“Don’t come back,” he spat as he began to close the door, the boy barely squeezing through.
The minute Aaron let go of her, Raphael’s Wife lunged back toward him with a howl, tripped, and fell facedown on her right forearm.
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If it’s true that there are moments in a life that engender and seal a man’s destiny, this was Raphael’s Son’s hour. Decades later, he would still recall the color of the sky that morning when he and his mother were thrown out of the Big House, the scent of the sea that had lingered in the hallway and followed them out. He remembered the way the door slammed behind them the moment they had cleared the threshold, how the sound of it felt like an explosion in his ears.
He remembered too his mother’s right forearm and wrist appearing much longer and more twisted than the left, how she had cried in pain and asked for help because “he broke my arm, my working arm, he’s made me a cripple!” It was her own hollow bones, the force with which they had landed on the ground, that had caused the damage. But the impact would not have been as harsh if Aaron hadn’t slammed the door the way he did, if he hadn’t thrust her out of the house and the family.
All his life Raphael’s Son would carry in his head the sound of the door closing. He heard it in his sleep and woke up in a cold terror, heard it every time someone raised their voice at him, however briefly. He heard it all the years he lived in Iran, and later in America; all the time he spent in Los Angeles as an outsider trying to penetrate “society,” and even after he was allowed in and accepted into people’s homes and offices, but not—it is true—into their lives.
He never did manage to gain their genuine respect or admiration, but he evoked their envy. And he never did get rid of that sound in his head, but in time he made sure that every man and woman he crossed paths with would also tremble at the sound of that long-ago disgrace.
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That night, Elizabeth dreamt that Madame Doctor had shed her perpetual lab coat and instead wore a ratty, patched-up dress and shoes of newspaper. Her husband and children were poor and hungry and had waited till dark for Madame Doctor to bring home a whole fish for supper. The fish, she said, was old and rotting and thrown into the garbage heap behind the fishmonger’s stall, but when she laid it on a piece of wood and cut into its stomach with a knife, a stream of clean, clear water flowed out like a fragrant mountain spring, poured onto the carving board and Madame Doctor’s hands, on her shoes and the floor and up around her and Elizabeth’s ankles. The water was sparkling and cool. It slid under the door of the kitchen and into the neighboring room, and from there it spread slowly all through the house and rose up to knee level, so that Elizabeth’s bed, when she awoke, was already floating amid the rest of the furniture and all her books and ledgers and school clothes, the curtains billowing with water and the windows and door caving in under the pressure of water seeking a way out, and the room resembled a fish tank that had been drizzled with blue ink—all the handwritten notes and loose sheets of paper that were washed clean—and then a glass shattered and water flooded the next room where the twins were sleeping innocently, lifting their beds and carrying them out into the parents’ room, and then at once they were all floating away in their sweet slumber, pulling, as if with a giant, irresistible magnet, every movable and fixed object in the house, every rug and window pane and plastic doll and leather-bound encyclopedia, every shoe and plate and bicycle wheel and black-and-white and color picture—the parents’ wedding, the children’s birth—down across Bagh-e Yaas and through the back gates that yielded to the water without a fight, down into the wide tree-lined Avenue of Tranquility until there was nothing left but darkness and Elizabeth standing barefoot and soaked on the ground where Raphael’s house had stood.
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In the morning, the gardener found her standing alone on a sodden patch of land. Her nightclothes were shredded as if by a storm, and she had the staggered expression of a creature who had gone to sleep in one universe and awoken in another. Around her the ground was covered with wood splinters and shards of glass, strands of hair and pieces of underground pipes and fallen antennae. In the midst of the ruin, Elizabeth had the air of a shipwreck survivor.
The hint of misfortune looming, that portent of loss and disappointment heretofore hidden from Aaron, had been released by the flood and remained, suspended, like a low, persistent fog.
* * *
She had escaped the flood because she had been awakened by the dream of the fish that brought the deluge. That’s what she said, and there was no reason to doubt her since she alone had observed the events of the previous night and seen her family carried off. Throughout the day, accounts surfaced of four bodies, two adults and two children, caught in a flash flood and floating, faceup and peaceful as if in sleep, uphill and northbound toward the slopes of the Elburz Mountains and the Karaj River. When the waters ebbed, the earth was paved with hundreds of 4" x 4" black-and-white pictures with latticed edges that the professor had taken of his children and archived with obsessive accuracy in dozens of oversize albums, and that washed onto the branches of trees and the windshields of parked cars, into private mailboxes and the front windows of shops.
The bodies were picked up and brought to Bagh-e Yaas by Good Samaritans or military cops, and when all four had been identified, they were loaded onto a hearse and sent off to the Jewish cemetery to be washed and wrapped in shrouds for burial. After that, Elizabeth went out to recover the photos. She walked the trail of the flood, holding a flashlight and a messenger bag. She climbed fences and knocked on windows and jumped knee-deep into the gutters on the sides of the streets. By the time she was done she had counted 281 photographs, wiped them clean of mud and debris, and filed them carefully into her bag, and that’s when she realized that it was nearly midnight, that she hadn’t eaten since the day before and didn’t have a change of clothes or any of her schoolbooks, but she knew she had a place to go back to.
She never doubted this—that Manzel would have a dry bed and plenty of food for her. In later years, when she spent hundreds of millions of dollars of her own money building hospitals and orphanages and homes for the sick and elderly, Elizabeth would still recognize Manzel’s hospitality as the greatest act of kindness a person could commit. He who saves one soul, someone said in the Mishnah, saves the world.
What she didn’t expect to find was a room arranged for her on the ground floor, with not only sheets and towels but three sets of school uniforms, three pairs of saddle shoes, white kneesocks, and an entire roll of white satin ribbon—all delivered to the house after hours on Aaron’s orders. There was also a black dress she was to wear to the funeral the next day, and a book bag that would be filled by new books, and a promise, relayed to her by Manzel in her childish handwriting and flawed spelling, that she could stay in the Big House for a few more days until she found a new place to live with someone from her extended family.
An unmarried girl and a single man sleeping under one roof, no matter how large that roof, was a scandal in the making. But for the impropriety, Aaron would gladly have given Elizabeth safe harbor in Bagh-e Yaas for the rest of her life if she needed it. He saw no irony in tossing his brother’s wife out, ignoring her so-called son, only to take in a stranger’s daughter. To him, Raphael’s Wife was an imposter who had insinuated herself into the family by taking advantage of her husband’s illness; Elizabeth was an innocent child caught in a cross fire between the Black Bitch and Aaron.
It would be some time before the implication of this reasoning—that Elizabeth was the victim of Raphael’s Wife’s revenge against Aaron—made itself evident to him: if the flood was her doing, then there must be truth to the notion of the widow’s sigh.
That’s what she said when she came back the next morning to plant her flag in the swampy remains of Elizabeth’s life and to promise Aaron there would be more where this came from. She rang the bell on the yard door at ten minutes to six, and when a maid a
nswered, Raphael’s Wife demanded to be let in because she had something of grave importance to share. She marched into the Big House dragging the boy by the arm and murmuring expletives, stood in the first-floor foyer, and called Aaron’s name like the Angel of Death summoning his next victim.
He didn’t respond, so she went on yelling that her prayers had been answered: “The scum-of-the-earth family you let into my son’s house was washed away like the filth that they were, and this is just the beginning, you wait and see, it’s going to make the seven plagues of Egypt look benign unless you do right by us and give my son his true name.”
At this, a small, quiet shape appeared at the end of the hallway. It was Elizabeth in the black dress she had put on for the funeral. She had been awake all night, sitting on the edge of the bed in the room Aaron had assigned to her, and staring at the dress that hung in the open wardrobe. She had no idea what time the funeral was going to be or when she’d have to leave, had never been to a cemetery and didn’t know what to expect, so she put the dress on at four in the morning and went into the kitchen to wait for Manzel. Now, in the dreadful hours when the house was still quiet, in the hollow middle of a world where every bit of certitude had been cored out for her, Elizabeth felt Raphael’s Wife’s curses reverberate through her with harrowing strength.
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Through the interminable fall of 1968 and into the winter of 1969, Elizabeth shuffled from one family member’s house to another. Everywhere, she was welcomed with sympathetic hugs and pitiful tears, told she could stay for as long as she wanted, but ushered out quietly at the end of a few days. Any longer than that, her hosts feared, would mean they would be stuck with her for good: she was an orphan girl nearing the age of marriage. She had no dowry, more than a few deficient genes, and rotten luck. The scent that emanated from her was heady and strange. It drifted from her hair and skin and filled every space she walked into; it was in her breath and urine, made any bed she slept in smell like the outer deck of a ship, turned her bathwater into a sap, and left a limpid, disquieting trace on anything she touched. It polluted the water that boiled in the samovar in her hosts’ kitchens, and spoiled the ground saffron and cumin in their pantries.
After three weeks, she had exhausted her familial options and was standing at the gates of the school, her cheeks hollowed out from hunger and her legs blue from the cold above her knee-high stockings, when her friend, Hussein Zemorrodi, pulled up in his father’s orange Paykan. Hussein’s parents were working-class Muslims who had been fortunate and resourceful enough to grasp onto the opportunities afforded by rising oil prices and the shah’s modernization efforts. The mother worked twelve-hour days sewing beads and crystals onto the ball gowns and wedding dresses of rich women, and the father drove a taxi, but their three sons went to high-class private schools on government scholarships and, with a little luck, would soon cross over from being the grandchildren of peasants and children of migrant slum-dwellers into the rapidly rising middle class.
Hussein had seen Elizabeth standing alone at the gates when his father came to pick him up in his cab. He knew she was there because she had nowhere to go. Without having discussed it with his parents or obtained anyone’s permission, he took her hand and said, “Let’s go.”
* * *
The fifty-eight nights that Elizabeth spent at the Zemorrodis’ house in South Tehran would influence every major decision she made in her life thereafter. There was the kindness of these strangers, the generosity with which they shared with her their earned-with-blood-and-sweat food. There was their complete dismissal of their mullahs’ teachings—“All the Jews are the devil’s children, they have tails growing out of their backs, they contaminate everything they touch and make it ritually impure”—and the unsullied faith that hard work and sacrifice was every man’s destiny. But there was also the realization, on Elizabeth’s part, that the distance between wealth and poverty, comfort and insecurity, is much smaller than most people realize, that the way back is long and bitter and strewn with the bodies of “also trieds,” and that for her, trapped and waterlogged after the flood, there was no choice but to resort to drastic measures.
On the Persian New Year in March, Elizabeth packed her worldly belongings—a spare uniform, two pairs of socks, and schoolbooks all donated by the headmaster—kissed Mr. and Mrs. Zemorrodi’s hands and Hussein’s face, and headed out. It was four in the afternoon on an unseasonably cool spring day, and the streets were buzzing with holiday cheer. The last of the winter’s snow, having only just melted, sat in puddles along the sides of the road. Elizabeth used the few tomans Hussein had given her to buy a pack of fruit-shaped miniature marzipan arranged in colorful rows in a clear plastic box, wrapped it in newspaper, and held it to her chest for the entire hour-and-a-half walk to Bagh-e Yaas. By the time she arrived, her white socks were splattered with mud and her white bow was coming undone, but the package of marzipan remained intact. She told Manzel she had come to see Mr. Soleyman.
In the main salon, Aaron sat with half a dozen men in suits and ties, their elegantly dressed wives, and exceptionally well-behaved children. The men sat with Aaron, smoking cigarettes and exchanging opinions about the latest dispute between the shah and the US government over a billion-dollar debt from oil revenues that American oil companies had failed to repay. The women converged into a circle of stiff beehives and exposed necklines, waving bejeweled hands and discussing just how and why the most eligible bachelor in Tehran’s upper-class Jewish society—Aaron—had managed to escape the noose.
At nearly thirty, Aaron had outlasted most of his contemporaries in evading the many traps set by the families of eager young women. The other bachelors his age were either too poor to support a family or too flawed to attract the kinds of prospects they had in mind. One or two were rumored to place their friendship with another man above their duty to marry and procreate. A few had been hoodwinked by loose women they couldn’t possibly be permitted to marry.
Elizabeth walked into the salon with her chin trembling slightly and hands balled into fists, having clearly grown out of the frayed uniform and saddle shoes she was in, and walked directly toward Aaron. She was fifteen years old, barely 5'2'', flat-chested, and bereft of any womanly flair.
She put her offering of marzipan on the table before Aaron, took five steps back, and stood with her feet together and her hands stiff at her sides.
“Happy Nowruz,” she said. “If you’ll have me, I would like to be your wife.”
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The wedding was a small affair at the Darband restaurant in the foothills of the Elburz Mountains in the northern part of Tehran. Because she was a year shy of the legal age of marriage for women, Aaron had to obtain special permission from a family court judge. Instead of a gown, Elizabeth wore a white cotton dress with a pleated skirt and a belt that tied in a bow in front. She had shopped for the dress alone, refusing the many offers of assistance from all the aunts and uncles and cousins who had greeted her with welcoming smiles when she turned up at their doors but grown churlish and irritated after she had been their guest a few days, who thereafter quickly looked away and crossed to the other side when they saw her on the street—until they learned that she was to become Aaron Soleyman’s wife, and suddenly they felt a renewed sense of kinship, reached out to her with invitations to luncheons and dinner parties and shopping trips and all-day visits to the hair salon.
She wasn’t being vindictive in turning down the offers of support and companionship; she just didn’t see the point of two people shopping for one dress, of spending an hour (much less a day) arranging one’s hair when a ten-second comb-through and a simple braid would suffice. She had never done the things other women and young girls liked to do—the seven-hour fittings at the atelier of the seamstress of the moment, the early-afternoon trips to the movies, the once-a-week ritual of soaking their hair in beer, then wrapping it in curlers, unraveling the curls when the hair was completely dry and straightening it wit
h a clothes iron.
She bought her dress at a small boutique on Persepolis Avenue without telling the owner what occasion it was for, and she used a fraction of the budget Aaron had allotted to pay for it. In the three weeks between the day she proposed to Aaron and the night of their wedding, she hardly left the Big House or answered the dozens of calls that came for her. News of her audacious (not to say immodest, presumptuous, and—who’re we kidding?—downright shameless) offer had burst across Tehran in a matter of hours and made even the most disinterested individuals sit up and pay attention. From the scheming parents of eligible young women, to the disappointed wives who had “settled” in their choice of husband and subsequently wished they hadn’t, to the most lethargic of old, opium-addicted servants in the homes of the well-to-do, everyone wanted to know just how such a thing was possible.
Why would a man with Aaron’s resources and reputation, who could have his pick of any girl in the world—just say the word, my dear, and the parents will hand her to you on a gold platter—choose a teenage orphan whose greatest talent was solving mathematical problems no one else cared to tackle?
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 8