Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  Then Malek simply blurted out over the music what had been on his mind all evening: “Have any of your own soldiers read your book?”

  James turned to regard Malek. His eyes were bloodshot, but more from fatigue than alcohol; both of Candace’s boys had come down with the flu and James had not had much sleep for the past few nights. McGreivy nodded his head. Yes, his soldiers had read the book, he seemed to say. And no, he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to talk about that because it was still too new. And because there were those under his command who had probably thought of him as some kind of prophet, and others who detested his particular brand of heroism. It was all in the book, anyway. He’d never questioned the bravery of his men, but he had rubbed salt in their wounds. Because . . . Fallujah had been no Iwo Jima; he had stuck to his guns about that. And for decades henceforth the men who had served with him would get heartburn every time James McGreivy’s name came up—not because he might be telling the truth, but because he had infused the kernel of doubt in their Marine hearts, the poison of uncertainty that made each of them wonder if their valor had ever been worth anything.

  During a pause after what seemed like the longest of Mexican love songs, James said, “I know Candace’s ex was outside that gym wanting to have it out with me. I’m sorry you got punched instead, Rez.”

  Malek murmured that it was nothing.

  “I guess I screwed it up, didn’t I?” James smiled tiredly.

  “The school contacted you?”

  “Yeah. They want to know all kinds of things, like how come I’m running a self-defense class filled with women at the gym and why I’m going out with a student. Our favorite Texan has also called me to his office to have a little chat.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “They might not even let me finish the year.”

  “They will. They just won’t renew your contract next year. You should have stuck to the military. Kill a few more hajjis, win a few more medals. You’d be a major now, sitting behind some desk, directing traffic from a distance, and giving PowerPoint lectures about urban warfare, proud of your accomplishments. Your old man would be happy too.”

  “That’s not funny, Rez.”

  “Tell me, what are you doing with Candace Vincent?”

  “Living the life I want.”

  “You’re happy there in the Bronx?”

  “It has to start somewhere, doesn’t it? I mean, we can talk all we want about changing the world. But who’s gonna do it?”

  “Is that what you’re doing, changing the world? That’s what Candace Vincent and her kids are to you?”

  “You know that isn’t it.”

  “You love her?”

  “I’m damaged goods, Rez. You’ve only known me a few months. But I’m doing well there in the Bronx for now. I like it. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

  “You love her?”

  “I was ready to give something of myself in this life and she was ready to receive it.”

  “Like charity?”

  “That’s low, Rez.”

  “I’m just trying to understand.”

  James downed the last of his beer and banged the bottle with impatience. “Understand what? I couldn’t tell you about love if it hit me in the face. But I do find myself in a situation that gives me satisfaction. It’s good for me, it’s good for her, it’s good for the kids. Is there really something so wrong with that?” He leaned forward. “And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Here’s McGreivy. Just like America. Pushing his weight around, thinking he’s bringing good to the world. Isn’t that it, Rez? But if it pleases you to hear it, then yes, I guess I am in love, in a way. I’m in love with a paradigm that works. Me and that girl, we work well together. I’m not even sure how in the hell it works so well. But it does. And that’s all that matters to me. I can’t go chasing after vague concepts. I’ll take this thing I got right here and call it love if that pleases you. And I’ll run with it.”

  “I’m glad to hear it then. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It may come as a shock to you, but I really do care about the people I’m close to. I care about you. And I care about my former student. And if this thing is working, then the world isn’t all shit.”

  “The world isn’t all shit, Rez. There’s just a lot of it to wade through sometimes till you’re in the clear.”

  James stood up. He pointed to their empty bottles and then started toward the bar. They were sitting at a corner table and the waitress was too busy to pay them much attention. Malek only had a carry-on case and the flight was not for another four hours. By the time James returned to the table, he had already bought two Mexican men a round of drinks. You could see the marks of hard, honest labor on the men’s faces. Malek watched James drink the round with them, slapping them on the back and shaking their hands. He talked to them in the language of men the world over, the brotherhood of tough work and play. James McGreivy knew something about these things. He was the champion of the underdog—the guy with less food, less clothes, less ammo. That was why the former Marine couldn’t come to terms with Fallujah. He’d won the fight there in Iraq. But it hadn’t been a fair fight. Not even close. And it was what he had to live with for the rest of his life. So perhaps he would marry Candace Vincent and move her and the kids back to Long Island, while the men he had gone to officer training with went on to polish their medals and write expert monographs on fighting terror.

  The night turned liquid in Malek’s head. He was grateful that James McGreivy existed in this world. And suddenly he was terribly afraid of losing this American whom he hadn’t even known half a year. The feeling made him sentimental. And when James asked him again to tell the truth about why he was going to Tehran, Malek just admitted it. He began with Soaad. And before long he had told James about Fani, who held the key to the release of Soaad’s dossier, and finally, slowly, like a man who feels himself inexorably tiptoeing into the abyss, he told James about Sina Vafa, his best friend from college.

  Malek didn’t even bother to raise his head when James quietly got up and went for a final round. He plopped two more shots on their table. “Last call, friend!”

  Out on the floor, with the bopping blue and red lights chasing the whirl and spin of the dancers, the waitress had finally given in to the pleading of one of the men and began to dance with him.

  Malek said, “You must understand, Sina Vafa is trying to save the world just like you. The two of you are not that different from each other.”

  It was only half a joke. But even as he’d started to say it, Malek came to believe it. He waited, with more conviction than he had energy for, to see what James would say about that.

  “I don’t know what your friend is doing in Iraq. What I know is men like him were the cause of the death of my men.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “If you’re sitting here tonight to defend that son of a bitch, then why even tell me about it?”

  Malek thought about it. He had no answer. And his mood was turning again. James McGreivy was no longer the man he would have taken a bullet for only a half hour ago. He was, actually, something of an enemy. Maybe. Malek wasn’t sure about anything. His head was foggy. He had to take that plane to Tehran in three hours.

  “I said he’s involved in something. I don’t know what.”

  “The bullets coming my way over there didn’t have Shia or Sunni written on them. They killed either way. You wanted me to know this. You’ve been damn near exploding to tell someone about it. And now you have.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Talk to the man. Tell him to cease and desist. Tell him it’s not his fight.”

  “How do you know it’s not his fight? Maybe it is.”

  That was the crux of it. Maybe it actually was Sina’s fight. And James McGreivy and Reza Malek, who had both written about that fight, sat staring at each other in the Spanish bar
until neither of them could stand it anymore.

  Malek finally asked, “What will you do about it?”

  “Me? It’s not my fight anymore.”

  SOAAD

  They were in a cemetery again. Outside on the coast road, a flood of flag-waving cars rushed in a cacaphony to the Anzali stadium for the weekend soccer match. Inside the Christian cemetery, though, things were serene. An Armenian family stood above a plot and would glance benignly over at Malek and Soaad, who strolled through the large section devoted to the Poles of World War II. There were about eight hundred Polish tombstones here, and unlike the Jewish cemetery in Tehran, all of them seemed to bear Christian names.

  It had been on Soaad’s insistence that they come. She said she wanted to see everything that had to do with Anna. Which was hardly possible. But coming here was something they could do. So Malek had hired a car and a driver from Tehran, and they’d spent the night in a hotel before coming to the cemetery in the morning. Soaad had bought flowers. And now she dropped to her knees and lovingly lay the stems of very expensive white orchids on an arbitrary grave. It happened to be the grave of a Polish child who had died in 1942.

  Malek noticed once again how lithe and supple his mother was. He’d thought that Anna’s death might break her. Now he saw that this woman, at sixty, was pretty much unbreakable. For four days straight she had made him come with her to the Behesht Zahra Cemetery of Tehran to see if they could find Anna, whose corpse was still lost in that immense place. Soaad wasn’t pushy, but was relentless in the way only someone who has known prison can be. On the fourth day, the petty cemetery official told them to go away and not come back; they had no idea where this Anna woman was, and since no close relatives had shown up with documents, there would not be an investigation to find her.

  “Somebody will steal those orchids,” Malek said.

  Soaad got up and turned to her son. He saw the contentment in her face. She had been waiting for him to return so she could buy orchids, Anna’s favorite flower, and put them on some grave, any grave, but preferably one that had something to do with Poland.

  “You know,” she said, “Anna always mentioned Poland like she preferred not to talk about it.”

  Malek pointed toward the Caspian shore, a stone’s throw from where they stood. “This port is where the Poles came when they arrived from Russia. Right where we’re standing. A lot of them had typhus by the time they got here. That’s why there are so many graves.”

  “They suffered, didn’t they?”

  A new wave of cars rushed past the cemetery heading for the stadium. Interestingly, the local team was playing against Sina’s family’s old team. You could have gotten yourself killed if you wore the red colors of Sina’s team in Anzali today. And yet the team’s supporters were bound to show up. There would be fights. For a moment Malek had the absurd notion that maybe Sina would be among them.

  “I mean,” she went on, “I know they suffered. It was all Anna wanted to talk about during her last weeks. But I didn’t know there were so many like her.”

  He condensed the story of those years and all those refugees into five minutes in that graveyard. The gist of it was that Anna’s family were among the Jews who had ended up in the Russian gulags instead of the German concentration camps. That was what had saved Anna: the gulag! Then another year of starvation in Central Asia after they’d been released. The rest of it Soaad already knew because she had written down what Anna had dictated to her. How in Tashkent Anna’s family had taken her to a Christian orphanage run by freed Poles. As a Christian, Anna had been put on a ship and brought to Iran. In the Tehran camps, she had been too embarrassed to suddenly admit she was a Jew. The other Jewish kids had been taken away to Palestine. She’d stayed. Turned into a Christian. Then a Muslim.

  Her story was like a lost boat. And even now her dead body was lost in Tehran somewhere. Those kids who made it to Israel may have been called the Tehran Children, but Anna was the ultimate Tehran child. And she would never leave it.

  Soaad insisted that they walk along the beach by the Anzali port, just to see exactly where Anna might have disembarked.

  On the beach he let her move ahead and made a long-distance call on his cell phone to America. Surprisingly, a little boy’s voice answered James’s phone. One of Candace’s, Malek assumed. This brought a smile to his face and he hung up.

  When he caught up to Soaad, she held his hand and said, “We have been watched ever since you arrived.”

  “Yes, we have.” He was stunned. He had not expected her to notice. Not even when the same motorcycle rider followed them two days in a row to the cemetery in Tehran. He had considered it might be Sina. But it wasn’t.

  She said, “It’s me, isn’t it? I’m the one causing you this headache.”

  “I’m going to take you to America with me.”

  “At what price?”

  “Whatever price has to be paid is not mine to pay. You are simply a guarantee in lieu of something else.”

  “Why are they following us then?”

  “They want to see if I know where Sina is. Once they are sure I don’t know, they’ll come forward.”

  “What has your friend gotten himself into?”

  Malek sighed. “We all get ourselves into something sooner or later. You got yourself into something way back then and it’s still with you. Anna, she told a lie one day in some orphanage in Russia, and except for you and me, she had to take it to the grave with her.” He kept himself from adding, And we don’t even know where that grave is. “As for Sina, he’s into something now. And so it goes.”

  “What are you into then?”

  He considered that. “I’m not sure yet. But I’ll know soon enough.”

  Soaad then uttered that she loved him, her only son. And he held her to his chest and said he knew this, and that in the end it would be all right.

  * * *

  They had agreed to meet at the teahouse across from Sina’s building. It was early afternoon and the place was crowded. A couple of young laborers lay sleeping on benches near the window, weak winter sun shining on their faces. They reminded Malek of those two Mexican men James had bought drinks for at that bar in New York.

  Fani came through the door.

  “Are you being followed these days?” Malek asked right away.

  “Ever since your friend Sina’s case has acquired the attention of the powers that be, I am no longer followed. I’m just another man on payroll.”

  “So you will not make the fortune you thought you would from Sina’s portfolio?”

  “I will,” Fani said easily, “but I will have to share. That’s how it is here.” He didn’t seem in the mood for the usual chitchat. He appeared focused and ready to get on with business.

  “Who is following me then?”

  “My people.”

  “Look, I don’t know where Sina is.”

  “I know. Which makes it all the more important you devote the next week to me. We need some more signatures from you.”

  Malek looked squarely in Fani’s eyes. “I have a request in return.”

  “Make your request.”

  “I spoke to Sina’s mother. She and her husband have found a piece of Vafa property. They too need a signature from me. It’s only a single piece of property. It’s not much, by your standards.”

  “I already know about it. You may sign off on that property. I don’t need it.”

  “You mean you won’t try to take it from them?”

  “If I wanted to, I would have done so by now. Think of it as my gift to you.”

  “So will I still be followed?”

  Fani got up. “You’ll know whenever you are.” He gave an address for Malek to be at early the next day. It was one of those quasi law offices where deeds and properties changed hands in three-foot-long handwritten ledgers.

  * * *

  Malek doubled and tripled back on himself for two hours until he was absolutely sure no one was following him. Back in New York, k
nowing what was probably in store for him, he had bought a dubious book with a chapter about evasion tactics. The book was mostly silly, spy-movie mumbo jumbo, but there were also nuggets of useful information that, put together, came in handy.

  He now emerged from the depths of the brass-sellers quarter of the sprawling Grand Bazaar wearing a cap and a cheap navy-blue windbreaker he had just bought and hailed a motorcyclist who took him halfway to his destination. From there he hopped in a regular cab and went all the way to a part of the city most people never saw. It was close to the Rey District near a park that only junkies frequented, the kind of place cops would raid once a month to fulfill their quotas. Most of the addicts were harmless men with more philosophy in them than danger. One time, when a French documentary filmmaker had needed a translator, Malek had spent a good two weeks in the area. It was a world unto itself. The railroad tracks going south were just on the other side of the highway, with a shantytown traveling the length of the tracks. Here, laborers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and men off the bus from their villages for the very first time lived crowded lives that went nowhere quickly. Children played with their homemade kites on the tracks and chickens clucked back and forth as trains lumbered by.

  The woman who the whole park called Maman was sitting where she always sat, on a bench where she could have a fair view of all the angles when the police decided to pay her a visit.

  Her trained eyes quickly realized it was Malek walking up to her, and she broke into a toothless smile. She never forgot a face or a name. She never sold bad dope. She never informed on anyone.

  “Aqa Malek! And in a hurry. Why?”

  Malek kissed her hand and handed Maman her weakness, a bar of Toblerone chocolate—one of those large ones you could only get in airports.

  “I’m looking for the Afghan.”

  She peered into the distance, her mind an inexhaustible thread of what-ifs and broken promises and a long-dead junkie husband who had first turned her on to the habit. On rainy nights the other addicts who had nowhere to sleep would crowd her and she would quote off the top of her head classical Persian poems from Hafiz and Rumi into the wee hours of the morning.