by Dalia Sofer
The cinema lobby was deserted. The last time I had been there was some months earlier to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my father. Though the two of us were barely speaking by then, we had maintained our ritual of seeing James Bond films, which, despite his scholarly airs, my father adored. Remembering how we had sat side by side, a bag of sunflower seeds between us, transported by spies and submarines and a henchman with metal teeth named Jaws, I felt a violent regret for what I knew I had to do.
* * *
“DID YOU SEE HOW I BLASTED THEM?” he said, catching his breath. “Like a bug bomb in an infested house.” He wiped his flushed face with a washcloth stained with oil. His Stalinist mustache made him seem older than he was, but up close I could see that he was no more than six or seven years my senior. “I am Mostafa Akbari,” he said, as he opened his bowling bag and pulled out another bottle filled with gasoline, into which he inserted an alcohol-infused wick. He handed me a matchbox and the bottle. “Your turn,” he said.
I took the bottle, placed it on the floor, and lit a match. But my hands were unsteady and I couldn’t ignite the wick.
He blew out my matchstick. “After you light it you have one second to throw,” he said. “Or else it will blow up right here and turn the two of us into abgoosht.”
I thought of Minoo, just then, running a fever. What would she say if she saw me with a Molotov cocktail? “I can’t do it,” I said.
“You don’t look like a cripple. But are you?”
“It’s a philosophy,” I said. “How shall I explain? A commitment to nonviolence.”
His surly laughter dissolved in the gunshots and screams outside the cinema. “The nonviolent ones are history’s losers,” he said. “Gandhi, and that black American stooge. Where did they end up? Wake up! Look what’s happening in that square.” He lit the bottle’s wick and threw, this time decimating a military car.
As we walked toward the crowd, I wanted to see who had fallen near the military car, but people had already congregated there and not much was visible. I thought I saw the girl in the platform shoes, hobbling, but Akbari shoved me along. We passed a soldier firing his rifle at a group of students, and Akbari, producing a baton from the bowling bag, hit him on the head from behind. The bloodied soldier fell to the ground; the students ran. Another soldier was crouching near a hair salon, his head in his hands. Akbari handed me a stick. “Hit him,” he said.
“But he isn’t doing anything,” I said.
“You fool,” he said. “You think so small. Hit him, before he rises and hits you.”
I held on to the baton with both hands and raised it, but I couldn’t act.
“If you can’t do it then go home,” he said. “You’re not made for this.”
* * *
THE BATON CAME DOWN and something crackled, like cellophane. His neck. He grabbed it and fell sideways on the pavement. He looked up at me, the shadow of a mustache framing his upper lip. He was young—eighteen or so, my own age. I knelt beside him, sorry for what I had done, but relieved, too, that I had finally done it, that from that moment on, I could go on doing it.
17
IN THAT TURBULENT AUTUMN OF 1978, I saw Akbari at all the demonstrations. He was from a village in Khorasan and had for three years worked as a petroleum inspector at the oil refinery in Abadan. Until the uprisings his goal had been to rise to a managerial role—anything that required a suit, a necktie, and a desk—but he had since understood, or so he claimed, the absurdity of his desires. He was, by all appearances, a peculiar man. He never smiled, had the thin-skinned pride of a peasant, and wore an assortment of ill-fitting corduroy pants and black turtlenecks that failed to hide his antler birthmark. He owned a pet lizard named Spaghetti, drank a glass of raw eggs and heavy cream every morning, and did thirty rotation planks each night before bed, followed by ten Superman planks and one hundred crunches.
When we met he was a member of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, and were it not for Minoo, who remained committed to nonviolent resistance and mistrusted Akbari from the start, I would have joined his group. After the government’s collapse and the arrival of the Ayatollah we drifted apart, but I ran into him in the summer of 1979, when he played a brief but ruinous role in my family’s breakup.
* * *
IT ALL HAPPENED HAPHAZARDLY and without warning, like a slip on black ice. I had gone shopping at the bazaar—since the closure of the Ministry of Culture and my father’s unemployment, the family finances were faltering and my mother had asked me to stock up on cheaper goods downtown. On my way home the Paykan huffed and suddenly died. A car honked behind me, impatient. After several minutes the driver cursed then backed out of the street and disappeared. I sat livid, turning the ignition to no avail, my mind circling back to a bitter exchange with my father.
Late in the afternoon on the previous day, as I was cleaning my closet, I had stumbled on a box filled with the old Märklin train set. The dusty compartments and rails—several of them bent and badly chipped—made me yearn for Uncle Majid, and for the night I had shared with him and the three-legged cat beneath the clear, moonlit October sky. As I placed the train components back in the box, another feeling gripped me, an unexpected warmth toward my father, whose spirits since the protests and the regime’s collapse had been diminishing. No longer the know-it-all professor, he had relinquished his encyclopedia, and he sat for hours in the living room, unshaven and often in pajamas, staring at a glass of tea that my mother periodically replenished.
Despite the hostility between us, I went to him, and finding him forlorn on the settee, I offered to take him for a drive.
“Where do you want to go?” he said, stunned by my invitation. “Everything has been destroyed.” The whites of his eyes were a pale yellow, making me wonder if his digestion was acting up again.
“Don’t exaggerate, bābā,” I said. “Everything is in transition, that’s all.”
My mother, reading a magazine by the window, looked up, shocked by my unusual act of benevolence toward my father. “Sadegh,” she said, “get up and get dressed. Your son has kindly offered to take you out.”
After grumbling for a while my father acquiesced. Half an hour later he emerged shaven, in his suit and necktie.
“No need for a tie,” I said. “We’re just going for a ride. And besides, we don’t want to attract any undue attention.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I forgot that a tie is now a symbol of royalist affiliations.” He uncoiled the tie from around his neck and threw it on the floor. “Now we have to dance to the tune of a bunch of illiterates.”
I was already regretting my invitation. But we walked together down the street to my father’s Paykan.
As I was about to get into the driver’s seat my father said, “You’re driving?”
“I thought I would,” I said.
“Do you even know how?”
“You forget I rode around the country two summers ago on my motorcycle,” I said as calmly as I could.
“Yes,” he said. “How could I forget your motorcycle, which you bought with the money you stole from us.” He got into the passenger seat. “All right,” he said, “let’s see what you can do.”
I had driven that car scores of times, but as we set off my hands felt unsteady on the wheel. I headed north along Pahlavi Street—now named Valiasr. “I thought we could go to Shahanshahi Park,” I said.
My father didn’t object.
“The new name is Park-e Mellat,” I added.
“The people’s park,” my father mumbled, grimacing. “Well, the people are in for a surprise.”
“I know things haven’t turned out well so far, bābā. But give the revolution a chance.”
“Āb az sarcheshmeh ghel āloud ast,” he said. “The water is turbid from its source.”
The lush summer plane trees flanking the boulevard lulled us into silence. My father watched me drive as though he were grading me for a road test. The more he watched the more nervous I became, and when I accelerated and
forgot to change the gear, he said, “Gear, gear! My God, you’re as lousy a driver as Majid was.”
I fought back tears. I’m not sure what had caused them, my longing for my uncle, triggered by the train set, or the feeling swelling in me as I sat beside my father—a sense of becoming small, of wanting to disappear.
We continued north in silence. I turned on the radio to distract myself, but all I found was a sermon by the Ayatollah. I shut it off.
“What are you planning to do with yourself when things settle down?” my father asked. “You can’t continue being a so-called revolutionary.”
“I guess I’ll go back to the university and resume my studies.”
“You intend to stick with drawing?”
“I enjoy drawing,” I said. “I’d like to become a cartoonist.”
“But you’re not very good at it,” he said matter-of-factly.
I made no reply. I thought of my drawing of Everyman Jamshid, how it had been photocopied and pasted throughout the school. But my throat felt shut and I couldn’t speak.
“Look,” he said. “What we want and what we’re good at don’t always match up in life. You’ve got to make smart choices from the outset. Otherwise you’ll end up useless and poor, like Majid.”
“What do you have against Uncle Majid today?” I asked.
“Against him? Nothing. But he lived badly and he ended up even worse. I don’t need to remind you.”
For the rest of the ride we didn’t speak. We hit traffic near a checkpoint, and by the time we made it to the park, dusk was already settling and two militiamen advised us to head home.
* * *
NOW, AS I SAT near the bazaar in the idle Paykan, the memory of the afternoon with my father played in my mind repeatedly. The car was sweltering despite the open windows, and a pungent smell of urine was trapped in the noontime August heat. I banged on the wheel and kept on igniting the engine, but it refused to start.
To my relief, I was soon joined by volunteers pushing the car from behind. I ignited, they pushed, I ignited, they pushed, their numbers growing with each traveled centimeter. The fact is that nothing unites my countrymen better than unforeseen bad luck. As I pressed on the gas with my tired foot, sweat running down my forehead and chest, I was stunned to find, among the multiplying faces reflected in my rearview mirror, the big, irritable, unmistakable peasant mug of Mostafa Akbari. I sank low into my seat so he wouldn’t recognize me, but soon another impulse, in complete opposition to the first, made me stick my head out the window and call out his name. He walked over. “Still in Tehran?” he said, a rifle hanging from his shoulder as casually as a tennis racket.
“Where else would I be?”
“I had counted you as one of those talkers who would pack up and leave as soon as things got messy.”
“You underestimate me,” I said.
“So I did,” he said. He had trimmed his Stalinist mustache and now sported a full beard.
“Who are you with now?” I asked him, and he said, “I am with whomever Allah sees fit. And you?” he added. “You’re still with Gandhi?”
I smiled, acknowledging the naiveté of my ways. “No, my brother,” I said. “I am with whomever you are with.” Pointing at the rifle I added, “Is God handing out Kalashnikovs now?”
Narrowing his eyes he smiled tepidly, like a schoolteacher who has decided to indulge a student’s juvenile joke. “I’ve joined the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guards,” he said. He glanced at the shopping bags stacked on the back seat of my car. The head of a chicken, just butchered, stuck out from one of the bags, and from another sprang the wet tails of two fish. “What’s all this?” he asked. “Looks like enough food for an army. You’re not still running around with the Communists, are you?”
How could I tell him that I, self-professed revolutionary, was still the errand boy for my parents? “Listen, now that you’re with Sepah, I have a favor to ask,” I said.
“Ask, brother,” he said.
“I’d like you to come by with a friend or two to seize … my father’s papers.”
“You’re asking me to raid your house?”
“My father’s house.”
“Your father still hasn’t left town? Wasn’t he with the Ministry of Culture?”
“He hasn’t left. He seems to believe that the arts hover above politics and that he is therefore immune.”
“You’re turning in your own father?” he said incredulously. “What kind of papers are we talking about?”
I hesitated. “Notes for an encyclopedia,” I said. “Three decades’ worth of research in his study and in an office space one floor above our apartment.”
I believe it was not the gravity of the task, but the extent of the intended injury, that made his black eyes soften with delight. “Consider it done,” he said. “How about Tuesday at three in the afternoon?”
We shook hands. I wrote down my family’s address on the back of the receipt from the bakery, where I had just bought my father’s favorite sweets: a box of koloucheh, which he liked to eat with his afternoon tea.
The car finally started, and as I pressed on the gas I watched the volunteers wishing me well and dispersing in various directions. All with the exception of one man: Mostafa Akbari, in his tattered corduroy suit, the bakery receipt dangling from his hand.
* * *
AT THREE O’CLOCK SHARP the following Tuesday the knocks came. His promptness stunned me; it was as though he had come for a job interview or a bank loan. My mother was napping on the sofa under the hum of the air conditioner, and my father sat silent on the settee, staring at his tea and cookies and playing with his tasbih, dazed by the vertiginous bounce of one bead on the next. “Who could that be?” said my alarmed mother, sitting up and straightening her hair. “Will you get it, Hamid?”
I had hoped that this task wouldn’t fall to me. But I did as I was told, allaying my hesitation with reminders of Yasser’s story about my father’s betrayal of his friend H.
Akbari stood before me, as promised, with two fellow Guards. On his face I found only a trace of derision. They walked past my speechless parents with their rifles and made their way to my father’s study. “What is this?” bābā said, walking after them. “What do you think you’re doing?” They ignored him as they ransacked his books, collecting whatever they thought may be viable evidence for a future case against him. “Hamid!” said my father. “Talk to them. They’ll listen to you.”
I stood beside him like a besieged moth before a praying mantis. “Hamid, Hamid, do something…” my father carried on. Akbari dangled a key in my father’s face and said, “We understand you have an office dedicated to your encyclopedia upstairs?”
“Yes, but what can you possibly want with an art encyclopedia?”
“You let us be the judges of that,” Akbari said as he headed upstairs with his men.
We sat in the living room in silence, listening to their footsteps and the rattle of furniture above us. It was another oppressive summer afternoon. My mother stroked my father’s forearm. “It was bound to happen to us, too,” she whispered. “After all, why not?” My father muttered something, his voice hoarse. Woozy, as though wasted, I walked to the window and looked out on the street, at cars headed to half-empty office buildings or desolate restaurants, at a city built by one regime and awaiting ordinances by another, suspended in disorder. My knees trembled as I stood, and a sinking feeling made the room spin slowly around me. Breathless, I took small steps to a chair, and as I sat down, my mother said, “Hamid-jan, you look so pale … It will be all right, don’t be scared.” From the kitchen she brought two glasses of water, one for my father and one for me.
Akbari and his men emerged hours later, and hauled away three decades of bābā’s writings in thirteen garbage bags. “You’re lucky your son is a friend of the revolution, aghaye Mozaffarian,” Akbari said on his way out. “Or you would be sharing the fate of your papers.” My father remained on the settee in his pajamas and slippers, his h
ands on his lap visibly shaking. He cleared his throat several times in an attempt to speak, but his voice wouldn’t come. Finally, in a barely audible voice he said, “History will not be kind to you, aghaye Akbari.”
“Professor,” Akbari said. “Don’t concern yourself with history, because history has the memory of a baboon. Agonize instead over your own destiny.”
He walked out, leaving dusty prints on the carpet, and I followed him to the foyer, unsure of how to bid him farewell. His face was even more sallow than usual, his antler birthmark more inflamed. “How would you like to join Sepah?” he said. “I’ll put in a good word for you.” I hesitated. “I am honored,” I said, my voice breaking. “But I’ve decided to resume my commitment to nonviolence.”
“Māshāllah—bravo!” he said. “But I’m afraid you crossed that line today, a hundred times over. Think about it, brother.”
As he walked out he noticed a crumpled piece of paper on the console. He glanced at it and put it in his pocket. It was, I remembered, the General’s phone number at the Imperial Air Force; the General had given it to me when the house had tilted and was at risk of collapsing. The number was useless now; like so many others, the General, too, had disappeared.
The front door slammed shut, the sound of heavy bags thrown inside a trunk filled the afternoon, a car engine boomed. Then came the sound of nothing, which follows all else.