The Septembers of Shiraz

by Dalia Sofer

  But that was 1971. The guests who had so revered him had long since deserted their host, and the shah, as he fled his country, could not find a place to rest his head. With his suitcase in one hand and his bleak medical prognosis in the other, he had gone to Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, America, and Panama, finally returning to Egypt—one of the few countries willing to have him die on its soil, which he did, in the summer of 1980. Perceived for decades as the beacon of the Middle East, he was now suddenly viewed as the tyrant who had crushed anyone who dared speak against him. He was, in fact, both of these things. But in those final days, as he lay dying in Cairo, Isaac saw him as neither visionary nor despot, but as a man who had wished both himself and his country to be something they were not.

  THIRTEEN

  Here they play solitaire and old songs. A 1950s recording spins on the turntable, the singer’s voice aggravated by the needle’s scratch. Baba-Hakim sits by a window, looking out, absentmindedly tapping his fingers to the music. A half-full glass is on the table in front of him, the tea inside looking cold. Afshin-khanoum, on the sofa, concentrates on her game of solitaire. The house smells of simmered onions and camphor oil.

  Farnaz has been here for the entire afternoon, but she has yet to tell them about their son’s arrest.

  “More tea, Farnaz-jan?” Afshin-khanoum says, shuffling her cards. She does not play these games of solitaire just to pass the time. She plays them to predict the future. Before each game she asks a question, and if the game is resolved successfully, it means that the augury will be positive; if not, then it will be negative. Farnaz remembers how for months after the shah had left the country the old woman had sat on her sofa with her cards, asking, “Will he come back?” And each time a game was completed with success she would clap and say, “The shah will be back; my cards say so!”

  “No, thank you, Afshin-khanoum. I had three cups already.”

  “Then have some cake, aziz. You’re so thin, thinner than before. Right, Hakim? Doesn’t she look thin?”

  Baba-Hakim nods, without looking away from the courtyard. He had never been much of a conversationalist; now, old age and doctors’ orders that he stay away from cigarettes and alcohol have all but silenced him. He turns his gaze to the room, glances at his tea, then at the locked liquor cabinet. He looks out again. Farnaz remembers the trip to Isfahan, some twenty-five years ago, just a few months after she and Isaac were married. She had not liked the father, then. While she, Isaac, and Afshin-khanoum went sightseeing, he sat in teahouses and smoked water pipes. The tile work on the Darb-e-Imam, the dome of the seventeenth-century Sheikh Lotfolla mosque, left him indifferent. The chimerical name of the palace, Chehel Sotoun—“forty columns,” which counts among its columns not only the twenty wooden beams that support its entrance but also their reflection in the pool below, eluded him. And when Isaac joked with him, saying, “Baba-jan, you know the saying ‘Isfahan, nesf-e-jahan—Isfahan, half the world’; Do you know what you’re missing?” he smiled and said, “Too bad for me. I guess I’ll just have to see the other half.” Throughout the trip, he carried in his pocket a metal flask of whiskey, from which apathy, fermented and distilled, tipped into his mouth and filtered through his veins, transforming him into the impassive man that he was. “Hakim is like a baby,” Afshin-khanoum would say. “Give him his bottle and he’ll leave you alone for a few hours.” When Farnaz asked him, one afternoon, why he drank so much, he said, “The amount of drink, Farnaz-jan, must equal the amount of pain. But I’m afraid you won’t understand.” She had not really understood then.

  “I have something to tell you,” Farnaz says finally. “Isaac is in prison. I didn’t know how to tell you…”

  Afshin-khanoum puts down her cards and looks up, confused. Baba-Hakim looks away from the window and stares at Farnaz. This may be the first time this husband and wife have ever shared an emotion, Farnaz thinks.

  “It’s been almost a month and a half.”

  “Why did you wait so long to tell us?” Afshin-khanoum’s eyes are recessed under the weight of her lids. A faint odor of mothballs emerges from her.

  “I didn’t want to worry you. But now…it’s been too long. I thought you should know. I also have a favor to ask you. I’ve been told that most likely the Revolutionary Guards will come to search our house. I was wondering if I could leave Shirin here with you for a few days while I go through all our books and documents and try to get rid of anything that may seem suspicious to them. I don’t want her to see me do this. I’m afraid it will alarm her.”

  “Leave her with us? We can hardly take care of ourselves. Hakim is very ill.” Shaking her head she whispers, “So much misfortune…” Her face is half lit by the afternoon sun, a few stray hairs dangling from her chin.

  “Baba-Hakim, you’re ill? What’s wrong?”

  “My liver, Farnaz-jan, is bad. And my kidneys have become extremely sluggish.” His voice belongs to a man who has not spoken in days, maybe weeks. He picks up his worry beads from the table and fingers them. Each bead clacks on the next, following the trajectory of the invisible thread by which it is bound.

  These beads, she thinks, will outlive his hands. His wool robe, which he has owned as long as she has known him, and before, will soon be folded and put away in a box, along with his hat, his good shoes, his pocket watch. What had allowed her to tolerate him, on that trip to Isfahan so long ago, was a single sentence. “Please make Isaac happy, Farnaz-jan, because we never did.” With this sentence he had made her realize that despite all the things his character lacked, which were many, he possessed at least the capacity to admit who he was: a bad father.

  “There are good treatments now for kidney problems,” she says. “Inshallah—God willing, you’ll get better.”

  He brings his cold tea to his mouth, takes a sip, and returns the glass to the saucer. “No, Farnaz-jan. I will not live long.”

  Afshin-khanoum looks down at her palms resting on her lap. She takes her black shawl draped on the back of the sofa and wraps it around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Farnaz-jan, that we can’t take Shirin,” she says. “This is no place for a child.” She caresses the fringes of her scarf, letting them slip, one after the other, through her arthritic fingers. For so long Afshin-khanoum had been defined by what she didn’t have, that to take away the little she did have—a son who loved her—seems unthinkable. What she didn’t have, and this was public knowledge, was the hope, after the birth of Shahla, her third child, of bearing any more children, thanks to the syphilis her husband had offered her after a trip to India, that undying souvenir. She locks her hands on her lap, her head bouncing lightly as she whispers something to herself. She will no doubt withstand the news of her son’s disappearance by resorting to solitaire. “Will my son come out alive?” she will ask, hoping that the fifty-two cards will somehow arrange themselves triumphantly, offering her the answer she so needs.

  “Yes, Afshin-khanoum, I understand. Well, I should go. Shirin is home alone with Habibeh.”

  As Farnaz leaves the house and shuts the door behind her, the knocker taps several times against the wood. It is a metal hand, representing the hand of Fatima, the prophet Muhammad’s daughter. A neighbor had offered it to Isaac’s parents some years ago because the hand is believed to bring good luck to the home’s inhabitants. Afshin-khanoum, who was not one to turn down the possibility of better luck, had hung it immediately.

  Farnaz walks through the narrow street, framed on both sides by short brick walls, along which is a row of bloody handprints—a common sight, nowadays—the stamp of revolutionaries displaying their sacrifice and their willingness to die. It reminds her of the Ascension mosque in Jerusalem, where they say Jesus left behind a footprint as he went up to heaven.

  FOURTEEN

  A good structure, like a good man or woman, must have two characteristics: strength and beauty. Parviz first heard this in class, and it seems right to him. For a building to be strong, here the professor quoted John Ruskin, it must accompli
sh what it was designed to do, and do so efficiently, without an excess of stone, glass, steel. For it to be beautiful, it must reflect its maker’s definition of beauty, whatever that definition may be. For only then can it be said that the structure exists honestly.

  Shovels, picks, wheelbarrows, winches, ten-ton hydraulic jacks—these were the instruments used to dig seventy-eight feet below the riverbed and build, stone by stone and cable by cable, this Brooklyn Bridge on which he walks. Occasionally, when he has time and the weather permits, he walks across the bridge to Manhattan; it is only once he is back on land that he rides the subway uptown to school. It is a long commute, not the most practical one, but something about the bridge—its combination of suspension and sturdiness—comforts him. A bridge, he thinks, is the only place where uncertainty is permissible, where one can exist with no connection to any land—or any person—but with the reassurance that connection is possible.

  Total length of wire in cables: nearly 3,600 miles; number of suspenders: 1,520; total weight of bridge, excluding towers and anchorages: 14,680 tons; number of fatalities during its construction: 20 to 30, including the architect. He first learned these numbers for a test, but unlike a lot of the information that fades once a test has been taken and passed, these figures had stayed with him. Looking out on the water, at the ferries and tugboats passing below the bridge, at the cars rolling on top of it, and the dozens of pedestrians who, like him, are walking toward Manhattan, thinking, no doubt, of the day ahead—the phone calls, the lunches, the possibility of unexpected encounters—he tells himself that the bridge is good, and it is beautiful, and thinking again of Ruskin, he marvels at the knowledge and willpower necessary to build a structure such as this: one must know the weight of each stone, the strength of each wire, the current of the water, in each season. Parviz doesn’t think himself capable of such knowledge and willpower.

  ZALMAN MENDELSON HAS extended him another invitation, this time for Hanukkah, and Parviz is considering attending. After classes he walks through the streets, passing along the way the pine trees truncated by the thousands and brought to the city for their brief annual holiday function. Already he is anticipating their brutal, inevitable end in the back of garbage trucks, their dry, fallen needles swept from porches and sidewalks. But when he finds himself among throngs of Christmas shoppers, their arms heavy with bags, he feels a lightness in his body, as if he, too, were on his way to the bright boutiques that sell, along with their white scarves and red tins filled with sweets, the promise of winter nights spent with family and friends by living-room fireplaces. He buys some French chocolates for the Mendelsons, spending, against his better judgment, the better portion of his last fifty dollars.

  Rachel is leaning on the stoop when he arrives home. He waves hello to her. “A bit cold to be outside, no?”

  She wraps her black wool coat tighter around her waist. “It’s too hot in the house,” she says, looking straight ahead. “I couldn’t breathe.”

  “Yes, those radiators do huff and puff all day.”

  “I’m not talking about the radiators. I’m talking about people. It’s always so crowded around the holidays. It gives me a headache. Not a moment to myself.”

  Looking at her from below, her body lost inside her coat, her pale skin half lit in the dusk, he finds her rather pretty. He opens the tin and lifts the chocolates up to her. “Please, have one,” he says.

  She looks inside, then at him, with the same seriousness as before. “It’s not kosher,” she says. “I can’t.”

  “Chocolate has to be kosher?”

  “Yes.”

  He shuts the tin and reconsiders joining the Mendelsons for dinner. What kind of Jew was he, after all, if he did not even know that one does not bring French chocolates to a Hassidic home? And what kind of Jew was she, for refusing him this small kindness—accepting a gift that he wished to share?

  He reads late into the night, first the paper, cover to cover, then pamphlets he received in the mail and intended to throw away, then a forgettable clothing catalog. He lies facedown on his bed, his eyes finally giving up. In his sleep he hears voices rising above him—a chorus of men singing and laughing, doors opening and shutting, the ceiling creaking under dancing footsteps. The sounds pass through him like a dream.

  The bang of the front door jolts him, and soon the laughing voices fill the night. He sits up, peeks through the blinds, sees dozens of black pants, the ivory tassels of prayer shawls hanging over them, followed by stockinged legs of women, their shape a mystery in the opaque night. Then come the children, with their dreidels and gold-foiled chocolate coins—the kind he should have bought if he had known what he was doing. “Happy Hanukkah!” the voices repeat. But what does it really mean to him, this festival of lights? Does it matter if Judas Maccabee reclaimed the temple of Jerusalem from the Seleucid monarchy? So what if the olive oil that was supposed to last for one day in the temple’s menorah miraculously burned for eight? How do these supposed events affect the life of Parviz Amin? And how would celebrating them bring him happiness?

  He thinks of his father, imagines the day of his arrest. As he perfected the knot on his tie and ate his eggs, listening to the morning news on the kitchen radio, did he have any premonition that on this day he would disappear from his own life? And when he did disappear, did he believe that, like Judas Maccabee, he would one day reclaim the life that he wished to live?

  He sits up on his bed, opens the red tin, and bites into a perfectly round chocolate. The dark ganache melting on his tongue allows him to forget, if only for a few seconds, his complete solitude.

  FIFTEEN

  Absence, Shirin thinks, is death’s cousin. One day something is there, the next day it isn’t. Abracadabra. But she has never liked magic tricks. Magicians make her anxious. So do their assistants. After all, what kind of person would volunteer to be erased? Is there a school somewhere for magicians’ assistants? And if so, do students get a degree in not being?

  What happens to a house full of nonbeings? What if, like her father, she, her mother, and Habibeh would one day disappear also? The house, of course, would not know it. That would be the sad part. The house would continue to exist. Its walls would remain in the same place, the doors ready to be opened and closed. The plates and glasses, too, would stay, even though there would be no one to eat or drink out of them. The chairs would stand still, their laps ready to serve. And the clocks’ needles would continue moving forward, and at midnight starting all over again, as though the day that just ended had never been.

  This morning she stays in bed and looks out her window, at the wind dusting the sky with the trees’ dry leaves. She looks at the branches, pities their nakedness and envies their patience. She watches the pale sunlight trying to break through clouds and failing. She wonders what is the point of it all, this endless cycle.

  There was a time when on weekends she would wake up to the smells of eggs, cake, toasted bread. These smells, too, have gone. The house, this morning, smells like nothing. Even a bad smell—dirty socks or rotten eggs—would mean that someone still lives here. Maybe they have all left but she doesn’t know it. Is it possible that, like the magician’s assistant, they are existing in some other world—a place where they cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled?

  She gets out of bed and walks through the house. Habibeh is gone for the weekend, taking with her the sounds of pots and pans. In the kitchen Shirin opens the refrigerator and takes out the milk, which, she knows, has to be boiled first in case it is spoiled. But she loves cold milk, and who would know if she were to drink straight from the bottle? She brings the bottle to her mouth and sips. A few seconds pass. Nothing happens. She brings the bottle to her mouth and drinks, almost finishing it. And there it is again: nothing.

  On her way back to her room she sees that the door to her father’s study is closed. Resting her ear against it she hears the shuffling of papers. She opens the door without knocking. Her mother, behind the desk piled high with files, bo
oks, and photographs, looks up. “You scared me, Shirin-jan!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “You see all this?” her mother says. “It has to go.” Her hands hover above the desk, palms up, indicating the mess below them.

  Normally her mother would have yelled at her for walking into a room without knocking. Today it doesn’t seem to matter. “Go where?” Shirin says.

  “It has to disappear. You see, people from the new regime may come to search our house. We have to get rid of anything that may look suspicious. Remember how last year you had to tear off the page with the shah’s photo from all your books? We have to do the same thing throughout the house—make sure that we have nothing that would prove that we like the old regime.”

  “Can I help you? I can shred.”

  “You?” She smiles. “Well, yes, why not? There is so much…” The circles under her mother’s eyes are darker today. “Oh, your breakfast!” she says. “Are you hungry, Shirin-jan?”