I realize I have now become the sixteenth subscription for New York City.
14.
MY FATHER DOESN’T KNOW, BUT when I was a little boy my mother hung a black-and-white framed photograph of him over my bed. It had been taken about a year before I was born, and it shows my father standing behind a podium giving a speech to delegates at a political conference somewhere in the Midwest. In the photograph he is wearing a white shirt and a dark tie and a dark wool jacket, and pinned to his jacket is his name tag, and he is balding and slightly unshaven, and he has his glasses on. Covering the front of the podium is a portrait of a man or woman whose face is entirely obscured by a sign that says Dekalb. My father is glancing down at his notes as he speaks—looking as calm and self-assured as always.
Eventually I figured out that the hidden face hanging in front of the podium was not that of an Iranian revolutionary, as I had originally assumed, but of Che Guevara. This was an exhilarating revelation for me, because while my father felt like a stranger, Che did not, and so I felt somewhat included. My mother had been sure to inform me on all the major aspects of Che’s life: his contribution to the Cuban Revolution; his famous, belligerent speech at the UN; his execution in the jungles of Bolivia. Years of falling asleep and waking beneath the photograph slowly fused the two revolutionaries together for me until Che began to seem so personal that I believed he belonged to me, and that he was my father and my father was Che, and it was now my father in the portrait and Che standing before the podium giving a speech about my father.
What I also learned from my mother was that my parents had considered naming me Che; his execution had taken place the year before I was born. In the end, though, they had opted against it, reasoning that a name like Che Sayrafiezadeh would have presented far too many obstacles for me in my life. I have always found this explanation highly dubious, considering that the alternative my parents finally settled on was certainly not picked with the thought of easing my passage through this world. My father once confided in me that the names of his three children could be viewed as a way to track his political maturity. When he told me this he meant it not as a compliment but as a supreme compliment. We were walking through Prospect Park and it had just rained, and there was such an air of confessional intimacy that I could not help but be captivated.
Presumably, my brother was not named Jacob with any political considerations in mind but rather familial ones. There are three Jacobs on my mother’s side: Jacob Finkelstein, her grandfather, a landlord; Jacob Klausner, her great-uncle, a florist; and Jacob Epp (née Epstein), the hero in my uncle’s novel Something About a Soldier. There is a nice symmetry in the first Jacob being from her father’s side, the second being from her mother’s, and the third being altogether imaginary. That my father—who has no Jacobs on his side—would have conceded the indulgence of naming a child after a florist or a landlord is evidence to me that his personality, his world outlook, his relationship to his wife were once so vastly different as to be virtually unrecognizable. By the time my sister was born three years later, though, my father had begun gravitating toward ideas of revolution, as Jamileh was named after Djamila Bouhired, a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, who had been imprisoned, tortured, and nearly executed in her struggle against French occupation.
When we arrive at me, five years later, my father returns to matters of ancestry, but this time it’s his own ancestry, his uncle Saïd Salmasi, an Iranian revolutionary who has been credited with establishing the first modern school in Iran. In 1907, nearly three decades before my father was born, Saïd Salmasi was killed fighting against the Shah in the failed first Iranian Revolution. What a powerful antidote he must have been to my father’s own father, a former businessman who had lost his wealth years earlier. By the time my father was born in 1934, he was impoverished and unemployed. He was also fifty-three years old. And what a powerful antidote Salmasi would have been to my father’s mother, who was blind, or nearly blind, and just as helpless as her aging husband. They were apolitical parents. My father has told me so. Powerless and apolitical, content to wait out World War II and the occupation of Iran without protest or complaint. My father, however, has described how as a little seven-year-old boy he would climb a hill after school and watch the long lines of Soviet vehicles rumble below him, ceaseless and disinterested, one after the other, until he became so incensed that he would pick up a handful of pebbles and hurl them at the trucks, ping ping ping. Day after day he would enact this ritual, until one day his pebble shattered a windshield and the snaking traffic came to a halt. The little boy was apprehended by the soldiers and taken to the local authorities, who in turn took him home, where he was instructed to sit out the rest of the war with his parents, waiting for others to decide what should happen.
Saïd Salmasi surely would have done something during World War II. And he would have done something that night in 1953 when the Shah’s tanks rolled past and all my father could do was go back inside. And he would have done something in 1979 when the revolution he had been killed in seventy years earlier finally returned in full fury.
My father called the night before he moved back to Iran. I was in bed with the lights off when the phone rang. Our phone never rang, and the sound startled me out of the early stages of sleep. Through the bedroom door I could hear my mother answer, and by the voice she was using I knew immediately that it was my father on the other end. It was a confident voice with a touch of breeziness, the kind of voice that one might use at a job interview to impress a potential employer. There was no other time when I heard that voice.
“The workers and peasants of Iran have been struggling for one century,” she said with aplomb.
Then my father’s response.
“Imperialism’s boot,” my mother said.
My father’s response.
Her response.
I listened to hear mention of me, of my recent tenth birthday, but there was no mention. Nor was there mention of my brother and sister. The two would fend for themselves. They were still teenagers, but they were solid, upstanding members of the party. Future leaders. They had no real need for a father anymore.
And then they wound it up, my parents. My mother said good-bye. There was something good-natured in her good-bye. It wasn’t a good-bye that implied permanent separation; it was a so-long-see-you-around-sometime good-bye. Then she hung up the phone. Click,
And then she sobbed. Great sobs. Shakespearean. Her wails shook our tiny apartment and the other tiny apartments in our building. They shook me in my bed, lying there in the darkness, pretending to be asleep.
When morning came, I played dumb when she broke the news to me. Neither of our faces betrayed a thing. It was January and a deep chill had descended over Pittsburgh, but after breakfast I went outside anyway. I tossed a tennis ball against the brick wall in the backyard, imagining that it was summertime, that I was Reggie Jackson throwing the ball, and that the wall was Reggie Jackson hitting the ball. The green ball would bounce high into the air and then come down hard, roll and stop. In my mind, each hit was the hit that won the game.
It made no difference, of course, in my mother’s and my day-to-day life if my father lived in the United States or Iran. In the same way it made no difference to my brother and sister what became of their mother. My parents had succeeded in building an insurmountable wall between the two factions of the family, and one can only imagine the calisthenics it takes to avoid fellow members of a small organization founded on the idea of universal brotherhood.
After my father’s departure, my mother took to removing the telephone from its hook each night. This was her way of declaring “You are still my husband, but you are never coming back. I know that now. And I honor it by taking the phone off the hook. We are now, both sides, unreachable.” The phone could not be unplugged from the wall, or the ringer turned off, so after she had kissed me good night she would simply set the receiver on the floor. In the dark, the dial tone cried out as if it were
a strange animal, its long, steady beep filling up the quiet apartment. I would listen to it and stare off into the black. After a good amount of time had passed, a male voice would appear, pleasant but urgent, like a messenger bringing news that could potentially be troubling.
“There appears to be a receiver off the hook. If you’d like to place a call, please hang up and try your call again.”
There was something embarrassing about this recorded voice assuming that the receiver could have only been displaced by oversight. I only need to make you aware of such an oversight and the situation will of course be immediately remedied. Three times the man would repeat this—“There appears to be a receiver off the hook …”—and three times my mother would ignore him. After his third try he would give up and let a shrill, high-pitched beep take his place. Despite knowing the pattern, I was always shocked by the sound, incessant and slightly chemical, as if alerting us to a fire. My heart pounded along with its rhythm. Fire. Fire. Fire. On and on it went, threatening to continue unabated until the morning. Had my mother developed some type of immunity and now I was the only one who could hear it?
Then the sound would stop abruptly, so abruptly that it continued roaming through my head. Eventually silence would drift in, take over, permanent silence. It was as if the phone had exhausted itself trying to get placed back on the hook.
My mother and I were on our own. We were floating on a raft in the ocean. It was night, and the waves were gently rocking us up and down and from side to side, and all we could do was hope that the raft would not spring a leak or water spill over the edge. There was no one anywhere in the world who could save us now. The black silence covered us, a silence so encompassing that I found myself desiring the return of the phone’s harsh, grating cry. Then I would drift off to sleep with Che hovering above me.
15.
I RUN INTO KAREN IN front of the public library on Fifth Avenue. She has gone there on her lunch break to check out a book called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood. There are giant rainbow stripes on the cover. We stand on the street for a while as she tells me about how she’s wanted to be an artist since she was a little girl and her father would take her to buy supplies at the art store on weekends. When it was time for college, though, her parents thought she should have a more “practical” education, so instead of going to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, she ended up studying at a liberal arts college in Connecticut, where she balanced a major in art with a minor in marketing.
“Now look at me,” she says. “I’m a project manager for Martha Stewart.”
I tell her I know how she feels because I’m also hoping to one day do what I love and have the money follow. And then, since we happen to be standing in front of the library, I describe how when I was a little boy my mother would send me in to return overdue books without paying the fine.
She laughs. Then she stops. “That’s a weird story,” she says.
Each morning while I’m riding my bicycle to the office I tell myself that today’s the day I’m going to ask Karen out. And each evening while I’m riding home I bemoan my lack of nerve. Sometimes I reason with myself that most likely she’ll say no anyway and all I’ll end up achieving is a permanently awkward work environment for the two of us. But the next day we’ll have a fun, friendly chat about something like how to find a good apartment in New York City and before we know it an hour’s passed. Or I’ll happen to turn around in my chair to get something and I’ll catch her staring at me. When our eyes meet she’ll smile and look away. Ask her now! But I don’t. I can’t. And once again on the way home I’ll berate myself.
In seventh grade there was a pretty girl in my class who I would often find watching me when I looked up from my desk. I enjoyed her stare but I was also confused by it. I did not believe that she found me handsome, that anyone found me handsome. And after a month of her smiling and blushing and getting no response whatsoever, she turned her attention to a good-looking boy in our class. Which made sense to me.
This morning it is not just Karen’s presence at the edge of my desk that’s causing me my usual turmoil but also what she’s chosen to talk about: a strike at the Museum of Modern Art, where she once worked. Last night, she tells me, she went to stand with former coworkers on a picket line in front of the museum, where she screamed at the top of her lungs, “Modern art! Ancient wages!” And also, “Lowry, Lowry, what’s your salary?” Referring to Glenn Lowry director of the museum, whose salary is, of course, immeasurably higher than the secretaries’, librarians’, and cafeteria workers’ who have been on strike for three months now.
“I never get to scream,” she says, laughing. “It was cathartic.”
I’m not able to share in her good humor. As she talks, my mind races to come up with something to say that will lead her from her experience last night to a greater understanding of socialism. Or something to that effect. I’m not sure what. There’s always something, though, to be said, something to be done, something to nudge the masses into consciousness. The Militant was always phrasing things like we argued, or we explained, or we discussed when describing conversations with workers. And by the end of the article the workers always bought an issue. Or a subscription.
“It’s good you went,” I say. “It’s an important thing to do.” I can hear the patronizing sound in my voice, but I’m powerless to stop it. All I can hope is that she doesn’t notice. There’s a smile plastered on my face, trying to hide my condescension, which in turn is trying to hide my ignorance. It’s my ignorance that feels the most troubling. I’ve never stood on a picket line in my life. Nor do I want to. Yet I feel like I should have some authority over Karen on this matter. I once got into a shouting match with a girlfriend over the Soviet occupation of Poland during World War II, even though I knew nothing about it and my girlfriend was Polish.
“Don’t go in there!” Karen says she screamed at the patrons about to enter the museum. “Don’t fucking go in there!” As if it were a haunted house they stood before. Some went in regardless, but many turned away. And when they did, everyone cheered.
“Are the workers planning to link up with other struggles?” I ask.
She doesn’t know.
“Did it have an international tone?”
“A what?”
Words rush into my throat, trying to get out all at once. Words like working class, ruling class, dictatorship of the proletariat. I feel choked by them. I want to change the subject. The subject must not be changed! I want to crawl under the desk.
“The union organizer gave me a whistle,” she says, but before she can continue with her amusing anecdote I cut her off.
“I should probably get back to work.”
She’s startled. “Oh.”
I am full of relief when she leaves. Then full of regret. What does she think of me now? The words in my throat recede, and I am left remembering how I’d watch my mother on those Saturday mornings as she “discussed” that week’s topic with a passerby until my mother grew frustrated and would nod and smile, as if to say “I’m sorry you’re such a fool,” and walk away. “Some workers cannot be won over,” she’d tell me.
It’s noon and I’m hungry. A few blocks away is a Caribbean restaurant and the thought of going there to eat something good makes me happy. On my way out, I pass Karen standing front of the copy machine. Her back is to me and she’s holding a giant stack of magazines.
“I’m going to get some lunch at the Caribbean restaurant,” I say.
“That sounds tasty,” she says, without turning around. “See you later.”
“I’ll finish everything up when I get back.”
“Okay,” she says.
“I won’t be long.”
“Okay”
“Do you want to come with me?”
She turns and looks at me. The machine whirrs and whirrs.
“Do you want to come with me to the Caribbean restaurant to get some lunch?”
; “Yes,” she says. “I’d love to.”
16.
ACCORDING TO The Militant, THE very first thing my father and a dozen other Iranian exiles did when their plane touched down at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran on the afternoon of January 22, 1979, was to catch a taxi to a news conference at the Intercontinental Hotel, where they announced the official formation of Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist (the Socialist Workers Party). It had been twenty-five years since my father left Iran for the University of Minnesota. The likelihood that the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, would have tossed him in a torture chamber the moment he stepped from the plane had prevented him from returning for even a visit. Now, though, SAVAK’s agents were being hunted, millions were marching through the streets, and the Shah had packed his suitcases to go on an “extended vacation.”
“Dear comrades,” Jack Barnes wrote in greeting, “the formation of the Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist—the first Trotskyist party on Iranian soil—is an historic and inspiring event.… You have taken a major step in building a mass revolutionary party based on the principles of Lenin and Trotsky. Only such a party can lead the fight for a socialist Iran to a successful conclusion. Long live the Iranian revolution! Long live Hezb-e Kargaran-e Sosialist.”
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