by Dalia Sofer
“I don’t have to,” I said, one arm cockily resting on the wheel. “Chest beating is my patrimony. I have nothing to prove.”
“And I do?”
We remained silent, the first incision of separation already between us.
“To be a bystander to a procession of mourners is worse than being a participant in the procession,” she continued. “The mourner carries his grief like a birthright; the bystander can claim nothing but his exclusion.”
The conversation was getting too sober. I would have preferred to talk about her Ray-Bans. “Let it go,” I said. “Your people have their esteemed place. You are, after all, Esther’s children!”
“Yes, that’s our claim to fame,” she said. “Esther. The beautiful slave who became queen and saved her people. That story legitimizes us as a museum validates relics.”
“As far as I know,” I said, “relics don’t build factories or become scientists and professors. You can insist on being a victim if you want. But the fact is that I said nothing wrong.”
In the pounding silence, I took a turn, headed back north, and held out my hand to her. After a long pause, she took it.
* * *
FROM AFAR WE SAW the lights of the Ferris wheel in the night sky. I drove toward them and Minoo didn’t object. We parked and made our way into the amusement park, where the air carried the din of children, laughter, and electronic chimes. Minoo wanted cotton candy so we bought some, and as she held the stick and took small bites from the spun sugar, I felt an old ache rise in my heart. I dragged her to a corner and kissed her, the taste of sugar still on her tongue. We were standing behind the house of mirrors and could hear people inside marveling and giggling at their distorted reflections. Holding hands, we rushed in, laughing at the tall and lanky and fat and swirling images of ourselves, complicit in the deceit of mirrors.
From the Ferris wheel, suspended in midair, I watched the feverish city below us, four and a half million people colliding and colluding, resisting and yearning. And here we were, just two of those millions, spinning in a yellow plastic booth. “Minoo,” I said. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” I held her close and we remained like that for the rest of the ride. Dawn, I knew, would break like eggshells. But that was a long way off.
* * *
HOME WAS WHERE I found my parents, as expected. In the living room my father was reading a book on the looting of Lorestan bronzes in the 1920s and my mother was watching Rangarang on television—a mind-numbing procession of pop stars in ball gowns and tuxedos delivering the latest hits, fingers snapping, bodies stiff, faces suitable for Puccini. I served myself some leftover tahchin and sat with them, but for some reason I could not swallow; the chicken kept sticking below my throat, refusing ingestion. I tried to make it go down with Coke, but the sweetness burned my throat while leaving the bird intact. “Are you unwell, Hamid?” my mother said. “I’m fine,” I said and continued chewing. I felt myself floating about the room, swinging from the chandelier, dusting my father’s gold griffin-headed goblet—some Achaemenid antique bestowed on him by the government.
“Who gave you permission to take my car?” said my mother without looking away from the television.
“Hichkas—nobody,” I said, relishing the nihilism of the word.
Her face glowed blue in the glare of the screen. I found her beautiful, just then, more so than usual. Maybe it was the knowledge that I had at last stirred her. From the bedroom came the sound of Omid’s latest coughing fit. Though I regretted having abandoned him, I reasoned that everything I had gained that evening and everything I had lost, merited my transgression. Collateral damage, as they say in the military.
“Do you know that the French movie you sent me to was almost pornographic?” my mother said over a funereal Googoosh singing “Gomshodeh.”
“What, Emmanuelle?” I said. “Everyone says it’s an amazing film. And you’re always singing that Pierre Bachelet song around the house.”
“I wouldn’t sing it if I knew what the film was about,” she said.
“I figured you would appreciate anything French,” I said.
My father gave me a disapproving look, then resumed reading. He was slumped in his chair, his face lit by the ludicrous table lamp: a marble bust of Marie Antoinette with a wide-hipped linen shade. My mother had bought it at a Parisian flea market some years before, and she had been so pleased with her find that my father had finally allowed her to display it.
“What do we have to do with that old queen?” I said. “Why is she in our living room?”
“Now you have a grievance against the lamp?” said my mother. “It’s just a piece of art.”
“Art?” I turned to my father. “You, of all people, are not going to challenge this absurd statement?”
“I don’t live alone in this house, Hamid,” he said with his exasperating poise.
“You could have fooled me,” I said.
He pretended not to hear.
My mother retreated to the kitchen and arrived some time later with orange cake and three cups of tea, offering a truce. Her music show ended with an abrupt beep, giving way to the color bars that appeared each midnight at the end of programming. So long, viewers. We have nothing left to distract you with. We’ve shown you all our tricks, lulled you with our electronic embrace for as long as we could. Go now and face the night.
With the television off, we drank our tea and ate our cake, the crumbs falling onto our plates. My mother, nibbling on a sliver, sat on the sofa, her legs crossed, her elegance bordering on boniness. The bitterness of the baked orange peels calmed me, and I felt sorry for having sent her to that movie, but not sorry enough to apologize. My father put his empty plate on the coffee table and extended his legs, hands clasped on his paunch.
Listen! I wanted to tell them as the excitement of the evening surged once more inside me. The city is cracking. For the first time I imagined myself alone in the world, without them, without Omid, even. Me. Just me. I felt a longing for that world, then panic about its possibility, then a deep sadness at its inevitability. But soon, the thought of Minoo returned to me. The white shorts, the eyelashes, the kiss in the Fiat. And these, her first words to me: I know who you are.
12
IF I WERE TO ASCRIBE MY FEUD with my parents in that summer of 1976 to a single trigger, it would be the event that became known in our household as the “Campbell’s Soup Incident.”
At the invitation of the Iranian ambassador to the UN, Andy Warhol had arrived in Tehran with his white wig and Polaroid camera to photograph the Empress, an art enthusiast who was building the first museum of modern art with a collection that Western critics deemed “worthy of MoMA.” Woe to the face that becomes a Warhol print, I had thought, for its days as a human face are numbered. I ignored the fuss about Warhol, but when an evening at the Ministry of Culture was arranged in the artist’s honor, my mother, dusting off her Saint Laurent shoes, insisted that I go, too. My father, who made no secret of his contempt for Campbell’s soup cans, was only attending because of his position at the Ministry. “You do as you see fit,” he said, a directive that back then I interpreted as indifference.
* * *
HIDING AMONG A GROUP of young admirers, the artist glanced at his hosts seemingly petrified, though the one trait he displayed with impunity was his weakness for the caviar that circled the room on silver trays carried by unsmiling waiters. The other guests, most of whom—in the artist’s own words—appeared to have stepped off a Visconti set, didn’t seem to care so much about the man himself as they did about his name; they were pleased to be in the same room as the words “Andy Warhol”—those ten letters that symbolized for them the holy number of creation and completion.
I walked around the room drink in hand, nibbling on canapés and wrath. My mother’s Francophile performance was grating me more than usual, and my father’s coolness, as predictable as the arrival of his morning paper, sent me into a silent tantrum.
I had
spent the summer with Minoo as a tourist of revolutionary thought. I had read transcripts of Ali Shariati’s lectures and had begun tackling Leninism thanks to the translated text of What Is to Be Done?, printed in a miniature font on a pamphlet, which I had found in the bathroom of a gas station during a family drive to Karaj. Sometimes I even perused Minoo’s library, filled with volumes of Voltaire and Diderot and Montesquieu, those mainstays of the Enlightenment. But like travelers who perennially declare that they wish to move to the city they last visited, I would read a few paragraphs of each and spontaneously decide to adopt its philosophy, a vow that would last only until my next excursion. This vacillation troubled me. What kind of man doesn’t know what he thinks? When a frustrated Minoo asked me if I admired anyone at all, I said, “As a matter of fact, I do. Masoud Ahmadzadeh.” I said this not so much out of conviction but because that morning at the bus stop I had found and read Ahmadzadeh’s pamphlet, Mobārezeh-ye mosallaḥāneh, ham esterāteji ham tāktik—“Armed struggle, both strategy and tactics”—which echoed ideas of Mao, Che Guevara, and Régis Debray. I said it also because Ahmadzadeh’s group was part of the Fadaiyan-e-Khalq, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, which had arrived on the scene with the assassination of the chief military prosecutor, and had conducted armed robbery of several banks. In other words, they were, by far, the most iconoclastic of the subversives. Minoo, a devotee of liberal democracy and nonviolent resistance, didn’t approve of my choice, and I, who in those days still wished to please her, conceded that, as Gandhi had said, “non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.”
* * *
IN THE MIRRORED HALL of the Ministry, opposite Warhol and his youthful entourage, men in military uniforms studded with medals stood erect, drinks in hand. Others in more casual clothes and metal-rimmed glasses assumed a more scholarly air. In the center of the room was a gathering of businessmen and their emerald-studded wives standing on a diagonal like Balanchine ballerinas and listening to a confectionary tycoon boasting of his latest factory in Qazvin. Next to them were my father and his research assistant, Yasser Maghz-Pahn, discussing pop art. “His brilliance,” said Yasser, referring to Warhol, “is that he has embraced consumerism wholeheartedly.” My father stirred his whiskey, the ice clinking against the Baccarat crystal. “Where’s the brilliance in that?” he said. “That’s capitulation…” Yasser cut him off. “But don’t you see? Instead of colluding with the system through hypocrisy, he’s putting it all on the table. There’s the brilliance!”
“Maybe it’s time we put it all on the table and called out the system for what it is,” I said.
My father looked at me, switchblades in his eyes. He glanced at the government men surrounding us and whispered, “This is hardly the place!”
“This is the place,” I said. “It’s the lion’s den!”
“Gentlemen,” said Yasser, trying to defuse the situation, “I woke up this morning with this rash on my finger.” He held up his chafed index finger. “Now what do you suppose…?”
“Maybe if you stopped sticking it up your nose, aghaye Yasser,” I said.
“What’s the matter with you?” my father said. “You’re back to your khorous jangi ways. My son, the fighting cock.”
“Bāz gardad be asleh khod har cheez—everything goes back to its origin,” I said. “Forgive me, Yasser-agha,” I continued. “That was inappropriate. But why do you change the subject? Weren’t you just saying that the brilliance of this man is that he has done away with hypocrisy and embraced the system? Why don’t we do the same? Why don’t we come out and shout from a rooftop, ‘We live and thrive in corruption; we are, all of us, puppets and puppeteers.’”
People had gathered around us now, among them my mother, whose enthusiastic display of cleavage had played no small part in fueling my drive all evening. “Quiet down, Hamid!” she said, her voice cracking with humiliation.
“You’re the one who insisted I come,” I said.
“I’d like you to leave immediately,” said my father.
“Finally, we agree on something,” I said.
* * *
I WALKED FOR A LONG TIME, toward Minoo’s house. Though it was a flawless summer night I felt myself at the edge of a precipice, aching for an encounter with my own spilled blood. What I had said about government corruption qualified me for an arrest and interrogation by the secret police, but my father had no doubt already finagled a way out. This enraged me further; I wanted them to question me, maybe even beat the hell out of me. Only then, I thought, would my circumstances match my anguish.
Pedestrians out on strolls filled the streets—a family with ice cream cones, a couple kissing next to the red-and-white glare of a Kentucky Fried Chicken window, a lone man in a suit running to catch the last bus. We were, all of us, funambulists skywalking between the myth of our ancestral greatness and the reality of our compromised past, between our attempts to govern ourselves and our repeated failures. We were a generation doused in oil and oblivion, the city expanding in steel and glass around us, erasing at dizzying speed the alleys of our grandfathers, hemming us in along the way.
* * *
MINOO OPENED THE DOOR wearing cutoff shorts and a camisole. “Weren’t you supposed to be at the Campbell’s soup party?” she said.
I entered, and when I realized that she was home alone I kissed her more forcefully than I ever had, pushing her slowly toward her bedroom. While we had fooled around countless times, we had never ventured beyond. She half resisted, half acquiesced, which was all the permission I needed.
I was sweating, from the nighttime heat and the scent of her summer skin. I removed my shirt and shoved her on the bed, continuing to kiss her on her neck and ignoring her aborted protests. I wanted to love and harm her at once, the weight of my body on top of hers intoxicating me with my own sentience. We carried on like that for a while, but as I unbuttoned her pants and slipped my hand inside, a smack landed so violently near my right ear that I felt my brain rattling against my skull. I sat up, my skin throbbing. It occurred to me that this pulsating pain was what I had been after all evening, and letting out a long sigh, I lowered my body to the floor and collapsed on my bare back, eyes shut so as to hold back my childish tears. She sat next to me, her legs tucked beside her. “I didn’t want it to happen like this,” she said.
As I lay there, on Minoo’s carpet wrapped in the scent of old wool, I whispered to her, though I don’t think she could hear me, “Forgive me.”
“Look,” she said. “Outrage alone is useless.”
“What else is there?” I said.
“You haven’t understood anything,” she said. “Please go. I want to be alone. And Hamid,” she added, “don’t ever come back. You and I are through.”
13
WERE IT NOT for the tilting of our house a few months later, my life may have taken a different turn.
That fall, after weeks spent in the void of Minoo, I began classes at the university. I was not, I told myself, made of political cloth. Better stick to my germinal love: drawing, and the history of drawing. Walking home from class one afternoon and considering that day’s lecture on the difference between seeing an artwork in and out of context—for example, witnessing a Giotto fresco in the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, versus encountering a reproduction of that same fresco in a magazine—I noticed the house leaning to the left, a bizarre slant that made it look like something Magritte might have painted. I wrote this off as an optical illusion; discussions about perspective, composition, and visual acuity were no doubt making me more perceptive of the world’s irregularities. But the longer I looked the more I became convinced that this was an architectural scoliosis that would, sooner or later, lead to graver conditions.
My father laughed this off. “Meymoun balad nist beraghse migeh zamin kajeh—the monkey doesn’t know how to dance, he says the floor is crooked.” At his desk in his top floor office, in his suit and necktie and slippers, he looked up from
his papers, and in a gentler tone he added, “The house is fine, Hamid. Maybe you just want to believe it’s crooked?”
Maybe, maybe. What did I know, in any case? I had been proven an idiot in my pursuit of sentiment and political philosophy, so why not architecture, also? I dismissed my apprehension of a structural collapse, but as fall became winter and cracks in our apartment began expanding like spiderwebs around doorframes and windows, I knocked on the forbidding door of our landlord, a bachelor from the Imperial Air Force. He was a tall man of about fifty, soft-spoken, with a collection of Lacoste polo shirts. We never saw much of him, since on weekdays he left before dawn and he returned home in the evenings just in time to sleep. According to Yasser Maghz-Pahn, the gossiper who knew anyone worth knowing, the General spent weekends reading Leonardo Sciascia novels at a teahouse near the bazaar—a peculiar location given his military rank—or went horseback riding at the Shaki riding club in the Evin district.
That afternoon, on account of the announced snowstorm, he was home early and opened the door in his pajamas.
I peeked inside the living room. On a console in the foyer a Germanic ivory statue of a jester on a wooden plinth stood impish and sinister. I remembered that he had received his military training at some air base in Bavaria, near Munich.
“Forgive the intrusion, General,” I said. “But I think the house is slanting.”
“Excuse me?” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“The house is leaning to the side.”
“Which side?” he said.
I wasn’t sure why the direction should matter. “I think the left side,” I said.