Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  “So you told me over the phone. Mr. Malek, years ago when Sina called and said he was coming back to Tehran, I was beside myself with joy. At the time, even though I had no real claim on the place, I had managed to get the penthouse back for us from the revolutionary courts.” She regarded her husband like some beloved piece of furniture. “What I mean is, Afshar here managed to get it back. It was a lot of work, but he did it. He did it for me and he did it for Sina. It took a long time and a lot of sweat. The courts were willing to give back one piece of confiscated property to each family. I’m sure you’ve heard about that law. Please drink your tea.”

  Malek drank. “And then he threw you out of the penthouse?”

  “He did,” Afshar answered from his corner. “We went from living on the top floor of this building to living in a mousetrap. What happened was one day Sina showed up with a man.”

  “Fani?”

  “Yes,” Afshar looked at Malek curiously, “that is his name. They came with some papers saying that we had no claim on the place and must leave.”

  “You didn’t fight it?”

  “Fight what, Mr. Malek?” Azar asked. “Sina was the legal inheritor of his father’s estate. As his mother, I am merely extra baggage. I count for nothing. And so here we are, in the servants’ quarters on the thirteenth floor where no one wants to live. I should start crying right now in front of you. But I won’t. My heart has turned to stone, though not out of spite. The revolution destroyed all of us. As I’m sure in some ways it did you. It turned brother against brother, father against son, and Sina against me.”

  “Why him against you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sina has decided to stay angry at the world. And Afshar and I happened to be available for him to be angry at back then. But we have not heard from him in quite some time. It’s peaceful now. We are peaceful and poverty-stricken. It is better this way.”

  “Mr. Malek,” Afshar called softly.

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you here?”

  Malek recalled the day he’d seen his first public hanging. He must have been eleven years old back then. The revolution in full swing. In the distance a crowd had gathered below a pair of feet dangling from a yellow crane, the kind of yellow crane he had a toy replica of at the time. It had made him think of the circus for some reason. Like it wasn’t real. Or it was real, but a different kind of real. Then there had been more of them. More and more hangings every day. The revolution like a grand scythe taking off heads in its wake. Until the day his old man had come home and said they were getting the hell out of this country before it was too late.

  Why am I here? you ask. Because we all got a rotten deal. Like that Arab in Kirkuk who burned himself.

  Malek replied, “Sina never said a word to me about his dealings with the two of you.”

  He watched the man and his wife. They were in tune, so much so that each knew when to take a turn speaking or remaining quiet. A tandem. Malek could well imagine what life must have been like for this woman after the revolution. She had somehow found the little fellow, her husband, and attached herself to him as you would a buoy. In time they had become life vests for each other. In the absence of better options, perhaps it was possible you could grow to love your life vest.

  It was Afshar who spoke again: “Why should Sina tell you about us at all? He threw his own mother out of the house, didn’t he?”

  The man had kept years of being angry in check. He had spent every last dime he had toward getting that penthouse back, then Fani and Sina had just come in one day, waved a court order in their faces, and thrown them out.

  “Please,” Azar chipped in, “you have taken the trouble to come here. Tell us why.”

  He explained that it was actually Fani who had said he should visit them.

  Azar and Afshar regarded one another. It was a moment of recognition. Then Azar smiled. “I see. Now my son has gone and betrayed that awful man too.”

  “I wouldn’t call it betrayal. He simply won’t give Fani power of attorney for the rest of the Vafa estate.”

  “Aha!” Azar suddenly switched to fluent British-accented English. “The Holy Grail, Mr. Malek. That power of attorney is like the Holy Grail in our town.” She turned to her husband who hadn’t understood the English and explained, “I just told Mr. Malek that power of attorney from my son is the object of everyone’s desire.”

  The three of them sat in silence for a minute. It was as if Azar’s speaking English had thrown them into a new space and they had to be careful of where they trod.

  Malek broke the silence. “Sina wants to give it to me.”

  “It, Mr. Malek?” Azar said.

  “The power of attorney.”

  Afshar popped up from his seat before realizing he was showing too much excitement and then immediately sat back down. Malek had hit a nerve and he could see it in Azar’s face too. She was looking strangely at him. “Why would my son wish to give you that power, Mr. Malek?”

  “I came here today to ask you that.”

  “Why not ask Sina himself?”

  “I thought you might offer me a different point of view.”

  A half hour later when he was taking his leave, Malek wasn’t much more enlightened than when he’d arrived. In fact, his sudden revelation to the couple had made them extra cautious with him. As if armed with a legal document from Sina, Malek would one day come here and throw them out of this apartment too. But then, just as he was about to step out, Afshar grabbed his arm and said, “Mr. Malek, if you should one day have that legal document on you and we were to ask for your help, would you oblige?”

  Malek stood there a moment letting Afshar hold onto his arm. Sina’s mother was hanging back, but watched with interest.

  “Would I help you? It depends on the sort of help, I suppose. You have something you need help with, Mr. Afshar?”

  “I might.”

  He felt sorry for the man. For the couple. He was in an odd position of power all of a sudden and he wanted to put the two of them at ease if he could. “You might need my help then?”

  “Yes, I . . . we will need help with something. But,” Afshar hesitated, “there might be something in it for you too.”

  The man was offering him a deal of some sort. It was funny and sad, in the way only a city like Tehran could make one feel. Malek gently lifted Afshar’s hand off his own and, after giving it a reassuring squeeze, released it. “Just call me when that day arrives.”

  * * *

  It was ten days and Sina still hadn’t returned. Malek had gotten into the habit of drawn-out tea mornings at the Turkish place across from Sina’s apartment, then hours of meditative spins on the motorbike. He had no close relatives in the city. When he so suddenly moved with his old man to California, the ties they’d had here had been severed permanently. There was Soaad, of course. But he still had to wait to make that move. Whatever business he had with Sina, and probably with Fani, he had to be sure it wouldn’t endanger his own mother. It was a peculiar sense of feeling protective of someone who he wasn’t even quite sure existed.

  Sina was calling him on the phone.

  Malek answered, “I’m standing in front of your dad’s old sports center.”

  “Why?”

  Malek wasn’t really sure why and he didn’t bother to answer. He’d happened to be riding up Shariati Avenue and there it was. The place looked absurd and profitable; they’d stuck some giant bowling pin, painted yellow and blue, outside of the building next to an even bigger movie poster.

  He assumed Sina must be on this side of the border again and would probably be back soon. The telephone numbers he used to call Malek had changed each time.

  Sina asked, “Did you see your mother?”

  “I saw yours.”

  In a dead-even voice Sina answered, “We’ll talk about that tomorrow,” before hanging up.

  Not two minutes afterward, Malek’s phone buzzed again. Another new number.

  “What is it?” he asked, s
ure it had to be Sina. When there was no answer, he spoke again: “Sina?”

  “This is Soaad,” the voice said, “your mother.”

  * * *

  He had a few memories of her. Sometimes she’d take him to the bookstores across from the University of Tehran where she would meet friends from college. They were a certain type, those friends. Even as a kid he’d felt there was something off about them. They weren’t like the regular grown-ups. The women hardly dressed up. In fact, they went out of their way to look utterly plain. And the men, they looked too serious. As if they were always about to do something that required intense concentration.

  They’d been Communists. He figured that out later. Not much later, though. Just months after the revolution, when the Communists and the Islamists were fighting it out openly in the streets. Suddenly all those bookstore gatherings and poetry readings she’d brought him to when he was eight years old began to make sense. Before long, most of her friends would be dead or serving long prison terms. The other side had won. The country was going to be called the Islamic Republic.

  He had thought about her often during the revolution. Where in Australia could she be? Would he ever hear from her again? Was there ever a time that she had truly loved him?

  In California he had at last begun to forget her. Though it wasn’t actually forgetting, just tucking something away and making sure it didn’t pop out of the drawer too often. Soon there was high school and the accursed cookie shop he had to run with his father. And he had new, thoroughly American concerns that had nothing to do with the Islamic Revolution. Like the Oakland A’s winning the baseball pennant or the San Francisco 49ers the Super Bowl. He’d let Soaad go a little more each day until that drawer finally stayed shut. Years later, he had actually thought about making a trip to Australia and looking up the Iranians there. He was sure he’d be able to find her if he tried hard enough. But according to his father, it was Soaad who had chosen to leave. Maybe she didn’t want to be found. Maybe she didn’t want him to come looking for her.

  And now, in her little apartment on one of these old back streets off of Ferdowsi Square, she was making him stuffed cabbage on a late-June evening. It was an odd choice of food for that season when there was usually no cabbage to be had in the entire country. Maybe she was still a Communist, he thought half seriously. One of those die-hards who’d gone for extra training next door to the Soviet Union when there was still a Soviet Union to speak of. Maybe that was where she’d learned to make stuffed cabbage.

  He watched her as she cooked. Her back to him. Her elegance, he concluded, was different than Azar’s, Sina’s mother. Soaad looked like, and was, a sixty-year-old yoga teacher, with long white hair that sat well in a ponytail. Her body lean and erect. Her movements deliberate, almost meditative. She had the face of a woman who studied suffering as a vocation. There was intelligence in the sadness of her ample eyes. When Malek had knocked on the door and she’d opened, she had neither broken down crying like he’d expected her to, nor thrown herself wildly in his arms. She’d merely stepped forward, put her forehead to his chest, and said, “I haven’t the words right now.”

  She had been getting by for the last twenty years with the yoga courses. Though lately she had to spend more time at home taking care of her sick neighbor. The stuffed cabbage, she’d volunteered, was as much for the neighbor as it was for the two of them.

  “Were you?” he asked. She turned around from the stove, smiling and peering inquisitively at him. Malek realized he’d been so much in his own thoughts that he’d assumed she’d know what he was asking. “Were you with one of the Communist cells? I mean, back in those days when I was a kid and you took me around to places.”

  “That was a long time ago. It was another life. Another world.”

  “Why did you leave us?”

  Soaad turned off the stove and came and sat across from him at the small, round kitchen table. There were no photographs in the apartment. That was what he’d noticed. Scant furniture. Not unlike Sina’s place. But there were a lot of flowers. She liked flowers. He’d bring her some next time.

  “Your friend Sina didn’t tell you?”

  “Sina just told me he had found you. That was all he said.”

  “What I was back then, and why I left you, they are all part of the same story. It doesn’t matter, Rez.”

  “I disagree. I believe I’m owed an explanation. And I want to hear the explanation from your own mouth, not from Sina Vafa.”

  She took a deep breath. “One day two men were waiting in a car for me. I used to teach at a middle school, if you recall. They had photographs.”

  That had been a couple of years before the revolution. Different players. But the precision was the same. Malek knew the story by heart: They took you somewhere and were methodical about it—All we want is for you to report to us from time to time about your acquaintances. They wanted her to snitch on her Communist friends. She had a choice of cooperating or they’d take the photographs of her and her lover and hand them to her husband. They particularly wanted to know about him; they wanted her to report on her own lover.

  He let her tell it to the end, though he already knew what was coming. She had come home one day and simply confessed to Malek’s father. It was the only way she knew to get out of that bind.

  “I could not be an informant, Reza. There are a million stories like mine in this country. Some of us chose one way, some the other. Your father took it quietly. Quiet rage, I’d say. His only stipulation for the divorce was that I disappear from your life for good. That’s why the fiction about Australia.”

  “You could have looked me up during the revolution. Things were different then.”

  “I did. One day I called your father and told him we had to talk. He agreed to meet me near Café Naderi and I told him I really needed to see my son. He did not say no. All he said was that I should give him a little time so he could prepare you. Weeks passed. When I called again, a stranger answered the old telephone number. So I came by the house. There was a new superintendent in the building. He didn’t know me. He was the one who told me the two of you had left for America.”

  She got up and started to excuse herself. She had turned chalk-white. For a second Malek thought she might pass out on him. Two and a half decades after she’d been summoned to the Intelligence Ministry, it had been his turn to be called in. Both of them had said no. They had this much in common. He reached out and grabbed her hand and told her it would be okay.

  “Nothing will ever be okay.” And then she finally broke down and began to cry. She was tough, though. Almost right away she recovered, looked him square in the face, and said, “I have to take food to my neighbor. You know, Anna really wants to see you. She has been saying so ever since we saw you on satellite television talking about your book.”

  “Why didn’t you reach out then if you saw me on TV? There’s the Internet, you know. The world is not so closed anymore.”

  “I did not know how. I mean, I did not dare, Reza jaan.” She went to the stove and put a plate together for her neighbor. “Anna is Polish. She has lived here since World War II. I have not told her you are here. If I did, she’d drag herself from bed to see you. She is very sick. She is all I have left here.”

  Turned out they had come after her again. Different men this time. They’d taken her lover too, whom she’d meanwhile married. Mr. and Mrs. Commie, Pinko, Red! Malek thought with just a hint of spite. Nevertheless, he was trying to muster sympathy for Soaad’s second husband, the man who had essentially taken her away from him. The man who they had killed. But they’d killed a lot of people back then. Did one more make a difference? Surely. It had made a difference in Soaad’s life.

  Malek sat in that barren apartment and listened to the sounds of the city. He was self-conscious. I am sitting in my maman’s house now and it feels strange. She would tell him how she’d spent that year in jail after the revolution. How she’d learned yoga in there from another inmate, and when she�
�d come out, she’d stuck with it. It had saved her life. Literally. She was already purged from her teaching job at school. So she began to teach yoga. It was not a bad living. There were a lot of rich folks in the city who wanted to look good and fill their time. And her husband? “I don’t know why they let some of us go and killed the others. We were all godless Communists to them. I can’t tell you how bad it got here for a few years. The killings. That endless war with Iraq. The cloud that fell over our lives.”

  Thirty minutes later, when she returned from her neighbor’s apartment, he simply asked her, “Did you love him?” She looked at him quizzically. “Your second husband. Did you love him?”

  “I did.”

  “Then why marry the old man, my father, in the first place?”

  She sat back down at the table, resting her chin in both hands. “I had been in trouble since high school. Politics. My own father, your grandfather, came home one day and said there was a suitor for me. A much older man. At first I thought I’d fight it tooth and nail. But I knew I hadn’t a choice. They wouldn’t have allowed me to take the university exams. I figured if I married, at least I’d have to deal with just one person, a husband. Your father was a decent man. An ordinary man. He had no trouble with me taking the exams for college. He even encouraged it. Said education was the key to life. I’m so sorry, Reza jaan. I feel like I’ve been disappointing people my whole life.”

  “You did what you thought was right. That’s not a crime.”

  She smiled weakly and served him a plateful of stuffed cabbages with yogurt and fresh bread. She was trying so hard. Why had Sina insisted so adamantly that he contact her? No matter. At this point he was just glad that his friend had insisted, even going to the length of giving Malek’s number to Soaad and telling her to call him.

  Soaad nudged him to eat. “And you? What did you do in California after you left here?”

  “We had a cookie shop. We baked cookies. The old man, he got sick after a while. America was like Merikh to him, Mars. I think getting cancer was the best thing he ever did for himself over there. He sold the business at a loss. Cooped himself up in his room and read Persian poetry until he died. I don’t think he bothered to learn a hundred words of English to the last day. He was like somebody abandoned on a boat somewhere.”