Brides of Blood

by Joseph Koenig

  “If I were pretending,” Darius said, “would your intercession have been required to save me from death?”

  “Crimes worse than yours have been forgiven. That you and Farmayan were members of the same agency is irrelevant. He was a torturer—you hunted foreign spies. Compromise was a way of life in those days, too.” Hormoz clacked his beads loudly, and started another count of thirty-three repetitions. “The years before the Revolution made for few heroes. God knows you were one. Allow the ayatollahs to use you, to sing your praises as one of the former elite, who, having seen the error of his ways, eliminated an enemy of the believers, and made himself valuable to the Islamic Republic.”

  “Now is not an auspicious moment to announce my candidacy for sainthood.” Darius tilted the mirror for Hormoz to see swelling behind his ear.

  “The understanding by which you were reprieved hasn’t strengthened with time,” Hormoz said. “There will be nothing I can do to repair the damage if you weaken it further of your own accord. Many of the friends who assisted us before are dead now or in hiding for their own lives.”

  “My attackers had fresh complaints. A woman was murdered, and I’ve been warned off the investigation.”

  “Warned by whom?”

  “By everyone it touches. The Revolutionary Prosecutor, the Bon Yad Monkerat, even the victim seems determined that her killer not be found.”

  “How does a criminal homicide involve the Komiteh?”

  “Are you acquainted with a Bijan, who is a big shot with the Bon Yad? I’ve heard he was once a student at Faiziyeh.”

  “Bijan is a common name.”

  “He’s a common type.” The weak movement of hot air through the wind tower raised shivers across Darius’s back. “I thought he might have earned special distinction at the madreseh.”

  “Once there was a student of mine too slow-witted to aspire even to becoming a mullah. He was such a poor reader that he acquired the Qur’an in the old manner, by rote, and never inquired into the meaning of the words he parroted. He left the religious life to go into the family trade, but was no better suited for copper beating than driving the devil out of souls. Subsequently, he drifted into the army. Though he was given every opportunity, he was too inept to die bravely in battle. Praise to God, he found his niche in the Committee for the Revolution. I believe his name was Bijan—Bijan Farmayan.”

  “A close relative of the colonel’s?”

  Hormoz shrugged. “It could be they’re simply from the same clan.”

  “If you would please find out,” Darius said. “It’s not only the investigation he wants to put a stop to.”

  “Why, what else?”

  “It’s me.”

  Farib sat well back on the other bed, unable to contain her mild revulsion. When Darius stirred, she slid into bed with him without dirtying her feet on the floor. She was wearing leopard skin panties that he had bought for her at a Washington sex boutique, and seen her in once before, when she had modeled them for him at his dingy student boarding house where female guests weren’t allowed upstairs after 10:00. A year’s romance conducted mainly in museums and repertory movie houses, but not at all in the Georgetown dorm room that she shared with three religious girls, had won her a modest engagement ring, and for Darius the opportunity to make love to her with record haste. Put under notice not to expect a next time until their wedding night, he had presented her with the panties as his shy way of telling her that the relationship could not regress and go forward simultaneously. Rather than endure another semester with the hopeless roommates, she had acceded to his demands, excelling at the game of sneaking up his fire escape to spend every night together; the excitement of the break-in a reward in itself, to be savored above the desultory screwing it prompted.

  She hooked her thumbs in the elastic, and wriggled out of the leopard skin with a measure of lewdness that struck him as something she had rehearsed in a mirror. Then she tugged at the drawstring of his pajamas. As he raised his hips the room cartwheeled, and he fell back against the mattress. Farib snuggled beside him, careful of his ribs. Someone’s heart was palpitating like a frightened animal trapped between them, and the odd thing was to discover that it wasn’t his. Digging under Farib’s shoulders, he scooped her onto his body.

  “You don’t have the strength,” she said.

  Darius put her hand inside his pajamas. Farib giggled artificially, and her tongue swiped at his ear. “That’s not what I mean. The doctors said you mustn’t strain yourself.”

  “It wouldn’t be any strain, if you’d—”

  She eased him inside, devoured him, her customary dryness overcome although he’d hardly touched her. Floating on elbows and knees, anchored by pink nipples burning into his chest, she rode him as passionately as his damaged body permitted.

  What, he wondered, was going on with her? Did every man need his head cracked open in order to arouse his wife?

  “And this …” she whispered into the ear she’d licked, “is just a hint.”

  Conversation could wait—had waited forever; but, feeling her start to hold back, he said, “Of what?”

  “Of how things will be in paradise.”

  The sweat ran cold under his back.

  “In paradise everything will be as wonderful as the Qur’an promises,” she said breathlessly. “We could be together in paradise, Darius, if you’d live cleanly, and attend to your religious obligations.”

  “We’d make love into eternity?”

  “In paradise you’ll be a king.”

  “And on earth—”

  “I’ll be your houri,” she went on faster. “One of many. Everything you wish can be yours.”

  Sadly, he thought, he could not be bribed, incorruptibility one more of his faults. Had he wanted other women, he would take a second wife, a sacrament in the eyes of Farib and, possibly, God. But he desired only the wife he had, who, in her confused embrace of Islam, viewed a husband who would treat her deferentially as a threat to heavenly bliss.

  He felt himself slipping away from her. He rolled his hips, and was gone.

  “Darius? Did you hear?”

  It took every ounce of strength to shove her off him. “Paradise is giving me a headache,” he said.

  Darius was awakened by the summons of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. In the darkness he sensed that Farib’s cot was empty. Sitting up too fast, he had to steady himself against the wall. Possibly she had been right, and he was still too weak to make love to her. But he preferred to find out without agreeing to terms that had less to do with an orgiastic eternity in heaven than with her own brand of hell on earth.

  She came into the room in her white prayer chador. The callus at her hairline was livid under a gray smudge from her prayer stone of pure Mecca clay.

  “How are you this morning?” she asked.

  Pressed against the wall, he tried to look at ease. “Much stronger. Anytime you’re ready, we can leave for home.”

  “Not yet. I’ve been to Fatemeh’s shrine every day to pray for your recovery. Now that you’re feeling well, you can give thanks yourself.”

  Stronger didn’t mean he had the endurance to argue with her. He laid out a change of clothes on the bed. “Give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

  “How can you even think of going there without bathing first.” Farib kept his shoes and socks locked up in her suitcase. “You know that sexual sweat is forbidden.”

  Along with blood, urine, feces, and the touch of an unbeliever, the perspiration produced by sexual excitement was one of about a dozen substances considered ritually unclean.

  “If I was sweating last night,” Darius said, “it was because of the damn heat.”

  But he wouldn’t mind a shower. On previous visits to Qom he had felt clean only during the scattering of religious festivals when he accompanied Hormoz to the ritual bath. Now he let Farib herd him into the tile bathroom that had been installed in the ancient house since the last time he was here. The salty water mad
e for thin lather; but in fresh clothes, his hair damp against his ears, he felt as though he had shed layers of skin. Ten minutes after joining Farib outside in the predawn blast furnace, he needed another shower.

  They walked alongside the muddy bed of the Qom River close to the Faiziyeh Seminary. The streets were clogged with the maimed, the blind, and insane seeking cures at the shrine of Fatemeh, sister of the great-great-great grandson of Hussein, the seventh-century leader of the Shi’ites. Vying for the pilgrims’ trade were miracle workers who tugged at Darius’s sleeve barking their qualifications to heal his head. Religious music blared from the minaret loudspeakers that had blasted him from sleep.

  A legion of unattached women wound through the gateway in the high wall. All ages, sizes, and dialects were represented among them, and in common only the veil, and abject despair.

  “Hookers,” Darius said disgustedly in English.

  “They do nothing immoral. The holiest of men employ seegahs from time to time.”

  Darius was sorry he’d opened his mouth. In matters of religion Farib was the last true defender of the faith.

  “The Prophet gave them his blessing,” she said.

  Seegahs were temporary wives, who, in exchange for a small sum of money, contracted themselves to a man for a predetermined period. The religious laws, even those proscribing capital crimes such as adultery, came equipped each with its own legal loophole, and it was the seegah to whom the Shi’a traveler turned for companionship in a strange city. A contract might run from an hour to ninety-nine years, but the temporary wife received none of the benefits of her permanent counterparts; any children she bore had no legal right of inheritance. The sole requirement for becoming a seegah was that the woman not be “addicted to fornication.”

  In their own quarter of the courtyard were the mohalels, the seegahs’ male equivalent. A woman divorced three times by her husband was forbidden to return directly to him. Mohalels were available for a sexless one-night stand culminating in a quickie divorce that left yesterday’s bride free again to remarry her original husband.

  The courtyard was paved with old gravestones arranged around the main building of the shrine. At a shallow pool in the center of the court the pilgrims made their ritual ablutions. Farib tunneled through the mob to plunge her arms in the filthy water, and to splash some on her forehead and nose. As Darius wet his fingers, a few drops landed on his cheek. More than ever he wanted another shower.

  “I’ll see you later at uncle’s,” Farib said, and started for the women’s entrance. Darius watched her pass barefoot through an anteroom of the shrine’s golden dome. Mirrors in the ceiling of precious metals dissected her into cameos edged in silver and gold. She kissed the right doorpost of the tomb chamber, and lit a candle from another pilgrim’s stub. Swept up in the procession around the sandalwood sarcophagus, she joined her wails to the mourners’ din in the ecstasy that had eluded her the night before.

  Darius stood at the men’s entrance under the arched portal. Spotting Hormoz in his capelike abayah at the head of a group of students, he followed into a side room where Hormoz recited a prayer with the copious tears that were the mark of a famous marja. Measured against Farib’s sobs the old man was found wanting in his fervor. Darius knew Hormoz as an intellectual who tested his faith daily against the reason of a world he never had turned his back on. Farib, better educated, and Westernized, had blinded herself to the contradictions of dogma frozen in obscure, seventh-century political rancor. But her weeping was not for the sister of the eighth imam exclusively, but to be shared with the martyr from the District of Columbia, who, caught up in events she couldn’t control, had taken sanctuary in the veil.

  Hormoz clacked his stone beads while he chanted “Forgiveness” three hundred times. Snatches of prayer recalled from religious grade school came together on the back of Darius’s tongue. They dissolved there like a crumbling pill as he left the shrine, rubbing the sore spot in his chest.

  Hormoz’s house was an open hearth under the rays of the morning sun. Darius played the brackish water of the new shower against his depleted muscles. He needed a shave, but Farib hadn’t packed his razor. Using cuticle scissors, he trimmed a week’s growth to several days’ stubble, and then he cut away the dressing from his head. The wound was too sensitive to go near with his fingers. He rubbed color into the wan stripe high on his forehead, and combed wet hair over the bald patch surrounding his stitches.

  A draft of hot air blistered the skin across his shoulders. He squinted at Hormoz stenciled in the doorway against the low sun.

  “I saw you at Fatemeh’s shrine,” Hormoz said. He came down the corridor diffidently. When his wife was still alive, this part of the house had been the anderoun, the inside, or women’s area, which he seldom visited. His room was the biroun, the outside, or master’s apartment. “In your bandages you looked like a holy man.”

  “The National Police are masters of disguise.”

  Hormoz patted Darius’s rough cheek. “What disguise is this?”

  “A well man.” Darius splashed cold water against his face, and then he toweled off. “I’m returning to Teheran.”

  “Farib, too?”

  “That’s up to her. But I’ve been away from work too long.”

  “She’ll be disappointed. Ayatollah Ardebili, the former chief justice, will be at Faiziyeh this afternoon to talk about proposed changes in the laws of Houdoud and Qesas. She asked that you be allowed to sit in.”

  “What else has she planned for the period of my recovery?”

  “There are seminars every day during the month of Muharram,” Hormoz said. “And she thought you might visit Mobarakabad and other famous mosques.”

  “It’s futile to attempt to make me devout—even in my weakened condition.”

  “She knows. But it’s become clear to her that the marriage has no future so long as your lives continue in opposing directions. As it is, you’ve grown apart. The need for you to remain my nephew is not a sufficient foundation for an enduring relationship.”

  “Since one of us must change, let it be her. I’ve tried—”

  “Farib already has changed.”

  “She can change back.”

  “Do you believe that is still possible?”

  Darius borrowed more hair from his temple to conceal the white patch. “No,” he said, “not really.”

  “Grant her the divorce she wants, and the freedom to find her way.” Hormoz’s stone beads came out, and silently he began counting Allahu Akhbars. “If you feel in jeopardy not being under the protection of my name, then you must flee as so many others have. You’ve lived outside the country before. Farib agrees that was the happiest part of your life. You speak excellent English, you have an American university degree. You came back from Washington more American than Iranian in attitude.”

  Darius wanted to interrupt, but deferred to the older man.

  “You don’t see yourself as others do,” Hormoz went on adamantly. “To believe anything is possible if you set your will to it, to place confidence in your judgment above all others, these are not Muslim traits.”

  “I didn’t need America to teach me to be the way I am.” Darius could not contain himself. “From childhood I thought I would fit in comfortably there. But as an Iranian, as myself, not as a forced convert to a secular religion with a different set of uncompromising demands.”

  “Certainly you don’t fit here. It will be easier for you in the United States, or Britain, or anywhere in Europe for that matter. I’ve asked myself often why you haven’t emigrated up to now, and concluded it was for the sake of your marriage. That will be of no consideration any longer.”

  “You’re too quick to credit me with selflessness,” Darius said. “When you were enumerating the baggage that always travels with me, there’s one item you left out.”

  “What is that?”

  “Which land would open her doors to a murderer convicted and sentenced to death under the laws when Iran was not
regarded as a pariah nation? Everything that was said about me at the trial was true. I am a ruthless killer with few qualms about destroying my perceived enemies. Why else would the ayatollahs have spared me? Who better than they can sympathize with that philosophy? There’s not a country on earth that will offer me a safe haven, no country wiser than this one.”

  “All the more reason to use the Revolution to preserve your life,” Hormoz said. “I’m an old man; you can’t take cover behind my reputation forever. I may die at any moment.”

  Darius filled a cup from the salty tap, and toasted Hormoz with a sip. “A long life to you, dear uncle,” he said. “A very long life.”

  5

  THIRTEEN STRIPES OF RED and white were painted on the doorstep of a cinder block house off Shush Avenue, the border of the southern slums. White stars of David alternated with the hammer and sickle in a square corner of blue. Someone in waffle-sole shoes had stamped all over the stripes, while the paint was wet; foot traffic had worn away most of the blue. “Walking on the enemy” was casual warfare in the patriotic quarters of South Teheran.

  Rocking on his heel, Darius vaulted over the flag. His momentum carried him into a hallway in which a trail of burned flashbulbs tapered into blackness along a bare floor. From where he stood he saw Ghaffari huddled in a closet with Hamid, the young criminalist, and listened to them cursing in the dark.

  “Shut the damn door,” Ghaffari shouted. “You’re spoiling the film.”

  “I didn’t know,” Darius said.

  “What? It’s you?” Ghaffari backed out of the closet holding a camera that was strapped around Hamid’s neck. Shading his eyes, he sized up Darius. “You don’t look the worse for wear.”

  “I’m fine.” Darius stared past him into the dim rear of the house, where uniformed officers had given up any attempt at looking busy. “Fine,” he said again, cutting short Ghaffari’s diagnosis. “Where are they?”