by Dalia Sofer
I neither agreed nor objected. The mere fact of my standing in Qom discussing social justice with a seminary man felt to me like a small miracle. I offered to take him for a ride and he accepted, as he, too, seemed pleased by our incongruous connection. He sat behind me, taking care to prevent his qabā from getting caught in the spokes, and as he looped his arms around my waist, we set off together, an unlikely duo, riding through the streets of Qom with the freedom of two young men out on the town. In that brief period, as he held on to me for fear of falling, I felt an openness until then—and since—unknown to me.
I dropped him off at the seminary, and as he got off the bike—again mindful not to trip over his robe—he slipped a cassette tape in my pocket. “The Ayatollah’s speech,” he said in a low voice. I thanked him, and as we stood facing each other on the street corner, we must have both borne the flushed look of two people who have had a one-night stand and must now reenter the austerity of the known world.
In my hotel, not far from the Fatimeh Massoumeh shrine, I asked the concierge—a middle-aged man in an outdated suit and oversize eyeglasses—for a cassette player. He obliged after considerable grumbling; I think he mistook me for a brat from Tehran with a sudden craving for the Bee Gees. “Not too loud,” he said as he placed the cassette deck on the counter. “If you bother the other hotel guests I will send you back to your parents.”
“Don’t worry, stealth is my specialty,” I said.
I had intended to amuse him. For some reason—maybe because of his frumpy style—I had assumed him to be on the side of the seminary men. But he stared at me now, his eyes humorless; one never knew, in those days as in the present, where another’s loyalties lay. I held on to the tape in my pocket, trying my best to calm my heart’s pounding.
For some time he continued staring, then shrugged, as though concluding that I wasn’t worth the trouble of further consideration.
In my room I closed the curtain, sat on the bed, and played the tape. The voice I heard was that of an old man, determined but fatherly, with a provincial accent that could sound appealing or objectionable, depending on who you were. Among the many arguments in favor of a religious judiciary there were also lucid tidbits. This one, for example, regarding the penal system under the monarchy: “They kill people for possessing ten grams of heroin and say, ‘That is the law,’ […] The sale of heroin must indeed be prohibited, but the punishment must be in proportion to the crime…”
Such eloquent statements were interspersed with incoherent arguments calling for the rule of God over human affairs, and I found myself tuning in and out, alternately convinced and distressed, unable, as had become my habit, to form an opinion. But the crucial fact, I told myself, was that the Ayatollah spoke of an end to oppression, something that, as the seminary student had argued, we could all agree on. Wasn’t this, I wondered, the voice—and more crucially the words—that would speak to a man like Mirza, far better than my academic lectures had managed to do?
I lingered in Qom for a week, spellbound by the number of mosques and seminaries and clerics walking around in their robes as naturally as ducks in a pond, a reality that was in plain sight but remained forgotten by most of us outsiders. Had they always been there? My ignorance was like that of a medieval Roman oblivious of the existence of the Vatican.
* * *
MY FAMILY HAD long been back from their summer holiday by the time I returned. I ignored my parents’ outrage about my disappearance, the missing money, and the Harley in the garage. “Heartless!” my father said on the first day. “We were worried sick about you, and you didn’t even have the decency to let us know your whereabouts. What kind of halfwit does something like that?” On the second day he called me “a con man.” By the third I had graduated to “bandit,” and by the fourth, when he named me an “outlaw,” it seemed that it was only a matter of time before I would reach the ranks of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He seemed unaware that by escalating the insults and aggrandizing my transgression, he was glorifying me. I had already become a minor hero for Omid, and maybe even for the basement brothers: Morteza had become obsessed with my motorcycle, and Mirza with where the motorcycle had taken me. “For some time,” he said one morning as I sat with the newspaper in the garden, “I’ve wanted to make a pilgrimage to Qom. It has been my wish to take my daughter to the Fatimeh Massoumeh shrine, so that, God willing, she may be healed. But I can’t afford not to work, not even for a week.”
I told him that at the shrine I had seen pilgrims on crutches and in wheelchairs, praying, asking for patience, for blessing, and maybe even a cure. This supplication, I added, initially struck me as preposterous, but the longer I stayed in Qom, the more my certainty began to shift, so that by the end, I thought, Why not? Isn’t the world populated with ex-votos and the hair and teeth and fingernails of this or that saint? What would a human being become without belief in something other than himself? I am not sure if this thought had truly occurred to me in Qom, or if I was simply saying it now because I knew that it would please Mirza and would entice him, once more, to pay attention to my revolutionary discourse. When he asked if I had become a believer, I said that my incapacity for unadulterated belief was beside the point, and that one had to admire the raw power of faith in keeping the world whirling, in allowing, say, a woman in a war-torn country to desire a child, or a man to embrace his wife even as his mother lies dying in another corner of the same room. “God willing agha-Mirza,” I told him, “you will go to Qom.” He nodded, pensive, with more conviction than he generally displayed. As he was about to resume his work I showed him the day’s cartoon and he laughed as he once used to. I believe it was this—the resumption of our old routine—that restored my confidence and made me slip the tape into his pocket. “A seminary man in Qom offered this to me,” I said. “Listen to it.”
In the garden the following morning he embraced me like a father. His eyes were bright, trusting. “Thank you,” he said. “For the first time in my life, I see a way out for us. We need to rid ourselves of this puppet regime. As the Ayatollah said, ‘Imperialist countries think they are better than us because they have conquered even the moon. Let them go all the way to Mars or beyond the Milky Way; they will still be deprived of true happiness, moral virtue, and spiritual advancement.’” He stood for some time, wistful, then smiled at me kindly, forgetting to hide the missing tooth.
15
“WHEN I SAW YOU AT THE POETRY READINGS, so serious…” she said. “I was happy. You seemed changed.”
Dear Minoo. I had run into her at the poetry readings of the Goethe-Institut a week earlier. That we should have found each other in a crowd of thousands seemed to me like an intervention of providence.
We were having coffee at Café Naderi, by a window overlooking the garden. The cappuccino machine fizzed in the background, filling the room with the heady aroma of fresh coffee beans and frothy milk, while the framed portraits of the writers and poets who in times past had been café regulars—Hedayat, Yushij, Daneshvar—kept vigil over our words. We met there because the coffee was good. Maybe we also met there so we could insert ourselves into the café’s past, and in this way, or so we thought, write ourselves into the national history.
“Since we parted,” I said, “I’ve met many people and seen many things. Something is about to happen, don’t you feel it?”
“Yes,” she said. “The ten nights of poetry convinced me. The thousands showing up, night after night! And how easily the literary evenings turned political. To hear allusions to freedom of thought and equality on loudspeakers was surreal. And the way the police just stood back and watched…”
“We will fly or falter,” I said. “But nothing will remain the same.” I reached for her hand and a current ran wild through my body. Was it carnal or political? Maybe the two were identical? “In the words of Ali Shariati,” I continued, “‘What if Iranian society consisted of twenty-five million Hallajs?’”
“Who is Hallaj?” she said.
“Ah … It’s finally my turn to teach you something.”
“Don’t gloat,” she said. “Just explain.”
“Mansur Al-Hallaj,” I said, “was a medieval mystic who was executed by orders of the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadir, because he is believed to have said, ‘ana al-Haqq—I am the Truth,’ which was considered a heresy. The French philosopher Louis Massignon wrote about him in his four-volume work The Passion of Al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam…”
“Look at you,” she said, “making references to Massignon … You really have changed.”
“Do you or do you not want to hear about Hallaj,” I said as I inched my chair closer to hers and placed my hand on her knee.
“Yes,” she said, her face flushed. “Tell me.”
“Shariati’s brilliance is that he infuses, through Hallaj, an element of spirituality into the Western language of oppression and justice. He is merging discourses of East and West to present a new way of thinking, a new vocabulary. But he isn’t speaking of religion as a stagnant, corrupt institution, the kind that has colluded with kings and rulers from the time of the Safavids until now. He means religion as an expression of social action.”
“I think,” she said, “that religion, all religion, should be left out of the democratic discourse. How can you impose religion on a secular society? The two can’t coexist.”
“You’re too committed to Western philosophy,” I said, “and to laïcité, that sacred ideal of the French. Secularism is an offspring of their experience, not ours, and it belongs to their lexicon, not ours. By ours,” I continued, “I don’t mean you and me. I mean everyone. A new way of thinking is what we need, and from that will come a new way of being.”
“But where would that leave those who prefer their religion in small doses and on the side?”
I wanted to say, That’s nothing more than an afterthought, a footnote at best. Instead I said, “This is like worrying about the buttons on an overcoat before it has even been sewn. Details can be figured out later. Can we agree, for now, that it has been a long, cold winter, and we desperately need a coat?”
“Fine,” she said, “if we must speak in allegories … But what will that coat look like? What kind of fabric? How many pockets? Double-breasted or single?”
“Dear God!” I said. “For such a brilliant person you’re so myopic.”
“‘Caress the detail, the divine detail,’” she said. “This was Nabokov’s advice regarding memory, but I think it also applies to what is yet to come … For my part, I’ve joined the National Front, the party of Mossadegh.”
“Mossadegh is an inspiration to all of us,” I said. “But it’s time to improvise.”
“Liberal democracy,” she said, “is the best system we have come up with so far, and I think…”
I kissed her, midsentence, and she closed her eyes, her lips soft, her hand warm on my knee. With so much rhetoric in the air, the future was murky. But who could consider the future, when the present was so bewildering?
16
SEPTEMBER 8, 1978—“Black Friday”—was the day that would begin the intricate frostwork of my soul. That morning, Mostafa Akbari—also known as “The Lizard”—ordered me to strike a soldier. He is sacrosanct now because he converted so many leftists back in the day, and now sits among those at the helm of the foundation governing the holy shrine in Mashhad. But he was a sort of false god, a div.
* * *
WHEN I FIRST NOTICED HIM, he was standing by the shuttered kiosk in ill-fitting corduroy pants and a mustard-yellow jacket with all but one button missing, smoking and surveying the crowd of protesters in Jaleh Square with the detachment of a hierophant. A purple antler-shaped birthmark jutted from his neck to his ear. I was standing in the bowels of the crowd, all of us behind a barricade. People think of protests as all freedom of movement and adrenaline, but anyone who has demonstrated will tell you that they are mostly boring affairs, figures trapped within the inertia of a mob, hypnotically repeating slogans. Until, that is, the decisive moment, the moment when bodies from all directions spill beyond the barricades, the moment of contact of flesh with baton, flesh with tear gas, flesh with bullet, flesh with flesh.
* * *
ON THE RADIO THAT MORNING they declared martial law beginning at six. When the news was announced I was sitting at the kitchen table with my father, whose breakfast was untouched; his head was buried in the newspaper. Mother, by the window, smoked her Gauloise. Omid was asleep.
“You heard the announcement?” my father said. “Martial law means a military government. You can’t go to the demonstration.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “Now I must go.”
I was still rattled from a chance encounter I had had the previous day, when, dizzy from the headlines I had gleaned at the newsstand, I stopped outside a café to light up a cigarette—a recent habit that I believed suited my image of a man in revolt. Through the window of the café a vintage map of the Persian Achaemenid Empire could be seen, a map whose long-held truths, Caspia, Parthia, Susa, had no particular meaning to any of us. Beneath the map a man wearing a navy suit was having soup. He looked up. It was Yasser, my father’s associate. Out of politeness—a trait I had difficulty discarding—I waved hello and bowed slightly, and he, perhaps out of loyalty to my father, motioned for me to join him. I demurred, he insisted, in that familiar dance that we all knew too well, until I had no choice but to do as he asked; his seniority made my refusal a flagrant offense.
“Shall I order you something?” he said as I sat.
I thanked him and declined, but he ordered me a tea nonetheless.
“Your father tells me you’ve become quite the revolutionary,” he said.
“I didn’t realize he had such interest in my activities,” I said.
“Hamid,” he said, putting down his spoon. “He’s worried about you.”
“He’s only worried I’ll ruffle some feathers in his beloved Peacock throne.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “This government can finish you off in a minute if it wants to. Your father knows something about this.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I’ve heard about my father’s so-called activism.”
He removed his hexagonal black-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look like tiny bees in a hive, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to tell you something I was never meant to mention,” he said. “I’m doing it because I’m hoping it will knock some sense into your thick brain. In 1953, a few months after the coup, your father’s apartment was raided by the secret police because he had written some articles on Mossadegh’s behalf. In his room they found an art book he had borrowed from the university library, and the name preceding your father’s on the attached borrowers’ card was the name of a prominent member of Tudeh—the Communist party that had earlier tried to topple the Shah. So they arrested your father, because of a stupid library book! He was held in jail for several weeks while they investigated to make sure that he had no ties to the previous borrower. They put him through hell, and forced him to disclose information about friends and acquaintances. For a long time he refused, until he no longer could.”
As he spoke a sharp pain stabbed my stomach and shot down to my foot, where it dulled into a throb. To numb it I reached for another cigarette. Remembering the conversation I had had with my father years earlier after the visit to the dentist, I said, “Was Houshang Habibi, the artist, among these friends?”
Avoiding my gaze, Yasser sipped his Coke. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Tell me the truth, Yasser-agha. My father ratted on his best friend?”
“You idiot!” he said, banging his glass on the table. “Why do you insist on simplifying everything? History is painted in shades of gray.”
“As far as I’m concerned, treachery has only one shade,” I said as I left the table and walked out.
“Fighting cock!” he called out after me. “Just as your father always says. I should have kn
own you’d be too dim-witted to understand this story.”
* * *
I DIDN’T TELL MY FATHER of my encounter with Yasser. Quietly I finished my omelet and retrieved the six-foot banner I had prepared for the rally, unfurling it on the kitchen floor, in front of my parents, wanting them to witness my creation. On the left side I had drawn, with a charcoal stick, a portrait of Mossadegh—deep, dark, with shades of gray filling his oblong face—and I watched my father with satisfaction as he examined my rendering of the abandoned hero of his youth, whose image, I imagined, inflamed the ache of his private history. He folded the newspaper and looked on as I wrote on the banner, in the most refined calligraphy I could manage, a slogan I had picked up from the previous demonstration, “Mikosham, Mikosham, ānke barādaram kosht—I will kill, I will kill, he who killed my brother!”
My mother stubbed her cigarette in the sink. “I’m going back to bed,” she said.
* * *
AT THE SQUARE, soldiers with rifles encircled the protesters. I had come alone, as Minoo was sick with the flu. I squeezed one end of the wooden pole attached to my banner with a clammy palm and a woman next to me—a pretty collegiate with platform shoes—held on to the other. A man in front of us had a small boy riding on his shoulder, and this comforted me; if a child was present, I told myself, then providence would not allow anything bad to happen. The same thought had always quieted me before boarding airplanes.
As our numbers grew the crowd’s velocity could no longer be contained, and we began spilling out, slowly at first then frantically, men and women dispersing across the square in all directions. Suddenly, the woman dropped the pole and the left side of my banner, slack on the ground, was trampled by the stomping feet of the protesters.
When I heard the first shot I didn’t think it was real; it sounded like a metallic hiccup. But as the sound of rifles reverberated in the September sky and I saw the pavement splattered with bodies and blood, I dropped the banner and ran—toward the man with the antler-shaped birthmark still standing, unshaken, by the kiosk. He gestured at me to crouch low beside him, and reaching into a bowling bag he pulled out a bottle, lit it with a match, and hurled it in the direction of the soldiers. “Run!” he said to me, as he, too, began running, and I followed him through the broken doors of the cinema and into the lobby, turning my head every now and again to witness the fire of his Molotov cocktail, and the soldiers, running, running—terrified as we were.