by Dalia Sofer
“Fix it then.”
“Yes … It’s complicated. It’s an old Harley-Davidson. A World War Two relic. There are only a couple of tires that suit it. Pirelli makes them. And of course they aren’t available anymore.”
“Everything is available,” he said, “if you go with a recommendation. Go see Asghar-agha. He has a shop on Meydan-e Shush. If you tell him I sent you, your tire will be fixed.”
“Sepās gozāram—I’m grateful.”
“That’s two favors in one afternoon,” he said. “But who’s counting?”
* * *
I SAT BACK DOWN and studied the dossier. In his drawings H. had replaced monarchs and their henchmen with mullahs and their henchmen. Photocopies of several drawings had been placed in the file, and I examined these, remembering the days when I, too, would bring pencil to paper and produce some original image. Now the best I could do was to compose a requiem for originality, which I delivered daily, with the time-honored repetition of formulaic questions, accusations, and threats.
The mechanic shop, on Shoosh Square, was south of the bazaar. Tires and tools overpowered the room with the sour smell of rubber and rust, and a poster of a sparrow hung under a sickly yellow light. An old man, grease-stained, greeted me. When I told him what I wanted he walked away. “Where have you been?” he said. “The days of Pirellis and Michelins are over.” I lit a cigarette with my father’s monogrammed lighter, slowly and deliberately. “That’s too bad,” I said. “Because Mostafa Akbari told me you wouldn’t let me down.” His eyes filled with dread, a look I recognized, especially from my own face, whose changing reflection stunned me a little every morning as I trimmed my growing beard. “Why didn’t you say so from the beginning?” he said. “Leave the bike here. Come back in two hours and you will have a brand-new set of Pirelli tires. And I will check the engine and all the parts besides.”
“Ghorbāne shomā,” I said. “You are too kind.”
“No kindness is too much for dear friends,” he said, in the language of masquerade that had infiltrated our mother tongue.
* * *
MY GIDDINESS as I left the shop slayed my earlier anguish over the case of H. Favors, promotions, considerations—in my future I saw these things, and more. I decided to return for the bike in the morning. I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to drop me off at a bakery near my home; I was in a celebratory mood.
Pistachio nougats and rosewater faloudeh—I bought a box of each as though I were hosting a wedding reception—and I walked home, the white packages tied with crimson string tucked under my arm. Twilight was dipping the city in hazard, announcing the hour of nothingness or air raids, one spent in anticipation of the other. Icicles hung from treetops along Revolution Street, and I could smell in the air the scent of snow, born from the communal frost-death of all other scents. It was the clean scent of absence.
In the apartment I arranged the nougats and faloudeh in glass bowls and set them on the kitchen table, powdered and ghost-white. I sat at the head of the table, in my father’s old chair, which I had until then avoided. The cushion, having memorized the contours of his body, now rearranged itself around mine. Three empty chairs besieged me. One, at the table’s other end, was the seat of my childhood. Briefly I saw myself there as a boy, an apparition that frightened me. In the dusk I ate a succession of nougats, the sweetness delighting me before numbing my taste buds, and as night fell I filled my mouth with spoonfuls of rosewater noodles, syrupy ice assaulting my tongue with oblivion.
I fell asleep at the table and woke up an hour later, my stomach a sinkhole. In the bathroom I knelt to the floor and leaned over the toilet, breathless, waiting for relief. Nothing came. I got up, brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, over and over, but an acrid taste resurged in my throat each time I stepped away from the sink. My body had begun its decades-long revolution against me, and I sensed, that night, that my slow, silent war with my own flesh would one day culminate in our inevitable destruction.
Restless in the apartment, I hailed another taxi to return to the repair shop. Two women already in the back seat eyed each other with alarm when I got in the car. I had of late been getting such looks from strangers, and I wondered if my façade was beginning to hint at my metamorphosis. I sat in the passenger seat next to the driver and rolled down the window, though the temperature had fallen and the snow had begun. The women sighed in the back but said nothing. The driver, too, was silent.
At the shop, a small black-and-white television on top of a painter’s ladder was broadcasting a recantation. This jolted me, as I recognized the man: he was a tailor, a member of the tailors’ union, and had been, until then, an unrepentant Marxist. I had not had much interaction with him, except for offering him an orange one morning after his overnight interrogation session. As he had been too weak to peel it, I had done it for him, removing the pith so as to spare him any unnecessary bitterness. I remembered how his face opened up as he placed an orange slice in his mouth, holding it on his tongue without chewing, just squeezing his jaws, gently, allowing himself no more than a few drops of juice at one time. Afterward, as though the act of eating had suddenly made him conscious of himself, he looked down at his soiled pants and ran his fingers along the tears in the legs. I promised to get him a needle and thread. I remembered now that I had forgotten my promise.
* * *
“ALMOST READY,” the mechanic said.
“Take your time,” I said, with none of my earlier swagger. I felt dejected now, and the deeper I sank into this dejection the angrier I became. Why did I need a new pair of Pirelli tires when no one else could get even one? What kind of privilege was this, exactly, and at what price? Every meter traveled on those tires would take me that much farther from decency. If I could have annulled my order I would have done so at once, but it was too late; the bike was almost finished. I sat in a corner on a low stool and listened to the television’s drone in the background, the Marxist reciting passwords of atonement, bartering lies for life.
“You’ve had the shop for a long time?” I shouted to be heard over the television.
“Thirty years,” said the old man. “We are castaways here. But it’s never tedious. That eatery down the street? All the lutis used to gather there for dizi and water pipes. The gangsters, the street fighters, the dash-mashtis, the javanmardan. Tayeb Haj Rezaei used to go there—khodā biyamorzatesh—may he rest in peace. And his brother, Haj Ismael Rezaei. Shaban Jafari, too. Everybody called him Shaban bi-mokh—brainless Shaban. And of course the wrestler Gholamreza Takhti, the Olympic gold medalist.”
“I remember when Takhti died,” I said. “I was a kid. Everyone talked about it, even at school.”
“Yes, the government said he committed suicide at the Atlantic Hotel, but that made no sense. It was obvious they’d finished him off because he had been a member of the National Front, was a supporter of Mossadegh, and was making too much noise.”
I remembered my father’s face as he had read the news of the wrestler’s death that January morning, regret puncturing the indifference that he had cultivated over the years. My mother, who had just returned from the butcher, said, “They’re all mourning as though he were some hero. All that for a ruffian from the zoorkhaneh. This country baffles me, sometimes.”
“He was no ruffian,” my father said. “He wrestled with ethics. That’s an art, knowing not only how to fight, but how to fight honorably.”
“Since when are you an advocate for the jonoub shahri—the backwater lowlifes from downtown?” my mother said. “Wasn’t it enough, growing up with them?”
My father folded the newspaper in quarters until it was reduced to the size of his palm. I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He fixed his necktie and left for work.
* * *
“THE BIKE IS AS GOOD AS NEW,” the mechanic said. “May you ride in good health.”
“I’m grateful,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”
“Friends don’t owe friends any
thing,” he said, a hand on his heart. “The only thing a friend asks is that you look out for him.” He tilted his head toward the television broadcast.
“What else can we do,” I said, “but look out for one another?”
* * *
PAPER-THIN SNOW already covered the streets. I rode for some time on the bike aimlessly, aware of the fullness of my tires, thinking again of the case of H. In the morning, in just a few hours, they would bring him to me, blindfolded. “Sit down and face the wall,” I would tell him, hovering over him as I had been instructed to do. And so would begin the game, the mind-fuck of coercion and resistance, barter and cheap philosophy, defamation and defacement, all of which was designed to culminate in one thing: the confession, the final words that would carve out the mote in his own eye.
Not wanting to return to an empty house, I turned onto Ferdowsi Square to visit Judge Emami. He had a reputation for thoughtfulness, and unlike most of the quickly appointed judges with a few weeks’ worth of seminary studies to their credit, he held degrees in law and theology from the Qom Seminary. We had once chatted in the prison kitchen, by the pot of steamed turnips that the ailing clerks had prepared. When he realized that we were almost neighbors he extended a brotherly invitation, a polite gesture that I knew, like most such invitations, was disingenuous. But my predicament—or more precisely the predicament of H.—was worthy of a transgression of manners.
The judge’s apartment was on the top floor of a four-story building overlooking the square. The snow was now coming down harder, and my motorcycle skidded a few times as I slowed down to park. Achy and feverish, I wondered if I should not have gone straight home to bed.
He didn’t immediately buzz me in. After I announced my name along with an apology for my impromptu visit, he hesitated. “Come up,” he said. “But you must walk. The elevator is broken.”
My footsteps echoed in the stairway. A clammy sweat was spreading over my chest and neck and I felt as though I were on a night train trapped in a tunnel. I stopped multiple times along the way, hanging on to the icy balustrade. Several lightbulbs on the stairway had come loose, and they flickered, on and off. The smell of fried fish from an apartment on the third floor reminded me of my nausea. Why had I come? What would I tell the judge when I finally reached his apartment? What did a kid like me have to say to a jurist from Qom? My heart pounded, and I considered turning around and going home, but it was too late; the judge was already expecting me.
His door was left open. I walked into an empty living room, sparsely furnished. White floor cushions lined two walls, and in the center an Isfahani rug, in brilliant shades of blue, sparkled under the prisms of a crystal chandelier. In the corner were papers, neatly stacked, a leather-bound notebook, and a fountain pen.
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” he called out. I followed the voice to the kitchen, where I found the judge kneeling on the floor in a pool of soapy water, a rag in his hand and a red pail of water beside him.
“The washing machine broke down,” he said. “I walked in a minute ago and I see this flood.”
I knelt down beside him with a kitchen towel, soaking up the water and wringing the towel over the pail, a repetitive motion that soothed me.
“Forgive me,” he said after some time, as though he had just noticed my presence. “I’m sure you didn’t come to wipe my floor. What can I do for you?” Without his cloak and turban he seemed an ordinary man. Average height, moon-shaped face, full beard, widow’s peak, gray slacks, button-down shirt.
“It’s my honor to wipe your floor, Haj-agha,” I said.
“Let’s take a break,” he said, rising from the floor with exertion. He could not have been more than fifty, but his bones appeared to have aged before him. He poured tea from a samovar into two glasses and we carried these with a bowl of sugar cubes to the living room.
“Haj-agha,” I said. “Where shall I begin?”
“What is troubling you?”
“I have been assigned the dossier of an artist named H.”
“I am familiar with H.,” he said. “Akbari told me about him.”
“That’s precisely it. Akbari is rash, for lack of a better word. I have been privy to his investigations, and maybe because I had until now been no more than an abettor to the interrogations, I had not felt the weight of my participation. But the case of H. has been assigned to me exclusively, and I am finding myself incapable.”
“If the man is guilty then he shall pay for his crime,” the judge said. “And your job is to obtain the confession.”
“But Haj-agha, what is he guilty of? Drawing? For decades he was hounded by the old regime’s men—men like my own father—for the exact same charge. How can we become the very beast we combatted?”
Slowly, he sipped his tea. Had I been out of line? Would I find myself, in a couple of hours, not facing H., but beside him? Again I broke into a sweat, this time a burning one. “Will you,” I said, if only to say something and appease my anxiety, “oversee this case?”
“What difference would it make,” he said, “if I oversaw the case?”
“Everyone knows of your judiciousness. You are fair-minded and believe in the law.”
“These days the law itself is the beast,” he said.
“The law?” I said. “But we finally got what we wanted, what many, in any case, wanted: a judiciary that’s an amalgam of French civil law and Sharia jurisprudence.”
“It was in theory a great invention,” he said. “But the two sets of law aren’t always in harmony. And in practical terms, none of it matters. Since we consecrated the Velayat-e Faqih—Guardianship of the Jurist—we have one supreme jurist who conducts the affairs of the State in accordance with God’s laws during the absence of the twelfth Imam. And that person, as you know, is the Ayatollah.”
“Are you saying it doesn’t matter what the judge says? That’s impossible, Haj-agha, it has to…”
The lights went off as I spoke. Another blackout. We sat together in the dark, wondering if this would be the night for air raids. The judge’s windows overlooked the square, where the marble statue of Ferdowsi, snowcapped and solitary, stood against the moonless night. “I will look for candles,” he said as I followed him to the kitchen, both of us sidestepping the soapy puddle on the floor.
He opened and shut cabinets. “Those candles…” he said. “Where did I put them?”
“But Haj-agha, how do we reconcile?” I said.
“Reconcile what?”
“What we could have been with what we are becoming.”
“What we envisioned was not to be,” he said. “Now we are in this labyrinth … Ah, yes!” He retrieved a candle, wax-dripped, and he placed it on a plate. “Now the matches…”
I pulled out my father’s lighter and ignited the wick.
“Good, we have light,” he said. “You can’t leave during the blackout so we may as well be comfortable.” He opened a box of chickpea cookies and began setting them on a plate.
The memory of the sweets I had eaten earlier made me queasy. “If you won’t oversee the case of H.,” I said, “then maybe you could remove me from it?”
He set aside the cookies and placed his hand on my shoulder. It occurred to me that since my family, and since Minoo, I had had no physical contact with another human being. I am not sure if it was the unexpected warmth of his hand, or the blackness of the night, or the chills and fever that coursed through my body, but I began crying, and, ashamed, I turned away from him and stepped back.
“It’s difficult,” he said. “I feel the pain, too…” He walked toward me, hands outstretched, and it was at that moment that it happened. The slip, the thud, the knock, the scream. The clamor of pots, shattering of glass. Then silence.
I stood in the half dark for some time, frozen, staring at the soundless body on the floor. “Haj-agha?” I said. “Haj-agha? Are you all right?”
Silence. The candle burned indifferently on the countertop. I picked it up and knelt to the floor, ca
sting light on his face. His eyes were open; his mouth, too. Blood oozed from a deep gash in his head, and the puddle had turned bubblegum pink. He had slipped on the suds with his socks and had hit his head against something, probably the door handle of the washing machine. Around him were shards of dishes, bits of ceramic and glass. I shook him. But I had seen enough death to understand that the judge, too, was gone. I sat on the floor in the suds, shut his eyelids with the palm of my hand. His mouth, as though in midsentence, was locked open.
Call for an ambulance? What would be the point? The police? What if they suspected me of wrongdoing? And what of Akbari? Were he to discover that I had gone behind his back to visit the judge, he would have me arrested on one pretext or another. As I sat in indecision, the cold, bloodied water seeping into my pants, I remembered that before the judge’s fall, I had been crying.
* * *
ELECTRICITY RETURNED with the sunrise. There had been no air raids, only blackness. I had spent the night by his side, the designated corpse watcher.
A bright, morning sun cast its rays along the countertops. To look at it one could have been fooled into thinking that it was time for tea and breakfast. His clothes lay inside the washing machine like witnesses. I wanted to remove and hang them, were it not for the judge’s body still on the floor, reminding me that we had arrived at the endgame. Nothing more could be done.
Soaking wet, I got off the floor. In the judge’s bedroom I opened his armoire, pulling from it a pair of clean slacks; they were too wide around the waist. I cinched them with a belt, also his. My own bloodstained pants I folded and placed in a plastic bag, wondering how to dispose of them.
I left Judge Emami lying stiff on the kitchen floor and ran down the stairs with the bag, past the man with a briefcase on the fourth floor, and the woman on the third, who had left the doors and windows of her apartment open, allowing fresh air to wash out the night’s cinders and fear. Snowdrift blocked the front gate, so I pushed gently, trying my best to remain unnoticed, to be, once more, an ordinary man.