by Dalia Sofer
* * *
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER, that time of the year when nightfall arrives with stealth in the late afternoon. In that brief, liminal space between light and darkness I headed to the garden in anticipation of my banishment. The evening was clear and there would be no rain. For this I was grateful.
I sat on the grass, under the apricot tree, which since late summer had lost its fruit. Omid joined me. “Are you scared?” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
“Do you think bābā will really make you spend the whole night here by yourself?”
I shrugged.
“Maybe there are wild animals roaming at night,” he said. “And thieves.”
“Shut up,” I said. “There are no wild animals in a city.”
“But there are thieves,” he said. “It’s too bad I never saw the train running,” he added. “I wish Uncle Majid had woken me up, too.”
My brother’s blameless face made me envy his untarnished status in the family. “Go away,” I said. “You’re a selfish idiot. All you care about is yourself.”
* * *
MY FATHER WAS, among other things, a man of his word. After dinner that night he told me to get a sweater and a blanket and head outside. My mother protested again, but he ignored her. I lingered at the kitchen table, chewing in slow motion in order to postpone the hour of my exile. “Hamid,” he said, “I am not doing this to amuse myself. I am doing it to make you understand that the world is a chaotic place, and one must learn to live by rules in order to contain it. Otherwise the descent is inevitable.” I stared at him, not understanding a word. “Will you write it down?” I said. “So I can remember.” His face softening, he pulled his fountain pen from his pocket and reached for the Pan Am matchbook near the stove. He flipped it open, and in the blank space he wrote down in a miniature script what he had said.
* * *
IN THE GARDEN I wrapped my shoulders with the blanket and stared at the moon, asking it for illumination. Something bristled against the geraniums and a stray cat appeared, his green eyes glinting in the night. I called to him, extending my hand, and he wobbled toward me on his three good legs. He was white with black patches on his face that made him look like a diminutive Batman. I placed my palm on the crown of his head and he curled up against my knee, his chest heaving. I felt sorry for all the times I had chased an animal with a water hose or disrupted an ant colony with a stone. I decided to give him a name. Pofak, I called him, after my favorite potato chip, and as I said his name I was overcome with the foreknowledge that I would lose him.
As I spread the blanket on the ground, the cat, perturbed by the commotion, hobbled away. I lay on my side, the smell of grass heavy in my nose. For some time I could see Pofak’s eyes shimmering in the night like memorial candles. In the distance an ambulance siren sounded; somewhere, I imagined, someone was dying. I thought about everything that had happened to me—the train disaster and the long day spent in anticipation of this night. And what, after this? I had arrived at a precipice, an ending that I could not name.
“Hamid!” I heard my uncle in the dark.
“Uncle Majid … I thought you would be on the train to Tabriz.”
“We’re leaving in the morning. By car. After your mother called and told me what happened, I couldn’t go. I’m sorry about all this.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“I explained to your father that I was the one who woke you up.”
“I guess you couldn’t change his mind.”
“No. Never. Not even when we were boys.”
Thinking of my father and Uncle Majid as boys was like looking through a telescope from the wrong end. My uncle sat on the blanket, poured a cup of tea from a thermos, and handed it to me. I took the tea though I didn’t want it. On a night like this I felt I should accept any offering—a moon, a cat, a cup of tea, a kind uncle.
“What was my father like as a boy?” I asked.
“He was smart, and serious. He won all the prizes. I think he always believed that he was destined for something great.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“I didn’t,” he said, removing his hat and twirling it with his finger. “I never felt I could compete with him, and I didn’t want to. I would finish my homework as fast as I could and go play. But your father … Did he ever tell you he tried to memorize the entire dictionary?”
“No. What did he do that for?”
“That was my question. I would tell him, The dictionary has one job, and that’s to remember words, so that we don’t have to.”
“Did he finish it?”
“No, he got to the letter dāl—D. He stopped when he fell in love with your mother.”
The night was getting cooler and I began wondering if my blanket would be enough. I refilled my teacup.
“Look, don’t let this incident separate you from your father.” From his pocket he pulled a prayer stone and handed it to me. “I’d like you to have this. I’ve carried it ever since I was a boy.”
“Why have you carried it?” I said.
“It’s made of earth and it has helped me stay anchored in this world.”
I held the clay stone in my palm. It was cool and light, and was engraved with some Arabic letters. “Do you pray, Uncle Majid?”
“I pray when I am so inclined.”
“Will you pray for me?” I said. “That I may survive this night?”
He placed his hand on the crown of my head, as I had earlier done with the cat. Then he removed his shoes and socks, performed his ablutions with the water hose, placed the stone on the blanket, and began praying, his body folding and unfolding in the moonlight. I knelt next to him and shadowed his gestures, but I had never prayed before and did not know the words.
My mind wandered off to an episode I had witnessed two weeks earlier, through the keyhole to my father’s study: Uncle Majid sitting stooped in a chair, and my father, standing over him, slipping into his hand a stack of banknotes. “Thank you, Sadegh…” said my uncle, as my father walked to the window, hands in his pockets. “You’re a fool,” said my father, “not to accept the position at the municipal park. It would change your situation.” Uncle Majid shook his head. “I can’t work for this government,” he said. “It’s a question of integrity, don’t you see? I am not like you.” My father turned around, his face flushed. “What does that mean?” he said. My uncle, looking down, answered, “Did you forget what you did to your friend Houshang? To work for this government one must relinquish integrity.” My father stared him down for some time. Finally he said, “What good is integrity if the price is your dignity?”
His head in his hands, my uncle, silent, began sobbing; he left the banknotes on the table and stood up.
“Take the money, you fool,” said my father. “What are you going to live on, your tulips?”
* * *
WHEN MAJID FINISHED PRAYING, he slipped the prayer stone in my pocket and lay down on the blanket.
“You’re not going home?” I said.
“I’m staying here with you,” he said, holding out his arm to form a pillow for my head.
“On the way to Tabriz,” he said as we both looked up at the sapphire sky, “there is a mountain range called Aladaglar. It’s red and yellow and copper and green, like a giant birthday cake from some fairy tale. Imagine, centuries of eroded limestone and volcanic rock have formed it. It’s one of the most beautiful spots on earth and it’s my consolation prize for enduring two weeks with your aunt’s family.”
“Uncle Majid,” I said. “Why did you marry Aunt Azar?”
“I made a mistake,” he said.
I had never heard an adult speak so frankly. No justifications, no explanations. Only an admission of a truth. I placed my hand in my pocket and held on to the prayer stone. Something warm settled against my leg—the cat had returned. I shut my eyes, feeling the moonlight above me, and as I sensed my own breath dissolving in my uncle’s snores and Pofak
’s purrs, I was, for the span of a night, happy.
* * *
WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at 4:59 in the afternoon five days later, my mother was out shopping with Omid and my father was in his study, listening as he often did to some musical transmission on Radio Golha. I was alone in the living room in front of the television, waiting for the end of the daily broadcast of the national anthem and the beginning of the children’s program. I picked up the receiver; it was Azar. “Get me your parents,” she said, out of breath.
I turned off the television and called out to my father, but the music was too loud and he couldn’t hear me. “They’re not here,” I told her.
“There was an accident,” she said. “It’s Majid.”
My heart pounded in my ears.
“Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Tell your parents there was an accident. Majid went for a drive and he crashed.”
I reached for the prayer stone in my pocket.
“You heard me, Hamid? You tell your parents, okay? They can call me at my family’s house in Tabriz.”
“Okay.”
I stood for a long time by the phone. My father finally emerged from his study to refill his glass of tea in the kitchen.
“What is it?” he said when he saw me.
“Aunt Azar called. It’s Uncle Majid … There was an accident.”
He brushed me aside, looked up Azar’s family’s number in my mother’s phone book, and picked up the receiver. When he hung up he sat on the sofa, his forehead in his palm. “Majid’s car crashed by a mountain range near Tabriz,” he said.
“Why wasn’t Aunt Azar with him?” I asked.
“They had a fight. He went for a drive by himself.”
I wondered whether, at the moment when his car began capsizing and Uncle Majid saw the Aladaglar Mountains upside down—the rainbow-colored limestone of centuries passing before his eyes—he had reached in his pocket for the earth that was his prayer stone, and, not finding it there, had bid the world goodbye.
“Bābā,” I said. “I think this is my fault. Uncle Majid gave me his prayer stone before he left.”
My father didn’t hear me. “That fool,” he said, staring out the window. “How many times did I tell him he was a lousy driver?”
* * *
TWO MONTHS AFTER Uncle Majid died we received, by postal mail, his black bowler hat and a wingtip shoe, also black; his body, it was said, could not be retrieved, except for a right foot, for which my father decided to hold a funeral at Behesht-e Zahra. The sprawling cemetery had just been built on the city’s edge, and my father, in a leap of faith, had already bought three plots—for himself, my mother, and Uncle Majid.
6
THE ONLY ONE IN THE FAMILY to attend Uncle Majid’s funeral was my father. My grandparents refused to go. How do you bury a foot, they said, when you’ve lost a son? Azar appropriated this lament to the point of exhaustion, telling anyone who asked—and those who didn’t—It’s one thing to bury a husband, another to bury … And here her voice would fade and her eyes would water, a performance that, in my father’s words, would have impressed Stanislavski himself. My mother, who had bought a dress for the occasion and shoes to match, woke up on the morning of the burial with a headache that was “blinding” and stayed in bed. And Omid and I, deemed too young to come so close to death—especially one so abrupt and untimely—were not allowed to attend.
If anyone had bothered to ask me, I would have said that I, of all people, should have been present, as I had been the one accountable for my uncle’s death, having accepted the gift of his prayer stone. No one asked. A week later, with a collective desire for redemption, everyone—my grandparents from both sides, and several aunts, uncles, and cousins—gathered in our home for a memorial. It was, they agreed, the least they could do for poor Majid, who died unheard and unseen, just as he had lived.
The two sides of the family rarely came together, which was just as well. I had always thought of them as soccer teams of unequal prowess. On one side, my mother’s family, something like the Spanish team Real Madrid, armed with the legacy of Alfredo Di Stéfano and the deftness of Francisco Gento, winners of the Copa del Rey and six European cups. On the other side, my father’s family, embodiment of some obscure team, say, Guam.
My maternal grandparents arrived first, theatrically morose. My cashmere-coated grandfather, Ardeshir, handed my mother a porcelain bowl filled with dates, and French pralines thrown in for good measure. She lifted the dish as discreetly as she knew how, looking for the telltale sign, the twin blue interlaced Ls—the mark of the magnificent, authentic porcelain of Sèvres. This was a specialty of the antique shop owned by my grandfather, who reminded us, again and again, that Sèvres porcelain came into being in the eighteenth century with the patronage of King Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. My grandmother, Ziba, the link to our own supposed royal but defunct heritage—a progeny of one of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar’s one hundred and fifteen surviving children—was the shop’s accountant and all-around manager. Their home, in north Tehran, was filled with everything porcelain—vases and clocks, tea sets and ice pails—and I was always stunned, when walking through it, to be among fat seraphs and pink-cheeked amoretti, wistful shepherdesses and naked nymphs, gemstone flowers and fantasy fish, all set against creamy backdrops haloed with twenty-four-carat threads of gold and splashes of brilliant color—fuchsia, turquoise, celestial blue, jade green, and jonquil yellow. Being in that house was like watching the real world from the inside of a Fragonard painting.
On the sofa, squeezed side by side, my grandparents seemed out of place, like a crystal chandelier hanging in a child’s playroom.
“Such misfortune,” my grandmother said.
Everyone nodded.
“Was the Simca very old?” my grandfather said. “People riding old cars play Russian roulette.”
“The car was fine,” my father said. “Majid was a lousy driver.”
My mother’s four siblings arrived, with husbands, wives, and children, people I had seen once a year throughout my life, if that. They filled the room, a flock of flamingos, the women in shift dresses and the men in Italian-cut suits, the kind my father also wore. There were enough diamonds in the room to fill the treasury of jewels in the National Bank. Foldout chairs were brought to accommodate the arrivals. Tea and sweets were passed around, and people spoke of the weather, which had suddenly turned cold, and of forthcoming trips. Two aunts and their brood were planning a ski vacation in Chamonix. I pictured them in their circular pattern Emilio Pucci skiwear and matching knee socks, rolling down the slopes of Mont Blanc like kaleidoscopic macaroons.
When my paternal grandparents arrived with Azar, the room shifted. People offered seats and expressions of pity, the kind you see in volunteers doing charity work for the first time.
“We are sorry for your loss,” Grandfather Ardeshir said.
My father’s mother, Grandmother Nasrin, cried in a handkerchief, while her husband, Grandfather Ahmad, sat impassive. For years a shift supervisor at the oil refinery in Abadan, my grandfather had, a few years after my father’s birth, worked his way into a government job in Tehran. He became a clerk in Edareh-ye Sabt-e Ahval—the Office of Statistics and Civil Registration—where he was the issuer of birth certificates and collector of population statistics. This job had left him in a perennial state of tabulation, and my grandmother, born in Ahvaz and part Arab, in a perennial state of justification regarding her origins and her right to be counted among her husband’s census tallies. That their eldest, my father, had entered academia and later the Ministry of Culture made them proud, you could tell by the way they dressed up whenever they came to see us—my grandfather in a suit one size too large, my grandmother in some shapeless geometric patterned dress and black patent pumps. Now they sat silent in a corner, in black versions of these outfits. Next to them Aunt Azar, in her self-made polyester knit skirt, appeared to have lost, in the presence of my mother’s
formidable family, all the dramatic flair she had acquired in the previous week. Shriveled and spent, she was no longer the exalted widow. She was now the dead gardener’s wife.
From time to time my father, visibly irritated, glanced at his sobbing mother. He got up, finally, and interrupted her grief with a box of tissues. She blew her nose, and looking up at the room she said, “Forgive me.”
Pity gained pitch, and with it came annoyance at being trapped in gloom. Someone commented on the beauty of the porcelain bowl. Grandfather Ardeshir explained that it dated from 1768 and offered an unsolicited and obscure story about Madame de Pompadour’s affair with Louis XV, whom he simply called “Louis.” My grandfather played up his faux-Frenchness every chance he got, quoting freely—and often erroneously, according to my father—from Molière and Racine. He spoke at length about the delicacy of the porcelain of Sèvres, of the divine quattrocento blue of a Lanvin gown, of the sanctity of bread made daily in the French home. As he spoke, guests reached for dates and pralines and other edible distractions.
* * *
MY FATHER, silent during this monologue, suddenly began reciting,
“Dar kārgaheh kouzegari raftam doush
Didam do hezar kouzeh gouyā va khamoush
Nāgāh yeki kouzeh barāvard khoroush
Koo kouzeh garo, kouzeh kharo, kouzeh foroush?”
“Who doesn’t love a quatrain from Khayyam?” Grandmother Ziba said.
The cousins grumbled about my father’s poetry recitation. “I don’t understand,” said Teymour, the wildest and the fattest, the one who used to taunt me with plastic snakes when I was small.