Man of My Time

by Dalia Sofer

  A line from a Leonard Cohen song looped in my mind, Everybody’s got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died. I had gone through a Leonard Cohen phase right around the time my daughter left me. Dear Omid, my brother. I envied him his suffering, the palpability of it, as clean and impenetrable as a white shroud. I sat with him in silence. From the open window came a rustle of a deflated halogen birthday balloon caught on a naked branch of a September tree.

  “And the other two photos are of Arash with Luca?”

  “Yes. Luca was a good sport. He let us dress him up for Halloween, and came trick-or-treating with us. I remember how Arash would stand by each door, behind the other children, half-apologetic, half-entitled, caught between the aberration of his foreign parents and the certainty of his American birth. On these annual candy pilgrimages the dog was his sidekick, offering him the courage and levity that I so sorely lacked. Afterward Arash would cradle his harvest—the Hershey’s Kisses, the Kit Kats, the Skittles—each candy, like collateral, escalating his worth, making him feel like he belonged to something greater—and maybe better—than our family. Anyway, that photo is from the last Halloween we were together, before Anita and I separated and she moved back to Los Angeles with our son.”

  “It must have been difficult for Arash to let go of the dog,” I said.

  “It was. But he had no choice. When Anita got custody, the first thing she said was, ‘At last I can be rid of both dogs.’ Obviously she meant me and Luca.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He nodded but didn’t answer.

  I looked again at my father’s photograph. In his old age he had come to resemble an ailing Mossadegh—the same oblong face, the bottomless black eyes of a man undone by his own kin.

  “In case you were wondering about the will,” Omid said, “he left you no money or property.”

  “I wasn’t wondering,” I said.

  “But he did leave you something.” He walked to his bedroom and returned with a book, which he handed me with reticence, as someone fulfilling an obligation. The book was an old edition of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Inside was an inscription: To my son, Hamid, this was my first copy of this timeless tale, which I studied in school, in 1948. I hope you will one day receive from it all the beauty that I failed to teach you. With love, Sadegh Mozaffarian.

  A pang of sorrow rose in my heart, but I contained it just as quickly. This was my father’s master plan, to present himself as the seraph that he was not. Puppetry from the grave—ingenious. I remembered a summer evening when at the dinner table, surrounded by his arty friends from the university, he commanded me to bring my drawing of Uncle Majid for all to see. He never tired of mocking the hat I had drawn in place of my departed uncle. “Leave him alone,” my mother said, but he ignored her, encouraged by the cheers of the men, among them Yasser. Defeated, I presented my drawing like a qhorbāni—a sacrificial offering—and my father, basking in the hilarity in the room, held it up and said, “I present to you my son, the next Walter Gropius. Already at this tender age he has shunned art for art’s sake.” In fairness, they had had more than a few rounds of Chivas Regal, and I was nothing more than a cog in the evening’s machinery of show-and-tell, which included a dramatic reading of some blank verses of Omid’s budding poetry and a photo of someone’s sister’s amateur bronze bust of Ferdowsi.

  “Remember how bābā used to read to us at bedtime?” Omid said.

  “He never read normal children’s stories. It was all epics and mythologies.”

  “You complain now, but you loved Gilgamesh. You used to cry for the dead Enkidu every time, as though you had never heard the story before.”

  A vague memory of my father sitting by my bed assaulted me. Scent of cigarettes and Paco Rabane cologne, indigo pajamas, warm hand on my forehead. “Gilgamesh was a Mesopotamian, like bābā,” I said.

  “Stories have nationalities?” Omid said.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “What I remember are the dinner table humiliations.”

  He shrugged.

  “You were not immune, as I recall.”

  “There were humiliations,” he said. “But Hamid, there was so much more.”

  Was my brother’s clemency mere reverence for the dead? If you were to judge humankind from epitaphs, you would think that only saints had walked this earth. Nowhere in a cemetery can a neglectful father, a selfish mother, a drunken uncle, be found.

  “Do you remember when bābā had his gallbladder surgery?” I said. “I think I was about eleven, so you were eight. Do you know what my biggest fear was as he began waking up from the anesthesia?”

  “That he would quiz you on Seljuk pottery?” he said.

  “I was afraid he wouldn’t remember me.”

  “I want to tell you a story,” Omid said. He picked up a squishy ball from the floor and squeezed it, causing it to whimper. “In the summer of 2003,” he went on, “New York suddenly went dark. It was the biggest blackout in the history of America. Bābā and I were at the Metropolitan Museum, for an exhibit on the art of the third millennium BCE. It covered all the land from the Mediterranean to the Indus, and there was even a section devoted to Gilgamesh.”

  “He must have been ecstatic,” I said.

  “He was. For months he had wanted to see it, but his heart troubles had already begun and we had spent the summer in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices. This was our last chance, as the show was to close just days later. So there we were, at last, among the lion-headed birds and lapis lazuli eyes and cuneiform clay tablets. When the hall went dark, we were standing before a statuette from eastern Iran. They had named him ‘Standing male with a scarred face.’ His black body was covered in scales and a deep gash sliced the right side of his face. One eye was hollow, the other was encrusted with a white substance, which the caption said was calcium carbonate that once upon a time might have been a shell. It was a small statue, no more than twelve centimeters, but it was one of the most frightening things I’d ever seen. When bābā saw it he stood before it transfixed, and he remained there long after the lights went out, long even after the guards with their flashlights began ushering everyone out of the museum halls. He said, ‘Omid, I saw this man in a dream.’

  “It was a hot afternoon, sweltering without air conditioners, and with the museum lights gone I was feeling tired and apprehensive. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘The city has gone dark. There is nothing left to see.’ Bābā said, ‘I’m telling you that years ago I saw this man in a dream. He came to me, exactly like this, a man with a scarred face, one eye hollow, the other encrusted. And in this dream the man was in his essence your brother.’ I dragged him away and we followed the throngs out of the museum, exiting through the medieval gallery, where the guards’ flashlights flickered on the altarpieces and tapestries once housed in European cathedrals. I felt as though all of us, withdrawing from that dark museum with alarm and awe, were contemporaries of the objects surrounding us.”

  “Did you believe him?” I said. “That he had seen the man in a dream, and that I was that man?”

  “I did. He was so perturbed by the dream that I had to believe him. Later I asked him when he had had that dream and he said, ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was the summer of 1988. I remember that we had just bought the apartment and were still deep in renovations. Throughout that summer your mother and I slept among slabs of sheetrock, wooden tiles, and dust. I was feeling unsettled. It was as if by building a new house we were gutting the memory of the old one in Tehran, and, along with it, the memory of my sorrow over Hamid. Maybe that’s why I had that bizarre dream.’”

  Omid’s tale unnerved me. Signs and symbols still held meaning for me. Broken mirrors, black cats, crossed telephone lines, the beloved’s face at the first appearance of a full moon—all of these carried messages from a universe I did not seek to control. Had bābā known, without actually knowing, what I had become, by that summer of ’88?

  “When we came out of the museum,” Omid cont
inued, “the city was hushed and in disarray. The subways had shut down and with no traffic lights cars rolled down Fifth Avenue, confused, interrupted occasionally by hordes of pedestrians forcing their way through. Bābā and I made our way down the museum steps, tiptoeing around the hundreds of people who sat perplexed, trying to devise a way home. We walked downtown heading eastward, passing by grocery stores whose shelves were quickly depleting. An ice cream shop was selling gelato cones for one dollar apiece; it was, said the manager, a ‘blackout sale.’

  “With bābā’s heart condition we had to keep pausing along the way, sitting on benches or in the lobbies of buildings whose doormen improbably welcomed us with grace. As night fell, an eerie mix of jubilation and disquiet filled the streets. Bābā said, ‘Look what happens when the system is disrupted. Chaos, euphoria, madness. This has been the logic of crowds, throughout time and all over the world.’

  “By the time we arrived home Mother was sitting in the dark listening to a shortwave radio, an anemic candle casting shadows on the opposite wall. My heart sank; I felt like we were back in the revolution, back to the curfews, back to you. Bābā must have had the same sensation because he said, ‘Monir, you would not believe it. We saw Hamid at the Metropolitan Museum.’ My mother looked up, perplexed. In the flicker of the candlelight I saw that she had been crying. ‘Yes,’ bābā went on. ‘We saw him. Our elder son. Right there inside one of the vitrines.’

  “As he removed his shoes and stretched out on the sofa, Mother searched my face, bewildered. I shook my head no, and she, retreating once again into her grief, where she now spent most of her days, turned up the radio. ‘Treat the day like a snow day,’ the mayor of New York was advising.”

  “Your story frightens me,” I said.

  “What I’m trying to tell you,” Omid said, “is that he never stopped looking for you. He looked for you until the end, among the living and the dead.”

  I ran my hand over his beat-up sofa. Dog fur stuck to my palm. “Omid,” I said, “how do you put down a dog?”

  “The same way you put down a man,” he said. “You hold him down and inject him with poison. The vet kept assuring me that it was the right thing to do, that the disease was killing my dog, not me. But I felt like a murderer nonetheless.”

  “The vet was right,” I said. “The dog was already dying.”

  “No matter how you reason,” he said, “witnessing a killing leaves you filthy.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked at my face intently, his eyes searching for the brother he had once known.

  “Let’s call Mother. Maybe she’ll join us for dinner,” I said.

  “I don’t think she wants to see you.”

  “Yet she wants me to come to the memorial, and she wants to hear a speech from my lips.”

  “That’s only for aberoo—to save face. Believe it or not, after all we’ve been through, what people say and think still matters to her.”

  I reached for Omid’s phone. There was a long pause after I said hello. In the background I could hear the lament of one more exiled singer—probably Sattar.

  “It’s you,” my mother said.

  “I thought you might not pick up if I called you from my phone.”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Would you like to come over to Omid’s for dinner? We’ve cooked ghormeh sabzi.”

  There was no answer.

  “Well?”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “And my arthritis is acting up.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to have a family meal, together?”

  “A family meal?” she said.

  “I leave for Tehran tomorrow, after the memorial,” I said.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing your speech,” she said, and hung up.

  “She refused, didn’t she?” Omid said as I put down the phone.

  “Does she know about Luca?” I asked him.

  “No. I’ve learned not to tell her such things. She has a way of lacerating other people’s pain. She thinks it competes with hers.”

  “Omid,” I said. “You’ve been so alone.”

  “I have,” he said. “But we are a family of soloists, aren’t we?”

  26

  IT’S ONE OF THE PARADOXES of this life that to fully grasp the extent of your aloneness, you must not be entirely lonely. In the winter of 1982, as my own loneliness became acute, I remained ignorant of this fact. But I did realize that I was developing bizarre habits: at work in my office, for example, while reviewing files or speaking on the phone, I would tap my foot loudly against my desk or move my chair brusquely for no other reason than to make it screech against the concrete floor—to prove to myself that I was still capable of producing an original sound, that I, in fact, still existed.

  That winter, the war had made bananas disappear, an event I considered a private calamity. Already I’d made myself accustomed to drinking condensed milk—the regular kind was now scarce—and thought nothing of washing with Soviet coal-tar soap. But come three o’clock, when I would normally pause my work and walk to the prison kitchen to retrieve my banana, I would find myself hankering in the empty hour, my blood sugar plummeting along with my morale. As a bad cold was going around that winter and the heating was intermittent, several clerks had taken to boiling turnips daily to heal their congested lungs. I didn’t partake in their communal meal; in those days I felt myself leagues away from them in erudition and disposition. But I developed a taste for the raw turnip greens they left behind, snacking on them until I thought I tasted bile. Increasingly, thoughts of my departed family trespassed my mind, and their unbroken absence mingled on my tongue with the bitterness of turnips.

  * * *

  FROM THE TIME of my recruitment until that winter I had been an auxiliary interrogator, brought in to assist a superior. Good interrogator, bad interrogator . This was and still is a tactic commonly used, and I was often cast in the role of the “good” one. My assignment was to offer unexpected gestures of kindness to the prisoner, to catch him off guard, as it were, at the very moment when, having endured despite himself, he had lost hope. An aspirin, some freshly brewed tea, clean underwear, a fig or a date, these things could disarm a human being, so much so that in his longing for connection he would offer the prized confession that would lead to his demise.

  What I had witnessed in those months, and what I had, myself, more than once dispensed, I wrote off to the chaos of transience, the birth of a black hole from which no particle—not even light—could escape. I had read somewhere that a black hole is born when stars collapse at the end of their life cycle, and that it continues growing as it absorbs other stars and merges with other black holes. But despite its invisible interior, a black hole transforms matter that falls into it into the brightest object in the universe. This, I still believed, was what our revolution could become: the brightest object in the universe.

  Between interrogation sessions I would read up on our ever-changing legal code. The constitution of 1905, for decades ignored, had been replaced by a new one in December 1979. This document was endlessly revised and amended, and I, ever the earnest believer, studied its nuances as though they truly mattered.

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 23, 1982, at 3:25 in the afternoon, I received a dossier marked “Urgent.” I remember the exact time because in the absence of my banana I was feeling lethargic, wondering how many hours separated me from the close of the workday. When I opened the file, I didn’t immediately notice the name of the accused; my mind was preoccupied with my motorcycle’s tire, which had gone flat that morning on the expressway on my way to work. I considered it a miracle that I had survived the accident with only a few bruises, since the bike had toppled over, throwing me in the air before landing me on the pavement on my right rib cage. Cars had stopped on my account, and a woman who reminded me of my mother offered to call an ambulance. It was beautiful, to be cared for by multitudes, to be, once again, on the side of the injured, of the mortal. I almo
st wished I had been more seriously harmed.

  * * *

  I STARED AT THE NAME on the front of the dossier: Houshang Habibi, known as “H.” I remembered the newspaper cartoons I once shared with the laborer Mirza, and the story Yasser had told me about my father’s betrayal of H. Based on the charges brought against him, H.’s case would be tried by the Revolutionary Court—a formalized version of the makeshift tribunals of the early months. As I read the dossier—address, date of arrest, names of family members—the words blurred on the page and my head began throbbing. I shut my eyes, but when I opened them the room was spinning, and the items on my desk—the plastic yellow clock and my father’s monogrammed cigarette lighter, which I had started using that winter—appeared to be floating in the air. I wondered if my accident that morning had not injured me more than I realized.

  Air, that’s what I needed, and a good smoke. But as I reached for my jacket the phone rang. I had a premonition it was Akbari, so I let it ring, one arm already in a sleeve. The shrillness of the ring resonated in the recesses of my body. Finally I picked up, dread rising in my chest.

  “A new arrest,” he said. “A prominent artist. You must have received his file.”

  “Yes.”

  “I did you a big favor, to send you such a high-profile case. Consider it a vote of confidence. It will get you noticed.”

  I tried to regulate my breathing so he wouldn’t detect my state.

  “You heard me?”

  “Yes. But am I to interrogate him by myself?”

  “He’s all yours,” Akbari said. “Don’t stall. I need the confession fast. This case is important and will be very good publicity for us.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “What’s the matter? Are you unwell?”

  “No … I’m fine,” I said. “I had an accident this morning on the motorcycle. I think I’m still in shock. It was a flat tire.”