by Dalia Sofer
Still, I had a job to do. “The police report indicates that Z was in your VCR,” I said. “Are you planning an insurrection?”
She laughed. “An insurrection?” she said. “Aren’t you people revolutionaries? You above all should appreciate the film. Besides, it’s set in a fictional country.”
“Where did you get the bootleg?” I said.
“I found it on the street,” she said, averting her gaze.
“What about the bootlegs of the Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam in your stereo? You found those on the sidewalk, too? You must be a very lucky gleaner.”
She said nothing. It was past midnight and a sudden fatigue overwhelmed me. As though trapped in an infinity mirror, I saw before me multiplying reflections of my father in his suit and necktie, alternately facing me and looking away. Z, I remembered, had caused a stir in my own household when I was a boy. In 1969, the year the film was released in America and Europe, my father, recently employed by the Ministry of Culture as director of national archives, had also been recruited as a member of the Commission of Dramatic Arts, whose task, among others, was to censor films deemed offensive to religion, the monarchy, the government, the military, morality, and national unity. Not yet hardened by the ludicrousness of the Commission, my father had found the deliberations over the banning of Z particularly distressing. “It’s a very good film,” he would say, mostly to himself, at the dinner table or during a drive. “How can I, in good conscience, ban it?” My mother would remain silent during these solo negotiations, like someone waiting for hiccups to pass. In the end the film was banned, and decades later, with a new regime and another censorship apparatus in place, I bought a bootlegged copy and encountered, at last, what my father had banished, and what I—like my father—was forced to efface all over again.
But I felt too tired to revisit any of that. So I focused instead on her confiscated camera, a Leica M6 that sat like the black box of an airplane on the desk between us.
“You know that I have to ask you to give me your film, don’t you?” I said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “You may want to, but that isn’t the same thing.”
“What’s on that film?”
“Will you believe me if I tell you?”
“Let’s say I will.”
“A series of self-portraits.”
“For what purpose?”
“To understand myself better,” she said.
“And do you?”
“What?”
“Understand yourself better?”
She looked around the room, which, except for the desk and the requisite posters on the wall of the two Ayatollahs—the original and his successor—was bare. “Allow me to photograph you,” she said. “It would be for my series.”
“You can’t charm your way out of this,” I said. “Besides, I don’t see how I would fit into your self-portrait series.”
“You are my interrogator,” she said. “And as such you have already become a part of my biography.”
“What goes on here must not be recorded,” I said.
“There was a time when what went on here was prime-time television.”
She was referring to the early days of the revolution and the videotaping of interrogation sessions, called mossāhebeh—interviews, recantations that were regularly broadcast on television.
“Weren’t you a child back then?” I said. “How do you remember?”
“There was nothing else on television in those days,” she said.
* * *
I KNEW THAT BY ASKING to take my photograph she was stoking my vanity, and slyly turning the table on me. But I didn’t care. Something about her boldness reminded me of the revolutionary I had once been. Besides, for so long I had been the chronicler of other people’s records. To be recorded felt like a kind of surrender.
She adjusted her camera and watched me through her viewfinder. I leaned back in my leather seat, my Captain Kirk’s command chair, as I always joked. Most of my colleagues, villagers with religious leanings and a second-grade education, didn’t get the reference, but a handful—those who like me had grown up watching American shows on their color televisions—appreciated it. This is how I had earned the nickname Capitān Kir—“Captain Prick”—a moniker I protested but which in truth pleased me. During lulls in the interrogation I killed time by telling stories of how my brother and I, addicts of the show, used to host Star Trek parties for the neighborhood kids, complete with Spock ears and blue-green drinks we made with grapes and a splash of blue curaçao.
I clasped my hands on my stomach but the pose felt forced. I leaned forward, my arms firm on the table, but that didn’t feel right either. “How shall I sit?” I said.
“Any way you like,” she said. “Be yourself.”
“But how can I be myself in a place like this?” I said, looking up at her, and it was at that moment that she pressed the shutter.
I watched her from across the desk. Her metallic eyeliner exaggerated the blackness of her eyes and a trace of hastily removed lipstick stained her lips, making her look like a fading Roman mosaic. She stared back at me, then bent her head, smiling and biting her lower lip. Here is a woman who knows how to look at a man, I thought. Audacity and reticence in just the right dosage. I retrieved a gold-foiled chocolate from my desk drawer and offered it to her. She took it but didn’t eat it. I got up and paced the room, unsure of what to do next. The fan on my desk spun against the summer night; a broken blade clicked at every rotation and threatened to come undone.
I stood back, enchanted with the ruby toes peeking out from her stiletto sandals; she hadn’t had time to change her shoes when the party was raided. Taking a few steps forward I stood close behind her chair. She didn’t flinch. Gently I placed my palms on her shoulders. She bent her head to the side and rested her right cheek on the back of my hand. Her skin was warm and throbbing with life. Her chiffon headscarf slipped off her hair and she let it fall to the floor. With my index finger I wiped the sweat near her temple, then I bent just a centimeter or two toward her head, which smelled of strawberries and cigarettes.
We remained like that a minute or two before I released her. “You’re free to go,” I said.
“And my friends?” she said.
“I’ll have them released, too.”
She took her camera and fixed her headscarf. But before she got up, she glanced at the dossier on my desk bearing her name (Noushin Taheri), her age (twenty-five), her address (Ziba Street), her job (associate at Anahita art gallery), the people she was arrested with (Mariam P., Shabnam S., Parissa A., Reza A., and Babak M.), where she spent her weekends (at a museum or in Park-e Mellat), her favorite café and drink (the cappuccino at Café de France on Gandhi Street), and other facts known only to her—and now to me and to the government archives. She walked to the door, but before leaving she turned around and said, with an inward smile, “Well, aghaye Mozaffarian, if you’d like to see a print of that photograph, you know where to find me.”
Twisted, like me, I thought to myself. I was thirty-seven years old and I had finally met my match.
* * *
STUCK NOW BETWEEN REGRET AND REVENGE, I held the phone and read her text over and over. “I’ll come to court,” I wrote back. “Just so I can see you.”
“I didn’t want it to come to this,” she wrote. “But Golnaz has agreed to testify on my behalf.”
“Testify on your behalf or against me?”
“Isn’t it the same?”
“Get lost,” I wrote.
And she did. All that was left was the lifeless screen, and our final exchange—the epitaph to our history together. Soon even the screen went blank.
Here I was once more, in unbounded solitude, a place I knew better than my own address. When I thought of how hard I had worked to get there, I was sorry that I wasn’t enjoying it more. I stared up at the ceiling, at the crystal chandelier glinting in the moonlight, and I heard the sound of my tired breath inside absences I had spent
decades collecting, with the same diligence and fervor with which my father once amassed his beloved encyclopedia.
3
BY THE TIME OF MY ARRIVAL, in the summer of 1960, my father had been at work on his encyclopedia for nearly a decade. If I had to associate a smell with childhood, it would be the scent of buckram and paper—not the innocuous kind found in stationers, but from moldy manuscripts piled up in every corner of his office, the largest room in our small apartment on Pahlavi Street. My mother, who still only half-jokingly called herself Monir Farahani Ed Dowleh—this last obsolete suffix a reference to her supposed aristocratic heritage—endured his mania with the pragmatism of a jockey putting up with her thoroughbred’s quirks. Though she claimed she was from old money, she had reconciled herself to the fact that having married an academic, the best she could now hope for was not wealth, but recognition from the band of university highbrows she couldn’t tolerate. Her father, Ardeshir Khan Farahani, a man with a Shah Abbas–style mustache who was our family’s supplier of French porcelain, had cut off all financial support, as he had never cared much for his impractical son-in-law, likening him to Don Quixote and calling him “Don Mozaffarian, man of Shatt al-Arab.” This moniker, a reference to the circumstances of my father’s birth, was an unconcealed attempt to estrange him: my father had been born two weeks early on a ferry crossing the contested river named “Shatt al-Arab” by our Arab neighbors and “Arvand Roud” by us. The exact spot of the birth, as the ferryman later described it, was past the juncture with the Karun but before the fork of the Tigris and the Euphrates, leaving my grandparents, who in those days lived in my grandmother’s province of Khuzestan, with a harrowing story and a stateless baby. And even though the matter was eventually resolved and a birth certificate was issued, my father, throughout his life, was branded with a fishy provenance teetering on the border of an Arab land.
To all appearances my father ignored my mother’s peacockish family and labored on his encyclopedia with the precision of a scribe, becoming, over the years, the mythical simorgh toward whom art history disciples, like Attar’s fabled birds, made their pilgrimage. In 1972, four years into his stint at the Ministry of Culture, he received an endowment from the government. He expanded his study to the apartment above ours and hired three scholars who showed up with their Samsonite briefcases every morning at seven o’clock with the fidelity of the three magi bearing gifts. I had nicknames for all three: the bumbling Frenchman with a penchant for Pierre Cardin trench coats became “Monsieur Hulot,” the stout Englishman with the bulbous nose was the “Earl of Sandwich,” and the Persian reputed to be a genius who consumed copious amounts of marzipan became “Yasser Maghz-Pahn—big-brained Yasser.”
Seven years later, when everything came to an end, M. Hulot and the Earl packed up and returned to their respective homes, but Yasser Maghz-Pahn, who maybe wasn’t such a genius after all, decided to remain because, he said, he had been only a scholar and had committed no crime. He must have forgotten that before becoming my father’s minion he had for years been a critic denigrating the artists of the Saqqākhāneh school, who integrated in their works local motifs from mythical lore, religious symbols, or objects found in the bazaars—amulets, zodiac signs, astrolabes, and even the lowly āftābeh—the toilet ewer. “Marcel Duchamp,” the eminent Yasser had written in 1964 following the Fourth Tehran Biennial, “born in the land of Molière, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, could permit himself to proclaim a urinal as art, but we, already regarded as Hajji Babas on flying carpets, can hardly afford to do so. I suggest we let the toilet ewer do what it was designed to do: wash our behinds.” The poor fool is buried in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, in an unmarked grave not far from the old prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda’s.
4
LOOKING AT ME NOW, one wouldn’t guess that I started out in this world as the kind of boy who would crouch in a corner of the kitchen, softly biting into a cookie and catching crumbs in my cupped hand. That I arranged my colored pencils according to shade—light to dark—and my books according to size, the spines aligned and facing the same direction like a field of sunflowers. That going to sleep I counted to ten to keep death at bay, and upon waking each morning I placed one hand on my heart to make sure it was still beating and the other on my penis to make sure it was still there, a habit that earned me a few slaps from my mother.
From my earliest years, I was in love with glass. I had a collection of nineteenth-century sulfide marbles—transparent globes with porcelain figures inside. My father would help me send for them from Germany through one of his art magazines. My favorite marble, the one that contained a milky snow owl, was, according to my perfectionist father, faulty, because the owl was cracked. This defect didn’t bother me; it only made me love that marble more. When one afternoon after school the marble went missing, I searched frantically, first in the vicinity of the crystal ashtray on the coffee table—where I had left it—then inside drawers and under furniture and even behind the toilet, where I discovered a ladybug, dying.
At the dinner table that evening my father confessed that having found the marble in the crease of the sofa the previous night, he had thrown it out. “The thing was broken,” he said, serving me a second helping of the eggplant stew that I had eaten under duress the first time around. I shook my head no, but my voice wouldn’t come. The memory of my chipped snow owl, now gone, made me cry with an intensity that embarrassed me. My father reached over his plate and handed me his monogrammed handkerchief. He promised to order more marbles from the magazine.
“Remember, dear boy, harmony!” he said afterward. “Without it things collapse.” He explained that to make those sulfide marbles a glassblower would heat the tiny figure at the same temperature as the molten glass globe that would encase it; even the slightest difference in temperature would cause either the marble to shatter or the figurine to crack.
I longed for harmony but didn’t believe in it. The world had presented me with too much incongruity: my father, the hermetic scholar, versus my mother, the unfulfilled socialite; my devotion to a prayer stone my uncle Majid had given me shortly before he died in a car accident, versus the stone’s complete indifference to me; the uninterrupted presence in my mind of the vanished uncle Majid, of whom I remembered only his knowing smile and his black bowler hat; and the fact that pleasant things, like the smell of burnt sugar, sometimes made me cry.
In glass I found my own deliverance. I saved used bottles and arranged them like soldiers on the bathroom windowsill, where they would catch the afternoon light and refract it back on the floor as dancing shadows. That they had once contained such remedies as pennyroyal and rosewater and marjoram pacified me. The bottles, I believed, protected me from the world.
I loved glass because it didn’t want to be defined. Was it solid molten earth or a liquid that moved so slowly that it seemed not to move at all, like the earth itself? I loved it, too, because through it I learned to see—the world appearing to me not as a smooth continuum but as a series of erratic shapes, reflected and refracted, changing color according to the time of day or the light in the sky. And I knew, besides, the heartbreak everyone experienced at the sound of shattering glass. A chipped pitcher, a splintered breakfast bowl, a shattered mirror—no other broken thing triggered such sorrow.
My father, believing that I was exhibiting the characteristics of glass, offered me a book, John Amos Comenius’s Orbis Pictus—a children’s pictorial encyclopedia from the seventeenth century—which he hoped would inject me with a dose of reality and make me more solid, less translucent. The full title was Visible World, or a Nomenclature, and Pictures, of All the Chief Things That Are in the World, and of Men’s Employments Therein. It was, said my father, the forebear to all subsequent children’s picture books, and pulling it out of his suitcase after a business trip to London, he placed it in my hand with the reverence one may devote to a prayer book. “Take good care of it,” he said, and kissed my forehead. Thinking that we might be performing some kind o
f religious ritual and hoping to live up to the moment’s gravity, I brought the book to my lips and kissed it. My father watched me for what felt like a very long time. “What is this nonsense?” he said, as he poured himself a glass of Cointreau. “Sentimentality, as Oscar Wilde observed, belongs to one who wishes to have the luxury of emotion without paying for it.”
That a book could contain the “visible world” seemed to me like an undeliverable promise. And soon I found that like all things in the visible world, this book could not fulfill its pledge: already in the second chapter there was a discussion of God, the most absent of all absentees, described as “a Light inaccessible … Everywhere and nowhere.” The accompanying drawing was nothing like the paintings of the white-bearded old men of Michelangelo and Benvenuto Tisi printed in my father’s reference books, but a sun with a triangle inside, along with letters in some undecipherable, extinct language. After an initial sense of betrayal, during which I convinced myself that I had been the victim of an inexcusable lie, I gradually came to admire the book’s lapse. Allowing the absent to enter the tyrannical assembly of the present was a silent concession by the author that the dead are not very far away, and it assured me that my own marble, with its snow owl cracked since birth, remained, despite my father’s casual murder of it, somewhere in this world.