Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  Malek mostly just listened. On the other side of the world, Sina Vafa was out to kill Americans because he thought they were greedy. And here James McGreivy was trying to save them because of the same thing. Reza Malek listened and wished for the soft whispers of a woman. The last woman in his life had been Clara Vikingstad, and that had been nothing but hardball, covering war and Middle Eastern politics with bouts of even harder, colder, mostly graceless lovemaking in between.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” James asked.

  They’d sat silently in his office, and at some point, knowing that James kept a bottle of whiskey under his desk, Malek reached for it and began drinking. James pretended to be rifling through some papers and didn’t fully meet Malek’s gaze. They both taught evening classes and James still didn’t have a place in the city, so he’d have to drive way out to Long Island to stay with his parents. On the nights they drank heavily after teaching, he’d just crash at Malek’s place up the street and drive back home in the morning.

  Malek, already feeling a buzz, said, “I think I saw you in Baghdad once, directing traffic or something.”

  James laughed and glanced up. “Wouldn’t have been me. I had tougher shit to deal with than fucking Baghdad.”

  “And you know what? I think you’re still trying to direct traffic. It’s what you do. You can’t help it. Except, you know, out here there’s rules and traffic lights. It’s not like it was in Baghdad. You don’t have to direct traffic anymore, Captain McGreivy.”

  “What’s with this dispensing advice?”

  “You already know they won’t rehire you next year.”

  “I know it. I don’t care.”

  “What do you care about then? You got a girlfriend? No, you don’t.”

  “Neither do you. We’re screwed that way. No good to anyone. Especially women. But I get plenty of fan e-mail. Peace-loving, antiwar women with exquisite names like Piper and Kiara and Penelope telling me how they’d love to take a round-the-world trip with me.”

  “So go with one of them. Pick a tall one. Someone closer to your own size. You’ll have tall, athletic, peace-loving, antiwar children together.”

  “And you, Rez?” James was suddenly all attention and the intense eyes bore down on Malek. “Did I see you in Baghdad? What were you doing there?”

  “You already know what I was doing there.”

  “But I don’t know much else about you, do I? You already know everything about my life. You met the old man and you came down to Virginia with me. You know I shot down my chances at this job here and that your own job is safe, and I’m happy for you and even happier for myself, because I wouldn’t want to compete with you. And—”

  “Is that why you did it? So you wouldn’t take my job?”

  “No. I did it because I lost something and thought I would find it here: purpose. But it’s not here, it seems. So let’s stop talking about me. Let’s talk about you.”

  Malek had told him the outlines plenty of times already. Growing up in Tehran. The revolution. Life in Fresno, California, at the cookie shop with his dad. College. A fairly useless doctorate with a final PhD thesis on those God-crazy Sufis in Basra. Then back to the Middle East. The wars. Et cetera. He’d even told James about working with people like Clara Vikingstad in Tehran, Kabul, and Baghdad, but he hadn’t mentioned the names of Sina and Fani, not even Soaad.

  “There’s nothing to say. Unlike you, I’m good here in Harlem. I like teaching, mostly. I can retire here, I don’t mind.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s retire then,” James responded, getting up. “Let’s go to your place and have us a few shots.”

  Malek followed. But then, as they came around to the main hall, there was a yell and they heard both of their names being called.

  It was Candace Vincent. She was running toward them and Malek could already tell she must have been crying. It was late. Almost ten at night. The last classes of the evening had gotten out at nine fifteen and the halls in the ugly, prisonlike building with its labyrinth of dead corners and windowless rooms was deserted.

  Candace Vincent came right up to the two men and stopped, staring at both of them with half-stunned eyes and breathing hard. Malek read the situation right away. This was about her kids’ pops, as she called him, the fellow who had gotten out of Rikers recently and was giving her trouble. She had written Malek about it again and wondered what she should do. He’d suggested that she go down to the college gym and look up his friend Professor McGreivy’s new self-defense class. So she went, loved it, then wrote to Malek to tell him about the way Professor McGreivy would lead you through a move like you were born to do it, like anything was possible.

  Now she stood there eyeing both men, panting, and then she broke into a welter of sobs.

  It was James who reached out to her and drew her close. “Shh, you’ll be all right now.” He caressed her gently and said, “What did I tell you guys in class? There’s nothing that can’t be fixed, there’s no hold that can’t be broken.”

  Malek stood there and watched the two of them. He could already see where this moment would lead and maybe that was all right. Or maybe not. He wasn’t even sure which one of their shoulders Candace had come to sob on. He was just glad that James had reached out first. Because that was what James McGreivy did. He did it for a living. He was no one if not that soldier directing traffic in Baghdad.

  * * *

  Clara Vikingstad was on TV again. She wore a tasteful black dress and had those gleaming eyes and that look of wise confidence which disarmed every interviewer who invited her on their show. She’d also had her black hair cut short since her brief arrest in Qum last summer. After coming back, she’d written a long piece about her fleeting experience in an Iranian jail, which was followed by appearances on the television talk circuit. Malek had called her one time in September but she hadn’t gotten back to him yet.

  She would. When it was time.

  Malek muted the TV. Two weeks earlier Soaad had telephoned. Anna had died at the hospital on a night Soaad wasn’t with her. They had taken her body away and buried it somewhere, but not at the Jewish cemetery. Now distant relatives of her late Iranian husband were showing up from nowhere and fighting over the possession of the apartment and the scant furniture in it.

  On the phone Soaad had asked Malek if he’d managed to do anything with Anna’s letter.

  “What letter?”

  “The one she gave you when you were here.”

  He’d come back to New York and left the letter Anna had dictated to Soaad on the empty bookshelf in the living room. Now he went over and took it out of the envelope and stood there examining it. He should not have forgotten Anna like that. She had just about begged to be buried in that Jewish cemetery they’d visited in Tehran. But according to Soaad, the hospital people had at first assumed they would be sending her body to the Christian cemetery. Then, realizing that her identity card showed she’d had to switch faiths to Islam to remain married to her husband, they’d dropped her at the sprawling Muslim cemetery in the south of the city.

  And that was where Anna’s body had finally gotten lost. The cemetery people had no record of where she was.

  Anna, Malek thought, was the ultimate castaway. And he felt the full guilt of not having done something more for her when he could.

  He said to Soaad, “Has that man bothered you?” He meant Fani, knowing Soaad understood exactly who he meant without having to spell it out on the phone.

  “You mean bother me by coming around? No.” There was a pause, and then Soaad added, “Yes, he has come around, but it wasn’t a bother.”

  Malek felt a pang of fear, the kind you only feel for your own kin, your own flesh and blood. Which was still a new feeling for him. He asked her what she meant.

  “He just came one day and said you hadn’t returned his call.”

  It was true. On a Friday he had heard Fani’s voice on his answering machine. All Fani said was, “Our mutual friend is nowhere to be f
ound. This may cause some problems. Call!”

  Malek hadn’t called. He didn’t want to give Fani the impression he was so invested in Sina’s case.

  And Sina really had disappeared. No contact from him since the end of the summer. Meanwhile, James McGreivy took up the space Sina had vacated. It was a peculiar shifting of characters in Malek’s head. And he questioned, just slightly, its significance.

  He heard Soaad whisper something on the phone and asked her to repeat it.

  “Don’t come back here,” she said a bit louder. “You don’t need to. I will be all right.”

  She had been forced to abandon him when he was a kid, and now she wanted to make a sacrifice of herself. He told her to stop it.

  “I am sorry that your friend Anna died,” he said. “I’ll read her letter after we hang up.”

  “It’s her life story.”

  “I know.”

  Ever since that phone call two weeks ago, books about World War II and the Holocaust had been slowly piling up in the middle of Malek’s living room. Anna’s letter, written in Soaad’s careful Persian handwriting, told an abbreviated version of her journey, from a little town halfway between Bialystok and Warsaw, to Tehran in the years between 1939 and 1942. She’d been a kid, one of an impossibly huge exodus of Poles escaping first from Hitler and later from Stalin. In the end, from what Malek could tell in the books, about a hundred thousand of these refugees had shown up in Tehran. The Jewish kids among them would be carried off to what would soon become Israel, and they would be known from then on as the Tehran Children.

  Malek tried to imagine a hundred thousand Poles in Iran in 1942. With Anna among them, hiding her Jewish identity and staying put in that faraway city all these decades. Anna, the last-known Jewish Pole of Tehran in 2008! She had dictated to Soaad, Tehran was the first place after three years of hell where I felt some safety. I didn’t want to leave it. I didn’t know back then what awaited me anywhere else. It was as if she was begging Malek to understand and excuse her for staying put, for not going to the Jewish homeland, for hiding who she was.

  The story buried him and haunted him for days on end. He recalled the three of them in the Jewish cemetery that day. Had he really put his mind to it, he could have done something then. He could have arranged things so Anna would get buried there eventually. He knew people in Tehran and had plenty connections of his own. But somehow Anna’s story just hadn’t quite stuck with him at the time. He had been too preoccupied with Sina, and with Fani, to understand what it meant for this woman to be buried in that place. And now it was too late. He had failed her, and by failing her he had failed Soaad.

  On the muted TV, Clara and the interviewer had returned after a commercial break. Malek considered this dance of improbabilities that surrounded him: Clara on that television; Anna’s story, which had made him go on a spree of Holocaust books now scattered all over the floor of his apartment; Sina under the radar somewhere in Iraq; and James McGreivy, the decorated Marine captain from Long Island and veteran of Fallujah, now shacked up in a Bronx housing project with Candace Vincent and her kids.

  Malek turned Clara off. He wasn’t teaching tonight, but decided to head for the college gym where he’d find James. He figured he was obliged to have at least one conversation with his friend about his new situation with Candace before flying to Tehran in a few days.

  * * *

  Even as it began to happen, and before he actually took a punch in the chest and fell on the stone steps of the quad where a small bevy of students quickly ran to his aid, Malek knew exactly what the situation was.

  He was eventually helped up by two campus security guards who eyed him like he had been hit just to make their day especially difficult. The crowd was already thinning and there was Candace standing ten feet away, looking distraught but holding herself together: “Sorry, professor. It’s my fault. I’m the cause of all this.”

  Malek shook off the guards and went to sit on the very steps he had just rolled off of. He’d been hit hard. His attacker was gone. Candace’s former guy, the father to her kids.

  His chest was in some pain. And there was a gash on the side of his head where he had first met pavement. As he rewound the past few minutes, he saw himself coming up to the Gothic structure where the college gym was housed. In front of it: Candace and a man she was arguing with. The man was about Malek’s size. His head was closely shaved and he had a distinctive island accent. Not Jamaican. Maybe Trinidad. But it was Candace doing most of the arguing while the man seemed like he was actually trying to reason with her. She wanted him off her campus, Malek overheard. And then a smile coming across her face, saying, “Oh, hi, professor.” Now the man turned and saw Malek standing there, frozen. The fellow had a chiseled jawbone. Big eyes. Handsome. And now he was coming up to Malek without a word, his right hand balling into a fist.

  He wasn’t even sure what he had come to tell James today. Don’t break my student’s heart. That was it. Because he wasn’t sure if McGreivy planned to stay with her out of some momentary sense of duty or because he meant it.

  And what business was it of Malek’s, anyway?

  He had been happy for them. That night when Candace came running down the hallway, James had ended up driving her home. And simply stayed. Soon he was Uncle James to Candace’s boys. Helping them with their homework. Teaching them to wrestle and throw the football. He admitted to Malek that neighbors looked at him funny at first, but he’d grown on them. And there was no sign of the kids’ father. Until today.

  Candace was whispering something to him: “He’s not a bad sort, he’s just violent sometimes.” Who was she talking about, the guy who had just hit him or James? The campus security people were telling him something too that he couldn’t make out. He was thinking of being in Tehran so he could find Sina and be with Soaad and search for Anna’s body. How was he going to find Anna’s body in a city of fourteen million? And how stunning the two of them, Candace and James, appeared together on campus. They’d started showing up here holding hands, in defiance of all the vague, silly rules against professor-student relationships.

  The fog in his head cleared. And suddenly Malek understood why, really, he had come to see James today: he wanted a happy ending. He wanted more than anything for this thing between the improbable couple to work out. Because if it did, it meant hope wasn’t lost in this world. It meant Malek himself had a chance, and so did Soaad, and Sina, maybe even Anna.

  He had, in essence, come to secure a guarantee from James McGreivy on behalf of his former student.

  Malek and Candace both ended up having to give statements at the campus security office, where they asked Malek if he needed medical assistance or wanted the NYPD so he could charge the guy who had hit him. No, he said, and saw that Candace looked relieved. Let her kids’ father think he’d taken his revenge. Let him also think he’d already broken parole with an assault. Then he just might put as much distance between himself and her as possible.

  Back outside, he asked her, “You’ve been writing, Candace?”

  “Always.” She added, “Thank you for introducing James to me.”

  “What do you guys do together?”

  “We talk. We take care of the kids. We live. I never had much of that. You hurt?”

  “Maybe for a few days. Nothing that won’t go away.”

  “I hope you find someone to love one day. I’ll pray for you.”

  He nodded.

  “My statement to the security,” she reflected, “will it get James in trouble at school?”

  “Even if it did, he can handle it. Your James, he’s a tough man.”

  “He’s the toughest man I ever met. And I’ve seen some real tough ones where I come from.” She smiled.

  * * *

  A Spanish bar with the unlikely name of Katz sat a block away from the Jamaica Center subway. It was a few minutes’ drive from JFK Airport and at night it filled up with Central American laborers.

  It was also where Malek first st
opped whenever he had to fly during the past couple of years. But this time James had insisted on driving him to the airport. Now a dozen empy shots of tequila and several beers sat between the two men. In front of them on a beat-up dance floor, a man with an outsize cowboy hat was desperately trying to get the waitress to dance with him while the jukebox played some aching south-of-the-border tune. And of all the things Malek could have recalled at that moment, he went back to those Kabul nights in the wealthy Wazir Akbar Khan District where you could drink yourself to an inch of your life at those wild parties under the auspices of one of the Coalition embassies, while not five blocks away Afghans died of everything you could possibly die of, including the freezing weather and hunger and disease and roadside bombs and guns and knives and heroin and lack of heroin and just plain good old-fashioned Afghan payback. It was a screwed-up, unjust world, and when a guy sat down in the Wazir Akbar Khan District to drink himself into a stupor, he either did it because, like a lot of those embassy paper-pushers, he couldn’t care less, or because he simply didn’t want to dwell anymore on what was happening five blocks away to his right and left. A man wanted to sit there while foreign whores served him Indian beer and Canadian whiskey so he could forget that Clara Vikingstad was up there in a warm room interviewing some UN apparatchik for the hundredth time about how awful war could get.

  Malek thought, if this Mexican joint at the dog-end of Queens brought him back to that Kabul of a few years ago, only God would know what James McGreivy was thinking. Because the former soldier had to be thinking of something too. Maybe something as ordinary as: there was no way on earth he was going to drive anywhere after all the booze they’d had. And that was fine with Malek. James could sit here and piss till he was sober enough and Malek would just ride the train the rest of the way to the airport and get on that plane and fly to Tehran.