Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  But now he simply wanted to get drunk. Maybe he just wanted his old friend back. The Sina of their college years. He wanted them to be sitting outside a café on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, talking politics while sipping strong black coffee and sneaking whiskey into their cups. There was so much water under the bridge and so much had turned to shit. Think of all the fixers and translators and interpreters and drivers and typists and snitches and local reporters who had worked in and out of the Green Zone in Baghdad, all of them waiting for their visas to the good old United States, visas that were delayed for years or were never approved, those impossible stamps of transit that would save them from getting killed in reprisal by their own countrymen who thought them traitors—think of all those poor bastards in hiding now, and why not thank our lucky stars that both of us carry American passports? He wanted to tell Sina all this and, most importantly, he wanted to tell him to drop it all, drop whatever he had gotten himself into, and just return with him stateside. And, of course, he knew what Sina would say to that suggestion: What’s a darkie like me supposed to do over there?

  “I need a drink,” Malek said.

  “None in my house.”

  “Why? Because you work for QAF now and if they found out you got alcohol in your place they’d be disappointed? You’d no longer be a good little Muslim in their eyes?”

  “Fani told you about QAF, did he?”

  “Did you expect he wouldn’t? What are you thinking, Sina? QAF are the kind of people who put your father on a death list. They’re the ones who forced you and your old man into exile in the first place. They tell poor bastards once they get up there to heaven they’re sure to have red-lipped maidens waiting to welcome them. This is not my imagination. It’s real. Just go online and see how they got entire websites devoted to this sort of garbage. And you’re a part of it. Why are you working for them?”

  “I only translate.”

  “You lie!” Malek shouted this. But at least the tension that had been building finally broke. Here they stood in the middle of Tehran, two Americans. When you really got down to it, that was what they were. Even their accents, Malek noted, were nondescript California.

  Nothing made sense, of course. It was the way this place was, a place of nonmeaning. This was what Malek had dreaded, that he’d come here and enter wonderland again. Take QAF, for instance. It was like the organization existed and didn’t exist. Sure, in the newspapers abroad you read about special-operation units of the Revolutionary Guards operating in Iraq. They were doggedly trained and had agents running things everywhere. But QAF was something entirely different. It was more a shadowy nonorganization of radical clerics, newspapermen, archconservative bazaar merchants, dangerous dreamers, and current and former officers who were convinced the Messiah was on His way. They didn’t advertise themselves, but you knew they were there. More than anything, they were an inspiration to others. They gave direction. Tried to keep the fire of the aging revolution hot. You couldn’t point to one guy and say, That’s QAF. QAF was a state of mind more than anything, and yet it had its tentacles everywhere.

  And maybe that was why it suited a guy like Sina so well. Sina was a child of the old aristocracy. He couldn’t have gotten a job with the regular military or any of the competing intelligence agencies even if his life depended on it. They wouldn’t trust him. They knew him for what he was, an American when it came right down to it. But people also knew just how rich the Vafa family had been. The kind of money that knocked the wind out of you. In every major thoroughfare in Tehran alone, there were properties that had belonged to Vafa. And even now, whoever managed to get any sort of a claim on that level of fortune would have enough cash to run operations for years and years without having to go begging at the state coffers.

  Sina was a tool. He had been made into one or had volunteered for the job of being one. This made him dangerous, pathetic, courageous, and absurd all at the same time. It made him a right fit for Tehran. Where else in the world could you imagine a guy like him going about his business as he did here? Sina was two of everything—a rich/poor, revolutionary/antirevolutionary, religious/irreligious, Iranian/American, who rode a motorcycle on the streets of Tehran and could point to a good portion of the city and say that and that and that had belonged to his daddy.

  * * *

  An hour later they had parked Sina’s motorcycle near a three-star hotel on Taleqani Avenue. Several Venezuelan policemen and bodyguards from a visiting oil delegation sat around bored to death in the lobby, without booze and without women. Their diplomats were elsewhere, probably being wined and dined, and there was nothing for these guys to do except sit there and look like they might shoot somebody. But in the basement of that hotel, Malek and Sina entered a dark empty breakfast room, and without so much as four words exchanged, a man came out from the kitchen with a tray of vodka and two shot glasses.

  Malek knew better than to ask. Everywhere Sina went in this town, he probably had half-invisible men who had once worked for his father now doing favors for him. The two men drank a good portion of the bottle without much talking. Outside, they could hear revolutionary songs being piped very loudly out on the street. That was from the old American embassy that had been stormed by the crowds during the revolution some twenty-eight years earlier. For a long time the place had served as a kind of museum to American infamy. Nest of Spies, they had called it.

  Sina said, “I have to go away for about a week.”

  “What are you doing for QAF, Sina?”

  “They’re just a newspaper.”

  “Where are you going for a week?”

  Sina shrugged. “I could tell you anything, couldn’t I? I could tell you I got a story to report about down by the Gulf. Or that I have to go to Islamabad to translate for a bunch of fat Iranian middlemen who want to sell the Pakistanis stolen gas.”

  “But you’re not doing either of those things.”

  He waited for Sina to open up and say something really worth flying six thousand miles for. But then, with a few shots of vodka in him, Malek had a revelation. Two people could come to a point where they either had to kiss and make love or the thing that was between them would turn awkward and stale. It was like that now. If Sina didn’t give him a hint of what he was up to, then they had nothing more to do with each other. It was over. Maybe Sina felt some of that too, because now he said, “I’ll take you part of the way with me where I’m going this week. How’s that?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because,” Sina took a long pause, “just like that guy Fani wanted to be seen at the tea shop, now I don’t mind him seeing you come all the way to the border with us.”

  “Iraq?”

  Sina nodded.

  “You want him to think I’m protected so he will lay off of me, because by laying off of me he’s really laying off of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But protected from what?”

  “I’ll tell you that part of it when I come back from the other side.”

  “And what’s happening on the other side?”

  “It’s the Wild West over there. And I’m loving it.”

  “Sina, why do this? What have the Americans done to you?”

  Folding over his shot glass, Sina muttered, “They piss on us and say, Smile! It’s raining.”

  The vodka was really going to Malek’s head. The oval-shaped basement breakfast room was like something you might see on a retiring cruise ship, its paint peeling and the carpeting musty and worn. The place had probably seen far better days when the American embassy had been across the street and functioning. Malek waited while Sina whistled and the silent waiter came out of the shadows again and brought some yogurt and cucumbers.

  Now Malek was having himself a second revelation: you act a part long enough, eventually you come to be trapped in it. In college, Sina had been just another snot-nosed twenty-year-old with a chip on his shoulder, going to anarchist rallies at People’s Park in Berkeley and shouting all that Do
wn with US imperialism nonsense. But somewhere along the line, in the years that he’d been here, that little college boy had hardened into something else. It was like the promise of a marriage you can’t back out of. This was his role and what he lived to do. For Malek, who was but a few days removed from his teaching job back in New York, the thought was macabre. Here was a man getting drunk with him whose purpose in this world had probably reduced itself to this: taking down one poor, overburdened farm boy from, say, Wisconsin or Minnesota, with an M16 and a hundred pounds of gear on his back, at a time. And he would do it wherever he could—the Anbar Province, the Kunar; wherever there was a pasty-faced kid with an accent not unlike his own.

  The thought, along with the alcohol, made Malek want to cry like a fool. He recalled the road trips he and Sina used to take together in college. Often they’d go down to towns like Bakersfield and hit the bars with Sina’s guitar and ten-gallon cowboy hat in tow. Sina had looked like some smashed Mexican cowboy out to prove himself better than the white man at his own game. He could belt those country songs like few could. Offering such aching renditions of “Lost Highway” that even those disbelieving truckers and barflies would come up to him afterward and shake his hand or buy him drinks. It didn’t seem like another lifetime ago. It was more like it had never happened; it had been a dream.

  Malek pushed the last of his drink aside. His misery just then was total and he wouldn’t have minded breaking something and going upstairs to pick a fight with those Venezuelan bodyguards. Somewhere along the line we turned into killers. We all did. You fuckhead, Sina! You fuckhead for dumping your world on me like this.

  * * *

  Sanandaj. Iranian Kurdistan. Malek sat in an outdoor ice-cream shop off of Abidar Street. Kurdish men wearing baggy shalwars gave him curious looks that were neither suspicion nor dislike. Just the curiosity of men whose pride was as sharp as their knives. He had forgotten how beautiful nature was out here. No wonder that Kurds, Iranians, Turks, Iraqis, even Syrians all wanted a piece of it. When it wasn’t bleeding, Kurdistan could be postcard-perfect. For Malek, there was also that old feeling of going on a job, as when you are about to cross a border, on foot, illegally, not sure if you’ll return. He was even tempted to look up some contacts from times past, runners and guides he had known who regularly took black-market goods between Sanandaj within one border to Sulaimaniyah on the other side.

  But roughing it like that, Malek now saw, was something that took staying in the game; it took practice, it was a language you had to speak a little every day lest you forgot it. Here, he felt a bit too old and shut out by Sina. He craved his own bed and a strong cup of coffee.

  “You drove me all the way out here so I can take a bus by myself back to Tehran?”

  “Sure. It’ll give you time to think about the two things I want to tell you.”

  “So tell me.”

  “I want to give you a full power of attorney. I want you to be my legal agent in case I’m not around.”

  The sheer scale of what Sina was asking stunned Malek. To have a full power of attorney in Iran from someone of Sina’s background meant trouble. It meant attention would suddenly be directed Malek’s way. He would be the one answerable for Sina’s presumed estates—estates that could, theoretically, be returned to him if the revolutionary courts decided to favor him one day. And Sina being an only heir, that could translate to everything. Every single piece of land, idle factory, and deserted restaurant his father had owned.

  He thought, I could get up from here, say no, and be on my way. They had had a longtime comradeship that transcended all their disagreements and distance. But this? Dumping on Malek a power of attorney when they were only a few miles away from the border, and on the other side lay Iraq in flames and who the hell knew what Sina was up to over there . . . and then for him to add, in case I’m not around . . . Why wouldn’t he be around? What was supposed to happen to him? Malek knew better than to accept. He didn’t owe that kind of favor to Sina. Not here, not like this. But all he could bring himself to ask was, “You want to give me a power of attorney so I can do what for you?”

  “Just say you’ll accept. We’ll talk about the details later.”

  Malek looked down at his shoes and then back up and met Sina’s gaze. “I accept.”

  Sina’s face relaxed and went soft. As if Malek had just given him a new lease on life. They stayed silent for a while.

  Then Malek sighed. “Look, I can’t read your mind. You said you had two things to tell me.”

  “I have an address.” Sina paused. “An address for your mother.”

  “Come again?” Malek had not heard from nor thought much about his mother in three decades. He waited for Sina to go on, trying to appear indifferent and not succeeding much at it. Was this some kind of joke? “What’s my mother got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing. I just thought you might like to know where she is. I know you haven’t seen her since before the revolution. I thought—”

  “You thought you were asking your old pal to do you a favor by accepting a power of attorney from you in this hellhole and you wanted to do him a favor in return?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Where is she then?” Despite trying to control himself, Malek felt his pulse racing a little. “I mean, does she have an address near a beach in Australia or something?”

  “No, she has an address far from a beach in Tehran.”

  * * *

  The bus was mostly Iraqi Shias and Kurds who were going to Tehran for care because there weren’t enough doctors and hospitals in their own areas. A busload of Iraqis of every age in various stages of blindness, their faces perfectly masked with resignation to their illness. It was maddening to watch. And as the light gave way, Malek felt he wanted to do their seeing for them.

  He thought back to Sanandaj and the mention of his mother, Soaad. One day when he was twelve years old, his old man had come home and said that Soaad had left them to go to Australia. And that was that. End of story. It was like being told tomato season was over and there wouldn’t be any more tomatoes. What was a twelve-year-old kid supposed to do with that information? Two years after that, Tehran was on fire. Schools were shut down, the royal family was running away, and traitors to the revolution were being hung from trees and streetlights. Instead of the classroom, Malek would spend his days watching fights break out between student factions in front of the University of Tehran on the newly coined Revolution Avenue. Until his old man, now jobless like everybody else, had come home triumphantly one afternoon and made another announcement—he had procured visas and they were going to America. They were headed to California, a town called Fresno where, according to Malek Senior’s excellent contact, there was a cookie shop for sale at a huge discount. They, father and son, would start life anew in California, far from the revolution and the war. Yes indeed, they would be baking cookies in sunny California.

  The bus, already hiccupping in fits and starts, finally broke down just outside of the town of Hamadan, next to a souvenir shop that sold local dolls that looked like poorer versions of Russian grandmothers. There was an eager Dutch traveler on the bus too, who kept taking pictures of the blind Iraqis. The fellow, tall and lean and very blond, made himself useful and escorted one blind Iraqi after another outside of the bus and onto the grassy area, and he never stopped taking pictures.

  Children had begun to cry. An Iraqi woman was in some kind of pain and Malek heard whispers in Persian and Arabic that she would have to be taken to an emergency room right away.

  He’d had enough. He walked over to the souvenir shop where several local cabbies were lounging, offered a price that couldn’t be refused, and in a minute was sitting in the front of a yellow Peugeot being driven to Tehran, alone.

  In California, his father’s “excellent” contact had turned out to be a con artist. The cookie shop was an already-failing business on a too-quiet street in a backwater American town. It had driven his old man to the grave. And throug
h it all, right up to now, Soaad had never figured much in the picture. If she were in Australia, she might as well be on the moon. Except that she had been here all along, in Tehran. What was he supposed to do with this piece of news?

  “Go see your mother,” Sina had said.

  See her for what? To kiss and make up for lost time?

  * * *

  Dawn brought Tehran into view and Clara Vikingstad’s voice with it.

  He was surprised at the address she’d given him. Up in the Niavaran District, there was a more remote semirestricted area where a lot of government types and ex-officials lived. The place had solid police presence, but it wasn’t too heavy-handed. You just felt it; it wasn’t an area to hang around at and take pictures for too long.

  The mansion had a panoramic view of the city below it. Yet the miles of dirty haze that greeted the eyes was mostly discouraging. In the distance, lines of traffic in the main arteries of town snaked slowly to nowhere, and far to the south everything turned to a grayness that looked downright apocalyptic.

  Private guards opened the door and Malek was escorted to an inordinately large reception hall. There was also the usual knickknack of new money—ugly chandeliers, gold upholstery, oversized armchairs and sofas. When Clara came down, followed by a servant who kept his eyes to the floor three steps behind her, she looked like an office woman in a Tehran notary firm. Headdresses never suited her. They took away from her fire. And Malek had never seen her wear one unless she had to in public. It was too strange. It made Malek feel like they were both on foreign territory.

  They were served tea and left alone.

  “Whose house?” Malek asked.

  The name she gave made him stop and consider his surroundings with a new eye. It was the house of a once powerful official. The man had served in every ministry since the revolution except this last one. He might have even signed off, in the old days, on a few standard death penalty orders. So the obvious question to ask was, “Why him? Why here?”