school gates were locked after the students entered in the morning, the tall, dirty wall beside the gate awaited us to climb over it.
I tucked Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees under my shirt so that Cosimo would not get hurt, and I began climbing the wall just as he used to climb trees. Dariush reached the top first and was waiting for me on the other side of the wall. It was while I was jumping off the wall that my eyes fell again on that annoying sentence, written by the government. The same sentence they were brainwashing us with every day as soon as we entered school: “The law is for all; it’s unbreakable, no escape!” With the chalk I had taken from the classroom in my pocket, I drew a line through the sentence and wrote underneath it: “All breakables will break someday; no escape!” The school guard, who was busy scolding the schoolyard, saw my head on the wall, like the severed head of Thomas More. As I looked back, I saw him running towards us.
We were both afraid that the principal would call our parents. So, there was only one option, which was to disconnect the school’s phone cable, which emerged from a junction box next to the famous phrase on the wall, along with a few other knotted black cables that separated the world communication between the girls’ school, the police station, and our school.
There wasn’t much time left. The guard was getting closer, and since I wasn’t sure which of the cables belonged to our school, I had no choice but to pull all three telephone cables out of the box, like rotten black teeth, all in one go.
The next morning, when I was summoned back to the principal’s office,
I realised that the guard had ratted me out to them. As I entered the office, I saw the principal of the girls’ school, a solemn single woman whose face always lacked a smile, just like Sunday evenings. She sat with the police chief and Mr. Lahouri, enjoying tea together and laughing.
Mr. Lahuri made a gesture to the police chief, and right there, they chopped off my hair with scissors. and then I ended up in punishment of filling a water gallon jug in the middle of the schoolyard with a Coca-Cola bottle lid. The same guard stood over my head, observing the punishment process with special attention and sometimes kissing my head, just like Judas over the sweat-soaked body of Christ.
I remembered Hanta and his Too-Loud Solitude, saying, “We are like olives, only when we are crushed do we yield what is within us!”
Although they punished me repeatedly and cut my hair short, the sentence had worked and eventually led to the expulsion of the police chief from the police station, prompting him to return to his family circle. Dariush had reached out to his girlfriend. My family remained unaware of the incident, and while I was sitting comfortably in the park reading Italo Calvino’s banned book, The Baron in the Trees, the two unmarried angry principals now had the opportunity to meet and get to know each other for the first time.
That’s how everyone won! That’s how I found out that my writing matters!
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-19DB053-Dariush Beritan