The Persian copy of this story was published in issue 21 of Asre Jomeh magazine.

On June 10, 1982, as the radio was announcing the latest news of the Iran-Iraq war, I was down in the damp and dark basement of a bookstore located on Khayyam Street at Urmia city, among the masses of rare and forbidden volumes seeking to draw my attention away from the battle that was raging outside.
As I walked deeper and deeper into darkness, on a shelf that was occupied with the carcass of a cockroach, I couldn’t help but notice this forgotten book featuring a beautiful golden cover with wooden engravings. I picked it up, wiped the dust with my sleeve and held it toward the shaft of light penetrating deep inside the basement. I almost lost my breath and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a copy of Pierre Menard’s Quixote. I was thrilled to find such a rare gem, but my happiness was short-lived as I opened it and found out that it had been carved like a grave by a foolish scoundrel and another book was hidden inside my beloved Quixote. It was a molded copy of The Shocking Adventures of Salim Javaheri—a Persian folktale carried from heart to heart since the Timurid era.
I thought that Salim Javaheri possessed a secret because its preservation was worth the destruction of an irreplaceable book like Menard’s Quixote. Being part of oral literature, many versions of Salim Javaheri exist and unfortunately, the name of this version had been crossed out. The disputable thing about Salim Javaheri was that the person who claimed to be the author had described the events of his short and fruitful life on the margins of pages and various sections. What fascinated me even more was the fact that these events had nothing to do with the stories of Salim Javaheri. However, in part of these events, the author narrates a story (I suspect its authenticity and reality) about his acquaintance with Pierre Menard and a person named Salim Javaheri.
The following is a transcript of a weird and horrifying story which is claimed to be real by its narrator. It should be noted that it was a difficult task to decipher the author’s illegible handwriting (which showed he had scribbled the text under tremendous emotional and psychological pressure). However, I have tried my utmost to stay faithful to the original text and transcribe the source material, which has been altered due to erosion and moisture, from an unpleasant, grotesque, and nonsensical writing to an appealing, audience-friendly, and tangible story full of suspense (as I think the original must have been). And now let us hurry to the narrative:
I first saw his frail body and withered face one summer afternoon. The heat had dried the root of people’s thoughts and hollowed their brains. The gridlock during the peak hour had turned into Gordian knots that drove drivers mad and they shouted, giving one another a piece of their mind. The golden dung flies that were everywhere tried to enter their eyes, noses, and ears whenever possible and little by little, fed on their minds and smeared them with shit.
That special day, the sky was blue and no wind was blowing. The chauffeur had broken the handles of the windows and sealed them shut with plaster so that no one fancied a gulp of fresh air. There was no way to unseal them. I leaned into the rigid and fabric bus chair and fanned myself using a folded paper. He was sitting right in front of me; I mean the old man. His left eye was completely shut due to his drooping eyelid and his right eye was half-blind. He peeked at the moving handles of a leather strap watch he had put on, clapped his eyes on me, winked, stood up with the help of his wooden cane, sleepy-eyed, and wended his way toward me. He was wearing a blue hospital gown with white slippers. He sat next to me and put his hand on my right thigh and pressed it as if he were juicing an orange. I ignored him (merely because he was an old man) pulled myself back, leaned to the window and thought that he had escaped from a hospital or an asylum. Who knows?! And who cares! I was waiting for him to break the ice and start a conversation about his grandchildren, but he was dull and mute. He kept buzzing as if one of those golden dung flies had metamorphosed into him. His lips twitched calmly, and it seemed that he wanted to speak the words he had been repeating to himself over the years of solitude, words that have been heard by no one, words that he muttered in the mirror over and over again, as if trapped in a loop, to a person he could not recognize. “What about you? What do you know of me, my beloved mask? Who am I?” he whispered under his breath.
My wrist got tired, and I quit fanning myself. The sweat was oozing, and I was ashamed of my armpit stains. I crossed my arms to hide the salty sweat spots on my blue shirt. One thing I knew for sure was that the smell of my sweat was the scent of musk compared to the old man’s reeking gown. Suddenly, the bus chauffeur, Salim Javaheri, wiped his wet wrinkled forehead with the back of his right hand and turned on the radio. The voice of the reporter echoed in the bus as we all pricked up our ears.
“…And now I draw your attention to the weather forecast.”
“Hello to you. The data that we just received shows that the citizens should expect at the western and northwestern parts precipitation falling as snow and rain along with strong wind…”
Salim Javaheri laughed, sipping some hibiscus tea to quench his thirst. Snow and rain were impossible in the peak of summer. The old man looked at me with the corner of his eye, and when he noticed he can do whatever he wants with me, he pressed my thigh tighter. The sound of the cracking of his knuckles came and he gave a contented smile. Then he tried to grab the piece of paper I was holding which at that moment was soaked with the sweat of my palm. I didn’t know what that paper was doing in my fist so to give an old man satisfaction, I let go of it. He chortled as he opened the folded paper and then his orgasmic face turned gray like a dead trout as he stared at the words in which that tabula rasa was embroidered with:
A Self-Portrait of Sancho Panza
I carefully examined the paper and thought about the meaning of those words. It all seemed to be an absolutely meaningless rubbish. I felt as if I had fallen victim to a prank. I looked at my watch, it was already 9:10. It was too late.
For what? I did not know.
I just knew it was late. Of course, it’s a tradition here to go late. If you go early or be punctual, the others will pierce you with their eyes, smirk and believe they are dealing with a moron, a fool. I looked out of the window to an officer trying to help the drivers escape the traffic, and of course, his attempt was in vain. He could achieve nothing. He moved his hands, tried and tried but they wouldn’t listen. I gazed at the text written on the back door of a jade Oldsmobile: “Akharin Nafas-haye Yek Sonnate Americyi!” (the final breaths of an old American tradition!)
Unconsciously, I thought of the old colonialism, the first opium war and Dr. Yu Tsun, a Chinese friend of mine who was a descendant of the former ruler of Hunan. I grinned thinking about my chaotic and disordered unconscious thoughts and looked at the old woman sitting at the rear of the bus. She stared at me and stoned me with her yellow watery eyes, believing that my ridiculous and selfish laugh was directed at her. I felt ashamed and bowed my head.
The old man was still meddling with the paper. He opened his mouth like a fish gulping for air and tried to speak but he couldn’t. I felt he was deranged and whacked as he moved the paper and tried to show me its meaning in sign language. I wanted to get off, but we were just at the beginning of the road and there was a long journey ahead of us. In the past few years, I tried to hold myself aloof from the others. I seldom left home. I would prefer to sit down and rot out at the corner of my room to get out there, among the sheep. There, I would blindfold myself and there, I would go wherever I wanted to go—my mind, my prison!
The crazy old man was still moving the paper and trying hard to puke the words in his rotten brain. He moved his trembling hands across his gray hair and then wrestled again with the paper, gazing at me, paused, then growled, paused, growled again. An obese man who was sleeping, while hugging his small leather bag, woke up with a jolt and sniffed the odor of the old man, filling his nostrils with his smell. He wiped the sweat over his lips with a white cloth, panting, wore the glasses which was in the pocket of his brown coat, stared at the old man and then at me. That man was looking for an excuse to blame others for his sleepless nights and nightmares. He gasped for a moment and cleaned his wet, bald, and shiny skull with the cloth, spat, scratched the marks left by his socks with his clubbed nails, put his glasses back into his pocket, stood up, disconnected his plumy butt cheeks from the chair, went to Salim Javaheri and whispered some ironically inaudible words in his right ear.
When Salim heard the words of the man, his breathing hitched, his eyes widened, he pushed the “Open Door” button, shuddered, pulled up his trouser legs, moved toward the old man and gave him a kiss of Judas, a kiss of betrayal, clutched his bony arm, whispered, “Haramzade” (bastard) and threw him outside.
The old man did not object to Salim’s decision. Salim closed the door and we all waited to move on. The old man slowly walked to my window, raised the paper, crying his eyes out, and when he noticed that I wanted to ignore him he lowered the paper and with the back of his hand cleaned the tears rolling on his clean-shaven cheeks. He felt dizzy and put his hand over the old American’s jade body.
I closed my eyes and held my breath, but I couldn’t concentrate because of the noise of the portable fan the old woman was using to calm herself down. Suddenly, I unsealed my eyes with the sound of a bird hitting the window of the bus. Stunned, I stood to get a better view of the bird and noticed that its neck was broken. And then out of nowhere, another little bird slammed itself into the window like a blind lunatic and then another bird. The glass become bloody, and the spilled blood was creeping up the window instead of moving downward. The old woman at the rear of the bus screamed in horror. The obese man shouted, “Madame Maurer, please be silent! You do not want to draw the attention of the birds to US!”
Madame Maurer was not going to shut up. The obese man picked a book from his bag, I could only peek at its carved golden title Rebecca, galloped toward her like a horse, and smacked the old woman’s forehead with the book. Her skull hit the corner of the chair, it cracked, her wound erupted like a volcano, blood sprang, and it spilled over her white skirt and blonde hair. The obese man threw down the blood-infested book, rushed to me, held my left hand, pressed it within his wide bones, pulled his tongue out and rubbed it across his face. His lips were shaking as he whispered, “Alfred, that’s my name. She wouldn’t shut up. That’s why I hit her. You will shut up, won’t you?”
I couldn’t speak gazing at the contagious fear and madness in his eyes.
“See…you are mute like an animal with four legs. We must find a way to get out of this horrid situation before we die like THEM. You don’t want to become dead meat, do you?”
Someone was screaming outside. Large flocks of birds were on their way.
The old American car panicked, put the pedal to the metal out of despair, fell into a ditch and then crashed into a bank, crumbling like paper. It was already the Akhar-ol-Zaman but there still no sound of Israfil blowing his trumpet. The bank instantly caught fire and all the money inside was burned to ashes.
My eyes were itching as everything became blurry. I tried to see and breathe but I couldn’t because there was nothing to see but blood. My skin was burning and bloated like a red balloon containing my beating heart.
Alfred lied down and put his hand over his head, a complete act of surrender. The windows were not going to hold, the glass was cracking like biscuits. How couldn’t we see this coming? We were naïve, we were blind. Salim opened the door of the bus. I closed it before the birds could get inside. He ran outside, fleeing in fear of his life, but the birds were conscious, they attacked him as I closed the door. He wanted to reenter the bus but he couldn’t, kept banging, shouting, the mad birds ripped off his lips, plucked his eyes out, fed on his flesh and nothing remained of Salim but some bones, ripped clothes and blood.
There is always blood. Yes! Spilled blood!
Thick fog covered the street. The bus trembled in fear as the birds hit its distorted iron body, sleeting like fat balls of ice. I was looking for something to defend myself. There was nothing other than that book. I ran to the rear of the bus and picked it up. Madame Maurer was lying half-dead on the floor of the bus; a thick yellowish liquid was oozing from her nose and the crack on her forehead had turned into pus. She kept murmuring to herself, “Ubi pus, ibi evacua.”
I wanted to stay far from the madding birds, their deafening voice. They were all gathering around the bus as if they had agreed upon one thing and that was to kill us, the indifferent passengers. I sat down on the floor and opened the book. I felt I needed to cry out loud like a child. I kept asking, am I going to die?
As tears rolled down, my mind trying to stay away from deadly thoughts made me recite lines from the book: “Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.”
Alfred gawked at me, rose from the floor like a ghost rising from his grave. The expression on his face was bloodcurdling. His eyes had sunken deep, and he had aged. With a devilish smile, he pulled out a knife from his leather bag, shining and sharp, and ran toward me like a nimble kid as the birds scratched his face with their claws. The floor trembled as he took each step like a blood-thirsty ghoul. He stood upon me and raised the knife. I knew exactly what he was going to do to me. He wanted to stab my hands, cut my veins, separate meat from my bones, mutilate my brain, my memories, my whole being, devour me like a leviathan in search of victims.
I looked at my watch to record the time of my death in my mind. The handles were showing 09:10. It was too late.
For what? I did not know.
When Alfred wanted to stab me and end my life like a mad tyrant, he began to choke on something and suddenly a bird came out of his throat. He let go of the knife and dropped it. Its edge cut his wrinkled forehead. His mouth wide open, one of his eyes popped out of its socket and fell by his feet. Another bird ripped open the fresh wound over his forehead, and then another bird came out of his nose; other birds came out from his eye sockets and ears. All of a sudden, Alfred’s skin was torn apart with bloody birds crawling out of it.
It was a horrifying scene. I got goosebumps, my bladder contracted, and I urinated.
With a gust of wind, the birds flew away, faded like lost objects in the distance. It was as if we were in a wild nightmare, or simply on a stage where the scenes are left half-finished so that everybody can leave early, go home and to bed. Ah…those damned fools are always tired; I mean the spectators.
And then it began to snow. The weather forecast was right after all. The gravity was shut down and everything calmed down with the scent of lavender filling the vacuum of space. The spilled blood, the ashes, snow, and dead bodies were floating like reified objects. Out of nowhere, the doors of the bus went open, the old man entered and coming behind him was my mother. She was young, full of life, and then she wiped my tears and held my hand. She knew I was tired of being there. That’s why she whispered in my ear, “Yat balam! Aghlama.” (Sleep, my child! Don’t cry.)
Soporatus!
My hands began to shrink, became smaller and smaller, and so did my bones. My skin became delicate, and my mind began to calm down and eventually, I turned into a one-year-old baby. My mother changed my diaper and handed me over to the old man.
Now, it all seemed so clear. I remembered everything. Nothing is real. This old man was Pierre Menard, but who am I?
I don’t know, maybe I am Pierre Menard too, but I cannot remember.
I have to make an incision in my mind and escape from the yellow papery cocoon like a butterfly. Escape from the present and go beyond the past and future to understand who I really am—probably a pseudo-man. I have to pull my little fingers across the rigid, calloused face of this old man I have hated all along to understand that this is me—old, lost, confused and grayer than ever.
I whispered under my breath,
“What about you? What do you know of me, my beloved mask? Who am I?”
…And now, we come to the end of this weird narrative. Unfortunately, when I was buying this book, The Shocking Adventures of Salim Javaheri, a half-blind old man, who claimed to be the director of the National Library of Argentina, expressed his interest in buying it. I clearly had no idea what a foreigner was doing there in the middle of the war and red alarms while everybody was trying to escape the country. He was accompanied by the ambassador of Argentina and was seeking to complete the Persian repository of the library with rare and handwritten books. That day I had woken up on the wrong side of the bed and bid higher than the old man’s price. No one was happier than the greedy bookseller. Finally, I let go of the book under the pressure of the embassy’s cultural advisor. To unburden himself, the old man, after noticing my broken heart, pledged to send me a copy of the microfilms of the book for my review after his return to Argentina, but one year passed and no response to my follow-up letters came. The senile old man didn’t keep his word. I knew, easy come, easy go. I stopped writing to him and had to forget about the book.
Three years later, on a cold autumn day, the postman delivered a small postal package. I got cold feet when I read the sender’s name—Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno. I quickly sat down on the stairs without closing the door and when I opened the package, my high hopes succumbed to despair:
Dear Mr. Ahmadian,
I’m truly sorry for the delay in responding to your letters. Please do not let the forgetfulness of this old man on the deathbed eat you up. I know that you think that I am a deceitful charlatan, but the truth is the book I bought with you caught fire and was reduced to ashes on my way to Buenos Aires. I could only save a few pages of it. I did not know how to give you the news because I thought you had a lot of interest in reviewing it, and that this heart-wrenching truth will burden your heart with sorrow. For years, I thought this book was destroyed, but when I saw it in your hands I was left totally flabbergasted. I first bought it from a chandler along Lethe River and sent it to a scholar friend of mine, Ulrich Marzolph. The book never reached its destination and disappeared completely. I hoped you would forget this as I had to forget it years ago, but your constant pursuit had become a nightmare for me. Finally, when you decided to stop pursuing it, like a memory that had been thrown away, buried in your unconscious, it felt necessary to reemerge and heal your wounded mind by sending a part of the book that had survived. You can read it as an attachment to this letter. I hope we find an opportunity to meet again in the future.
Yours sincerely,
J. L. B.
PS: Here are some quotes that might soothe your pain.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
Life itself is a quotation.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.