That Aaron’s widow and daughters could easily meet the same fate to which he had condemned Raphael’s wife and son was not the subject of controversy. Nor was it viewed as particularly poignant, given how frequently it happened, or especially unfortunate, given that Elizabeth herself had snatched the goods from the legions of better, more qualified candidates for marriage to Aaron. What did concern everyone was the ferociousness with which distant relatives and new and old business partners began to attack one another even before Aaron was loaded into the coroner’s truck, and the levelheaded, seemingly dispassionate reception they each received from Elizabeth.
* * *
She had gone home after the funeral and taken a pair of scissors to her hair, cut off the braid in one jagged snip, and put it, wrapped in newspaper, into a box. Later that day, she gave the hair to Chamehdooni, the strange little man who went around with a beat-up briefcase and who traded in women’s hair for a living. He stole most of the hair from dead women—prostitutes and old widows and political prisoners whom no one dared claim—at the city morgue where he tipped the attendant to let him in at night, and he sold it to wigmakers in the posh, upscale salons of North Tehran. Elizabeth gave him the hair without explanation, but he didn’t have to be clairvoyant to see what it meant for a young woman to give up such an essential part of her appearance, or why her face was suddenly carved with the laugh lines and crow’s-feet of middle age.
She threw the dress and shoes she had worn at the cemetery in the trash, locked up the master bedroom and made a narrow bed for herself in Aaron’s home office, and set about getting the house ready for the shivah. Within hours, the glass in the windows, mirrors, even on framed pictures was covered with black cloth. Music was forbidden and television was cut off and everyone—from Elizabeth to the maids to five-year-old Angela and three-year-old Noor—donned widow’s black. By the time the first callers arrived, Elizabeth had grown up, grown old, and grown into the wife she had never expected to be.
This she owed to Raphael’s Wife.
* * *
Elizabeth thanked the well-wishers for their good advice and offers of assistance with that same spectator-like expression she was so known for, but you got the feeling she didn’t quite recognize anyone or remember how they were connected to Aaron. She certainly didn’t give any indication that she intended to call or rely on any of them for either help or advice. The men were encouraged by this—her obvious cluelessness as to what awaited her—but the women, who know their own kind better, were alarmed. If she wasn’t in a panic and already clawing at every chance to defend her daughters’ inheritance against the wolves, it must be that she had a plan.
She wasn’t religious and didn’t know a word of Hebrew except the mourner’s kaddish, which she had learned when her family drowned (though she wasn’t allowed to say it because she was a girl), but she sat in the front row of the women’s half of the room and trained her eyes directly on the pseudorabbi who had been brought in to pray from dawn till well after dark. He had a long dirty-white beard and chapped lips, stopped eating only when he had to relieve himself, and was loathe to make eye contact. He rocked back and forth slightly, mumbled ever so softly as he chewed, and was always staring at people’s hands as if to inspire them to grow money and extend it to him. For all anyone knew, he was reciting the day’s news or uttering obscenities through that forever-ruminating mouth of his, dissolving the last of his sugar-blighted, tobacco-stained teeth in a steady stream of sweetened black tea and plump, juicy dates, but he was one of those fixtures you could not do without at a time like this, and he seemed to hold a special fascination for Elizabeth anyway.
She said later that he reminded her of what could become of a person who settled.
__________________
Then again, not settling had its own perils. You had only to utter the name Raphael’s Wife to win that argument, even if the woman herself was too blinded by ambition to understand. So many times, people who were tired of watching her self-destruct tried to reason with her that a fraction of something—which is what Aaron had been willing to give her—was better than all of nothing; that it was better for her son to be a comfortable bastard than a poor one; that she should have invented a story that made some sense, even if it didn’t place her son at the epicenter of the Soleyman riches, instead of one that was impossible to believe.
But if there was ever a time when Raphael’s Wife might have tired of her Sisyphus-like campaign on behalf of that pear-shaped, squinting, taciturn-as-a-retired-math-teacher excuse for a son, it was good and gone ten seconds after Jay Gatsby closed the door behind him in Aaron’s office. Never mind the elation of seeing the enemy’s demise, or the rapture of discovering the extent of her own power: with Aaron gone and his second-closest male heir a cousin twice removed, Raphael’s Son was all but a shoe-in for the post.
* * *
Raphael’s Wife had the good sense to stay out of the way during the week of the shivah, but she didn’t plan to give Elizabeth a single day of rest after that. She all but stood on the street corner screaming to the world that it was she—the wronged widow—who had made “calamity” a household name among the Soleymans. She even went the extra mile, sent word to her own erstwhile family, the relatives she had been so eager to leave and with whom she had maintained no contact for over a decade, in Bushehr. She didn’t have an address for them, didn’t know what surname they had chosen for themselves since the local government began to enforce a law that every person must have a first and a last name.
“Ask for the kosher butcher,” she told the young bus driver on the Tehran–Bushehr route as she shoved a few crumpled bills into his palm. “Tell them that any day now, the son of Raphael Soleyman’s widow will be able to buy and sell all of them with the small change in his pockets.”
She had a plan: Now that Aaron would no longer be there to stand in her way, she was going to apply to the Ministry of the Interior for a new birth certificate for her son. Before any of the other pretenders had a chance to make their move, she would file suit in court—something that would have been impossible while Aaron was alive and could use his influence—on her son’s behalf. Ten years ago, she might have lost outright to a man—any man—who challenged Raphael’s Son’s entitlement, regardless of the truth or fairness of his claim. But Iran in the 1970s was a much kinder place to its women—at least on paper—than it had been even a decade earlier.
All this was perhaps a bit too ambitious for a woman who lived in South Tehran, in a rented room she shared with her son in one of those old-style houses with a sunken courtyard, one outhouse, and portable kerosene lamps for heat and cooking. The neighbors were mostly Muslim migrants from faraway provinces; they had abandoned the land they had farmed for generations, come to Tehran in search of better jobs and more pay, and found the big city and all of its cruelties and temptations overwhelming to say the least. Compared to these people, Raphael’s wife and son were quite fortunate: she worked as a maid in the Razi Hospital, and had been saving her monthly handouts from Aaron, plus the occasional sums he paid just to rid himself of her shrieking in Bagh-e Yaas. There was also the school tuition and the money for uniforms and books that he sent directly to the principal at the Shah Reza Academy—to make sure it went toward the bastard’s education instead of being put to other use by Raphael’s Wife.
She might have had a happier life, raised a better human being for a son, had she accepted her limitations and let go of her aspirations. But Raphael’s Wife, like Elizabeth Soleyman, wanted more than to simply subsist. She didn’t compare herself to the hunchbacked grandmothers with black gums and hollow bones she saw all around her, didn’t see her son as equal to the barefoot village boys and bewildered young men who thought they were lucky if they got a job laying bricks for some rich person’s new mansion.
* * *
How Raphael’s Wife came by the notion that she deserved more than what fate had parsed out for her is something no one figured out. What is clear is th
at all the devastation that resulted from her campaign was the outcome of this inherent sense of entitlement, the perception, however false, that she was as worthy as any rich and happy person walking God’s good earth.
That’s how revolutions start.
__________________
She didn’t have to wait long to have it out with Elizabeth. Raphael’s Wife had geared up to launch her assault on the eighth day following Aaron’s burial. On the seventh night, she smelled the sea and all of its living creatures, went outside to detect its source, and found Elizabeth at the door.
The only part of Elizabeth that hadn’t changed since the last time Raphael’s Wife had seen her were the moonstone-colored eyes and that whatever-it-takes reflection of inevitability.
Raphael’s Wife was so shocked by Elizabeth’s appearance she thought that she might have been ambushed, that she was about to receive some kind of payback for Aaron’s demise. She glanced around furtively for a warning sign, turned instinctively toward the house, and called for her son. To her great dismay, Elizabeth picked out the fear.
“I mean no harm,” she said respectfully. “I’ve come to make peace.”
There was that earnestness again, that I-couldn’t-lie-if-I-wanted-to simplicity in Elizabeth that made other women suspicious of her and drove Raphael’s Wife mad. She felt her son come up from behind and stand next to her. She put a hand on his shoulder as if for balance, and spent a few seconds searching for the right tone. She decided on derision mixed with sarcasm.
“So that’s what you people do,” she said, a forced smile, like a grimace, splitting her face. “When all is lost, you sue for peace.”
They were standing a few steps outside the front door of the rental house, on the edge of the narrow alley with the open gutters filled with garbage and the stench of stray animals’ feces. Though it was dark, most of the neighbors were still outside, hiding from the quickly spreading mold and decomposing rugs and furniture, the wet plaster and lingering debris, the children’s disintegrated schoolbooks and the carcasses of drowned cats that the three days of rain had brought. They had all seen Elizabeth arrive in her Mercedes, and now they were watching the exchange between her and Raphael’s Wife.
Elizabeth, of course, did not get it.
“I did lose my husband,” she began, but Raphael’s Wife interrupted her.
“Huh! Your husband! He’s the least you’ve lost.” She sensed Elizabeth’s mounting confusion. “You may not know it yet, because your donkey brain hasn’t caught up, but you’ve lost it all! You’re a widow with no sons and no one to show you the smallest bit of mercy. You’re going to be thrown out of that house along with your litter just as I was in my time, and the person who’s going to do it,” she gripped her son’s shoulder so tight, it made him wince, “the one who’s going to do to you what your husband did to me,” she shook him again until he pulled away, “is right here. Take a good look. If you never noticed him before, all those times I brought him to you, you’re going to see him now.”
She was breathless with rage, electric with satisfaction. Her excitement seemed to frighten her son and further puzzle Elizabeth.
“Look,” Elizabeth said, still respectful despite Raphael’s Wife’s outburst. “I don’t know what the truth of your fight with my husband is. I didn’t start this and want no part of it.”
It had been dark when Elizabeth first arrived, and it was even darker now, making the white of her car stand out more offensively against the grayness of an unpaved alley with no trees or streetlights. A dozen or more men and women, their faces lit only by the tips of burning cigarettes, watched intently.
“You want no part of it?” Raphael’s Wife let out a shriek like someone had just driven a knife into her back.
Her cries brought the spectators closer as the crowd grew in the alley. That, in turn, made her son bristle with shame. He had retreated as far back from his mother as he could without going into the courtyard of the house and closing the door, and he was standing with his eyes narrowed to slits and his right leg stabbing the ground with the tip of his right shoe.
“I’ve come to make peace,” Elizabeth said again. “I want to offer you whatever it takes.”
Even Raphael’s Wife was stunned by this. She mulled it over for thirty seconds, then ventured, “You have nothing to offer,” just to see what, exactly, Elizabeth had in mind. Was she really going to decamp from Bagh-e Yaas willingly, take her daughters, and leave it all to the competition? Could she—could anyone—be that much of an imbecile?
“Well,” Raphael’s Wife continued tentatively, hoarse from the earlier screams and cautious not to walk into a trap, “you can start by hightailing it out of my son’s house.”
“I want to give you whatever it takes for you and your son to leave us be.” Elizabeth paused, perhaps alarmed by the fire that was again rising in Raphael’s Wife’s eyes. “There’s enough money . . . I’m sure . . . enough to provide—”
“So there it is,” Raphael’s Wife sneered, “that’s the catch. You think you can buy peace from me. Give me enough to make me go away because you know, you have seen, what I can do to you all.”
She knew she was right because the smell of the sea became stronger, more dense.
“You know I can take away not just your husband but everything you care about.”
* * *
Who says revenge is not golden? Let them stand here, in this putrid alley with its half-crumbling walls and the tales of woe hanging from the clotheslines, and watch Miss Queen-of-the-World go pale and soft with fear.
Because Aaron sold her house to the professor and Madame Doctor, Raphael’s Wife wished a flood that took away Elizabeth’s parents and siblings and left her alone and impecunious at fifteen. Because Aaron refused the Soleyman name to her son, Raphael’s Wife revealed a secret that took away Elizabeth’s one great love and left her a widow at twenty.
And yet, when Elizabeth said the last word that night, there was no mistaking her message or resolve.
It wasn’t a bargain she had sought or a fight she wished to join even now, but nor was she inclined to let her losses be in vain.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am afraid of you. I have come to buy peace. But I’m not going to give back to you that which you’ve made me pay for in blood.”
__________________
Assuming his mother had told the truth—that he was conceived in the last days of Raphael’s life and born in 1963, after a thirteen-month pregnancy that produced a twelve-pound baby who rolled over on his third day and sat up before his thirtieth—Raphael’s Son was thirteen years old the night Elizabeth made her ill-fated attempt at reconciliation. The trouble was, his mother could not be telling the truth, or even a modified, adapted-for-popular-consumption version of the truth. The Soleymans knew this. So did everyone else who heard her story, even if they pretended to believe her just to end her monologue and make her shut up. And now, as he grew from a stricken little orphan into an awkward and edgy young man, so did Raphael’s Son.
The indisputable, clear-as-daylight facts that he had bought into wholeheartedly as a child, because that’s what children do—believe their parents until they don’t—had become increasingly difficult to explain to other children when he was in elementary school. In middle school, he found that the only way to defend his story or establish his mother’s honesty was to respond to every challenge with a string of expletives lobbed at the accuser. By the time he reached his teens, Rafael’s Son had to resort to physical violence, which was unfortunate because he was too heavy and uncoordinated to land a punch, but he wasn’t half bad as a target himself, so he came home every day with a new set of cuts and bruises that he tried very hard to hide, along with the added humiliation, telling himself this wasn’t the last those boys would hear from him, there was more than one way to make a person pay for their actions. His mother was gone most of the time—cleaning at the hospital or pouring her heart out, along with his birth certificate, Raphael’s forg
ed will, and the rotting remains of long-dead animals she carried around, still in the same plastic bag, as evidence of the Soleymans’ cruelty.
He felt sorry for her. He felt he had let her down by failing to be the crown prince she claimed he should be. He was grateful beyond measure for her unrelenting defense of his rights. And yet.
His earliest memories were of the times he and Raphael’s Wife had stood outside Bagh-e Yaas while she screamed and cursed as passersby threw coins at her or slowed their pace just to say, “Give it up, sister, take your kid home and stop acting the fool.” He remembered the terror he felt every time his mother dragged him onto the bus heading north toward the Avenue of Tranquility, how as a small boy he would squirm and squeeze past her and make a run for the door at every stop, hoping to get off before they arrived at the dreaded destination. He carried that terror—the way his skin nearly burned with shame as they waited outside the gates of the house, the way he stood inside the Big House when they were finally let in, and imagined that half his body had become invisible, leaving only his head and legs for others to see—he carried the acute awareness of being unwanted and unvalued to the end of his life.
Who to blame, though, for this agony?
So many times, after he was big enough to brave her beatings and defy her, he had screamed at his mother that she should let go, stop the begging that, only to her, appeared as “a legitimate demand for justice.”
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 11