It was last week that Nasser Taghvai turned eighty-four. I celebrated his birthday alone, beneath a sun as scorching as the summer days of Abadan, beside a foreign palm tree—a Californian one—with the hope that all the palm trees in the world belong to one family, whether in Abadan or in the hereafter.
These days, if you’re Iranian and, like me, have reached your eighties, you know you’ve lived through several centuries. You started studying under an oil lamp and now find yourself in the digital world. You’ve witnessed a revolution with your own eyes and, like me, perhaps have ended up somewhere on the other side of the world, far from home.
At this point, memories become fragmented images, and from a friend, from a human being, sometimes only their eyes remain in your memory. That’s why when I think of Nasser Taghvai, I first see his eyes—bright eyes full of untold stories, eyes that penetrate your inner world and stay with you forever. When I think of Taghvai, I see his smile too—a playful smile, full of biting yet kind humor, accompanied by an infinite silence.
Nasser was a man from the South, born in Abadan, a city that didn’t know if it was a suburb of London or a town of workers. Its sun-drenched streets were filled with wandering sailors and the strong scent of Indian spices. One of those cities that seem to grow only in legends, briefly merging with reality—and being born there meant a chance to become anyone. He was born to the smell of oil, opened his eyes to ships and a sea that would take him to the other side of the world. Not like me—I was born in the bastard city of Tehran, a dreamless place that never knew what the sea meant. And so the age gap between us was much more than four years. He had seen the world, while I had known only crooked streets that led nowhere.
I hadn’t yet seen Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, or else I would have said: Nasser was the samurai—an inward, solitary soul who wanted to build a new world—and did. I don’t remember the first time I met him. He often came to our house to see my brother, M. Azad. And I admired him. With his lean frame, southern accent, and sunburnt skin, he reminded me of a character from a Hemingway story. He was the young Santiago of The Old Man and the Sea—a fighter, tireless and brave.
Nasser was Hemingway himself. His stories enchanted me, not because he imitated Hemingway, but because he had the same visual, concise, and storytelling language. I read his stories over and over and never tired of them—like a beautiful landscape you could look at again and again. Without Nasser Taghvai’s short stories, the working-class life in Iran would lack an honest image of itself.
To this day, I still read That Same Summer and find myself spellbound by Taghvai’s magic:
“Late in the summer, they let some people go. Pessimists might not believe that it was truly crowded and there was no space, and that’s why they left us too. We went back to the dock. Not all of us returned. A few months earlier, we’d seen many fall to the ground. Black ambulances carried them off, gliding on black asphalt strips to the morgue.”
“Ashour would reach into his pocket and shake the policeman’s hand. The policeman was a good guy. He stayed, and we went. By late summer, we were exhausted—even of summer itself. Honestly, here, summer lasts five or six months, then it’s always autumn until the next summer. I’d said several times, ‘Let’s take a leave.’
He’d ask, ‘Where to?’
I’d say, ‘Anywhere.’
He’d ask, ‘What’s the difference from here?’
I’d say, ‘It’s different.’
He’d say, ‘It’s not.’ Like a prostitute who stays here in the winter and goes up north in the summer. In the end, I went alone. And I saw he was right. There was no difference.”
For years I waited, but Nasser never wrote another story. Thus, the presence of a great writer was denied to Iranian and world literature. And in that sense, Hemingway committed suicide a second time. But from this second suicide, a filmmaker was born.
When Nasser came to television—where I worked as a filmmaker—we grew closer. I often spent my afternoons at his house, with him and his wife, Shahrnush Parsipur. Those evenings were rich and full. Nasser would sometimes get very animated. When his forehead wrinkled, you knew he was speaking from his soul. We’d sit late into the night, talking about life and cinema and what needed to be done. Both of us stood against the avant-garde posturing of the time—not because we were against innovation, but because we couldn’t stomach pretension. By the end of those nights, on my way home, I’d feel like I was flying—full of the seeds of dreams that had been planted in me during those magical evenings.
The Wind of the Djinn
Nasser’s marriage to cinema was so sudden and astonishing that now I believe it was cinema that proposed to Nasser—and breathed the soul of filmmaking into him. In this reincarnation from writer to filmmaker, his prose reached its peak, for he wrote in images, his short sentences like cinematic shots—rhythmic, sequenced like film editing. When I saw his early short The Wind of the Djinn, I was stunned by its cohesive language and Rossellini-like gaze. From the very beginning, Nasser Taghvai had the marks of an auteur. The Wind of the Djinn remains the best film ever made about the Zār ritual—and watching it is like being intoxicated by vintage wine. As a filmmaker who inherited the writer’s mind, Taghvai had a deep knowledge of Persian and world literature. That’s why he produced two of the best literary adaptations: the Uncle Napoleon TV series—undoubtedly the most successful show in Iranian history, based on Iraj Pezeshkzad’s work—and Captain Khorshid, an adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, a tribute to the master.
I remember when I was editing the film Bebraz Nameh, which I had made about the life of Bebraz Soltani. For many years, Bebraz Soltani had collected costumes and stage props from various theater productions performed in the southern parts of the city. By the end of his life—when I was filming him—he had lost his grip on reality and had taken refuge in a world of dreams, inventing stories of his own. I made the film in the style of parde-khani (traditional Iranian narrative storytelling), and at the end, Saadi Afshar—the famous blackface performer of Iranian theater—spoke about Bebraz Soltani. It was the first time he had been captured on film. His words formed a long monologue, filled with repeated pauses, in which he alluded to Bebraz’s mental state.
I spent hours working on editing that final section, unable to make the right decision. Then Nasser entered the room in his long gray overcoat. As usual, he was silent and just looked at me. But when he saw my state, he said, “I know why you’re hesitating. But don’t cut Saadi Afshar’s pauses. Those pauses are sometimes more important than what he’s saying. Don’t hesitate. Leave in everything he says.”
And I followed Nasser Taghvai’s advice. That’s why Bebraz Nameh became a successful film—and a large part of that success was thanks to Saadi Afshar’s long, pause-filled monologue. I owe that to Nasser Taghvai. In fact, I owe him much more—for keeping Hemingway alive for me within himself. I am proud of him for becoming such a memorable filmmaker, an auteur. I love him because I never saw him speak ill of anyone, or act with jealousy, or try to sabotage another artist’s work. I love him because he always stayed honest and helped every artist he could, as much as he could. To me, he is still that dark-skinned, worldly fighter who emerged from the misty, sweltering ports of the South.
In the face of all the cruelties, betrayals, and malice, Nasser Taghvai never chose the path of bitterness. Perhaps that’s why he chose the path of forgetting.
