Continuing our examination of filicide in Persian short stories, we now turn to another story on the same theme: The Highway by Hossein Noush-Azar.
The story follows a man named Sohrab (a name that is surely deliberate), who has been living abroad for sixteen years, entering, as the narrator says, another world. During this time, there has been no news from his tyrannical father, except occasional demands for money due to financial failures that occurred after Sohrab left. There has never been an emotional bond between father and son, either before or after Sohrab’s migration. Sohrab leaves empty-handed, seeking liberation from his father’s oppressive authority, and devotes all his efforts to building a normal life for himself. Sixteen years later, his elderly father unexpectedly appears in Düsseldorf. Claiming to visit for a routine check-up for his prostate, he tells Sohrab that he has come to see him—but Sohrab knows the true reason is something else entirely.
Sohrab meets his father at the airport, takes him, and abandons him in an unfamiliar, wooded area. While doing so, he brings up his mother’s death and the betrayals his father inflicted upon her. Through these details, Noush-Azar adds a psychoanalytic dimension to the story. Ultimately, Sohrab also leaves his father’s suitcase by the roadside before returning home, exacting revenge in a symbolic way: his father now finds himself in the same vulnerable position that Sohrab experienced sixteen years earlier when he emigrated with nothing but a suitcase.
At first glance, the story seems to involve symbolic patricide rather than filicide. Indeed, the author’s defamiliarization of the theme of filicide emerges here. We encounter a modernized Rostam and Sohrab, with Sohrab enacting revenge on his father. The theme of filicide operates in the background, particularly where the father, in addition to his tyranny, betrays Sohrab’s mother and refuses to provide financially for his son despite being wealthy. Toward the end of the story, Sohrab’s dialogue with his father reads:
“For twenty years I have been alone. Alone. And every time I betrayed someone or was betrayed, I thought of you. Twenty years of life, and now I can no longer love you. Now I can no longer think that you are my father.”
The events of those twenty years of solitude and suffering in a foreign land constitute a symbolic “filicide.” If this filicide is the earthquake in the story, we could say the author is now showing us the aftershock—an aftershock that, interestingly, culminates in patricide. In Noush-Azar’s The Highway, then, we encounter both patricide and filicide simultaneously.
From another perspective, can we say that the protagonist, Sohrab, achieves inner peace after committing patricide? The story does not explicitly suggest his inner reconciliation or salvation. However, certain textual cues indicate that, behind this patricide, nothing but the reproduction of violence persists. Early in the story, as Sohrab awaits his father, he is tense and anxious. He goes to the restroom to splash water on his face, and the reflection in the mirror illustrates the reproduction of violence:
“In the mirror’s clarity, he saw himself and recognized the outline of his father’s face. The bone structure of his father’s face—as he still remembered, or thought he remembered—was prominent, and the prominence of the bones doubled the masculinity of his father’s features. Sohrab’s face was masculine and harsh.”
Later, the story offers another indication that Sohrab will not find peace even after the symbolic patricide. Without explicitly revealing Sohrab’s inner state, the author creates a correspondence between Sohrab’s inner world and the setting where he abandons his father:
“Sohrab stood by the pond. The water was murky. Several dead fish floated on the surface. The pond smelled of stagnation… Sohrab gazed at the corpses of two dead fish. Despite the pollution, life persisted in the pond. The pond was a swamp, and yet it was still alive.”
It is important to remember that this foul swamp results from the symbolic filicide, which is not narrated directly but exists in the story’s background.
Finally, we may consider the story’s language. Naturally, in any story, language corresponds to the narrator’s perspective. What may be grammatically incorrect could be appropriate and effective in a child narrator’s voice. Yet contemporary readers immediately perceive the antiquated style of The Highway. For instance, at the story’s opening:
“He wondered: Would I recognize my father? After all these years, would I recognize my father?”
Or at the airport, when Sohrab searches for the restroom:
“The sign indicated the path to the men’s restroom. He followed the sign and arrived at the restroom without difficulty.”
On one level, the author intentionally selects this archaic style for narration. Upon further analysis, however, it seems that there is insufficient narrative necessity for this choice. Given the story’s modern setting and themes, the author could have employed a fresher, more lively language to convey the narrative more effectively.