by Dina Nayeri
The judge looked at the paper again, then he said, his every word coated with a kind of exhaustion that takes decades to set in, “Grandfather, I grant you your divorce. You can keep the marriage gift. She is absolved of all wrongdoing. Go.”
“Oh.” The man beamed. He seemed surprised down to his yellowing toenails. “I was expecting a long, hard thing, lots of papers.” From his pocket he retrieved a bag of unskinned pistachios; the best kind, right off the tree.
The judge didn’t object to the gift. He got up from behind his desk and shook the man’s hand with both of his. He touched his face as he would his own father’s and said the pistachios made his day bright. Then the man left and Bahman was called in.
“Agha, let me warn you,” the judge groaned before even glancing at Bahman. “This day is almost done for me.” He looked up with the desperate, bloodshot eyes of a man who has just crumbled a dozen villages.
Bahman introduced himself, extending his hand to the judge. His lawyer stood behind him, clasping his wrist in front of his groin. Suddenly the boy seemed more than useless; his presence made Bahman look as unsure of himself as the old man, except he inspired no sympathy with his paid attorney and his suit.
“I’ve come for a divorce, Your Honor,” he said. “I won’t give reasons, since you’re very busy and I have the right to divorce. I’ve prepared the papers, am ready to pay the full marriage gift, in gold coins as originally agreed, and I have no wish to speak ill of my wife.” The lawyer laid several typed petitions on the judge’s desk.
The judge chuckled, fanned the papers on his desk, and smiled at Bahman. “Doctor Hamidi, you make my work easier. I’m sad to see you here with this riffraff.” He said this as if they were old friends, a customary nod among educated sorts who run into each other in inhospitable places—though, to be fair, Bahman was the only one with an unbiased education in the sciences, humanities, and all that.
Bahman nodded. “Yes, I was listening outside. It’s very sad.”
“As is the world,” said the judge. He was quiet for a moment, his fingernail digging into one of the unskinned pistachios. Bahman too played with his green counting beads, turning them over his knuckles as he waited for the judge to speak. He reminded himself to wash them tonight, after this errand was done; a film of hand grease was covering each orb. “Humor me with the story,” said the cleric.
Bahman nodded again, aware of his docility. “Medically speaking,” he said (he tossed this phrase around to amuse himself since his credentials extended no further than teeth and gums), “she has a borderline personality that’s manifesting in a kind of hysteria. She will be happier with her family. She is already collecting her things. We have no children. She’s young, and that’s something she has that I don’t.”
It seemed to Bahman that the judge would sign some papers and send him off with the same quickness and warmth with which he had treated the old man’s case. Putting aside his turban and graying robes, his unsophisticated beard, one might admit that this man’s eyes showed caring and weariness, the same weariness Bahman had felt for some time. Maybe the cleric didn’t believe in these laws he was forced to protect. Certainly he had seen enough to acquire a different sort of wisdom than the politicians and the revolutionaries possessed, all those fiery, villainous prophets who saw the world as a single droning mass to gorge on their burdensome dogmas. Clerics and politicians, as everyone knows, have no appreciation for the individual and no ear for stories; they are blind to everything that happens in the quiet hours when nothing is happening. That is what makes them dangerous.
The cleric smiled. “My friend . . . this day and age, these people . . .” He shook his head as he folded down the tops of some of the pages in Bahman’s file.
“It’s one long madness,” said Bahman, feeling like a recording of himself. For years he had offered up such cynical commentary on the world and yet hadn’t he, along with everyone else, just stood by and watched? Hadn’t he sat still, smoking from his manghal, while his children were taken away? While his dreams were kneaded down into a smaller and smaller ball, until they fit in the palm of a hand?
From the end of the corridor, something clattered, and a shrill confusion of voices spat out warnings and explanations and obscenities, all blended together like the mismatched strands of woolen yarn that his mother rolled together into mottled balls. Khanom Jamshiri ambled out of her chair, and, to be fair, why would she move any faster? The corridor was always a sweaty, loud mess of turmoil and high drama.
At this moment, the judge must have stumbled onto a page about Bahman’s previous marriages. “You have children,” he said.
“Yes,” said Bahman, keeping it vague, leaving out any dangerous words like America or Holland. “Two of them are studying abroad. Their mother took them from me in secret, and now she’s out of our reach. The other is the adopted daughter of my second wife. I have no biological claim on her. I give money, of course.”
“How old is that child?” asked the judge.
“She’s young. Eight now,” said Bahman, unable to hide his annoyance. “She was with us from three to four. Then we divorced, I remarried, and so on. None of that is related to this marriage . . . We have no disagreements. I will pay the gift.”
Though Sanaz’s family had contracted a handsome sum for her, it was true that the marriage gift wasn’t enough to sustain her forever. And his savings and investments probably were, so it was in her interest to stay married. In that case, she should have treated him more kindly. What he really wanted was to save his fortune and use it to entice his children back to Iran, where he had his beloved village and his practice and his opium. He couldn’t leave these things, but would they come, if he had a vacation home on the Caspian Sea? Or a tea farm by the mountains?
“The two who are ‘studying’ . . . aren’t they more than thirty years old?”
Bahman didn’t answer. The clatter outside grew to an untenable volume and moved closer, Khanom Jamshiri’s voice becoming one with the approaching throng.
“What is going on out there?” asked the cleric. Bahman’s lawyer, who had yet to do anything but nod and hand over papers, stuck his head outside.
“I’m confused about this other daughter,” said the judge, returning to Bahman’s documents. “Who is she? What did you want with her?”
The story was an embarrassment, because he had to confess this thing that many husbands have to confess—when you marry younger women, often someone else comes along and excites them. This can happen to anyone, irrespective of generation or politics. It happens because the world is a sweaty cave crowded with bodies clamoring and fighting to capture every good thing for themselves. Young men are the hungriest, the most brutish and unashamed before their chosen deities. And who was Bahman’s god? Science? Family? Love? The old poets, it would be fair to say, were Bahman’s prayer stone, the recipients of his regret, in those private moments when he was compelled to bend and drop his gaze, to kneel and kiss the ground. He cringed at the fact that once, at twenty, when he had long hair stained by the Ardestoon sun, when he wore bell-bottoms to class and carried a soccer ball everywhere, he too had enticed an unhappy woman from her husband’s cold bed.
Of course, he wasn’t going to tell the judge the real story, the simple dull one where everyone sins. It’s best to blame the infidelities and missteps and dark impulses, especially the ones that result in children, to people who are safely dead.
“My second wife, Fatimeh, had a sister who died of stomach cancer,” he said, and this part was true. The woman did die, husbandless, childless—her gift to her family was the clean slate she left for them to befoul.
After a lifetime in Ardestoon, Bahman knew that the art of lying in divorce court, and in fact, of all yarn weaving, is to be confusing but precise. Pile on the irrelevant details, make them circular and long, but be sure to include dates and places and anything that might rouse the listener’s curi
osity. Thus prevent the listener from asking questions. So, Bahman wove a story as dramatic and mouthwatering, as full of mud and clutter, as the kind he used to tell Niloo at bedtime decades ago. The kind he had heard thirteen times today in this courtroom:
The cancer killed Fatimeh’s poor sister fast, sparing her two-year-old daughter any memories. For a grim, hungry year, the girl lived with her wayward poet father, a handsome man with excellent white teeth who made his living as a roving office clerk, occasional setar player, extra security at underground parties, driver, and maybe even a witness for hire. One day, this cad left the girl, Shirin, sitting by the gate of a mosque with her birth certificate and a note pinned to her jacket. She obeyed her baba, not daring to unpin it or to move from the gate for three hours.
All that sad jacket business made Bahman proud—he had a touch of the storyteller in him, after all. And Shirin was indeed a sweet, simple child who followed every instruction if it was clear and didn’t deprive her of her next meal.
So . . . then the white-toothed devil disappeared into the ether like a character in a bad American film. (Bahman repeated this detail for the judge, emphasizing its awfulness, adding, “not that I’ve watched any.”) The man’s mobile was disconnected, his small house cleaned out. As far as Bahman knew, he just left the girl in the street outside the mosque, crying after him. Who knows what would have happened if a kind cleric hadn’t stumbled upon her, rolled up his sleeves, and called every agency and courthouse until he found Bahman? Oh, and this wayward poet; the girl’s real father? He was dead too, of course, and unable to testify to anything.
“Agha, you won’t believe the difficulties that were suffered,” Bahman droned.
The girl’s birth certificates turned out to be fakes, leaving no record of her. Her mother was unmarried and so she had lied to hospitals and to bureaus and everyone about her name, her daughter’s name.
On and on Bahman went, omitting no detail. The truth was this:
The white-toothed villain was indeed little Shirin’s biological father. He worked for Bahman as a temporary hygienist once. But it was Bahman’s second wife, Fatimeh, not her sister, who was the object of his lust and mother of his child. Bahman married her anyway, promising to love her and the child. He harbored such guilt over Pari’s fate, all alone abroad, and now Fatimeh needed him to care for her. Better to repay the universe. At night lying awake, he thought: here is a second family, a second chubby daughter, a second chance at fatherhood and youth and the love of a little creature with clapping hands and laughing eyes. But could he do it? Could a godless addict to opium and verse ever be a good father? He had failed once.
He paid to change the papers to establish that Shirin was not born to his new wife but adopted by her. The people in her village forgot so fast that he lost a kilo of faith in his community’s judgment and good sense and gained it all back for its capacity to love, all in one quick month.
Did the judge believe him? From the beginning, the sadness in the cleric’s voice had shamed Bahman. In his thoughts he had judged this man a thousand times today. And, in the privacy of his sitting room, all Bahman did was complain about the state of the world, about its irrational nature, the fools who run it. Maybe he would make a few changes after the divorce, however small. One should take steps toward one’s own happiness whenever possible.
The judge was just starting up again about the soul-killing nature of divorce, when the door slammed open and a confusion of bodies burst in, shouting at one another and at Khanom Jamshiri, who had gathered the ends of her chador in her hands as if she expected someone to trip over them.
Among them were Bahman’s wife, Sanaz, her sister and brother-in-law, Agha Soleimani, and three strange men in faded ill-fitting suits and work shoes caked with mud and concrete. Others seemed to have followed them in, a few security guards and another assistant, a man in a village cap. One of the men glared at him through a wooly beard with sandy patches that struck Bahman as familiar. “What is the meaning of this?” he whispered to Sanaz, whose cheeks were red from weeping and her eyes swollen to slits. From the tightness of her lips, all gathered and pressed small like a gum wrapper, he could tell that she would cause some trouble. This was his fate, after fifty-five years of trying to make a decent life: an insane woman holding him hostage. She greeted the judge with practiced words, eyes humble, all manners and borrowed modesty. Strands of her newly blonde hair peeked out through her headscarf, either a mistake, since hijabs were checked at the women’s entrance, or a typical domination of Sanaz’s good sense by her vanity. Why was she here? Only days ago she had accepted their separation; only yesterday she had promised that if he would only spend one night in a hotel, she would gather her things and go. She was a naturally fiery woman, so this calculated sort of crying, the prettiness of it, alarmed him more than all the wild rants of the last months.
“Agha, thank you for hearing me,” said Sanaz through some impressive wheezes and sobs. “I have to tell you that this man, my husband, he’s lying to you. Whatever he says is a lie.” Her sister stroked her shoulders. The pair looked so convincingly sad, exuding so much feminine helplessness and need that Bahman had to take inventory of his own many failings as a husband. What had he done?
“Your Honor, I swear,” said Bahman, “I don’t know what this is about. Sanaz joon, you know I will pay the marriage gift. You didn’t have to wake the whole city.”
The youngest of the men in dirty shoes scoffed. He was chewing sunflower seeds. Sanaz’s brother-in-law slapped his hand as he brought a kernel to his teeth.
The judge, realizing that this silly girl was Bahman’s latest wife, smirked wearily at the throng, maybe because he had respected Bahman a minute ago. “Young lady, he’s agreeing to pay the money. He has letters proving the amount—”
Sanaz interrupted the judge, causing Bahman’s stomach muscles to collapse on themselves like cheap shelves under the Sufi canon. Did she want to get herself tossed in jail? “I have these witnesses,” said Sanaz. The sunflower seed man huffed again, readying himself to spew back whatever he had been fed earlier. Now Bahman remembered the familiar man, the one with the wooly beard, one of the witnesses for hire loitering outside the courthouse. In the minute or two of muteness after grasping the depths of his wife’s malice and trickery, Bahman listened to her explain to the judge that these three men (these imposters whom the judge probably passed that very day as he entered the courtroom) had witnessed Bahman hosting rebels with green wristbands in his home, that he had welcomed them and fed them with food and alcohol and hours of Rumi worship.
Glancing sidelong at Bahman, she uttered the first truth she had spoken since arriving: that her husband believed what the Green Movement people believed (which, to be fair, wasn’t a belief, but the embarrassing truth that the people had voted overwhelmingly for Mousavi. Where is my vote? The protesters took to the streets of Tehran when an Ahmadinejad victory was announced, and each night on their rooftops they shouted Allah-o-akbar. Did Sanaz claim that they plotted some part of these demonstrations and rebellions in Bahman’s house?). “I have been seeing it myself, suffering it every week since before the election,” Sanaz explained.
“All right, collect yourself, young lady,” said the judge. “We will dig into this matter until our spoon hits the bottom.”
Bahman tried to appear composed. He wanted to raise his voice above the din, as now people were shouting. His lawyer had started to question the merit of the witnesses and they, in turn, began speaking all at once, and Soleimani pretended to be insulted. What did she hope to gain? She had come within a fox hair of implicating herself, an excessive way to punish a negligent husband.
“Your Honor, you’re an educated man,” Bahman said, trying to seem unconcerned. “You’ve seen the lies people make up to get what they want. Arrest me if you want. Send me to prison. But please grant me a divorce first.”
“Agha,” said Sanaz, then promptly correc
ted herself—what a quick study she had always been—“Your Honor . . . if you divorce us, I’ll lose my home. And this man is false and two-sided. I only wish for you to investigate.”
A sourness spread through Bahman’s stomach and traveled up to his mouth. What had she done, all night alone in his house? She had asked to collect her things and he had spent the night away. Had she changed the locks? Taken his furniture, planted evidence? The thought of the photo albums, souvenirs from Niloo and Kian’s childhood—he wanted to run home right then and check. When Niloo was in first grade, she had a pencil case from London. It was pink plastic with three white butterflies near the zipper. He had saved it in a drawer along with her schoolwork. In second grade, she wrote him a poem. It was called “Babajoon” and it had rhyme and meter; the cadences had a touch of Mevlevi verse. The child was clearly gifted. One night when she was three, he whispered this discovery to Pari. Niloo must have overheard. After that, every evening she sat at his feet and propped open his medical books to demonstrate her cleverness. She showed him her drawings, even recited dozens of children’s songs from memory. Bahman had her poem memorized and was convinced the paper still smelled like her sugary hands, always sticky from some jam jar or pastry. Once, near the end of his affections for Sanaz, he caught her reading it and he snatched it from her. She said, “I was careful,” and walked away. Now, all he wanted was to go home and open all his drawers.
The judge put two fingers to his lips and pinched off a flake of dry skin, then rubbed one eye with his palm and looked at it, as if expecting blood. “Doctor, those are some grave accusations.” His tired voice strengthened Bahman’s resolve.
“One thing doesn’t have to do with the other,” said Bahman. He glanced around at their hungry faces, ready to pick his carcass. How had he not seen them circling? What does a pretty young woman want with an old man like him anyway? She had been plunging her fingers in his bowl for years, and now that his love for her was spent, her family wanted his last shreds for themselves. Who’d want the trouble of a divorce, when they could hang on to his house, his money? They preferred to keep him married and under suspicion—no more traveling or opium or freedom, the things that made Sanaz unhappy. Better to cut him off at the knees.