by Salar Abdoh
He saw the defensiveness in Clara’s eyes. One time she had written a long article for some magazine describing the lives of American soldiers in Iraq. It had been a serviceable, true-to-life piece, depicting her subjects as warriors and vulnerable and confused and basically well intentioned. Except that things were a hell of a lot more complicated than that. He’d told her that “any old hack” could write this obvious stuff. And her face had taken on the same look back then. If a reporter doesn’t write the obvious, then who will?
She said, “Elections are next year. This guy might be back in the game. He’s progressive. He advocates change.”
“So you’ve come and put up tent at his place and become his concubine?”
She didn’t show anger, but said coolly, “I ought to slap you.”
“Come on, Clara! After the guy fattens his Swiss bank accounts and builds himself a few of these McMansions, he suddenly softens up, starts seeing the light, and advocates change and democracy? Is he remorseful now? He’s concerned about the common people?”
She just looked at him, waiting for him to finish his short rant.
“Man’s got blood on his hands,” he added.
“Who doesn’t have blood on their hands, Rez?”
More tea was served. Tea was always bloody well served. A country where you drank an average of fifteen teas a day, and each was more piss-weak than the last. Why couldn’t the Iranians learn from the Turks how to make real tea? And now he felt like he was having just another version of the conversation he’d had with Sina about him working for QAF. What is Clara really up to? he asked himself. Answer: a major scoop. That’s what she wanted. It wasn’t enough for her to be in the select club of foreign correspondents. She wanted to report deep from the inside. She wanted a Pulitzer.
All he could say was, “You’re playing a dangerous game, Clara. You know how it is here. When they decide to put you in their crosshairs, they can destroy you. Yes, even you.”
And now he watched her with concern. There were things about Clara he didn’t particularly like. The scope of her ambition, for instance, or the fact that she’d pretty much forgotten about him until she needed him again. But Clara herself he liked. At heart, she was a soft touch. He had seen her help others than himself. He had seen that look of utter mourning on her face more than once in Iraq. And she had courage. She was not one of those rear-door journalists. She went for the jugular and never thought of her own skin first. For all these reasons, Malek’s concern for her was real. He owed it to her to protect her. This wasn’t her territory. Things could go wrong. Things did go wrong.
She laughed off what he’d said and pushed him to drink his tea. “What’s the worst that can happen to me in this place? Next year, maybe not my bad guy but the other bad guys win the election. And if I’m still here, maybe they decide to throw me in jail for a while. I’m an American. How long can they keep me in a cell? Three weeks? Three months? I’ll come out of there a little leaner, I’ll go home, and—”
“Write something about it?” Now he saw that not only did Clara not worry about being thrown in an Iranian jail, she actually counted on it. It would give her cachet. He shook his head and smiled for her. “Okay then. You’re the boss. I’m just a lowly interpreter here.”
“Stick with me, kid.”
She’d saved him in Baghdad. Yes, she had. So why should her ambition not include this pompous house and its former minister of whatever?
She poked him, “You’ll stick with me, yes? We’re going to be in for quite a ride. There are things brewing here. I feel it. It’s big. I haven’t come back here just to bag a few reports. I’ll need your assistance. I trust you. Do you have what it takes to stay next to me?”
“Clara, I have a job back in New York.”
“Keep your job. Your job is good for you. But I’ll need you now and then for the next year or so. I’ll need you next to me. And I’ll pay your airfare every time. Can you do that? Can you stay close and on call?”
He thought about Sina. And about Soaad, his mother. You couldn’t remain disengaged. Not here. Things happened. Clara was a tough woman. But being tough in Tehran, that was more a liability than anything.
He said yes, he’d stay close to her. Then in Persian he added, “I am at your service, boss.”
* * *
It was a small side street off Ferdowsi Square in the heart of the city, far from where he’d met Clara that morning. Malek sat hunched on Sina’s motorcycle. There was a kebab house down the street where bike messengers were busy riding in and out during noontime. He could have passed for one of them, the green vest and several days of old stubble blending him right in, making him look like a kebab delivery boy on a midday rest. When he had gone on jobs with Clara, he would usually shave and put on good clothes. It made a difference. And it made a difference from city to city too. In Tehran, the lightness of his skin and a clean suit would actually get his foot inside doors that were impossible otherwise. And next to Clara, people often took him for a Westerner with enviable native fluency. They gave him respect, called him “sir.” Sometimes they wouldn’t even accept that he was simply one of them, just another native. Yet that same clean look would have gotten him killed in Baghdad in 2005. You had to know when to blend in and when not to.
The thought brought him back to Sina. One day in their senior year of college, Sina had run a hand on his own brown face and told Malek, “Skin matters, brother. I’m on the outside looking in on America.” Sometimes he would jokingly call Malek “His Whiteness.” Other times he would go on tiresome riffs of race talk, about the iniquities the Americans had done—as if his grandparents had been born slaves in some plantation in Louisiana instead of having been one of the richest families in all of the Middle East.
It was something to consider: would Sina Vafa have ever ended up back here, doing what he did now, had his skin been three shades lighter?
Malek shook his head to get rid of the cobweb of thoughts. More water under the bridge. To each his own. All that nonsense.
At one point a small woman came out of the building. The age was right, but she looked nothing like his mother. Then again, what was Soaad supposed to look like? He remembered her as much taller than this woman. But maybe that was just a child’s vantage point of thirty years ago. He watched as she walked past the kebab house and came back some minutes later carrying fresh bread. She bit into the fabric of her full black chador to hold it over her face and still be able to carry the bread with a free hand. Malek’s mother had never worn a chador. She had been a schoolteacher, for God’s sake. She was educated. No, that was not her. He refused to believe it.
“I spoke to her, you know,” Sina had said. “She almost fainted when she found out I knew you. Said she’d seen you on Persian satellite TV giving an interview after your book came out. She’d wanted to contact you then, but didn’t dare, and didn’t know how.”
So what next? Hello, could you buzz me in? I happen to be your son.
Malek kick-started the bike, took a last look at the building, then slowly rode out toward the traffic circle on the main avenue.
* * *
It was on the third day that Sina rang him. This was a good sign. It meant he wasn’t operational. On mamuriyat, as they liked to call it in the jargon.
“Did you see your mother?”
“I went to the address you gave me.” After a pause, Malek asked, “Why is it important to you I talk to her?”
“Mothers are important, Rez.”
Yes, they were. They could mess you up or break your heart or disappear and not give you an inch of love. Or they could be, if you were damn lucky, everything you ever dreamed of. It had taken baking a whole lot of cookies in a failing cookie shop, in a strange town in California, before Malek had finally managed to put her out of his mind and shut the door on that part of himself. Did he really need Sina to remind him mothers were important? It was that motherless immigrant life in America that had made both of them hard. Now that very hardness seemed question
able. Mothers were certainly important. He just didn’t know if that thought meant the same thing or something entirely different to Sina.
After that quick exchange with Sina, Malek rode to an Internet café near Valiasr Square to check his e-mail. Rows of college-age kids sat in small cubicles in chat rooms, some of them obviously looking for husbands and wives abroad. The two e-mails that weren’t garbage had to do with Malek’s job, one from the head of the department telling him he’d been placed in a couple of committees for the upcoming year.
Malek looked around, then out the window at the mad Middle Eastern traffic outside. Out there on Valiasr Avenue you’d have to be something of a tightrope walker to be able to cross the street in one piece. Buses, decrepit old cars, brand-new expensive SUVs, and fanatical motorbike messengers and pedestrians contested every inch of space on the asphalt. The only thing missing was maybe a donkey cart and a caravan of camels. And in a few weeks he’d be leaving all this behind again to go back to committee meetings and teaching.
The other e-mail piqued his interest far more. It was from James McGreivy. The former Marine captain who was going to join his department come September. The writer of Winter in Babylon fame. It was a polite letter. Sure of itself and free of that chirpy enthusiasm of a lot of work-related communications with Americans. McGreivy wrote that he had taken on this teaching job to see if there was life after the military. He said that he had just finished reading Malek’s book of reportage and found it interesting that the two of them had been, in a way, on opposite sides of the same battles. This of course wasn’t true, but Malek didn’t mind the overblown acknowledgment. The truth was that McGreivy’s book was a small jewel that a lot more people should have known about. He had written of American soldierly life and his own gradual disillusionment with the war he was fighting in, especially after the Second Battle of Fallujah. And he had written about it with sensitivity and insight. It made Malek wonder why McGreivy had accepted the offer at this cash-strapped public college in Harlem rather than somewhere far more prestigious. Why compete for my job?
Should he answer the e-mail? He was interested in this man. And it was true what he’d told the department head about having used McGreivy’s book in his own classes. On the inside jacket flap there was a photo of McGreivy looking handsome and immaculately blond, at the same time rugged and strong and fiercely intelligent. An American through and through, Malek remembered thinking. But one that was maybe a little out of date too.
He clicked Reply and simply wrote:
Dear James,
Greetings. I am back in the old neighborhood, Tehran to be exact. I am sitting in an Internet cafe having just read your gracious note. I’m sure we’ll have a thousand things to talk about back in New York. I send you my regards.
Reza Malek
Not overfriendly. But friendly enough. If the man was going to take his job, maybe at least they could do it without blood.
* * *
The next several days Clara needed him full-time. She had a security detail now and Malek was not allowed to ride in her car. So he rode with a couple of tough-looking men in a second car instead, men who joked incessantly about the probable color of the panties of women on the street wearing full hijab. On the second day the guards became more comfortable with Malek and included him in their chatter. One of them even wondered out loud why they should be following a foreign journalist around town when there was more important work to be done. When they both zoomed on Malek’s face for an answer, he told them the truth: “I was hoping you gentlemen would know.”
On the third day they drove all the way to Qum, a clerical city some two hours away from the capital. “The Man,” as Malek had come to call Clara’s host, had lined up an important interview for her, a well-known opposition cleric under house arrest. But they would not allow Malek to enter the house of the cleric to translate for Clara. So he sat in the tinted Range Rover with the two guards for the next hour and a half as a human storm began to gather outside. First there was just a group of three thugs who showed up. Next there was a larger group. Voices were raised and somebody started denouncing the cleric for seeing the American journalist. Before long there were fifty or so men out there. Police came and stood watching, the whole thing a setup. The guards that Malek was sitting with did not lose their cool, though; they were used to these confrontations. But he could see they were counting the minutes and were angry that the foreign journalist had gotten them in this hairy situation. Finally, both of them jumped out of the car and, joining the driver and another guard from Clara’s car, positioned themselves in front of the cleric’s house.
Someone threw a rock at the cars. Then another. Soon Malek was sitting alone watching a hail of stones hitting the windshield and sides of the car. He could not get out without risking being hit on the head. It was when several boys dashed toward the car to try, futilely, to turn it on its side that things exploded. The guards ran at them with batons swinging, their sticks looking exactly like the ones police used for riot control. In the melee, Malek finally managed to slip out of the back door, but was instantly grabbed by a pair of hands that threw him against the side of the car.
It was like being on autopilot. One time in Karbala a bomb scare had set off a stampede outside a mosque. He had crouched low, his back to Sina’s back, so that they had fended off the rushing bodies coming at them as if they were in a wrestling ring. It wasn’t a matter of bravery, just adrenaline. And fear. Afterward, he had quietly gone somewhere and thrown up. Now he didn’t feel so much fear as anger, especially anger at Clara for having gotten them into this mess. The whole interview with the cleric could have been arranged far more discretely, if she had wanted it so. But no, she had wanted this to happen. To make some kind of a headline. She was inside there, probably on the roof or the second floor, watching, taking pictures, while out here her bodyguards were forced to fight a crowd ten times their number.
Malek swung wildly but with force, determined to hurt and break bones. In the middle of it all he recalled Captain James McGreivy and had an irrational wish to have this man by his side. And thinking about McGreivy, even as he was throwing punches, again he was taken back to Iraq. The individual heroism of a lot of these Americans had never ceased to make his jaw drop. One time he’d watched a young lieutenant jump out of a Bradley and start directing dangerously bottled-up traffic in a location everyone knew was infested with snipers. Clara had remarked back then, “Look at gorgeous over there! We don’t make Hollywood films. Hollywood makes us.”
The police were rushing in now. And a crowd of white-shirted, bearded men stood there, like extras in a film, waiting for some sort of cue. Malek’s face was bloodied and he found himself and the rest of Clara’s security detail backed against a wall while rocks resumed flying at them. He was thankful when the cops finally broke up the scuffle and began pushing people away.
Malek turned to a guard with a bad gash on the side of his face. “Are they arresting us?”
“That’s why they came here.” The man spat in disgust, “That’s why we came here. To get arrested. Politics is shit, brother Malek. It’s shit. Save yourself the trouble, go back to America.”
* * *
The Man himself had apparently come down to Qum and vouched for his people, including Malek, to be let out of the police station. The next day, the more radical newspapers ran articles about “foreign elements” working to corrupt the “glorious revolution.” Clara’s name was mentioned alongside The Man, and pictures of the cleric’s house with the crowd gathered in front of it were on display. The cleric himself was just about called an apostate and it was suggested he should be brought to trial by the Clerical Court for accepting suspicious foreigners into his home and inciting riots in the holy city.
Malek was tired. And hurting. At some point in the fracas he had received a pretty hard wallop from a stick just below his shoulder. A little farther up and he would have had a cracked bone. His new friends, the two bodyguards, had dropped him off at
the central bus terminal at Argentine Square, and he had decided right there and then to catch a bus to the Caspian shore. There were people he could have looked up in the north too. But he needed to be alone and try to get his head together. The whole episode down in Qum had been one of those nasty businesses where you couldn’t know who was working against whom and toward what purpose.
Two days later, when he checked his e-mail from the little motel he was staying at between two decrepit beach towns, he saw that Clara had written him. Her visa hadn’t been revoked, but she’d decided it was best she leave the country for the time being. She meant to come back for the following June elections, and I expect my favorite interpreter in the whole world to be right alongside me.
Before answering her, he scanned the American papers online to see if there was mention of what had happened to Clara in Qum the other day. There was. Plenty of it. American journalist briefly jailed in Iran . . .
He wrote her: Does using people become second nature in your line of work?
Malek stared at what he’d written for a good long time. Then he deleted the question and discarded the reply e-mail altogether.
Another e-mail was from his student, Candace Vincent. The e-mail was in two parts. The first was a link to several pictures with captions. Candace and her kids—making breakfast for them in the morning, then dropping them off at school. The second was of her being quoted in a local Bronx newspaper about a police shooting in her neighborhood. In this last picture she had braided her reddish-purple hair and her almond eyes stared past the camera. It was almost like she was gazing back at Malek, challenging him—There are troubles everywhere, professor. You don’t have to go to the other side of the world to find this stuff.
From the motel’s small computer room by the lobby, Malek had a narrow view of the sea. The water came right up to the foundation of the motel and threatened to take it down. Wherever there was beach left, it was full of debris and garbage and remnants of old homes that had already succumbed to the water.