by Dalia Sofer
This was a side of my uncle I had not yet witnessed. “Uncle Yasser,” I said. “Don’t you work for that fellow at the Ministry of Culture? I don’t understand how you could be involved with the government and still admire films like this.”
“The Ministry of Culture itself funds some of these films,” he said. “But on the other hand it bans many more.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I told you, Ali,” he said. “Most things are true and untrue at the same time. A man can be a diamond one day and a pencil another. So can a government. Did you know that when Beaumarchais wrote The Marriage of Figaro mocking aristocrats, the entire court of Louis XVI eventually found it brilliant, the king included?”
* * *
WE SAW MORE FILMS IN THE SERIES, films whose protagonists were downtrodden men and women from even more downtrodden parts of the city and the country, moody films that made me grasp the smallness of the life I had been living. “This also is one side of the story,” Yasser said of the retrospective. “It’s a side they don’t tell you about.”
Afterward I sought out my uncle as one may seek the riddle of the Sphinx. I believed he contained all the questions in the world, if not necessarily the answers. Each afternoon after school I would ride my bicycle to his house on Vanak Square and he, already back from work and wearing a white T-shirt, would greet me with fresh-brewed tea and a plate of marzipan and dried mulberries. We spent hours speaking of school, idiotic classmates, insipid teachers, polyester, plastic, pleats, monarchies, democracies, the Enlightenment, encyclopedias. He told me of the project he was involved with, doing research for a compendium of Persian art—the interminable, mad design of Sadegh Mozaffarian of the Ministry of Culture.
What we never talked about was love, and the more I got to know him, the less he resembled the image of the playboy the world had drawn of him. He seemed to me rather lonely, and what he found lacking in human affection he made up for in drink and opium, both of which he would break out after six o’clock in the evening, according to some self-imposed regulation he had instituted to keep himself in check.
One night that summer, as we sat on his terrace cooling ourselves with watermelon and stories of his encounters with some kola makhmali hooligans from the bazaar, a knock on the door interrupted us. It was ten in the evening; I had stayed far later than usual. More knocks followed, frenzied. Yasser hesitated, as though he already knew who the visitor was. “Stay here,” he said, and went to the door. I heard a woman cursing, and my uncle’s baritone failing to appease her. Minutes later he appeared on the terrace, pale and frightened. “I have to go,” he said. “I need to take someone to the doctor.” I followed him to the living room, where I found a young pregnant brunette, pretty but in cheap, provincial clothes, a white flowery chador sliding off her body. She could barely stand up. Uncle Yasser was frantically looking for his car key. “Maybe we should call an ambulance?” I said. “No! Mind your own business,” he said. He grabbed towels from the linen closet and hooked her arm around his neck. “Find my keys,” he commanded me. “I’m going to help her to the car.”
I rummaged through his belongings, feeling guilty as I opened and closed drawers. I thought it a strange irony that the one time that the celebrated Alfa Romeo could have been of actual use, its key remained elusive. Finally I found the key in his underwear drawer, on top of a stack of T-shirts; he must have accidentally placed it there that afternoon while changing. At the bottom of the drawer was a letter. I hesitated, then unfolded it. It was from my mother, dated almost twenty years earlier. As I began reading I remembered that a sick woman was outside, waiting. I glanced quickly at the final line: “While you enjoy yourself with widows and actresses, your father lies here dying. Will you please come home, Yasser?” I placed the letter back where I had found it, and on the way to the car I did the math, which was not complicated. Yasser had returned from France four years after that letter had been written.
* * *
HE SLID THE WOMAN into the back of the Alfa Romeo as I arranged a towel under her. Was the towel there to protect the car or the woman? She was olive-skinned, with black eyes and a moon-shaped face, and with her chador off I could see that she was very pregnant. I sat in the front next to Uncle Yasser, and as we sped through streets overstuffed with summer crowds I thought about the strange concept of family, its intimacy and unknowable gaps. The woman moaned in the back, and Yasser, swerving through traffic like the taxi driver he had once been, kept on repeating, “Simin, azizam, for the love of Imam Reza, keep quiet.”
Our speed was short-lived. Shahanshahi Expressway was a desert of unmoving, honking cars. Yasser whimpered, the woman cursed. I had no idea where we were headed and was too afraid to ask. When we finally snaked our way out of the expressway the car became eerily silent. I turned around.
The woman was crouching in a pool of blood, holding on to a tiny human knotted to a hideous ropy thing. Yasser must have seen it, too, because he was already turning into a dark residential street, thick beads of sweat on his forehead. When he parked the car he ran out and opened the back door, then stood, stunned, staring at the fetus, whose mouth opened and closed like a fish. The woman handed him the creature and as it turned purple, then blue, my uncle rocked it as though it weren’t dying. A light turned on in a nearby house and someone peeked from behind a curtain. Somewhere beyond, a dog barked. “He’s beautiful,” Simin said. My uncle placed the dead child on her chest then returned to the front seat. As he began to shift the gear he paused, rested his head on the wheel, and wept.
We arrived at our destination—the house of an obstetrician who was my uncle’s good friend—past midnight. “You’re mad,” said the doctor when he saw the wreckage inside the car. “Why didn’t you go to the hospital?” Yasser looked sheepish. “Please help me,” he said. “I couldn’t take her to the hospital, and still can’t. If this gets out it will be the end of me.” I was not sure if “this” meant his relations with Simin or the dead baby or both. The doctor, obliging, brought more towels and some medical gear. He sliced the umbilical cord and the two men carried the tottering woman inside, leaving behind the lifeless baby.
I picked him up—he could not have weighed more than a grapefruit. I wiped him with a towel and wrapped him in a fresh one. Then I cleaned the car as best I could, though the job called for a forensic team. I kissed the baby on his forehead, no wider than a man’s thumb. “I’m sorry,” I said, recognizing that he was also my cousin.
* * *
YASSER EMERGED ALONE from the house. “She’ll be fine,” he said, “but she needs to rest. I’ll come back for her in the morning.”
We drove with the dead baby on my lap. The roads were hushed. “Simin is a woman I’ve loved for years,” my uncle suddenly said. “But I could not give her what she wanted.”
“What did she want?”
“For me to marry her. And this would be impossible, you see? Marrying a woman of her social standing would be the end of my career. And not marrying her would be the end of me, because her family is very religious. That’s why we kept the affair secret all this time.” As he spoke I noticed the creases around his eyes and wondered if they had been there all along. “Ali,” he said. “No one can know about tonight, you understand? Especially your mother. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said. “And the baby? What shall we do with him?”
“We will bury him,” he said.
“What, in a cemetery?”
“In the park,” he said.
* * *
AT SHAHANSHAHI PARK, which was empty except for a couple making out on a bench, we buried the baby in a shallow grave that we dug with our bare hands at the foot of a cedar tree. Yasser covered the child with soil and knelt on all fours to kiss the ground where he lay.
Three years later, long after a new regime had renamed the park where the baby was buried Park-e-Mellat—the People’s Park—a letter arrived in the mail. It read,
Yasser Ehsan, 52, was exe
cuted yesterday at 2:35 in the morning. His body is being held at the municipal morgue. We are extending his next of kin a rare chance to come and retrieve it.
* * *
MY MOTHER READ THE LETTER and said, “He caused enough trouble while he was alive; I won’t let him do it now. Who knows what will happen if we show up? This could be a trap.” The letter lingered on the pantry for weeks, next to jars of cumin and saffron and cardamom, until one morning, when, remembering the baby as I ate a sunny-side-up egg at the kitchen table, I decided to get my bicycle and ride to the morgue. Every being, I said to myself, must be claimed, sooner or later.
* * *
LIKE HIS SON BEFORE HIM, Yasser was buried in the blackness of a sibilant night, his grave unmarked and unnamed. Months later I saw a revolutionary riding around town in the Alfa Romeo with the windows rolled down. Ray-Bans on his suntanned face and a harlequin-green bandanna around his head, he tapped the wheel to a dreamed-up tune.
24
ALI RAHIMI ABSORBED THE APPLAUSE. People asked him about trauma and post-trauma and writing as catharsis and other fashionable words leaked from psychology manuals into the vernacular. Some wanted to know the fate of the suffering Simin, and many more requested details about the luckless baby: how many seconds had he lived, had he made any sound? One young man with a hipster beard wondered if Ali had considered telling the story from the baby’s point of view. Ali answered diplomatically. Yes, the writing had been a kind of deliverance. He did not know what happened to Simin—during the three years that separated the baby’s death from Yasser’s, he, Ali, had had limited contact with his uncle. As for questions of time, he could not say for sure how long the baby had lived—the entire night felt to him like a dream. But of one thing he was certain: the baby had made no sound. Finally, in response to the bearded man he said, with a smirk, that had the book been written from the baby’s point of view, it would have been, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Everyone laughed.
Afterward, as he offered the last autographs, I approached him and congratulated him on his book’s publication. He acknowledged my words with the chronic politeness he had maintained all evening. He didn’t remember me, and why would he? I had changed in the intervening decades, and in any case, on the night in question he must have regarded me as nothing more than another revolutionary in khaki clothes. But having at least recognized me as a fellow countryman he said, “We all lived some version of this, didn’t we?”
“Our shared story,” I said.
The bookseller who had earlier introduced him collected the few unsold copies, dismantled the microphone from the podium, and thanked him profusely.
Ali nodded. “I hate these events,” he confided in me, mistaking our common heritage for intimacy.
“Do you have to do many?” I said, feigning sympathy.
“Tomorrow I fly to the West Coast. I have a few in San Francisco and Los Angeles.”
“Glamorous,” I said.
“As glamorous as an airplane bag of peanuts. I feel like Arthur Miller’s salesman.”
I assumed that by alluding to literature’s archetypal salesman, he wished to prove that he was not a dull interlocutor. To reciprocate I said, “Things ended badly for that salesman, as I recall.”
He laughed, appreciating my retort. I stood patient as he gathered his belongings and packed up his messenger bag.
“From what I gleaned from the reviews, much of your book is about your uncle’s experience in prison, and his eventual execution. Is that right?”
“Yes,” he said. “I did my best to put myself in his place, to imagine what he endured.”
“But how could you imagine such a thing?” I said. “Since you weren’t there.”
“I’m a writer,” he said, defensive. “It’s what writers do.”
“Something else occurred to me,” I continued. “You write that your uncle asked you never to disclose the events of that unfortunate night with the baby.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And I didn’t. For decades.”
“That’s admirable. But now you have. You’ve disclosed it to the whole world.”
“Not an easy decision,” he said.
“You know, our beloved salesman kills himself at the end of the play in order to cash in on his life insurance for his family. What is it he says?… Oh yes, ‘A man is worth more dead than alive.’ Or something like that. One could argue that you also cashed in, not with your own death, but with those of others—your uncle and the baby.”
He stared at me, a flash of recognition in his eyes. “Am I being interrogated?” he said. “Who are you?”
“I am the asshole who buried your uncle,” I said. Without waiting for his reply, I walked out of the bookshop, sensing an ancient, muffled rage, more familiar to me than my own sorry face. I had revealed myself to him not for atonement, but to undo the congratulatory mood of the evening, to dismantle his delusion that loss could be conquered, that grief could be packaged and labeled, applauded and peddled. It seemed that every person who spent an hour in or even near our detention centers had gone on to pen a bestseller detailing the dignity of his affliction. What poseurs, the lot of them, hailed in America and Europe as modern-day Dostoyevskys and Solzhenitsyns and Koestlers, building an empire of grievance on the ruins of our disillusion. Were they, in the end, any better than we had been?
Footsteps echoed behind me. I slowed down to let him catch up.
“What do you want from me, aghaye Mozaffarian?” Ali said. “You undid me once, all those years ago. I won’t let you do it again.”
“You give me too much credit,” I said. “It was history that undid you, as it did me, and millions of others. I had nothing to do with your undoing.”
“No, that is too easy,” he said. “A man has a choice in how he responds. You played a part in that history.”
“And what choices have you made, aghaye Rahimi?” I said. “I’ve read all about you. It seems you are not shy about giving interviews. I know, for example, that you live with your wife and two daughters in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, which I understand is very fashionable these days. I know that your wife owns an organic bakery in Williamsburg that has won multiple awards for making the best bread, and that you spend Sunday mornings reading the paper and drinking a pot of Darjeeling tea and your wife a pot of Ceylon. I know that in the fall you enjoy apple picking in Dutchess County with the girls. Summers you like to spend on Shelter Island, where your family has become known for its paella dinner parties. But I’ll tell you something. When you are on your deathbed, inshallah many years from now, and your wife brings you a sliver of organic apple pie that you are no longer able to eat, you will be thinking not of Hart Crane’s bridge or of your seaside paella soirees or the century-old moldings of your Brooklyn brownstone, or even of your darling daughters who by then, God willing, will have offered you many grandchildren, but of your uncle’s corpse being lowered into the ground, and of the baby, who died gasping for air in the Alfa Romeo like a fooled fish. And you will recognize, at last, that these things cannot be subdued. There is, in the end, no deliverance.”
* * *
HE WALKED AWAY, tears in his eyes and hands in his pockets, so consumed that he was nearly hit by a speeding taxi as he crossed the street without noticing the red light; the stunned driver, who had braked just in time, rolled down his window and cursed in Bengali.
25
I RETURNED TO OMID’S. The nighttime doorman, less chatty than his daytime counterpart, called to announce me.
“This is not a good time,” Omid said at the door.
“Will you let me in?”
“I’m not well,” he said. “My dog collapsed this afternoon. I took him to the vet and had to put him down. I lost bābā just weeks ago. And now Luca. I’m devastated, and I have no stamina for you.”
“Both of us lost bābā,” I said.
“Both of us?” he said. “You didn’t even know he was living.”
<
br /> “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “Right after the memorial dinner. Let me be with you.”
He shifted his body and half-heartedly let me in.
* * *
THE DOG’S ABSENCE overwhelmed the living room. An unclaimed leash, an empty pet bed, a half-eaten bowl of congealing food, a scattering of squishy balls, a Mr. Spock chew toy. I picked up the Vulcan doll. It carried a soft scent of the vanished animal. “Remember our Star Trek parties?” I said.
“I remember,” he said.
“And those awful blue drinks we made for all the kids?”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
“Grapes and blue curaçao.”
“That’s right,” he said.
“At my old job people called me Capitān Kir—Captain Prick.”
“You’ve earned many nicknames,” he said.
“Have you had dinner?” I asked.
“I can’t eat,” he said.
“Let me cook for you.”
He neither accepted nor declined. His grief was too vast to allow room for decisions. I grabbed a pot and browsed the fridge and pantry; he had most of the ingredients for ghormeh sabzi and rice. As I chopped the parsley and fenugreek and chives it occurred to me that the last time I had cooked for anyone was for my daughter, three years earlier, on the night she left home. For myself I could not bother.
The stew simmered. Neither of us spoke. I noticed three framed photographs on the bookshelf—one of the dog running in snow with a young boy who I assumed was Omid’s son, Arash, another of the same boy and the dog dressed in matching Gryffindor Harry Potter costumes, and the third of an old man on a terrace with a cup of tea, book in hand. “Is that bābā?” I said, pointing at the third photograph.
“Yes. In the summertime he sat on the terrace of their apartment for hours, looking out at the river and reading. I think it was the only place where he was happy.”