Tehran at Twilight

by Salar Abdoh

  He asked, “Has your agha always been this generous?”

  “As long as I’ve known him. I started working for him when I didn’t even have a shirt on my back. Five years ago two of my younger brothers came to Tehran looking for work too. Do you know what agha did? He fixed their papers to stay in Iran and paid for them to go to college. Both of them are in college now. Two Afghans in college, if you can believe it.”

  He hadn’t come here to hear all this. It ruined his case. It dampened his hatred. He had nursed this hatred for thirty years. Watered and nourished it like a famished plant. He had had an idea of becoming a writer when he was younger. But he’d done the sensible thing and studied computer software and played it safe. As had his brother who’d been an engineer. It meant they’d both become levelheaded, middle-of-the-road immigrants in the new country. For Lotfi’s brother what was past was past. Buried. They never talked about it. Never talked about Iran or their father or Sarkeshik. And when one day his brother had told him he was ready to get married and have a bunch of children, Lotfi had no choice but to give his blessing, even if he didn’t have a good feeling about it. His brother had met some bovine-looking number in Los Angeles when he’d gone to have a teeth cleaning one day. Some Iranian gold digger who was tired of working in a dentist’s office. She had his brother by the balls out there in California, and within six months they were married and talking kids. Four years later, still no kids and the woman wanted a divorce. Soon she was taking his brother to the cleaners. He lost the house, half his pension, and most of his savings. That was the New World for you! There was no balance anywhere in the world. Here in Iran all the rules favored men. Over there in America they favored women. All that bullshit talk of equality of the sexes. What equality? The woman had put his brother in the poorhouse. Another year passed and one day Lotfi got an official call to hurry to LA. His brother was dead. Massive stroke. But Lotfi knew better: it was heartbreak that had killed his brother. America had killed his brother. And Iran had killed him. And Sarkeshik had killed him. And, especially, that cow who was now living in the house his brother had sweated so long to get a mortgage for.

  The Afghan was saying to him, “Do you want me to call agha and tell him you are here?”

  “Not necessary.” He began to get up.

  The Afghan insisted he stay for dinner. Lotfi smiled to put the man at ease and reminded him that dinner was another eight hours away. Then he thanked the entire family, brought cash from his pocket, and left it next to his tea glass. The Afghan protested and Lotfi insisted.

  “I will be back the day after tomorrow. Don’t tell your agha I came by. I want to surprise him. I know it will make him happy.”

  The Afghan nodded good-naturedly. Anything to make his agha happy.

  * * *

  He rode in a daze to Vanak Circle where heavy police presence had brought a hush to the usually chaotic main thoroughfare. He didn’t even know how he got here. All he knew was that a sickness had come over him as soon as he was out of Sarkeshik’s place. It was the sickness of knowing that thirty years of entertaining revenge had suddenly become dust. After seeing the Afghan and his family he had no choice but to shed his hatred for Sarkeshik. He felt naked without this old hatred; he had to leave it behind and ride away.

  The cops in Vanak eyed him but didn’t order him to stop his motorbike. They must have gotten word that a street demonstration was heading this way. He rounded the circle and headed south on Gandhi Avenue. The city seemed at a standstill, waiting. It was usually on Fridays when the demonstrations would erupt. Some of them were planned weeks in advance. Those were the really big demonstrations. Others just sort of happened by themselves. Ad hoc gatherings in different neighborhoods. Often they might begin with university students chanting against the regime. Then others would join. And before long, helmeted men would arrive to beat people up and take busloads of students to Evin Prison. This looked to be a day like that, everything hanging in balance.

  Lotfi wondered what Aida was doing now. She was . . . a good woman. Though he imagined he didn’t even know what a good woman was anymore. After his brother’s death, he’d made a conscious decision to relegate women to the extreme peripheries of his life. He would never forget the day he’d entered that sunless studio apartment in Van Nuys that his brother had been renting after the divorce. A hole-in-the-wall near Sherman Way in Los Angeles Valley that stank of unwashed dishes and garbage and death. The place was an utter wreck of Salvation Army furniture and hand-me-downs. The two brothers had survived America so it could come down to this? Then Lotfi’s eyes had fallen on a shelf full of books. He had never taken his brother for much of a reader. But now he saw dozens of manuals about how to write crime novels. Books about poisons and guns and learning how to create a plausible private eye for your story. There were even notes in his brother’s meticulous engineer’s handwriting in a small red notebook about the things he had learned. His brother had tried to exit the rot of his new life by writing his way through it. Then the massive stroke. And soon a letter from the insurance company that Lotfi was his brother’s beneficiary, but—

  And wasn’t there always a “but”?

  He’d fought them. They had tried to get away with not giving him most of the insurance money. His brother, God bless him, had done one thing right these past few years and changed his beneficiary to be Lotfi. And then he’d upped and died and left Lotfi half a million dollars. The first thing Lotfi did was to quit his software job. The second was to hunker down back in his apartment in Brooklyn and go through those books his brother had left behind. Now that he had time and money, it was his one chance in life to try his hand at being a writer. The result was that ridiculous pseudo-tech novel about computer hackers and a heist. And yet, incredibly, in no time he had found an agent for it and then a publisher and a miraculous option from the movie that brought him another big chunk of change. Life was just that stupid and arbitrary. His brother had died in a miasma of bitterness and heartbreak and Lotfi was, as the insurance claim said, the beneficiary of that.

  He saw an open store on Gandhi Avenue and parked the bike to get a pack of cigarettes. Gandhi! Now that was a man who had never thought of revenge. Old man Gandhi and his shaved head and his glasses and his loincloth. For the second time that day Lotfi asked himself the question: Why am I here? But of course he knew exactly why he’d ended up riding down Gandhi Avenue. The Cow’s family lived off of one of the smaller streets here. The Cow! His brother’s ex-wife. She’d even tried to squeeze him out of the life insurance. But he’d beaten her fair and square. The paperwork was clear: Lotfi was the beneficiary, not the Cow. Nevertheless, beating her in court in America wasn’t enough anymore. He knew she came to Tehran every other year to visit family. Lotfi had bided his time. It was amazing what money could do in this country. In any country, really. He kept a tab on her and when he got word that she was in Tehran again, all it took was a bribe in the right place to keep her from going back to the States. On the day she had gone to the airport to catch her flight out of Tehran, they’d taken her passport away and told her to go home until they contacted her. That was six months ago. Six months that she couldn’t be in Los Angeles in the home she’d stolen from Lotfi’s brother. Six months that she couldn’t meet her mortgage. Six months that she couldn’t go to the nail salon or eat her stupid Jenny Craig weight-loss diets. O sweet justice. Iranian justice. Fuck with me in the United States and I’ll fuck with you in Iran. The Cow of course had no idea why they’d taken her passport away and how and when she would get it back. He took comfort in assuming she must be beside herself. That was good. But was it enough?

  He knew himself well enough to realize he had ended up on Gandhi Avenue out of frustration over losing his taste for revenge against Sarkeshik. The Cow, though, was still his prey, his prisoner here. She wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Lotfi had come to Gandhi Avenue for something more definitive. He would hurt her, he decided. He’d just wait for her to come out of that house near t
he Channel 2 building off Gandhi, and he’d do what his brother should have done a long time ago. He was carrying a Czech-made police baton that could fit in the palm of the hand but would open out to a vicious-looking metal rod with the slightest flick of the wrist. It was an instrument of hurt. It could bash a window in. Or a head. Or a face. He had brought it along to rearrange Sarkeshik’s face; instead he’d use it on the Cow today.

  How he missed Aida! And how he hated missing anyone. The irony didn’t go past him that he had done to his brother’s ex-wife what Aida’s husband was doing to her, not letting her out of the country. This was a country owned by men, after all. And for better or worse, Lotfi was comfortable with that.

  * * *

  “Can you spare a cigarette, brother?”

  He had been sitting on the bike, daydreaming and smoking one of the cigarettes he’d just bought. They were two men and they had him surrounded. Not the toughest-looking men. But guys who obviously knew the business of intimidation. Lotfi kept his right hand close to his pants pocket where the flick-baton bulged a little bit. With his other hand, he threw the pack of cigarettes to one of them. “Keep all of it.”

  The other man said, “Aida khanum didn’t come home last night.”

  “Come home to what? A eunuch?”

  The one he hadn’t thrown the cigarette to grabbed Lotfi’s shirt. “Best be polite when talking about our boss.”

  Lotfi didn’t flinch. If they were going to take him down this second, he had no chance. He was sitting on the bike and couldn’t open the baton until he had some space.

  “Who sent you? His father?”

  “None of your business. Stay away from Aida khanum.”

  “Oh, so it is baba-jaan who is looking out for the son. I was sure it couldn’t be the eunuch who sent you guys to follow me.”

  The man he’d thrown the pack to gave Lotfi a backhanded slap. He felt his face flush and it made him angry. The anger in turn made him feel alive. He could kill these guys. He could kill them right now. They weren’t the carrying kind. They were small muscle for a motherfucker of a bazaari merchant. The same holier-than-thou bazaari fucks who had financed the stupid revolution thirty years ago.

  He bit his words, “What happens to Aida now?”

  “That’s none of your business either, you whore’s son! Just stay away from her.”

  “If she gets hurt—”

  “If she gets hurt, what? You’ll do something about it?” Both their faces were inches away from his own now. They looked like brothers. Bald, short, and broad-shouldered. They were probably failed wrestlers.

  Lotfi put his hands up in a gesture of resignation. “Tell baba-jaan I’ve received his message. Loud and clear.”

  “Good.” The man with the cigarettes stuffed the pack in his own shirt and then gave a short, painful squeeze to Lotfi’s cheek. “It’s nice you learn so fast.”

  It happened instantly. As soon as they turned to go, Lotfi reached into his pocket, flicked the baton open, and rained a succession of quick blows on them. They went down faster than he had expected and were immediately howling like sissies. They were belly-down and holding their hands over their heads to protect themselves. He could not believe how easy it was. They just lay there howling and pleading for him to stop even when he’d already stopped hitting them.

  This show of weakness was in poor taste, Lotfi thought, and it made him even angrier with the men. He saw that inside the store people were staring at them but no one dared come out.

  “Tell that fucking baba bazaari I’m going to stay away from his eunuch son’s wife. But . . . if I hear anything has happened to her, and I mean anything, I will come after him hard.” He reached into the back pocket of one of the men and pulled an identity card from his wallet. “Stay down!” he shouted when the other man tried to turn on his back.

  He kick-started the bike. He felt exhilarated. This was the best thing that could have happened to him today. Suddenly Sarkeshik meant nothing. Nor the Cow. It dawned on him he had no idea what Sarkeshik looked like after so long, and he hadn’t seen the Cow in over three years. They could look like anything. And it didn’t matter anymore.

  He squeezed hard on the gas so that the noise from the exhaust would screech right into the prone men’s ears. Two semi-tough guys sprawled on the ground with just several whips of the baton. It was too easy to kill people. And even easier to put the fear of God in them.

  Lotfi jammed the baton shut, returned it back to his pocket, put the bike in gear, and peeled off into a side street and away from Gandhi Avenue.

  * * *

  The next two weeks were a cloud of overdrinking. He had to call the Christian back and ask him to deliver more bad vodka in those plastic gas containers. Despite the momentary elation of that day on Gandhi Avenue, Lotfi had lost his center and knew it. What could you do when the settling of scores no longer haunted you day and night? It was like training for the biggest fight of your career and then being told the match was canceled and the opponent was gone. In the fog of alcohol, with his brother’s former wife and Sarkeshik no longer of consequence to him, Lotfi sat behind his computer and followed the news of the street demonstrations instead.

  And he drank and drank.

  He kept the lights in his apartment dimmed and the shades drawn. The two men he had pummeled didn’t come around. But he couldn’t be too careful. He rarely ventured out and called the local grocer, a fellow Azeri Turk, to send his boy with periodic deliveries. Then one morning he received a call. The voice simply asked if Lotfi wished to “renew” his account. Which meant if he wanted to keep his brother’s wife in the country another six months, he had to pay more money.

  “No, you can close my account. I’m satisfied with the return.”

  The voice seemed disappointed and asked if Lotfi was absolutely sure.

  “Yes, I’m sure. You can give the bird her wings back. Thank you for your services. My satisfaction is complete.”

  But he wasn’t satisfied. Not the least bit. He missed Aida more and more. Which made him drink more. And what made it worse was that his Internet service suddenly went bad and there were long stretches of days when it was simply nonexistent. He felt like a ship adrift. Then, on another Friday morning, he was staring through half-shut shades at the synagogue when he heard a ping on the computer. Miraculously, despite his shoddy connection, there was an e-mail from Aida in his inbox.

  Miss you.

  What could he do? He didn’t want to be rash and get her hurt. He began to follow her husband’s postings online. By now Pretty Boy was virtually a rock star. He posted seemingly every hour, telling friends and followers that they needed to stay the course—Freedom is around the corner . . . Long live the movement!

  Garbage. Garbage that made Lotfi want to puke his guts out with all that bad raisin vodka he’d been drinking. In one especially sickening post Pretty Boy had written that since green was the color of the protest movement, everybody should wear green not just on the streets but also inside their own homes. We should wear green day and night. We should go to sleep green and wake up green. We should dream in green: Verde que te quiero verde.

  The son of a bitch was now quoting García Lorca in Spanish.

  Lotfi told himself he had always hated that senseless, overrated poem of the Spaniard’s anyway. “Another faggot freedom fighter!” he cursed aloud like the ugly alcoholic he felt himself becoming.

  Now he was tempted to post his own note online letting everyone know this was the same sick punk who was keeping his wife a prisoner in Tehran.

  He realized he had turned into a caged animal. He almost wished those two men would show up again so he could finish all this. Die if he had to. Why was he feeling this way? All that money he had in American and Iranian bank accounts, and yet he was more miserable than ever. What was the use of money? He envied that khakham and his son across the street; he envied how every other day they went about their business of taking such loving care of their little patch of earth, wateri
ng the synagogue trees and sweeping and preparing the place for Saturdays. How he wished he could be like them.

  Then, when the self-loathing reached boiling point, he had a revelation: Pretty Boy had to be working for the government. He was a rat, a snitch, a stool pigeon. All those so-called Internet friends of his, they were going to be rounded up sooner or later. Pretty Boy was collecting names and e-mail addresses for the government.

  Once Lotfi thought he had put two and two together, he knew what he had to do. He had always known. They had always known—he and Aida. From that moment on, his recently lost resolve found a fresh center of focus.

  He was forced to spend the next few days in the wasteland of onlinelessness, as the government censors were again clamping down on Internet access. He had not stepped out of the house in almost three weeks. His vodka was just about gone. He stunk. And he thought obsessively about Pretty Boy. He had to know what the guy was up to or he’d go crazy inside the four walls of his apartment. He sat and stared at that frozen computer screen until the connection returned in the wee hours of one of those mornings. It was like emerging from the bottom of the sea.

  There had been fewer postings. Pretty Boy acknowledged that the Internet situation was getting worse, but if any friends could read this note they should meet him—wearing green, of course—in front of Maskan Bank on Bahar Avenue at nine thirty sharp this coming Friday morning. From there they would join the crowds that were supposed to gather at 7-Tir Square a half hour later.

  Lotfi breathed. He showered. He ate some rice and yogurt. He made a point not to drink any alcohol. Friday was only two days away.

  * * *

  A terrible chill took over his entire body. Lotfi was guessing they were in the garage of an unoccupied building.

  A half hour. That was all the difference there was in being in the world and not being in it anymore. A half hour ago he had been gazing north toward Karim-Khan Avenue, the sea of people he had been a part of these past few hours now completely dispersed. It had felt good to be a part of the demonstration. This feeling had surprised him and he had had to will himself to stay focused on his quarry. Then on Kargar Street, where the fight with the police began in earnest, Lotfi discovered, at last, that he was no killer. He watched as scuffles broke out, rocks began flying, and people scattered like ants. Tens of thousands of people running every which way. It was beautiful. It was life itself in all its glory. It was combat. It was hunger and pain and reason for living. But what was he going to do about Pretty Boy? Nothing. He was going to do nothing. Lotfi had aged during this demonstration. He had become wise. What had he been thinking? That armed with his baton and a medium-sized kitchen knife he’d stick it to Pretty Boy and walk away?