The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  She released the boy and picked up the plastic bag from the floor, turned it upside down above the table. Two dozen raw chicken feet, some a light pink, the rest a sickly yellow, poured onto the polished wood surface.

  “This!” she screeched as the smell of rotting meat rose in the air. “This is our dinner. The butcher gives it to us for free because no one else wants it.”

  Aaron watched her dispassionately, then glanced at the boy who stood trembling without a sound. Aaron reached into his pocket and took out a wad of hundred-toman bills. He counted ten, then put them on the table before Raphael’s Wife.

  “Take this,” he said coolly, “and understand you’re never going to get from me what you want.” For a minute, the two stared each other down. Then Aaron softened his tone, glanced once at the boy, and almost appealed to the mother.

  “You must know this,” he said, as if pleading for common sense to intervene. “No matter what you may want or how badly—you must understand that in this country, at this time, you and your kind don’t hold a prayer against the likes of me.”

  __________________

  It’s strange how insignificant words can appear at the time they’re uttered, how savagely latent their power can prove over time. What had been, to Aaron, a simple declaration of fact—practical advice, even, to Raphael’s Wife, so she wouldn’t spin her wheels and ruin her son’s life chasing what he would never attain—became, for her, an invitation to war.

  That night at the Big House, she glared at Aaron till her eyes began to water, then said, “Now you’re going to see what my kind can do.”

  * * *

  All those nights when, as a teenager, he had crawled in the dark through the doors that Fereshteh left unlocked for him, crept past the servants’ bedrooms and up the steps, past her husband’s, at times even her in-laws’ rooms; all those nights when he had climbed, trembling with desire and ready to die if only from joy, into the narrow wooden bed where she waited, bare legs and eager breasts and unfettered hunger; all those nights when they thought they were alone in the world and safe from the judgment of others, Raphael’s Wife had been there, in the tenebrous quiet of the yard in Jay Gatsby’s house, watching.

  “This name you hold so dear,” she said, no longer desperate, “it would be less than dirt if I opened my mouth and told people what you did with that faggot’s wife.”

  * * *

  There’s the harm you do to others in order to gain an advantage for yourself, and then there’s the harm intended only to inflict pain upon the other. Raphael’s Wife had tried the first tack with Aaron for many years, and failed. This time, she would try the other.

  It was inevitable, she told Aaron at the Big House, that she would find out. She had been Raphael’s caretaker, the person who stayed up all night when the glow inside him began to burn and the ghosts and night creatures drew him out of the house. Often, she had to run after Raphael into the streets, like a mother trailing a wayward child. Of course she would see Aaron stealing away from Bagh-e Yaas.

  She realized now that she had only one hand to play. If she threatened Aaron with a public shaming and he didn’t bend, her only other option would be to go through with her promise.

  “Do you want a name that’s smeared with shit,” she asked, “or do you want your aabehroo?”

  There was that scent again—sweet rain falling onto a lake at midnight—as if evoked by forces unseen in advance of some irreparable shift in the geography of lives. It swept through the room like the breeze at dawn that awakens sleeping infants and blushing brides, cleansed the air of the smell of putrid animal flesh and open wounds to the heart, and lay bare for Aaron the dimensions and shape of a future caged by Raphael’s Wife.

  She was staring him down, she thought, because their eyes had locked, but the light was too dim and she was too nearsighted to see that his gaze was vacant, his absence complete.

  __________________

  Slowly, word began to spread about a rumor so appalling and outrageous that even repeating it was a sin, concerning Aaron Soleyman and the wife of his maternal uncle. That crazy witch of a wife of Raphael, it seemed, was going around with her mutt (What did she do—find an orphan? Steal the kid from his parents? She certainly didn’t give birth to him.), swearing on every holy book she could find that she saw with her own eyes, more than once . . . well, the rest is too odious to repeat.

  That’s what it was, at first: a rumor about a rumor. Repeated enough times, it became a very unlikely possibility that became a vexing doubt that morphed into a virulent suspicion that struck, with all the force of an imploding reputation, at Jay Gastby’s soul. Suddenly, the old gossip about his staring too long at other boys and playing flirtatiously with the fringes of his silk scarves was revived and reexamined. Could it be that he had failed to satisfy his wife to such extent, people wondered, that she had sought relief elsewhere? Did he know about the affair and turn a blind eye? Did he not realize he had a houseguest some nights because he himself was busy entertaining?

  Jay Gatsby had spent a lifetime and made many a sacrifice to keep his good name from being soiled by accusations of homosexuality. In a rage, he accused his wife of having behaved in such a way as to allow people to entertain such repugnant thoughts. That was bad enough. It never occurred to him that it could be any worse.

  She could have apologized and promised to do better, let him burn with the shame of having a wife about whom untrue murmurs spread. Instead, she told him it was true; all of it, even the part about she and Aaron being lovers, sleeping in a bed together in a room next to her husband’s. It was all true because he, Jay, was not a real man.

  __________________

  Years later, Elizabeth would still hear the sound of the phone ringing in the dark. It was Sunday, October 31, 1976. In Bagh-e Yaas, the girls were asleep; the servants had finished the day’s work and retired to their own quarters. In the sitting area next to the master bedroom, Elizabeth was engrossed in an English-language engineering account, complete with blueprints, of the 1938 construction of the first US regeneratively cooled liquid-propelled rocket engine. The designer, James H. Wyld, had died in 1953 at the age of forty-one, but not before a later version of his engine had been used to break the sound barrier for the first time.

  Elizabeth read science books and engineering accounts the way other women read romance magazines and weekly installments of translations of Jane Eyre and Les Misérables. Leaving school at age fifteen had derailed her presumed future, but it had made little difference in the ways in which she maintained a connection with the physical world. It was like the language of numbers she had invented for her drowned brothers, the words and sentences she had taught Manzel the Mute to write: what looked to others like a random cluster of digits or an impossible labyrinth of lines was, to Elizabeth, a poetry of meaning and attachment.

  The phone rang twice, stopped, then started to ring again. Elizabeth, who had stood up from her chair to reach for the receiver, paused halfway and turned instead toward the window: the last time she had peered out, the sky had the luminous blue-black hue of fall in Tehran, when the air was dry and stars were scattered all the way to the edge of the horizon. Now, a thick film of humidity, like the soupy fog before a storm, coated the outside of the glass. Beyond it, where she couldn’t see, a wave rolled forward though the dark, gathering height and becoming louder the longer the phone rang.

  She took hold of the receiver and was about to lift it when she felt something akin to lightning burn her palm. She loosened her grip and pulled her hand away, but the ringing didn’t stop.

  “Answer it,” commanded five-year-old Angela, barefoot in pajamas, from the doorway.

  There were nine rings; twelve. The moment she picked up, Elizabeth knew, the tide would break against the walls of the house and bring them down, wash away everything in its path.

  “Pick it up, already!” Angela ran to the phone. “It’s probably—” She was going to say, It’s probably Dad, but Elizabeth took the re
ceiver out of her hand.

  A man’s unfamiliar voice, laced with a provincial accent, spilled into the line: “Is this the residence of the late Mr. Aaron Soleyman, God bless his soul?”

  __________________

  The shooting had occurred at seven thirty p.m., in Aaron’s private office on the penthouse floor of the Soleyman Enterprises building on Pahlavi Avenue across from the park. From what the military police were later able to infer, Jay Gatsby had acted swiftly and with great precision: the first shot was heard less than sixty seconds after he had walked into Aaron’s room. It took off half his face and left the rest unrecognizable. It also sent the secretary running down the hall and away from the sound, shrieking louder than a train’s whistle till she had drawn all the male employees out of their offices and sent them rushing toward Aaron’s door only to find that it had been locked from inside.

  Before anyone could break in, Jay Gatsby’s 6'3'', 180-pound body, lean and smooth and disturbingly well tended, crashed through the penthouse window and dropped, backward and half-decapitated, seven floors down onto the sycamore-lined sidewalk. Having established his masculine credentials by shooting to death his wife’s purported ex-lover, Gatsby must have wavered between shooting himself in the head and jumping to his death. Maybe his hand had trembled before he could pull the trigger with the gun in his mouth, or maybe the shot had been fired accidentally as he approached the window, but either way, he arrived onto Pahlavi Avenue with his neck blown out and his head attached to the rest of him by a few precariously hung ligaments.

  * * *

  Elizabeth listened to the man on the phone the night Aaron was shot. “Yes, this is Mr. Soleyman’s residence . . . Yes, this is his widow speaking.” Yes, she would start making funeral arrangements for him. Then she had hung up and stood at the side of her bed and stared down at the night table and the phone without moving a muscle or making a sound even as little Angela pulled at her hand and yelled out her name and asked, “Who was that?”

  Angela would have screamed herself into hysterics and Elizabeth might have turned to salt and remained in place for good had Manzel the Mute not come to their rescue. She didn’t have to be told the specifics to understand, from the hollowness in Elizabeth’s stare, that she was, once again, entirely lost and alone.

  * * *

  She went out in the same clothes she had worn at home all day. It was the middle of the night, hours before a rabbi could be reached or an announcement made, but she knew exactly where to go because she had been there before, in another flood.

  The cemetery was centuries old, unpaved, and stowed in a hillside far enough away from the city as to avoid polluting the ground beneath the feet of God-fearing Muslims. The Jews who, until the advent of Reza Shah, were banished to ghettos because they were ritually impure and risked contaminating Muslims with the merest touch, had never been allowed to expand the cemetery. Instead, they stacked the dead in the ground a dozen deep, which was helpful in preserving the integrity of the family but made for unpleasant accidents when, in trying to add a new arrival, the gravedigger’s shovel stabbed an old parent or a dearly missed child. When the young boy asked her why she had come, Elizabeth said only, “I want to make sure you don’t put him on top of the twins.”

  The mortician explained that graves were assigned by paternal lineage. Only married women and widows were buried with their husbands; everyone else got to decompose with his or her father.

  “Go home and get ready for the shivah,” the boy counseled, as much to help Elizabeth as to let himself get a few more hours of sleep.

  She said nothing, just stood there next to the coffins, staring down at her feet as rain dripped from her hair and clothes like the tears of an immense, inconsolable whale.

  * * *

  The coroner signed the death certificates without mentioning either murder or suicide, and sent the bodies to Beheshtieh to be buried. Since both victims were men of status and some wealth, everyone understood that the official cause of their passing would be “unfortunate accident.” “Suicide” would be mumbled only in a whisper, and “murder” banned from any conversation about them. It was another one of those secrets that was fiercely guarded because it was so universally known, and it would be easy enough to maintain, would have spared both families a whole lot of embarrassment and agony, if the rain would do everyone a favor and stop.

  The sound Elizabeth had heard when the phone rang, which she thought was the ominous portend of a thousand-mile-an-hour tsunami, was in fact the ripping open of storm clouds that had come from nowhere, gathered over Bagh-e Yaas and the Avenue of Tranquility, up Pahlavi Avenue and every inch of the way between Elizabeth and her already dead husband, and that unleashed, even before she had heard the news, a murky brown downpour worthy of biblical mention.

  For three days the rain did not relent. It fell against a dirty white atmosphere, opaque as seawater in a storm, that gummed up the daylight and made the night dark and heavy as the inside of a coffin. In Beheshtieh, the young mortician boy who had inherited his job from countless generations of his forefathers, like a curse by a jealous queen, took special care to wash the bodies with lye and wrapped them in extra layers of caftan, selected two of his least damaged coffins in which to carry the corpses to their resting place, and went outside to dig the graves.

  No sooner had he made the smallest dent in the ground than the rain washed a shovelful of mud back in. By the end of the first day, the earth was too soft to even walk on without sinking knee-deep. On the second evening at sundown, headstones were floating in the marshy pits. On the morning of the third day, a mudslide had pulled enough dirt off the top of the graves as to expose the corpses and send them drifting downhill.

  In the middle of all this the only sight more striking than the rotting shrouds and protruding skulls, freed from the earth and floating like happy fish, was that of Aaron’s widow—the young, flighty genius who could draw the engine of a spaceship from memory but not give the cook instructions for the day’s meal—standing watch in the gravedigger’s shack in a plain wool sheet dress and a pair of saddle shoes, resembling something that had fallen off the side of a shipping boat, impervious to the elements and deaf to the poor boy’s assurances that he would send for her the instant he was able to begin the burial.

  __________________

  On the fourth day Raab Yehuda, the chief rabbi of the country, sent in a small army of men to corral the stray bodies and runaway headstones, put them back in their places under a tarp weighed down by stones. They erected a tent around the Soleyman family grave, held the mud back with a makeshift dam, and slipped Aaron in before the rain had a chance to bring down the canvas and poles and ropes holding it all in place. They did the same for Gatsby, and then Raab Yehuda uttered the fastest prayers he had ever let a dead man get away with, lamented loudly the poor turnout at the burial of a “great man” like Aaron but said nothing about Gatsby, and brought the proceedings to a finish.

  “Go home.” He patted Elizabeth gently on the shoulder. “The dead don’t come back.”

  He didn’t have to say anything to Fereshteh Gatsby because she was nowhere near Jay’s grave or even the cemetery. She was either holed up at home waiting out the rain, or she had gone into forced seclusion just to avoid showing her face, so bereft of any trace of aabehroo, to another person. If so, that was probably the best idea the foolish harlot had had in a few decades, and it may not have been such a bad one for Elizabeth either.

  Raab Yehuda started to mumble his important, precious advice to her: “You’re not exactly unsullied by scandal, my dear, what with your husband’s dalliances and that other matter, the Black Bitch of Bushehr, I think she’s called. It’s time to put an end to this war, give her something to make her go away or shut up before she sighs again and this time, God forbid, takes your children.”

  __________________

  Not that anyone asked, because there was no need to—the answer was so obvious, even the village idiot would have figur
ed it out all on his own—but there was a reason why eight-year-old Elizabeth had homed in on Aaron from the first encounter and never let go, wasn’t letting go even now, with him good and soggy. You didn’t have to know Freud to see that Aaron embodied everything Elizabeth’s father had lacked: confidence, power, good looks, the ability to make a quick exit if the house were on fire. Add to these qualities a more than impressive estate, across-the-board social charisma, and a name that inspired immediate deference, and you had your reason a thousandfold.

  She was a child when she first set her heart on Aaron, an orphan when she offered herself up to him, and though she became a mother times two, though she went through the motion of matrimony and parenting as best she could, she never gave up her unqualified reliance on Aaron to stand in for her not only as an adult, but as a person able to engage with the world.

  Slowly, while Raab Yehuda trekked down toward his car and the gravediggers hauled away the empty coffins and their wheelbarrows and shovels, the rain thinned out. Within the hour, just as Elizabeth finally abandoned her post, the fog lifted and sunlight revealed a hillside and a city that had retched its insides out and lay ragtag and disorderly and badly in need of a new plan.

  __________________

  The kinfolk had sat out the burial and later claimed they had no idea it had happened, but they took advantage of the first hours of dry weather to line up outside Bagh-e Yaas with their condolences and questions, their expressions of concern for Elizabeth and the girls and offers of advice and assistance because, you see, you’re too young and naive to get this now but the world is full of charlatans and sharks, every other person in this town right now is angling for a piece of your husband’s holdings and interests and what can you do? A woman with three daughters. And I’ll bet he didn’t write a will either, why would he? A young man like that. How was he supposed to know that Gatsby would lose his mind and pull a gun on him? This is one for the books, really, but you have to know your friends from your enemies or you’re going to be turned out into the street with only the girls and not a penny to your name, just another widow crying foul in the wind.