It’s as if they want to leave behind a trace, proof that it happened. This togetherness. This drinking tea. Just being. Here. It’s as if they want to hold on to the memory. But the notes are not really the memory. They are texts born of the memory. Its representation.
Within them there is an urge to turn this moment into the past and flee it, but there is also the urge to return to it, discover it, rediscover it.
They say Iranians are a nostalgic people. We wonder why memories follow us from the past into the present and further, why we insist on carrying them. Perhaps we fear that if we release them from ourselves, they might stop being true. Maybe we need to learn to create memories of the future too. Learn to remember things before they even happen. Learn to be nostalgic for the future.
Perhaps we are no more nostalgic than others but have come to develop a sense of urgency for personal archiving, for embodying the past. In the absence of official archives, in the presence, even, of systematized erasure of the past, the body and the unconscious become depositories for archives, hidden, dormant, lying in wait.
But what about archiving systematically, consciously? How to move toward it? How to encompass a time and a place in an archive that extends beyond the bodies of its people?
How to encompass the infinite on the page, between the covers of a book?
Will the archive ever be whole when we do not have access to the voices of the dead? To their thoughts and minds in the moments before death?
What is an archive when it cannot hold on to all that a moment is in the middle of a protest, the moment when someone throws tear gas and someone shouts and someone tastes the bitterness of the air on her tongue, when someone touches the arm of a stranger and pulls him into an alley, when someone hears a gunshot but doesn’t know what it is or where it has come from, the moment when everything goes black, the moment when everything becomes silent?
What is an archive when it cannot hold on to all that a moment is in the middle of the stillness of solitary confinement?
What is an archive when it cannot hold on to any moment in its totality?
What is an archive of an era, of a people?
How should the archive be compiled? How should the archive be organized?
What will the archive teach us?
She looks for the note about the map and the language among the older scraps of paper. She looks for it and cannot find it. She finds the middle one, once again follows the trail her eyes followed earlier. She finds the second and third and fourth and fifth notes, a chain of paper and words that runs to the coffee-covered scrap at the edge of the table, but there is no trace of the note about the map and the language. She wants to remove the glass top and search for it. The women call for her as they go down the stairs. The server arrives at the table with a new group. She takes one last look and walks away.
The red pins on the map are all gone. She also notices an old sliding blade with a wooden frame suspended over the staircase. It looks as if it has been lifted from a guillotine. She hadn’t seen it on the way up. Downstairs, in the hallway that leads to the café door, stands an old telephone booth with the glass panes removed. The old machine is missing a few keys and looks scratched as if by coins and pens and knives. Old newspapers wallpaper the upper part of the café’s cement walls. The women have already paid and are waiting outside. On the sidewalk, a kitten is meowing for her food.
She asks the man standing behind the counter about the red pins on the map. Without even looking up from the cucumber-mint sekanjabin he’s mixing, he says, What pins? Take a look at our store sign. Have a wonderful night.
Stepping out, she crouches to pet the kitten and looks up at the sign: “KaféKa,” spelled out in wood with red pins. She wants to go back in and check the upstairs map again, but the door to the café is closed, the curtains are already drawn, and the lights are turning off inside, one after another.
corpse (19)
missing links
How to bear the void?
How to bear loss? On one’s skin, on one’s hair, on one’s lashes, on one’s nails, on one’s nerves, on one’s cells, in one’s heart, on one’s tongue?
How to translate loss into language?
How to survive loss?
What is at the center of loss? At the center of life after loss? How much time needs to pass before mourning can become healing can become living?
How can we walk the distance that separates you and me, you and us, who became one and the Other because a shared experience exploded into an abyss of unshared history, memory, story?
How can we walk the distance and arrive on the other side, alive and generous, capable of light and love, reaching in and reaching out with a touch and a tone that can make joy and be joy?
Are we, as we walk, leaving the dead behind?
Are we leaving ourselves behind?
What about guilt?
What about shame?
Mine and yours?
Ours and yours?
How to bear memory?
How to bear witness?
And what about witnessing, remembering, documenting, and archiving dreams? How to embrace and represent the endlessness of dreams? How to word the world of the unconscious and the subconscious? Defined by its very own rules. Defying all perimeters of storytelling and meaning-making. Accessible only through forever-imperfect interpretations/translations. As yet indecipherable.
The moon is full, and on the terrace she has spread the white-and-pink floral cushions on the black metal chairs and a few cushions of rough, nomadic-style fabric on the stone floor. The moon is full up there in the sky, and the light of the few stars has faded in the face of its light, and some have filled their glasses with vodka and fruit juice, and some have brought the wine bottles and their glasses and plates and bowls of mezes outside to the table, which is covered by a tablecloth that was once the fresh green of grass but, after weeks left out under the blazing sun and in the dust from construction sites nearby, has faded to the green of the pistachios in the bowl of mixed nuts, and yet it has kept its dark-blue dots, dots that are the color of the dark blue of the city night, the city on less polluted nights, on nights like tonight. The moon is full up there in the sky, and the tall metallic crane has fixed its leg in the earth of the huge pit where the once-upon-a-time villa stood, off the main alley to the right of the building, and the crane has risen high, has reached its arm out to touch the round face of the lover moon that is sitting up there in the sky all naked and stretched out, while the trees and the lights and the dust and the air and the noise of the city swoon over the songs from the iPod in the living room coming through the wide-open French doors to where they all are now settling. “I feel I know you / I don’t know how / I don’t know why …” “We spent some time doing one thing or another / Never really mattered as long as we were together …” “My home has no heart / My home has no veins / If you try to break in / It bleeds with no stains …” “T’as pas le droit d’avoir moins mal que moi / Si j’ai mal, c’est pas normal que toi, tu n’aies pas mal …” “Everybody wants to rule the world / It’s my own design / It’s my own remorse …”
The moon is full up there in the sky, shining a frame around their togetherness with one another and with the plants, with the metal chairs and the table covered with glasses, small bowls of cherries and chips and cucumber-yogurt dip and nuts, an ashtray shaped like a cockroach, a tiny candleholder, and two iPhones. The cat appears out of nowhere, appears whenever it wishes, coming to this house to be fed, to lie on her couch, to interrupt the movement of her fingers on the laptop, to be caressed by those very fingers. The cat appears through the bamboo that lines the short terrace wall, and a light goes off in a window of the villa overlooking the courtyard and terrace only to go on in another window, and the cat swishes past the legs of the woman who calls to it lovingly and the legs of the woman who fears animals and the legs of the man sipping his vodka nonchalantly and the legs of the man discussing the latest art auction and th
e legs of the woman listening closely to him, finally finding there the familiar scent it is looking for and curling up with a purr on her lap, on the cushions on the floor, and letting its neck be stroked.
The moon is full, and the man, whom she doesn’t know, who has come with a friend, whom she knows is a wonderful artist but who is so full of himself, heatedly discusses the auctions and the pieces and the prices, the hands behind the scenes and the money laundering, the fake exports and the fake artworks, the figures and the names and the mix of colors and the strokes of brushes, the image of a nightmare, the room with a view of Dali’s surrealism, the shades of a woman’s intestines, the broken engine of an old Beetle, the souls’ shadows, the sewn eyes, the shattered statues, the face of the sun on an ochre wall, the coins tossed in a tar case on some Mediterranean sidewalk, black ink afloat on white paper, disrupting and concealing the image of the nightmare.
The moon is full, and the woman listens carefully, trying to memorize his words, the names and the banknotes, thinking she needs to ask the friend who has brought this man to arrange a meeting so they can talk art and statues, pretending she is listening not to him but to the water rising from the small fountain in another corner of the terrace, looking at the cat’s eyes and the hands and fingers and shoes and legs of the men and women all around and the light spilling over the terrace from inside the apartment. She smooths the white dress floating around her body and runs a hand through her short black hair and stares at the watch on the wrist of the man she has been desiring, the hand holding a digital camera, the fingers changing the settings, the eyes hidden behind the lens through which he’s looking at the moon, the moon high up there in the sky looking down on them. The light of the upstairs neighbor goes off, and the playlist comes to an end, and she hands the cat to the woman next to her, and she gets up and takes a few dirty plates and an empty bowl and her glass of wine to the kitchen.
She cleans up a bit, brews tea for later, puts together a tray of sweets and fruits, and prepares to go back outside. At the threshold, she almost bumps into him as he comes inside to put down his camera and go to the bathroom, and she takes in the scent of his cologne, and he asks her if she needs help, and she tastes the weight of her own breath and hears the muscles of his body, and the second is only a second but it’s longer than a second, and she says he can take the sweets and fruits outside, and he gives her his camera, and she sends him out again. She goes to the bathroom to pee but forgets and instead splashes water on her face and puts on more red lipstick, and, before heading back to the terrace, she chooses another playlist and turns the volume down a bit and takes the poetry book from the shelf and her wine glass from the kitchen counter and walks out under the moon, so full up there in the night sky, slowly moving farther and farther away from the crane.
If, in the city, “the established symbolic order is the ‘Law of the Father,’ and it is discovered to be not only repressive but false, distorted by the illogicality of bias, then the new symbolic order is to be a ‘woman’s language,’ corresponding to a woman’s desire” (Hejinian 2009).
A woman’s language. Spiral. Sprawling. Moving in and out. Meandering toward and away. Breathing in and breathing out. As if a jellyfish expanding and contracting to move its body forward through rough water.
A woman’s language, like a woman’s body. A woman’s language, like a woman’s desire. Opening to embrace and nurture an Other in its womb and thereafter. Closing only to hold on to and defend an Other or the self against the bodies of intruders. Exploding into formation within a constellation of past, present, and future female (hi)stories, which the official, rigid, patriarchal narrative intends to erase and forget. Weaving its definition with threads of a female lineage that the power-hungry, male-dominated hierarchy hopes to undermine and disrupt.
A woman’s language speaking the narrative of a city that does not abide or end, a language embracing openness, attempting to continually redefine its openness.
She gives the book to the woman petting the cat, who hands the cat to the man sliding a cigarette from a pack, who holds the cat only for a second then puts it down on the floor to light his cigarette. The cat meows and walks quietly toward the bamboo to hide in its shadow. She fills her glass and swallows half the wine as she sits down again on the cushions on the floor, feeling the moon fulling and her body fooling around, wanting the man she wants to follow her bare feet, her ankles, and what of her legs he can see at the hem of her dress, wanting him to take in her scent, see the corner of her mouth curving into a smile as she takes a stealthy look at his lips, his beard, his neck, wanting the artist and whomever he’s talking with to shut up, wanting the woman to whom she handed the book of poetry to open it and read a poem for divination, for the metal wings of the butterflies resting on the metal vines erected in the jasmine pot, for the tiny feet of the ceramic lizards and turtles strolling among the pots of geraniums, peonies, and rosemary, to read a poem for divination, for the gestures of the night, for light, for flesh, for breath. She hushes everyone and asks them to say the prayer and asks her to open the book, and she sips the rest of the wine and waits for the poem, feeling the touch of his gaze on her fingers around the wine glass. She reads the poem, and the moon reaches for the peak of the blue darkness of the sky, for its highness, for its vastness, reaches for the life, for the life and death in their bodies down below, and the cat jumps sleepily over the wall behind the bamboo and wanders into the alley toward the neighbor’s house, the house she calls home, as they begin to repeat the final line of the poem.
They drink freshly brewed tea, some discussing the poem and others not caring, until some get up to help clean off the table, and they all head inside, and the playlist has long since ended. They invade the living room’s silence with their voices, moving from the outside that is the terrace to the inside that is the apartment and soon to the outside that is the alley then into their cars, toward their homes. Hope-to-see-you-soons and promises for another gathering take only as long as it takes to grab the keys, to cover up with manteaus and scarves, to put kisses on cheeks, and when the friend and the artist so full of himself step toward her to say good-night, she rushes to ask the artist if they can meet to discuss the auctions and artworks, but he says he is going abroad in two days for a show and vacation, he’s sorry but he’s too busy until then, and she wants to push him to make this happen, but the body of the man she wants badly tonight comes closer to hers in a frame of late-night wine and tea breath, and he embraces her and says he hopes to see her soon, and she forgets about the artist leaving for a show and vacation and the friend who brought him, and the two are out the door in no time, and she wonders whether she should ask the man she wants tonight to stay, but she doesn’t find the right words, and then he too leaves with another friend, who is giving him a ride back home.
And a second is not just a second, and fifteen minutes is the time it takes her to empty the bowls and organize what is left of the food in the fridge and put the plates and glasses in the sink and bring the cushions in and turn off the lights and lie down on the couch and light a cigarette in the light of the moon, whose round body is not in the frame of any glass panes anymore but whose light is still seeping into the living room, spreading its warmth over the lion and the gazelles and the birds of the hand-woven carpet that covers a patch of the stone floor. And fifteen minutes is the time it takes her to realize she cannot wait for him and for the soon he spoke of.
She picks up her phone and texts him and asks whether now is soon enough, gets a text back immediately that says it is already beyond soon, that says he shouldn’t have left, that says he should’ve kissed her before leaving, that says he’ll make up for it, that asks how should he make up for it, and she texts him back and says what about trying to make up for it now, gets a text back that says now is the time to try to make up for it, that says he’s just gotten home but that he’ll call a cab and be on his way, don’t fall asleep and I’ll be there soon, and she texts him back and says she’
ll be waiting.
And fifteen minutes double is the time it takes him to call a cab and wait for it and ride again through the very same streets only now in the reverse direction, for her to wait for him on the couch with another cigarette and another, telling herself she needs to write down what the artist was saying, the names, the titles, the prices, before she forgets, but instead she rolls a joint, and her index finger fumbles with her phone’s keypad, and she rereads his messages and gets new ones that say he’ll be there in ten minutes, in five minutes, in two minutes, can’t wait to get there. She goes to the bathroom and freshens up and opens the French doors, all of them wide open once again. And after fifteen minutes double plus a few more, the lobby man buzzes her to let her know, in a sleepy voice filled with disapproving question marks he tries to hide, that she has a guest, and she opens the apartment door to him.
Corpse (3)
Age: 37
Gender: Female
Occupation: Manager at a company, university student majoring in law
Date of Death: 7 Mehr 1390 / 29 September 2011
Place of Death: Tehran
Time of Death: Morning, exact time unknown
Cause of Death: Suicide with pills
Date of Burial: Exact date unknown, a few days after death
Place of Burial: Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran
Rumors of her arrest. Along with her beloved and their mutual friend, a human-rights activist. The rumors are later denied. She was not arrested.
The two men were. Along with another friend.
Those who speak of her arrest speak of the psychological pressure of interrogation, of her being threatened, of her being forced into false confessions on TV, of her fear. Her beloved commits suicide twenty-four days after his release.
She, almost a month after that. On a Thursday. The day of their trysts.
trans(re)lating house one Page 4