by Salar Abdoh
Those domes were divine things—mosque interiors of earth color and turquoise. Her ancient house, right off Sheikh Hadi Street, a fifteen-minute walk from my own place, was built around a shallow pool. They didn’t make them like this anymore. This was old Tehran. Away from the soulless cubes of the nouveau riche north of the city. She could afford to live anywhere now but she stayed put, faithful to the house that had been handed down to her by her ancestors.
She came into the living room carrying a tray of tea and pastries. It was raining and just before coming here I had finally finished reading through the war diaries of the martyr Moalem in Syria. Moalem’s last sentence: God willing, death will be as perfect as a glove. I remembered the two of us in the red house. Moalem shelving his angry prostate and his wheezing chest for those minutes so he could defend nothing and no one, shouting for me to clock my rounds. How did one have a death as “perfect” as a glove?
Miss Homa had something to say about that. That was the reason I was here.
“You will take me with you over there next time. It is where I wish to die.”
“But you may not die, Miss Homa. You may live yet for a long time. Imagine all the amazing art you’ll produce.”
She looked at me with a mixture of pity and annoyance. “Art?”
“Yes, it’s what you do, after all.”
She regarded her domes. In other rooms there were other canvases that spoke of other decades. Her lifelike, almost photographic portraits of personalities from the end of the last regime and the beginning of the revolution now brought considerable sums in the art houses of Europe. I had gotten a taste of all that right here in Tehran and across the Gulf, where young Arab princes showed off who could bid higher for her newest works, the domes. It was a world so far from where I’d just come from that even now I felt I was coming apart at the seams. I had sat in auctions in Dubai and Sharjah and watched money move like a virus. Everybody was dirty and my assignment was to be present and write about the “quality” of the works of art. A lot of the people in those rooms who bid on the art would be in other rooms the next day sending money for one side or the other fighting in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Yemen. And so it endured, the imposture. I’d get invited to dinners at restaurants on Sheikh Zayed Road where they brought lobster and sushi not on trays but in crates the size of golf carts. I was a part of it. A small cog in the pageant of Middle Eastern excess and injustice.
They, the billionaires, had made a racket out of the twilight of Miss Homa’s life. Yet the money she made for herself went to nursing homes, to orphanages, to hospitals, to teaching Afghan kids how to read and write, to war veterans, to families of martyrs. There was good in the world and she was it. Had I been a Tolstoy I would have put it down in a sprawling, all-encompassing book that took in the kitchen sink in this grand, fucked-up country and the countries around it. But I wasn’t a Tolstoy, rather just another scribbler—as my mother called me—trying to make ends meet.
“Did you know,” Miss Homa said, “I hired an accountant for exactly three weeks to help me give away all the money I’ve been making? I found out he was already stealing from me. Now I do all of it myself. It takes more of my time than the painting. I spend more time over ledgers and lawyers than anything. I told my studio assistants to go away and not come back. I don’t paint anymore. I am finished.”
I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say. I tried cautiously, “It’s life, Miss Homa.”
“An ugly life. But I’ve lived it a long time. I want to end it.”
“End it?”
“And you are going to help me.”
* * *
The latest grotesque shopping mall on Hafez Avenue was between Miss Homa’s place and my own. There were several new restaurants on its sixth floor. After that last bout of mock interrogation with H, I’d gone there on my barbecued-liver binge. Now it was kebab that I wanted in copious quantities. The favor Miss Homa had asked of me was beyond the pale, and I had no idea what to do with it.
So I ate. Like Saeed and I ate in East Africa all those years ago. Around us there was unbearable hunger, but all we really cared to do at the Iranian Red Crescent headquarters was stuff ourselves and keep away the famine. Twenty years later in Iraq it was the reverse: it was the scale of the food waste that was a mind fuck. The mokeb casually threw away enormous amounts of food. The kind of absurd waste that only an army is capable of. Sometimes when a village was freed from the enemy and I stood in the back of the truck and distributed goods to the villagers, I imagined I was making up for all the discarded food in Arabia. But you cannot make up for that kind of waste. It was another kind of illness that went untreated because everything was ill. It wasn’t just the Americans who wasted. We all did. We all were guilty.
“I was wondering how the food is here.”
Mafiha spoke. My boss! Atia’s “husband.”
He was the last person I’d expected to see. The kebab lodged in my throat, I waited for him to speak.
“Atia told me you were back in the city.”
“I guess now that she’s your wife she reports to you. Chief!”
“Why do you not like me, Saleh?”
“I like you well enough, chief.”
“Then come back to the Citizen. The art section awaits.”
“You only want me there because Miss Homa talks to me and doesn’t talk to you.”
“Speaking of which, you just came from her place, didn’t you?”
“I would say: ‘Can’t a man go anywhere in this town without being followed?’ But the answer of course is no.”
“What does she want from you?”
“It’s our business.”
His baby-bulldog face went green a bit. He had a full mane of graying hair he was proud of, always running a hand through it like one of those rock stars you see on foreign TV.
“Then don’t call Atia again.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s my wife and this is the Middle East.”
“Oh. I thought this was Norway. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be so foolish, Saleh. Atia begged me to come talk to you—”
I didn’t let him finish. “Oh? Begged you to come talk to me? Here in this restaurant? And just after having me followed from Miss Homa’s house?”
“We’ll get to Miss Homa another time. For now I want you to come back to the Citizen. It’s a promise I made to Atia and I’m sticking to it.”
I thought of Atia and my anger turned soft. Then the softness became unmanageable. I relented. “What if I said yes?”
“Great! You can start tomorrow.”
“Can I eat in peace now?”
“Of course not. You’ve left a trail of angry people by disappearing like you did. As usual! I don’t know why you do these things. But there are two gentlemen here to see you besides me.” He pointed outside to the pizza house across the sixth-floor hall of the mall.
I was too blind to discern the faces of anyone from that distance. But I already suspected who they were. I had begun referring to them as Ajooj and Majooj. The TV writers for the Abbas: Sniper Legend and Fist of God television series.
* * *
“You owe us twelve episodes of Abbas. And starting next week. The public demands it!”
Ajooj and Majooj were types from central casting and they were inseparable.
Their ponytails were precisely the same length. Both were stocky in a squarish sort of way, but they comported themselves like art house film connoisseurs who had to write for TV in order to get by in expensive Tehran. They wore “natural” loose fabric clothes, always white, that made them look like vegetarian weightlifters, and they sent their kids to the same expensive after-school language programs. In other words, they had everything figured out, except that they didn’t know how to bring the ratings up for the Abbas television show. I could not easily tell the two of them apart, unless they began to talk. “Italian” Ajooj had spent a few years studying in Milan and faked a preposterous Latin acc
ent while speaking Persian.
I’d known these guys from our university days. They’d gone the way of anyone who has too little talent and studies film—they’d started a film festival business. But then bigger fish had taken that racket out of their hands and they’d signed on with Iranian television, where you could write about love triangles with zero sex from one season to the next and get paid for it. The Abbas serial was their big break. They’d ridden its crest this far and they didn’t want to lose it so quickly.
I almost wished Mafiha had stuck around. Compared to these guys, at least he understood his own corruption; he took himself with a grain of salt. One time I’d asked him why all of a sudden he was writing antiwar poems and he’d said, with a perfectly straight face: “Because women like it and men can’t argue with it.” Now this very same guy, an editor in chief and art collector, Mafiha the purveyor of peace, was the guy who had my Atia. While I was left with hate e-mails and messages from pacifists who believed that even so much as reporting from Iraq and Syria was tantamount to murder and that I should be blacklisted from the peace-loving literary community.
I said to Ajooj and Majooj, “Did I sign anything that says I owe twelve episodes of Abbas?”
Italian Ajooj spoke: “No, but you will. Because State TV will be at your door and you know what that means.”
“Well, it won’t be so good for you guys either.”
Majooj: “Just write us a few episodes. Give us some bullet points. It’s all we ask.”
“I’ll have to go back to Iraq for research then.”
Ajooj: “You’re not going anywhere. You just came from there. You’ve had all the research you need.”
“What if I don’t write so well?”
Ajooj: “Then I’ll personally bash your head in for creating a character you can’t sustain. The whole country will hate you for it. We’ll make you the most hated writer in Iran. The guy who turned the Abbas show to shit.”
“I just wrote a pilot for it. I never meant for it to get so out of hand.”
Majooj: “But now it has. And the O Channel demands that the show go on. You’re responsible for it.”
I stared at my hands. Once again, I could not get these thoughts out of my head: My brothers in Syria and Iraq had died so these guys could have their hit TV show. So Mafiha could be feted in Frankfurt and Amsterdam for writing “with a human voice.” So Dodonge could publish a book about himself as “the true voice of Syria.” And, finally, so that Saeed could chauffeur Europeans around for their weekend documentaries about combat.
I wanted out.
8
Nevertheless, within a few weeks the show’s ratings were already up. Ajooj and Majooj turned out to be better writing partners than I thought. I would give them the most absurd ideas with just a few pointers and they would run with it. Suddenly the entire machinery of State TV and the O Channel were pulled into gear so that episodes could be filmed on the fly and shown as early as two weeks later. It was a record-breaking production time and Ajooj and Majooj were the faces behind the resurrection of the Abbas show.
Strangely, I had not heard from H, but he was certainly on my mind. So I took the show back to 2006, just as H wanted: The Americans are all over Iraq and Abbas the sniper legend, who is called into action from one of his many retirements, decides to give them a bloody nose for their perfidy in his beloved motherland. He begins taking out select individuals from long distances in Baghdad through his immaculate aim. Abbas can’t miss.
The flashback to 2006 on television was a particular hit. Ajooj and Majooj became actual stars.
That was when I finally began to receive messages from H. It was obvious he had been reading the Marcel Proust book in his possession and he would send, via text message to my new phone, peculiar sentences that seemed like his own out-of-context ideas and mutations from French, via English, into Persian: Gilberte is not unlike an unstable country with whom you should never form an alliance.
One time I replied with a simple: ?
And he came back with: D’Argencourt appeared gentle, since he lacked the physical ability to express that he was still rather mean.
I wrote back: Your English has improved so vastly that you are able to read this stuff and understand it.
H: But my writing in that language is still poor. Too poor! And my true wish is to be able to read it in the original French.
Me: Next lifetime, inshallah!
H: All of humankind is in this book, you know.
Me: Appears that way.
H was taking credit, alongside Ajooj and Majooj, for the Abbas show’s success. As my handler, he could explain to his superiors that it was really via his insistence that I come up with a new pilot for the war that the show had been given new life. Those Marcel Proust sentences he was sending me via text message were his way of expressing that he approved of the TV work, but he still hadn’t forgotten that sooner or later I had to get back to Iraq and find the actual owner of the volume.
One day I found an old, translated copy of the novel in a bookshop near the University of Tehran. It was a fair translation of Marcel Proust into Persian, not great but not a disaster either. I bought it and went straight to a line I vaguely recalled.
I wrote to H in the Persian translation: The nature of the moment meant that he had to entertain a mediocre crowd.
To which H replied in English: It felt fraudulent, like a book written in forced vernacular.
When I wrote nothing back, he added: A book with theories in it is an object that still displays its price tag.
Of all the people in Tehran, my interrogator had become my one and only interlocutor, my savior. My saint.
* * *
Writing seemed to matter after all. It wasn’t all lies. And even if it was, then you could examine that lie, work it, and stitch it into the fabric of your truth.
One day, as I was putting together the unlikely sixth new episode of the Abbas show about how the Iraqi sniper hero was visited by a man with angelic white wings who gave him a rifle with a special scope (made in the City of Brass at the far reaches of the Muslim Middle Ages), I received an e-mail.
Even now, as I write these words, I shudder to think that I might have been making the Iraqi champion into a cartoon figure, or a stock character from The Thousand and One Nights. My only consolation was that all the martyrs we knew were somehow turned into cartoons anyway. Go into any city where martyrdom is not an idea but something tangible, something that is of the mud and earth of that city, take a careful look at the faces of the departed on their memorial posters as your cab travels from the airport to your hotel room—in Tehran, in Baghdad, in Mashhad and Basra, martyrs posing with their weapons and other accoutrements of their death—and your mind will settle on how their absence has become a force of nature. The shadows of the departed hang over these cities not like saints but mood regulators.
The e-mail I received, like much else in my life, had to do with a piece of writing. It went back to a time when I’d been thrown into exile at the city desk at the Citizen, that section of the paper which held far more readers than art but no personal profit.
The e-mail was in English: I am a scholar interested in the old Jewish quarter of your city. Your article about Haim Synagogue across from your apartment piqued my interest. I would like to pay you for some research, as I am unable, due to political circumstances, to come to your excellent country.
I shut the computer down, turned the lights out, and stood by the window in the dark. I’d never thought of Iran as “excellent,” but that was one way of looking at it, I supposed, if you’d never been here. Was this a new trick by H? Had the man no other cases to handle but mine? He was breaking protocol by sending text messages. Now this e-mail.
I didn’t want to think about these things anymore. Through the slats of the window shutter I watched the quiet garden of the synagogue. Everything was still and I had forgotten the seasons. It was neither hot nor cold, neither raining nor dry. It was nothing. A s
tillness was everywhere and there was a lull in everything. Did it even matter what season it was? Maybe even the war, which I hadn’t the stomach to read about if I wasn’t there myself, was over. In fact, it was as if the war simply never was and all along it had been a figment of my imagination. Meanwhile I was going through the routines of daily and weekly life in Tehran—visiting my mother, who was slowly losing her awareness of the world and barely registered my presence, spending a couple of hours a week with Ajooj and Majooj at State TV to come up with the latest illogical adventures of Abbas, and I had even begun the art column that Mafiha wanted at the Citizen. Whenever I entered the offices of the paper I’d see Atia in the film department, looking fairly satisfied with her choice in life. I would see her in the hallways when she and Mafiha happened to run into each other, their quiet understanding and laughter: they were in one another’s orbit; they had a union and were on the same team. I had put away my feelings for Atia a long time ago, shelved them. Which was just as well. It was Mafiha who had the woman, the position, the prestige, and even the invitations abroad for his empty poetry.
Because I was quietly jealous, I threw myself into work more than ever. The Middle East was in flames, Iran was utterly broke, yet Tehran was bursting with art galleries and art shows. Women and men were making their fortunes overnight. There were exchanges of money that boggled the mind even as our currency plummeted right into the sewer. In such a world, why not make cartoons of people? Maybe I would never even return to the war.
But I knew that sooner or later the war would return to me.
* * *
And it did.
The impossibly tedious diary of the war in Syria that I had inherited for editing from the martyr Moalem was put into circulation just as fast as the Abbas episodes were coming out on the O Channel. Overnight the diary became a best seller in the provinces. I was sure the government was buying up all the copies to make the thing a quick hit; it made for good propaganda. I did not care one way or other; I would not even get a “thank you” for my labors except the regular editor’s fee, which was a joke. But the publisher would score a fortune and so would the martyr’s family.