Divided Loyalties

by Nilofar Shidmehr

  Like books such as Sadegh Hedayat’s Haji Agha, Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s Fear and Trembling, Shahrnush Parsipour’s Women Without Men, and Salman Rushdie’s Shame, translated into Persian by Mehdi Sahabi after Khomeini called for the writer’s head, and many more, R. Etemadi’s books were banned after the revolution. The only place one could buy an old copy was on the black market, which I did, once, when I climbed five flights of creepy stairs in a dilapidated building in front of the University of Tehran to get to a secondhand bookstore, leaving me out of breath in a room full of dust and old books. I first had to get my hands on the owner’s wrinkly dick in order to get my hands on a copy of Ce soir des larmes seront versées (Tonight, Tears Will Be Shed!). The most disgusting part was when he screamed “John” before coming.

  I fiddle with the pen in my hand. Ce soir . . . There is no blank space left on the paper to write my proposal. But it doesn’t matter anymore, because from now on I will communicate only in sign language. I have made up my mind to be a deaf writer. I will be much happier as such. I won’t need to give lectures at my book presentations, if there are any. When I introduce myself as the author of the book, nobody will raise their eyebrows or screw up their faces, or look at me the way a sane person looks at the crazy ones. I know that look very well. Besides, I will be free of the question “Where are you from?” that is thrown at me everywhere I go. And I will tell people my Persian name. I will no longer be an eternal alien in the land where I am a citizen. Neither will my teller be known as “John”— he can have his real name back. Everyone will call him by that. Only I will add “John” after!

  “Oh, John.” I look my teller full in the face and put the pen down. I will communicate with him through his language. We are both deaf and will need no pen, paper, or even a keyboard. I have my hands and he has his, to lift me up and take me to bed. I will strip him of his clothes but leave his glasses on. Their shiny frames will wink at me in the dark, shedding light on his tiny freckles. We will pronounce every vowel with our fingers as we roll over one another. Our tongues curled into each other, we will talk till morning.

  As I return to myself, John smiles, looking straight into my eyes. Is he reading what I am writing? Not from the way he’s squinting at me with no smile on his lips. He looks down at his watch and points to the sentence he has written: “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” Again my mind reels. Yes. I want to pay a bill . . . His smile is back for a moment, but I realize it is not meant for me. It passes close to my ears and flies over my slumped shoulders. It is aimed at the woman standing behind me: the blonde teenage girl who approaches to take my empty space.

  So much for asking out my teller! Do I somehow have an accent even when I talk in sign language? Have I offended him? Haven’t I gotten through?

  To get even and to please myself at the same time, I stand up, lean forward, and yell into his deaf ears, “Thank you very much.” I know he can’t hear me. Let him be deaf. It’s his loss. He could have been my lover. I gave him a chance. But no. He prefers this teenage girl over me: a girl wearing a ridiculously short tank top, too-tight jeans, and a belt with a set of ugly chains hanging from it. This girl who speaks fluently in English. Perhaps I should seek vengeance on both of them.

  Although I still haven’t walked away, the girl ignores me; her shoulder rubs against me as she sits down. Should I shout out that I am not finished yet, pull on the chain on her belt and knock her down? No, the girl is sweet. At closer range I see that she too has small freckles on her delicate nose. Besides, I don’t want to turn this story into a drama. Tonight, no tears will be shed! Romance is my favorite genre. So maybe I should come up with some peaceful diplomacy — a romantic plot — and ask both of them out. Then the three of us “Johns” will speak our own languages — English, sign language, and Farsi. Yes, what about a ménage à trois? Wouldn’t that be perfect? Ce soir, mes amies, nous converserons d’amour en trois langues de toutes les langues du Canada. After all, we’re living in a multicultural, multilingual society, aren’t we?

  Saving the Dead

  Mary secretly moves her air mattress and blanket from the Red Cross staff tent to the one where the bodies are laid out in plastic bags. She wants to keep an eye on things. Since there is no running water to give them a proper Islamic wash, someone will come tomorrow to give them ablution by earth before they are buried in a mass grave. She sets a cot sideways across the opening of the tent and peeks out to see if the pestering old man who was a nuisance the whole day is there. He is not. Mary draws a sigh of relief and lies with her back to the dead. It is better to breathe the freezing air of the desert winter than the odor of decaying bodies. Two bodies — a young woman and a young man partly wrapped in white cotton sheets — share a plastic bag as if asleep side by side. Mary feels a pang in her breast and gasps. She has come from Canada to her childhood city of Bam to save those still living after the earthquake in these last days of 2003, but instead has ended up saving only the dead. She hasn’t even been here for twenty-four hours and already she has seen enough.

  Mary had to give the old man three shots in just two hours. That many tranquilizers in such a short time could put a camel to sleep for a week. Still he kept trying to attack his daughter’s body, finally tearing at the plastic with a knife, and in the end injuring himself. He had hobbled away, through the ruins and dust, toward the others trying to help pull survivors from under the debris.

  Now, exhausted from her struggle to quell the man’s rage, Mary fights to keep her eyes open. She hopes that somebody got the knife away from the old man. Surely by now the tranquilizers are doing their work. Her eyelids are heavy, but she notices something moving outside, beside the lone palm tree just beyond the tent — like a ghost, jerking periodically and moaning like a dying animal. Mary is afraid it’s the old man, coming back, possibly still wielding a knife, probably still set on using it on his daughter’s lifeless body. She sits up in the bed, hugs her knees, and rocks gently back and forth, listening, terrified of the darkness. After a while she lies down again and is overcome by sleep.

  In her half-sleep, Mary sees the earth open and a hand grab her. Then she recalls that she’s in the tent of the dead and shuts her eyes tight, hoping to dissolve the vision. Even so, her heart races as she sees the old man’s sharp knife right there, behind her eyelids. She gasps. Her mouth is dry with the taste of earth and she still feels the grip on her throat. She tries desperately to touch something — anything — but can’t budge. It’s as though, with the slightest movement, her bones will splinter. She wakes with a start — sits upright — remembers another time: the moment when she bent over her own father, just before his death.

  He had spent all his strength in drawing that one last breath, the muscles of his face tensing with the effort. But he had never breathed out. Instead, a sudden shudder poured out from under his skin around his open mouth. The tremor expanded across his face from ear to ear, setting his flexed muscles free.

  Mary exhales. She looks up and peers into the darkness. The ghostly figure is still there by the palm tree, whose topknot sways now in the dusty night. It can’t be anyone other than that crazy old man. The same one who got Mary into all this trouble. She shouldn’t have imposed on the Canadian aid team to help him — there must have been hundreds calling out for help — but the old man had reminded her so much of her own father. Even at a distance.

  * * *

  “Help. My daughter. Please. God,” he bawled. He was tall and lanky and had a long, thin face, soft brown eyes, sunburned skin, and, just like her baba, deep furrows marking his forehead and face. Mary grabbed the old man by the shoulders. They felt so frail under her hands she was afraid they might break if she pressed a little harder.

  “My daughter is here, please, for God’s sake!” The man pulled away and pawed madly through the debris and broken mud bricks. “She was as dear to me as my eyes.”

  Mary trembled. Her own father used to say the s
ame thing. Every time Mary had come back to visit him, he would sit her on his knees as if she were still a small child. His hand would move up and down the stream of her black hair. Mary’s sisters used to make fun of them so much that she finally got a haircut, and her baba had stopped treating her as a child. But he had never stopped saying, “She is the apple of my eye.”

  Mary told the blond Canadian aid officer what the man had said. She translated everything except the part about how much the man loved his daughter. Moments later, four trained dogs in Red Cross vests sniffed through the dense rubble as the old man bustled about them. The aid officer shook his head — after a half hour of scouring the area, the dogs had not found even a whiff of life. He led the dogs away.

  The old man remained in the middle of the debris and threw fistfuls of dust over his head. “I should not have let her stay. I wish I had broken my leg and not gone to the wedding of our far relative in Jiroft,” he wailed. His bristle-headed scalp was layered with heavy dust — his liquid eyes were bloodshot. He didn’t say anything when Mary gave him the first shot. But he resisted when she tried to move him out of the path of the approaching bulldozers, unearthing the dead. “I want to lift her with my own hands when she comes up,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  Mary noticed his burned eyelashes and felt like crying. She left the man and ran to the tent to shed her tears. Six years earlier, in Bam, when her own father was at death’s door, she had rushed off in the same way — past the trees in the yard — stumbled thirty-two steps into the dark basement to sit by the pickle and jam jars, where she used to hide as a child. There, she had cried as loudly as she wanted. Then, as had been her childhood habit, she had opened a jar and fingered some jam into her mouth. She had returned to her father’s side with red eyes, a wiped mouth, and sticky palms.

  * * *

  Mary lies on the inflatable mattress. Yesterday seems lifetimes away now. As soon as their group arrived from Canada, Mary told the supervisor that she needed to take care of some personal business first, and promised she’d rejoin them soon. Knowing that she used to be a local, the supervisor agreed right away. He even asked their driver to take her to the cemetery after dropping the rest of them at the site. The pallid, dead brilliance of the winter sky had made her dizzy for a while. She wandered around. Nobody was there. All the tombstones were broken, and the graveyard was nothing but churned ground. Mary found some bones regurgitated by the earth, but, thankfully, they weren’t from her father’s grave.

  On the way back from the cemetery to the site, Mary cried. All of Bam had become one big burial ground. Every house they passed had turned to chunks of broken adobe, limed cement, and mortar blocks. When they reached her former neighborhood, she asked the driver to stop. As she stepped out of the SUV, her heart was crushed by the sight of her childhood house, turned now into a crumpled mound of mud bricks, the base of its walls mapping out where the rooms had once been.

  The most mortifying sight, however, was the trees; most had toppled and now lay beneath the rubble. Mary didn’t even want to enter the yard. But she did want to see if the palm tree her father had planted when she was born was still standing. She walked into the yard and toward the entrance to the basement, now clogged by debris. And there, near the entrance, half-uprooted, her palm tree still stood.

  She remembered how the tangerine trees bloomed every spring, even after the death of her mother, when Mary and her older sisters had paid requent visits to their father near the end of his life. They always found him sitting in the garden on a threadbare carpet he had spread beneath the palm. A brazier sat in front of him, and he held an opium pipe in his hand. As they approached, the scent of orange blossoms in the air gave way to the smell of opium. Her sisters, who, like Mary, were all living abroad, couldn’t hide their disappointment and scolded their baba, who had shrunk to the size of a child. “What kind of life is this, sitting here all day and smoking taryak?”

  “I have nothing better to do,” he said.

  Only Mary accepted their father as he was. She was always more forgiving toward him than her sisters were. Perhaps because he was more forgiving with Mary than with them. When they were children, he wouldn’t punish her in the same way he would punish her sisters for their wrongdoings. That aside, he had been right in what he said. If Mary’s mother had been alive, she would have kept him busy picking orange blossoms for her, which she would have made into jam to send over to Mary in Toronto and to Mary’s sisters in Phoenix, Arizona. Nevertheless, he always abandoned his pipe and opened his arms as soon as he saw Mary, his youngest child, approaching.

  “Maryam,” he’d call, using her Persian name. “Maryam Banoo.”

  To Mary, the house was the place where the memories of her father dwelled — a place she could always return to, even if all other doors were closed to her. The place where her palm tree still breathed. But after his death, the house sold quickly. Mary was the only one who hadn’t wanted to sell. Her objections made no sense to her sisters. They wanted their share of the money. There was no point, they said, in keeping the house after their parents had died.

  Mary stared at the barren yard. Everything was covered by a thick coat of dust. She could not have come out of her frozen state to go back to the car had she not seen the young man carrying turquoise prayer beads suddenly appear from what used to be the veranda, his long, straight hair falling on his dust-caked shoulders. The son of the new owner, Mary thought, watching him stumble on the broken stairs and then recover. The man looked at the ground, stirring the dust with his heels. He wore a long and loose robe like a sack, fastened with a rope at his waist. It had the same dull hue as the white-tinged sky, and the soft skin under the stubble on his face seemed burned.

  Grainy bits and pieces crunched beneath his feet as he ducked under the palm tree that sat at its awkward diagonal angle and walked toward Mary, grinning. Like Christ, his eyes were brown and suffering and he had an elongated face. Mary didn’t know him but she felt at ease when the man saluted her, bowing his head while turning the blue beads around and around in his hand. She then headed back to the car to ask the driver, who was honking impatiently, to wait a little longer. She couldn’t leave her childhood house before replanting the half-uprooted tree.

  * * *

  Later, amid the rescue effort, Mary, dazed and fatigued and revisiting memories of her palm tree, found herself hugging a bundle of the clean sheets used to wrap the dead. She was surrounded by medical equipment, along with dozens of blankets and cans of food that two helicopters had brought in earlier that day. She wiped her face on the bundle of sheets and got up. What was she doing? Oh yes, medication. Go out there, help that old man. She wondered if his daughter had been found. She took two syringes from a black plastic bag and walked outside, ready to give him another shot in case he fainted at the sight of his dead daughter.

  “Please be careful. She could be alive. Don’t injure her body,” the man screamed as the bulldozer moved forward.

  A blue-eyed Quebecois aid officer wanted Mary to ask the man if there was only one person in the house. His eyes were clear against the dry background of earth.

  “Yes,” the old man replied emphatically.

  On the seventh go, the bulldozer’s scoop turned up the girl’s body. Wailing, the old man ran toward the two aid workers, who took the body from among the rubble. He stood transfixed when he saw that she was naked. A man’s blunt arm was in the scoop, too. The old man’s face went as blank as his dead daughter’s, and his pupils widened into the same shape as hers. Mary’s knees began to tremble. The man stumbled forward, and Mary reached out and held him by the collar of his long khaki garment to prevent him from collapsing.

  Her own father had looked this way before his death. He had shivered like the leaves of Mary’s palm tree in the wind. “I’m sorry, Baba. We shouldn’t have taken our mother abroad,” Mary had choked.

  “It’s okay. The past is behind us all. Look into your fu
ture.”

  “I’ve talked to my sisters. We are going to come back here forever and live with you.” A sudden cough had shaken her father; she waited until it passed. “Here is better for me. I can work as a doctor. In Canada, I’m only a nurse.”

  “You can’t live here again. Your future is somewhere else. But your childhood stays here with me. My children have never left me. They are here and never grow up. You still roam in the rooms and run in the garden and hide in the basement.” He had taken her hand in his own; it was very soft, nearly translucent to the point that Mary could see blue veins knotted together under the skin.

  Mary knew she had gone too far. Her father had let her to go to Tehran to study medicine. Had he ever imagined she would emigrate to Canada after finishing her degree? He had thrown a big party for her graduation, but when she announced her plans, he’d left the party and hadn’t come back until it was over.

  Then Maryam had gone further still. She’d sponsored her sisters one by one and dragged them to Canada and pushed them through graduate school. Not being able to find a decent job in Tehran or to get admitted to a post-grad program, they had come back to Bam with bachelor’s degrees to putter around the house. Mary’s mother supported the idea of them leaving the country. Her sisters reported her words she’d told their baba over a long-distance call. “What kind of job are they going to get in this city? There’s nothing. This garden doesn’t need any more caretakers other than you. If they are idle all day, they will turn into spinsters, looking after their friends’ children! And what kind of husbands are they going to get in this city? Men below them with no university education. You want that?”