by Dalia Sofer
In the uninterrupted silence between us, the knowledge that here, in Ramsar, we were in one of the most naturally radioactive spots in the world thrust itself to the forefront of my mind like the centuries of radon carried by hot springs to the earth’s surface, seeping into the limestone with which this house, as so many like it, had been built. I had read of tests showing that the area’s inhabitants had through the generations developed an ability to adapt to this radiation, like sea turtles continuing their deep, slow swim across time.
Moving closer to me she rested her head on my chest as she used to do when she was a toddler. I held her close and we fell asleep like that until nightfall, when I woke up with a start, and scanning with my eyes the edges and curves of the unfamiliar furniture in the dark, I decided that our time here together was over. We would drive back to Tehran in the morning, our windows rolled down, the taste of saltwater on our silent tongues, between us the shared memory of blood that neither one of us could ever forget.
* * *
OMID’S APARTMENT, as he had described, was in a cul-de-sac of Tudor-style buildings with fanciful gargoyles and heraldic cartouches. In the dimly lit lobby a doorman with a cowlick surrounded by stained-glass windows broadcast my visit over the intercom.
When Omid opened the door I said, “Did I see Henry the Eighth in the lobby?”
“I warned you,” he said, laughing, then added, “The rent was cheap.”
I entered the overfed apartment. A cabinet facing the sofa bore everything from dictionaries with cracked spines to a pen collection to piles of letters. In one corner of the room paper-filled shopping bags formed a tower of Pisa, while in another boxes marked “Affidavits” were haphazardly stacked. A miniature lemon tree stood under a light fixture, and a vase of wilting white roses dripped onto the dining table every time the dog, a spotted Labrador, brushed against it.
“This is Luca,” Omid said affectionately of the dog, who eyed me with suspicion.
Omid looked haggard. Deep, gray crescents shadowed his bloodshot eyes and a two-day-old beard darkened his chin. He prepared tea in a kitchen the size of Golnaz’s old make-believe stove. As I stood back, imagining my brother’s life in this medieval-styled shipping container, the dog sniffed my pants then settled in his bed, observing me like a jaded volunteer militiaman of the Revolutionary Guard. “Your dog is watching me like a worn-out Basiji,” I said.
Handing me the teacup Omid sat on the sofa, dread in his eyes. “Luca is dying,” he said. “This morning when I woke up he didn’t stir from the foot of my bed, as he usually does. I walked over and sat beside him, but he just looked at me with tired, crusty eyes. His breathing was uneven and labored. Finally, with great effort he lifted one paw and placed it on my knee. For the past few months his heart disease has been worsening, and I understood that the end must now be near. From the bathroom I brought a wet towel and wiped his eyes and coat. He let me tend to him, surrendering his weakness to our friendship. Then I sat with him, watching the sunrise and stroking his head—those beautiful ridges and valleys of his skull that I know so well.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Thirteen years. We got him when Arash was just three. He was a two-year-old rescue that we picked up from a shelter in Brooklyn. Anita, my ex, was dead set against getting a pet, but Arash and I prevailed. When we brought him home, I felt an old sadness lifting from my heart; it was like encountering, after decades, a childhood home you thought had been destroyed.
“Arash, too, was changed. He had been a fussy child but in the dog’s presence he became more spirited. At the time we lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side, not far from Central Park, and on Saturdays I would take Arash and Luca to the park. At the pond, where Arash would race a model sailboat along with other children, Luca would bounce excitedly, his eyes following the boats. He was a fantastic swimmer, and once, on a scorching afternoon in July, he did jump in, swimming back and forth with his wiggling paws from one sailboat to another, much to the delight of all the children gathered around the lake, who laughed and clapped for him. Afterward we walked together, the three of us, to the statue of Alice in Wonderland, and as Arash climbed on top of the Mad Hatter, Luca cheered him on, circling the statue as the kind and beautiful dog that he was.”
Omid began crying, releasing unrestrained tears that alarmed and embarrassed me. “For so long I’ve wanted to take him to the beach but I never got around to it,” he continued. “There was always something—a deadline, a house project, a school meeting, an argument with Anita, or just inertia. Luca would have so loved to run along the seashore … And now it’s too late.”
I knew better than to say, “It’s just a dog,” so I said nothing. Seeing my brother bereft over an ailing animal made me realize, in a way I hadn’t until then, that I no longer knew him. Time had washed away the traces of our familiarity. I decided to give him a few moments of self-pity. Silence, I had learned, quickened the sufferer’s transition from disbelief to surrender.
I walked to the bookshelf in the corner and examined the volumes, most of them American classics—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather. He had clearly gone through some phases, too. There had been the black phase, when he had spent time with Baldwin and Wright, and the Jewish phase, when he had consumed Roth and Bellow. These books, I thought, contained all the kilometers and decades that stood between us. That my brother had read them here, in the place and language where they had been written, had transformed him into a man different from the one he would have become had he read them in another land and in translation. As I scanned the volumes I noticed a name that sounded familiar but I could not place it: Ali Rahimi. The book was called A Man Named Yasser.
“Who is Ali Rahimi?” I said.
“That’s the nephew of bābā’s old associate, the guy you had nicknamed Yasser Maghz-Pahn. Remember him? He died a bad death, as Ali tells it.”
I felt my heart lodged inside my rib cage as a stone. Reaching for the shelf to steady myself I said, “So that pimply louse has written a book, too?”
“You know him?” Omid said.
“Does he give any details about how Yasser died?” I said.
“He knows it was by firing squad, but he says no more than that. He does describe the burial in detail. Some revolutionary drove him and Yasser’s corpse from the morgue to the cemetery for a secret burial. It’s a gruesome scene.”
I couldn’t tell if Omid was trying to break me down for a confession, or if he truly didn’t know the role I had played in this so-called scene. An aftertaste of the greasy diner eggs I had eaten for breakfast surged in my throat and gradually subsided. I picked up the book. On the cover was a stock black-and-white photograph of a man in a suit, pictured from the back, holding a briefcase and standing on some kind of ledge.
“Does Ali name the revolutionary?” I said, still facing the bookshelf.
I could feel Omid’s gaze flagellating my back. “You know who it was?” he asked. The dog shifted in his bed and growled a few times.
I made no reply.
A deep, muffled sound escaped my brother’s throat—the kind Noushin emitted from the staircase the last time I saw her—and he said, “Get out.”
“It was so long ago, Omid,” I said. “Another lifetime.”
“No, Hamid,” he said. “You’re mistaken. It was this lifetime. It was our lifetime.”
21
I LEFT OMID’S APARTMENT with the taste of rotten eggs in my throat. The dog barked in my wake, and I wondered if animals, known to foretell disasters, could also sense the oxidized scent of bygone betrayals. In the lobby the doorman was now in deep conversation with a tenant about the promiscuities of a new resident on the seventh floor. Life everywhere was the same. People informing, judging, being judged.
Midtown crowds were trickling into the little park across the street—pale women in colorless suits and sexless flats, anonymous men in white shirts and dull pants, all carrying bags of plastic food containers and settli
ng on benches to take in their noontime ration of fresh air. Briefly I imagined myself among them, in an alternate life where I had become, like many of my countrymen, an office worker in New York.
I walked along First Avenue, where two Africans in bright peach kaftans were rushing somewhere, dossiers in hand. The Syrian ambassador, a tall striking figure with his Omar Sharif mustache, was arguing something with his retinue. Not far behind was a Saudi government man in a starched dishdasha and Gucci aviator glasses, flattering someone. The Israeli ambassador, being interviewed by a television crew at the street corner, defended his government’s forgetfulness of the circumstances of its own birth. Policemen dotted the sidewalks, hands on gun belts. I made my way back to the hotel, feeling dizzy.
An image of Omid and me on our way to school in the clean morning light looped in my mind. We used to stop at a tobacco shop for Khorous Neshan chewing gum with the rooster on the packet. Sometimes I would confiscate his packet just to annoy him. It’s tax day, I would tell him. And at other times, far less frequent, I would offer him mine, an act that he interpreted as generosity but which was actually designed to unsettle him.
* * *
THE MINISTER WAS ALONE in the hotel lobby, staring at a teapot gone cold.
“What are we doing here?” I said. “We’re like funeral guests who must remain until the body is carried out.”
“And we have another problem,” he said. “Akbari. He is at it again.”
“What now?”
“He is delivering speeches about how I capitulated to the West. And he is making up things I supposedly said during a closed meeting—all fabrications. The trouble is, the more the Americans backstab us, the better the case for Akbari and his clan. Of course the hardline press is already all over it. Haven’t you received my messages, Hamid? Where have you been?”
I had forgotten to check my phone all morning. “I was with my brother,” I said.
“Your brother?” the Minister said, uncharacteristically caustic. “This is a state visit.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I’m losing my bearings.” I sat beside him. From our first encounter, a decade earlier, the Minister had been for me a kind of hope, like the promise of a green, open field at the end of a road paved with deceit. The night we met we had adjacent seats at a puppet show on the grounds of Teatre Shahr—the City Theater—both of us accompanied by our daughters, who were about the same age. The show was a representation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and I, who despite everything could not forsake this last filial loyalty, had decided to bring Golnaz, to instill in her, as my father had in me, the permanence of loss.
We stayed in our seats, our backs perspiring against the foldout chairs, our somnolent eyes following the shadows of the paper puppets before us. The warm light behind Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim glowed against the black sky; something about the August night reminded me of my father’s final days in Tehran. When a firefly emerged leaving phosphorescent trails in the black night, I whispered, softly, bābā. The Minister, who at the time was not yet the Minister, must have heard me, for his face reflected an anomalous kindness. “It’s true,” he said, “the firefly is beautiful.”
How does one explain the shame of being mistaken for a man who can see, as he once did in boyhood, the beauty of things? I sat silent, feeling myself an impostor, but after the shame a strange elation came: if I was capable of seeing beauty in the world, then I was, despite everything, still a man.
When the show ended we trickled out of the theater grounds, walking against the summer heat. The Minister and I spoke together, as did the girls, who had quickly bonded in the way that children do. Mostly, I was the one asking questions, and the Minister answered amicably, like someone at ease with himself and with his life. He told me that he was a professor of political science at the university, and that he was born in Tehran but was from an old conservative family of merchants from Tabriz. His father had been among the first to import cutting-edge medical equipment into the country, and despite his religious leanings, had sent all his children to study abroad. The Minister, who had left in the fall of 1978, had completed his studies in America, first at Berkeley, where he majored in international relations, and later at Yale, where he received a law degree. After working for a few years at the Council on Foreign Relations, he decided to move back to Tehran, because, he said, “a job at a think tank was ossifying me into Rodin’s Thinker. After a decade away, it was time to come home.”
As he spoke, it occurred to me that perhaps his departure just prior to the country’s implosion and his return ten years later had left him unsullied by that initial decade that had so tainted the rest of us. Inevitably he, too, began asking questions, and I deflected these as best I could, offering brief answers or making some comment about the children. As we reached the outer boundary of the theater grounds and the crowds began dispersing, we came across vendors selling vintage puppets. Golnaz pointed at a medieval European jester with brilliant blue, downcast eyes, and a shimmering crimson collar. There was something in the marionette’s face, a certain palpable sorrow—made more astonishing by the fact that this sorrow was chiseled in wood—that made me want to offer it to her. The Minister, too, bought one for his daughter, and we walked on, the Minister and I chatting, the girls cheerfully holding on to their jesters—a foursome briefly unperturbed and improbably free.
As we parted we exchanged phone numbers with promises of day trips and picnics with our wives, and though in the ensuing months he attempted several times to reach me, I never took his calls, feeling myself incapable of replicating the man I had been for a few hours on that summer evening, the amiable and gentle man who was not me.
It was only a year later, in 2008, that I finally got in touch with him, after hearing that the Tehran Urban & Suburban Railway Operation Company had without notice fenced off the theater grounds one night, turning it into a construction site for a new metro station. Already in 2003 the municipality had damaged the complex to build a new mosque. I am not sure why I dialed his number on hearing the news of the metro, but I was feeling despondent in a way that had become increasingly familiar, and visions of the gutted theater complex felt to me like stakes through my own ribs.
We met for lunch in a small eatery. It was a gloomy day in December—cold and damp—and because of the weather, the place was mobbed. The windows were sweating from soup steam and ancient radiators and cigarette smoke and human breath. I apologized for not returning his calls, offering the usual excuses people offer when they have avoided someone, then asked him if he had heard about the gutting of the theater grounds.
“First they took the parking lot to build the mosque,” he said. “Now it’s the grounds. They want to gut the theater because it symbolizes everything they are against: poetry, beauty, ambiguity—in a word, humanity. They say the new metro station is needed. Maybe. But couldn’t it be five hundred meters down the street?”
“Everything is going backwards again,” I said, “ever since that buffoon became president. The old posters and murals are back, and the Basijis are out again with a vengeance.”
He nodded in agreement, and it was then that I decided to tell him the truth—that for many years I had been an interrogator, formally known as a judicial officer, with Vezarat-eettela’at—the Ministry of Intelligence. As I spoke his face turned pale and he leaned back. Clearly he was speculating whether he had been trapped in some kind of setup, and his mind was fast surveying past activities that may have landed him in a jam such as this.
“I didn’t mean to alarm you,” I continued. “I’ve never spoken so candidly with anyone. But I am tired, and there is something about you that signals mercy, if not understanding. I’ve done many things I’d rather not talk about. I have been in it deep, as they say, and since I can’t get out, I decided long ago that the best I could do was to try to influence things from inside.”
For some time he was quiet, idly stirring his soup with a spoon. “A piece of shit can’t clean a cesspool fr
om inside,” he finally said.
I swallowed my pomegranate soup, unsure of how to react to this rebuke by a man who was ordinarily so unruffled that he made you forget he was fallible, let alone mortal.
“Hear me out,” I said. “I accepted the job because I had to. Later, when I could no longer exit, I reasoned that at least by having access to detainees’ files I could occasionally circumvent the fate that had been assigned to them. In the final years of the last millennium, I hoped, like many, that a government of moderates would at the minimum steer us in the right direction. But now, eight years into this new millennium, that administration has been eviscerated and it seems we are turning back again.”
The clink of noontime dishes in the uncarpeted room made the space feel even tighter. “Since you claim to wish to speak candidly,” he said, “I’ll honor your wish. Here is what I think: a man can make himself believe anything he wants. He may convince himself that he is wielding influence from inside, that in fact he is doing good, or whatever fairy tale he tells himself to fall asleep at night. But as long as he remains in that pothole, he is nothing more than a collaborator.”
* * *
I DIDN’T SPEAK to him again after that lunch, until an afternoon in 2013, when, after the election that at last ousted the unhinged president and once more brought a moderate man to the presidency, I called to congratulate him on his appointment as the minister of foreign affairs. I had, by then, fallen out with Akbari, and quit the Ministry of Intelligence. When I asked if he would consider employing me, I was certain he would refuse. After all, this was a new era that would best be served by fresh faces. Why select this scarred face of mine? But I had little left to lose. As I spoke he cleared his throat several times but remained quiet. Then he said, “Yes, I would like to extend you this chance. After all, kessi az dele kessi khabar nadārad—no one knows of another’s heart.”