Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  “The Afghan prospers.” She gave Malek an address. “You’ll be stopped down there. Give them my name.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “How is America?”

  “It’s a bit like a habit.”

  “Do you like your habit?”

  “It’s not out to kill me.”

  “Go with God then.”

  * * *

  The address Maman had given him was a twenty-minute walk. Malek stepped into a narrow alley and lounging men gave him the once-over. There were maybe a half-dozen areas in Tehran like this that he knew of, places that were usually no-go for the police. Boys no older than nine stood inside shacks pimping their twelve-year-old sisters. Men in debt came out of two-table teahouses with puffy opium faces. And above it all, instead of flashing neon, tall black standards with the names of the Shia martyrs draped the sides of hole-ridden walls.

  It took a kid scout and then another before Malek was brought to a man who introduced himself as Khiyaal. The man resembled an industrial-sized fridge and his name, which meant Imagine, left a lot to wonder about. There was another hour of waiting. The sky grew dark and a winter chill sat inside Malek’s bones. They were in the back of a kebab house where Afghan men sat in huddles chatting quietly and drinking tea. The dank place smelled of sweat and war and furtiveness. It was everything that Malek had wanted to never return to. Yet here he was. Again. His phone rang and he retreated to a corner to answer it, guessing from the strange numbers who it was.

  James spoke without a hello. “My kid answered the phone the other day. Sorry! I knew it was you. I wasn’t sure the number you’d given me would work, but hey, here you are.”

  Malek considered what James had said. My kid. The words sounded so natural over that phone. So right. The man could make a believer out of anyone. Still, Malek flipped the little foldout phone shut. Speaking English would bring undue attention at this fence-shop in the rat’s end of the city of Tehran. He hadn’t wanted to do this, look up any old associates. But there was no helping it. If anyone could help him locate Sina, it would be the man everybody else simply knew as the Afghan, but whom Malek and Sina had once known as Babur.

  To look at Babur you would have thought he could be knocked over with the fat pinky finger of his current lieutenant, Khiyaal. But Babur, who barely reached to Malek’s chest and was as thin as the thinnest junkies in Maman’s park, was one of those free agents who are natural at staking territory wherever they go. It was in the Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan the first time that Malek and Sina had come upon the Afghan. He was running then, from the Taliban fundamentalists fighting the Americans, and from the Americans. Years earlier, before the Americans’ arrival, Babur had secured himself the unlikeliest job in the world: a cook at one of the camps in southern Afghanistan where the Arab, Chechen, and Bosnian fighters came to get training for their various holy wars. The Arabs bosses of the camps strictly forbade communication between the foreign fighters and the local Afghans. So Babur had played deaf and dumb. Literally. Which made him an ideal servant in the eyes of the men who ran the camp. Until one time somebody had caught him late at night in bed listening to a faint radio station coming out of India. The next day they would surely cut his throat for lying to them. So Babur had hit the road. To Pakistan, then India. In Bombay he’d done every kind of job for Muslim mobsters until somebody from back in Afghanistan recognized him. Then he was on the run again. Back to the old country and to the Badakhshan Province, where he took a chance and told his tale to Malek and Sina who befriended him. They’d smuggled him with them back to Iran, the one place neither the Americans nor the Taliban could follow him. And here, in the last few years, was where he’d built himself a fat business working the cheap Afghan labor market and dealing in stolen goods. He was a little Afghan lord now. And he owed Malek a lot. Malek had never called in a chip. And maybe he wasn’t calling in one now. All he wanted to know was where he could find Sina Vafa.

  “I hear strange things about him,” Babur was saying.

  Babur had come in, embraced Malek, and signaled to follow him to the second floor of the kebab house. The man who brought them plates of rice and yogurt had an angelic face but no ears. A throwback to the time of the Soviet war in the ’80s when some of the more fanatical muj commanders would cut off the ears of any child they found going to the godless schools of the infidels.

  “What do you hear?” Malek asked.

  Babur fidgeted in his seat. He had hardly changed. Still thin as a wraith, with flashing wide, intelligent eyes that saw everything before others. In Badakhshan he had taken one glance at Malek and Sina in that little end-of-the-earth marketplace and knew he could trust them with his story. Now it was Malek who needed to trust someone.

  “Aqa Malek, I have love for you. And I have a good life now in Tehran.”

  “Then don’t tell me anything that might cause you trouble.”

  Babur went to scoop some rice with his hand, then changed his mind and looked up at Malek. “You? You are in trouble?”

  “No. But tell me about Sina.”

  “Tell me about yourself first.”

  Malek sighed. “I have a mother.”

  “Mothers are good, my brother.”

  “I may need to smuggle her out of the country.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “She has a file.”

  Babur froze for just a moment. “With who?”

  “With people who can make life very difficult for you if they learn you smuggled her out.”

  “You are my brother. I will still do it for you when and if you ask.”

  Malek breathed deeply, not sure if it was relief he was feeling or a new level of apprehension. “I am also looking for a dead body.”

  Babur almost swallowed the little Persian cigarette he’d been trying to light instead of eating his rice. “You have lost your mind, like our good friend Sina.”

  “Nothing like that. It has to do with my mother again. Her friend died. Some Polish lady called Anna. They lost her body at the big cemetery, if you can believe it. The fools! I want to make my mother happy and find the body. I need a grave for Anna.”

  “You love your mother that much, Aqa Malek.”

  Malek shrugged. For some reason he was thinking about Sina’s mother, and what Sina and Fani had done to her and her husband years ago, kicking them out of their house.

  “All right. We will make a grave for Anna,” Babur announced.

  “But the body?”

  Babur’s expression said it all. “Aqa Malek, do you know how many bodies never make it to the grave in this world?” He pointed to the earless guy who was working quietly in the back kitchen. “For every one of those men walking around Afghanistan today, a hundred of them had their ears cut off only after they were killed and chopped up. No one knows where they are. No one cares. Do you think Anna cares? Anna doesn’t care. What is this Anna’s last name?”

  “She was married to an Iranian once. Last name was Majidi.”

  “Beautiful. Mrs. Anna Majidi. We will fix it. It will cost some money. Grave plots are not cheap these days.”

  Malek took out a wad of hundred-dollar bills and gave fifteen of them to Babur. “Fix it as best you can.”

  Babur took the money and stuffed it in his pocket. “Now, who else do you love, Aqa Malek?”

  “I love Sina Vafa.”

  “The man has a price on his head in south Afghanistan, especially around Kandahar. Did you know that?”

  “I did not know.”

  “Don’t forget I was a cook for these people way back then. The camps of those days, they will never be repeated. No one will ever get that kind of training again.” Babur shook his head, almost nostalgic. “Those men, they may have been many things. But men they were. And they hated Iranians.” He laughed. “Called you people innovators. Worse than Jews. Worse than Christians. Your friend Sina had it in his head to make contact with people like that. He was going around Kandahar, where everybody and their mother is a spy, advertisi
ng that a Muslim is a Muslim, Shia and Sunni do not matter. It’s a miracle he didn’t get killed there and then.”

  “Who wants him dead over there?”

  “Whoever. Maybe Sunnis. Maybe some man sitting in an office in London who is worried about the safety of his contractors in Kandahar. I can give you a list of a hundred men off the top of my head who have prices on their heads in Afghanistan. Sina is just one of them. And it’s not even a high price.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “If he’s not dead.”

  “Babur, you of all people would know if he’s dead.”

  “He has been playing with men whose shadows scare me. I’m just a poor Afghan trying to survive in Tehran.”

  Malek stood up, exhausted but also satisfied. Babur knew exactly where Sina was. Malek had come to the right person. Sina may have even counted on Malek coming here. The Afghan was the one trustworthy connection to the underworld that they both shared. Babur knew all right. And all this talk today had conveyed to Malek that he knew without actually spelling it out for him.

  Malek walked to the stairway.

  Babur didn’t get up. “Aqa Malek!” he called. Malek turned. “Don’t come back here!”

  “You’ll find me?”

  “Yes, I’ll find you when the time is right.”

  “Just remember, I’m not here long, Babur.”

  “We’ll start with the grave for Mrs. Anna. What was her last name again?”

  * * *

  Saidi!

  Malek cursed the Afghan for having remembered Anna’s husband’s last name wrong. Now he and Soaad stood in a corner of the vast cemetery, surrounded by a sea of dead with a misspelled gravestone and Soaad laying orchids on it anyway. Malek let his mother have her time, acting like she didn’t really care about the mistake.

  It was a poorly kept area. Wind seemed to carry grocery bags from miles away and drop them at exactly this spot, so that the graves seemed like they had plastic blooming out of them.

  Anna Saidi.

  The wrong name, the fake burial, and the dance and twirl of ten thousand grocery bags in this part of the cemetery made everything about the woman’s history seem like a terrible joke. And yet Malek remained quite still as his mother went about patiently clearing all the plastic from the immediate vicinity of Anna’s plot.

  Meantime, Babur still had no location on Sina.

  Soaad said, “When they killed him, I didn’t have a body that time either.”

  It took a few seconds for Malek to register what she meant. When they’d executed her second husband during the revolution, they’d probably dumped the body in some mass grave with others like him.

  All Malek could say was, “I’m sorry. I tried.” He was curious though. “But why do you lay the flowers if you know this is not her grave?”

  “Because it gives me satisfaction. Thank you for this.”

  Twilight. It came early this season. And today it was a particularly stunning drift of filleted, salmon-colored clouds that seemed to stretch from here all the way to Arabia. Malek gazed at that sky. Winter cold sealing and tinting the noxious air of the city under a sphere of terrible beauty. It was poetry. All of it. This isolated cemetery plot of plastic garbage bags and leaning graves and a false tombstone. He glanced at his mother and he understood. Satisfaction was in the heart. He would not forget this moment at this hour in this spot. He would hold onto it like a meditation and relive it now and then, forever, like a prayer.

  * * *

  He left her at the apartment and took a cab to Sina’s place. He hadn’t been there yet on this trip, but still had the key. Surprisingly, the key worked. Though the place itself was entirely empty. Everything was gone. The exercise weights, the books, the guitar, bed . . . everything. He stood at the balcony watching the wrestlers and weight lifters down below for a while. Then, when he came out of the building, Fani was, as usual, waiting for him.

  “Find something?” Fani asked.

  “It’s empty.”

  They drove. The evening traffic was heavy. Three days earlier Malek had signed a document that would allow Fani to work on the release of real estate in north Tehran belonging to Sina’s father that was worth tens of millions of dollars. It was a sweet deal because in Tehran property, more than anything else, mattered. The confiscated Vafa estates in the land-hungry city were such an orgy of money and potential money that after a while you started to dream about it. You woke up thinking real estate and cash and who to bribe and how much of a cut to take for yourself.

  Fani said, “You and your mother have a thing for cemeteries.”

  After a resigned pause, Malek answered, “It calms us down.”

  “I want you back in Tehran in the early summer. That is when our labors will bear fruit. By then those lands will be released, and you will come to sign for their sale.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “You backed out of our deal about Sina’s mother. You said you’d let her have that small piece of land that she and her husband found. Yesterday I went to court with them. The judge changed his mind. You did this. That old couple, I couldn’t look them in the face. I almost had to carry them out of that courthouse.”

  “Yes, I did change the judge’s mind. Temporarily.”

  “But why? What have that man and woman done to you?”

  “Nothing. I feel for them. I had a mother myself once. Like you have a mother. Like Sina has a mother.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Only this: that I was Sina’s case officer once. Let’s not forget. I know his psychology. He is a man full of remorse. For his mother. For what he did to her before. If I let her have that property now, Sina will feel his conscience eased and he will be ready to die. He will get on with this martyrdom business that, to be honest, I find boring. So I put a stop to the transaction. For now. When our business, yours and mine, is done, that lady and her husband may have that piece of property.”

  “Sina doesn’t want to die. He only wants to kill. Suicide is not his issue at all.”

  “This I understand. But sometimes a man who is so focused on killing can end up killing himself. I cannot permit such stupidity at this time. Malek jaan, at the end of the day, our religion is simply a set of laws. And I am simply not able to work on the property of a dead man. The courts will not allow it, no matter who I know or who I have behind me. Then the Vafa estate will tumble into another cycle of negotiations and recriminations between men far above my station. I have no time for that. I am ready now. Not fifteen years from now.”

  Everything Fani said had truth to it. But Malek gave it another shot: “You are assuming Sina is still alive even as we speak.”

  Fani looked at Malek, reached over, and opened the passenger door. “Go to your mother, Mr. Malek. Make up for the lost years.”

  “You are acting like a thug, Fani!”

  “I believe Sina Vafa is still alive. Should you find him before me, let him know that it will not do to get himself killed. He may do it a year from now when our business is done. But not this year. This year he must live and breathe. And I need you here in Tehran when I send the word. This is how the world turns. I will see you here in the summer. And stop going to so many cemeteries and spending so much money on orchids. It makes me depressed.”

  “At least let me take my mother out of the country.”

  “Your mother will go with you when our business is finished.”

  When Malek got out of the car, he saw Soaad standing in front of her building, holding a long piece of fresh barbari bread, watching them. Malek stuck his head back into the car. “Do I have your word?”

  “About what exactly?”

  “About letting my mother go when we are finished. Do I have your word on that?”

  “This is Tehran, Malek jaan. Here, the last person you should ever trust is a man who looks you in the eye and gives you his word.”

  * * *

  Soaad said, �
�I am selling this apartment. I have a buyer.”

  They sat in the kitchen. It was early morning, not quite light out. Malek had an eye on the small satellite TV that sat in a corner of the cabinet. A Persian news channel was repeating the programming from the previous afternoon; Clara was being interviewed on some Iranian TV station in California. She looked bright-eyed and had that slightly benevolent appearance she always assumed when being interviewed by non-American television stations.

  Malek sipped his tea. “Who are you selling the apartment to?”

  “Your friend, the Afghan.”

  He didn’t bother asking her how she had come to know the Afghan. Soaad had turned out to be something of a pro. Even when she was being conned into giving meaningless reports to the intelligence people thirty-some years ago, she had remained cool about it. This thought made him love her more. Made him love her in a way he had never loved another woman.

  He asked, “Do you think you’ve been followed lately?”

  “I always know when I’m followed. It’s a habit that never went away. We haven’t been followed since we went to pay our respects to Anna.”

  “That wasn’t Anna.”

  “It was Anna enough.”

  “What about the Afghan?”

  “He made me memorize an address.” She recited it. “Do you recognize it?”

  “No. But I know whose it must be.”

  “I like your Afghan friend. He said that you saved his life once. He said he would do anything for you. I believe him. He said that I should be ready because he might be taking me out of the country. I told him I would have to sell my house, but discreetly. He said he would have someone buy it from me. But only for half what it is worth.”

  “Great friend I have.”

  “Men do what they can, Reza jaan. By summer, when you return, my house will be sold. I will be ready to go.” She added, “If you still want me.”