by Dalia Sofer
This ritual I repeated every morning for about a month, without telling a soul, not even Minoo, who since my disappearing act on my motorcycle had been giving me the cold shoulder. Those who witnessed my transgression were too preoccupied with their own lives and misfortunes to care. And so I carried on, repeating the image like a mantra, hoping to reach shore on the lifeboat of subversion.
During this time, a strange thing happened: I mistook every tall, middle-aged man for my father. More than once I followed a stranger down several avenues, my footsteps echoing his quickening pace, convinced that the chase would culminate in some reconciliation. After following a man in a checkered scarf inside a tobacco shop one foggy afternoon, I stood idle as he bought himself a bag of rock candy, and I shadowed him back out, monitoring his movements as he opened the bag and popped a candy into his mouth every couple of blocks. He slowed down, finally, allowing me to catch up, and turned around. “May I help you?” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I mistook you for someone.”
“What is your name?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I made a mistake. Forgive me.” I began walking away.
“Hold on a minute,” he called after me. “Who said you could go?”
“Who said I couldn’t?” I said as he reached for something in his coat pocket. I stood still. Though his face—the thick eyebrows arched over the horn-rimmed glasses, the outturned ears, and the dark scrape on his forehead, which had of late become the seal of piety because it signified repeated friction against the prayer stone—seemed vaguely familiar, I could not place him. “Who are you?” I said.
He approached me and stood very close, his godly forehead almost touching mine, his breath reeking of onions and candy. From his pocket he did not pull out a gun—as I had feared—but a worn-out wallet, from which he deftly produced a driver’s license. I recognized the name; he was the chief prosecutor of Tehran, in those days something of a celebrity.
“So I ask you again,” he said. “Your name, brother.”
“Hamid Mozaffarian.”
“Providence has its way,” he said. “I was about to send someone to pay you a visit. Come with me.”
We walked together along the pavement, my knees buckling, and got into his car and set off. “Where are we going?” I said.
“I ask the questions here,” he said, putting the bag of candy in my face.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I know … You’re supposed to have them with tea, but I just eat them like this, one after the other. I’m ruining my teeth.”
I said nothing.
“So it appears you are quite the artist,” he said.
“Me?”
“Aren’t you Everyman Jamshid?”
“Me?”
“Are you half-witted or something? Yes, you. Many of your old schoolmates are now, shall we say … my guests. And they’ve all identified you as Everyman Jamshid. So what are you thinking, you jackass, doodling that stupid face all over town? Is he supposed to symbolize something? And why is he red? Is that a nod to your old Marxist friends?”
“No, it’s just a face,” I said. “And red is just a color.”
He scoffed. “And what about ‘Man of Revolt’? What does that refer to? Are you plotting against the new regime?”
“That … That’s just my homage to Albert Camus.”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Some French philosopher. He believed that revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature. At the same time, he cautioned that this urge has to be reined in, so as not to lead to excess, as happened, for example, during the French Revolution, or…”
“Save your cherto-pert—your gibberish—for a poor fool who will be impressed,” he said. “I know your kind. You’ve read half a book on some French writer and you’re suddenly the expert.”
He was smarter than I had supposed. I had to change tactics. “Brother,” I said. “You are right. I am no expert on Camus, or on anything else for that matter. I’m just a university dropout killing time. But I do know one thing. The images of raised fists and droplets of blood and Kalashnikovs that you guys are sponsoring are already becoming tired. No one even notices them anymore. You have to offer people something to think about.”
He stared at me, and the realization that I was trapped in a car with a man whose tribunals lasted about as long as it took to unload a washing machine seized me. I sank low, the seat belt chafing my neck.
“Consider yourself lucky,” he said. “You have a friend in high places who has been speaking well of you, and of the sacrifices you have made for the cause of the revolution. He is the reason you have so far been allowed to roam free, despite your doodles all over town.”
I kept my head down, picking at my cuticles.
“I know of your denouncement of your father,” he continued. “One of my judicial officers, Mostafa Akbari, has told me all about it. The capacity for such a betrayal, in my opinion, is a rare thing, and precious.” Turning into an alley he stopped the car. “I was going to take you in for interrogation, but I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to offer you a job, instead.”
“What job?”
“A job in the prison. As an interrogator.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because I like you. I see in you a beautiful mix of brutishness and naiveté.”
I made no answer.
“Well?” he said. “This offer has a quick expiration date. Otherwise I’m taking you in for interrogation.”
“I am at your service, sarkār.”
* * *
FOR MANY WEEKS, maybe as many as seven or eight, long after I became an interrogator for Akbari, I told Minoo nothing about my new job. I slipped in and out of the house always with the excuse of roaming the city. The deeper I sank into my alternate life, the more I longed to resume my studies at the university. But when I shared this with Akbari, he had a good laugh. “Be a man,” he said, “and leave the art degree for the homosexuals.”
We were standing outside branch six, cell block two. “But don’t you also want to go back to your old job?” I said. “We could both pick up where we left off.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “Every man must sooner or later reckon with what he is. I, for instance, know that I am no oil company man. And you … you have to get that fancy idea of yourself as some iconoclast artist out of your head. You put an end to that the day you asked me to raid your father’s house. On that day, whether or not you realized it, you chose a new course, from which there is no return. So just keep on going, brother. That’s all you can do.” He pinched my cheek in that patronizing way of his and added, “One more thing: you may want to get rid of that Bolshevik Jewish girlfriend of yours. The path you’ve chosen cannot accommodate her.”
I carried on as instructed, convincing myself that better days were ahead, that the revolution, after all, was still only an infant crawling its way to maturity. Akbari, pleased with my compliance, asked me to witness my first execution—that of Yasser Maghz-Pahn, who had been detained some months earlier—on shabeh yaldā, the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, a night normally celebrated with friends and family until dawn, a night holding the promise of darkness defeated.
That afternoon I bought Minoo a box of sweets and visited her at the shop, where the lone customer was a lanky militiaman with a unibrow. His gruff reflection in the Murano glass of a gold-rimmed Venetian mirror was a strange sight. “Why is the glass scratched in the corner?” he asked Minoo reproachfully. Minoo, unruffled, replied, “It’s an antique from Italy, from the early nineteenth century. That’s the beauty of it, you see, the history…” He cut her off. “What kind of discount will you offer then? It’s clearly faulty.” She resisted. “It’s an antique,” she repeated. “It’s not faulty. The scratch is the mark of time, nothing more.” He sneered at her and left the shop.
“You should be more careful when you talk to these guys,” I said.
“They don’
t scare me,” she said, as she prepared tea and set out the pastries I had brought next to the register. We sat together in the empty shop, sipping tea, our reflections in the scores of mirrors along the walls persuading us that we were guests at a midnight revel.
“Why did you bring all this here?” she said. “I was hoping we could have a little winter solstice celebration at home.”
“Minoo,” I said. “I won’t be coming home tonight. There is something I must do.”
“What thing?”
“You can’t ask me that,” I said.
“I can’t?” she said. “You’ve never talked to me like that.”
“I am now. Get used to it.”
“What’s going on, Hamid?”
I retrieved my backpack. “Bye,” I said.
“This is how you talk to me, after everything?”
I turned around. “After everything what?” I said. “Are you going to deliver your monologue about how you renounced your family and stayed here for me? Go ahead, because I’ve been waiting for it for months.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “I didn’t stay for you.”
“You stayed for your love of turbans, then?”
“You may find this absurd. But I stayed because two thirds of the Jewish population has left. And if everyone leaves, then what? We’ve been here for two thousand years. Someone must persevere until things settle down.”
“I thought all that synagogue talk of Cyrus and Babylon and Esther made you feel like a relic. What happened? Suddenly you’ve become more Jewish than the Chief Rabbi.”
“In the words of Italo Svevo,” she said, “‘it’s not race that makes a Jew, it’s life.’ And by the way, even the Chief Rabbi has left. I hear he is now driving a Mercedes on Sunset Boulevard.”
“Well then, congratulations,” I said. “You’re single-handedly going to be the savior of Middle Eastern Jews! You must be the first anthropological martyr history has yet produced.”
“Who are you?” she said. “Who have you become? You and I used to be on the same side. We fought the system together. This one as much as the old one.”
“Well, my love,” I said. “Slowly, slowly, I’ve become the system.” I strapped my bag to my shoulder and jumped on my motorcycle, and as I rode in the icy air toward the prison, I remembered how my father had said those very words to me a decade earlier.
* * *
MINOO WAS GONE when I returned home the next day. I didn’t go looking for her. Instead, over the ensuing weeks, I retreated into the memory of sound. The sound that emanated from the firing squad on that winter morning—deafening, dull, single-minded, smoke-filled. The sound of my own boots on the snow as I walked the dozen steps to Yasser’s corpse; the sound of swallows flying overhead afterward; the sound of a man’s dead weight as it is placed on a stretcher; the sound of a lifeless arm scraping a trail in the snow with a fingernail; the sound of my breath vibrating in my thorax; the sound of shrapnel dropped into a metal bucket by a janitor using his bare hands.
The tribunal, perhaps displaying gratitude for my good behavior, honored my request to keep Yasser’s body safe at the morgue until his family claimed it. After a couple of weeks a pimply nephew named Ali, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, showed up at the prison. I assumed he had some sob story about his parents, but I didn’t ask. Still, his bewildered face made me feel sorry for him and I offered to drive him to the morgue. When he saw the body—which, except for a bullet hole lodged near the spine, looked quite ordinary—he said, “I imagined he would be bigger.” I almost made a joke about how his uncle’s supply of marzipan had been cut off in prison, but I thought better of it. “Well … Good luck,” I said and walked away, but the boy’s scrawny arms were now trembling before his uncle’s corpse and I felt sorry for him again.
To put him out of his misery I drove him to the cemetery for a secret burial that same night. I carried the shrouded body out of the morgue and dumped it in the trunk as they do in movies, marveling at the absurdity of my life and of Yasser’s death. Everyone has heard how heavy a lifeless body is but no one knows what the weight feels like until he has carried a dead man himself. Like lifting a hundred-kilo burlap sack of rice, tightly packed and stiff as a cello.
The boy insisted on sitting in the back, as though this would shield him from the man I had become. I let him. The last thing I cared about was some heartbroken adolescent’s misgivings about the way of things. As we drove I thought of Yasser’s trial, which had lasted no more than fifteen minutes, of his surprise and relief upon seeing me in the room and of his anguish when he understood that I would be of no help to him. I thought of the tremor in his right hand as he nervously tapped his knee and the twitch beneath his emaciated jaw. I thought of Akbari reciting the charges against him—declaring war on God, colluding with the West, insulting government officials, lying to the authorities—and repeating, again and again, “Is this true?” I thought of Yasser refuting the charges until only minutes later when, shutting his eyes as a man who has had a quick word with his own death, he said, “Yes, it is true. Everything you say is true.”
At the cemetery I bribed a gravedigger to dig a hole and waited in the car for an hour with the boy and the body. From time to time I glanced at the boy’s face in the rearview mirror and noticed the strain of aborted tears in his eyes. Crickets sang in the starless night, but the boy said nothing. To distract myself I turned on the radio, but the only audible transmission was a religious sermon and I was in no mood for that. I imagined the boy wasn’t either; I switched it off. “Did you know your uncle well?” I finally said.
“He used to teach me to draw when I was a kid,” he said, his voice as hollow as a beggar’s bowl. “And he always brought me gifts. The best one was a giant box of colored pencils.”
“Yes,” I said. “My father also brought me those beautiful pencils.”
* * *
WHEN THE GRAVEDIGGER tapped on the window Ali helped me carry the body to the grave. After we lowered it into the ground he threw on it a fistful of soil, as was required of him. For some reason, perhaps out of nostalgia for the days when Yasser Maghz-Pahn and the others gathered in my father’s office, I, too, threw a fistful of soil on the corpse and recited the prayer for the dead, “one always returns to Allah and ends with Allah.” The gravedigger covered up the body with more soil and I sprinkled rosewater on the grave. In the car, on the way back, I offered the devastated nephew a piece of halvah I had brought for the occasion, as one does after a burial. He refused it.
* * *
FOR WEEKS AFTER THE BURIAL I searched for an antidote to my restlessness. I undertook another house cleaning, rode my motorcycle longer and farther. I began attending the Friday prayer weekly, but unable to sustain this attempt at religiosity, I let go of this, too.
20
IN THE HALF-LIGHT OF THE HOTEL ROOM I checked my phone. Nothing from Noushin, not even a rebuke. Would my daughter testify against me in court? My Golnaz, who had for a time been my dearest friend, maybe my only friend. I thought of our third summer alone together—after Noushin had left—of our visit to Ramsar, and of the brilliance of the water that July.
We had rented a small house near the old hotel, the mountain on one side and the sea on the other. The days were hot and humid, but in the nighttime winds scratched the windows. Golnaz was afraid. She said there were spirits all around us. I told her she only knew the exhaust of Tehran, the sirens, the soot, that’s why she thought this. She conceded, but more than once she snuck into my bed during the night, and I let her. She had just turned twelve and we got along like old friends, taking turns making breakfast and driving to nearby villages every morning to pick up raw milk and pails of yogurt. In the afternoons we took walks along the palm-lined promenade that led from the hotel to the sea, where the air carried the sound of waves and crowds and children. Sometimes, when we tired of the water, we drove to nearby forests and foraged for wild mushrooms and starflowers.
During
the summer break she rarely wore the mandated manteau and scarf, and since she was still young enough, I didn’t protest. But it was on one of those afternoons that I noticed, as I walked behind her, a bloodstain on the back of her pants. I stepped ahead of her and walked on as though I had not seen the blood, and she, silent, dragged her feet to keep up with me. Finally, she asked that I stop and she bent over holding her stomach. When she noticed the stain she looked up at me with the guilt-ridden face of a criminal. “Is it your first time?” I said, embarrassed for not knowing and even more embarrassed for having to know. She nodded, avoiding my eyes as she removed her sweater and tied it around her waist. Back at the house, she locked herself in the bathroom for what seemed like an eternity. When I knocked gently on the door, asking if I could help, she said, “I wish Mom were here.”
If the father in me wanted to quiet her pain, the man in me felt a pang of betrayal. My daughter’s blood became for me a declaration of an unspoken mistrust between us. I knocked again. “Come out, azizam—my dear,” I said, regretful now that providence had not given me a son instead. “Let’s get groceries for dinner. It will take your mind off.”
She unbolted the door and came out, looking mournful. She had changed into pajama pants and thick socks. The years of hormonal volatility ahead of us made me suddenly breathless. How was it that I had not considered this earlier, when I had insisted that she stay with me? She wobbled to the living room and sank in a corner of the sofa, curling her legs under her and making herself small. Though I found her needlessly thespian, I made her tea and brought it to her with a tray of cookies. I sat down at the other end of the sofa, and for some time we remained, not speaking, in this rented house that suddenly seemed to me as cold as an interrogation room. An old clock with Roman numerals that I had barely noticed ticked loudly on the wall. It was six-fifteen in the evening.