by Dalia Sofer
The knocks grow louder until Farnaz sees them, two men with rifles standing outside her door. She takes a deep breath and walks down. Shirin is standing on top of the stairs, her hand clutching the banister.
“Hurry up!” a man’s voice commands. The knocks grow more impatient.
When she reaches the foyer she takes another deep breath and opens the door. She examines the men, one at a time. One, with a bushy black beard and chapped lips, looks disheveled, even dirty, and were it not for his rifle she would have taken him for a laborer. The other, dressed in a military uniform and standing in the back, has a very young face.
“We’re here to search the house,” the dirty one says.
“Your papers?”
“No papers. We have orders.”
She nods and steps aside. They enter without wiping their shoes on the mat. The young soldier acknowledges her with a quick nod. They walk up the stairs, ahead of her. The bearded one starts with her bedroom, the other one goes to Shirin’s room, rests his rifle on the child’s bed, opens her closet, and begins gutting it, removing the clothes, and throwing them on the floor.
Farnaz takes her daughter’s hand and together they walk to her own bedroom, where mounds of clothes are already on the floor. Walking back and forth, the bearded man steps on them with his muddy shoes. He reaches for the tie rack and dismantles it, sending the ties undulating to the floor. “Tell me, did your husband always wear ties?” he says.
“Most of the time, yes,” Farnaz says, unsure of the question’s significance.
“So he took himself for a farangui—a westerner, didn’t he?”
“No. He was a businessman. He wore business attire.”
“Couldn’t he conduct his business in ordinary clothes?” He kneels to the floor and runs his hands through the tangled silk.
“I’m not sure what is considered ‘ordinary,’ Brother. A suit and tie used to be quite ordinary.”
“You’re wrong. This was ‘ordinary’ for westernized dandies, not anyone else.”
“Brother, is my husband accused of being a dandy? Is that the charge brought against him?” A moment of silence follows and she reproaches herself for having said this.
“How unfortunate that you don’t recognize the gravity of your situation.” He stands up and moves close to her, so close that his chest touches her breasts. His pungent breath hovers between them. She steps back, notices Shirin on the bed, watching them. Where is Habibeh when she is needed? Had she been here, she could have taken Shirin to the park or for a walk. Why had she decided to visit her family at the last minute? Was her mother really ill, as she had claimed in the morning, or had her revolutionary son warned her about this and she did not want to witness it?
When he is done with Isaac’s side of the closet he turns to hers, adding her dresses and sweaters to the pile on the floor. He smiles when he gets to her underwear, retrieving the pieces one by one and holding them in the air just for a moment before throwing them to the floor. He picks up a box of sanitary pads, peeks inside it. He nearly says something but doesn’t. Then, noticing a pair of onyx cufflinks in an open box on Isaac’s nightstand, he says, “Your husband wore jewelry?”
“That’s not jewelry. It’s for shirts.”
“Show me.”
She grabs one of Isaac’s shirts from the floor and attaches the cufflink to the sleeve. The last time Isaac wore the shirt with these very cufflinks was two years before, in the early days of the revolution, to a dinner party at their friend Kourosh Nassiri’s house. There had been whiskey, pistachios, kebab, Turkish coffee, music, and even opium, all of which allowed the guests to ignore their crumbling country and their fading futures. There, in that room, was the final gathering of the ambassadors to the past. Kourosh had danced and smoked most of the night, barefoot on his silk rug, hands stretched out wide and fingers snapping, coaxing all the women to abandon their husbands and join him for a dance. His wife, Homa, had laughed, herself groggy with more than a few puffs. “Kourosh-jan, what’s happening to you?” she would ask, giggling. “Are you leaving me soon?” “No, Homa, don’t you know? We’re all leaving soon!” he would say, and laugh. After they killed him, their home caught fire, with Homa in it.
Farnaz slides her arm inside the sleeve to give it some shape, and as her hand emerges from the sleeve’s end the man says, “Nice…very nice…” He takes the cufflinks and drops them in his pocket. “It’s evidence,” he says.
She throws the shirt back on the pile of clothes, where it lies limp and wrinkled. Sitting on the floor and watching him unweave her life, she notices that Shirin is gone. “Brother, I’ll be right back. I have to check on my daughter.”
“You’re not going anywhere. I’m certain your daughter is fine.”
“Please. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just…”
“Sit, Sister,” he says, reaching for his rifle. “Let’s not make this more painful than necessary.”
She sits back down. Looking at him rummage through her closets, his black eyes bulging with rage, she acknowledges, in a way she has not until now, that things might end terribly. How can this rage, multiplied by millions, be contained, confined, reasoned with? Isaac may not come back after all. She looks at his scattered clothes, his shoes, the fedora they had bought in Rome during that snowstorm—awful reminders of his absence.
“You’d better have a good explanation for this,” he says, holding an old military cap. “Did your husband serve in the American military?”
She looks at the cap, weathered and lint-covered. She has always disliked it because Isaac had refused to tell her why it was so special to him, no matter how many times she had asked. That cap symbolized an expired happiness that did not include her—one that could not even be shared with her.
“No, my husband was not in the American military,” she says. “That was just a little something an American soldier gave him during the war.”
The man keeps the cap as evidence. He has already amassed eleven large bags—books in English, correspondence that Farnaz did not get a chance to rip up, and family photographs she could not bring herself to destroy, including one of Parviz with his classmates at a picnic, his arms around a girl, and one of Isaac in a bathing suit in front of his first car, a used 1954 Renault, laughing at the camera. She had taken that picture during their first trip together. They had spent the night in a motel where the pillowcases displayed the brown rings of unwashed heads and the hallways smelled of urine. She had been upset with him for taking her to a place like that, knowing, all the while, that he could not have done better. For some time after they left the motel she was quiet in the car, looking out the window at the sinuous road down to the sea, wondering why she had married a man whose only belongings were one old suit, a few poetry volumes, and a photograph of his mother. Now that the conjugal contract had been signed, his talent, passion, and potential seemed impotent against the stench of urine. That marriage contract, she also knew, had brought a concrete, definitive end to her own aspirations, making her realize that those long years spent training her voice and studying literature, had, after all, been nothing more than a way to pass the hours while waiting for a husband and beginning her real life.
She rolled down the window. The air smelled of pine. He turned on the radio and Miles Davis’s “Bye Bye Blackbird” came on. As the car inched down toward the water the spare, earnest sound of the trumpet calmed her, and by the time they reached the sea she felt tranquil—happy, almost. Was it the sudden shift in altitude that made her so moody? From several thousand feet above sea level they had driven to ninety feet below, and as she breathed the salty air she wondered if being so low and close to water somehow made one more sensible.
They wore their bathing suits and took turns posing for pictures with the car. Looking at him through the camera lens as he laughed and made faces, she felt an overpowering love for him—a love that, since their wedding, she had not felt when looking at him directly. Were these, then, the ingredients necess
ary for sustained love: salt, water, a prism?
SHIRIN REAPPEARS. SHE stands in the doorway, her eyes on the bags of evidence lined against the wall.
“Where were you?” the man asks her.
“I was hungry. I was in the kitchen.”
“Yes? And what did you eat?”
“I…I ate an apple.”
“Brother, please leave her alone,” Farnaz says. “She is just a child.”
“Tell me, little girl,” he says. “Is there mud in your kitchen?”
Shirin’s eyes widen. She looks at Farnaz, terrified. There is, in fact, mud on her shoes and on the hems of her pants.
“Shirin-jan,” Farnaz says. “You went to the garden to play, right? Tell him that you went out to play. It’s all right.”
“Yes,” she says. “I…I went out to play.”
The man examines the child for some time with squinted eyes. “Then why did you lie? This child is up to something.”
“Brother, please. You are scaring her.”
He nods, unconvinced. Shirin sits on the bed, her hands on her lap. Farnaz notices how thin her daughter has become. Has she been eating, sleeping, doing her homework? How will they go on, if Isaac does not return? Can she be a mother, Farnaz asks herself, without being a wife?
Hours later, in the living room, the men cluster all the furniture in one corner and roll up the carpet. They pull out their knives and split open the pillows and sofa cushions, sliding their hands through the slits in the hope of finding more evidence sewn inside. From the tops of shelves and drawers they take down her trinkets—the porcelain creamer, the copper plate, the antique silverware—and park them in a corner of the room as if preparing them for an auction. When she sees her silver teapot, which had been missing for some time, she thanks them for finding it. “Look how happy a piece of silver makes you,” the scruffy one says, shaking his head. “There is no cure for your kind.”
“I bought this with my husband in Isfahan, right after our wedding,” she starts, but stops. How can it be explained, the joy of being in a strange city with a strange man, buying the first items to furnish their communal household—a teapot and twelve glasses? She thinks of all the hours she spent in bazaars and flea markets and antique shops in so many countries, picking these items one by one, considering their color and shape and history, holding them to the light to observe cracks and chips, and wrapping them in towels for the trip back home. A gray-violet glass vase she had bought from a Venetian artisan, now placed on the windowsill, catches the afternoon sunlight and reflects it in disjointed rays on the floor. She remembers so well the day she bought it: a wet and humid May afternoon, vaporetti swinging in the water, tourists stepping onto gondolas, and her walking with Isaac to their seaside hotel, holding a slice of Venice in her little bag. These objects, she had always believed, are infused with the souls of the places from which they came, and of the people who had made or sold them. On long, silent afternoons, when Isaac would be at work and the children at school, she would sit in her sun-filled living room and look at each one—the glass vase, a reminder of Francesca, in Venice; the copper plate, a souvenir of Ismet, in Istanbul; the silver teapot, a keepsake from Firouz, in Isfahan. Living among these objects assured her that hers was a populated world.
“So many things, Sister,” the man says. “Why so many?”
THEY SEARCH THE kitchen and the other bedrooms with less fervor. Around midnight, as they are about to leave, they realize that they forgot the garden. They stand by the glass doors and look out into the night. The dog, on the other side of the doors, barks violently.
“Sister, leash that mad dog so we can take a quick look in the garden.”
The image of Shirin with her mud-stained shoes and pants appears in her mind. It occurs to her that her daughter would not have simply gone out to play; that she may, in fact, be hiding something. “I’m scared of the dog, Brother,” Farnaz says. “She is really my husband’s dog. Since he’s been gone, the housekeeper takes care of her, and she’s not here today. You’re welcome to go out there and leash her yourself.”
The soldier glances at his colleague, then at his watch. “It’s late,” he says. “I think we’ve done enough.”
They disappear with their bags of evidence. Farnaz bolts the door, takes her daughter’s hand, and leads her up the stairs. “What were you doing in the garden, Shirin?” she asks once they are in bed.
“Nothing.”
“Then why were you so muddy?”
Shirin turns on her side, covering herself, up to the neck, with the blanket. “This blanket smells like Baba,” she says quietly.
Farnaz spoons her daughter’s small body and shuts her eyes. Huddled like this with Shirin, she remembers the early days of the war, when the terrible thunder of Iraqi bombs falling over a blacked-out Tehran would send the three of them to their hiding place under the stairs—a spot that gave them an illusion of cover but in fact was no safer than any other place in the house. There they would sit with a candle, and as they would wait for the bombs to pass, Isaac would distract them with puppet shows of singing cats and quarreling frogs—shadows of his nimble hands reflected on the opposite wall.
EIGHTEEN
New York loves expanse. It grows upward and spreads its tentacles outward, the island spilling into adjoining lands through its many bridges and tunnels. A person given to idleness, as Parviz has come to think of himself, must move about for the sake of moving, if only to fit into the general scheme of things—an electron obeying the current. Tantamount to movement, he has come to realize, is self-reliance, a fact reflected even in the language: “Take care,” a friend may say to another as the two part. In his old life the same two friends would have said to one another, khodahafez—“may God protect you.”
He finds refuge from the city in Zalman Mendelson’s hat shop, spending three afternoons a week steaming identical hats. The task numbs him, half-formed thoughts emerging from his mind like the vapor rising from his steam machine and vanishing just as quickly. Time moves slowly here, like those agonizing hours spent in mind-numbing high school classes, when his young, excitable mind had to castrate all of its instinctual thoughts in order to grasp the rice output in Isfahan, for example, or the pistachio export from Rafsan-jan. And yet something has changed in him so gravely that he now actually enjoys these slow, indistinguishable hours, which pass him by, demanding so little of him, no more than fish swimming in an aquarium. He looks at Zalman Mendelson standing at the counter, his accounting books spread open before him, adding and subtracting the profits and losses of his life. He seems a happy man, his round face giving him a generous and benign appearance. And if it weren’t for his pale, soapy complexion—no doubt a result of so many years spent in a dim, steamy shop—he would have been the ideal advertisement for the fulfilled life.
“Do you like Brooklyn, Mr. Mendelson?”
Zalman looks up from his book, his glasses sliding down his nose. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I like Brooklyn?”
“It’s fine, of course. But don’t you ever wonder what it would be like to live somewhere else?”
“Why would I wonder about living somewhere else? I live here.” Zalman puts down his pen and removes his glasses. “What is this about, my dear boy? What are you trying to say?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m wondering if you ever regret anything.”
“Regret anything? Like what?”
“I mean in life. Do you ever wish things could have turned out differently?”
“No, I don’t regret,” Zalman says. “What should I regret? God has given me a wonderful, healthy family and I thank him every day.”
“Yes, sure. But beyond that. Are you sorry, for example, that your father was imprisoned and had to leave Russia? Don’t you wonder what your life would have been like if you had lived in Leningrad instead of Brooklyn?”
“Parviz!” He laughs. “You cannot ask questions like these because you will never know the answer. It is all God’s will. I cannot qu
estion it. Besides, if circumstances were such that my father could have stayed in Leningrad, then he would have never met my mother in Vladivostok and I would have never been born. He would have married someone else and they would have had different children. Things happen for a reason, and only God knows what these reasons are.”
A cool breeze announces Rachel, who walks in, looking flushed, the shape of her long, slim arms visible through the sleeves of her sweater. Such lovely, delicate arms should not be wasted on the pious, Parviz thinks. What is the point after all, of having such arms and not being able to embrace those who are taken with them? She places the bag of food on the counter for her father, as she does every afternoon.
“Where is your coat, Rachel?” Zalman asks. “Aren’t you cold, walking around like that?”
“I forgot it at the shop.”
“You forgot it at the shop? My Rachel, her head always in the clouds…Go pick it up, or else you’ll have to go to school without a coat tomorrow.”
“It’s too late now. Mameh needs me to help her with dinner. Dovid and Chana are coming over.”
Parviz watches her through the steam. “I can go get it after I’m done here,” he offers. “I’ll bring it to the house.”
She looks at him, for the first time since her arrival. “Thank you,” she says. “That would be very kind.”
When she leaves a sudden happiness swells in him, along with an anticipation for the evening ahead, which, he knows, will consist of no more than an errand.
“Thank you, Parviz,” Zalman says. “Actually, you may enjoy meeting Rachel’s boss, Mr. Broukhim. He’s Iranian, like you. His wife divorced him after they came to this country, and the poor fellow, old enough to be a grandfather, found himself on the street. She took him for all he was worth, that woman! After thirty years of marriage, she decided she is done with him. Naturally she got custody of their daughter too. He lived in his car for a few months, eating canned beans and tuna. His daughter, about Rachel’s age, would sometimes sneak out of the house and bring him food. He came to our community, finally, and we helped him out. Now he is settled here. He has an apartment, a shop, and, God bless him, a dog. He says he is done with women. And who can blame him, after all that?”