by Dalia Sofer
Running into the garden, I crouched under the apricot tree and sobbed. When I was done I got up and frantically looked for Pofak the crippled cat, whose magical appearance, I felt, would signal that things would turn out all right in the end. But there was no cat.
In the living room my father sat stooped on the settee, his hands clasped on his bony knees, staring blankly at the untouched plate of koloucheh before him.
It was the first and last time I saw him cry.
18
WHEN I LEFT MY FAMILY at the departure gate at Mehrabad airport in that summer of 1979, it was they who called out my name, and not the other way around. “Hamid, Hamid!…” cried my father amid the footsteps of travelers and the public address system blaring departures, arrivals, delays, cancellations. I didn’t turn back. I allowed my father’s broken voice to inoculate me against loyalty, and I kept on walking, one foot in front of the other, facing a splintering city promising solitude. A hot wind filled my father’s old Paykan as I drove home with the windows rolled down, dust and pollution making everything—the abandoned construction sites and the rusted cranes—feel like the yellowing sketches of a dead architect.
I parked the car on Shahreza Street, renamed Enghelab—Revolution—and walked toward the apartment. The old frame shop still displayed in its window prints of docile kittens, London Bridge, and alpine forests. The cassette seller next door played one of the Ayatollah’s old speeches.
When I opened the door to the empty house my reflection in the foyer mirror startled me. I looked at my hard, haggard face and asked myself a question that would haunt me for the rest of my days: how does the stone stand being a stone? The hollow gloves stacked palms up on the console were as solemn as an undertaker’s handshake. In the living room my mother’s red cardigan draped over the sofa, my father’s slippers abandoned at the foot of the settee, and my brother’s favorite vinyl—Boney M.’s “Ma Baker” single—left behind on the coffee table, all bore the fingerprints of familial heartbreak. On the floor, next to my father’s slippers, was the last book he had read in that settee—a monograph on Caravaggio. I picked it up. It was bookmarked at a page on The Calling of St. Matthew. I stared, mesmerized, at the photograph of the painting, remembering the old Polaroid I had once found in his desk drawer. It was the grit that now drew me in—the seedy tavern, the weathered faces, the bare, dirty feet of Saint Peter. I loved the image, in all its soil and unsaintliness. I loved, too, the outstretched arm beckoning in the ray of light, and the stunned face of Matthew pointing at himself. I closed the book, wondering why I had shirked, countless times, my father’s attempts to share with me his love of Caravaggio. I wanted to call Minoo, but felt unqualified for both sympathy and love. Instead I went to the kitchen, where an unwashed teacup sang a requiem from the sink, and I made myself two sunny-side-up eggs, the heady smell of frying butter convincing me that I had done the right thing. At my father’s seat near the window, I ate ravenously. His morning paper was still on the breakfast table. I did not read it.
* * *
IN THOSE EARLY DAYS what preoccupied me above all was dirt. I dusted the apartment daily, washed my hands at least a dozen times a day. I played Omid’s Boney M. record over and over as I painted the walls hospital white and wiped the floors with bleach, all the while singing along, Ma Baker, she never could cry … Ma Ma Ma Ma … Ma Baker, but she knew how to die … I sorted the closets and tossed out my family’s belongings like a widower at once grieving and jubilant. I did the same with friends and acquaintances, liquidating those I deemed unfit for the portrait I was drawing of myself. Though I tried my best to carry out this selection in a manner that caused as little offense as possible, a few discarded friends took their dismissal to heart; one old Baha’i classmate wept.
There were items I could not cast off. The honeybee car. My collection of sulfide marbles; my mother’s hideous Marie Antoinette lamp; my father’s Caravaggio book; his monogrammed cigarette lighter, and his spare reading glasses, which I began using some two decades later; the prayer stone Uncle Majid gave me before the car accident; the shortwave portable radio, around which my family had huddled in those final months to pick up staticky transmissions of the BBC; the Pan Am matchbook with my father’s inscription, given to me the night he exiled me to the garden; bins of family photographs; and this: a shoebox I found under my parents’ bed, containing dozens of photocopies of caricatures, all initialed “H.” Among these were facsimiles of two typed letters from the Ministry of Culture, addressed to Houshang Habibi, informing him that should he not desist the political nature of his work, he would suffer severe consequences. The signatory on both letters was my father.
Throughout this liquidation my mother’s canary sang, having neither memory nor foreknowledge of misfortune. As was my habit I berated my mother for neglecting those who depended on her, in this case her beloved bird. Why had she not entrusted it to a friend? But soon I remembered that I was the one who had precipitated my family’s exit, leaving them no time to settle accounts, make peace, say goodbye.
19
WITH MY FAMILY GONE, I talked Minoo into moving in with me. This caused a disturbance in her household, especially as I had no intention of marrying her, and as far as I knew, marriage—so petty and bourgeois an institution compared to our riotous exploits—wasn’t on her mind either. With the revolution now accomplished, we set out each evening with cans of aerosol paint to imprint the city with graffiti. I drew, Minoo wrote slogans. But as the nimbus of the victorious regime seeped its religion into the marrow of our lives, dictating ideals, laws, and eventually habits, our guerrilla-style living arrangement gradually became illegal, and Minoo, whose affronted father refused to take her back, effectively became a fugitive in my home. She kept her head down and limited her comings and goings to off-hours, and we made sure never to be seen together outside the apartment, a dichotomy mirrored in countless households, a harbinger of a nation’s collective psychosis. Our slapdash street art was soon deemed unacceptable, too, replaced instead by government-sponsored propaganda murals.
Ask any child who has played musical chairs: finding your place in the shifting order of vanishing chairs is no small task. So it was for us. Would we keep whirling to the tuneless clapping of a new regime and grab a seat at someone else’s expense, or would we relinquish the game and disappear? Minoo’s family, as mine had a year earlier, decided to surrender and leave for America, and she, wavering for weeks, chose in the end to stay. I was pleased with her choice but only hoped that it had not been made on my account.
One week before their departure date, her father, Ebrahim Levy, son of the late rabbi Baruch Levy and owner of a mirror shop on Lalezar Street, amateur interpreter of the Babylonian Talmud and lover of pistachios from Rafsanjan, died of a heart attack on his way to the synagogue, where he had hoped to pray one last time for his family’s safe passage. I accompanied the devastated Minoo to the funeral, and sat in mourning with her for seven days in her family’s home, where their last remaining friends and relatives gathered nightly to recite the Kaddish. On several occasions, when the required ten Jewish men were not present to form a minyan, the rabbi, seeing the exceptional nature of our time, allowed me to stand in as one of the ten. In the circle of praying mourners I felt both privileged and alien, honored to have been included but not wishing to make a habit of it.
* * *
THE ENVELOPE OF CASH my father had left on my pillow on the day he fled soon lay like a deflated balloon on the dining room table, along with our abandoned spray paints and revolutionary banners. And Minoo’s savings, courtesy of her bereft mother, would in a matter of weeks become nothing more than a chilly memory of familial refuge. With the threat of destitution pushing us toward pragmatism, Minoo decided to take over her father’s boarded-up mirror shop, determined to support us in our solitude.
For two days we cleaned the shop, wiping dusty glass with vinegar and rags, sieged once more by our own reflections as we had been in the house of mirrors at the
amusement park, on that summer night that now seemed centuries ago. Convex, cheval, swing, and oval mirrors, Venetian mirrors rimmed with rosettes, gold-plated Beaux Arts mirrors—all stood taciturn along the walls, unstained and chaste.
* * *
ON THE MORNING of Minoo’s first workday I got up before dawn and, as had become my habit, didn’t bother to put pants on. While I was grateful for her sensible decision to overtake the shop, this descent into normalcy unnerved me. Not only were we going to play house, we were going to do it under a government that wished to erase us—its progenitors—as it expunged its own footprints. To fill the hours until sunrise I placed the kettle on the stove and picked up a newspaper from the stack piling up on the kitchen counter. It was a one-week-old New York Times that the kiosk down the street had somehow managed to get. I read,
Tehran, Sep 29, 1980—
Tehran at night appears like a ghost town.
Like most other cities in the country, the capital is dark because the authorities switch off the city’s electrical generators to assure that a blackout is enforced and perhaps also as a conservation measure. Iranians live by candlelight behind thick curtains.
Thousands of militiamen, on foot or in cars with dimmed headlights, circulate in silence. Shadows loom to intercept a lone pedestrian to check his papers or advise him to return home.
MISSILES LIGHT SKY
Every evening since the beginning of last week an air raid siren has broadcast the presence of enemy planes over the city. Ground-to-air missiles and machine gun fire light the sky, making an enormous racket. Last Sunday’s raid warning and the firing lasted more than two hours, but not one enemy bomb was dropped on the city. In fact, the only verifiable bombing of Tehran came last Monday, the first day of the war.
Iraqi planes have aimed rockets at the Tehran airport, but they have not succeeded in damaging the runways. According to witnesses, from two to eight people have been killed in these attacks …
The shortage of oil, which until now was the only commodity that had been rationed, has become a very serious problem for Iran. Travel between Tehran and the provinces has diminished to a trickle, and on the highways one encounters mainly supply vehicles and military trucks.
In Tabriz on Saturday the long lines at gasoline stations came to a halt when the electrical power on which the pumps run was cut off. At one station hundreds of orange taxis were lined up for several kilometers.
SHORTAGE OF PUBLIC TRANSIT
The scene is similar in Tehran, where private cars are forbidden to operate. Drivers of buses and taxis have trouble getting gasoline, and people often wait up to two hours before they can find transportation to work. Many are not able to return home at night. Nevertheless there is not the slightest complaint or sign of ill humor …
Rendered with a Western pen our troubles sounded almost poetic. I pictured us as described, good-humored and philosophical, lining up at bus stops and gas stations as sunset dipped us in wistful postcard colors, our militiamen bidding us good night like benevolent uncles.
* * *
MINOO APPEARED IN the kitchen groggy and ill-tempered. She poured herself a glass of tea. “Don’t you think it’s unsanitary to walk around the apartment naked?” she said, lighting up a cigarette.
“Not more unsanitary than that smoke in the kitchen.”
“You’re one to lecture me on smoking,” she said. She nudged me aside to grab a pan, tucked her head inside the fridge and moved its contents—the butter and the milk and the eggs—like mahjong tiles. The cigarette, still in her hand, spewed smoke inside the fridge.
“Omelet?” she said. Despite the shortages we had finally gotten a dozen eggs the day before.
“Sure, thank you.” I stepped aside to give her full reign of the stove. She glanced at my nakedness before cracking the eggs open in the sizzling pan.
“It didn’t use to bother you, my walking around like this,” I said.
“Well, it does now,” she said.
I folded the newspaper and left to cool off in the shower. Was she feeling the same agitation I was—she, who after all had surrendered her family in order to sustain the idea of us? I washed quickly—the water refused to heat up—then dressed and returned to the kitchen table, where she had laid out two plates. She knew I would return to eat with her because that’s what I always did.
Daylight arrived reproachfully, exposing our aimlessness. From the floor above came a squeaking sound, which had begun weeks earlier and magnified with each passing day. I wondered if mice had set up house in my father’s old office, but I was too cowardly to check. Minoo glanced up at the ceiling then at me, but said nothing. A dozen times she had asked me to go upstairs; she wasn’t going to ask again. We ate in silence, the omelet leaving an ashen taste on my tongue, no doubt from her cigarette.
“Thank you,” I said, releasing my fork, my plate half-empty.
She examined the uneaten half but didn’t speak. I detected the hint of a shrug. Her own plate was nearly full and she was already reaching for another cigarette. I poured a teaspoon of sugar on the table and traced a smiley face inside it with my finger.
“I feel very sad today,” she said. “There is so much darkness. I miss my father.”
I reached for her free hand and kissed it. She resumed smoking and looked beyond me, at the ashes-of-roses face of the porcelain clock on the wall. It was almost seven o’clock. “I have to go,” she said. “Before the neighbors see me.”
I strapped her purse to her shoulder and walked her to the door, as though I were sending her off to school. “Thank you for taking care of us,” I said as I watched her descend the staircase, disappearing and reappearing along its spirals.
* * *
AT THE KITCHEN TABLE the smiley face stared back at me until I could no longer stand it. I dipped my fingertip in the sugar and sucked it, then scattered the remaining granules all over the table. Unsure of what to do with myself I paced the apartment and stood by the living room window. Another day was unfolding on the street below. A woman walking her daughter to school, a bookseller unlocking the metal gate of his half-censored shop, an unemployed man returning home in a crumpled suit with sangak bread. The meagerness of it all made me yearn for the bloody days of protests, when possibilities still lay ahead of us. I considered going up to my father’s study to check on the mice. But not having entered it since Akbari had paid it a visit, it remained as unapproachable to me as a looted mausoleum.
I lay back on the settee, that same settee where my father had sat trembling as he watched the abduction of his life’s work. I shut my eyes. Homemade alcohol, black-market gasoline, glassy-eyed addicts, smugglers, pushers, sweaty men passing the hours in downtown teahouses amid the clatter of saucers and cups, people blindfolded and spirited away only to be distilled days later into names on execution lists in newspapers—these things, which I, like others, had been witnessing, flashed in my mind. These were the makings of an underground parallel city shadowing the so-called pious city above, the scaffolding of a professed republic that like the monarchy preceding it did not dare to look at its own reflection save in a draped mirror. So our revolution had been accomplished, but what of it? And what of us?
I sank into a fretful sleep and dreamed of a cockfight in which I, one of the combatants—half man, half rooster—pierced my opponent’s eyes with gaffs attached to my legs, and my adversary, in turn, punctured my lungs with the precision of a curved ice pick, drawing out the air as in a deflated zeppelin. Faceless spectators cheered as my opponent and I outdid each other, surrounded by smoke and the smell of whiskey and sweat. I looked at my blinded rival and said, in the voiceless voice of someone struggling to speak in a dream, “But how is it, brother, that we have been trapped like this? We—you and I—have been for millennia emblems of spirituality, harbingers of new beginnings. Left to our own devices, we may at worst do a cockerel waltz. How have they defaced us, as they themselves have been defaced?” As I spoke, I felt my lungs collapsing and I woke
up with a start, breathless, as a dreamer about to fall into a black crater. Bābā, I cried. Bābā! What have I done?
How I wished to tell Minoo of how I had betrayed my father. Sweet Minoo, who had cried for months over her own father’s death and the grief she believed she had caused him. But I could not tell. Would not. A week earlier, as the sound of fighter planes reverberated through a blacked-out city and we huddled together under the kitchen table, a candle flickering between us, I nearly said, “Minoo, you have bound yourself to a traitor. Walk away, while you can.” But that, I knew, would be the end of us, an end that in any case would come sooner or later.
I idled in the apartment for the rest of the day, then set out on my motorcycle as the sun began to forsake a liquidated city, glittering like mica on tar-bound rooftops. I rode all night, defying the curfew and going nowhere, my last drops of gasoline taking me through streets bereft of the memory of streetlamps, past houses where people slept but didn’t dream. Daylight broke as sharply as a wishbone, and as the first rays of sunlight shimmered on treetops, I parked the bike near the apartment and walked along Valiasr Street, intent on making up to Minoo for my nocturnal absence by returning home with pastries for breakfast. I had forgotten that because of the war and the shortages, no bakeries were open.
* * *
THE APARTMENT WAS EMPTY WHEN I ARRIVED. I called the mirror shop but there was no answer; I figured she must be somewhere along her tortuous commute.
Filling a backpack with spray paints I set out again, hands in my pockets, and along a quiet alley shooting off Enghelab Street, I pulled out a can of red paint and sprayed an image I had sidelined but not forgotten, that of Everyman Jamshid—the same turned-up raincoat collar, prominent sideburns, and pensive mien. But in accordance with the times I tamed his pompadour, changed his Gauloise to a Bahman cigarette, and gave him a beard. Stepping back, soothed once more by the act of drawing, I signed the bottom “Everyman Jamshid, Man of Revolt” and kept on walking, replicating the image a few steps down, and again in the next alley, on the shuttered metal gate of an abandoned shop. With a sense of aliveness that I had relegated to times past, I walked all morning, spraying my everyman along the streets of Tehran like a scorned cat pissing in forbidden places to reclaim lost territory.