by Salar Abdoh
He’d hit a nerve. She seemed like she might cry again.
Malek said, “Forget the past. But tell me this: are you in trouble?”
“What?” She seemed genuinely surprised.
“Are you in any kind of trouble here?”
“No. I . . . don’t think so.” Here was a woman who had been a political prisoner for one year, and whose second husband had been killed in the men’s wing of that same jail—Evin Prison. So of course she couldn’t be certain. Who could be certain about anything when they could come and take you away anytime they wanted to?
He stared at Soaad. “Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything at all?”
“No!”
“Before the revolution, when those men came to see you—did you agree to inform for them even once?”
Her head hung low, barely bringing the words out: “Only for three months. It was nothing, Reza. I swear, it was nothing. I told them useless things. I gave no one away. I didn’t get anyone in trouble.”
She looked scared. More than that, she looked ashamed. He had to put her mind at ease.
“I am not here to interrogate you. Do you understand? If you understand, nod your head.”
She did.
“All right. You are not an unintelligent woman. Look at me. Look at me!” He raised her chin and caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. “You have a dossier. Even if you worked a single day for those people, you have a dossier.”
“Why am I not dead then? Why did they not kill me after the revolution?”
“It was a chaotic time. You said that yourself. You were not high on anybody’s list. Nobody bothered to peek into your file twice.” He went silent for a while before adding, “Nobody except Sina. He found your dossier.” Malek was talking more to himself now. Trying to figure out the meaning of all this.
She sat there hunched, deflated. He forced himself to finish his plate and asked her for seconds. She darted up. Happy to be doing something for him.
When she came back to the table, he asked, “Why did Sina go out of his way to find you?”
“I don’t know, but I’m glad he did. Because you are here today.” Her voice was almost pleading. Like she wanted to convince herself of something. “We’re together at last. Isn’t that what matters?”
“Yes, that’s what matters,” Malek offered, consoling her.
* * *
Two men were fighting. Malek stood at the ledge watching what was happening at the bottom of the stairwell in the gymnasium courtyard. There was a circle of impossibly thick-necked men down there, all of them bodybuilders, letting the fight go on without interfering. A shout had brought Malek out of Sina’s apartment. It had begun with threats which soon turned into thrown fists. Now the two exhausted men wrestled clumsily on the ground while others watched. Malek was spellbound, fascinated with the impassivity of the spectators. It was a fight that had to be fought.
A tap on Malek’s shoulder. His first thought was that Fani had caught him off guard again. He turned around roughly.
Sina was smiling at him. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Malek watched Sina watching the fight indifferently for another minute, then they both started to make their way inside.
The door closed and Sina, looking disheveled, smiled again.
It was time and Malek went right ahead and did it. He took a swing, throwing Sina to the floor against the entrance door. He stood there, waiting for Sina to get himself together and fight back. When he didn’t, Malek stepped in again and booted him in the thigh. “Get up!” He wanted to wipe that smirk off Sina Vafa’s face forever. “Get up, you son of a bitch. I know they’ve trained you to kick the hell out of me. Let me see you do it.”
Sina remained on the floor with his back still resting against the door, his legs splayed out, his backpack hanging from one shoulder. “I’m tired, Rez,” he said, not smiling anymore. “If it’s a fight you want with me, you’re gonna have to wait for another day. Why don’t you go downstairs and have yourself a real fight with one of those weight lifters?”
“Why did you call me to Tehran?”
“Can we discuss this over a drink?”
“No, I want to discuss it now.”
Sina unzipped his backpack and brought out a bottle. “Johnnie Walker Blue. Compliments of Iraqi Kurdistan. You can’t get this stuff here. I thought you’d be pleased.”
A half hour later Sina had taken a shower and was walking around the apartment wrapped in a red long. Malek sat on the floor next to a tray that held the alcohol and two tall glasses. He had quickly swigged several shots by himself; if he felt anything, it was remorse for having lashed out. He heard the tuning of a guitar and in a minute Sina came out of the bedroom holding an acoustic. It was the strangest sight, Sina half naked with the long draped around his dark body playing chords to a country-and-western song.
They should have been anywhere except at this address on Orumiya Street in Tehran. Nothing made sense. Sina Vafa made the least sense of all.
Malek spoke over the music: “You found my mother’s file somehow, didn’t you?”
Sina shook his head, put the guitar aside, and poured himself a drink. “There’s a file, yes.”
“But why even bother with my mother’s old file?”
Sina’s neck was beginning to bruise from the punch and he kept rubbing his pummeled thigh. “Fani found it, not me. Because it was his job to do that. Those years, when you came to Tehran to work and he saw how close you and me were, he had to check your background. It was his job. So he came across your mother’s old file.”
“Why would you need a case officer in the first place?”
“Because I’m a Vafa. Don’t you get it? Sometimes they just assign you somebody. And you have to accept it.”
“I didn’t accept it.”
“But your mother did.”
Silence.
“What now?” Malek asked.
“Fani kept your mother’s file on him all these years for a day like this.”
“And you figured if I am the executor of your estate, I can deal with Fani myself. Yes?”
Sina, looking impatient, lightly kicked the guitar away and came and sat across from Malek. “I truly am tired, Rez. I don’t want to deal with the Vafa holdings, or potential holdings, or confiscated holdings, or released holdings, or anything else anymore. I’m tired of my name. I’m tired of my dead father’s name. And—”
“Your mother? What about her? You return to Tehran and then you and your case officer throw her and her husband out of the house she got back from the government.”
“A mistake for which I’m sorry.”
“So why not tell her you’re sorry?”
“It’s too late.”
“I see. You want me to take care of that too. You’re tired, so you want Reza Malek to take care of his own mother and your mother.”
“Who else can I ask, Rez?”
“You are using me.”
“For a good deed. If you don’t accept, then a fellow like Fani will eventually take it all anyway. Would you like that?”
“I can’t say that I care either way.”
“You don’t care about your own mother?”
It was the strangest kind of blackmail Malek had ever heard of. It was cockeyed. His best friend was coercing him to take charge of a fortune confiscated by the Islamic Republic years ago—otherwise something might happen to Malek’s mother, a mother Malek didn’t even know he still had until a couple of weeks ago.
He could walk away from it all right now. Just get himself up. Go to the Imam Khomeini Airport. Get the hell out. Never look back.
Sina blurted, “And don’t work with that American, Clara Vikingstad, anymore. She’s bad news for you.”
The entire town seemed to know about the fiasco in Qum. He watched Sina pour shots for both of them. The guitar lying on the floor, an anomaly from a past that may as well have never existed. Sina Vafa was the last person in the world fit to tell h
im what he should and should not be doing.
Malek asked, “What did you do with the house you threw your mother out of?”
“Split the money with Fani after I sold it.”
“What did you do with your share of the money?”
“Spent it.”
Later on, whenever he thought about it, Malek would come back to this night as the precise moment when something broke between him and Sina. It was like he was watching his friend drifting away in a boat and there was nothing he could do to stop it or reel him back in. Something was finished. But they still had to play along.
Sina raised his glass. “Brothers like always. Yes?”
Malek too raised his glass, but said nothing.
* * *
He’d been daydreaming in Soaad’s kitchen. Shafts of light fell from the bamboo blind, cutting the kitchen in an almost perfect diagonal half. Outside, a street vendor was calling at the top of his voice about something to buy or sell; Malek couldn’t tell which. He’d been thinking about a kebab joint in Berkeley where he and Sina would go late at night for their only real meal of the day when they were students. The portions were huge and the man behind the counter always gave them extra meat.
Earlier that day he had accompanied Soaad to a yoga workshop she’d been asked to supervise at one of those mansions in the fashionable Velenjak District, an area of expensive homes and luxury apartments in the western foothills. He had wanted to know something about Soaad’s life besides that dark past, something that would lend her a reality beyond the outmoded politics and jail term and dead husbands. So he had asked to come along and then watched as she began a two-hour women’s class in a bright hardwood room filled with designer yoga mats. After a while a servant politely led him out of there to an indoor pool area where the owner of the house was having a white wine breakfast party for a dozen other guests. Malek was welcomed easily into this mix, presented with a choice of wine or Bloody Mary, and then settled down as conversations took place around him in Persian, English, and French. These were the moneyed people of the city who usually held dual citizenships in Europe or North America. They went skiing a half hour away from Tehran during winter and they spent summers on the Caspian Sea waterskiing and playing cards at each other’s villas. A few months of the year they visited their children in California or Europe or Canada, and they spent the rest of their time sitting by heated pools like this one, complaining about the failing Iranian currency and wishing that the Islamic regime would just be gone already.
Malek imagined his mother in the midst of all this opulence, teaching her classes for so many years and smiling at the people who basically kept her fed. He too smiled back at the easy chattiness of the rich folk by the pool and found himself feeling grateful to them. They’d saved his mother. Their money and their mansions and the private courses that only they could afford had given Soaad a space to breathe. He began to feel a quiet buzz off the drinks and mused on the presence his mother had running her class. She was respected and listened to. He’d watched her holding a particularly difficult pose for the students, momentarily glancing up to catch Malek standing by the door watching her. She’d beamed at him then, as if to say, Now you know who I really am and what I do.
Afterward, she declined the poolside invitation for wine, but accepted the host’s offer that his chauffeur would drive them back home.
In the car she’d whispered to him, “They are not bad people, you know. They have been my bread and butter.”
“I know.”
“Now you have seen me teach. Do you want to see me buy groceries too? I do all these things. I really am real. Truly.” She laughed.
“Yes, you are real.”
It had been more than an hour since she’d gone out again for groceries. Malek waited, missing her. At last he heard the outside door turn. Soaad, holding a shopping bag, hurried into the kitchen. She set the bag on the floor and eyed Malek.
“What,” he began, and then added the word that until two weeks ago would have sounded alien to him, “. . . Mother?”
He could tell she was anxious, but was keeping it mostly in check. She half turned to the kitchen door as if someone would walk in any second.
First came Fani, then behind him another man. A big, puffy-faced, unsmiling fellow who gave the kitchen a quick once-over as if he were searching for something.
Malek didn’t bother to stand up. There was, he had decided, something essentially tedious about men like Fani. From the outside you would imagine their world was one of layered intrigues. But it wasn’t that. It was the persistence of these guys that was their essence. They were like barking dogs that never let up.
He watched Soaad, admiring how relatively cool she was under pressure. Even now, standing between him and these two strangers who had muscled their way into her house, she didn’t allow herself to waver. She didn’t break down and start cowering or invoking God and the Twelve Imams like someone else her age might have done. She just stood there, gazing back at her own son, no doubt wondering how this thing was going to play itself out. She was a veteran that way. And Malek had begun to, well, love her for it.
“You have been holding out on me, Mr. Malek,” Fani said humorlessly.
In front of Malek, on the kitchen table, was an oversized piece of paper twice folded. Malek unfolded it and let it lie on the table. It was the power of attorney that Sina had given him two days earlier. Full and complete, it gave Malek the authority to sign and sell in Sina’s name anything and everything. It was one of those sealed, loophole-proof documents that people killed for. Except this particular document had a proviso written in block letters at the bottom of it, stating that it was nontransferable. It was to belong only to Malek. No third party or lawyer could make a move on Sina Vafa’s behalf without Malek’s direct presence. In the Islamic Republic, where these specifics mattered, it was a legal record made of steel. The piece of paper was almost holy, and it was even scribed in artificially sacred language heavy with Arabic vocabulary.
“Take a look for yourself,” he said to Fani.
Fani told the shadow to stay outside. But the man didn’t move. He was some type of gun for hire. Malek could tell by the way the sudden daft smile came over his face. It was the smile of a certain brand of mercenary. You almost never, for instance, saw it in the face of a British ex-soldier going private in Afghanistan or Iraq. But you saw it with some of the Americans. Not the seasoned pros working for the top foreign security companies in Baghdad, the guys who Clara would often try to chat up for those rare nuggets of information. But the ones with less skill and more mouth.
Malek would have liked to wipe the smile off the man’s face. He wanted to get up and stick something into the guy. Everything his mother had been through, all the poison of thirty years, came down to this man now smiling at him like a camel’s ass.
He decided to accept the risk of a severe beating and called out, “Get the gorilla out of my mother’s place! He stinks like a mosque that hasn’t been washed for a year.”
Several minutes later, when Fani had barely managed to contain the other man and before cajoling him out of Soaad’s apartment, the first thing he said to Malek was, “I didn’t bring him here for show.” Fani’s face was pale and beads of sweat had collected on his forehead.
Soaad’s samovar was making a hissing noise from lack of water. She’d excused herself to go attend to her neighbor and in her hurry had forgotten about the samovar. Malek filled the thing and put it back on the stove. “Please go ahead and examine the document,” he said to Fani.
“I already did. I read the original copy at the same place you and your friend had it drawn up. Why else would I be here?”
“And?”
“It’s a foolproof document. Even the court couldn’t annul it. Congratulations.”
“Fani, you have my mother’s file from before the revolution. I want it.”
“And then what happens? You sign over the power of attorney to me? Can’t be done. The document say
s you can’t transfer it. I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you in Tehran indefinitely, Mr. Malek. Your signatures will be necessary for everything I work on for the Vafa estate.”
“What makes you think I’ll work with you? If Sina Vafa had wanted this, he would have given you the contract himself.”
“Sina Vafa is a maniac. A zealot. And now that he’s with QAF, he can’t sign for anything and not look bad in their eyes. The only thing left for him to do was sign his entire will over to someone else. That someone else has turned out to be you, Mr. Malek.”
“I can’t stay in Tehran.”
“Then we have a problem.”
“I want my mother out of this country.”
This brought loud laughter from Fani. “You want to leave and you want your mother to leave with you. What does this leave me with, Malek?”
They were at an impasse and remained silent for a minute, both of them hovering next to Soaad’s stove without making a move to sit down. Malek finally asked, “So who is that ape you brought with you today?”
“That man is the type of guy the Americans will hire right away when they return. He’ll put on a tie, shave his beard, learn a few phrases in English, and be the first in line to do security work for the Americans. Indeed, Mr. Malek, I did time in Iraq too. You weren’t the only one. I saw what the Americans did.”
“And what about you, Mr. Fani? What will you do when the Americans come?”
Fani’s face lit up. He was glad again for their banter. “I will do very much the same. Do you know why? Because I’m the best friend you Americans are ever going to have here. I’m a man with no ideology. And I’m a lot smarter and more educated than that beast out there.”
“But who is that beast? I know you didn’t bring him here just to scare me. I’m already scared.”
Fani took a beat too long to answer. “He’s a guy who does my errands now and then.”