by Salar Abdoh
It hadn’t really been a book. More like a patchwork of reports from the sidelines of America’s wars, and Malek had come upon it mostly by chance. After Berkeley, it had taken him another seven years to complete that doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. Seven years of studying a school of Sufis, Muslim mystics, who had lived in Basra, in modern-day Iraq, a thousand years ago. Mystics who went on endlessly about how God’s light shone on everything and everyone. Not that that was a useless thing to study (somebody had to do it, Malek supposed), but the year was 2002 when he’d gotten that degree, America was already in Afghanistan and was getting ready to go into Iraq, and there weren’t exactly a whole lot of universities looking to hire someone to tell them about the Muslim mystics of a thousand years ago. So he’d packed up and returned home. Sina had already been living back in Tehran for some years and when Malek got there his old friend helped him pick up interpreter jobs until Malek was on his feet and had his own clients, journalists who came for their rounds from time to time, people like Clara Vikingstad. The years of graduate work had honed Malek’s Arabic too, so he had turned out to be that rare interpreter who could carry a Western reporter not just in Iran and Afghanistan, but also Iraq and other Arab countries. After a while he was an interpreter in high demand, his name in the address book of every foreign correspondent between Berlin and Los Angeles. This way he’d gotten to see his share of the interesting and slowly started writing little reports on the side and having them published in Asian newspapers and online. Before long, somebody somewhere had gotten wind of the material and offered to put them out in a collection. There had been a couple of fair reviews online. And then out of nowhere this Texan with the high nasally voice had written him an e-mail, asking if Malek was interested in joining their department to teach students how to do creative reportage. Malek’s take was: Why not? Living in Tehran and moving around constantly in that region was getting to be tiresome anyway. Eventually you just got bogged down in the details. Another suicide bombing. Another high-level assassination. Another missed unmanned drone missile that killed forty members of a family in the middle of a wedding. You became cynical and then you became self-conscious of your own cynicism and posed for it. It was a bad cycle. Bad enough that Malek had already started toying with the ever-present opium between Tehran and Kabul.
Yes, he would go back to America and teach creative reportage, whatever that was. The Texan’s offer was a godsend, a lifeline. And considering that including his undergraduate years Malek had studied more than a decade about those Muslim mystics, maybe it was some sweet poetic justice that he was finally being offered an academic job. He’d earned it.
“I’m working on something now,” he now said to the department head. It was an outright lie. He had nothing. He had put that book together because he happened to be in the middle of those wars and simply recorded what he saw. He wasn’t a Clara Vikingstad or any of the others he’d done interpreting for. He wasn’t a pro. He had written because he was a witness. There was a difference.
The man took several pills of varying colors from a pillbox on his table and downed them all at once as if they were candy. He then took a swig from his coffee and eyed Malek. “There’s another matter.” Malek waited for him to spit it out. “We’re hiring someone else on the same lecture-line as you. He’s coming in September.”
So that was the real reason he had been called in here today. The department head had wanted to break the news to him that they were hiring someone else to compete for the permanent teaching position.
He didn’t really know what to say to the man. In a way, it was generous of him to let Malek know this. This was a “heads-up” kind of meeting. You better write something new about that Middle East of yours, Professor Malek. Or you’re history. “I’d like to meet this person,” Malek said, just to have said something. “My new colleague.”
The department head suddenly brightened. Maybe it was the pills working quickly. “I tell you what.” He fished in his desk and brought out a book. Winter in Babylon. Author, James McGreivy. “It’s a fantastic book. This is what your new colleague wrote. It covers some of the same things your book does. Well, not really. The man’s a former Marine captain. Iraq, Afghanistan, all that. It’s a good book. It might inspire you. You should read it.”
“I already did.”
The department head looked stung, as if the notion that Malek would actually read other books was beyond him. He said, “Well, what did you think of it?”
“It’s brilliant.”
“How so?”
“It has truth.” Then to really rub it in, Malek added, “I’ve even used parts of it to teach my own classes.”
By the time Malek left that office, the English department had taken on the festive air of end-of-year celebrations. There were wine bottles lined up and young, underpaid graduate-student teachers were drifting in to eat from the generous spread laid out on the long table. Malek stood there for a moment watching. The first year, not sure if his contract was just going to be temporary, he had mostly stayed a stranger to the place, keeping a low profile and sticking to the classes he had to teach. The full professors, he knew mostly through what they taught, the Shakespearean, the Americanist, the Victorian, and so on. But this past year—maybe because the department head was putting pressure on him—he’d begun to pay more attention. He came to the faculty meetings, sat in the back, and listened. There were factions, he’d noticed. They fought. Mostly over nothing. It was an arrangement of low-key corruption where the department head and his cronies had the run of the place. They gave each other promotions and assigned themselves light teaching loads and generally had a ball with the little fiefdom they had going. As soon as Malek understood this scheme, he accepted it. The department head may have been just slightly dishonest, but at least he wasn’t killing people. In Baghdad, Malek had watched a whole neighborhood go up in flames over who’d get to inherit the electric generator the Americans had left behind by mistake. One was a world of flesh and blood, the other of text and ink and boredom and irrelevance.
He wondered how Captain James McGreivy of the United States Marines would fare here next fall. The fellow really had written a good book about the war. But what had possessed him to give up all that adrenaline and want to come to a place like this just to teach? How would he be able to stand it?
The thought made Malek revisit something that had happened the previous semester. There had been a Latino kid in one of his classes, Ezequiel. “Call me Easy,” he’d told Malek. Easy had done all right in class for the first few weeks. Always polite, always on time and handing in lukewarm pieces he’d written about not much of anything. Then one day, out of nowhere, he’d written of how he’d done a part of his New York State National Guard tour of duty out of Base Speicher near Tikrit in Iraq:
Do you know, professor, what a fifty-caliber machine gun can do to a family of four Iraqis who didn’t see your hand signal to turn their car around? I looked you up the other day online, man. I saw some of the stuff you wrote. YOU KNOW how it was over there. But you stand here and smile at these dumbasses in your class like the world is all fine and dandy and we should all go to the mall in New Jersey and buy Christmas gifts. You think that’s honest? You and your kind, you ain’t shit, professor. This whole place ain’t shit. This country ain’t shit.
The kid had been all of twenty-five years old, and he had perfect spelling, and he’d never come back to Malek’s class after writing him that note. Malek had waited for his return, unwilling to drop him from the class roster until the very end. And for the rest of those weeks he’d walked these hallways expecting some sort of bad news about the kid and vaguely blaming himself for it.
You and your kind, you ain’t shit, professor.
The following semester he had taken Candace Vincent under his wing—Candace, who knew nothing of the war but could sometimes write like an angel.
SINA
Malek sat in a tea shop on Orumiya Street in Tehran watching the traffic f
low. The tea shop was heavy with the sound of Azeri Turkish and the smoke from smoldering qilyans. The place was small, packed with bodies, and permeated with the stale scent of labor and tolerable poverty. It was nothing like those touristy hookah places in Istanbul or Cairo or even Damascus where men might sit for hours playing backgammon and chatting leisurely into the wee hours of the night. Across the street a bike rider came to a stop at Vafa Alley. But it wasn’t Malek’s man. Malek hunkered down, even though he was allergic to the smoke. He wasn’t going to find a better place to keep watch.
He was startled when he heard his name called. The man had somehow entered unnoticed and slipped in across the long bench from Malek. Gray suit. Short beard. Recent haircut. He didn’t seem like Ettelaat, Intelligence, but it was a given he had plenty acquaintances in that world. He had the look not of a shark but a lawyer. There was a slight difference. Malek had known men like him. They were comfortable in their own skin. The Islamic Revolution had been good to them. They knew where the connections lay. They were men who didn’t need to interrogate; they could sweet-talk.
Malek said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, to be honest.”
“You’re keeping an eye on your friend Sina Vafa’s house.”
“I know that. Mr. . . .”
“Fani.”
“But I’m not sure why I’m doing it. I mean, I have a decent enough life far away from here, in America, as I’m sure you know.”
“What is decent about it?”
“Well, I don’t have to watch anybody’s house before I go say hello. Especially my best friend’s house.”
“It could have to do with the circumstances.”
“What are those?”
He expected Fani to say that it was Malek’s job to tell him that. But Fani just eyed him with an amused look. He was obviously enjoying this: two men who had never met until this moment could sit in this teahouse and speak like old friends or adversaries. It was a world of double meanings and casual one-upmanship and it was about as far away from his life in New York as one could get. Malek gauged Fani’s face and realized that the man had decided to like him, for now. It was that simple; Fani would have enjoyed this back and forth with anyone who had the presence of mind not to get spooked so easily. Another guy might have fallen to pieces had Fani approached him so suddenly. But Malek knew how to hold ground. Other things rattled him. But not this.
Fani did a survey of the tea shop and Malek’s eyes followed him. Such a world of men it was. The stink of men, Malek thought to himself. That was the other difference—in New York he moved in a world tilted toward women. Most of his students, like Candace, were women. So were the clients in the physical therapy class he had started taking in Chelsea to heal his bad back from that bus crash in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province four years earlier. Had there been just one woman amongst all these men here, the place would have had a different feel. And suddenly Malek felt nostalgic, as if he were never going to see women again, and he had to pull himself out of this silly reverie and collect his thoughts for the next phase of sparring with Fani.
Fani said, “Sina Vafa has called you to Tehran. There’s a reason for that. Do you know the reason?”
“How do you know I haven’t come of my own free will? Anyway, shouldn’t we be having this conversation in a small, nondescript hotel room downtown?”
Fani laughed and loudly ordered a round of tea for himself and Malek.
“This is downtown, Mr. Malek. Do you know the reason why your friend called you?”
“No.”
“In 2004 and 2005 you took several trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. A few of those trips you went with Mr. Vafa.”
“I didn’t know it would interest anyone.”
“What did you do in the places you went?”
Malek turned to his right and left, imagining men were listening in on their conversation. But nobody was. The TV was on and for a moment a newscast showed the Iranian president giving a speech somewhere. A loud voice in Turkish called the president a “whore’s son” and someone else asked to turn the “fool’s” mug off that television screen.
“I was working with journalists. So was Sina. We came and went. Sometimes together, sometimes not. It was an interesting time. That’s about it.”
“It’s still an interesting time over there.”
“I’m done with all that.”
“But your friend continues those trips.”
“Maybe he’s still working with foreign journalists.”
Fani gave Malek a look. Do you take me for a fool? He asked, “Do you know of QAF?”
How could he not know? QAF was the shortened name of an outfit in Tehran, with a newspaper as a front, that was about as reactionary as you could get. These were guys who didn’t suggest the cutting off of the heads of infidels; they demanded it.
“I am not going to believe you telling me Sina Vafa has been working with QAF.”
“Why? Because you don’t want to? Or because you believe that QAF would never accept someone of Sina Vafa’s dirty background?”
“Both those reasons. Besides, what does Sina’s going to Iraq have to do with QAF?
Another incredulous look from Fani. And then he said, “Ask these questions of your friend yourself, Mr. Malek.” He smiled and got up.
“Is that it?” Malek asked, surprised. He had expected all sorts of revelations. Or even offers. It was routine. Part of the trade. During the time he worked with the foreign journalists, he’d been called into the Intelligence Ministry, was served tea, and then they showed photographs of him with various reporters, including Clara Vikingstad. He’d been asked if he wouldn’t mind working with their bureau. There had been no pressure, though. It was simply procedure—You work with foreigners, we want to know what they’re up to. They’d even had pictures of him and Clara in Beirut and Amman. Both side trips that had been more out of curiosity than work. If anything was going to rattle him, it would have been that. But even then he’d kept his cool. He’d just as politely said no, he wasn’t interested. And they hadn’t pressed it any further. The guys in Intelligence knew their job. They had asked if he wanted more tea and then gave him their spiel—Contact us if you ever change your mind. A couple of years later, he’d been called in again. This time they knew he’d published a book though they weren’t unhappy about it. In fact, they were kind of pleased. They already knew he was going to teach in a college in New York and asked him if his answer was still no. He had wanted to tell them, I’m going to New York to teach creative reportage, for Christ’s sake. What is it you think I can do for you over there? But to these men the world was always one of seized opportunities and missed ones. They told him that the public college he’d be teaching at was where a lot of Iranian UN consulate staff sent their kids because they couldn’t afford the expensive private schools. What they had essentially been asking him was to keep a tab on the children of their own diplomatic corps in New York. It was obscene. And made perfect sense.
Fani said, “You can tell Sina Vafa that you saw me. Or, if you like, you don’t have to. We’ll meet again.”
“About what?”
“There are many things for us to meet about.”
* * *
The sound of bodybuilders and local toughs came from a large basement where a gym had been rented out by the Vafa clan. The building was one of theirs, an old, badly kept property that the revolution hadn’t bothered to claim from Sina’s family. Sina’s apartment was on the third floor. A nearly barren living room with just a wooden writing desk in a corner that had its legs sawed off. The only other things were a laptop and a dozen pillows of varying sizes and colors scattered about. Glancing into the bedroom, Malek saw mostly books, which at first glance weren’t a bad sign.
Sina appeared healthy and must have been hitting the weights regularly. His muscles taut and buffed, his face a repository of blankness that comes from overexerting your body. His dark skin was also weathered and tanned and he had a week-old beard. Wh
at he looked like was a stranger. He could have been one of those wrestlers making humphing noises in the basement.
He asked Malek if he wanted tea.
“I’ve had plenty today.”
“How many cups did Fani have?”
Malek took the jab from Sina in stride.
Sina went on, “Look, the tea shop owner is my friend. He told me Fani visited you there. But don’t worry about that. Fani wanted to be seen at the teahouse.”
“I don’t get the logic of any of this, Sina.”
“Why should you? I don’t mind if you stake out my place before you come and ring the buzzer. I might have done the same. It’s procedure. Our lives are permanent emergency in this part of the world.”
“You exaggerate. You just want it to be that way. It makes you feel important.”
“And what if it does? In America I was a zero. A nothing. But in this city I call my own shots, make my own plans.”
Here it was, the same old tired arguments, and Malek saw himself falling right into the trap, yet couldn’t keep himself from sounding off: “Don’t lie to yourself, man. If you want to have your adventures, go ahead and have them. But don’t blame the problems of the world on America or neocolonialism or whatever other bullshit they tried to slam down our throats in college, or in those books you got in your bedroom.”
“One of the books in my bedroom, Rez, is yours. Not a bad book either. I didn’t think you had it in you to actually write a book.”
Malek hated these conversations. But still he couldn’t back out. Sina had called him to Tehran and he had come. But he hadn’t come unconditionally. He had questions. They were questions that he should have asked years ago—though that would have meant sticking around in this godforsaken city.