The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  That’s important to remember, given what happened next and everything that followed from it—that the silver spoon Aaron was born with was also his shackle, that his good health and robust intellect in fact restrained his freedom, that the great wealth he came into entitled him to very little of his own.

  It’s different when you inherit not just money, but a legacy; when you embody not just your own dreams, but those of many.

  * * *

  Aaron had a boyish face, a taut, agile body, and an old man’s eyes. They had that faded look—the pupils rimmed with a bleached halo, as if the color had been seeping slowly into the whites and turning them creamy. It was an unsettling disparity: a wise old man standing at the window of a young one’s face, peering out at a world he’s seen too many times before.

  He was the only person in his family to attend high school. He finished at the top of his class and sat for the college entrance exam where he came in fifth nationally, but instead of letting him go to university in Iran, his father sent him to Paris to study medicine. Aaron left in September of 1958, shortly after his eighteenth birthday—a quiet, quick-witted boy with a suitcase full of starched white sheets and another packed with starched white shirts, all of them monogrammed by hand and folded with mathematical precision and attesting to the extreme fastidiousness that had ruled every fragment of his life since early childhood. Four years later, when he was summoned home, he was more self-assured but no less exacting, disappointed that he was not able to complete his studies and become a physician, but never—not once—questioning his duty.

  His duty, as Aaron knew it, was above all to safeguard the good name and reputation of the Soleyman clan. This is what he tried to do that first week after he arrived in Tehran and sat shivah, and what he would continue to do for the rest of his life, regardless of the harm it might cause. He was not what people at the time referred to as “overly punctilious” and that psychologists now call “obsessive-compulsive.” He wasn’t driven by forces he could not tame. He was just a man who believed in doing things well and keeping his promises, and this was unfortunate because no sooner had he taken his father’s place than Aaron found himself at war with the Black Bitch of Bushehr and her single-minded, fanatical quest to muddy the Soleyman name.

  __________________

  Thirty days after his father had passed, Raphael rose from his sickbed and went sleepwalking into the street. Opium Morad, the old addict who lived on the sidewalk a stone’s throw from Bagh-e Yaas, saw him and thought he was going to catch his death of cold: it was the middle of the night, the temperature was well below zero, the ground frozen, and yet Raphael was barefoot and dressed only in his cotton nightshirt. How he managed to stay asleep in spite of the cold Morad couldn’t fathom, but he did note that for once Raphael was walking alone. All the ghosts and birds and insects that normally followed him, Morad figured, had the good sense to stay indoors.

  Morad himself was wrapped in a blanket he draped around the little brazier where he heated his opium. He asked Raphael where he was headed.

  “To see my father,” Raphael said, which was alarming, given Izikiel’s recent relocation from the world of the living, but Raphael kept slogging away down the middle of the street and in the general direction of the Jewish cemetery that was many kilometers outside Tehran and accessible only through a narrow, dangerous road. The glow from his chest had dimmed to a languid flicker, Opium Morad noticed, and he never did appear to wake up or to open his eyes, never did see the mammoth truck that flew the green and black flags of mourning and the white satin signs displaying verses from the Koran—prayers for the dead in Arabic—the red and green lightbulbs that lined the outside of the cabin, the hand-painted exhortations to the Almighty, the Prophet Muhammad, and his disciples, Ali and Hussein; or maybe he saw the truck barreling down the street with its headlights flooding the darkness but without so much as a whisper—no sound from its massive engine, no noise from its gargantuan wheels, no reverberation from the rattle of windows or the jolting of metal or the piercing of still night air—like a ship sailing quietly but at breakneck speed through a dark channel, the wind from the truck’s movement bending the trunks of trees and raising the water in the open gutters, churning the dust and dry leaves and bits of discarded newspapers from the sides of the road, tearing the veils off the heads of streetwalkers on their way home from the night’s final encounter—a vision at once so terrifying and so beautiful that even the mangy stray dogs and crippled child beggars asleep on the sidewalk sat up to watch it with glazed eyes and open mouths, and the only person or entity, Opium Morad later insisted, who didn’t pause or hesitate to walk toward it was scraggy and decrepit Raphael.

  He looked, in fact, like a man bent on meeting his destiny, which is just what he did—“I realize you have trouble believing this, gentlemen, I do have a tendency to see things that don’t exist, it’s true that opium plays tricks on the mind, but this one, I assure you, was real, he kept walking straight toward the truck, and it didn’t slow down or slam on the breaks or even sound its horn, it just rolled toward him and then onto and over him, the whole thing took less than half a second, I didn’t even hear it hit poor Raphael, it just absorbed him, I thought, and then I looked up at the driver’s-side window just as it passed by me, and I swear on the spirits of my dear mother and my revered father, the cabin was empty, there was no one in the driver’s seat, no one at the wheel of that truck, I couldn’t make that up if I smoked an entire poppy field’s worth of opium.”

  __________________

  Aaron sat shivah again and afterward allowed a decent interval before he moved to set his brother’s affairs in order. There was the house Raphael and his wife had lived in, and the few thousand tomans she had managed to save from their allowance. And there was the wife herself, though she was not really a wife at all—just a woman with no marriage contract and not even a verbal promise of recompense (at the time of the temporary marriage or later) for the years she would spend with Raphael. She had brought nothing of monetary value to the union, so she was entitled to nothing in return. There were no children who might need her parenting services. Legally, Aaron owed her nothing but a safe return to her father’s home. By custom, there was no chance of her being able to stay with the family once Raphael was gone. Still, Aaron realized that what’s legal is not always right, and he was determined to do right by his brother’s caretaker. Once they had passed the thirty-day mark, he sent Manzel the Mute to fetch Raphael’s Wife.

  The girl came back twenty minutes later looking bewildered, making gestures that were incomprehensible to Aaron. He called in another one of the maids to translate Manzel’s signs, but the older woman couldn’t make sense of them either so Aaron sent the second maid to Raphael’s Wife.

  This one too returned without an answer. Pallid and trembling, she kept reciting a prayer against blasphemy and hiding her face from Aaron as if in shame.

  Exasperated by the drama, he trekked down to Raphael’s house and knocked with his fist on the door. The Black Bitch opened almost instantly.

  “You’re not sending me away,” she said. “I’m pregnant with your brother’s son, and when he’s born he’ll be first in line to inherit all this.”

  It was a foolish move on her part, a scheme so swinish, it left Aaron little choice but to do just what she had warned against. He never believed, even for a moment, her claim about the child—a near miracle, she was willing to concede, given his illness and her old age, but just remember Abraham and Sarah—he was a hundred and she a young ninety when they conceived Isaac. Because of this, Aaron realized that she had intentions far more ambitious than what he was willing to allow. He decided that he must cut her out like a bad tooth before she became an all-consuming pain.

  He counted 15,000 tomans—one thousand for each year she had spent with Raphael—added to it fifteen gold coins, and gave her thirty days’ notice to vacate the house. He waited a month, and when she didn’t leave he waited another month. Then he sent t
wo policemen to force her out and padlock the door. She was allowed to take her own and Raphael’s clothes, the 15,000 tomans, and the fifteen gold coins. Finally, to ensure that she realized her expulsion was permanent, he sold Raphael’s house.

  __________________

  The new owners were a Jewish couple with an eight-year-old daughter and a pair of six-year-old twin boys. The husband was a former professor of mathematics at Tehran University; the wife was an obstetrician who specialized in difficult pregnancies. They had met in 1950 when they were both students at Tufts University in Boston, married, and returned to Iran. She had a thriving practice; he hadn’t worked for six years because he was severely agoraphobic and could not bear to leave his room. He spent his time writing the math section of the concourt—the national college entrance exam—memorizing encyclopedias, and caring for the children.

  The older daughter, Elizabeth (after the queen), was doe-eyed and fair, exceptionally bright, and eerily independent. Before she entered kindergarten, she could solve complex mathematical problems in her head and memorize a dozen pages of text after a single run-through. By age eight, she read science textbooks for entertainment, and was teaching herself English and Arabic while girls her age still played dress-up and begged their mothers for blonde, blue-eyed dolls. She weighed which university she should attend and what courses to take. That was her dream and her goal: to go to university. She was always dressed in her uniform, even on Fridays when there was no school, and she wore her voluminous hair in a ponytail with an enormous white bow that she starched and pressed every day. Her only friend in the world was a Muslim boy named Hussein Zemorrodi who was two years older and nearly as smart as Elizabeth. Their idea of fun was to recite from memory entire sections of the Shahnameh, the Persian equivalent of the Odyssey, all written in verse. Other than that, she had no relationships with anyone outside her immediate family: she was too weird for other children, too frighteningly bright for adults. And there was the smell.

  For reasons that even her physician mother and professor father could not fathom, eight-year-old Elizabeth emitted a warm, sweet-and-salty-and-humid-as-the-sea-at-midnight scent that, depending on how you felt about fish and algae and sand crabs and the tide, could be exceedingly pleasant or plainly offensive but, either way, maddeningly persistent. The first whiff of it had seeped into the air when she was barely a cell inside her mother’s womb, when Madame Doctor had burped after drinking an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. She and the professor were on their honeymoon in the port city of Ramsar on the Caspian, and the marriage was already a fiasco because he had panicked at the prospect of being in a hall with a few hundred other people and therefore bailed out of their wedding reception, and now he refused to leave their room because he could not stand the thought of running into anyone he didn’t know or anyone he did know. At any rate, there wasn’t much point in leaving the room because they had come to the sea during the rainy season; it poured in Ramsar from the minute they arrived till long after they returned to Tehran, which might have made for a romantic setting—newlyweds together in a room with one big bed and nothing else to entertain themselves with—if only the bridegroom weren’t so fainthearted and easily spooked.

  Let’s just say he made love like a man who writes math tests.

  The story goes that Madame Doctor lay in the hotel bed thinking of the sea outside the window and let her insides fill with the humid, briny air where the professor came up short, listening to the rising tide and thinking of the fishermen on the tiny islands that dotted the sea, their sun-ravaged faces and ropy limbs and hail-Imam-Reza boats, and became thirstier by the minute until the deed was done and the frightened little mathematician had scurried into the bathroom and she could pick up the phone and order a Coke, taggaree—cold as hail—drinking it down in a single stream, then letting out a belch that, ominously, smelled like the sea.

  Later, she kept farting and burping the smell of the sea as her stomach started to expand, and she even perspired it like an urgent fever, until at last her waters broke, Elizabeth slid out, and the nurses in the maternity ward abandoned their posts and ran for cover from what they could only deduce was a biblical flood that must have spilled out of the Caspian and traveled 350 kilometers south to Tehran.

  For most Iranians, the Caspian Sea and its surrounding regions evoked either the striking beauty and unbounded peace of golden-green rice fields and near-mythical white tigers, or the heart-stopping terror of midnight suicides by drowning and in-broad-daylight invasions by blood-on-their-hands and human-flesh-at-the-tip-of-their-spears Russian soldiers. Not the safest choice of a scent to overwhelm one’s surroundings with, but no amount of lemongrass and arrowroot oil, rosewater baths and coconut oil enemas, could rid the poor child of this birthmark. The only aspect of her that might have been considered charming was her complete lack of guile, a certain obliviousness that, if mistaken for stupidity, could count in her favor with men and save her from dying an old, grizzled virgin buried chin-high in books.

  The dumb-as-a-donkey label, while perilously wide of the mark, did have a certain resonance in light of the intellectual shortcomings of Elizabeth’s twin brothers. They were friendly and boisterous and always ready to embrace anyone, even strangers, or to walk off with them without the slightest hesitation, but they had trouble performing the simplest tasks, from holding a pencil correctly to tying their shoelaces to, alas, developing the capacity for speech. They could hear well enough, and they understood the meaning of things, but the part of their brain where words are created must have been left on the drafting table the day these two boys were formed because, strive as they might, neither their parents nor their doctors nor teachers nor any other well-meaning soul managed to get the twins to say, or even write, a single comprehensible word.

  The closest they came to communicating was through a network of numbers developed by—who else?—Elizabeth and registered in a logbook for the benefit of Madame Doctor and the mathematician, a kind of sign language that appealed to her and was accessible to the boys because of its linear, one-dimensional, and free-of-nuances-and-subtleties quality.

  * * *

  People said that the twins’ many “peculiarities” were caused by their mother’s selfish pursuit of a medical degree, which must have put too much stress on her and the children. In her own defense, Madame Doctor pointed to her husband’s own “peculiarities”—his agoraphobia, his obsession with memorizing every one of the twenty-three volumes plus the index of the 1956 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—as evidence of a genetic malfunction that must have passed to the twins. She even regarded Elizabeth’s advanced math skills, her extraordinary composure and unusual self-control, as cerebral kinks.

  She said as much to Aaron the first time he invited the new family for Shabbat dinner. She arrived in her lab coat and with only Elizabeth in tow, explained that her husband “didn’t go out” and that the twins “didn’t do well in social settings,” and that “this one”—she pointed with her head toward Elizabeth—“you won’t even know is here.” Then she announced that she was heading back to the hospital where a patient was in labor, left her daughter, and rushed off.

  In her school uniform and pressing a spiral notebook to her chest, Elizabeth looked every bit the star student who has shown up for class only to find it’s a holiday. For a minute or two after her mother had left, she stood steadfast and calm in the middle of the room, her face radiant with expectation and her hair reined into a single, lustrous braid. After that she went and sat—straight backed and with her feet dangling inches above the ground—in an armchair next to the window overlooking the garden.

  She didn’t seem bothered by the leaden stares of the other children, or the open conversation among the women about who she was and how strange her family had always been, why Aaron Soleyman had sold his brother’s house to such peculiar people, and whether it was true, what the servants whispered, that Raphael’s Wife had cursed the house and the new owners before she left. Nor was sh
e in the least curious about Aaron himself, though she could sense, even without glancing up from her calculus problems, that everyone around her was fixated on him and his every gesture or word.

  Look at him, he’s a real prince, all handsome and elegant and speaking French, and now he owns all this, just thirty-two years old and he’s the chairman of the board and the king of kings, I’ll bet every mother in this town is paying a sorcerer to put a spell on him for her daughter, and every girl who crosses paths with him is pouring love powder into his wine, he’s going to be snatched up and taken whole in no time, my dear, some people know how to catch a big fish, they have their ways, and, believe me, they’re going to put it all to use for this one.

  She sat through the first three hours of the evening without once making eye contact with anyone. At eleven p.m., when dinner was called, she searched around hesitantly, as if wondering what to do with herself, how to negotiate this next hurdle. She watched the older guests file languidly into the dining room, cigarettes in one hand and crystal glasses of Black Label on the rocks in the other; watched the children be corralled by servants from the garden and the patio and other parts of the house where they had dispersed to play, and she was still furtive and unsure when she felt a hand on her shoulder and glanced up.