The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  She asked for directions to the Square of the Pearl Cannon—the place of pilgrimage where, it was known around the country, the most outrageous prayers and undue wishes came true—and entered it just at the moment when Raphael, glowing heart and hungry ghosts and a cloud of moths and mosquitos and all, came in through the opposite gate. This, the Black Bitch of Bushehr would later insist, was an act of God—the first and only time in her life when an otherwise miserly Almighty opened His habitually clenched fist and threw a crumb or two in the old maid’s direction. She attributed it to the hallowed nature of the grounds upon which she and Raphael had stood, and especially to the propitious powers of the blessed cannon itself.

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  The Square of the Pearl Cannon in South Tehran was a vast rectangle that served as an axis to many historic sites and celebrated areas of the capital. It was built in the sixteenth century as a gateway between the city and the barren lands beyond, with the inaugural name of Square of the Citadel, and had none of the allure and exaltedness that was bestowed upon it some three hundred years later, during the unfortunate reign of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar. An art-loving, wife-collecting, vain-even-for-a-king dandy of a monarch who had a habit of abdicating every battle before it had begun, Fath-Ali Shah embraced every monstrous treaty that was offered to him as the price of surrender. When he was not busy losing broad regions and major provinces of the country to foreign powers, he married 158 women (many of them princesses from other dynasties), and produced 260 children and 786 grandchildren. He also spruced up the Palace of Roses—a sixteenth-century relic that sat at one end of the Square of the Citadel—and hosted poets and artists and more than a few genteel foreign “advisors.”

  He might have been more suitably advised to spend his money on reining in the power of the Shia clergy in Iran, who were all but ruling the country along with the French and the British, or improving the state of his own army, which at the time was nothing more than an unfortunate assortment of unpaid, poorly fed, and often unarmed soldiers, but you couldn’t tell a shah what he should or shouldn’t spend money on—that was the job of the mullahs and the Europeans and they, it seemed, liked the army just as useless and ineffective as it was.

  To defend the country against the ever-marching battalions of Russian soldiers intent on stealing every part of Iran, Fath-Ali Shah liked to wear his “Robes of Wrath” and sit on his Peacock Throne. The robes were entirely red, and he accessorized them with a crown of rubies, meant to incite the fear of God in the czar and his invading forces, because they signaled that the shah was angry—a condition that, within Iran itself, did imply that very bad things were about to happen to the subject of his wrath. He even asked his courtiers, as he sat on the throne, just how concerned—very, very concerned, Your Majesty—and how terrified—extremely, inordinately terrified, Your Majesty—the czar should be by news of the shah’s donning of the robes. Only when he had lost to Imperial Russia the entire province of Georgia and a great fortune in monetary damages did he consider updating his army’s weaponry.

  Because the czar had cannons, Fath-Ali Shah commissioned a set of new state-of-the-art ones himself. The prototype for the cannons was made by a well-known forger in the city of Esfahan. Built at a stupendous cost and brought to Tehran with great fanfare, the cannon was unusually large and extremely heavy. It was installed on the grounds of the Square of the Citadel, next to a shallow pool of water that reflected its image, across from the shah’s palace. For the unveiling, Fath-Ali Shah summoned his entire court as well as ministers from foreign nations, created the kind of spectacle usually reserved for long-awaited prophets, and promised to give the world a glimpse of Persia’s transition from a tired, crumbling empire to a dynamic, modern state.

  In the presence of the shah and his legions of guests, the cannon was armed, its barrel turned toward the desert that lay beyond the gates of the square, and fired. There was a deafening sound. The earth shook and the skies darkened and a rain of oily black particles fell on the guests as they ran every which way for cover, coughing riotously and bleeding from the ears and blinded by soot. The shah himself was blackened from royal head to sacred toe. When he inquired about the source of the disturbance, he was told that the cannon seemed to have a built-in idiosyncrasy: instead of projecting the ball through the mouth of the barrel as any ordinary cannon might, this one preferred to excrete it from the back. As a result the ball, which didn’t have enough room to exit whole, imploded inside the cannon’s belly, then spewed soot and gunpowder into the air.

  Given its dismal performance, a less creative monarch might have ordered that the cannon be summarily destroyed, its builders sent to the gallows, and its existence erased from memory. But no one was going to accuse Fath-Ali Shah of lacking either vanity or imagination. Shortly after ascending to the throne in 1797, he had extended his royal title from King of Kings, Shadow of the Sun, Ruler of the Universe, to include Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Rather than admit failure with the first modern cannon, he gave the useless heap of metal a name—the Pearl Cannon—placed it on permanent display on an especially built platform outside the Palace of Roses, chained a ferocious lion and a truculent bear to each side of the platform to guard the cannon, and designated the area surrounding it as hallowed grounds. Just like in a place of worship, it would be recognized as a refuge for anyone who entered. In its shadow, every prayer would be answered and every wish would come true.

  From that day on, the Pearl Cannon became a haven for petty thieves and ruthless murderers, exposed spies and failed coup leaders, escaped convicts and bankrupt merchants who were entirely safe from the reach of the law or their enemies for as long as they remained on the premises. Some of the refugees lasted a few days, then gave themselves up; others stayed for years, surviving on alms thrown at them by passersby and on food brought to them by young women in love, or parents of ailing children, or even old witches with dreams of holy matrimony who traveled for eighteen months and eleven days to rob the Soleyman family of a night’s peaceful sleep.

  It doesn’t matter what’s true, Raphael’s Wife had learned during the days and months of pilgrimage, only what’s believed.

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  She claimed she had fallen in love with Raphael on the spot.

  She said this from day one—to him and to his family members and to every friend and stranger with whom she happened to cross paths—and she said it again, through the next three decades, in good times and bad, in poverty and riches. No matter what preposterous lie she was busy defending or what harebrained scheme she applied herself to, the one assertion that remained constant was that she was, wholly and unreservedly and so very selflessly, in love with Raphael.

  Never mind that she was an old woman with no family, no place to live, and certainly not a dime in her pocket; or that she had a face that was dark and furrowed and generally offensive to the eye. Never mind that she’d found Raphael when he was half-naked, sleepwalking, inhabited by vermin, and surrounded by ghosts. She said she saw him and thought he was an angel fallen from the sky, his glowing heart proof of his purity, his bare feet and skeletal figure evidence of his saintliness.

  Either that or, as Izikiel the Red would conclude based on the facts on the ground, she was a lonely, penniless woman who found a sleeping rich boy and snared him before he had a chance to open his eyes.

  That morning at the square, she took him by the hand and said she knew just what he needed to quell the bedlam in his bowels. She poured ground coal mixed with dried, pulverized crow’s feet and seven drops of turpentine into a sheep’s stomach and had him drink it all in one gulp, and a moment later he was vomiting heaps of slithery, agitated worms, some a hundred feet long, others as short as forty feet. After that, she took Raphael’s head onto her lap and whispered to him until he fell asleep. When he woke up, hers was the first face he saw.

  She walked him home that day, sat outside the house, and waited till dark when everyone was aslee
p and Raphael emerged in his nightclothes. She led him, still sleeping, back to the square, and there they remained on the edge of the pool reflecting the image of the cannon until the sun came up and the scribes and mullahs who conducted business at the site dragged themselves in with their fountain pens and worry beads. Raphael’s Wife didn’t ask the unsuspecting young man in her clutches if he was married, because she didn’t want to know. Even if he were single, she figured that his parents would never consent to their twenty-two-year-old son marrying an older woman, much less one as poor and unattractive as she. But if a legitimate Jewish marriage was out of the question, a temporary Muslim one was not.

  Islamic law allows a man to take four permanent wives at any one time. But it also provides for an unlimited number of “temporary” wives. The temporary marriage can last anywhere from an hour to ninety-nine years, depending on the terms specified at the outset. It can be performed by a mullah in a matter of minutes, no questions asked and no paperwork provided, and it expires automatically at the end of the contract’s stated length.

  Raphael’s Wife later claimed that he had married her “temporarily” for a period of ninety-nine years. That might have been true, though Raphael told his brother, Aaron, privately that he thought the contract was for ninety-nine days, but there was no way to know for sure because the contract was verbal and did not require the presence of a witness. None of that mattered anyway because, legend has it, Izikiel the Red took one look at Raphael’s Wife, then turned to his son and said, “Ghomesh kon”—lose her.

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  Later, Raphael’s Wife would claim that the Soleyman family had her to thank for Bagh-e Yaas. By that she meant they had usurped her husband’s right of ownership and that it was she who should be living there—a claim that was vehemently denied by the rest of the family. Still, there was no debating that her marriage to Raphael had been the catalyst for Izikiel to built Bagh-e Yaas: until Raphael brought home the Black Bitch of Bushehr, the family had lived on Sepah Street, not far from the Square of the Pearl Cannon. Raphael may not have been an ideal son, but he was obedient and undemanding. Then he went and fell under the witch’s spell and suddenly found, first, the nerve to bring her home like the prize that she wasn’t, then the audacity to refuse to “lose” her as Izikiel had ordered.

  In a rage, Izikiel banished Raphael from the house, so he went back to the square and lived there with the Black Bitch for three consecutive months. His mother cried her eyes raw and begged Izikiel to show mercy on her sick child, and word spread around the city that Izikiel’s eldest son was living on alms and scraps. Aaron was dispatched to bring sense to his brother—leave this whore and come home—and when he failed to convince Raphael, others volunteered or were conscripted to mediate between father and son. In the end, Izikiel caved.

  It was his first and only defeat as the head of the family, and he blamed it entirely on Raphael’s Wife. He let the two back into the house, with the proviso that he never have to lay eyes on Raphael’s Wife. To make sure of that, and to mend the damage to his name and reputation as a result of the standoff, he built a house large enough for Raphael’s Wife to be lost in.

  * * *

  Izikiel bought a four-and-a-half-acre parcel of land, shaped like a diamond, that was situated in what, at the time, was the northernmost part of Tehran. The Big House, where Izikiel would live with his wife, was at the top corner of the diamond, closest to the Elburz Mountains that constituted a changing backdrop—blue in daylight, shadows at night, snow-covered tips glowing silver at the first hint of dawn—against its golden brick shell. From there, the land sloped gently downward, widening at the center, becoming narrow again at the opposite end from the Big House. On the right and left sides of the diamond were metal gates that opened onto a narrow, covered walkway, like a private access road with a roof, and that eventually led to the back entrance of a small one-story house.

  The two small houses were almost identical in shape and dimension, and could be accessed from the street so that the inhabitants could come and go without crossing paths with one another, which was exactly what Izikiel wanted—to keep Raphael under supervision without having to suffer the sight of his wife. In 1954, when construction was complete, he gave the house on the left to Raphael, and the one on the right to Aaron.

  To everyone involved, and to impartial observers, this seemed like a fair and rational plan. Raphael, they thought, was lucky to receive anything at all from his father—given his defiance of him and the embarrassment he had caused the family by marrying the Black Bitch. He did not have the physical capacity to manage his own or the family’s finances, and his health was deteriorating at an ever-faster pace. The worm colony that had nestled at first in his intestines had over time expanded into the entire landscape of his body, feeding not just on what he ate and drank, but also on his blood and bone marrow, rendering him brittle as a dry leaf in autumn, so that his skin cracked and his limbs broke at the slightest pressure, forcing him to lie in a bed of goose feathers. He slept days and sleepwalked at night, and he still glowed in the dark—a gentle, innocent luminosity that made him resemble a fading lantern and that broke his father’s heart every time he set eyes on him.

  The wife, meanwhile, washed and dressed and fed Raphael, bound his cuts, and reset his bones. Sometimes, she even followed him and his posse of ghosts around the city, to see that no harm came to him by the young boys and stray dogs who often chased him. She claimed she was motivated purely by love, but you didn’t have to be especially cynical to discern an element of self-interest in her efforts to keep him alive: as long as Raphael was living, and as long as he refused to divorce her, Raphael’s Wife could count on having a roof over her head and three square meals a day.

  She managed to stay on the ride for a good ten years before it was interrupted.

  One morning in the winter of 1962, Izikiel woke up and announced to his servant girl, a fourteen-year-old mute he had purchased two years earlier for a thousand tomans, that he was going to die that day. He was sixty-one years old and in perfect health. He wasn’t contemplating suicide and didn’t think he was going to be murdered. He just knew his time had come, and that he had till midnight to set his affairs in order.

  He made a call to Aaron, who had been studying in France for four years, and told him to rush home and bring all his things, “because you won’t be going back; I’m dying today and you’ll have to take my place.” He would have liked to say his other goodbyes in person, but they were in the midst of the first real snowstorm of the season. Roads were closed all over the city and roofs were caving in and glass cracked from the cold in window panes, so he sat in a pale blue armchair by the large bay windows in the main salon all day. He drank hot black tea sweetened with saffron-flavored rock candy, and wrote letters to everyone he could think of whose life would be affected by his death.

  “My father is waiting for me at this side of midnight,” he began each letter.

  At nine o’clock in the evening he took a bath, put on a clean suit and a black tie, and lay in bed with his shoes on and his hat resting on the pillow next to him. He left the light on and his door unlocked, so that when he called for the servant girl, Manzel, at seven minutes to midnight, she heard him immediately in her own bedroom downstairs. It took her two minutes to put on her shoes and run upstairs. She found him lying supine in bed, still fully dressed. He asked for a glass of water. A moment later, he inhaled deeply, let out a long, slow sigh, turned over onto his left side, and died.

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  The undertakers were sent for at five a.m. and arrived an hour and a half later. They were let in by a weeping Manzel and shown to Izikiel’s bedroom. In spite of the early hour, the house was already bustling with family members who had been alerted by the cook, and had rushed over to offer their sympathies and arrange for the burial and shivah. The undertakers sought permission to enter the bedroom and, once granted, went in with their heads bowed and their hands clasped in respect
for the deceased. They found nothing—no body, dead or alive, no trace of Izikiel’s clothes or shoes or hat, no footprints or other signs of retreat.

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  From the letters, and from Manzel’s version of sign language, people came to the conclusion that Izikiel had not so much died as simply departed—in the company of his father and, as he had predicted, for good. They understood there would be no burial, because there was nothing left of the man to bury, but they did expect a shivah because that’s what you do when you lose a person for good (when they die or disappear or marry outside the religion or, worst of all, willingly convert). Afterward, they assumed, Aaron would move into the Big House and take ownership of all of Izikiel’s other assets, continue to support his sick brother as their father had done, marry a rich, beautiful girl, and have a few sons of his own.

  It wasn’t exactly “happily ever after,” but a close-enough version, and one that any mortal man (save, perhaps, an American) would be exceedingly fortunate to live. Only an American would have the gall to want more than that, or to put happiness on the list of essentials.

  The truth about Aaron is that he was at once blessed and cursed by a birthright he would never be able to escape. You could see it in his eyes—this awareness of the heft of the responsibility he had to bear. He was the offspring of a wealthy Jew who had, thanks to the kindness of the shah and his own outsize abilities, risen overnight from the hardships and deprivations of the ghetto into a world of privilege and excess, who remembered the past too well and was determined never to go back, or even to pause long enough to catch a glimpse of where they came from and how far he had traveled. His father had given Aaron every financial advantage a young person could reasonably aspire to, but he had also charged him with the backbreaking task of fulfilling, in his own life, every lofty ideal and impossible expectation, every foolhardy dream and failed ambition of all the generations of Jews who had lived and died in all the ghettos and back alleys over three thousand years of history in Iran.