Thus, the beginning of a tale told
by Shirin Farameh to John Pitt –
Through the famous city there flows a river.
It rises in the mountains to the left
and expires in the desert to the right.
If a river can be said to have a purpose,
the purpose of this river is not to unite itself
with the waters that encircle the inhabited earth
but, to make more possible this beautiful city:
to make gardens of melons and quinces
and fountains in the public squares;
to wet the pavements of mosques and seminaries
and to run down channels by the thoroughfares
in which Mercedes buses
are forever breaking their axles
and to be spanned by five bridges, their piers
sinking into fathomless antiquity.
This is why the Isfahanians
call it the Zendeh Rud, the ‘Life River’.
The subsidiary purpose of the river
is to flow through your memory,
bathing you in an insufferable regret.
For the river carries upon it
traces of an earlier existence
that is now substantiated only by this –
the beginnings of a story. Us
(adapted from the exceptional novel
‘A Good Place to Die’ by James Buchan)
.
Steven Taylor
.