by Salar Abdoh
But she also had to be even more careful of what she wrote now. The cat-and-mouse game had entered a new stage. Ahmad had had an operational name, for instance. Everyone had taken one on after things became more serious. But should she dwell on that? She didn’t know. It was tricky. Even trickier was the idea of Ahmad Fard having been to their house at all. That would mean her mother and father knew about him. Her confession then had to steer clear of their house at all costs:
I met Ahmad Fard for the first time at a headquarters meeting during the new year. I had gone there with Ali, my brother. Ahmad Fard talked to everyone, including me. Then I found out he was an engineer and had gone to the same university that my brother went to. I can’t even say for sure if Ahmad Fard was his real name. I saw him at all the later meetings I attended as well. He was always very serious. I was never sure which branch of the organization he was responsible for. Honestly, I don’t have a good idea of the organization’s hierarchy. A little over a year ago I ran into him accidentally on the street. He paid us a visit at the house and told my parents Ali was doing all right.
Work was out of the question today. She had a headache and felt like throwing up from lack of sleep. She left a text message at work that she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come in. Being Thursday, the beginning of the weekend, it was only half a day at the day care center anyway; they could do without her.
She stared at that laptop screen. It was time. His e-mail address sat in front of her. She figured it wasn’t necessary to write anything out of the ordinary. She’d cut to the chase. She’d tell him she wanted to see him for old time’s sake. And what should she tell her therapist about this new development in her life? Should she even mention it? Probably not. Her therapist wasn’t keen on the idea of sudden decisions.
Greetings. I am Fariba Tajadod. Ali Tajadod’s sister. I hope you remember me. A recent piece of unfortunate news on television made me do a search on the Internet and I managed to find your contact information. I hope you don’t mind. I would like to see you, if possible. But in case you don’t remember me, I can write again and give you further information about myself. Though I am fairly sure you will know who I am. Thank you.
p.s. Finding out just now that you are alive made me very happy. Truly.
She sat staring at what she had written. Maybe she should keep it as a draft and send it another day. No, now was the time to do it. She clicked so hard on the mouse that it hurt her index finger. Then she jumped up and started pacing around. Deep breath! Get out of the house, Fariba. She had to hit the streets before she went stir-crazy. She should get in touch with her therapist. That’s what she should do. She’d often told her therapist how she lived in two worlds, but she had never said a word about Ahmad Fard and why he contributed so much to that feeling. There were things you could simply never talk about. Even in therapy. And that man, Ahmad Fard, had become the dead bolt across her mouth a long time ago. She had thought she was reprieving his life by saying as little as she could about him at the interrogations, giving him a chance to make a break for it, or else die a noble death—like Ali and so many others.
A noble death was the key; that was what she’d imagined for him. Cyanide, grenade—whatever it took to do himself in and save others. She could not imagine anything less for a man of Ahmad Fard’s stature. Which was why until last night he had been lying in some unmarked grave that no one, least of all Fariba, was ever supposed to discover. But now this convenient illusion, too, was finally over and suddenly all of the many dead, every last one of them, were up and about and marching in front of her with a vengeance, asking her the same question: What about Ahmad Fard? Why is he not with us?
She drove aimlessly. Or so she thought at first. But before long she was staring at the outside barriers of Evin Prison at the foot of the mountains in the far north of Tehran. The area had changed so much since those days. So much had been built in this part of town. And with every building frenzy so much had been buried and forgotten.
Ahmad Fard . . . he was a part of all this, his life having merged into the very fabric of lies and ridicule that was the end result of three months of interrogation. Brother Amir had only been toying with her all that time. They’d all been toying with her, as they already seemed to have mounds of confession from none other than Ahmad Fard himself, written no doubt in his impossibly neat handwriting. He’d told them everything. Even the operational name that he himself had given her, “Leyli.” She was dumbfounded. In her mind, at first, she put it to his trying to protect her, to show the men questioning him that Fariba Tajadod was not someone they should worry about at all. She was not a threat, just a teenage girl who ate and slept and worried about her brother and didn’t have the kind of discipline that a true guerrilla needed to have. What Ahmad Fard had not written about, of course, was her love for him, because that was the one thing she always kept to herself. So the day when Brother Amir finally laughed past her blindfold and disclosed how worthless she had really been to the “cause,” she felt an utter emptiness: three months of cat-and-mouse for nothing. They’d already had all the answers. They already had Ahmad Fard. And if he had written about her—even if it was only meaningless stuff—what of the others who were more important than her? What else had he written? Whom had he given away and to what extent? Ahmad Fard hadn’t died that noble death after all. No cyanide or grenade for him. Rather, they would probably just kill him here in Evin, she’d imagined.
Maybe there was still some nobility in that.
Unless he gave everything away. Unless he sang like a lark for them and didn’t stop singing and betraying people until they commuted his death sentence to some jail time and a slap on the back of the hand.
Back at home Fariba made straight for the laptop. There was a reply.
A warm hello to you, dear Fariba. I too am so glad that you as well are alive. I am on a trip until late Friday. I can see you Saturday morning at my office. Say about 11 AM.
There was an address. Even a telephone number. He remembered her, obviously. What else did he remember? And what had he willfully forgotten?
She did more searches online until she came upon a video link of him at some industrial seminar in Istanbul. At first when she clicked the link she shut her eyes and just listened to him speak for a while. It was him, all right. That same voice of pure command and total control. What was he saying? It didn’t matter. She opened her eyes and was astonished. Photos could be deceiving, but even on video he’d barely changed at all. Some gray hair on the side, making him look more distinguished. Otherwise it was the same Ahmad Fard. You couldn’t mistake him for anyone else.
Two days left until Saturday.
She went to the mirror and stared at herself for a long time. A woman, alone, with more white hair than Ahmad Fard. Some age lines under her eyes, though not too bad. But her lips had long lost that freshness of youth. Smoking had seen to that. She also noticed her eyebrows were all over the place lately. Maybe she could pay a quick visit to that chatty makeup girl who worked near Vanak Circle. She was good with eyebrows, but she talked way too much.
She heard the ding of her cell phone by the laptop. It was Maryam with a text message: You better not cancel on the party tonight. AGAIN! She hadn’t forgotten about the party, but had decided she wouldn’t go. Now she changed her mind. Why not? She’d drink a little and get herself out of herself. Maybe she’d dance. She and Maryam would dance next to each other and her friend would give her that look of utter disbelief that appeared on her face once every six months when Fariba decided to dance for five minutes at one of these Thursday-night parties.
I’ll see you there, don’t worry, she wrote back to Maryam. Then she started digging around the bathroom for her eyebrow trimmer. It wasn’t anywhere to be found, but she did come across a sharp little cutter-blade. The blade was not for trimming; it was for loneliness. Every solitary woman and man in Tehran probably had a cutter like this that they kept for those times when enough was enough. But cutting one’s
wrist was inefficient, unlike exploding oneself with a grenade or biting on a cyanide capsule. Even with the cyanide you could not be sure. She recalled Mahbubeh, a girl in her cell block who had bitten on the capsule, but they’d managed to catch her in time and bring her around. There was nothing worse than being saved after you chewed on the poison, because then they assumed you had to know some real secrets to have taken extreme measures like that. They saved you and then the real nightmare began.
* * *
That night the party had more than its usual share of the city’s literati. For a minute she thought about turning back, going home, and having a quiet night to herself. She saw Maryam in the kitchen chatting with the host, a blue-eyed woman who acted in TV soaps, wrote poetry, considered herself a painter and a photographer, and lately was supposed to be working on a novel which, undoubtedly, would win a bunch of prizes. She even had a business card where she mentioned all the things she did. Except, Fariba thought matter-of-factly, she didn’t do any one of those things well. But who cared? People came to these parties to get shit-faced drunk, dance, flirt, sleep with each other’s wives and husbands afterward because they were supposed to be intellectuals, and then repeat it all next week and next month and all the months and years after. The same people. The same parties. And the same infidelities.
But tonight, Fariba at last decided, she’d go ahead with her original intent: she’d lose herself in that crowd. She went to the liquor table and poured herself some arrack. And when Maryam joined her she drank more and managed to actually hold her own with her friend for the next two hours.
“Well, you’re a surprise tonight,” Maryam said at some point after they’d been dancing for a half hour straight.
Fariba stopped dancing all of a sudden. She wasn’t sure if she should say anything about what she’d discovered yesterday. She stood there immersed in the din of music and the dancing bodies around them, looking uncertainly at her friend.
“Well?” Maryam said. “Out with it.”
She brought her lips close to Maryam’s ear. “Ahmad Fard is alive.”
“What did you say?”
“I’ve found him . . . I’m sorry, I think I upset you.”
“No, no. Just, well, it’s a shock. I mean . . . how come he’s alive? And why and how did you find him?”
Fariba explained while Maryam kept shaking her head. They had slowly made their way to a corner where there was less music and people.
Maryam asked, “What kind of a man is he now?”
“The same, I think. Has his own engineering firm. Goes around giving speeches a lot. Writes articles. About all sorts of things. Basically he’s still being Ahmad Fard. I can’t believe we didn’t run into him at one of these parties before this.”
“Fuck him!”
“I wrote to him. Made an appointment to see him.”
The shock came back to Maryam’s face. “Why would you do that?”
“Unanswered questions.”
Maryam scoffed. “Good luck with that. It’s hard to fathom why they didn’t kill someone of his importance. Then again, how many upper-echelon types like him do we know who bought their own lives at the expense of the rest of us? Am I right or am I right?”
“They weren’t all like that.”
“But more than a few of them were.”
“Yes,” Fariba muttered resignedly, “more than a few of them were.”
Maryam threw her hands up. “Oh, the hell with it. Let’s not ruin our night over this.”
“Do we have any nights that are not already ruined?”
“Stop this gloom right now! Tonight I’ve seen you drink and dance. And it’s a beautiful thing to see for a change.”
“I don’t know what came over me.”
“Ahmad Fard, maybe?” Maryam smiled and pulled on Fariba’s arm. “Forget that traitor. Let’s go dance some more.”
Fariba pulled back. “Wait!”
Maryam turned to face her again. “What?”
“Do you want to come with me to see him?”
“Are you kidding? I’d only shoot him.”
“With what?”
“God! I’m kidding. All right. We’ll go see him together. I wouldn’t want you to go there alone, anyway.”
“I’ll text you his address. It’s off Villa, a few blocks south of Saint Sarkis Church. Saturday morning. Eleven o’clock. Meet me nearby, let’s say at Café Lord, a half hour before that. We’ll walk from there.”
Maryam nodded. “All right. Can we dance now?”
* * *
She spent most of Friday trying to recover from a hangover. She barely left her bed and had all day to imagine tomorrow morning when she’d come face-to-face with Ahmad Fard again. His office was just a few blocks away from the house she’d grown up in—the house that Ahmad Fard had stayed in for six months all those years ago.
How would she comport herself tomorrow at his office? She probably had to deal with one of those stuck-up secretaries first. The ones with the nose jobs and voices like a cat’s meow. The girl would make her sit while she called Dr. Fard’s line. She’d have to make sure not to make any nervous movements. Then what? When the secretary finally guided her to Ahmad’s office, what would be the first thing he’d do? Would they shake hands? Miss Tajadod, I am so pleased to see you. Is that what he’d say? Or would he call her Fariba? Or even “Leyli,” that needless operational name that he himself had given her. She had a lot of things to ask him. But maybe she’d start with how his life was. Are you happy? Do you sleep well at nights? Do you ever think about those black years? Do you think about all the friends and comrades we lost? Do you still believe that everyday life should be sacrificed for some greater cause, like a revolution? Or are you too just another hostage of day-to-day existence like the rest of us small people in this world?
Maybe she’d get tongue-tied and not utter a single word. It wasn’t impossible that could happen. But even if she had to get drunk again to be able to speak her mind, she’d do it. Thankfully, Maryam would be with her. Or would she? Now she could no longer imagine Maryam being there tomorrow. Actually, she shouldn’t have told Maryam anything. That was stupid of her. Because, well, there was a storm inside her that only Ahmad Fard could address, and for that she needed to be alone with him. She wanted to tell him about her nightmares of going back to prison. The sound of the last bullets delivered to this or that prisoner. The sound of the names of the women who were called one by one to present themselves for their own execution. She wanted to tell him how she’d tried but still could not bury the past. But also . . . this: how glad she was that she never killed in the name of revolution. That no one’s blood was on her hands. But what of her brother? What of Ali? She had lived three decades with this one thought: what if before dying Ali had killed others? Would Ahmad Fard be able to tell her the truth about that? Or would he feed her another one of his old sound bites—Fariba, war is war and freedom has a price.
This Friday hangover was the worst she’d had in years. There was always a price to pay, wasn’t there? Ahmad Fard, I have had to pay the biggest price because of you. You changed the course of my life. And my brother’s life. You are my ancient love who never knew what was in my heart. And today I’m a middle-aged woman with a trunkful of regrets and what-ifs. No, I don’t want to recover that past. There’s nothing left to recover. I just need some information. And a commander like you always had the information, right? What did you do with all that information? Serve it lock, stock, and barrel to your interrogators? Is that what you did? People like you always talked about dying for the cause. And yet here you are: alive! What does that say for the rest of us? That we were all your cannon fodder?
She stayed up most of the night and the hangover stayed with her. She wished she had just one cyanide capsule left from those days. No doubt its expiration date would be long over, but still she wanted to take it to Ahmad Fard and see if he’d have the balls to at least put it in his mouth, even if he didn’t sink his teeth into it.
Of course he wouldn’t. Instead he’d probably say something like, Oh come, Fariba, get over it. All us Iranians experienced these things back then. You need to find the peace within yourself.
People like that always had something to say about reaching peace within yourself. She’d give him peace all right. She’d finish him. Better yet, she’d finish herself.
She lit a cigarette and searched for the cutter she’d found earlier. Maybe there was a way to do it efficiently with a blade after all. Cut up and down rather than sideways. She found the blade on the ledge of the bathtub where she’d left it earlier. She kept the bathroom door open. After all these years since leaving prison she still got claustrophobic from closed doors and small spaces. Wasn’t that funny? She wanted to kill herself and was still afraid of a closed door! She was afraid of death too. But she was also numb. In fact, suddenly the roller coaster ride of the past couple of days was over. She stood under the shower in her clothes and turned the water on for a few seconds. Then she made a cut on her wrist. Nothing deep. Just enough for some blood to come out. It felt ridiculous. It was as if a bee had stung her. She dropped the blade into the tub, grabbed the end of her shirt, pressed it over the cut, and left the bathroom.
On her bed she sat staring at the fast-approaching daylight. The sting from the cut made her aware of her body for the first time in days. She felt weak and dizzy. She pulled a sheet over herself, closed her eyes, and let go.
When she woke up she felt even worse than before. She noticed the trails of blood on the sheet and was disoriented for a minute. Now she dragged herself in front of the TV and searched for one of those classical music stations. Mozart’s “Requiem in D Minor.” Seemed appropriate enough this morning. Slowly her wits were coming together. The dampness in her clothes brought on a sudden chill and she felt a grogginess that kept her from being able to move around easily. The cell phone was on the kitchen counter. One missed call and a message from Maryam: “You’re not answering. I’ll just see you at 11 at his office. I can’t make it to the café before that. So don’t come earlier.”