by Dalia Sofer
* * *
AT THE HOTEL reception a Dutch family was checking in—mother, father, two boys. They lingered by the brochures in their Dr. Martens, contemplating the options of monuments, plays, museums. I envied them their togetherness, the inevitability of their tour bus afternoon. The Minister ordered another pot of tea and stroked his forehead. I remembered my father making the same gesture at the airport terminal that summer morning as he waited for their final flight out of Tehran. “What does Akbari even want?” the Minister said.
A few months after I had resigned as judicial officer, Akbari—who by then had long been the prosecutor general of Tehran—moved to Mashhad to become assistant to the custodian of the city’s largest charitable foundation, which controlled two thirds of the urban land, along with scores of businesses that included mines, a bus factory, a pharmaceutical plant, a sugar refinery, dairy farms, cattle ranches, and orchards. “Akbari believes in nothing, except power and money,” I said. “He wants to thwart you because he knows that relations with the world will encourage foreign businesses to invest in our country, and this, in turn, will mean less political and economic influence for foundations such as his.”
The tea arrived, and the waiter served us with pomp and fuss, as though we were Englishmen on holiday. As we sat back with our cups, I thought of my years at Akbari’s side when he was a public prosecutor and I was obliging his requests, doing everything short of pulling the trigger myself. That, even I could not do, a failing for which he reproached me, and one that, he prophesized, would be my undoing. But I was made to watch, relentlessly and against my will, and thinking of him now filled me with revulsion, not for him but for myself.
I remembered the summer of 1988, when the then deputy Supreme Leader, who in those days was nicknamed Gorbeh nareh—the Cat—because of his round face and scruffy beard, pleaded with us not to carry out planned executions of thousands of political prisoners, many of whom, once members of the Mujahedin, had been imprisoned for years. He had sent multiple letters to his superior, the Ayatollah and Supreme Leader, to no avail, and in an unusual display of dissidence, he had met with members of the judiciary to voice his objection. Akbari was at this meeting and had brought me along, and I, for reasons that I could not then name, secretly recorded it. Maybe I had sensed, even then, that its significance would one day surpass my own.
In the forty-minute recording, which I had listened to only once, the Cat could be heard speaking to us—several judges; the Intelligence Ministry’s representative to Evin; Mostafa Akbari, by then promoted to prosecutor general; and me, his shadow. “The worst crime in the history of this Republic,” says the Cat on the scratchy recording, “which will be condemned by history, is happening at your hands.”
It was a scorching summer afternoon. Fruit flies congregated around a bowl of overripe apricots, among them a blowfly in a colonel’s uniform—a green, metallic body and a red-dotted thorax. Unlike his homelier brethren, the blowfly showed no interest in the fruit; I knew from my childhood fascination with insects that he must have earlier feasted on a carcass somewhere—a dead mouse or a stray dog crushed in a roadside accident.
Drenched in sweat and at our wits’ end, we listened to the good cleric. After nearly a decade of delirious revenge, rations, war, and death, we saw the world in shades of blood. We had begun by killing our own, and in this we had been joined by killers across our western border. We had witnessed our oil fields engulfed in flames, our cities shot through with bullets, the enameled walls of our mosques perforated like diseased brains on their way to forgetfulness. We had known, along the banks of the Karun, the chilly, scentless scattering of bones.
The scheduled executions were claimed as retribution for another attack on the government by the Mujahedin, now armed by the very enemy we were fighting. The Cat spoke of justice and legacy and the judgment of each man for his own actions. He argued that though the attacks on the government were reprehensible, the condemned prisoners had played no part in the latest bombing, making their execution absurd and morally unacceptable. We grew impatient and deemed him irrelevant. Akbari, determined to follow through with the executions, delivered a soliloquy worthy of Macbeth, and he became, toward the end, so belligerent that he cursed all who should stand in his way. And I, seeing the error of his ways as clearly as a rooster senses the dawn, did not oppose him. I remained silent, knowing that the episode would one day—perhaps long after our deaths—lead to both our ends.
* * *
“DON’T WORRY ABOUT AKBARI,” I said to the beleaguered Minister. “We will draft a statement and put him in his place.”
“Yes,” he said, unconvinced. “But tell me,” he added. “You said you missed my calls because you were visiting your brother. What brother? How is it that you never mentioned him?”
“My brother has been an absence for so long,” I said, “that I made myself believe he didn’t exist.”
The Minister was silent. What was to be said? Absence was our country’s chief commodity, and we all had, at one time or another, traded in it.
22
THE MINISTER RETREATED TO HIS ROOM to make calls before the Russian president’s speech that afternoon; I stayed in the lobby, with two hours to spare. I began drafting an official statement in response to Akbari, but after multiple false starts I abandoned it and dialed Omid’s number. There was no answer, so I left a rambling message. As I was about to hang up, the machine, as if sensing the ineptitude of my words, offered me the option to review what I had said. I accepted. “Omid…” I heard myself saying. “Just let it go. You can’t possibly understand. It was all a long time ago. Let it go, brother. You know, there are things in this life … And situations. Okay … Call me.” The machine asked if I wanted to confirm my message or delete it and begin again. I chose the latter, and the voice victoriously confirmed the erasure of my words and prompted me to try again. As the beep sounded, I froze and hung up.
A woman in a white shirtdress and sky-blue espadrilles sat before me with a glass of water. She looked like she had stepped out of an advertisement for a holiday on the Amalfi Coast and I wondered if her life was as carefree as it appeared. I envied her this lightness. A few minutes later she left the water on the table, adjusted her crushed turquoise necklace around her swanlike neck, and walked out, a white figure dissolving into the sunlit afternoon. I stared at the empty chair facing me; had I made her up? I felt sleepy, and hollow. My eyes watered and burned like the exhaust pipe of an overworked transit bus. All I heard within the barbed wires of my mind was one name—Ali Rahimi. I walked to the concierge and asked where the nearest bookstore was. A couple of blocks south, he said.
* * *
THE BOOK WAS IN THE SHOP WINDOW, wearing a dictator’s jacket of accolades and endorsements. “A remarkable meditation on suffering,” said one reviewer. “Psychologically resonant,” said another. A poster announced the author’s appearance at seven o’clock that same evening. I entered the shop and found the book on a front table, propped up with a dozen identical copies that made me think of the reverberations of a man’s howl in an empty room. How many copies were out there, settling as dust motes on the world’s polluted sills? I reached for the top copy but could not bring myself to pick it up. “May I help you?” a store clerk said. I looked into his sophistic eyes, and made my way to the exit, where a security guard wished me a good afternoon. I thanked him and wished him the same, permitting myself a moment of blamelessness, when I could pretend to be nothing less than a book browser.
Back at the General Assembly, I buried myself in the drone of the Russian president’s speech, self-absolving and familiar, a fifty-minute oration on the new world order and the might of his nation, a sermon that could have been delivered by Tsar Nicholas II himself.
* * *
AFTERWARD, I declined the Minister’s offer to ride the honeybee car back to the hotel and returned to the bookstore. Rows of listeners were seated before the empty podium as congregants awaiting a holy man. Next to t
he podium were stacks of orphaned books expecting reunification with their creator. I settled into the back row and stared at the book’s jacket, wondering who was the man in the stock photograph standing in for the deceased Yasser, toward whom I suddenly felt oddly proprietary, as though my role in his secret burial had somehow bestowed on me a privileged status.
A bookseller introduced the author. For twenty-five years he had been a film critic and had written several books on film history. He had won many awards and this was his first memoir.
Ali Rahimi stood up to reverent applause and nervously approached the podium. His studious appearance had a calculated air about it, not unlike that of his so-called intellectual brethren in New York—navy blue sweater over striped shirt, tortoiseshell glasses, a three-day-old beard. In his bag was no doubt the same weekly magazine read by all his cohorts, making the lot of them uniformly well-versed in ivory poaching or the Sinaloa Cartel for about a week, when the next issue would appear and they’d all move on to Norwegian cuisine. I had come to know his type. They had of late been visiting Tehran more frequently, speaking in their accented and faltering Farsi, reclaiming their homeland after so many decades as though they had never abandoned it in its hour of need. They viewed their absence as their birthright, not realizing that their collective forsaking was a betrayal of the worst kind.
Rahimi thanked the audience for sacrificing a beautiful autumn evening for his sake. Time may have aged and polished him, but if one looked closely one could detect the scrawny teenager terrified of his uncle’s corpse at the morgue. And now, just as decades before, I wanted to walk out on him, but could not help feeling sorry for him. So I sat back, like the others, and listened to him read. Because the truth, when I finally cared to admit it, was that I, too, had come to hear him.
23
A MAN NAMED YASSER
By Ali Rahimi
Long before he had gone to study art history in Paris, Yasser, my mother’s younger brother, dabbled in a string of odd jobs. Beginning as a taxi driver after high school, he later became a motorcycle mechanic in a downtown garage, then a window washer in Plasco—Tehran’s first skyscraper. As a waiter at the Shokoofeh No’ Club, he was known to have carried on romances with more than one dignitary’s wife. With the money he made, saved, or once or twice usurped, he bought himself an Alfa Romeo Giulia that he painted dark blue, adding red stripes and a white roof—a wink to the Italian carabinieri. His mischievous reputation was only elevated during his years in France. Instead of rumors of liaisons with the “colonel’s wife” or the “mistress of the minister of education,” he now was believed to have had associations with a certain “Madame de La Boulay,” a widow with a withering château in the Loire Valley, and with a nameless ingénue whose most memorable performance had been as an extra in the French war film Forbidden Games.
All of this was history by the time I was born, and as with all histories it contained within it a dose of myth. He himself neither confirmed nor denied the allegations, because, as he explained to me when I was old enough to spend time alone with him, the charges were both true and untrue. “How can that be?” I asked him, and he said, “Do you know that a diamond and a pencil are made of the same material?” I told him I was getting too old for such jokes. “No joking,” he said. “Both objects are made of carbon. The only difference is the way their atoms are bonded. Think of a man in the same way, Ali. One day the man can be a dazzling jewel, the next day he can be as serviceable as a pencil.”
This was too much metaphysics for my preadolescent brain. I suspect my uncle did not fully buy his own assertion either. But curious declarations such as these added to his mystery, an element lacking in my own household, which lived within the grip of budgets, boredom, routine. My father, a sports aficionado who loved wrestling matches and considered soccer a second religion, was a house painter whose ambition did not transcend his evening meal of ghormeh sabzi. My mother, a hairdresser who collected decades-old European magazines for hairstyle inspiration, was anything but satisfied. In the evenings she pacified herself with a bowl of pumpkin seeds and Iranian B films, which in the 1970s had become as ingestible as automobile exhaust.
When Yasser began showing up to our weekly Friday lunches, by then a middle-aged art scholar in a tailored suit, cosmopolitan and discriminating—everything that my family was not—my parents treated him with the reverence reserved for an imported truffle that spoils an otherwise simple but delicious meal; they understood his worldly value but did not much care for him. Around him there was also the gossamer of a story about a certain Simin, a woman whose name could not be mentioned outside the house. When they spoke of her, my parents whispered as though she were a venereal disease for which there was not, as of yet, either a vaccine or a cure. I learned, from their example, to keep my mouth shut.
* * *
ANOTHER ELEMENT LACKING in my household: birthdays. When I asked my mother why mine, unlike other children’s, was not celebrated, she said, “What did you do to bring about your own birth that’s deserving of celebration? If anyone should get a present on your birthday, it’s me. I was in labor for twenty long hours.”
Yasser was the only one who brought me a gift and sweets every year, much to the displeasure of his sister. My favorite gift was the giant box of Swiss Caran d’Ache colored pencils that he offered me on my seventh birthday, with the snowy alpine mountains and virginal fields etched into the cover of the tin box. Second in line was the most impressive Lego set I had ever seen—Lego no. 8—with enough pieces to construct an entire make-believe city. The more my mother objected to the presents, the more extravagant they became. By my twelfth birthday, when Yasser arrived with a Bianchi Celeste racing bicycle and my mother almost refused him entry into the house, I understood that the gift-giving ritual was no longer about me. Maybe it had never been.
On my thirteenth birthday, my uncle arrived empty-handed. My mother, interpreting the gesture as a truce, tried her best to be something more than cordial. But when after lunch Yasser turned to me and said, “Get your jacket, we’re going out,” she stiffened once more. “Where?” she said. “To see a movie,” he said. “What movie?” she said. “A movie, for God’s sake!” he said. “Stop treating him like a baby, he is thirteen years old.”
My mother sat back in her chair, twisting her fork. “I’ll come, too,” she said. “No,” Yasser emphatically countered. “This wouldn’t be your kind of film.” My mother looked in my father’s direction in the living room, but my father, engrossed in a soccer match on television, was as responsive as the maroon sofa he was lounging in. “Just because you’ve been too much of a Casanova to settle down and have your own child,” said my mother to her brother, “doesn’t mean you can play bābā with other people’s children.” Yasser lit up a cigarette and said to me, “Get your jacket, Ali-jan, we’re going out.”
I was certain that my uncle was taking me to a foreign pornographic film, a prospect that thrilled and unnerved me. What happened was the opposite. We saw an Iranian film unlike any I had yet encountered: stark, slow, shot in deep, throbbing hues of black and white, sexually charged and frustratingly abstinent—a film about the impossibility of consummating a passion. Made a few years earlier, it was called Zir-e Poost-e Shab—Under the Skin of the Night—and was playing at a small art-house cinema retrospective dubbed Mirror on Society. The plot was simple: A young man from the lower classes meets a girl—an American tourist scheduled to leave the next morning. The two communicate through sign language and decide to visit Tehran together for the following twenty-four hours. As the day unfolds, mutual attraction grows between them, but they are unable to find a suitable spot to consummate their romance. After a scuffle with some ruffians, they are arrested and taken to the police precinct. The girl is sent to the airport and the man is imprisoned. Alone in his cell, the man masturbates as the girl’s plane takes off, an act that I suspect the entire audience would have liked to indulge in to alleviate the film’s unabashed withholding of gratifica
tion.
Afterward my uncle and I sat in a teahouse, between us a bowl of pistachio ice cream. The film had made me antsy, needling me with the reality of my own loneliness. And yet I felt fully alive, because for the first time I had glimpsed the possibility of depicting impossibility, which, in the end, was so much truer to life than the nonsense on television.
“That film was a cocktease,” I said.
“What do you know about cockteases?” my uncle said, laughing.
I blushed. “I know nothing,” I said. “I’ve seen it in movies. But in the movies there is always a satisfactory resolution.”
“You probably think this film was all about frustrated sexual desire,” he said. “And of course it was about that. But it was about so much more.”
My hormonal mind came up empty. “What else?” I said stupidly.
“The young man, you noticed, was of the lower class,” Yasser said. “The film shows how Western ideals of emancipation are unattainable to the average Iranian, who is a product of his own society and its mores, and whose life is dictated by its confines.”