trans(re)lating house one

by Poupeh Missaghi

  “Intellectual life—artistic life—in Mexico is very active, as are all aspects of life in Mexico. Mexico is a tremendously vital country, despite the fact that, paradoxically, it’s the country where death is the most present. Perhaps being that vital is what keeps death so close” (Bolaño 2009).

  They all get into her car. The friend at the wheel. She in the front seat. The men in the back seat. The thinking angel too. Covered in bubble wrap just to be safe, especially her wings. She sits on the lap of one of the men. Another makes them wait as he goes to grab something from his house a few blocks away. They sit and watch the people going in, coming out. He comes back. Inside the car, he reveals the already-rolled joints. Another drinks from a plastic water bottle filled with vodka and offers it to others. Her friend starts the car and begins to drive. She, in the passenger seat, looks out the window.

  Meandering through the streets, they pass the joint around. The vodka too. She does not drink. She looks at the cars around them in traffic. When they arrive at the address they were given, the other group of friends is not yet there. They wait. The men bare the thinking angel. Look at her. Touch her. The angel sits silently, her wings, made from the feathers of a once-living crow, weighing on her papier-mâché body, her long fingers poised seductively in the air around her knees.

  Others arrive. They leave the angel in the car and, with the other group, walk toward the alley. It is almost empty. Friday evening. Businesses closed. An old woman taking garbage out to the garbage can, leaving some food next to it for cats. A few men idling around the corner. She wants the group to move faster, but they take their time and don’t care. Introductions. Handshakes. Kisses on cheeks.

  In the middle of the alley. A house. No signs. The door closed. Half metal and half glass, covered with vertical bars. Narrow. Someone rings the bell.

  Someone opens the door and welcomes them in. Inside is a narrow hallway immediately slashed by a flight of floating stairs, which begins at the end of the hallway and ascends in the direction of the door, the weight of its slanting plaster soffit pushing into the newcomers’ faces. Bodies move around. Someone hands her a pamphlet, the program for the night. She glances at it without really reading. A door to the right opening toward other doors opening into large and small rooms. A door at the end of the hallway leading to a balcony and a courtyard. On the right wall, a small sign that reads, “Why should we leave? Where are we going? I am staying. Come.” She stares at the words. From a hidden projector, the face of a young woman appears on the soffit of the staircase, appears and disappears, comes to life only to fade again.

  The woman has a voice. She says things. Her features move. Her voice is silenced. She reads the sign again, “I am here to stay. Let me embrace you. Stay with me.” People ascend and descend the stairs on top of her face.

  “Wars, revolutions, military coups, and repressive regimes are among the circumstances that may force the formerly settled and sedate to lead picaresque and disjointed lives,” pushing them to turn into wandering characters who, due to psychological, historical, and literary or aesthetic reasons, “are little inclined to see themselves as the protagonists of life stories” (Andrews 2014).

  She and her friend walk into the room on the right. An installation in the middle. Boxes draped in fabric. A television on top of the boxes. A man bangs into her as he leaves the room. He doesn’t say a word. She stands to one side. Ghostly words flash on the screen.

  The television is old. She looks at the guide in her hand. The lights are dim. She doesn’t really understand the guide. Mumbling voices. A young woman’s wafting perfume. She walks back to the hallway and looks for familiar faces. An old chest in the hallway that smells of aged wood, heavy with the presence of an old woman who puts things in, takes things out. She and her friend walk out to the balcony. Their feet go beyond the threshold of the hallway and the heads of the people outside suddenly turn toward them.

  Curious. Questions in their eyes. Suspicious. Colorful lanterns hang overhead from a clothesline. A few light bulbs shine in the trees in the garden below the balcony. She listens, tucking her scarf back away from her ear. She listens, hoping to pick up some names, some answers, find out what the place is, who the people are. Find out why they were told to come here.

  I want to take her aside and talk to her, tell her some things, prepare her for the moment of revelation to come. I want to talk to her about how cities are spilling over their historical containers, becoming fluid amalgamations of the good and evil of various cities and landscapes, real and fictional, local and global, past and present and future, natural and artificial, composites of the heavens and the underworlds. I want to speak to her about how in these cities that are sites of our modern nomadic lives, those who become detectives in search of answers can only fail and arrive at more questions. And I want to say that in their failures, they are the new flaneurs of our exploded, decentered world, setting out on searches they’ll dedicate their lives to, but becoming so enamored with life or drowned by waves of (hi)stories that they’ll never arrive at what they intended to find. And I want to point out to her that in their loose wanderings, they come to be seen as criminals, too, displaced by the interrelations of their lives and the lives of the cities. And I want to remind her that even so, it’s all O.K., that the only thing that really matters is to keep wandering, to keep searching, to keep asking questions, to become the questions, to aim to create not a map that leads to arrival, but a map for getting lost deep in the city.

  I want to embrace her and hum a calming melody in her ear, because I know, and you might know, too, that in these cities, the fates of the ones searching might not be very different from the fates of the ones they search for.

  corpse (55)

  sherbet to drink

  flower petals

  tears to shed

  Corpse (10)

  Age: Unknown

  Gender: Male

  Occupation: University student

  Date of Death: 25 Khordad 1388 / 15 June 2009

  Place of Death: University of Tehran dormitories, Amirabad Street, Tehran

  Time of Death: Early hours of the day

  Cause of Death: Several blows to the head and neck by electric baton

  Date of Burial: 25 Khordad 1388 / 15 June 2009

  Place of Burial: Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Tehran

  In front of the gate to campus. Nighttime.

  Police, special forces, paramilitary forces, plainclothes forces.

  Unrest. Slogans.

  Students stand. Forces try to enter. Students throw rocks. Forces throw rocks and tear gas.

  Fire.

  In the dorms, students get ready for bed.

  It is illegal for police, army, and other military and paramilitary forces to enter campus grounds. They enter. It is unclear who ordered the entry.

  Attackers in plain clothes. Students in plain clothes.

  Attackers in uniform.

  Fire here and there.

  Everyone runs.

  Someone films. Students run. Attackers curse and beat them. In front of the library. Fires burn. Bones break. Sounds of bullets and rocks. Tear gas. The special forces beat students. The plainclothes forces ask them to stop. They curse. They arrest. They call out the names of Shiite imams. They film.

  Inside the building, they break glass. They break locks. They punch holes in the doors. They have axes and daggers. They have guns. They have electric batons. They force students to lie on the floor. They touch them. To feel for knives and guns, they say. They search through possessions. They spread papers all around. They shuffle through. They break heads and hands. They stand in two lines along the hallway walls. They force students to run. To run even with broken bones. They thrust their weapons out over their shields. They beat students.

  They threaten to hang. They threaten to rape.

  They arrest students. Push them outside the building. Drag them on the floor. Beat them. Someone asks them to stop. They curse. They hold guns over stu
dents’ heads and bodies. Someone orders them to film. To kill.

  Someone calls the students spoiled. Someone orders them to lie down. Students resist. They pile students up in a corner like meat, hands and legs and heads crumpled over one another. In pajamas, bare chests, bare feet. They film the scene. They take pictures. They take students away. They beat them. Students shout and ask them to stop. They beat them. Students shout and ask why.

  Some students are left there. Wounded. Unaided. Watched over so they can’t get away. Left to the darkness.

  Others are taken to secret detention centers. One in a basement said to belong to the interior ministry. Students are tortured. Humiliated when given water or food. Later, the links to the sources claiming documentation of the torture redirect to a page that cannot be found anymore.

  Electric batons are used. Electric batons are used on heads and necks.

  Students are killed. Five are confirmed dead. He is one.

  No official reports on the deaths. Only the wounded are counted.

  The ones who survive are handed clean clothes before they leave detention. Concerns about how they’ll look when they step out.

  Papers spread all around in dorm rooms and hallways. Broken chairs. Torn clothes. Bloodstains. Broken plates and cups. Bullet holes. Black ash. Torn books. Overturned beds. Overturned bookshelves. Unpaired slippers and shoes. A sticker that says “change” half torn off the door.

  Students gone. Students idling. Students wondering. He and the other four students are buried secretly, without the permission or presence of their families. The families are prohibited from speaking. The families are prohibited from holding funerals.

  All the data about the deaths compiled here can be found online (or, in some cases, they could be once, before they disappeared in the rabbit hole of the internet). This is not an attempt at investigative journalism; it is about using what any citizen can find, what has already been made available, by sources from both sides, journalists, citizen journalists, human rights organizations, families, friends, and others, in the form of texts, videos, audio files, photographs, et cetera. It’s about being curious, wanting to know, and setting out on the journey of the search.

  Re: the questions.

  The ability or failure to ask questions about things that exist, have existed, things that happen, have happened, about their truth, has “something to do with the ability to make and hear cries for help…. Questions and their assumed interlocutors thus open up a whole world beyond curiosity and research, leading us fairly directly to conditions necessary for human beings inhabiting a shared world” (Stauffer 2015, discussing Emmanuel Levinas). “Research takes form as a question, and a question addresses itself to others. That is an existential as much as an ethical truth” (Stauffer 2015).

  Questions are there from the very beginning. They prompt the search; they prompt the writing. And they shall remain until the very end, even beyond. Though they will change and new questions will keep being born throughout the process. As if each page is a layer removed, a layer closer to the core, though not necessarily leading to anything.

  It is only by way of questions that the text can be transformed into a body that offers its wounds for examination and treatment, opening itself up and inviting the writer and readers into its vulnerability and fragility.

  Without the questions, the book would become a manual and a postcard, a goddess posing for cameras, too pleased with her limbs and her arms, with her words and her voice. It might imagine itself as the authoritative text, the representative text, the text that will leave its mark on the literary landscape of this place and time. Failing to bare its gaps and failures to readers, growing too sure of itself, a closed text will suffer illusions of grandeur, will mimic the very forces it has set forth to expose and oppose.

  “I don’t know which is the real life except that the dream life is of course the most real” (Cixous 1993).

  “That frontier between the unconscious and preconscious—the frontier of dreaming—is the metaphorical place of that distinctively human conversation with ourselves in which raw experience that simply is-what-it-is … is transformed into experience that has accrued to itself a modicum of the quality of ‘I-ness’” (Ogden 2001). “The internal conversation known as dreaming is no more an event limited to the hours of sleep than the existence of stars is limited to the hours of darkness. Stars become visible at night when their luminosity is no longer concealed by the glare of the sun. Similarly, the conversation with ourselves that in sleep we experience as dreaming continues unabated and undiluted in our waking life” (Ogden 2001).

  corpse (56)

  hushed ceremonies

  prayers

  videos

  The people on the balcony are smoking. A round copper tray of now-empty tea glasses and a light-green crystal bowl of sugar cubes are on the table, which is the cut trunk of a once-living tree. Silence suddenly, as if their presence, now too long, is an intrusion. They walk back in, up the stairs.

  Rooms in front and to the right. A crowd waiting to come down the stairs. A woman hands her an envelope. The silent words of the face projected on the staircase reverberate in her head: Where are you going? Come. She steps into the room to the right. Seats in profile. Rows and rows. A few people sit and watch something on the far-right wall. She looks. A journey. A train moving on the wall. The doors of a train car opening and closing. Music.

  People look her up and down.

  She sits down, constantly turning her attention from the video to the door and the people coming in or leaving in the middle of the short film that plays on repeat. Some sit on the floor. The scent of incense permeates the room. She steps into the train car. Sits in front of a stranger. The train speeds out of a station. They stare into one another. The man wears the beard of an intellectual or an artist. The train moves into a tunnel, and she becomes the ghost of a burlesque dancer reflected on the window behind her, and he becomes the ghost of a sculptor reflected on the window behind him, and the train moves forward in the darkness of the tunnel, and she dances, and he chisels, and she touches him, and he touches her, and they breathe in one another, away from the eyes of the audience, and when the train comes out on the other side, the ghosts of the dancer and the sculptor have separated and disappeared, but their footprints remain on the windows, and she and the man are still sitting, staring into and beyond the windows and each other.

  The train arrives at a station. She leaves the train car. She leaves the room. Gives her seat to a young man.

  She clutches the letter she has been handed. Puts it in her purse. She walks through the door of another room. An old man wearing pajamas sits in a faded burgundy armchair by the door as if he were a wax figure guarding the entrance. Staring into an unknown reality beyond him or trapped forever in the clock and the books and the candleholders on the shelf before him. A cat mews and moves around the feet of his chair. An alarm clock sounds. She hesitates for a moment, wondering if the room is off-limits, but sees others sitting on the couch on the far side. She mumbles a hello to the old man and hesitantly steps in. On the side table, several newspapers. On the coffee table, dozens of envelopes. All similar to the one she has just put into her purse. A woman picks one randomly and asks her if she wants it. She reaches into her purse.

  Her envelope is still there. She shakes her head no. Someone laughs downstairs in the courtyard. A man gets up from a chair in front of a laptop and hands the headphones to another man who has been waiting behind him. He gets up. He sits down. A video she cannot see runs on the laptop screen. She turns around and glances at the old man. His cigarette ash falls into the crystal ashtray on the arm of the chair. The cat jumps on his lap.

  In another corner of the room, suitcases piled on top of one another up to the ceiling. Old. Heavy. Dozens. A few scattered around. She goes and stands next to them. Looks inside one that is open on the floor. Clothes. Photo albums. Books. A few personal items. A woman brings in more items and sits by the suitcase. Small
bags of roasted nuts and sweets. A few clay figurines. A folded map. More books and photo albums. More personal items. She puts a few things in, takes a few out, rearranges others. She opens the albums and leafs through. Takes a few photographs out of one. Tears a few. Puts kisses on one. Throws the album aside. Puts the photos she took out in a folder and places it in the pocket of the suitcase. A few handwritten notes too. The map too. She goes through the books. She reads titles. Smells pages. Reads a few words. She takes a few pieces of clothing out. She puts a few more books in. The cat moves among the clothes, jumps inside the suitcase, lies comfortably over the woman’s life, as if to safeguard the objects from being devoured by the suitcase. The cat mews constantly. She stares at the cat. She stares at the figurines still lying on the floor outside the suitcase. A mother and child. A thinking angel. Covered with bubble wrap.

  For protection. To keep from breaking. She puts them inside the suitcase. The cat rearranges its body. She stares at the cat, at the clothes, the albums, the books, the figurines. The old man smokes his cigarette. The old man doesn’t look at her or the cat. Someone comes in with a tray of cold water. The woman packing takes a glass. The cat jumps out of the suitcase and follows the woman with the tray out of the room. She drinks the water. Takes everything out of the suitcase. Arranges everything patiently next to the wall of suitcases. She crawls into the suitcase. In the shape of a fetus, she fits in its confines. A man walks toward her and the suitcase. He crouches down. He halfway closes the top. The column of suitcases piled on top of one another suddenly crumbles. The suitcases open from inside. One after another. A man, a woman, a child, a cat, a woman, a child, a man, a woman, a woman, an angel, a mother, a child, a woman, an angel step out of them. One after another. They all gather around the half-closed suitcase next to the man and the woman. The cat comes back to the room, finds its way to the suitcase, striding through the objects nearby, the figurines left behind, the bodies amassing. The cat scratches the suitcase. As if to mark it. To sanctify it. The bodies sit cross-legged in a circle on the carpet and keep vigil around the suitcase embracing the fetus woman. Still standing to the side, she hears them humming.