by Dalia Sofer
“‘A package from my cousin in Bogota,’ he said to me as he signed the slip and handed it to the courier. He had never mentioned this cousin, and I made a mental note to ask him about it over dinner. But as soon as the FedEx man had left, two police officers appeared, flashed their badges, and handcuffed Alvaro. ‘What’s going on?’ he protested. One of the officers calmly said, ‘You are under arrest for possession of cocaine,’ and dragged him away with the package. Running after them into the hallway I yelled, ‘I know this man. There must be a mistake.’ The other officer—a red-faced man with a crew cut and bloodshot eyes—looked up from the stairway. ‘Lucky for you,’ he said, ‘that you weren’t the one who signed the slip. I’d keep my nose out of this, if I were you. Because you’re not in the clear, Mr. Mozaffarian.’”
“You, in trouble with the law?” I said to Omid. “I can’t imagine you entangled in such a mess.”
“I couldn’t either. But I was his roommate and therefore a suspect. Anyway, I got myself a lawyer, and after many months of court proceedings and lost dollars, I was cleared.”
“And your friend?”
“Turned out that the cousin in Colombia had been using family members in New York to send the stuff, and was asking them to deliver the packages to a local contact. During the trial it became clear that Alvaro had no idea what the packages contained. But as he had received five ounces of cocaine, he got convicted of criminal possession in the second degree and was sentenced to eight years in prison.”
“Eight years?”
He nodded, with the kind of resignation that appears only after outrage has long congealed; I knew that look well.
“Anyway, with Alvaro gone,” he continued, “I sat at the kitchen table one morning and I thought, I am a middle-aged poet with no job and no family and no home. That’s when I decided to take up legal translation, move out, and get married.”
“You capitulated,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I surrendered. To capitulate you must believe that what you have given up was of great value. I had no such belief in my own talent. I can’t say that I became happier after my marriage, because I soon realized that in my hurry to turn my life around I married the wrong woman.”
“Like Uncle Majid,” I said.
“Yes … But at least I no longer felt at war with society,” he continued. “To get society off your back is no small triumph. Especially expat society.”
The waiter cleared the table and slapped the bill down like a summons. “There is one thing,” he said, getting out his wallet, “that feels true to me, and that’s my love for my son.”
“You never told me his name,” I said.
“Arash,” he said.
“Arash the archer,” I said. “You haven’t forgotten your mythology.”
“Mythology is all I have left,” he said.
“Omid,” I said. “I missed you all these years.”
“I did, too,” he said. “You were my best friend, you jackass, and you disappeared on me.”
“But don’t you see?” I said. “You disappeared. I didn’t go anywhere. For all of us who stayed home, it was the others who vanished.”
He nodded, unconvinced, then put on his newsboy cap. “You sound as virtuous as a sailor’s wife.”
“Those early days were mad,” I said. “Don’t judge me by them.”
“I am no judge,” he said. “But look,” he continued, “I have to go. My dog is old, and he hasn’t been well lately.” As he got up he pulled out a slim volume from his coat pocket and handed it to me. “A chapbook of my poems. I’d like you to have it.”
I held the book, titled Two Sons. “Meet me again tomorrow morning?” I said.
“Come to my place,” he said. “I live near the UN, in a neighborhood called Tudor City. You can’t miss the fake Elizabethan gargoyles and cartouches on the buildings.” Laughing, he added, “This country has scant history but plenty of shtick.”
As I watched my little brother put on his reading glasses to write down his address, I was flooded with the regret that for so many years I had forsworn.
“By the way,” he said, “Mother wants you to speak at the memorial dinner.”
“Me? That’s absurd.”
“She wants both of us to say something.”
“But what could I possibly say after all this time?”
“You’ll come up with something,” he said.
* * *
ON MY WAY BACK TO THE HOTEL I passed demonstrators with placards and slogans and megaphones, voices annihilating one another amid the steel towers of midtown. I made my way through them, disbelieving that in a different time and place, I had been one of them—a man with a grievance, trusting the possibility for rectification: strongmen would be banished, the fraudulent punished, forgers vanquished, and the friendless—like me—at last cherished.
In my room that afternoon I locked the door, undressed, placed my father’s ashes and Omid’s book on the nightstand, and slipped my body under the covers. The sheets were icy against my bare skin, but I was burning from inside. I turned on the television. There was a documentary on the eightieth anniversary of the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria and the beginning of the last world war. Eighty years. What had changed since then? The world was yet again splintering, and nations, once more bewitched by ideas about racial purity, were decrying the wretchedness of the other. Newspapers said children had dropped dead like cicadas amid the scorched ruins of Aleppo and in the waters of the Mediterranean, but these deaths were no more to me than a bothersome idea I had to contend with. I shut my eyes and imagined someone somewhere preparing to attend a funeral for a body part, as I had done many times, for a few I had loved and for many I had wronged, and occasionally both at once. I knew that what was happening in the world, despite its absurdity, would one day be written up as history, as everything up until that moment had been. Maybe someday, history, like a fly-by-night lover, would send us all an apology. The message would read, “I am sorry for my ways.” It would be signed by everyone who had ever lived, myself included. Suddenly, I felt in my heart a piercing pain that foretells a loss. It was a stab not for the vanishing of people, but of places, those that were mine—like the bakery near my apartment that was shuttered one morning and a month later turned into a hair salon—and those that weren’t. And for memories, those that were mine—like the first time I kissed Noushin under the willow tree in the park—and those that weren’t. For life—my own and others’—I felt pity but not sorrow, since its destination was already known; my father’s ashes next to my pillow were proof of this.
The world may be splintering, but hadn’t it been doing so since its conception? The breach had begun long before, with a million wrongs that like hairline fractures on an ancient urn finally crack it from within. I reached for Omid’s book of poetry and opened it to a random page, and in the half-light of the September dusk I read.
I have two sons, my father says
addressing me, one of the sons.
I don’t remind him who I am.
Lost on his way home, he calls me, says,
frantic, I don’t know where I am.
I, the younger of the two sons,
say, shush, shush, like a father .
Why did you go all alone?
Walk to a corner, read me a sign.
There are no signs, says my father,
only a river and a lone
crow, and, oh, yes, one big sign,
Pepsi-Cola, red neon rising against an orange sun.
I have two sons, says my father .
And your brother will save me from you.
11
IN THE SPRING OF 1976 Minoo Levy shuffled my life like a veteran croupier. I first noticed her on a May afternoon, before the summer break, when she joined our all-boy soccer game, uninvited. Though the boys protested, she positioned herself at defense on our team; Omid, normally on defense, was sick that day.
The ball happened to be with me, and I foun
d myself kicking it, hard. This is how the game resumed, with Minoo in it. Afterward I went up to her and introduced myself.
“I know who you are,” she said. “Hamid Mozaffarian, right?”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead, maintaining a good distance. “I didn’t know I was famous,” I said, and she laughed. “It’s your drawing that has become famous, an icon throughout the school,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”
I had seen photocopies of my caricature of Everyman Jamshid—my Iranian Camus—pasted inside the boys’ bathroom stalls and in the courtyard, lined up in a row like mug shots above the garbage bins, but I had no idea he was anything other than a joke. “An icon of what?” I said.
“An everyman on the brink of consciousness,” she said.
Not wanting to appear dumber than my own creation, I smiled knowingly and made my way home. What did it mean to be on “the brink of consciousness” and how had my drawing portrayed it? Had I intended this without fully understanding it, or were people projecting meaning onto a senseless caricature? The questions circled my mind, but as the afternoon hardened into dusk, that odd hour still unresigned to the day’s conclusion, my thoughts shifted to Minoo, who was far more captivating to me than my cartoon. I thought of her white shorts and red-striped Adidas, of the improbable curl of her eyelashes and of her eyelids light as a dragonfly’s wings.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, THE LAST OF THE SCHOOL YEAR, I went down to the tenth graders’ floor every chance I got until the pursuit became as thrilling as the prize. In the final hour I saw her with her friends by the school gate. Normally I would have been too timid to pierce a circle of girls, but remembering my newfound celebrity I took a deep breath, said Besmellah, and went in. “I wish you ladies a beautiful summer,” I said. They stood silent, cheeks flushed, with their cigarettes and Levi’s, looking at me wide-eyed as though I truly were some kind of luminary.
“We’re all going to a secret meeting tonight,” Minoo said. “Six o’clock. Come with us.”
“A meeting about what?” I said.
She glanced around for prying ears. “Gharbzadeghi—westoxification,” she said.
This was one of those words that had of late entered the lexicon of the intellectual class, among whom I did not count myself. The term, suggesting a contamination, denounced our national infatuation with the West. I had not until then given it much thought, and in truth, it mattered little to me. The meeting could have been about grasshoppers and I still would have gone just to be with Minoo. “I’ll pick you up in my car,” I said.
“You understand that you can’t tell anyone,” she said. “The meeting is at a safe house, the vacant apartment of a professor who is abroad.”
“I understand,” I said.
As she scribbled her address I schemed to borrow my mother’s Fiat coupé, the only gift of note that she had received from her father. The alternative was my father’s beat-up Paykan.
She handed me the paper and when I read her surname, Levy, I stood wordless.
“Something wrong?” she said.
“You’re Jewish?”
“Is that a bother?”
“Not if it isn’t to you,” I said.
“I make do,” she said, with irony that disarmed me.
“I meant no disrespect,” I said.
“I expected better from Jamshid’s creator.”
“All creators are imperfect,” I said as I reached for her hand and kissed it.
“Pick me up at five-thirty,” she said.
* * *
TO COAX MY MOTHER out of the house I bought her a ticket to a French film showing at a theater nearby, along with a box of Swiss chocolates. The manual to my mother’s heart, I had long ago discovered, was Gallic. When I arrived home I found her on the terrace cleaning the birdcage as she did every afternoon and chatting with the canary as though the bird were an old and dear friend. I handed her the chocolate and the ticket. “What’s the occasion?” she said. Her face was flushed from the afternoon heat and her hair, normally styled in Charlie’s Angels cascades, was up in a ponytail, making her look girlish. I felt a pang of sorrow for my scheme to take her car. “A modest present for a beautiful mother,” I said.
“You want me to drop everything and go to the movies?” she said. “And with Omid still not feeling well? He is in bed.”
“Live a little,” I said. “I’ll look after Omid.”
She kissed me on the forehead, shut the birdcage, and headed to her bedroom to change. I stood on the terrace, the world open before me, the canary in full song. I didn’t know what was more thrilling, the prospect of an underground meeting or of seeing Minoo. I had found a girl and a cause, all at once. What more could a man ask for? One of my father’s oft-recited verses came to me, “I’m in love with the whole world, for the whole world belongs to my beloved.” I could not remember who the author was but assumed it was one of the usual suspects—those medieval mystics people refused to renounce. A million verses had since been written but we all clung to the bards like the nostalgic progeny of a fallen dynasty.
With her heels clicking and echoing in the courtyard, my mother looked up and blew me a kiss, then rushed down the street to catch the five o’clock showing. During the previous months she had been softening, spending more time with me and Omid and the bird, cooking elaborate meals and ironing every last bit of linen and clothing, even our underwear. It was all overdue—I was nearly sixteen—but I appreciated the maternal effort despite the late hour. I attributed her newfound kindliness to loneliness. The deeper my father burrowed into his encyclopedia, the more attentive my mother became to us. I waved goodbye to her and held on to the moment.
To the ailing Omid I brought a cup of tea, and I made him promise not to rat on me. Green as an unripe mango and running a fever, he was in no condition to refuse.
* * *
WHEN I SHOWED UP AT MINOO’S in the convertible Fiat she leaned over the car door and said, “You do realize what the talk is about?”
“I realize,” I said, making no comment about her Levi’s and Ray-Bans. “Get in.”
We drove off, leaving skid marks of hubris on the streets. The evening sun warmed our skin and the smell of hollyhocks and jasmine from the June gardens filled the approaching dusk. We were running away from something and reaching for something beyond, both sides as infinite and unknowable to us as the beginning of time and the end. Circling the five-year-old Shahyad Tower that embodied our pre- and post-Islamic past—its parabolic arch, echoing the ruins at Ctesiphon, interspersed with pointed arches reminiscent of mosques—we marveled at our own still unrealized possibility. Three years later the tower would be renamed Azadi—freedom—and its architect, a young Baha’i, would flee the country in that mass exodus of the persecuted and the fearful. But his creation would remain, a witness to decades of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, to collective hopes and their stillborn offspring, to crowds converging to cry out an ancient despair and dispersing, just as fast, under batons of one creed or another.
The meeting at the safe house was as I had expected: a roomful of smoke, and opinions on rights, liberty, equality, and other lofty words that raised our emotional temperature. There were communists, socialists, constitutionalists, and historians of all stripes, reminding everyone that we had arrived at this juncture many times before, most notably in 1906 and again in 1953, and had each time been thwarted by foreign powers in our efforts to democratize ourselves. Someone recited entire paragraphs of Samad Behrangi’s Little Black Fish by heart. Others paraphrased Marx and Hegel and Voltaire. Still others spoke of Ahmad Fardid, who had coined the term gharbzadeghi—westoxification—and Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who had popularized it, and of how the machine-made goods of the West were destroying our agriculture and handicrafts. The soil and the soul were invoked, again and again, and we all nodded, again and again, intoxicated with the prospect of our rebirth.
* * *
AFTERWARD I SAT in the Fiat with Minoo and held her h
and. The meeting had gone on far longer than I had expected and I knew that my mother was no doubt home by now and had noticed the empty space where her car should have been. But for the first time, I didn’t care. The moon was full and low in the summer sky. Anoushiravan Rohani’s “Soltane Ghalbha (Emperor of Hearts)” was on the radio. I leaned over and kissed Minoo, and it was in that kiss that I forgot the hours of solitude I had already amassed and the desolate hours that I would go on to collect. Love was a sweet interruption in the lonely march toward nonbeing.
I drove for a long time afterward, aimless, postponing as long as possible my return home—humdrum territory of television, dirty dishes, a tiresome encyclopedia, and familial fences. I drove by the shops on Shahreza Street, past the convergence of chadors and miniskirts, and steered us downtown, where the dilapidation made us feel magnanimous for having ventured there. Near the bazaar a group of men were reciting prayers and beating their chests—another day of mourning in the endless procession of days punctured by national bereavement. “It’s the martyrdom of Fatima,” Minoo said, and remembering her Jewishness I said, “Well, it doesn’t concern you very much, does it?” She looked away and said, “I don’t see you beating your chest either.”