The Septembers of Shiraz

by Dalia Sofer

Her personal items—a blue scarf, some hair clips, a telephone book—scattered behind the counter, suggest an intimacy that Parviz knows he will never experience with her. “Yes, I know,” he says.

  “I am a bitter man, Parviz-jan, so maybe you shouldn’t pay attention to me. I have lost so much. My wife not only left me, but robbed me as well. My profession deserted me. I was once one of the best cardiologists in Tehran. I studied in Paris and Geneva. But here they tell me my license is no good. They tell me I have to start all over again—study, take tests—like an eighteen-year-old. I have no energy for all that! In this country, I feel like a ghost. Maybe it’s because I am old already. I am at that point in my life where the days ahead of me are fewer than those behind. I envy you, Parviz.” He sighs. “I envy your youth.” He walks away to greet a customer who asks him for yellow chrysanthemums.

  Outside Parviz wonders how he could be anyone’s object of envy. His youth is doing little for him, except robbing him of the right to suffer. Pain, he has come to realize, is the domain of the elders, their suffering always more noble and more justified than that of a boy like him, who is expected to find thrills in his new environment and to lock his short past in the cellar, only to retrieve it, years later, like a bottle of wine, and share it in brief sips with dinner guests.

  HE WALKS TOWARD the Brooklyn Bridge and then across, continues walking through the city, the skyscrapers casting their long shadows on sidewalks and depriving the pedestrians below of the final minutes of sunlight. New York is a masculine city, he thinks, vertical and with rough edges, with none of the curves of a Paris subway entrance, for example, or the enameled dome of an Isfahan mosque. New York is all steel and glass, economic and functional. It is a city where circles are rare. In his mind he traces halos, rings, wheels of fortune, clocks—all instruments of confinement on the one hand, and hope on the other. Walking along the grid of Manhattan, its numbered streets and parallel avenues, he tells himself that what this city is missing is more roundness. And the people who live here—stacked not only side by side but also on top of one another, always running out of space, time, and breath, paying large sums for slivers of air and settling down in the sky with their cats and dogs—reach upward, continually, without ever returning to themselves.

  He walks through the evening, stops at a diner for coffee and eggs, and watches the other patrons, whose number dwindles as the hours progress—families becoming couples and shrinking into loners, who walk in, disheveled, with their newspapers and books, ordering a cheeseburger and fries and pretending that this is exactly how they wish to spend yet another evening.

  Around three in the morning, on his way back to the bridge, he passes through the Fulton Fish Market, watches the delivery vans, the stacked crates, and the fishmongers, their faces covered with soot, warming their hands over small fires that burn inside trash cans, haggling with their customers. The cobblestone streets, bloodstained and slippery, smell of seaports—a familiar smell—reminding him of the port city of Ramsar by the Caspian, not far from his family’s beach house. That he is awake at this hour and able to smell the sea pleases him, and he tells himself that to understand the world, and even find in it an occasional reprieve, a person must always alternate his hours of sleep, his road to work, the places he visits, the foods he eats, and even, perhaps, the people he loves.

  THIRTY-THREE

  A few early risers are at the teahouse, sipping and smoking, some shielding their eyes with sunglasses to cover up the damage of a sleepless night. Farnaz sips her tea, waiting for Keyvan to speak. But he doesn’t. He looks tired and thin. He could use a pair of shades, like the others.

  “What’s on your mind, Keyvan?” she says. “You sounded terrible on the phone.”

  He throws two sugar cubes on the table like dice, then picks them up again. “Shahla and I are leaving,” he says finally.

  “What? First Javad, now you…”

  “Two days ago Shahla was attacked. She was returning from the hairdresser’s and she had put on her headscarf very loosely—you know, she didn’t want to ruin her hairdo. Some men jeered at her then threw some kind of liquid on her face.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Was it acid?”

  “I don’t know. When she came home her skin was all red. I washed her face with water for a long time, but it didn’t help. Now the burning has gotten better, but her skin has patches of red that don’t go away. She has tried all sorts of remedies. All day I see her peeling cucumbers, preparing bowls of milk and rose water, dipping sponges in her mixes and massaging her face, but nothing seems to help. And she refuses to see the doctor. I brought him to the house but she locked herself in the bathroom. He stood at the door for two hours, the poor man, trying to coax her to come out. She wouldn’t. She was too embarrassed. ‘The doctor has known me for so long,’ she said to me afterward. ‘How can I show him this face?’”

  “It might heal still. It may just be irritated.”

  “Yes. That’s what I tell her. But that face. It’s all she has. At least that’s what she thinks. ‘I’m disgusting,’ she says to me. ‘So go. Find yourself another woman.’” He rubs his eyes with his palms, gently, as if shielding them from light. “After all these years, she still doesn’t believe that I actually love her.”

  The server picks up the empty glasses and replaces them with fresh ones.

  “Hajj-Ali,” a young man drawls. “You got eggs today? This tea is so good it deserves a sunny-side up.”

  “Eggs?” The server laughs. “We haven’t received eggs in over a month. But maybe in your haze of hashish you’ve missed the war, Kazem-agha.”

  A few men chuckle. The lax attitude of the teahouse surprises Farnaz. These men must know one another. Each morning they must force themselves out of bed, their only comfort the prospect of meeting other vagrants. To be sitting here at this hour among them disturbs her. What happened to her morning routine, to her family at the breakfast table, to the sunny-side up in her pan and the milk boiling on her stove?

  “I’ve decided we have to get out of here,” Keyvan says. “This country is no good anymore.”

  “Where will you go? And what about your house? And your belongings?”

  “I’m tired, Farnaz. I don’t care about the house. Besides, I’m sure they’ll come after me, too. Why wouldn’t they? They already got Isaac and they’re after Javad. With my father’s connections to the shah, I’m an even better target.”

  And what about me, and Isaac? she wants to ask.

  “We’ll be going to Geneva, where my parents are. There are good doctors there. They may be able to help Shahla.”

  Yes, Keyvan. Go to Switzerland and fix Shahla’s face. And why not? I would do the same if I could. “Good luck,” she says. “Give Shahla my best. When will you go?”

  “In two weeks. It’s all arranged. Friends of mine who escaped a few months ago referred me to a couple of men with a good reputation. We’ll be smuggled out through Turkey. Let me give you their information, Farnaz-jan. No doubt you will need it, too, hopefully with Isaac.” He jots down a name and telephone number on a piece of paper and hands it to her.

  In the back of the teahouse, Hajj-Ali breaks down a sugar cone, the sound of his hammer echoing in the room. The men sipping their tea are quiet for the most part. An advertisement on the radio announces a shoe sale downtown.

  “Look at this place,” Keyvan says after a long silence. “Half of them are junkies.”

  “It’s been getting worse lately, hasn’t it?” she says. “There are more of them now.”

  They leave some change on the table and walk out. It’s a cold day, misty and humid. They stand outside, facing each other, neither of them willing to be the first to walk away.

  “Did you bring an umbrella?” he asks. “It may rain.” He looks like he may cry.

  “Yes, it’s in here,” she says, pointing to her purse. “Well, good-bye, Keyvan-jan. Inshallah we will see each other again soon.” She hugs him and walks away. For some tim
e, she senses his eyes on her back, knows that he is watching her as she disappears in the rush-hour clamor of the boulevard.

  Walking past the shopkeepers standing in their doorways and killing the morning in gossipy clusters, she remembers Shahla and Keyvan’s wedding, that lavish affair at the villa of Keyvan’s parents. In her white silk dress Shahla floated among the guests, picking up a sugar-coated almond here and a nougat there, strands of pearls woven into her hair, her dress rippling around her. Her round face, which tended to bloat during her depressive episodes that she referred to as “passing clouds,” looked sculpted and radiant, so she walked with her head held high and her back straight, her clavicles forming perfect dashes below her elegant neck, as if to say, Take note of this lovely face. Guests flocked into the garden along the gravel path, greeted the newlyweds, found their seats by the wooden trellises on the side of the house, drank arrack and ate caviar, snapped their fingers to the santour and tombak, and broke into song. That a palace of the shah and his queen lay a few miles above this villa in the Niavaran hills cast a gilded spell on the evening, so that the guests, pleased with the party for its extravagance and with themselves for being part of it, stayed on until light broke out. And throughout it, Shahla, more preoccupied with the china pattern than with her groom, laughed and danced, pleased to put an end to her quest. “Noone khaharet too roghane—Your sister’s bread has been dipped in oil,” Farnaz whispered to Isaac, to which he said, “Yes, I believe her life’s work is finished.”

  Thinking now of Shahla’s disfigured face Farnaz feels a deep pain, not just for Shahla but for the loss of what she had come to represent—shameless extravagance, which others both enjoyed and ridiculed, much as they did their government and their king.

  “Amin-khanoum!” a man calls.

  She sees the cobbler standing by his shop and smoking a cigarette. “Ali-agha, how are you?”

  “Fine, thank God. And you, khanoum? We haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Yes, well…”

  “You know, I have a pair of shoes here for your husband. They’ve been ready since September. He never picked them up. He forgot?”

  The cobbler’s ignorance of her misfortune is delicious to her. For a while she says nothing, allowing herself to linger in his world, where Isaac has not disappeared but has simply forgotten his shoes. “He has been busy,” she says, finally. “Let me pick them up while I’m here.”

  She follows him inside the shop, where rows of shoes hang from their heels on metal rods along the walls. She examines the empty shoes, forlorn under the sheen of their polish, like children in an orphanage dressed up for prospective parents. She spots Isaac’s among the others, the shape of his feet still imprinted in the leather’s memory. “There,” she says, pointing to the familiar pair.

  “Eagle eyes,” Ali-agha says, reaching for the pair with a pole. He places them on the counter for her approval and she runs her fingers over the leather, flipping them over to inspect the soles.

  “Very nice, Ali-agha. Thank you.”

  He slides them into a bag and hands them to her, and she takes them, like a widow leaving a morgue. She walks home with the bag looped around her wrist, the shoes banging against her thigh, as if kicking her for interrupting their repose.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  He sees his world in black and white: Filthy snow, a hollow sky, the gray cement of the walls—water stains, like giant ink spills, eating into them—and his own skin, an ashy patina enveloping his body. Even the wounds on his feet, hardened and crusted, have lost their red. He has come to think of color as something fantastic that exists only in his mind—the red of a tomato sliced and salted at the lunch table, the deep blue of a lapis lazuli on Farnaz’s finger, the honey hue of his daughter’s hair in the sun. As a young man he shunned color, his camera, filled with black-and-white film, swinging around his neck like a dog tag. In the first years of his marriage, he photographed Farnaz everywhere, in parks, in teahouses, in the living room—her young, bare legs on the coffee table, looking into his viewfinder with the exasperated air of a much-too-photographed actress, but pleased, nonetheless, with the attention bestowed on her. The children, too, he photographed in black and white. He preferred the mystery of gray scale to the nakedness of color, believed it to be more substantial, more archival—better suited for memory. Later, as the years passed, he craved color. He switched films and compared grains, and his prints, unlike his life, became more and more saturated, filled, like a canvas, with splashes of longing.

  The cell is cold. He walks away from the window and crouches on the floor, wrapping himself with the piece of burlap meant to serve as a blanket. He tries to remove the insects trapped inside, but they are stubborn and stick to the weave. He lets them be. On cloudy days like this he cannot tell the time of day; he believes it must be afternoon, but can a single afternoon be so long?

  What was it that the old fortune-teller in Seville had said to him? At Farnaz’s insistence he had sat before her deck of cards, his future spread out on the table in the form of knights and castles. “A five of cups,” she said in her broken English, then, “Ay, dios mio, la tarjeta de la muerte también, el número trece—the death card, señor.” The cards—one depicting a stooped man draped in black, the other a skeletal figure in medieval armor on a white horse, terrified him. There were other cards, of magicians and chariots and priestesses, but they seemed inconsequential in the face of those two. He sat still, losing his breath in the small room, the hot Andalusian night weighing down the red velvet curtains and seeping through the arabesques of the railing of the mezzanine, where, upon entering, he had seen a little albino girl surveying the customers below. Even she, he thought, was now privy to his black future.

  “Don’t worry, señor,” the old woman said with garlicky breath. “La tarjeta de muerte does not mean actual death. It is the end of something and the beginning of something new.” Behind her, smoke from a lemongrass incense rose all the way up to the mezzanine and the albino girl, who looked at him with her white eyelashes and sneered. “And the grieving man?” the old woman continued. “Yes, he, too, represents the loss of something. But you see his bent figure looking at the empty cup before him? Look carefully and you will see that there are two full golden cups behind him. A door is closing on you, my dear sir. That is all.”

  Is that all? Remember, my dear Farnaz, how sorry you had been that evening, your face pale even as you laughed and shrugged, saying to me, like a mother to a child, “Such rubbish! These so-called clairvoyants like to scare people. Forget it.” But I didn’t forget it, and neither did you. Later as we stood in a restaurant by the tapas bar, drowning the oracle of that August night in sangria, you were quiet, and maybe even sad, a little. After all, had you not forced me into the fortune-teller’s shop to get back at me for what I had forced you to endure all afternoon? “No, no, I cannot watch animals murdered in this way,” you had said all along, but I went ahead and got the tickets anyway, didn’t I? As we sat in the stadium, the sun hot and still above us, the matador in his beaded suit parading below and the big, doomed animals pierced with one, two, three, four spears—each spear drawing a louder cheer from the crowd—I looked at you and saw the pain in your face, and still I thought, She’ll get over it. Who comes to Seville without watching a good bullfight? So you had gotten even with me, my Farnaz, and you were sorry. So was I.

  He opens the Koran that Hossein has brought him, practicing his high school Arabic on a random verse. Qul aaoothu birabbi alfalaqi, Min sharri ma khalaqa—“Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of the dawn, From the evil of what He has created.” He reads the verse out loud, the sound of his frail, raspy voice foreign to him, but calming him nonetheless. In his middle years he had let go the habit of reading out loud. Rather, he listened. At night he fell asleep to the crackle of the BBC on his shortwave radio, at dawn he awoke to the sound of the morning broadcast and the national anthem. When the children were younger, he listened to his wife reading to them, her fables overtaking
his newspaper. Why had he not also read to the children, he who as a young man had hoped to become a storyteller? Why had he come to regard such activities as necessary for the children but superfluous for him—better suited for Farnaz who, as a woman, could afford to be superfluous? Sitting behind his desk at the office, a verse from a favorite poem would sometimes come to him—“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,” or “Can drunkenness be linked to piety and good repute? / Where is the preacher’s holy monody, where is the lute?” He would welcome these unannounced visits, allow the verse to tickle him like the memory of an adolescent crush, then shoo it away from his mind with the documents before him, waiting to be signed.

  Looking out, he sees the snow falling again. He lies down on his mattress and looks at the flakes caressing the air like gossamer. The prison is calm tonight—no rattle of locks, no footsteps in the courtyard, no sound of a little boy running up and down the stairs above his cell. Even the ants, busy with the sugar cubes he has left for them, seem exact and orderly, as though parading to a hushed symphony they alone can hear. He falls asleep, so comforted by the order of things, that when the familiar rattle approaches his door he is convinced that the sound is rising from his own head, nothing more.

  “Brother Amin! Get up.”

  He opens his eyes and finds three guards before him.

  “Follow us,” one says. The other two stand above him, each one sliding a hand under his arms and lifting him to his feet.

  He tries to speak but his voice won’t come. “Where?” he manages to say. “Where? Where?” They drag his body out of the cell and through the dark corridor, lit only by the flashlight of the leading guard. The wounds of his bare feet scraping the concrete floor send currents of pain through his body. He feels a terrible tightness in his chest, his heart contracting like a fist. “Please,” he says. “I am not well.”