Tehran Noir

by Salar Abdoh

  Her father had wanted a straight answer to a straight question. But Ahmad Fard’s composure would not be shaken. Calmly he answered, “The experience of revolution is something new for all of us. Everything is possible.”

  She remembered how Ali would barely look at their father as the two young men left the house for the meeting. That had been the beginning. And the end.

  A life of empty chores—that was what she’d been left with ever since coming out of prison. She’d been let out of jail exactly a quarter-century ago, twenty-five years of running errands to keep herself busy and not think about the dead. Ahmad Fard had told them, “We have to sacrifice ourselves so that the people of this country will have peace, so that there’ll be justice, so that there won’t be hunger anymore, not even sadness.” From that first day that she’d met him at their house, until almost two years later when he showed up again suddenly and stayed hidden there for six months, an unbearable ache had taken hold of her.

  Afterward in jail, the interrogators told her that Ahmad Fard had been finally executed. But when they released her a few years later, forcing her to have compulsory weekly meetings with a handler, it was hinted that Ahmad Fard might still be alive. She didn’t believe it. Yet information was a one-way street. It had to go from you to them and not the other way around. So she’d never found out anything more. If Ahmad Fard was really alive, did he know what finally happened to her brother? There had been a girl in her cell block who always said she’d kill herself if she found out Ahmad Fard was dead. There had been a lot of girls who felt that way about him.

  And they were all dead today. Ahmad Fard was not.

  * * *

  Seven in the morning and not a wink of sleep yet. All night she’d weighed Ahmad Fard’s guilt and innocence. She was back to a summer day of a lifetime ago. After months of having no news of him, Ali was suddenly at the door. Fariba was so happy to see her brother that she’d hung onto him with both hands and would not let go. Their mother and father were in the kitchen preparing a feast together for their son’s return. Ali had whispered to her, “Things are really bad, Fariba. There’s nowhere to stay. We’re getting caught right and left.”

  “What about Ahmad?”

  “Forget him. No one knows where he is. Some say he pulled a grenade on himself before they got to him. Some say he left the country. Others say he’s in jail.”

  “But if he was in jail, they’d have come for us too by now. No?”

  “True. None of us must get caught alive. You mustn’t forget. Whoever gets caught will eventually give ten more people away. It’s like dominoes. Fariba, listen to me.” He’d held her and looked hard into her eyes. “If you have a chance to leave this country, do it. Don’t stay here. I doubt I’ll be alive long. I took a big risk coming here today.” Ali was breathless, talking fast, trying to get it all in before their parents came out of the kitchen. It was then that she realized this was probably goodbye. He’d continued, “You’re not that involved, which is good. But you need to know what’s going on out there. I see death in front of me every day. There’s no longer any turning back for people like me. Do you remember Turkish Saeed? They identified him over at Laleh Park. I was supposed to meet him over there. So I took Jalil’s daughter with me. I figured that way I’d look like a regular father out for a stroll with his child. I’d barely gotten to the park when there was a blast. Saeed saw them coming for him and pulled the pin before they could snatch him. I held the child close to me. She was screaming. Everyone was. I came out on the other side of the park and bought her some ice cream. If Saeed hadn’t acted fast, they’d have caught me too. And with the kid with me, there was no option of blowing myself up. Are you getting the picture now?”

  She had gotten the picture, yes. The last memory she had of that day was of their father yelling at Ali to stop his death wish, their mother weeping, and Ali with his head hung low putting an apple in his pocket and shutting the front door gently behind him. He had said to her, “You know, sister—one day somebody has to write about these days and how we all lived it. What I’m really afraid of is dying for nothing. I’m afraid that no one will ever know what we did and why we did it. Are we martyrs or traitors to this country? Was all this for nothing? Pray for me!”

  She had prayed. For Ali and for all the people from those days. In fact, she was still living in that time. The anger of it crushed her sometimes. But so did the love.

  Now she had to get ready for work after a night with no sleep. Her job was usually a breath of fresh air for her. For several years now she’d been working at a day care run by one of her friends from college. Fariba was good at the job and loved being around kids; it made her forget herself, made her forget everything. People told her she should open her own day care. But she always gave a thousand reasons why she couldn’t. She told her friends that she’d looked into it and found out they wouldn’t give a day care permit to a former political prisoner. But it wasn’t true. It was more like she simply didn’t want to own anything. Ever. She couldn’t. Everything for her was at an end point. It had been like that for a long time. As if she didn’t want to leave any trace of herself in this world. Nothing that could ever prove she had once lived. Which was why she never finished anything. Piles and piles of half-written stories. Projects that started well but were set aside. Small businesses that she’d open and then hand over to others who’d run with it.

  That’s right, for twenty-five years she hadn’t fought for anything. Except her friendships. She worked hard at those. It was important to her to maintain them. In truth, the only thing she felt she owned in this world was her telephone book. Later on, when cell phones appeared and she started entering numbers into the gadget, she realized she was going to have upward of eight hundred names in there. She dreaded losing even one of these people. But what of the names who were already lost? Ali, Turkish Saeed, Sudabeh, Mohammad, Rasul, Homa . . . That would be a fairly long list too, though thankfully nowhere near as long as the people who were alive. Sometimes she wondered how the dead would judge her if they saw her now. Would they be disapproving because the living ones had gone “soft” and lost their revolutionary fervor? What, for instance, would they think of someone like her best friend Maryam?

  She had met Maryam at a party a few years ago and they’d become fast friends because, unlike everyone else at the gathering, they’d both been intimates of the cell blocks and the solitary confinements and the interrogations. But Maryam always insisted, “I crave to simply lose my long-term memory and never get it back. What I want is to have fun, fun from now until the day I die.” Back in the day, they had executed Maryam’s sister while letting Maryam go on living. Had that been another form of torture? You let some of the people go so they would remember? And could Fariba really blame Maryam if all she wanted to do these days was drink until she was sick and dance until she had to be carried from the weekend parties at the end of the night?

  So Maryam had become the sister Fariba never had. If only she could be more like Maryam! Carefree. Not so fixated on the past. Still, even Maryam had mentioned Ahmad Fard’s name that one time: “Do you remember that guy? Of course you do. How could anyone forget him? My little sister was one of his charges in the organization. One time there were a whole bunch of weapons that needed to be transported. They just needed the stuff stashed for one night in a safe place. So they chose our place. Well, that same night the militia broke into our house out of the blue, ransacked it, found the weapons, and took me and my sister away. Somebody had to have told them about it.”

  Those overnight raids, she remembered, were a lot more nightmarish than daytime ones. When they broke into your house at night, it was as if you had been devoured by the darkness. No turning back. Fariba’s own turn had come one midnight. They hadn’t even bothered knocking; they just broke in. Three armed men. Took them two hours to search the place. They’d taken everything, every single photograph and piece of writing she possessed. Her mother and father standing there in shock and
Fariba telling the men that she had her final language exam in the morning. The man told her to not worry; she’d be back in no time. “No time” had turned into five years.

  She recalled every minute of that drive in the cream-colored Chevrolet from her home to Evin Prison. They had told her to put her head down on her knees so she wouldn’t see where they were going. But it wasn’t exactly difficult to guess. Then at some point one of the men had remarked, “Almost there, we’re at the ‘turn of repentance.’” Everybody knew what that meant; it meant the final road that ended at the dreaded Evin cells—it meant the place where loyalties went out the window and all secrets would eventually be pulled out of you.

  Ahmad Fard. It all came down to him, she thought. Was it in Evin that he had started giving names away? Or had he started singing for them even earlier? So many young men and women had fallen under the sway of that tall, handsome leader. But how many of them had actually lived under the same roof with him for six months as Fariba had?

  * * *

  It had happened on an early autumn morning. She was walking down her street when a hand had grabbed her shoulder and directed her to the house, telling her to look only straight ahead. Her heart had dropped. Ahmad Fard, here! When they’d entered the house, her mother had almost collapsed from the shock of seeing him; while her father, in a voice filled with bitterness and rage, had pointed his finger at Ahmad.

  “Where’s Ali? I didn’t raise a son so that he would turn into a killer.”

  “Ali is fine. He cannot be seen right now.”

  “So it is not all right for my son to come to his own house but it is all right for you to come here?”

  “Mr. Tajadod, Ali is known in this neighborhood. If he shows up, they’ll be at your door in no time. But me, they don’t know. I just need a place to hide for a few days and then I’ll be on my way. But if you are not comfortable with that . . .”

  Of course he’d stayed. What else was there to do about it? Fariba’s mother even insisted. In a way, Ahmad Fard was the last thread they had to Ali. It was better to have him here than not have him.

  And so a few days had turned into a few weeks, and then into more than six months.

  It was six months of strangeness and quiet love on Fariba’s part. Ahmad Fard would of course never know her feelings for him. He would have called it bourgeois, antirevolutionary, or just plain silly. He spent his days exercising, praying, helping around the house, and telling Fariba that she needed to build her character and become strong.

  “How does one build character?” she’d asked him.

  “Start by reporting on your day. Try to find your weaknesses. Write everything down and show it to me.”

  “But there’s nothing to report. I don’t do much of anything.”

  “That’s just it. If there’s nothing to report, then something is wrong with your character. You need to become strong. Our revolution needs toughness, stamina.”

  During that winter, the most important mujahedin leader who was still at large or hadn’t escaped the country was finally gunned down. The order from up above had always been clear-cut: kill yourself before they catch you. But when it came down to it, a lot of the leaders had chosen jail rather than death. And by doing so they’d gone on to net some of their unsuspecting subordinates for their captors. She could see the frustration in Ahmad Fard’s face during those days. And the arguments between Ahmad and her father were getting worse by the day. Her father, who wrestled constantly with the fury of a man who’d lost a child over nothing, had asked Ahmad, “You people still think taking up guns is the answer?”

  “The path we are on requires blood to be spilled.”

  “Whose blood? Yours or the twenty-year-olds you’re sending to the gallows?”

  That night over dinner Ahmad finally announced that he’d be leaving in a few days.

  And so he did. Then, in the summer, word finally came that Ali had been killed. A note was quietly slipped under their door reporting Ali’s “martyrdom.” They wrote that he had bitten on the cyanide capsule and blown himself up at the same time so as to make sure he got the job done.

  How would they know? Fariba had wondered even back then. If someone blows himself up, how do you know he bit on the cyanide too? They had written in the note about “martyrdom for the sake of freedom.” It was the kind of language Ahmad Fard used to perfection. Yet it did nothing for Fariba’s mother who began her downward spiral from that day on, and her father who went completely mute for the next decade until his death.

  On the day Ahmad was leaving she had finally told him she was no longer interested in working with the organization. She had never taken up guns; she was only a sympathizer. Now she didn’t even want to be that. She’d had enough. She had to look after her parents.

  His answer had been predictable, typical Ahmad Fard, typical mujahedin: “Fariba, having a family is only good when everyone can have one. How is justice to be carried out if everybody thought like you? Think again. Do you really believe you’re more entitled than a simple laborer?”

  There was nothing to say to that. How did you argue against ready-made sentences? In the long run, she thought she had forgiven him, just as she’d forgiven her interrogator at Evin. Nowadays she thought of “Brother Amir”—the fellow who had put all those questions in front of her when they brought her in—as just another soldier, another clerk doing his job. All that time answering the questions of someone you never got to see. The blindfold they had you wear was actually the perfect prop for forgetting.

  Her interrogation had begun with Ahmad Fard’s name. She had read the question several times, not knowing whether she was supposed to write about an Ahmad who was dead or one who was still alive. All she wrote in response was, He was my brother’s friend.

  But both Fariba and her interrogator knew there was no longer a brother in the picture. Ali was dead. Which meant Ahmad had to be alive. The nature of the question made her almost sure of that. After an hour, when her interrogator came back and her blindfold was slipped back down, he asked her, “That’s it? That’s all you know about Ahmad Fard? That he was your brother’s friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we start again,” Brother Amir had snapped. “If you want to stay alive, start writing. Don’t leave a word out about Ahmad Fard.”

  What was she to write? Ahmad had taught her to write the most ordinary stuff if she ever got caught, pretend she was just a teenage girl interested in school and getting married. If they made her name names, which they would, she should name those who had already died. She should do her best to waste the interrogator’s time. That way she would be buying time for others who were still not caught. Some things were not too hard to write. But writing about the dead was.

  When it was time, she began with her brother: They told us Ali was dead. They told us there was no body to recover. They told us not to hold a funeral for him.

  It was a cat-and-mouse game between her and her interrogator, Brother Amir. But it was also the truest part of her confession. Writing about those who had been killed or blown themselves up or bitten on the cyanide didn’t cost the dead anything; it only cost her. It was a list that could fill a couple of pages—Abbas, Nahid, Mehyar, Nasser, Reza, Ebrahim, Lida, Shahin, Roya, Simin . . .

  At sixteen I joined the student wing of the mujahedin organization. My brother Ali introduced me. I don’t consider myself a member of the mujahedin, but a sympathizer. I did not contribute much, because my parents were very much against it.

  I never carried a gun. I haven’t had paramilitary training. The only thing I learned was to make Molotov cocktails. I joined some of the demonstrations, but a lot of us didn’t realize there would be armed conflict. They’d only told us to bring newspapers and matches, so that if teargas was thrown at us we’d be able to build fires and protect our eyes from burning. This was simple self-defense. It didn’t harm anyone.

  I have not had any contact with the organization since last year. With my brother’s disap
pearance and the death of my friends, all my contacts were severed.

  She had handed the paper to the guard outside her cell to give to Brother Amir. An hour later she had her blindfold pulled back down and the cell door was violently thrown open.

  “You’re writing homework for us? Is this high school? You’re playing us? You didn’t even write a word about this fellow Ahmad Fard. Until you write something real, you can stay here and rot. I keep giving you the benefit of the doubt because of your age, but it looks like you’re bent on destroying yourself.”

  Ahmad Fard had also taught them to never come out of the role they’d created for themselves under interrogation. Killing time was important. But why should Fariba kill time? All of her time had already been killed.

  The next morning Brother Amir held a piece of paper in front of her on top of which Ahmad Fard’s name was written in large letters. There was no getting around it now. Ahmad Fard was the closest person in the world to her, and the person she knew least. It was a one-way intimacy. Ahmad Fard was important, both for her and for her interrogator.

  So her strategy turned to assuming Ahmad Fard was dead. It was the safest way to approach this part of her confession. She realized that imagining Ahmad dead was not too difficult for her. How could someone like him be alive when so many lesser people in the organization had died? She remembered how easily Ahmad Fard had always spoken of necessary suicide. His eyes shone when he mentioned pulling a grenade’s safety pin or biting on the cyanide. He became more beautiful than ever talking like that. More serious. More complete. She told herself if her brother Ali, who’d had the softest heart in the world, could do it, then it must be as easy as one-two-three for someone of Ahmad’s caliber. Ahmad who was one of the theoreticians of martyrdom for the cause of revolution.