by Dalia Sofer
“The poet goes to the potter’s workshop,” my father explained. “He sees two thousand pots, and one of the pots speaks. It says, Where is the potter, and where are the buyer and seller?”
“I still don’t understand,” Teymour said, denting a date with his chipmunk teeth.
“My interpretation is that the potter symbolizes God,” said my father. “The poet is wondering where God is, and where humanity has disappeared.”
My father’s spirituality only revealed itself in the presence of his in-laws, who could elicit in him humiliation and exasperation, a combustible combination that turned even him—reader of Sartre and Nietzsche—into a mystic. The room went quiet and my mother, who all afternoon had perched on the sofa armrest next to her family, gave him one of her disapproving looks, the kind she reserved for the butcher who cheated her out of a few grams of lamb each week.
“I’m sorry if the porcelain bowl makes you so despondent about humanity,” Grandfather Ardeshir said to my father, smirking under his venerable mustache.
“It’s not the bowl,” said my father. “An object is never at fault.”
My grandfather replenished his tea.
Silence. As the referee would say, it was a fifty-fifty ball.
“But how did our Don Mozaffarian,” said my grandfather, “born on the Shatt al-Arab, become such a fine reciter of Khayyam? This I’ll never figure out!”
Any reminder of his origins never failed to expose the fault line in my father’s backbone. Invariably he would withdraw into an eggshell of shame.
* * *
AS NIGHT FELL and bottles of wine were poured, my mother’s family, trapped in some hilarity, listened to Grandfather Ardeshir as he recited a passage attributed to his wife’s so-called eighteenth-century ancestor, Fath-Ali Shah.
“‘Some fool or other has been telling you about my wealth,’” my grandfather the baritone was saying with imperial panache. “‘It is true that on the Nowruz they send me presents, but what are they?—not money—but horses and camels, mules, sheep, shawals, pearls, and such sort of trumpery. The first, as you see Mr. Ambassador, enables me to move about and then,’” here he added a stately flourish, “‘the women coax me out of the two last.’”
Everyone laughed. The assembly never tired of the patriarch’s performance.
* * *
MY GRANDFATHER AHMAD watched them with both deference and distaste. Maybe he was thinking that the price for his clerical job in Tehran, and his son’s ascent to the peak of the social order, was the endurance of afternoons such as this. I had once asked him, during a summer trip to Babolsar, what his job entailed, and he explained that the Office of Statistics and Civil Registration had been created by the Shah’s father, Reza Shah, to ensure that all births were duly recorded. This, he said, was part of the plan to centralize, systematize, and organize, and followed an earlier edict, the “Law of Identity and Personal Status,” which had made the bearing of a surname a civic obligation. Bewildered families, until then content with honorific suffixes and pseudo-military titles, had to select a name that would define them for generations. Some chose their city as surname—Tehrani, Shirazi, Hamadani (of Tehran, of Shiraz, of Hamadan)—others their profession—Saatchi (watchmaker). Intellectuals flaunted their erudition—Daneshvar (learned)—and the clergy boasted religious knowledge—Shariatmadari (expert in Sharia law). It was my great-grandfather Lotfollah who selected our family name, Mozaffarian—of the family of the victorious.
“Us? Victorious?” I said.
“Why not?” said my father. “Do you know how Reza Shah selected his own name?”
I had never considered the possibility that a king could have become king without his name. “How?” I said.
“An ordinary man originally named Reza Khan,” said my father, “commander of a Cossack-trained brigade who toppled the Qajars—your mother’s alleged ancestors—he chose for himself the surname ‘Pahlavi’—the name of the Middle Persian script practiced until the Arab conquests. This is how he offered himself an ancient lineage and gave his subjects the myth of imperial potency, a crafted historiography, a continuation of the narrative of the Book of Kings.”
As usual, I didn’t understand my father’s words, but I memorized them nonetheless, because I believed my father the encyclopedia man was an actual encyclopedia. “What is historiography?” I said. “Do you mean history?”
“It isn’t history itself,” said my father. “It’s how history gets written.”
* * *
NO ONE TALKED to my grandfather the tabulator, who sat counting the lipstick-stained cigarette butts in the ashtray. Maybe if they had known that he, the mourner, would soon become the mourned, they would have made some effort to address him. In exactly sixty-two days, having left a friend’s house at three in the morning after a game of poker, he would be blinded by the headlight of an oncoming car and would slip into a puddle of icy water, cracking his skull on the pavement at Sarcheshmeh Crossroad, right by Bahar Confectionery, which still makes the best koloucheh in Tehran.
* * *
TO BREAK HIS SOLITUDE I brought him tea; it was all I had to offer. He thanked me. My grandmother, next to him, cried intermittently. Her legs, two swollen buttresses in black tights, and her puffy feet crammed in her patent pumps, filled me with an ineffable ache.
“Uncle Majid and I spent a night together in the garden,” I said to them without knowing why. “And there, we made friends with a three-legged cat who kept us company until sunrise.”
They smiled, no doubt thinking that I, too, was fabricating some tale to outwit the specter of death.
* * *
ACROSS THE ROOM my mother was regaling her sisters with the story of how, on her Roman honeymoon with my father, she had hyperventilated and nearly collapsed in the Sistine Chapel—God’s hand reaching out to Adam above her head. “One minute I was admiring the Last Judgment frescoes, the next I was sitting cross-legged, right there on that marble floor, my skirt hiked up above my knees. On the site of the papal conclave, imagine! Guards came, offered water, ice, a handkerchief. But it was all a scheme. To get these handsome Italians fussing over me! I was very operatic, once upon a time, wasn’t I?”
The sisters laughed as they cracked open sunflower seeds with white teeth. But my father watched as if she were a tedious movie he had seen many times and was being forced to sit through again. I never dared ask him if my mother had really collapsed in the Sistine Chapel, as she claimed. From their honeymoon the only witness was a miniature replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà, buried in the recesses of an overstuffed vitrine.
7
THE YEAR AFTER I LOST MY SNOW OWL, the Märklin train, and Uncle Majid, I developed an obsession with bugs. More precisely, it was an obsession with their demise. Capturing them in glass containers and shutting them in with airtight lids, I monitored their undoing, which lasted hours, sometimes days. The humble housefly was a stalwart fighter, but the mindless mosquito circled itself for so long that I usually ended its turmoil by flushing it down the toilet. Moths were the most theatrical and therefore the most hysterical of insects. Butterflies were too delicate to harm, and ladybugs, for which I held a particular affection, were exempt from my list.
Forced to witness these slow deaths, Omid opened the jars one summer afternoon, rejoicing as six houseflies, four mosquitoes, and a moth took flight in our bedroom, in the direction of an open window. I watched them as they exited, fancying themselves free, and I let my brother savor his budding righteousness. No matter. In another house, just a few doors down and a few hours later, a shoe would smack a fly’s head flat, or a puff of bug spray would halt the mosquito’s final breath.
* * *
THAT SAME YEAR my father’s work on his encyclopedia took on a frenzied pace. It was at this time that he became a true insomniac, one who no longer found solace in warm milk. And I, sleepless like him, would lie in bed and listen to the midnight tap-tap of his typewriter filling the hours as I tried, again and again, to
reconstruct Uncle Majid’s final moments in the car—was the window rolled down, was the radio playing, did anyone witness his fall as the aquamarine Simca transformed into a coffin? Of these things no one spoke.
What we did talk about was my father’s gallbladder. The sharp, unannounced pains, which he called “knife attacks.” Bile, stones, indigestion, biliary obstruction. It seemed fitting that my father should have a disease of the “humors”—melancholy and rage, appropriately medieval. He banished butter from breakfast, forswore red meat, ate half the portions he once did. He grew gaunt and gray, but the attacks persisted and he gave in, at last, to his doctor’s urging to have the gallbladder surgically removed.
During his hospital stay my mother, Omid, and I carried on with our days, but we circled around his absence with a jagged calm. Unable to sleep one night I tiptoed into his study, hoping to better understand the man who introduced himself to the world as Sadegh Mozaffarian. A smell of tobacco, paper dust, and anise candy lingered by his desk. On shelves along the wall were black binders in alphabetical order, where he stored encyclopedia entries as he compiled them. Next to these were a dozen editions and translations of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and newspaper clippings on the discovery of one more clay fragment of the reconstructed epic.
A few months earlier during our summer vacation he had explained to me that early strands of the narrative could be traced back to Sumerian poems, but the best-known version was the Babylonian, written in Akkadian, a cuneiform script. The eventual vanishing of cuneiform wiped out the story of Gilgamesh, and for two millennia the sunbaked clay tablets lay buried, along with tens of thousands of other cuneiform texts, under the remnants of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. In these rediscovered tablets, said my father, was, among other tales, the story of the flood, precursor to the biblical account of Noah.
“How can that be,” I said, “since the story of Noah is the genesis of the world?” We were sitting on the patio of the Caspian house my father had bought a year earlier, after receiving his post at the Ministry of Culture. A nest of bees—an octagonal sac that threatened to unleash an army of stingers—had formed that summer on the exterior wall; the insects buzzed and whirred as my father spoke. “The story of Noah is the one we all know,” he said, “but there were other versions long before that one. In Gilgamesh the immortal man, survivor of the deluge, is Utnapishtim.”
As my father carried on about the deluge, a sharp pain stabbed my stomach, pain that for weeks had been coming and going with no explanation. Doctors had found nothing wrong with me. Aching, they concluded, was part of my theatricality. And maybe, they said, I was emulating my father and his gallstone attacks. I dismissed the sensation now as best I could, and argued instead with my father, for always undoing what I thought I knew. “Are you saying everyone is wrong?” I said. “My teacher and the textbooks and even the movies?”
“The story they tell,” he said, “originated elsewhere. And our job is to reconstruct from the lost fragments new versions of our origin.”
“But what if more tablets are found, even older than these? How can we ever know where we started?”
“We’ll never know,” said my father, oblivious of the three bees dancing near his ear. “So we compile, we compile, as I do with my encyclopedia … We go back as far as we can see. That’s all we can do.”
Sitting now at his desk I wondered how he was managing at the hospital without his encyclopedia or his papers. From his bookshelf I picked up a translation of Sartre’s Nausea but could not get past the first paragraph. I placed the book back where I had found it, next to translations of works by people whose German-sounding names I could neither read nor pronounce. Above these were several volumes by Sadegh Hedayat and a collection of stories by Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, whose name I recognized because his story “The Cow,” which had recently been adapted into a film, had earned him considerable fame. And then there was the translation of Gilgamesh, which he used to read to us at bedtime when we were younger. Opening it to a random page I read, of Gilgamesh pleading with Utnapishtim,
Enkidu, my brother whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept for him seven days and nights till the worm fastened on him. Because of my brother I am afraid of death.
To say that I was moved by this passage would be a half truth. I was, to be sure, as moved by it as any mortal would be, and briefly I wondered if the loss of my brother would similarly devastate me. This train of thought agitated me, and I grew increasingly annoyed, not by the passage itself, which I had to admit was beautiful, but by the incessant reminders of dissolution wherever I looked. Maybe grief, that exalted realm of humanity, was as tedious as any dictator.
In his top drawer I found postcards from people unknown to me—his friends and acquaintances from Yerevan or Istanbul or Rome; a moonstone tasbih—string of prayer beads; Air France towelettes; a dark Polaroid of a painting with the inscription, on the back, “Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, August, 1952.” I remembered that my father had traveled in Italy as an art history student. What else did I know of his youth? In the back of the drawer, inside a Kodak manila envelope, was a black-and-white photograph of two boys, arms akimbo, standing under a cypress tree. The caption: “Abbas and Majid by the Abarkuh tree, Yazd, 1943.”
* * *
AFTER THE SURGERY, still in the postanesthesia fog of half- consciousness, my father stared at nothing, his eyes empty of resolve.
“How are you, bābā?” I said.
He didn’t answer, and I wondered if he had already forgotten me.
“How did I not see it?” he said.
I looked around. Bleached walls and white curtains enclosed the two of us. “See what?” I said.
“Majid. I didn’t save him.”
“Bābā, he died in a car accident.”
He stared at the ceiling. “Did I ever tell you that when we were boys I made him carry my schoolbag? And he was so little … I had all the good grades, so I got away with so many things. I think,” said my father, “that I made my brother suffer.”
I said nothing.
“But we had good times, too,” he continued. “We would ride on our bicycles to Lalezar and sneak into movie theaters. Majid loved The Mark of Zorro with Tyrone Power. How many times we saw that film!… But how could I not see it?”
“Uncle Majid died in an accident, bābā,” I said.
“Oh yes,” my father said. “The accident.”
* * *
WHEN HE RETURNED HOME from the hospital, my father appeared to have no memory of our conversation. Regret seemed as elusive to him as the completion of his encyclopedia. And so he carried on, the faultless man in search of the genealogy of objects, his vision extending back to the beginning of time but unable to stretch wide enough to accommodate us, his mundane family.
8
TIME SOON BECAME MY MAIN PREOCCUPATION: I wasted it, lost it, measured it, beat it, marked it, passed it, filled it, killed it, waited for it to tell, to counsel, to heal. But I could neither forget it nor abide by it. Lessons designed to intrigue left me indifferent—another king, another massacre, territories forsaken, lands won, new nations traced and old ones erased from the world map—it all evened itself out in the end.
Omid and I diverged further; puberty was unmasking our dissimilarities. While my brother obeyed every house rule, I began disregarding them. I went alone to the shops—ignoring my mother’s warnings that child predators lurked at every corner—and I bought bags of tamarind paste, sucking on them until my teeth were as rusty as a copper kashkul. For each piece of gum we were allowed I chewed five—all at once—and to each relative we were obligated to kiss I turned my head, so expertly that at the moment of contact all they got under their puckered mouths was a sweaty knot of unwashed hair. The rare occasions when Omid and I attempted a joint adventure ended badly, like the time we snuck into a movie theater to see Chaplin’s The Great Dictator but got caught because Omid cried in the back—fr
om guilt, he said—or the time we fed a feral dog the shank bone of a lamb but got bitten, Omid on his ankle, I on my hand, all because Omid could not run fast enough and I, in brotherly concord, had to slow down and suffer with him.
From the school biology laboratory one afternoon I stole a cow’s eyeball and hid it in Omid’s schoolbag. That night, when my brother reached into his bag to retrieve an uneaten apple and pulled out an eyeball instead, he dropped the eye on our bedroom floor and ran through the house like a madman. The eye, a milky, gelatinous ball with a giant brown iris, wiggled before settling into the geometric motifs of the carpet. As I doubled over, laughing at the absurdity of the prank and pleased with my triumph, Omid returned to the bedroom and threw his physics textbook in my direction. I dodged and counterattacked with a pencil, which pierced the top of his head, releasing a trickle of blood that stained his forehead. Bodily injury was the point at which my parents, like good NATO allies, intervened. I received the predictable admonishment from them both and it was then that I earned my most enduring nickname, khorous jangi—fighting cock—which, I soon learned, carried far more prestige than my previous incarnation as the boy who exhibited the properties of glass.
* * *
AND ALWAYS, I DREW. With charcoal I drew animals and plants—monkeys and elephants, cypress trees and tulips. The apricot tree in our garden, under which I had spent a night with my uncle, made a cameo appearance every now and again. When I was done with the animals I drew humans—bakers and cobblers, dancers and drifters. By eleventh grade I adopted caricatures—the most recurrent was a contemplative man with a turned-up raincoat collar, prominent sideburns, and a 1970s-style pompadour, smoking a Gauloise—my Iranian incarnation of Albert Camus. I named him “Everyman Jamshid” and autographed each drawing not with my own name, but his.