My Father's Notebook Read Online Free

write them down on the paper, one by one. Go ahead! Don’t be afraid. I’ll hold the mule. Just write!”
    Aga Akbar may or may not have understood what his uncle had in mind, but in any case he started copying the text. He stared at the cuneiform script and did his best to draw each character, one by one, in his notebook. Three whole pages.
    “It’s finished,” he signed.
    “Good. Now put it in your pocket and get down. Be careful.”
    That evening, when Kazem Khan was at home again, smoking his opium, he signed to Akbar, “Go and get your book and come sit here by the brazier. Now give me your pen and listen carefully. You copied the letter written by the king. Do you know what it says?”
    “No.”
    “That letter is something that used to be inside the king’s head. Nobody knows what it says, but it must say something. Now you, yes you , can also write a letter. Here, on the next page of your notebook. Some other time, you can write another letter on another page. You can write down what’s inside your head, just like the king did. Go ahead and try it!”
      
    Years later, when Ishmael, the son of Aga Akbar, was sixteen and living in the city, he went to visit his uncle in the mountains. “But Uncle Kazem Khan,” he asked him one evening at dinner, “why didn’t you teach my father the normal alphabet, so he could read and write like everyone else?”
    “What do you mean ‘like everyone else’? Nowadays you have to learn to read, but you didn’t have to back then. Especially not here in the mountains. Even the village imam could barely write his name. Who could have taught the alphabet to a deaf-mute child? I wasn’t the right man for the job. I simply didn’t have the patience. I’ve never liked sitting around the house. I’m always on the go, always riding off somewhere on my horse.
    “To teach a child like that, you need a capable father and astrong mother. I didn’t want to teach him how to write, but I felt—or, rather, observed—that Aga Akbar was forming sentences in his head, that he was thinking up stories. Do you understand?
    “Those sentences in his head, that storytelling talent, could have destroyed him. He had headaches all the time, and I was the only one who knew why. That’s the reason I taught him to write in cuneiform. To write for the sake of writing. I didn’t know if he’d be able to do it, or even if it would help. I was simply trying to solve a problem. Anyway, no one can read the king’s cuneiform inscription. Maybe the puzzle will never be solved. But the king did write down his thoughts.
    “Did I steer Akbar in the right direction or not? You’re entitled to your opinion, but I think my method worked. Your father still writes, to this day. And cuneiform is a beautiful and mysterious script. Your father has his own language, his own written language. Do you ever look in his notebook?”
    “No. I see him writing in it sometimes.”
    “Have you ever tried to read it?”
    “I can’t read a word of it.”
    “You could ask him to teach you how.”
    “What about you? Can you read it?”
    “No, but I know what he’s writing about. One time … God, how long ago was it? I went to his room and found him sitting at his desk, writing. I think he was about as old as you are now. Except that he was stronger. Big shoulders, dark hair, clear eyes. Anyway, I saw that he was writing. ‘Show it to me,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you’ve written.’
    “In those days he had quite a bit of contact with the foreigners who went to the cave, the ones who were trying to decipher the text. I think he’d learned something from those experts—something about other reliefs, or maybe even a likely translation. ‘Explain to me what you’ve written,’ I said.At first he didn’t want to. He was embarrassed, but I kept pressuring him. I wanted to know if my method had worked.
    “So he read. I can still recite his words from memory. Listen, it’s beautiful: I, I, I am the son of