by Salar Abdoh
“And that toenail doesn’t belong to Sina Vafa?”
“No, of course not.”
“I won’t ask you how you know these things. That’s none of my business.”
“Feel free to ask. I am here today to give you a lesson. You and me, Malek, we are nothing. We are faces. I thought I had bowed out and was working toward a comfortable retirement. But I guess I’m not. Our streets are in chaos and the Americans are not happy with us and all the hajj aqas uptown have passed the word down: Call Fani and let him take care of it. Because if things go bad tomorrow, they can say, Look, it was all Fani’s fault. It was Fani and that fellow Malek. They were working together. All the false signatures come from them. You see, in the end none of us have much choice. Because once you start to play the game, your world doesn’t expand; it gets smaller. Smaller and smaller. Your friend Sina knows something about that.”
“Very nice speech.”
“I have a dozen of these speeches.”
“Why tell me about the Kirkuk operation?”
“So that with a relaxed heart you can stop protecting your friend. You can sign over your power of attorney without feeling guilty about it.”
“I thought that my power of attorney cannot be transferred.”
“Arrangements, my dear Malek, have been made. This is not the Tehran of last year. It is what they call an emergency situation.”
Malek was numb. He didn’t even have it in him to feel anger toward Sina. Fani was looking at him with eyes that maybe had some pity in them. The man pushed Soaad’s file toward Malek. “I think you know what this is. Take it. Burn it.” Malek opened the file. Several photos of Soaad, going back three decades. A beautiful woman. But also a fresh passport in there, with an up-to-date passport photo that had obviously been transferred and adjusted from Soaad’s recent national ID card. Fani was giving him the green light to take Soaad out of the country. “These photos,” Fani brushed a hand over the table, “we will throw them away. And that lady in the other room, she will be released before you can say the letter aleph.”
“Doesn’t it seem like overkill to even apprehend Vikingstad? You didn’t need to do all this to make me sign over the Vafa estate to you.”
“How many times have I told you that in Tehran our friends have calculations that go beyond our understanding. Miss Vikingstad is merely a means to an end. Somebody somewhere needed to be taught a lesson. And so Miss Vikingstad was brought in. It just happened that the arrest of Miss Vikingstad and our affairs, yours and mine, seemed to come together. And so here we are, at the end of the road.”
“And Sina? Will you kill him, now that no one needs him?”
“What makes you think he is not needed anymore?”
“Once I give my last signature and his family estates are sold, he won’t be of consequence.”
Fani nodded resignedly, saying nothing.
“And that business in Kirkuk, it also closes the chapter on something. On what exactly?”
Fani sighed. “If they make me pay a visit to your friend, I will give you fair warning to start grieving.”
“Why?”
“Because they will most probably put the blame on you eventually. And, come to think of it, on me. They will say we were his closest associates. I too am a replaceable man, Malek jaan.”
Malek imagined living in a world without Sina. It didn’t quite bring a lump to his throat. His friend was starting to become a newspaper story.
“To go that whole length just to destroy one Iraqi in Kirkuk!” Malek shook his head wearily.
“This is how you flush someone out while blaming his death on the good old Americans. It is a method. A way of thinking. They teach us these things in classrooms and we take notes and we apply our learning sooner or later. What we do is not cinema. It is tradecraft. It is real. All you have to do is go outside and run into the first roadblock down the street to be reminded of it.”
“You and Sina’s employers, you’ve reached an understanding then?”
“God is great.”
Which of course meant yes, they had reached an understanding. Sina was, at last, completely expendable.
It was the end of the line.
“I’m ready to sign.”
“Good. God is twice great. And I know of a notary who just happens to be open for our purpose on this very challenging day.”
Malek stood up. “I need to see Vikingstad for one more minute.”
“Oh, Malek, you are too sentimental. I have promised you she will be released.”
“I want to tell her that she better get her contacts in the American State Department to issue a visa for my mother.”
Fani opened his eyes wide. “Maybe she would do the same for poor Fani here?”
“Doubtful. But may I show this picture to her?” He pointed to the naked shot of Clara and The Man.
“Do you intend to blackmail her, dear Malek?”
“No, I just want to remind her not to write a book about all this, in case pictures like this one here might find their way to the wind.”
Fani nodded with some appreciation. “You could always come back and work for us, Malek.”
“I don’t know who us is anymore.” He took the photo. “I’ll just be a minute.”
* * *
On the flight back from Dubai, where they’d stamped her Iranian passport with an American visa, Soaad stared out the window at the clear blue expanse of the Persian Gulf, as if in a trance. And just once during the two-hour journey did she turn to Malek: “This is the first time I’ve gone abroad in my whole life.”
“The other side of this gulf is not exactly abroad. Wait till we get to America.”
“America!” she echoed, closing her eyes as if to imagine the place behind the name. “Why can’t we just fly there now? Why must we go back to Tehran?”
“Unfinished business.”
“Did you find your friend’s mother?”
“Yes. She and her husband are alive and very well.”
* * *
Two days later it was announced in one of the Tehran papers that Clara’s friend was going to be put on trial next fall for various issues related to national security. From Clara herself there was perfect silence, except for an e-mail that Malek had received when she was safely back in the States: Contact US embassy in the Emirates for your mother’s visa. No blockbuster news about her time in jail. Not even an article or interview. Silence. That day, when he returned to the room where she was handcuffed, he had set the photograph of her and The Man on the steel table and waited for her response.
“You took this?” she asked, staring up at him.
“Jesus, Clara! How would I take it? They also have ones of me and you. I just saw those.”
“What do they want?”
“Your quiet. They don’t need you to go in front of their cameras here and confess that you are a foreign agent inciting rebellion. They won’t require you to do anything. They just want you to shut up and go away and never come back to this place. Do you think you can do that?”
Her body trembling, she’d answered, “Yes, I can do that. I swear to God I can do it.”
“One other thing.”
She looked at him with worry.
“Don’t fear, my love,” he said casually, “I just need a favor. You have contacts in Washington. And I have a mother.”
* * *
Maman had cleaned up her act. But it was a forced cleanup, and she didn’t seem too happy about it. During the midsummer political arrests, her heroin park had fallen to the onslaught of the police. She and her crew had been sent to various three-week camps where they had to kick the habit cold turkey. She looked slightly fattened up and irritable. She would stay clean for another two days at most, then one morning, just as easily as sipping a glass of tea, she’d pick up a spoon and aluminum foil and prepare her dosage. That was how it always went after a forced cleanup.
Malek gave her the Toblerone chocolate he’d brought for her.
With her usual toot
hless half grin, she started sucking on a piece of the chocolate right away. “Do you know, Aqa Reza, health is something that is like language. I don’t know this language very well. But I know how to be sick. I am comfortable in sickness.” She glanced away from her bench at a pair of policemen passing nearby. They waved at her. Her friends. They’d arrest her one day and shout greetings the next. “Our land is the same, you know. It only knows how to be sick.”
Malek handed her a key. She examined it and put it inside the fold of her chador.
“It is for the Afghan, Maman jaan.”
“I hear he is still not around the neighborhood.”
“You hear right. The key, it’s to a house he bought from me. From my mother, actually. I didn’t want to give it to anyone but him. See that he gets it.”
“You are going away again?”
“For good this time.”
“You are leaving the sickness behind.”
He gave her some money. “I will visit you again before leaving.”
“Go with God. Our times here are not changing.”
“In the streets they say the opposite; they say everything is changing.”
“The streets fool themselves. There is no new revolution. And even if there were, I would want no part of it. Revolution is not my language. It carries hope, which is a false husband. I’ve had my share of those.”
Malek nodded. He would have liked to bring James McGreivy to this park one day to meet Maman. James would have appreciated her. Her philosophy. Her tired wisdom. She was Iran in a nutshell. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“Go with God!” she shouted again after him.
James had sent him pictures in an e-mail. San Francisco. A cable car going down that hill toward Fisherman’s Wharf. Candace Vincent and her kids hanging off the side of the cable car smiling at the camera, happy. James wrote that he’d already managed to create a veteran’s group in Oakland to help former soldiers get jobs and go back to school. Pretty soon he’d be shuttling back and forth to DC to lobby the government for his new organization. But Oakland was where he meant to stay. He even had teaching offers again. Small ones. I’ll be less in-your-face this time, Rez. I’ve learned a few things.
When the short walk from the park brought him to Sina’s place, Malek saw a brown car already parked opposite the railway tracks. Fani, who sat in the car alone, had given him the heads-up he’d promised. He didn’t have to. But he had. Something had happened to Fani so that he was going out of his way to be nice to Malek. Even though the streets had been quiet of late and there were no more demonstrations set to take place until early September, Fani wasn’t taking any chances. He’d called Malek often and taken him out to lunch a couple of times. He’d shown concern about Soaad’s American visa and expressed satisfaction when Malek told him the visa had finally been approved. The man had even talked about his own family and brought out some authentic-looking family pictures. Malek didn’t know if any of this was real or not. But the contacts between the two men were not without effect.
One day Malek had to finally ask him: “You really are concerned the Americans will show up here, aren’t you?”
“Do you blame me, Malek?”
“I promise I’ll put in a good word for you when we come.”
“You have my eternal gratitude.”
“Just remember, you have promised to let me know before you move in on Sina Vafa.”
“You speak the words as if you have no heart, Malek, as if you do not care for him.”
“I speak the words without illusion.”
Malek now nodded toward the brown car in which Fani sat. Behind it, fifty meters off, there was another vehicle with two more men in it. He knew them. They were the ones who had picked him up in front of Soaad’s place on the day of the last big demonstration.
He continued to the other side of the tracks. The little shop was closed. Further off, the shop boy and his friends were attempting to fly an orange-yellow kite from a rooftop. Malek felt dizzy. The midday summer heat of south Tehran made the ground seem burned into submission.
Sina’s door was ajar. Malek knocked and entered without waiting for an answer.
Sina sat on the floor next to his medicine kit with a large book on his lap. He glanced up, saw Malek, and offered a big smile. “Listen to the Book: It was WE who created man, and WE know what dark suggestions his soul makes to him. Isn’t that true poetry, Rez?”
A decade of studying the Muslim mystics returned automatically to Malek and he answered easily in Koranic Arabic, “Not a word does man utter but there is a sentinel by him ready to take note.”
Sina lay the Koran aside and got up to embrace Malek. “Welcome, brother.”
“Why read that now?” Malek asked.
“It gives me solace.”
“What is it that bothers you that you need solace?”
Sina closed the door and locked it. Then he fished under the sink to gather what they needed for an opium interlude. Malek lightly protested that he hadn’t come for that, but Sina paid him no mind and continued putting the charcoal together.
Strange how the horror of it all seemed to distill itself into that charcoal burner Sina was toying with. Malek reached and forced the burner upside down so that the coal fell out and went cold in the sink.
Sina looked up. “What are you doing?”
“Who was killed instead of you in Kirkuk?”
Sina retreated to where he’d been sitting. He leafed through a few more pages of the book, murmured something to himself, and then turned to Malek who was still standing by the sink. “I already told you, the man who died in my place there, he was no angel.”
“I don’t suppose it was him—your lover’s brother—who they killed?”
“If only it had been that murdering—” Sina swallowed his words, his voice cracking. It was a rare hint of real emotion. Malek watched him. He had to remind himself that this was a man who had known love once, and not too long ago. It had been misplaced love, with some Sunni girl in Iraqi Kurdistan in the middle of the war. It was, in fact, as misplaced a love as you could find in times like these. And when that girl’s brother had killed her for it, Sina had no revenge to calm his spirit. Sina gathered himself. “No. No such luck. I will never have that satisfaction. Tehran wouldn’t allow me to take him out.”
“Then who was it they killed in your place?”
“No one you know, Rez. Let it rest! It was a triple.”
Malek looked at him nonplussed. What in God’s name was a triple?
Sina pressed his palms to his forehead and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. He sighed impatiently. “A triple is this: one, we got rid of someone, a real rat, who was giving us a lot of trouble over there; two, we managed to chalk the hit on the Americans; and three, I—your friend, your brother, your pal of twenty years—supposedly died in that hit and am no longer a concern to anyone. A triple, Rez. One, two, three. That’s what we call it—se-neshun.”
“And you sit here, read your holy book, give out a few worthless pills to people, teach English to poor children, and make everything okay in your head?”
The silence felt like sin. Malek had pushed the issue because he couldn’t leave here not having tried. It was more for himself, he realized now, than for Sina. Not that it made a difference, but he had to believe he’d depart this place leaving no stone unturned.
He said, “I just need to know why. That’s all.”
“I’m spent, Rez. I got nothing more.”
“Why did you agree to this operation at all?”
“Agree? I don’t get to pick and choose what I do.”
“But why use me to do it?”
“It just happened that way. You have to believe me. I only asked you to come to Tehran because of two women. So, tell me . . . how is she?”
“Your mother is all right. I have taken care of her.”
“And your own?”
“Soaad is okay too. I thank you for her. For calling me here. For saving her.”
“I’m not all evil then, you see!”
Malek took a deep breath. “One of those Basra Sufis once said, Crush one ant and it’s like you slaughtered a thousand men.”
“And you’ve never crushed an ant, I suppose?”
“Not knowingly.”
“Sure. You sit in your comfortable little college in America and let GI Joe do the crushing. And you’re happy your own hands are clean.”
“We’ve been through this. A million times. I didn’t come here for a political argument today, Sina.”
“Then why did you come?”
“To learn the truth.”
“And you feel better now that you know?”
No. He didn’t. He said softly, “Listen, Sina . . . I had to sign over your estate to them. I had no choice.”
“I know you didn’t have a choice.” He laughed weakly. “Sometimes life is like that, as I’ve been trying to tell you. They kill me off in Iraq, but keep me alive in Tehran until they are sure my estates are signed over. It’s like the beast always needs to have its bookkeeping in order.”
“Why even go to the beast in the first place?”
“Oh my friend! It’s too late for me to think about all that now.”
“I’m sorry then.”
“Don’t fret, brother. They might let me live yet. I’m no bother to anyone here.” Sina opened his arms wide and attempted a smile. “Seriously, they just might let me live.”
Malek turned to go. As he was leaving, he heard Sina call out, “I wish I could have been one of those Muslim mystics of yours. Wish I could have been a saint who wouldn’t even crush an ant.”
“No you don’t.”
* * *
When he emerged outside, he didn’t see the cars. For a moment he felt hopeful, as if the danger had passed. He had the idea of losing himself in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran today. Soaad had told him that before becoming completely hospital-bound, Anna had insisted she wanted to visit the vast place one last time. The two women had hired a car for the day. Then, at the main entrance to the bazaar, they’d done something silly and beautiful: they’d hired a horse-and-buggy and had the driver take them up and down the newly refurbished yellow-brick boulevard as if they had been transported back sixty years. They had giggled like little children and paid the horse-and-buggy man for a second ride before Anna started coughing and had to be rushed back home.