爻賴 賯胤乇賴 禺賵賳 = Se-Ghatreh-Khoon = Three Drops of Blood (short story), Sadegh Hedayat
This short story was originally written by Sadeq Hedayat and translated into English by Brian Spooner.
The title story, Three Drops of Blood, follows the protagonist's increasingly unstable mental state through the repeated occurrence of three drops of blood, while 'Hadji Murat' depicts an almost Joycean epiphany in classically understated terms, as a man mistakes another woman for his wife. These are stories which, though set in a distinctive milieu, deal with universal truths and cut to the very essence of humanity.
He was gazing into space, with a half open mouth, as if he were laughing at something out of reach. He felt a pressure at the base of his skull which extended to his forehead and temples and caused wrinkles to appear between his eyebrows. from "The Man Who Killed His Passions"
Is there a thing as normal? Sometimes a book will squish me, and all I have is a vague feeling that it believed in a these are the days we live in, that stranger to me. I don't know about this, just a kind of suspicion. It's like looking at a group of children when adults are near (not including myself. I don't, anyway). Oppressive parallel lines bending their will of private inmate dependent on prison guard society. I'm not convinced it's as much as being there on the day that they handed out how to manipulate the system as it is a willingness to not die. Part having nothing else to do but stare into the black pit of what everyone else has got. I can remember listening to the other kids who wanted to be in the know, I'd be half in awe of their mysterious visits and resentfully skeptical of being lorded over. I had that kind of vibe about these stories big time. I feel that shimmery suspension of full of shit and, yeah, visits to the other side. What the hell is normal, anyway? That staring into the pit of what everyone else has is the sky and the falling is what if there is such a thing as normal and you aren't it. I don't know, I guess it's a good thing about Hedayat I have a bad feeling before a fall.
I don't know if this means anything as far as editions. My copy is called "Three Drops of Blood" and features stories from The Stray Dog and Buried Alive, as well as from "Blood". There are probably all kinds of books. Knowing publishers there might just be a shiny Hedayat book titled after each and every story. (Then again, maybe this is some "Best of" deal. Exactly like a hits album titled after one song.)
Abji Khanom was ugly. The stork somehow sensed what a terrible person she was and she got what she deserved in an ugly tree beating. Her little sister, innately all that is good and pure in the world, was blessed with her due of great looks and the personality nosy neighbors like to loudly compare favorably to their ugly sisters. I think that would be hard to deal with in Islam. That you were punished by Allah with some deep personal failing. When it rains it is because God is crying because of something you did. Scientific type studies show that pretty kids are coddled by teachers, etc. etc. getting the best of it all. Abji nurses the green monster's wound with scabby knees from hours of prayer. If she is twice as devout as the next guy then at least heaven will be her reward. No one is fooled. Not the pang when the peanut gallery reminds her of the love who didn't want her. Not the mother who misses no opportunity to compare the sisters. If Allah didn't love her to begin with there's nothing she can do to change their minds now. The jury wags their fingers guilty, guilty, guilty. The pretty sister kisses her groom and there's a martyr's pity party in the water. I used to work with an obese man and his parent's favored little brother. The brother was a total douche and he made sure to bring up all of fat brother's humiliations to garner allowances with the socially accepted (I guess there were enough of them that prick equals normal). Even as I felt pity that this guy had to grow up with that, he was already such a misogynistic tool that I couldn't help feeling he would only be worse without that albatross. Abji's life points this finger at her. I can't see that if she were joyously pious rather than smugly pious they would have liked her any better for it. If you could cut Abji from the others, no duty or ranking, what would she stand for? But she doesn't. Hedayat sees her end as nothing, no her or them, no ugly and pretty and the no black and white is her clean. I try to think of people I have a hard time with as they would be if they didn't belong to anyone. I think I'll try the nothing when I still don't like them. I know if I knew a girl like Abji I would hate her as she did unto me spiritually, the wish devoid of anything save a table turn.
The Buried Alive stories are suicides, Three Drops of Blood are poetic murders and The Stray Dog the dying neglected.
How would they judge me? But I wouldn't be embarrassed, nothing is important to me. I laugh at the world and whatever is in it. However harsh their judgement of me might be, they don't know that I have already judged myself even harder. They'll laugh at me; they don't know that I laugh at them more. I am sick of myself and of everyone who reads this trash. from 'Buried Alive' His grave didn't want him so he lies in the world, spitting onto its pillows. The dead are his friends who must look the faceless he sees himself. The living are dead pool reflections. Anxious to be thought of. I didn't know this kind of suicide when being dead is the state rather than the only end. The man is convinced he cannot die. The body throws itself and the tears don't come. He's frozen inside some kind of plateau. This story was hard for me to read. It reminded me too much of my mother. I have thought about it as comforting, natural, a self punishing act. The dying alone was missing its fingers. He grasped a ghost story, glamour over heart stop. Maybe it was too much what other people must be thinking about him in a disconnected from wanting or or ever knowing anyone else. They must have lived on the matter what they thought after he was dead? I couldn't get past this part being more important to him than what he wanted to happen when he was dead.
The dead and buried in The Man Who Killed His Passions is seeking the answers of a life denied. Basically, he's horny and just says no. He probably felt better about it than everyone else who doesn't get any because the lover of their dreams doesn't knock on their door. He hears all the poems, devours the you must do this as he starves his stomach. The rumbling of his tummy just knows that this is the way. Until he looks for confirmation in the daily bread of do's and don'ts and the guy he can't stand (hey, he's dedicated to going without to pick this sheikh for his spiritual adviser) is as much of a hypocritical knocks up his housemaid all along, besides being boring. Mirza LIKED being bored. The love of a drunk Russian and cheap wine weren't all they were cracked up to be. I had that feeling about Mirza like in the other 'Buried Alive' stories of some break with life that I didn't get why these were the breaks in the first place. He's empty, maybe better off dead if his ideals were true in the first place. But if they were what about everyone else?
Fire-worshiper had a French man who embraced the answers and felt his old home the ashy pit. I suspect that wherever he wasn't blazed brightly as he confessed a homesickness in Iran. This man is the only "Buried Alive" who the coffin wasn't the point. His longing and loneliness take place.
The most unsettling and the one I think about the most is Hajji Morad. The man fixated on the upper hand with a stingy hand. He beats his wife. His friends all say divorce her. The fists ball in rage when he spies a chador in the crowd. It must be hers, she must be leaving the house without his say so. The threats don't stop her. The woman says she's another man's wife and who is he to touch her? The broken man shamed in public, cornered in the police. So he divorces his wife to point the finger in public. I felt his sick normal and slipping away owed. If there were a nothing made up of his nothing I would feel that would be hell.
I wish I could step into the "Three Drops of Blood" stories and be there to hear the other story. The little girls (eight, nine, fourteen) as they are outside. In The Legalizer two men share their stories of the nine year old bride who wronged them into their current wandering lives. I wanted to point out to the husband in "Whirlpool" that his wife was entirely dependent on him for everything. Somehow shake them out of his normal of women who are there to make things hard on them. I don't know about Hedayat. I wished for something I could do to exist the wronged feeling when the fourteen year old in "Dash Akol" is confronted with the parrot's repetitions of the restless Dash Akol's desires. If she had wanted to marry the suicide rather than the old thing her family set her up with I have no idea. Something about her brought to tears in this way. "Loving you has destroyed me." Where does Marjan live in life. I want to push away this normal. The nine year old in the Legalizer lured into the middle aged man's bed with the withheld story's ending. 'Whirlpool' makes me think of some story I must have read. When the distraught friend and the paranoid husband throws his daughter away to want her back. Of course the tragic death of the always faithful. His heart beating nothing in his (already planned) flight. I didn't feel anything about this one as a familiar (for some reason) punishment. But of who, him or the poor girl, the dead friend or was it the greedy wife who inspired the lusts of the helpless man? If she had been allowed to leave the home she wouldn't have had to nag the guy to support her. I can't feel a sorrow for the inevitable when there could have been another way. I get this about some of Hedayat's stories and others they transcend it. It's a bit frustrating, really.
Three Drops of Blood's house-cat caterwauls for her lost love. The asylum man who haunts his nights with the grief. The thoughtless blood taking (he was probably the kind of man who destroys plants just because they are there when he's idle) and this choice to regret in place of freedom was intriguing. I'm not too sure about another unfaithful woman and how it couldn't go anyway as the ending (again).
I loved the stories from The Stray Dog. Odette from The Broken Mirror, the other side of the moved on. The starving dog ashamed to feed from memories of being fondled. These stories reminded me a bit of Anna Kavan collections. Close cold light, pitifully rejected and hunger yowls of why won't they love me. Something about the wishing more than the ought moved me more than the missing women. The dog, Pat, he barely remembers his name. If no one calls him anything. Children are cruel. I once had to get two kids off from beating a neighbor's cat to death (most days they had it worse than the cat. They didn't pity). In this world there are you did something wrong and gone are the children who loved you and here are the fences. I could forget them in their brutal eyes and this dog had to live there. Too tired to run and the open car of this new man who gives him food. The dog dies and he dies again when Davoud the Hunchback forgets who he is. Davoud won't hold the dog (what if someone sees him, what if these are the rules) until he's dead. Stories felt more living to me when they had to live with something. Something had to happen. Someone could have.
Three Drops of Blood is a collection of 11 short stories. Each story is unique, distinct, grotesque and unsettling; painting the reality as it is: human and ugly.