by Dalia Sofer
THE DOOR CHIMES as he enters the flower shop. A small, mustached man, wearing a tweed jacket, is behind a counter, trimming stems. Parviz introduces himself and they shake hands.
“So you like it here?” Mr. Broukhim says. “What are you studying?”
“Architecture.”
“Really? My brother was an architect. Guess what he is doing now? He paints houses.” Mr. Broukhim has an easy smile, but weepy eyes. “I tell you. Study something else along with your architecture. One cannot easily transport one country’s architectural sensibility to another. People won’t take to it.”
“Where would I transport it, Mr. Broukhim? I live here now.”
“Yes, now you live here. But who knows where you’ll end up in a few years? Do you really love this country so much that you can’t imagine living anywhere else? Once you leave your own country and start moving around, there is no telling where you’ll go next.” He disappears into the back, emerges with Rachel’s coat, and hands it to Parviz. “Me, I was a doctor. Now, as you can see, I’m in the flower business.” He smiles, his palms like an open book circling around him. “But I like to think it’s temporary. Between you and me,” he whispers, “I don’t like these religious beardies. I can’t wait to save enough money so I can get out of this neighborhood. But what can I do? They helped me out and now I’m settled here. Well, I don’t want to bore you with my problems, Parviz-jan. Give my regards to Rachel and her parents.”
“I thought you didn’t like the ‘beardies.’” Parviz laughs.
“They’re the only ones I like! Now go, go!”
WALKING HOME HE holds the coat against his chest. The sweet, flowery smell that wafts up to his nose surprises him; it is not a scent he would have associated with Rachel. He brings the coat to his face and holds it there for an instant, but seeing Yanki the grocer on the other side of the street he brings it down again.
“Erev tov!” Yanki waves hello. “How are things?”
“Fine, thank you. I haven’t forgotten about my debt, Yanki. I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”
“Sure, sure, you’ll pay me back,” Yanki says. “Moshiach will come before you pay me back!” He turns the corner and disappears.
To the long list of his losses, Parviz adds dignity. In his old life, who would have talked to him as Yanki just did? He thinks of Mr. Broukhim, of his wrinkled face and his tweed jacket, of the gratitude he must once have received from his patients, of the life he must have left behind. Now he has a little flower shop on a little-known street in Brooklyn, and he is learning the difference between violets and African violets.
He walks up the steps to the Mendelsons’ and rings the doorbell. He knows that Rachel may send one of her siblings to answer the door. But when the door finally opens she is standing before him.
“Thank you.” She smiles as she takes the coat.
“You’re welcome. How is that dinner party going?”
“Party?” She laughs. “It’s not a party. It’s a dinner for a young couple going to London as emissaries tomorrow.”
“As ‘emissaries’?”
“Yes, you know about our emissaries, don’t you? We have thousands of them. They go to foreign countries and help the Jewish communities. They provide kosher food, build schools and synagogues, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds like quite an operation. Exporting Judaism.”
“No, it’s not like that.” The smile disappears from her face just as easily as it had appeared. “Well, goodnight. Thanks again for the coat,” she says as she shuts the door.
Standing on the stoop, he tucks his gloveless hands in his pockets and looks out onto the dark street. How unyielding is that space between connection and interruption—one false move, one misspoken word, and you find yourself on the wrong side of things.
NINETEEN
Musical chairs in Leila’s house means musical cushions. Shirin and the other girls, gathered here for Leila’s birthday, lay out pillows and cushions on the floor, while Farideh-khanoum stands by the stereo, in charge of the music. Shirin has always disliked this game, whose purpose, she believes, is to show that in any gathering, there is always one person too many.
On the fourth round she loses her spot. She stands on the periphery with the three other condemned girls and watches the race. Chaos intensifies as seats become scarce, the girls screaming and laughing as they scramble to sit. She looks out the window. A snowstorm was predicted this morning. Large flakes are already coming down, accumulating quickly on trees and rooftops. She remembers how on weekends, in the wintertime, when her father and Parviz were still around, they would go out for lunch to her father’s favorite kebab house, or to that Russian restaurant whose chicken Kiev delivered a flow of melting butter when pricked with a knife. Afterward they would return home, well fed and half asleep, to the lullaby of radiators. Her mother would prepare tea and sing in that feathery voice of hers that made people tell her she should have been a singer. To which she would always reply, “I should have, I should have, I should have been many things….” Her father would sit with a stack of newspapers and catch up on the week’s events—the earthquakes, the assassinations, the stabbings, and robberies. Shirin would curl up on the sofa next to him, comforted by the masculine scent of tobacco, aftershave, and newsprint.
WITH SEVEN GIRLS still in the game, it occurs to her that she has enough time to go to the basement and take more files. Farideh-khanoum is very focused on the game, her finger alternating between the “play” and “pause” buttons. And Leila’s father is most likely not at home; if he were, there would not have been any music. But where would she hide the files, since she doesn’t have her schoolbag? What if one of the girls sees her? She thinks of that afternoon when the two men had come to search their house, how she had buried that one file, of Ali Reza Rasti, in the garden, next to the cherry tree. She had almost gotten caught, with the mud on her pants. How many times can she get lucky, like that? But she is here, already made irrelevant by the game. Should she not try, at least?
She tiptoes out of the room until she is out of view, then takes her coat from Leila’s room and walks down the creaking stairs to the basement. The stomping of feet above sends her heart racing. She opens the armoire and moves the old clothes. More files have been added to the pile. She takes the top three, wraps her coat around them, and sneaks back up. She shoves the coat—and files—in Leila’s closet.
Back in the living room, the competition has intensified between the remaining two players vying for the last seat. The rivals spin, and when the music finally stops the one sitting down is Elaheh, the daughter of the head of a prison. Did Farideh-khanoum ensure Elaheh’s victory with her timing? After all, it would not hurt to be on the girl’s good side.
Once the birthday song has been sung and the candles blown out, she eats her slice of cake but thinks about the files. How will she retrieve her coat without anyone noticing? What if the whole class finds out? What would Elaheh do if she knew? No doubt she would report back to her father. And the father, what would he do? Drops of vomit form in her throat, with the sour taste of undigested heavy cream. She stops eating. The other girls, already devouring their second and third slices, are planning the next activity. There is talk of hopscotch, Monopoly, the telephone game.
“Shirin-jan, you don’t like the cake?” Farideh-khanoum says.
“It’s very good. I just…I’m not feeling well.” Under her sweater, beads of sweat trickle from her chest down to her stomach. She excuses herself and calls her mother to pick her up.
“I’m going to think you are allergic to our house!” Farideh-khanoum laughs. “You get sick every time you come here.”
“She’s not that much better in school,” Elaheh says. “She spends half her life in the infirmary.” Because of her new social standing, Elaheh is the most vocal of all the girls, as comfortable with adults as she is with her classmates.
“Yes, Shirin-jan?” Farideh-khanoum says. “Are you that sickly? Well, some c
hildren are just like that.”
She had been to the infirmary five times in the past two weeks, a fact that had categorized her by her peers, her teachers, and now, Leila’s mother, as “sickly.” But she doesn’t think of herself as a sickly child. What had been troubling her were bouts of nausea, accompanied by sharp stomach pains, and it was only once she was in the infirmary, sipping the tea prepared for her by Soheila-khanoum, the school nurse, that her stomach muscles relaxed and she felt the nausea float away. There, in the hush of the white-walled, sunny room, away from the other children, she would let herself be coddled by the nurse, a kind woman who people said had lost a daughter in one of the revolution’s bloodiest riots. “Black Friday” people called the day of that riot. But for Soheila-khanoum, Shirin thought, the blackness must have spilled onto the other days, giving her nothing but black weeks and months. She wondered if Soheila-khanoum got bored or lonely all by herself in that infirmary, the silence a constant reminder of her daughter. She seemed pleased to have a visitor who interrupted that solitude as frequently as Shirin did.
When the girls begin their game of telephone, Shirin retrieves her coat and holds it on her lap, making sure the files are not visible. Waiting for her mother, she watches as each of her classmates whispers a phrase in her neighbor’s ear and giggles. The phrase emerges from the lineup, botched.
Her mother honks. She holds the coat in one arm and waves good-bye to her classmates with the other. “Feel better!” some call out and Shirin thanks them, though she wonders if they really mean it.
They drive slowly in the snow, the car skidding every now and then. “I don’t have the snow chains on,” her mother says. Shirin imagines the car spinning out of control and crashing into a tree. But soon they arrive home, without tragedy.
In her room, she spreads out the files on her desk, and when she sees the name “Javad Amin” scribbled on one, she runs to the bathroom and throws up, finally. As her mother washes her face Shirin looks at her own reflection in the mirror and sees the cherry pins in her hair—Uncle Javad’s final gift. She wants to tell her mother about the files, about his file, but decides not to. Increasing her mother’s grief, she knows, would also increase her chances of dying. Grief terrifies her, because it’s invisible.
After a nap and a cup of mint tea she takes the files and buries them in the garden, on top of Ali Reza Rasti’s file. “Good luck, Uncle Javad,” she says as she covers up his name with soil and snow.
TWENTY
Isaac stares at his hands—the skeletal knuckles, the dark veins, the fingers he has always regarded as too short for his palms. These hands, he thinks, are his connectors to everyone and everything that exists outside of him. He looks at his feet—anonymous, neither beautiful nor ugly—just feet, doing their job, keeping him upright. How much longer will they remain unlashed? The longer he stares at his hands and feet, the more disjointed they seem, and he wonders if he would recognize them were they to be severed, somehow, after an earthquake, for example, or a plane crash, or another random, unforeseen accident. People reside inside their bodies for decades, but they rarely examine these vessels, and all their intricate, dutiful parts. A house is more easily remembered than a body: one can describe the number of rooms, the glass in the windows, the color of the walls, the tiles in the bathroom.
What will happen to his body if he were to die here? Will they shroud him in linen and place him in a wooden casket, as his religion demands, or will they dump him somewhere, in a mass grave perhaps? What will become of his faithful hands and his nameless feet, for which he suddenly feels enormous love? Will a shomer—“guardian”—sit by his corpse and recite psalms until he is buried? Will there be seven days of mourning in his house, will mirrors be covered, will his son return? Will anyone say Kaddish for him? He brings his right hand to his mouth and kisses it, resting his lips between two bony knuckles.
“Amin-agha, are you all right?” Ramin says.
“Yes, fine.” He is sitting outside with the usual group of prisoners, which now includes Vartan, the pianist, who is not a talkative man, at least not here. Isaac, too, has little to say. These weekly hours of fresh air leave him indifferent. During his first month he would use his hour to breathe as deeply as he could, as if breathing deeper and harder could somehow allow his body to store more oxygen for those remaining one hundred sixty-seven hours of the week. But just as overeating the night before the fast of Yom Kippur does nothing to quell the hunger that inevitably surges during the final hours of that long day of atonement and fasting, so too the deep breaths did little to help him endure those unending days spent in his dank cell. The human body is like that. It needs a constant flow of nourishment, air, and love, to survive. Unlike currency, these things cannot be accumulated. At any given moment, either you have them, or you don’t.
“So, Maestro, tell us more about Vienna,” Ramin says. The prisoners have nicknamed Vartan “maestro,” out of both derision and affection. He has replaced Isaac as the one most picked on by the group.
“I’ve told you about the city, the cafés, the opera. What else would you like to know?”
“The women,” Ramin whispers. “Are they beautiful?”
“Some may find them beautiful. I found them rather plain.”
“Forget Vienna,” Reza says. “Why don’t you tell us about playing music for the shah? What was it like to be the court jester?”
“I was not a court jester. I played at the Rudaki Opera House.”
“Agha-Reza, stop putting everyone on trial, will you?” Hamid says. “Maybe if you had gone to the opera house with your father once or twice you wouldn’t be the brute that you’ve turned out to be.” Once a minister of the shah, Hamid has gone through more interrogations than the others. But he remains convinced of his innocence and optimistic about his future, probably because he cannot afford to be otherwise.
“You think dressing up and sitting in a room with velvet chairs and crystal chandeliers makes you more cultured, Hamid-agha?” Reza says. “You’re just like my father, mean-spirited and arrogant.”
“If you think your father is so mean-spirited and arrogant, why did you help him escape?”
“Maestro, did you compose your own music?” Ramin tries to diffuse the tension—the child caught between arguing adults.
“A long time ago I began writing a symphony. But I never finished it.”
“To write a whole symphony, you have to be in love,” Ramin says. “I’m quite sure that’s what you need.”
“Perhaps.” Vartan glances at Isaac then looks away. Isaac feels a violent anger rising in him. What did it mean, that glance? Was Vartan telling him that he had, in fact, loved Farnaz, or was he merely clarifying that theirs had not been a love story? He realizes that the answer matters little. There had been something, maybe no more than a passing affection, but still something, and he will never know exactly what. For now, they are both here, two condemned men sitting side by side. It is even possible that they will die together, their bodies thrown into the same grave, one on top of the other. Who can predict these things?
The guard Hossein stands a few yards away. He is the most lenient of the guards and usually allows the prisoners to talk, if the discussion is innocent enough. He approaches the group, looks around to make sure no other guards are present, and says, in a low voice, “Executions have increased in the past couple of weeks. If you are taken to interrogation this week, I strongly advise each of you to repent.”
“Repent?” the old man Muhammad-agha says. This is the first time he has spoken in weeks. “Repent for what, Brother Hossein? For what one doesn’t believe, or for what one hasn’t done?”
“What’s wrong with you, Muhammad-agha?” Hossein says. “If you’d start praying and showing that you are a decent Muslim, a believer, they’d let you go. You’re an old man. Why make your final days on this earth more painful than necessary?”
“Because, Brother, my prayers are between me and my God. And in any case, I have nothing to
go back to. My wife is dead and my three daughters are in prison.”
“We’re all goners,” Mehdi says as Hossein walks away. “I wish that at least after killing us they would pay our families the blood money.”
“Blood money is owed only when a believer accidentally kills another believer,” Hamid says. “Our deaths would be neither accidental nor reimbursable.”
“Even if our families were to get paid, you, Amin-agha, and your friend the maestro, would be worth half the blood money than the rest of us.” Reza smiles. “Are you aware of that?”
Isaac doesn’t answer. The blood of a Jew, or a Christian, or any non-Muslim, is not as valuable as that of a Muslim—he knows that of course. But what once seemed to him like one of the many archaic, even amusing, laws of his country suddenly terrifies him. Blood money. An actual tariff placed on people’s blood. He looks at Vartan, who is hugging his knees, his torso limp and yielding. What the two of them share, beyond any real or imagined personal history, is a massacre of their forebears—the Jews by the Germans, the Armenians by the Turks—and he wonders if this membership in the club of the slaughtered doesn’t create a certain kinship, after all.
“Back in the time of Cyrus and Darius,” Hamid says, “our country was just and generous. Everyone was considered equal. We were a great nation, an empire.”
“Stop the grandiosity, Hamid-agha!” Mehdi says. “That’s our problem in this country. We think we’re special because once upon a time we were great. Cyrus. Darius. Persepolis. That was a long time ago! What are we now? Now we are barbarians.”
“Not all of us,” Hamid says. “Just a couple of years ago, when the revolutionaries tried to bulldoze Persepolis, the governor of Fars and the people of Shiraz prevented them by force. When they wanted to ban our New Year celebrations, no one would have it. These things are important parts of our Zoroastrian past, and we will hold on to them no matter what regime takes over.”