VidaKashizadeh

Part 6 - Dancing on the Desks

Rhea had changed her seat after having served the coffee, and was sitting further away from the table next to Niko at a more receptive angle to me.

We continued our conversation.

But the image of the upside down coffee cups had made a print on everyone’s mind creating a restless youthful excitement - nevertheless subdued.

For one instant I felt a slight embarrassment with some physical discomfort, most probably from the excess of expectations put on me, but decided in a mo just to be, and the discomfort was gone.

Rhea’s tired look of having been cooking a big meal on a hot day seemed to have completely faded away. This is so true of a lot of women and may be the real reason why some women started reading coffee cups in the first place; a kind of entertainment after meal.

Or perhaps the reading was part of the buzz of the coffee itself, and so some started to see images in the cups just before washing them. And so, they entertained themselves about the secret lives of their guests instead?

Why Rhea would trust whatever I was going to see in the cup could never be the question. For most women that would not be the point at all.

This is the case when a person’s life is seen by another as special enough to imprint itself in a small cup. She was going to be the protagonist and I was to be her caring audience watching her precious act of life.

By taking intuitively the position of the receptive she automatically encouraged the creative force in me, a force that is uninterested in ego and super-ego (internalised authority reflecting the judgements of parents/teachers/society in our childhood – the inner critical parent), so I had no worry about what would happen. This was an adventure and I was now almost a child being watched by her admiring parents.

When I turned the cup the most prominent feature was of a blind musician. Everything else seemed to be somehow connected to him. I just expressed what I saw without using my skill in interpretation.

Rhea kept looking at Niko, who had looked very interested from the beginning, but perhaps like many older Iranian men saw this as a women’s thing and would feel embarrassed to ask me for his own reading.

But of course Rhea’s cup was going to reflect his situation to some extend as well, so he looked quite attentive.

After I finished the reading Rhea revealed the fact that her father used to be a musician in his youth and that he had now lost his sight. As a result she was spending a lot of time visiting him and that she was really worried about him.

I was a bit surprised about the precision, but not really amazed.

Then she came and took her previous seat across the table to my left, in order to read my cup. I leaned back to listen.

She is talented but her super-ego gets in the way and limits her creative perception. She said something about an event happening in the future but judged it instantly as not possible, and almost swallowed the word before she pronounced it to the end. While she was saying this I was looking at her profile and saw the moment when the inner censorship took place. It was accompanied by a sudden slight movement of her head away from me towards her left. I read from her face that she had seen a true event, but she did not believe what she saw.

Prejudice is always counter-creative. It hinders evolution and change.

But as Karl Marx already saw it (one’s state of) being determines (one’s) consciousness [‘Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein’].

Gramsci focused on the reverse effect of this formula – consciousness determining being - influencing Mao who then tried it out in China thinking it must and will work - through the ‘Cultural Revolution’ -, but it did not. At least not as expected.

Before leaving my hosts, Rhea showed me a large room upstairs with a view to the sea which is now free. But the view from the balcony was not stunning enough to make me want to move. And as it had three beds, I said I rather stayed where I am, and if a room with a better view became free I would have a look again.

Unlike most other houses in Lendas, the rooms in this house have self-catering facilities.

I am sitting in the front of my little room. It is a tiled little half yard facing the private passage to the sea down the stairs. The waves are getting stronger again and there is a constant crescendo rush treating my ears.

The garden on the other side of the passage is full of large plants and yes it is a cerise flowered oleander facing me and next to it rose-coloured paper flower (bougainvillea glabra / gol-e kaaghazi), with flowers that are in fact coloured leaves or bracts encircling their tiny tubular flowers. Down on the passage itself there are fluffy bunches of a green plant unknown to me. Will I remember the shape of the leaf to look it up later?

Behind and above oleander I see bamboo shoots very high, and further in the back I see a part of the rocky hill west of Lendas. I am on the far east side; in fact one house before the last on the beach.

It’s around 7.30 p.m. I am in the Internet Café.

‘You make me feel like a Natural Woman , Aretha Franklin

My usual table is occupied by a German who was on the same bus sitting behind me next to Lalla, after we had changed bus.

Apparently he had told her he’s been coming to Lendas since 1989, whereby I had heard her say that she had been coming there since 1984 and that was the year in which she was born.

I respect anyone who keeps coming back to the same nice place every year, perhaps because I haven’t been able to do this myself. I went back to Loutro in the 90’s for a second time, but I think it made me melancholic. What is gone is gone.

Nevertheless I said to Rhea I may be coming back here frequently and will stay for 1-2 months once I am retired, which made her very happy. She said if I ring beforehand she will keep the best room for me.

I am sure I meant it when I said it. But just ten minutes ago I walked to the highest road which leads to the beach and looked down at the village.

It gave me a melancholy feeling; perhaps it was also due to the sunset and the beautiful little cloud on the right to the rock with a purplish fluff.

Chain of Fools , Aretha Franklin

I used to dance with this as a teenager.

I remember once the girls in my class room begged me to dance during the break. I think they had heard about my dancing from close friends or perhaps a few in the class had seen me dance before.

My school was a state high school (dolati) and next to Sa’ad-abad palace which was occupied by shah’s family occasionally (now it’s a museum and the school has closed down). The very high wall in the back was in fact shared between the palace’s garden and the school.

The head-mistress was known to be a SAVAKI and had installed intercoms in the class rooms in order to check at will what teachers and students were talking about.

On that particular day with all the encouraging shouts by the girls I had ended up dancing on the narrow long desks jumping from one desk to the other before the head-mistress’ shouts could be heard by one of the students standing close to the apparatus. She was demanding to know what was going on. I believe we carried on for a while as her room was in the building on the other side of the yard.
She generally didn’t leave her room and would usually send the deputy over. Some even believed or had seen her using a binocular to watch our classroom regularly.

She was usually quiet but intense, and had unplucked eyebrows which were a traditional way of showing that she was not married.

Once she even demanded to see my mother and complained to her about my eyebrows being plucked. The bore must have been looking very hard at my face, as I had plucked only the few scattered hairs under my eyebrows without touching the structure.

I could see that my mother wasn’t really impressed by her attitude and was physically uncomfortable as well. Her aura was visibly invaded. She was polite but restless. She was listening without hearing. and her body was saying: I don’t want to be here. I was quite annoyed that she had to be exposed to my head teacher’s petty preaching. To see your open minded mother having to listen to a Savaki lonely woman full of twisted feelings is definitely not a good sight.