Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  “I’ve been trying to call you for hours.”

  Malek was too exhausted to give updates on how the street fights in Tehran were going. After a pause he asked, “Where are you, Jimmy?”

  “Shoreline Drive. Santa Barbara, California.”

  “With the family?”

  “Indeed. It’s heaven here, Rez.”

  “I know it is. I surfed there for a whole week once. Ages ago. But just watch out you don’t give the white folks there a heart attack with your family.”

  He heard James laughing. “I think I already did.”

  “Good.”

  “Anything else I should know, Rez?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you call if you need me.”

  “And you’ll do what? Get a squad of Marine recons to come rescue me?” Now Malek laughed. “It’s all right, my friend. Enjoy the Pacific Ocean. Nothing pacific about where I am.”

  “You call me, Rez, goddamnit.”

  “Will do, captain.”

  James McGreivy had become something of a pinup boy in Malek’s head. Even when things were going badly for him, James always had two solid feet on the ground. He would raise his new family and maybe expand it. In time, he’d get his deadbeat brother and sister to move to California too, and he’d take care of them. He’d put everybody to work. He’d dutifully attend his father’s funeral and afterward help his mother sell the house in Long Island and bring her to the West Coast to live downstairs from them. His mother would at first try to hide her shock of having black kids for grandchildren, but eventually she’d get used to it. James was a pinup poster boy, and a damn pretty one at that. He had a country to live for, and to die for if necessary.

  Malek tried calling Soaad again. But, of course, the beautiful illogic that had just allowed him to talk to James in Santa Barbara, California, would not let him dial a number just half a mile away.

  September 11 came back to him. That September 11. He’d been a graduate student then. Almost finished with his PhD thesis. He’d sat glued to the television in Austin, Texas, and when they showed people in New York crying after the Twin Towers fell, he had felt nothing. Wasn’t true; he had felt something. It wasn’t quite schadenfreude but something along the lines of, Now you Americans too know what a burning building really feels like. But wasn’t he just another Sina Vafa? He wasn’t out to get America. America had given him life, and now it was giving him a doctorate. He had never joined in those juvenile demonstrations in college like Sina had, and he had never, ever burned a US flag. But that day in September, for just a passing moment, he’d felt a charge of wicked euphoria that had quickly passed and in the days ahead turned into maddening guilt.

  And now, sitting by this poor excuse for a stream in Tehran and hearing the noises of death from less than a quarter-mile down the road, Malek recalled that day some eight years back and suddenly, out of nowhere, he began to weep. The crying lasted only about a minute, and when he was done he got up, shook himself off, and began walking toward Soaad’s place. He didn’t care if the police stopped him.

  * * *

  No one stopped him. He saw young men and women being dragged off by plainclothes thugs and thrown into prison vans. There were foot chases that brushed right by him, batons flailing. On the tops of balconies uniformed soldiers scoped targets. And still no one touched him.

  Sometimes it was like that; you turned invisible. The sniper watched you from his window and knew you were not a target worth taking. So he shot the guy ten feet to your right in the stomach just because the man had an insolent grin on his face and needed to be disciplined.

  He saw Sina’s motorbike where he always parked it by Soaad’s place. Burned, like a lot of bikes had been burned in the past week. The skeleton of the charred thing was on its side, half of it pushed underneath an unlucky car whose windows were shattered.

  On the other side of the street two men sat in a small, brown, antiquated Renault. They were watching him. Low-level operatives. He knew the type. Their clean, inquisitive faces in the middle of that violent day, in that unlikely car, told him they were here for him.

  Malek rang Soaad’s buzzer and immediately the men jumped out of the Renault.

  Soaad was buzzing him in.

  Malek didn’t move. When the men were close enough, he asked, “Who wants me?”

  “Fani.”

  “Can I see my mother?”

  “She is all right. She went in the building two hours ago.”

  “Would you gentlemen like some tea?”

  One of the men shrugged and said okay. The other stared at his partner with disbelief. The one doing the shrugging said to the other, “Let him see his mother. Fani said not to push him.”

  Upstairs, Soaad had already set three glasses of tea on a tray and was waiting for Malek to take it down.

  Malek observed his mother with some incredulity. She seemed to always be two steps ahead of him. “I’m sorry I lost you,” he said to her.

  She still bore that street-fighter look of a few hours ago. She came up to him and put her head on his chest. “I went somewhere today after we were separated.”

  “In this madness?”

  “I went to your friend’s mother’s house.”

  “Sina’s mother? Why?”

  “I wanted to know she is all right.” She backed off a step from his embrace. “They are not living there anymore.”

  “Maybe they moved away. Sold the place and sold the land I got back for them, then just moved to another town. Somewhere quiet and cheap.”

  “But what if something happened to them?” Her former political prisoner’s mind was working overtime.

  “It’s not my business.”

  “It is.”

  “Soaad, I have two men waiting downstairs.”

  “Are they here about me?”

  “No. They are not here for you.”

  “Can you get me out of this country?”

  She asked it matter-of-factly, as if she were talking about a third person, not herself. She was used to such conversations—her life, like the lives of so many of her generation, was mostly an overture to escaping.

  But now they had another problem. Babur, the Afghan, had disappeared. Malek had found this out during the first days he’d been back. In the roundups following the elections, the Afghan had taken a hit for doing what he did for a living. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to go under and it wouldn’t be the last. The men who worked for him assured Malek that Babur would be back by the end of summer once things calmed down in the capital. Malek had sat on this piece of information and didn’t say anything about it to Soaad. It would have been more anxiousness over nothing. It was time, however, to share bad news. As he talked, they could hear the report of gunfire going off somewhere. Someone was getting killed around the corner. That was their reality. And Fani’s guys were waiting downstairs for their damn tea.

  Soaad asked, “Does Mr. Fani have a family?”

  “All these sons of whores do. They are family men. Good family men. They go to picnics. They take holidays. They help their sons and daughters with their math homework. What do you suggest I do—appeal to his sense of being a family man?”

  “Yes. That is what I suggest.”

  Malek drank his own tea in one swig and took the men’s downstairs for them. They drank thirstily, as if all day they’d been waiting just for this. One of them took the tray and set it down by the door of the building. “Your mother will pick it up herself. Let’s go.”

  For a second Malek watched the abandoned tray like he was leaving a part of himself behind that door. Then he followed the men to their car.

  * * *

  Clara Vikingstad was crying.

  In the confusion of the last few weeks he had mostly forgotten about her. He’d known she hadn’t escaped the city and was still filing her breathless reports. But as the demonstrations had gotten out of hand and the government began throwing foreign journalists out of the country, he’d just assumed t
hey’d thrown her out too. At the same time he’d eventually stopped following outside news altogether. It was as if this new revolution on the streets of Tehran had created a cocoon where nothing that happened beyond it was of much use.

  Which was why seeing Clara in that bare but brightly lit room completely discombobulated Malek. Something about this picture was wrong, but wrong not in the usual way that some journalist might be arrested for a short time. Clara was behind a steel table that was nailed to the floor. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. She wore an ugly gray uniform that sat like a shoe box over her, her head wrapped in the same grayness, giving her an archaic, nunlike look. She was thinned and colorless. She was in custody.

  Malek sat across from her, as if he were an interrogator. The bright light invaded him and he could only imagine what it did to Clara. He tried to summon a measure of sympathy for her and was surprised at how little he could muster at that moment. Her ghostly look had none of the confidence and poise that she displayed in front of crowds. She was like a phantom. When he’d first been let into the room, she had been resting her head on the desk over her cuffed hands. She glanced up but said nothing. For a moment she stared at her own hands. Then she began crying.

  “Clara,” he called. Immediately she went silent, as if he’d barked at her instead of calling her name as softly as he could. “Clara,” he repeated, even more quietly this time. Oh but that light! It ravaged him. Made him want to knock his own head against the horrible white wall.

  “Rez,” she barely brought out. It was the voice of a scared animal. The voice of someone who didn’t know what their next few minutes would be like. “Rez, are you working for them?”

  “Who?”

  “The people who are keeping me.”

  “No, Clara. I work for nobody.”

  “Then why are you here, my love?”

  My love? Now he was her love? He wondered if her famous war photographer friend had put out a search for her yet, or if the newspapers in the States had already begun a zingy chorus to get their world-class correspondent released from the clutches of Middle Eastern brutes.

  “I told you not to come to Tehran, Clara. I brought you your special friend’s warning. And do you know where your special friend is today?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “He’s in jail. A whole bunch of them are in jail. He and his friends lost the wager, Clara. They are arresting people like him left and right, shutting down their newspapers, leaning on their families . . . and you.”

  “What about me?”

  “I don’t know yet why they got you.”

  “Then why are you here?” She was staring at him. But her eyes were blank. Several times she seemed to nod out. She’d had little sleep. He could see that. He could also see she was warming to his presence. It brought relief. It gave her some kind of hope.

  “I’m not sure yet why I’m here, Clara. But I’ll know soon. How long have they been keeping you?”

  She burst into tears again. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. She was losing her mind. Rez, I am begging you, get me out of here. They had kept her in a cell by herself. Not here though, she added. They’d brought her here only today. Sometimes there were sounds, like ghosts. Every day an old woman wearing a chador would come and stare at her for a few minutes. No interrogation. Just the old witch and her staring. Then she’d go away and a voice in bad English would announce from somewhere that Clara was going to be here forever. No one knows where you are, Vikingstad. The voice, a man’s, said her last name as if the first i were two e’s instead: Veekingstad. She had lost track of time. She didn’t know when it was night and when it was day. Sometimes she would hear laughter. Men laughing and that horrible old woman. “I can’t do this, Rez. I can’t stand it.” She was moaning now. “I’ve done nothing. They won’t even say what I’ve done.”

  He had to mention it: “Clara, I thought you said you didn’t mind being jailed for a couple of months. For your career’s sake, I mean.”

  “You son of a bitch, Rez,” she said weakly. “It’s horrible. I can’t do this. It’s not for me. I don’t know. Please! I beg you. You are not here for nothing. I don’t know who you are. You are torturing me. Help me out of here, Rez. I’ll do anything. Please!”

  In the room next door, Fani waited for him. There were blowup photographs on the desk. A desk identical to the one that Clara was sitting at.

  Malek picked up one of the photos: Soaad and himself and Anna in the Jewish cemetery of Tehran. Then another one of just Soaad and Malek at that other cemetery by the Caspian Sea.

  “Not that I’m surprised,” he said to Fani, “but why these photos?”

  Fani was unusually disheveled and gave off the pungent smell of someone who hasn’t showered for a few days. There were several other men of indistinct government variety in the building. They shuffled or lounged in the hallway, looking as bored and tired as traffic cops who had issued too many tickets.

  Malek figured they must be close to 7-Tir Square, but he wasn’t sure exactly where. The men he’d come there with had told him to drop his head to the floor of the car for the last few minutes of the ride and he’d done it automatically—wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to do something like that. When he’d finally emerged from the car, they were in a basement parking lot and a half-lit neon sign blinked at the end of the driveway.

  Fani scowled at him. “Sit!”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  “Why these photos then?”

  “They collect things. It’s their job. Photos especially. When they need to have something on you, they call you in, as I’m doing now, and they say, Hello, Mr. Malek. How is your day? Take a look at these photographs, Mr. Malek. Tell us what you were doing in a Jewish cemetery. Do you work for somebody? Then they will say, And that woman, your mother, a known Communist with a jail term under her belt, what is she doing there with you and with that person of foreign origin? They will ask these questions, and when you can’t answer—which you can’t, because there is no answer that is correct anyway—then they will draw a case against you. Sedition against the state. Spying for a foreign country. And so forth. Then you will object and say, But I was just visiting a cemetery. And they’ll say, Aha! But that’s just it. And you won’t be able to argue. Because there is nothing to argue against. It’s just you and these incriminating photos.”

  “What do you want?”

  “One last signature.”

  “You want to embezzle everything from the Vafa estate. That’s what this is about.”

  “It is not me, Malek. Take a look at where you are,” Fani said wearily. “For all I know, this place,” he gestured around the room, “might not even exist two days from now. Times are changing. Our streets have gone mad.”

  Malek finally understood what this was really about. Yes, it was about the Vafa estate. But it was also about a lot more. Fani was afraid. The men whose thumb he was under were afraid. The men at QAF who had been Sina’s employers were afraid. But none of these people was sure what to be afraid about. Who was going to come out on top after these street fights were over? Overnight, all calculations had changed. And everybody wanted to claim their stake now, cash it in, and get out of Dodge if they could.

  This still left the reality of Clara Vikingstad in that other room. Clara was just another blowup photograph, like the ones on this table. She was like a certificate of guarantee. To Fani, and to whoever Fani worked for, she was nothing but a bargaining chip. They would have to release her before things got too ugly. In the meantime, they could make a show that they meant business.

  Malek watched as Fani pulled another file from his briefcase. On it was written Orchid, and Malek immediately presumed it was Soaad’s dossier. Fani plopped the folder down and rifled through his briefcase before producing several more photographs. In one of them, Clara’s gentleman friend who was now in jail was naked, and so was Clara. They were lying side by side
, the man appearing to kiss Clara’s back while she turned away, as if bored or disgruntled.

  The other set of photos were of Malek and Clara. They went a few years back. Some from Tehran, but mostly taken in Iraq and Syria. In one photo Clara had a hand on Malek’s shoulder, with a vague citadel-like edifice in the distance. It may have been Aleppo, but Malek wasn’t sure. Not exactly a compromising photograph, but in a kangaroo court it could be made to signify anything. About that, Fani was completely right.

  “You keep Clara Vikingstad any longer, there will be an international uproar.”

  Fani shrugged. “We like uproars.”

  “No you don’t.”

  Fani leaned back in his chair. “Do you want to do business?”

  “What have you done with Sina Vafa’s mother and her husband?”

  “Nothing that I know of. But I do happen to know they sold their place and moved away. I have an address for them.”

  Fani wasn’t lying. He had no need to.

  Malek finally sat down. “I’d like their address.”

  Fani nodded. “You seem to forget I was the one who originally gave his mother’s number to you.”

  He had. It was true. And Malek wanted to ask why, but what difference did it make at this point? He waited for the other man to complete his maneuver. Fani took out more photos and spread them in front of Malek. They were pictures of a building that had been reduced to rubble.

  Iraq.

  “Your friend Sina Vafa was recently in Kirkuk for an operation.”

  “How do you know this, Fani?”

  “Because I pay attention.”

  “Is he dead? Is he in that rubble?

  “Don’t play dumb, Malek. You know why he was there. You were a link in the chain of events that led the Americans to attack this building. But . . . oh so conveniently the building also happened to be a storage house for hundreds of pounds of ammunition that blew it all to ashes when the attack started. Whoever was in that building, his biggest body part is a toenail.”