by Dalia Sofer
“No, I ate,” Shirin lies. She sits next to her mother and rips. They tear up account balances, names and telephone numbers of her father’s friends, holiday greeting cards, and photographs—mostly of people she doesn’t recognize, or recognizes only after looking at them for a long time. Baba-Hakim was young once, she thinks, even handsome. And Uncle Javad was a skinny boy with messy hair. One photograph, of a young woman—not her mother—in a see-through white dress, taken from the back, makes her stop. The woman is climbing a dune by a beach, a fierce wind whisking her dress and clinging it to her legs. Her hair is wrapped in a sheer scarf tied behind her neck, and she is holding it in place with her left hand, while her right hand swings in midair like a dancer’s. She likes that the photograph was taken from the back, that at the moment the shutter snapped, the woman had no idea that she was being captured by a curious eye, probably male, probably her father’s. And she is stunned suddenly, to think that this man whom she knows as her father, who wears suits and goes to work and reads the paper, has lived for such a long time before her, has seen so many things she will never see, has known—maybe even loved—so many people she will never know.
There are other photographs, of her parents in the South of France; Keyvan and Shahla sunning by their pool; and her parents’ friends Kourosh and Homa, on a ski slope, somewhere. Kourosh, she knows, was killed in prison. What she remembers of him is the nickname “Aghaye Siyasat—Mr. Politics.” He would begin any conversation with “Did you hear of so and so’s election?” or “What did you think of such and such assassination?”—things she did not understand but which prompted discussions that continued well into the night, long after she had gone to bed, when she would lie in her dark bedroom and listen to the adults’ voices, punctuated by the clink of ice cubes in whiskey glasses. The night she heard of Kourosh’s death was the first time she heard her father cry. Lying in her bed behind the closed door she heard the sobbing, which at first she could not believe could come from her father, and then his voice, “They killed Kourosh, they killed Kourosh. I can’t believe it.” Of Kourosh’s wife, Homa, she remembers a white mink coat, and that round, perfect mole above her lip. Homa, she knows, had died in a fire. Everyone knows about the fire.
A photograph of herself on the ice-skating rink makes her stop. Where would she begin ripping, in the middle—first tearing it in half and then into pieces, a lock of hair here, a squinting eye there? She leans back and examines the room: the open drawers, the overflowing desk, heaps of paper on the floor. Has her mother gone mad? What will her father think if he returns home and finds his life torn up?
“Are you sure we should do this?” she says.
Her mother drops a paper on the desk. She reaches for a cigarette and brings it to her mouth. “No, I’m not sure,” she says.
The cigarettes appear, Shirin knows, whenever things are going badly. They had emerged, for instance, years ago when she was just five or six, when once in a while her mother would take her to the house of a pianist with whom she practiced her singing. For an hour or two Shirin would sit alone in the man’s living room, looking at his books, the paintings on the walls, the silver candelabra, the marble floors. What surprised her was a hand puppet of Kermit the Frog on a writing desk, so out of place in that house full of antiques. The puppet was enough to make her like the pianist, and gave her the patience necessary to sit and listen to his piano and to her mother’s voice, which, heard through a closed door, would become the voice of a stranger. When the music and singing would die down, she would hear talking and laughter, and she would wonder what private joke had been shared between them. Finally the door would open. “Not too bored?” the pianist would ask Shirin, producing from his pocket a Kinder surprise egg. Shirin would unwrap the egg and eat the chocolate shell. The surprise she would save for later. At night, alone in her bedroom, she would build the toy and add it to her collection on the shelf above her desk, where they all stood, side by side—the zebra, the cat, the warplane, the car—residues of her mother’s private life. Because the toys were so tiny, no one ever noticed them, not even Parviz, and it comforted her that so many things, if small enough, or quiet enough, can go unseen. After the sessions with the pianist her mother would be in a lighthearted mood, but her spirits would dive as the night would progress, and by the evening she would be in the living room, reaching for her cigarettes, which, she said, calmed her nerves.
“I’m not sure what’s right anymore, Shirin-jan,” she says as she exhales, looking out the window and quietly crying. Shirin notices that her mother is still in her pajamas. The polish on her toenails has chipped. Why had she questioned her mother’s judgment, like that? She takes that photograph of herself and rips.
SIXTEEN
Isaac watches the dark clouds through the shoebox window, smells the wet morning air. Soon the sky disgorges hail, which taps against the black metal bars. Water enters the cell through the broken window, gathering into a puddle.
A light switches on outside and a pale band appears in the gap under the door, just before it is flung open. “Get up! Let’s go. Showers!”
Mehdi places his feet on the floor but his bad foot can no longer support his weight. “Ah!” he moans and falls back on the mattress. “Didn’t we just take showers?” he says. “Has it been a week already?” Isaac extends an arm and Mehdi holds on to it, leaning his body against it. Together they drag their way out of the cell. Ramin covers his ear with his hand. “Quiet, some quiet,” he mumbles in his sleep. Has the boy forgotten where he is? “Ramin-jan, get up!” Mehdi says, but the boy does not move.
In the hallway they join the flock of prisoners making their way to the showers. The men disrobe and enter the stalls. Isaac has learned not to look at the naked bodies passing by, at the blistered feet with black nails stepping inside gray puddles on the slimy ceramic floor. He goes into a stall, under the frigid water, and rubs his body and hair quickly with soap. He washes his shirt, his underwear, his socks, knowing that the mildew will remain trapped in them, no matter how hard he scrubs. He steps out of the shower, his clothes on his arm, looking for an empty spot where he can get dressed. Others, like him, are walking and dripping, each man searching for a small space that will offer him a semblance of privacy. Suddenly, in front of him, he sees a familiar face, from long ago.
“Vartan? Vartan Sofoyan?”
The man, naked also, stops, startled. “My God! Isaac Amin!”
They stare at each other for a few seconds. They had never exchanged many words.
“So you’re here too…” Isaac says. “How long has it been?”
“About two months. I was in a different block. And you, how long?”
“Almost three, I think. It’s hard to keep track…”
“Yes, I know.”
A guard, watching them, approaches. His black rifle seems more threatening here, in the showers, than anywhere else. “You two think this is some sort of a salon?” he yells. “Get your ugly selves dressed and out of my sight.”
Isaac and Vartan nod to each other and walk in opposite directions. Minutes later, as he stands in a corner and gets dressed, Isaac replays their interaction. That he had thought neither of his nakedness nor of his dislike for the pianist while they talked surprises him. He imagines the same must have been true for Vartan. Now as he puts on his pants and buttons his wet shirt, his resentment slowly resurfaces, and he feels agitated by the memory of the pianist’s tall, naked body.
Through the water’s gurgle comes a prisoner’s cry, followed by guards’ admonitions. In a nearby stall he sees Ramin, his nose bleeding, being stripped by two guards and shoved under the water. The boy’s arms form parentheses on his emaciated torso, his hands cupping his genitals, shielding them from view. The water gathering under his feet and swirling into the drain is pink. “That’ll teach you!” one of the guards says. “When we say wake up, we mean wake up. This is not the Plaza, you son of a dog.”
“I WONDER WHAT they’re doing to him,” Isaac says to
Mehdi when they are back in the cell. “I wish we had dragged him out ourselves.”
“Yes. I was so preoccupied with my own foot. And he is such a difficult boy. Actually, he is like so many of my students, arrogant and idealistic. It was infectious for a while, that idealism.”
“And you got caught up in it?”
“I don’t know. There was a feeling that something was happening, and that we were the ones who were making it happen. We wanted to put an end to the monarchy. We thought we were cheering for democracy. So many different groups marched together—the Communists, the Labor Party, the Party of the Masses, you name it. Add to that the religious fundamentalists. What brought us together was our hatred for the shah. But there wasn’t much else to keep us together. In the end, we unleashed a monster.”
A pair of eyes peers through the opening in the door and a tray of food slides through. Isaac gets up and grabs it. There is cheese, bread, and tea. The two men sit cross-legged on the floor and eat in silence. The rain has stopped but the cell is humid and cold.
“Why are you here, Amin-agha? You still haven’t told us much about your life.”
“I don’t know, but I have two things going against me. I’m a Jew and I lived well under the shah.”
“To live well under the shah means you had to shut your eyes and ears. You had to pretend the secret police did not exist.”
“Yes, but at least Savak imprisoned and tortured people for one reason—to get information and discourage future subversives. You only got arrested if you actually did something. Awful as it was, the regime had a logic. This government simply wants to destroy human beings, regardless of what they may or may not have done. Its goal is to annihilate. They are after people’s souls, Mehdi-agha. It’s much more dangerous.”
Mehdi nods and sips his tea. “A year ago I would have hated you,” he says. “Now I don’t know. We have more in common than I would care to admit.”
A guard calls for Isaac. The cheese still heavy in his stomach, Isaac does as he is told. He is taken downstairs, to a different room this time. When he enters he looks for the missing finger on his interrogator’s right hand, and finding it, he knows he is dealing with Mohsen again. Some three weeks ago the news that Mohsen had released a prisoner on the spot had spread throughout the prison, making the men more lighthearted, like children anticipating the summer during the final days of school. But when, a week later, he shot another prisoner just as spontaneously as he had released the first, anguish had resettled among the men. Mohsen is a wild card, people said. Who could know how to play him?
“Tell me about your brother—Javad,” Mohsen says.
“What would you like to know?”
“What does he do?”
“I am not very close to my brother.”
“According to the phone company’s records, the two of you speak regularly.”
“Yes…but our relationship isn’t one you’d call intimate. It’s merely civil.”
“Help me be ‘civil’ with you, Brother.”
“This is the truth, Brother. Javad likes variety. He’s always changing jobs. One cannot keep up with him.”
“I see. It may interest you to know that he has a new job. Your brother smuggles vodka into the country.”
This is news to Isaac. He is not sure he should believe it.
“Islam does not permit alcohol, you know that, right?” Mohsen adds.
“Yes, of course. If my brother is in fact involved in smuggling, I have no knowledge of it.”
Mohsen walks behind Isaac, leans into his neck, and whispers, with a humid breath, “You know, I like you for some reason. And I want to help you. But I cannot do it alone. You have to help me. You see, we went over to your brother’s residence several times, but he wasn’t there. We also checked his so-called office, but apparently he hasn’t been there in weeks. Where is he?”
“Brother, I really don’t know. How could I? I’ve been here for three months. Like I said, he’s a free spirit. He travels a lot. He’s never in one place.”
“Bastard! You think you’ll get away with it? You come from a family of taghouti, of promiscuous sinners. You think you can protect each other?”
“Perhaps there has been some mistake. My brother would not be one to engage in smuggling. He…”
“Shut up! The mistake, Brother Amin, is that I have been too lenient with you.” He walks away, stares at the view outside his small window—the concrete walls of another prison wing. “I am too tired for you today. I don’t even want to see your face. Just know that one day, soon enough, you’ll regret your lies and you’ll beg me for mercy. But by then, my dear Brother, it will be too late.”
When Isaac returns to the cell he finds Ramin on his mattress, cleaning the spaces between his toes. He has grown used to the boy’s foul habit and says nothing. He lies on his back. There is a putrid smell in the air, of humidity and urine and blood. He recalls the stifling humidity of Khorramshahr when he was a boy, and how he would pass the summers playing soccer in the street with Javad and a few neighborhood kids, their soles so callused that they would not feel the heat under their bare feet. To cool off, he would often swim in the Karun River with his brother, trying to avoid the black lumps of oil—residue from the refinery—that the water would carry toward them from time to time. The viscous lumps seemed to him like shifting ogres, and he took them as bad omens, though he did not know why. Javad, on the other hand, did not swim away from them, but toward them, trying to capture them in empty pickle jars in order to sell them later. “We’ll be oil tycoons,” he would tell Isaac. “You have to believe it!” Poor Javad, Isaac thinks, his impractical little brother, whose life so far has been a series of failed get-rich schemes, and whose boyish good looks, now fading, will no longer allow him to charm his way out of trouble. Where is he now?
The muezzin calls for evening prayers. Isaac covers his ears. The sound makes his chest tighten. Lately whenever he hears it, he feels as though he were being buried alive. He turns on his side. Ramin is still preoccupied with his toes.
“Ramin, you’re not going to pray?”
“I’m not well,” the boy says. “And I can’t pretend to be religious anymore.”
“I saw what they did to you in the shower this morning,” Isaac says, the image of Parviz never far from his mind when talking to Ramin. “You should at least pray here, in the cell. What if a guard comes to check up on you?”
“Amin-agha, are you a religious man?” the boy asks.
Were he not in prison he would have replied that he is not. He has always observed the essential holidays, but he is not a religious man, as such. Now he is not sure. To deny belief terrifies him. In order to hold on to hope, he feels he must believe in something. “I may be becoming one,” he finally says.
“Not me. No matter how much I want to believe, I can’t. Religion is for the weak, that’s what my mother always said.”
“I thought this for a long time also,” Isaac says. “Now I don’t know. It’s possible I am just becoming weak.”
After a while the boy removes his shirt and begins exercising on the floor. His back is covered with bruises. On his right arm there is a tattoo—tall, beautiful letters, together spelling “Sima.”
“Is that your mother’s name, tattooed on your arm?” Isaac says.
Ramin stops the exercises, caresses the letters. “Yes, I got the tattoo after they took her to jail.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“So is she,” Ramin says.
“Tell me, Ramin, what would you be doing if none of this had happened?”
“I would be traveling. I want to see the world. I want to be a photographer.”
It pleases Isaac that the boy speaks in the present—I want to be a photographer, not I wanted—that all this, his dead father and his jailed mother and his own uncertain fate, is just a transitory phase, a simple interruption.
The door opens and a guard sticks his head in. “What are you doing here boy? Why aren’t yo
u praying?”
“I’m sick, Brother,” Ramin says.
The guard walks in and lifts him off the floor. “I’ve had it with your antics. Sleeping in late, showing up to prayer when you feel like it. Listen to me! This is not some kind of vacation. You’re in prison! Do you understand? You are a prisoner! You pray when we tell you to pray.”
Ramin looks straight ahead. He doesn’t flinch. When the guard lets go of his arm he says, calmly, “Brother, I am not a religious person, but if I were, I’m certain God would forgive me for being ill.”
“You are digging your grave with your own hands!” The guard leaves, banging the metal door behind him and rattling his keys for a while before locking it.
“My God, Ramin,” Isaac says. “Why tell them you are not a religious person when you know that’s the thing they hate to hear most?”
“I speak the truth. That should mean something.”
Isaac cannot remember the last time he had such convictions. Even as a boy, and later as a young man, he had been driven less by principles than by his desire to erase the stains on his life—the indifference of his father, the unhappiness of his mother, the rumbling of his stomach, the heat of his city, and the fear that, like his father, he would live an insignificant life.
All this, he had achieved, but the price had been a string of compromises, looped over one another like pearls, creating a life at once beautiful and frail.
He takes deep breaths to calm himself, filling his lungs with the foul air then draining them. The prison, a giant tomb, makes no sound.
SEVENTEEN
When they arrive, on an overcast afternoon in December, Farnaz does not hear the knocks. She stands by the kitchen window, looking at the street below, the homes with closed curtains whose owners have left one by one. The mailman is making his rounds, sliding envelopes through door slits. She imagines their thump as they fall into empty courtyards, letters whose destiny is to never be read.