Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  The answer was preposterous. Malek had seen the worry on Fani’s face when he’d had to pretty much beg the other man to stand outside for a few minutes. That was no errand boy out there. Probably Malek’s former associates in the ministry had gotten word that he was aiming for the Vafa estates and they wanted in on it. So there was a hierarchy now. A food chain that no longer ended with a jack-of-all-trades like Fani; rather, it ended with other men, far more shadowy, devout godfathers who wanted their cut because that was their job. Between last week and this week Fani was no longer working alone; he had to answer to these other men and pay tax. It was a simple, well-worn structure, Malek realized; they let you move the ball up the field on your own, but when it was time to score they stepped in and said, Salaam, “We’re in.” It was, in a way, the quintessence of gangsterism.

  Malek swallowed hard and proposed his deal. He would go with Fani to the places they had to go to and sign the things he had to sign, but then he would have to return to the States because of his job. He could come back again for a month during his winter break.

  “Think big, Malek! When you take your cut of the Vafa estate, you will never have to work again.”

  He’d never thought of it that way. But of course it was true; if everybody took a cut, why couldn’t he? Without him nothing would take place. He could charge his own commission. The corruption came bit by bit. One morning you woke up and you were part of that food chain.

  “You yourself said this estate has a lot of eyes on it,” Malek said. “It could take forever. I can’t sit here until then and do nothing.”

  “That’s fair. I also imagine you miss your beautiful city. Too bad about the towers in New York. But you Americans, you will build again. You always build. You always win.”

  “I’m not American.”

  “Oh please, Mr. Malek. You carry their passport. I envy you that. And when you guys finally arrive, I can tell everybody that I have an American friend and his name is Reza Malek. My life will remain legitimate.”

  Fani suddenly reached out and gave Malek an energetic handshake. Then he started to walk toward the kitchen door. Malek called him and he turned.

  “What about my mother?”

  Fani winked. “She’s my collateral, isn’t she? She stays. She doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Is this what the men you work for want?”

  Fani gave a long look at Malek and walked out.

  * * *

  A man and two older women stood at a row of graves in a remote section of the cemetery.

  Soaad bent down and tried to read the name on the marker. Under a small Star of David, the name Orba and beneath it Ryfka had been etched into the stone. Then the dates when the child had lived, 1937–1942.

  Anna, Soaad’s Polish neighbor, leaned heavily on Malek’s arms. She could barely stand. From the pictures Malek had seen in her apartment, she had been a woman of substantial proportions in her middle years. She was wasting away now. Strands of her short white hair jutted beyond her awkwardly pasted headdress and gave her haggard face the appearance of a tail growing out of her forehead. Her eyes were sunken and hollow. She was looking beyond the rows of tombstones to an unspecified place west of the cemetery where a park named Martyrs of Islam was located. Her knees buckled, so that Malek had to cautiously wrap one of her arms around his own neck and lift her up. When they’d gotten here, there had been a hint of life in those legs. Now even that little bit was gone.

  Yet it was at her insistence that they had come to the Jewish cemetery of Tehran.

  Malek saw that the gaunt, redheaded caretaker of the place was still looking oddly at them from a distance. At first he hadn’t wanted to let them inside, saying that the cemetery was only for Jews—even though he himself, he emphasized, was not a Jew. There had been some back and forth until Malek handed him the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of wages and the man opened the door.

  Meanwhile, the private car they’d hired for the day waited for them outside.

  It was a well-kept cemetery, but inside the dusty old synagogue time seemed to have drawn itself to a close. Photos of former dignitaries of the community lined a couple of glass cabinets, and old tomes were scattered haphazardly on wooden benches and piled in precarious columns in corners.

  It had been hard to get Anna through the place, especially since the section devoted to the Polish Jews of World War II was at the very end of the grounds. All that the sign said at its entrance was: Lahestaniha. Poles. Before they got to it, they had to sit for a long time on one of the benches in the synagogue so Anna could catch her breath. At one point her gaze fell on the eastern wall and on a glass case where a tanned parchment was laid out. Anna had smiled, her head drooped, and she seemed to fall asleep for a while.

  Now Soaad was moving between the several rows of graves, reading the names aloud to herself, trying to digest whatever it was that had brought them here. When she glanced up at Malek, who was still holding Anna up, there was wonder in her eyes.

  Walking back toward them, she called, “A lot of them were children.”

  Anna, her voice barely audible now, repeated, “Children. The ones who didn’t get there.”

  “Get where?” Malek asked.

  “Eretz Yisrael.”

  Soaad lifted Anna’s other arm. “We go now, Anna. That is all right with you?”

  “One more minute,” she pleaded.

  And so they stood there for another minute in the Polish section of the Jewish cemetery of Tehran, next to a park called Martyrs of Islam. The absurdity of it all—and the withered beauty of the scene with the three of them there—did not escape Malek. It was like he had entered another world, one that was neither Tehran nor New York, but something of another time and space altogether. He only wished there was someone he could call and share this moment with. He had not even brought a camera.

  He whispered to Soaad, then mother and son heaved in unison and slowly began to drag Anna back to the cemetery gate and the waiting car outside.

  * * *

  For the next couple of weeks Fani’s shadow disappeared. So Malek’s time was now mostly spent driving from office to office with Fani alone and being introduced to this and that hajj aqa—men in various states of corpulence who would nod and shake hands and make no promises. It was a round of introductions at the courts and the different revolutionary foundations. The foundations were basically rackets where the confiscated estates of the previous regime were held in some kind of perpetual escrow so that anyone associated with the foundation could steal from the common trough—the Foundation for the Needy, the Foundation for the Martyrs of War, the Foundation for Martyrs’ Families and Orphans. The list was endless, and so were the riches to be had. The trick was that for those who wanted to steal more than just their allotted share, each estate would have to be “freed” from the foundation’s clutches. That was where Malek’s power of attorney came in. If, for instance, just the Vafa Sport Center was freed, in one swoop the men who had done the freeing would have over a hundred million dollars to share amongst themselves. The stakes were immense.

  And since this was how the game worked, Fani wanted it to be known there was a vakil, a proxy, actively representing the putative Vafa estate. And that the rep, Malek, was in turn being represented by Fani. Each hajj aqa would examine the legal document, clear his throat, and offer his noncommittal “no problem,” and they’d move on to the next guy. Once a critical mass of no problems was reached, Fani would begin his dance. But that was in the future and Malek’s summer of 2008 in Tehran was fast drawing to a close.

  One day, outside of the Central Revolutionary Court, as Malek and Fani were walking away from the building, Sina called out to them. It was the first time that Malek had seen Sina and Fani in the same place. He watched as the two former associates eyed each other, wary and familiar and cold.

  “You two are getting along well, it looks like,” Sina observed. He sat on his motorcycle and did not make a move to get off and shake hands. “I feel l
ike an extra now. Not needed anymore.”

  “You wanted this,” Malek said impatiently. “You set it up.” He wasn’t used to speaking Persian to Sina and the words seemed to leave his mouth somewhat warped.

  Fani said something but in the din of midday traffic it was lost. Just then a yellow bus filled with kids sticking their heads out drove past, the children screaming and wearing black bandannas that had Army of the Messiah written on them. It was all a mad carnival where Malek felt more like a hostage than a player.

  When the noise subsided a little, Fani repeated, “Aqa Sina, your friend is pulling his weight. He is all right. You stick to your own people and I’ll look out for Mr. Malek here.”

  “But it’s my name being spread around over there.” Sina pointed to the court. “Maybe I have something to say about that.”

  “If you did, you would have said it by now,” Fani countered. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing. I just came to pick up my friend. There’s a game on today at the stadium.”

  “All right then!” Fani nodded and began to retreat. Within seconds he had disappeared into the crowd.

  Malek had been gauging the icy look in Sina’s eyes during the encounter. “You could kill that man, couldn’t you?” he asked, switching back to English.

  “It would not be beneficial.”

  “To whom would it not be beneficial?”

  “All of us.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Hop on. It’ll be a good game.”

  “Your father’s old soccer team?”

  “The one and only. Come.”

  * * *

  It was just a warm-up preseason game before the real season began the following month. Nevertheless, the stadium was full and Sina’s team scored a couple of quick goals before settling into a comfortable defensive position for the duration.

  The whole time Malek’s focus remained on Sina, who watched the game with the intensity of someone who had a stake in it. Some hours later, Malek brought up the subject. “You really care if your old team wins or loses, don’t you?”

  They had ridden out from the stadium in a convoy of flag-waving, horns-blaring bikers heading to Razi Park in a southern district full of motorcycle mechanics.

  Sina chipped in some money with a loud group of men to get chelo-kebab, and when the food arrived, they all sprawled on the grass near the man-made pond and began digging in with hands and plastic spoons.

  Slowly, the night turned into a riot of vows about how the championship was going to be theirs this year. Men danced. Police arrived. But these were tough, bike-riding soccer fans and they were soon forcing the police to eat with them or stand aside.

  Malek ate and watched Sina do the same and knew that all that his friend had ever wanted was exactly this, to simply be one of the boys. Around one o’clock in the morning, when the riders began drifting away, Sina finally answered Malek’s question. “Of course I care about my old team. A man has to stay loyal to some things.” He glanced at Malek. “Like you and me, for example. We’re loyal to each other, no?”

  They were still sitting on the grass. Alone now. A park worker sauntered over telling them they had to leave soon. They didn’t pay the man any attention and he went away. In the distance, on the other side of the little pond, families lingered with their kids. On summer nights like this they stayed out till the wee hours of the morning.

  Soaad would be waiting up for him right now, worried. His own mother! It was Malek’s first experience of actually living with a woman, even just for a few days. She had begged him to collect his stuff from Sina’s house and move in with her while he remained in Tehran, and he’d said yes. She cooked for him every night. In return, besides the daily rounds he made with Fani to the courts, he didn’t stray far from Soaad and her neighbor, Anna.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time: what do you do for QAF?”

  “QAF doesn’t exist.”

  “Maybe not. But what do you do for them?”

  “I translate when they need a translator.”

  “Is there an office you go to? Do you have a desk? Do you report to a superior?”

  Sina smiled. “What difference does it make? Let’s say I have a nine-to-five job at a place called QAF Headquarters, does that satisfy you?”

  “I’m only trying to understand.”

  “You’ve been trying to understand for many years, Rez. That’s why you kept going to school. You’re the guy who needed to understand and I’m the guy who had to . . .”

  “What?”

  “Do things. To actually live. There’s a difference between living in the world and going to school, Rez.”

  “What you call doing is doing without thinking.”

  “Not true. I gave everything a lot of thought.”

  “Like deciding to tell me about my mother? Maybe I didn’t have to know about her. I lived all this time without knowing.”

  “Is that really what you would have wanted?”

  No. It wasn’t what he would have wanted at all. Now he gave up trying to make sense of any of this and simply said, “Tell me anything you want to tell me. Anything!”

  Sina gave him a rare serious look. “I’m in too deep, Rez. Way too deep.”

  “So come back stateside with me. Forget all this.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “You’ve committed yourself that much?”

  Sina nodded. “I just want one thing from you: if you succeed with Fani, promise me you’ll take care of my mother too.”

  “You want to make amends with her after throwing her out of that house?”

  “I do.”

  “So go apologize. Tell her you love her.”

  “Not possible. Some borders you cross, you can’t go back to.”

  There was truth to that. And it felt like Malek had to give some sort of promise to Sina to keep him from falling off the edge of the world. He said, “I’ll do this whole power of attorney thing. I’ll finish it. I’m doing it for my mother. And I’m doing it for your mother. Understand?”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you,” he held Sina’s hand, “you know they won’t even wash your body when they’re done with you. They’ll just throw you in some unmarked grave.”

  “Is there really a difference when we’re gone? You really prefer a marked grave rather than an unmarked one, Rez? Is that what’s important?”

  * * *

  When Malek told Soaad and Anna he was leaving in two days to go back to America, Anna began weeping. Soaad just stared at the wall. They were in Anna’s bedroom where the smell of sickness was heavy. It was some kind of cancer. Malek didn’t remember which, only that it was terminal. Maybe Anna had weeks or months. She’d already lived her life, she kept repeating.

  “Please, have them bury me at the Polish section in the Jewish cemetery.”

  It was going to be impossible. She had nothing to prove she was a Jew. Her story had come out in truncated bits and pieces in recent weeks, whenever she could sustain talking more than a sentence or two. The cemetery trip they had taken together had really knocked the wind out of her. That night Soaad had had to rush her neighbor to the emergency room while Malek was out. By the time Anna returned three days later, there was not much of her left.

  Yet Anna had taken to calling Malek “Son of Soaad.” Now, using that epithet, she asked softly while lying in bed, “Why do your eyes tell me that my request will not be met?”

  He explained that he’d already gotten in touch with what remained of the Jewish community of the city. They were reluctant. More than reluctant. Theirs was a close-knit community. And to be simply told there was an old Polish woman—who had been living in Tehran as a Catholic for six and a half decades—declaring suddenly that she was Jewish just didn’t cut it for them. They needed strong proof, especially from other Jews who could vouch for her. On the phone they had sounded scared and eager to get off. While they didn’t come right out and say it, they wanted to avoid trouble with
the authorities. It was in the air. They’d been through enough since the revolution and they didn’t want to give any cause for problems.

  “What if I leave them my apartment?” Anna asked hopefully. “They could sell it. Use some of the proceeds for a grave for me.” She had run out of steam and her eyes began to close.

  Soaad stood still on the other side of the bed, observing her friend of more than twenty years. Finally she asked Malek, “Is there nothing you can do for her?”

  Anna’s eyes popped open and she half smiled. “Yes, do that please, Son of Soaad. Tell my story.”

  He saw that she had reached over and was holding out an envelope for him. The veins on her hand resembled faded ink blots. He knew so little about her. There was a picture of her on the mantelpiece with her husband, a local, who had died a long time ago. No children. Just the two of them. The man a small dark fellow, and Anna looking several dozen pounds heavier than she was now. Anna in a red dress staring at the camera some twenty-five years ago. Her secret locked in her breast, so that there was nothing to do about it but to fatten the space around that secret and throw away the key.

  Malek took the envelope and peered questioningly at Anna.

  “I have been dictating to your mother,” she said. “It is my life story. Only a few pages. Maybe you make something of it. Some of it you already know. Don’t forget me, Son of Soaad.”

  He pocketed the envelope. He was tired all of a sudden and felt burdened with the weight of too many people’s secrets. He kissed Anna on the forehead and bade her goodbye.

  Back in Soaad’s apartment, she asked him when he was going to return to Tehran.

  “Winter.”

  “Why did you find me?”

  It wasn’t necessarily an odd question, it was just a little late to ask it. He looked at her and didn’t quite know what to say. “You already know the story. My friend Sina directed me to you.”

  “But you didn’t have to come, Reza.”

  “I did. Just like I had to take that letter from Anna right now.”

  “I’m an act of kindness for you then?”

  “You’re my mother.”

  “What happens now?”