by Dalia Sofer
9
AFTER MY PROMOTION TO FIGHTING COCK, I became my father’s designated companion on visits to Doctor Albert. For decades my family’s dentist in Tehran, Doctor Albert, a man resurrected from the Victorian age, had drilled and crowned my grandfather’s molars, extracted my father’s canines, assessed my mouth more than once as one appraises a horse. To this day I owe my impeccable oral hygiene to my terror of this man. His clinic was on Lalezar Street, on the second floor of a ramshackle building flanked by a row of fish stands through which I walked with my chin tucked into my shirt collar and my nose appended to a tin of Nivea cream that proved powerless against the stench. My father, egging me on, likened me to a fussy marquis with a snuff box and shamed me into keeping up with him. “Such affectations,” he would say, “belong to your mother’s side of the family.” And so we would walk past the fishmongers and the still-pulsating gills of the condemned fish, and up the shabby wooden stairs where we would be greeted by the gatekeeper and makeshift secretary, Ali-agha, who would hand us an appointment number from his deck of cards. Naturally, a banknote slipped into Ali-agha’s scaly hand would nudge one to the front of the line.
In the fall of 1973, I accompanied my father to Doctor Albert’s office for the extraction of a wisdom tooth. Holding on to his swollen chin my father walked with me almost obediently, not as my better but as my equal—a friend in pain. His reliance on me that afternoon both flattered and burdened me, and by the time we made it to the top of the stairs and received a three of spades from Ali-agha, I almost missed the father in whose eyes I had until then been immaterial and therefore free of obligations. Attempting to rise to the occasion I pulled his wallet from his coat pocket and slipped a twenty into Ali-agha’s clammy palm, receiving in exchange an ace of hearts, which moved us up accordingly. My father’s eyes brightened; I don’t think he had expected such slyness from me. Thirteen years old and puffed up with recognition, I understood, on those rickety stairs of Doctor Albert’s clinic, the meaning of filial loyalty and moral malleability.
After the doctor greeted us in his starched laboratory coat and head mirror, my father submitted to the examination chair and I made my way to the waiting room—a replica of Louis Pasteur’s nineteenth-century office complete with mahogany furniture, velvet drapes, and marble busts. In the wood-framed vitrines were dental tools from bygone centuries, some of which, I was quite sure, the good doctor still used from time to time. Two patients were waiting, an ancient man holding on to his last tooth, and a woman with frumpy clothes and skin scarred from some unforgiving childhood disease. The cruelty of having to go through life with a face like that made me restless, and to distract myself I picked up a French magazine. I could read well enough in French to understand a chronicle of a five-month-long volcanic eruption in Iceland.
From the treatment room came the sound of drilling and the rising pitch of my father’s scream. Doctor Albert didn’t believe in anesthesia, or even in ether. He believed in suffering, and in his own ability to inflict it.
I looked up from the magazine. The old man played with his worry beads and the scarred woman looked mindlessly at a shoe shop sign out the window. I returned to the magazine and moved on to another article, this one a twentieth-anniversary commemoration of “the fall of Mossadegh.” I read of the deposed prime minister’s battle to nationalize the oil, of the British and Americans who collaborated to unseat him, of his supporters and detractors at home and the clashes between them, of the Shah’s “retreat” to Rome—no one called it an escape back then—and of the monarch’s return to Tehran, when, choked up and weary, he said of his people, “I knew they loved me.” One had to feel sorry for such a man. The article quoted a New York Times account of the prime minister’s defeat, on August 21, 1953:
An eyewitness to the surrender said the former Premier was wearing pajamas. The surrender took place in an emotionally-charged scene in General Zahedi’s office on the third floor of the Teheran Officers’ Club. The three who surrendered with him were Safollah Moazami, former Minister of Posts and Telegraph; Dr. Ali Shayegan, Dr. Mossadegh’s former spokesman in the Majlis (the lower house of Parliament) and a chief adviser, and Dr. Gholam Hossein Sadighi, former Minister of the Interior.
The deposed Premier was driven into the courtyard of the Officers’ Club and then helped from his automobile. He appeared tired and depressed. He emerged from the car, leaning heavily upon a yellow malacca cane.
On the way home I asked my father about the life of Mohammad Mossadegh; all he ever talked about was his death.
“He got his start in the Constitutional Revolution in 1906,” said my father. “Later he became a member of parliament, then minister of justice, then finance minister, and again a parliamentarian. As prime minister he introduced social security and land reforms, and his downfall, as everyone knows, was his nationalization of the oil industry, which until then had been controlled by the British.”
“Did you like him?” I said.
“I was among his supporters and demonstrated on his behalf and against the system. We were all accused of being Communists.”
I had never envisioned my father a protester. “You, a Communist?”
“I was no Communist,” he said. “I only believed in justice. But the Shah and his supporters had pegged Mossadegh as a devotee of Communism.”
“Were you there on the day he surrendered?” I said. “The magazine said he was wearing pajamas.”
My father held his swollen cheek and didn’t answer. “I had a friend,” he said after a while. “We met at the university. His name was Houshang Habibi. Still is, of course, but now he is simply known as ‘H.’ We were inseparable. We believed our time had come. Democracy. Self-governance. A constitution. In our future we saw these things, and more.”
“What happened to your friend?” I said.
“He became an artist,” said my father. “A political satirist. His drawings are in galleries all over Europe. Even here, his work sneaks its way in. But since we last saw each other, twenty years ago, he has been imprisoned three times.”
“What did he do?”
“He drew.”
“Why haven’t you seen him in so long?” I said.
“In life you have to make certain choices,” said my father curtly.
Swallows were flying overhead and a smell of burning wood hung in the dusk. “But how is it that all these years later you work for the Shah’s Ministry of Culture?” I said. “Didn’t you say you were against the system?”
“My dear boy,” said my father. “Slowly, slowly, I became the system.”
10
TO DISCUSS THE FATE OF THE PILGRIM, the drawing impounded in a federal warehouse, the Americans sent a low-level functionary, an assistant to the ambassador to the United Nations. He apologized for the absence of the secretary of state, citing some absurd last-minute scheduling conflict, something about the secretary’s child having food poisoning and his wife being out of the country. The functionary, red-faced and tight-lipped, was the kind able to mouth meaningless words until his adversary surrenders to the farce he has been trapped in. So be it, I thought. We, too, know something about farce.
“We understand this drawing is of some importance to you,” he began. “It’s unfortunate that current circumstances prevent us from engaging with you.”
“I’m glad you appreciate the value of the drawing, which is symbolic, rather than simply monetary,” said the Minister. “Returning stolen property—which your own federal agents have deemed this object to be—would hardly qualify as an engagement. It’s simply a restoration.”
“A restoration,” said the functionary, “must recognize the opposing party as worthy.”
“Isn’t a theft a theft, regardless of your assessment of the aggrieved party?” the Minister said. “Consider this,” he continued. “That drawing depicts a pilgrim to Mashhad, resting place of our eighth Imam, Reza, and the shrine built in his name. It is one of the holiest sites of our religion, visited by mill
ions of pilgrims every year. The artist who drew it, Reza Abbasi, was for a time court painter of Shah Abbas, who in the late sixteenth century decreed Shi’ism the country’s official religion. To mark his devotion Shah Abbas made several pilgrimages to the shrine and bestowed on it sizable waqfs—charitable donations. So you see, the artifact we are talking about is of national symbolic significance, and your returning it would not only signal your country’s acknowledgment of our heritage, but also your willingness to discuss matters of far greater consequence. We all know that this meeting is not really about a drawing.”
“Look,” the functionary said. “You may have gotten used to sweet-talking our predecessors. But we are in a different time now.”
“If I may,” I said. “What animal has the most powerful hearing capacity?”
“How should I know?” he said. “A bat?”
“Actually the moth beats the bat, by one hundred and fifty times. Do you know how it got that way?”
He shrugged.
“The moth is the primary food source for the bat. But over time it evolved to outsmart its predator. Call it nature’s arms race, if you like.”
“You’re wasting your time,” he said. “And mine.”
“Why did they send you to meet with us?” I said.
He smiled with bloodless lips. “So we could tell the press that we invited you to talk,” he said. “And here we are, talking. Are we not?”
* * *
OMID WAS ALREADY at the diner when I arrived. I slid into the booth and a burly waiter with a bald spot and a ponytail handed us menus as thick as his forearms. “What is this,” I said, “lunch or the Shahnameh?” My brother smiled as he once used to. “Sometimes I get so overwhelmed,” he said, “that I randomly open the menu and point at a dish.”
“Fal-e Hafez,” I said.
When we were boys we followed the tradition of seeking guidance from the Divan of Hafez, which involved opening the volume at a random page to find the answer to a dilemma in the verses of the fourteenth-century poet. But instead of turning to Hafez, Omid and I used as oracle Dayee Jān Napoleon—My Uncle Napoleon—a bestselling novel whose popularity had naturally turned our father into its critic, and us into devotees.
I remembered the time Omid came home in a panic because he had seen our father huddled over a monograph with a young woman in a trench coat and lace-up boots in the art history aisle of the bookstore. When he told me that he wanted to inform our mother, I tried to dissuade him, not so much for my parents’ sake but for my own; I was in no mood for domestic quarrels. “It’s a bookstore, for God’s sake,” I said, “not exactly Shahr-e No.” Omid wouldn’t have it. “For bābā the bookstore is the red-light district,” he said. “There is no greater aphrodisiac in that man’s life.” He paced the narrow width of our bedroom. “I’m telling you, Hamid,” he continued. “There was something in the way they held that volume together, their hands making love on the page. She was very pretty,” he continued. “In a bookish way. She looked the very part of the sexy postdoctoral student.”
I knew the kind of girl he was referring to—I had plenty of them in my own class. Beautiful, high-minded, snobbish, they unleashed volatile sexual energy in spurts as intellectual discourse, like hair spray from an aerosol can. Making love to one of them, I imagined in my still-virgin brain, would be as exhausting as being trapped in a conference on Michel Foucault. That only a year later I would fall in love with the poster child for these girls, and with Foucault himself, was unthinkable to me then. But that’s how it goes in life. One often surprises oneself, at least in the early years. “What’s the point in ratting on him?” I said.
“The point?” said Omid. “To let the truth be known.”
I was sitting on my bed, playing a game of solitaire. “There is never one single truth,” I said, “but a pandemonium of truths within the same man.”
Back and forth we went, neither one of us letting go, until I pulled out My Uncle Napoleon from the shelf and presented it to Omid, who opened it at random and read, “Suddenly Dear Uncle remembered the treachery of those who were near him…” He closed the book. “Well?” he said, to me, the interpreter.
“Let the man breathe,” I said. “And in any case, the bigger question is, what was a louse like you doing at the bookstore?”
“My research on Charles Dickens for my final paper,” he said. “I’ve been at it for months. But when have you not been oblivious of me?”
* * *
THE WAITER LOOMED, NOTEPAD IN HAND. In our indecision we both ordered burgers, which neither of us wanted.
“How was the morning meeting?” Omid said.
“Useless. They sent some lightweight to meet with us. His job was to refuse. They’re just being vindictive, since the drawing is in a warehouse collecting dust. The custodians of the foundation that runs the Mashhad shrine will make a big ruckus, and of course they’ll blame the Minister.”
“For a charity foundation they make a lot of noise,” Omid said.
“Religious charity foundations control the economy,” I said. “It’s like in medieval Europe, when the pope and his cardinals, claiming to speak for God, owned every piece of land and property.”
“It’s the same here,” he said. “Except here, instead of holy shrines, there are corporations.”
“Yes, every nation has its sermonizers. They are just in different costumes.”
“So who spoke at the Assembly today?”
“The Saudi prince. I kept dozing off like we used to during bābā’s John Wayne movies.”
“Did you know that John Wayne was a lot funnier dubbed in Farsi?” Omid said. “In English he is just a ruffian. I was very disappointed the first time I heard his real voice.”
Our burgers arrived—behemoths of ground meat—accompanied by mounds of French fries, two bowls of pickles, and a full bottle of ketchup. There was enough food on the table to feed a congregation of worshippers at a Friday prayer in Qom. As we ate in silence, I felt once more the familiar weight of time, its incapacity to contain the past. Every minute spent chewing was a minute added to the cenotaph of lost hours.
“Did bābā ever mention that young woman, the one at the bookstore?” I said.
“The woman at the bookstore?” He paused, then said, “My God! And you tell me I’m frozen in time. She was a footnote in our family history.”
“Sometimes the footnote is the main story,” I said.
“No, Hamid,” he said. “The main story was always you.”
“For bābā I was not even an idea, much less a story,” I said, wondering if my father’s ashes, still in my pocket, could hear me.
“After we left all he ever talked about was what had happened to you and how you would fare all alone in that revolutionary chaos,” Omid said. “We sent you many letters. You didn’t answer a single one. And we tried calling you. But there was never an answer.”
“I changed the phone number after you left,” I said as I pulled the sports bottle from my bag and took a few sips.
“Why don’t you order a proper drink?”
“You know very well that I can’t be seen drinking alcohol.”
“And you think you’re fooling anyone with that plastic bottle?”
“Every other person in Tehran walks around with one of these. We all know what it is and we all pretend not to know.”
“What the hell are you still doing there, Hamid?”
I took several sips. “Yes,” I said, “I could have left that polluted world long ago, as so many have. But in leaving I would be forfeiting my self.”
“What self?” he said. “You forfeited your self long ago, if the rumors about you contain any truth.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ve made many mistakes, and I’ve committed many misdeeds. I can’t undo any of that. But I also know this: were I to leave my birthplace, I would be done for. Freedom with no lifeblood has no meaning for me.”
Omid nodded and a tender smile appeared on his face. “‘Some
how the change wore out like a prescription,’” he recited. “‘And there’s more to it than just window-views and living by a lake. I’m past such help—’”
“What?”
“Robert Frost,” he said. “You know, I tried hard to find my place on this earth, and I think I am old enough now to accept that I failed. I spent my entire youth in the dusty stacks of libraries researching my doctoral dissertation—‘The Reconciliation Between Word and World in The Waste Land.’ But I got restless and left school with thousands of pages of notes. I tried some odd jobs—for a few years I was a copy editor at an agricultural magazine, The Farm Gentleman; then I became a ticket seller at the Metropolitan Opera, then a bartender in the East Village, back when it was home to junkies and dealers. Finally I packed up my bags and went to a Buddhist retreat in California, with the knowledge that I was becoming a cliché but unable to stop myself. There I met a man who called himself Denpa, a Colombian whose real name, I later learned, was Alvaro. We quickly became friends, I think because we were the only foreign, dark-skinned people at the retreat, and we were relentlessly called on by our well-meaning but sadly dim fellow bodhisattvas for an education on Otherness. Alvaro and I had patchouli-infused midnight conversations about the difference between pain and suffering. He encouraged me to purify my diet and to do body cleanses, and I spent many sleepless nights meditating cross-legged on a pillow, dizzy from a juice fast, my back stiff and my mind aching. I believed that if only I tried hard enough I would transcend my sense of alienation, this feeling of exile from which I could never fully extract myself. But the truth is that I felt like a charlatan.”
“That was bābā’s word—charlatan,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “He liked that word. Everyone to him was some kind of con artist. And maybe he was right, after all. In any case,” he continued, “when I returned to New York, Alvaro, who had been trying to pursue acting in Los Angeles, decided to settle on the East Coast, having had an epiphany during the retreat that he was ill-suited to the film world and would do better in the theater. We rented a ramshackle apartment in an old walk-up on East Eighty-Fifth Street, where the smell of Chinese food from the restaurant below stifled the air. Alvaro hung up beaded curtains and burned incense all day long. I remember coming home from some temp job one winter night, broke and frozen, to find him meditating in the dark on a buckwheat pillow. Not wishing to disturb him, I lay on the couch contemplating the usual plate of General Tso’s chicken, and I was half-asleep when the buzzer rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ I mumbled, but couldn’t get myself to stand. He interrupted his meditation, turned on the light as he teasingly cursed me in Spanish, and answered the intercom. ‘FedEx,’ a voice announced from downstairs.