Good Muslim Boy

by Osamah Sami

  But her voice was getting closer and I convinced him to listen. We ran downstairs to join our mother and our aunties, who were shepherding dozens of people into the bunkers.

  We huddled in. Moe was gloating about winning Drunk Russian, but people weren’t paying enough attention. To correct this, he started slowly pulling down his undies to reveal his bum crack. I remember the disgusted looks on the girls all around.

  Then a series of bombs rocked the bunker for the longest time. All banter and laughter and chatter stopped. Debris fell through the air holes. The girls and boys cried; the women too. Our home was finally nothing but a smouldering carcass.

  And then it hit me, the worst thing, the irreparable thing. My youngest brother was still up there, transfixed by the noisy, colourful sky. Mum’s headcount had come two minutes too late.

  Mum never spoke about that day ever again, though her moist eyes painted melancholic pictures of lament at random.

  A cow on the last day of the war

  Dad was still not home, but the promise was he would be home soon. On this last day of the war, the oil rigs were burning, making a hot day hotter. They would burn for a long time.

  And there was a cow—one cow, indifferently grazing.

  And then a long train of Iraqi POWs, all with their hands on their heads, walking in single file.

  All life had drained from their bodies, these weary hordes. The Iranian company leading them looked equally worn. The only difference was the Iraqis all had bushy moustaches; the Iranians had beards. Beards versus moustaches. That’s all.

  The Iranians pointed their guns at the Iraqis and told them to keep walking, in way-past-reluctant tones.

  Where they had come from, where they were going—all of this a mystery.

  I just saw soldiers leading soldiers while the cow chewed on the shrubs.

  THE TALL MALE WAS OF EXCELLENT HYGIENE

  Mashhad, Iran, 2013: six days until visa expires

  When I finally drag myself out of the shower, it’s 5 am. I get dressed and go downstairs.

  The concierge kindly reminds me that I am to check out this morning (and since the hotel’s booked to the rafters, I really do have to). Dad and I were meant to head back to Qom today. I have a plane to catch. What with the Imam Reza commemoration and all, how will I get another flight? I have to take the police chief the envelope. I assure the receptionist I’ll be back.

  I cab it to Kalantari 27, where activity has quadrupled since last night. The guards at the door frisk me. I head up to see the chief.

  The chief is out on patrol. Instead, I get a sergeant. I explain my situation—the hotel, the flight, the body. He dunks a sugar cube in his tea and shuts his eyelids for two whole seconds. He reopens them, nodding his head slightly. He takes a sip of his tea and goes on with his business.

  At eight-thirty the chief shows up and heads to his office. He closes the door before I can get a word in. He’s a short man—that’s all I have time to absorb.

  Just after ten o’clock, the chief opens his door. He twitches his index finger to call me into the room.

  ‘So you had nothing to do with the man’s death?’ He asks.

  ‘The man,’ I say. ‘My dad.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he says. ‘Son, do you know how many family homicide cases I’ve done?’ He says this so dramatically I have to stifle a laugh. He squints his eyes and studies me. I’m too worn out to protest. I just have to wait until he’s done X-raying my mind.

  He asks me to go through the events again. I walk him through them. As I speak, he cross-checks my story against the statement taken yesterday by the burglary detective who was so ‘out of his depth’.

  ‘So you didn’t hit your father?’ the chief says.

  I’m stunned. ‘What?’

  ‘Says here you were hitting your father.’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ I say. ‘That was a reaction. I wanted to wake him up, you see.’

  ‘Have you had physical altercations with your father before?’

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘I hit him because he was dead and I didn’t want him to be dead.’

  He opens his drawer, takes out a stamp and stamps the statement. He scribbles a note on the paper.

  ‘Take this to the coroner’s,’ he says. ‘This is not your release yet. Since you’re a foreigner and your father was an important man abroad, I’m taking extra caution. I need an official cause of death. If the cause of death is consistent with your statement, I will sign the release to the morgue so they can give you a burial permit. Then you can take it from there.’

  I thank him and rush out. I hail a cab outside the Kalantari. It stops for me. Good news: I just have to shout ‘coroner’ and the driver flings open the door.

  There’s a long line at the coroner’s. I line up behind everyone else. Forty minutes later, a man behind the counter takes the paper the chief gave me and goes out to search for my file. He comes back with the death certificate and tells me to take it back to the Kalantari.

  I run out and find a taxi. It’s way past my checkout time. I call information, get the hotel’s number and talk to the receptionist. He tells me the people who have booked the room are on their way.

  Could he take my belongings out? I ask him.

  He consults with a supervisor, then confirms: this, they can do.

  I hang up and read the cause of death. Cardiac arrest. The last paragraph catches my eye: ‘The tall male was of excellent hygiene.’ Why would they include that? It’s tattooed on my mind.

  Back at the Kalantari, it only takes the chief another thirty-eight minutes to open his office door. He stamps the paper and wishes me well. ‘I could tell you are not the kind who would kill his father, but my instinct has been off since my divorce.’ He hopes there are no hard feelings.

  Back to the coroner’s again.

  Official closing time is 4 pm. It’s after three by now. My flight’s at seven-fifty. I can’t focus on that right now.

  At the coroner’s, the guard tells me to come back in the morning. I explain my situation as rapidly as I can. He goes inside and talks to the man who found the death certificate. The man recognises me, and nods his head. I sit down in the hall. A lot of people are waiting. I hear causes of death called. Every one is drug-related, no matter how old people are.

  Finally, I hear my name. I head to the counter.

  ‘Where are the court papers?’ the man says, clapping once and showing me his palms.

  ‘What court papers?’ I ask.

  ‘These are the police papers. Isn’t your father a foreign national?’

  ‘Yes, but no one told me—’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to take the death certificate to the courts? I think I told you.’

  ‘No, sir, you did not.’

  ‘Well. You have to take the chief’s paper and get it released through the court.’

  ‘I have a visa expiring on Saturday.’

  ‘Don’t get rowdy, just do as I say.’

  ‘They’ll be shut today.’

  ‘So do it tomorrow. Don’t complicate thi
ngs.’

  ‘I have to fly back to Qom tonight, I haven’t got a place to stay—’

  ‘You think you’re the only one with problems?’

  I can’t think. I just take the chief’s stamped statement and take a taxi back to the hotel. More than a day has passed and I still haven’t told Mum. I want to be sure what’s happening first, but the pressure’s mounting.

  The hotel manager apologises for being unable to accommodate me tonight; the religious festival means the whole city’s booked out. I take Dad’s suitcase and walking stick, and head out in search of a room for the night.

  It’s just after 7 pm and my body’s shutting down. I’ve barely slept in days, and haven’t had anything to eat in all this time; nothing to drink either, except the glass of water at the hospital last night. I stop at a felafel stand and grab two sandwiches. I remember the last felafel stand—not so long ago, Dad was giving a man who was down on his luck some money. I wonder where he is right now. What he and his children are doing. I check the time and swallow the sandwiches. I don’t even feel them go down, so I order another two. I down those with little chewing.

  Five sandwiches later, I go hotel hunting again. I try more than thirty hotels, motels, hotels, serviced apartments—nothing. I look at my watch again. It’s midnight already.

  Snow falls, stiffening the tips of my fingers. I must’ve walked over twenty kilometres, wearing a backpack, dragging luggage. I have to take a gamble. I cab it back to our old hotel.

  I casually enter the lobby and collapse on the couch. It’s incredibly comfortable. I sink right in, feeling the enervation drain out. The staff here know me; they know I have no reservation for the night. I look nervously at the receptionist. He catches my glance for half a second. He gives me a slight nod, gets back to his business, and lets me close my eyes.

  CHEEKY SON OF A CLERIC MAN

  Qom, Iran, 1995

  For Shiites, Qom was one of the holiest cities in Iran. It was home to the prestigious hawza ’ilmiyya, the largest Shiite seminary in the world, and the shrine to Hazrat Ma’sooma—the eighth imam’s sister, and also the granddaughter of the Prophet.

  In other words, it was turban festival. It’s also where my family moved after the eight-year war. You don’t have to be a geography enthusiast to see how bizarre this would be to a seven-year-old kid. During the war, we lived in Abadan, on the Iraqi border, always feeling the mortar shells caress our ears. And now, here we were, in central Iran, about 200 kilometres from Tehran—probably the safest place we could’ve been during the war, which now happened to be over.

  But I wasn’t a seven-year-old kid anymore. I was officially a teen. I’d been the man of the house since age four, I’d smoked my first cigarette at seven, and I knew how to assemble and dismantle a Kalashnikov by eleven.

  Dad was doing pretty well; he was now a qualified cleric. He taught at the hawza ’ilmiyya for 800 tomans a day, and lectured in Arabic Literature at the University of Tehran. But 800 tomans is only about forty cents Australian, so the more things changed, the more they’d stayed the same. We’d moved houses six times in Qom since the war had ended. Nowadays, Mum and Dad, my two brothers and little sister and I were renting someone’s basement.

  The Mister John Walker

  Growing up in a family dominated by Arab speech, my Farsi wasn’t anywhere near as good as the other kids’, and Dad had an uphill battle finding me a school. At meeting after meeting, schools routinely rejected me, despite my eager recital of a Hafiz poem I knew by heart (not that I had any idea of its meaning).

  Eventually, a teacher by the name of Mr Rashidi intervened and took pity on me. He loved Dad’s love of the arts and theatre; he loved that Dad was a different man of the cloth. Once enrolled, I picked up Farsi in no time.

  What’s more, I performed in every school play Mr Rashidi had written, and he even had me over for dinner a bunch of times. One night, when his wife had cooked qormeh sabzi—a traditional Persian herb stew, absolutely mouth-watering—Mr Rashidi offered me a drag on one of his Marlboros. Mr Rashidi had lost his one and only son during the war, a thirteen-year-old who’d enlisted as a minefield-clearer. He cleared one mine. Perhaps because of this, Mr Rashidi treated me as an adult; he was always happy to discuss complicated politics, and even fantasised openly about what it would be like to stage an uncensored showcase of Romeo and Juliet in Iran.

  The night he offered me the Marlboro, he must have felt particularly close to me. He started talking about his fondness for liquor.

  Before the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, during the Shah era, he’d tasted what he called the Mister John Walker.

  ‘The Mister Walker is one that plonks you out with happy dreams,’ he said, dreamily. ‘Dreams of freedom and the smell of air without blood…’ There was a glitter in his gaze. ‘It’s also good for your eyes,’ he confided. ‘You start seeing your wife in ways you never had before. You’ll see the super goggles I’m talking about when you grow up.’

  ‘Does Mister Walker make your wife less older?’ I asked. Mr Rashidi’s wife was noticeably his senior.

  ‘Yes, Osamah,’ he said wistfully. ‘It takes a decade off her. And that’s only one benefit.’

  I sat there, amazed and astonished and feeling important, having been worthy of my teacher’s sharing a punishable secret with me. If anyone else had heard such a confession in Iran, he’d have been sacked and imprisoned and, naturally, tortured. I felt an admiration for this rebel of a man, more than any religious authority I’d been brought up to worship. I felt cool, in other words. He puffed cigarette smoke out his nose, and gestured to his pack of Marlboros.

  ‘Osamah, my boy, don’t think this stuff’s what’s gonna kill you. There’s a stronger killer, something that suffocates you stronger than the gas. When you grow up, you’ll know what I mean,’ he said, again, mysteriously.

  ‘Why do I have to learn everything when I grow up?’ I asked him. ‘Why can’t I just know now?’

  Mr Rashidi just patted my shaved head, got up and walked into the kitchen, still beaming his signature smile. He kissed his wife on the shoulder and made his way to the fridge. He retrieved a bottle of Mister John Walker, an illegal import, no doubt, walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the street.

  I watched him look over the street, impassively, pour the bottle on himself, shout, ‘God is Great!’ and then self-immolate. He was flapping as the flames engulfed him, but his wife flapped even harder, helpless and screaming. There was nothing she could do. I just watched Mr Rashidi until he dropped onto the concrete. I read the Koran, silently, to brighten his burned soul.

  School crime and punishment

  Mr Rashidi was still fresh in his grave when the surviving teachers began to routinely belt the socks off me. Other kids got beaten too, but I was an Arab, and so I had to cop a lot of discipline.

  The necessity for discipline made the teachers work hard. The ever-growing need for new and interesting torture techniques opened their imaginations, fuelled their creativities. Instruments ranged from the wooden ruler to the garden hose to the electric cable, applied as needed to the knuckles or the bare soles of the feet. This was not as fun as I am making it out to be. The fun part was walking home if it was snowing; with your feet fresh from the lashings, it was a
blessing to be numb. It still stung, but it dulled your pain receptors.

  If your hair was long enough that a teacher could grip it in their fingers, it was deemed too long, inspiring them to perform what they dubbed an ‘intersection’.

  I detested shaved, short hair.

  Not from vanity. I’d seen too many dead soldiers on the street, and shaved heads were the one thing they had in common. I always pushed it, growing my hair to three centimetres’ length. But you had to be careful: nothing delighted the teachers more than hair long enough to grip and twist between their fingers. Or, almost nothing. They also took special pleasure in the intersections. This involved shaving in a cross-shape, leaving four patches of longer hair, causing strangers by the side of the road to call cruel and droll remarks on your walk home, mainly about watching your step when you crossed the intersection. ‘Nice grass patches! Can sheep herd on them?’

  The thing about kids is that they’re prone to forget things. This is just how kids are built. It’s the reason you have to punish them, the reason you have rules, but it’s also the reason they’ll keep breaking them, over and over, and the reason your punishments can’t be uniformly brutal. Like the day I went to school in a short-sleeved shirt.

  The day was warmer than usual—beautiful, but hot. I forgot short sleeves were banned, I really just did.

  The schoolmaster yelled like a dragon. I saw the fire come out his nose. He called me into his office, saying I needed to be taught to behave. He said I was a no-good, trouble-making Arab. His frog-like lips always made me giggle inside.

  He opened up his filing cabinet and pushed me inside. My shoulders touched the edges; my head crammed against the roof.

  At recess and lunch I was so hungry, I wanted to ask for my lunchbox, but I didn’t dare. He didn’t let me out until long after the last bell rang, and everybody else had long ago gone home. I was so scared in that dark box I peed my pants.