by Dalia Sofer
Back in my apartment I picked up the phone and called in sick, like a malingering schoolboy. “Serves you right,” the clerk said. “For refusing to eat our turnips.”
For a long time in the shower I let the hot water run over my body. Afterward, naked in front of the fogged-up mirror, I waited for patches of my face to connect under the vanishing steam, which seemed, just then, like human breath.
27
THE DOORBELL RANG. How long had I been asleep? Ten minutes or ten hours, I couldn’t tell. I sat up in bed—my parents’ bed. The room was half-dark, and my eyes had watered in my sleep, sealing my eyelids. I brought a finger to my mouth, wet it with saliva, and rubbed my eyes, removing the salty crust. Knocks interspersed with the doorbell. Dear God, the judge’s body on the kitchen floor; had I dreamed it? But there, on the dresser, was the silhouette of the plastic bag. I got out of bed and threw it in the back of the closet, then wobbled to the front door as everything whirled around me.
Akbari was holding a pot swaddled in a red gingham kitchen towel. “You look like death,” he said. He entered casually, as though he had been expected, and carried the pot to the kitchen. “The place looks different since I last saw it,” he went on. “You liquidated it.”
Was I delirious from the fever? Akbari was not a man one would expect on a doorstep with soup. But no, he was there, standing by the stove, stirring. “Sit down,” he said. “When was the last time you ate?”
I sat at the kitchen table as a stabbing pain shot through my head. He placed a sloppy bowl of ochre-yellow soup before me. I brought a spoonful to my mouth; it was watery and bland, leaving on my tongue a gelatinous film.
“When the clerk told me you had called in sick,” he said, “it occurred to me that you are, despite everything, still a boy. You are, after all, only twenty-two. Someone needs to look after you.” He poured me a glass of water and sat down, in my mother’s old seat. “You need a friend. No, more than a friend. You need family.”
His words comforted me, and briefly I allowed myself to crouch under them, as one crouches under a stairway during an air raid. Chewing on a tasteless drumstick it occurred to me that he was doing what I had been doing for months: he had cast himself as the good interrogator, offering me kindness in exchange for a confession.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“That’s some way to thank me,” he said.
I pushed back the bowl. “The soup, the compassion, what kind of performance is this?”
“You think me incapable of soup and compassion?”
“I think you capable of much more,” I said.
“Very well,” he said. “Since you insist. While you were sleeping, strange news emerged. Judge Emami was found dead in his apartment this morning.”
I tried to look him in the eyes but couldn’t. This, I knew, already incriminated me. “That’s terrible,” I said.
“Yes. Such a fine judge. And so beloved. A real shame.”
“How did he die?”
“At first glance,” he said, “it looked like an accident. It appeared as though he had had a mishap with his washing machine and slipped on soapsuds. But when one looks more closely, there are clues…”
“What clues?”
“Where were you last night?” he said.
“I picked up the bike from Asghar-agha, then I came home.”
“You came straight home?”
“Is this an interrogation?”
“Answer me,” he said. “Straight home?”
“Yes. Can’t you see I’m sick as a dog? Where else would I go?”
From his pocket he produced a photograph and placed it on the table. It looked like an image of snow; I didn’t understand.
“Like I mentioned,” he said. “When one looks more closely … Pick it up. Tell me what you see.”
The fever interfered with my vision. “It’s snow,” I said.
“In the snow,” he said, “there are tire tracks, of brand-new, perfect Pirelli tires. These were right by the judge’s doorstep.”
“So what?” I said.
“How many people have new Pirelli tires, nowadays?”
I didn’t reply. Wasn’t I still wearing the judge’s pants?
“And if that doesn’t convince you,” he said, pulling another photograph, “maybe this will.”
It was an image of my father’s monogrammed cigarette lighter; I must have forgotten it on the judge’s countertop.
“The rest is clear,” he said.
“Yes, I was there,” I said. “But it was an accident. He really did slip on the soapsuds.”
“Why not report it then?”
“I was afraid that I would be considered a suspect.”
“You are no mere suspect,” he said.
“That’s absurd,” I said. “What motive could I have?”
“Motive is meaningless,” he said, “when guilt is obvious. Why did you go to see the judge in the first place?”
I said nothing.
“Never mind,” he said. “I already know. Your loyalties, my brother, are still with the left. You wanted to have H. released, by whatever means you could. And for this you went behind my back.”
“It’s not only H.,” I said. “It’s us. It’s everything. Didn’t the Ayatollah say he wanted justice, equality, democracy? All his tapes, all his discourses…”
“The Ayatollah laid it all out,” he said. “But people like you listened selectively. You projected onto his words whatever you wished to hear.”
“Akbari, what are we doing?”
“We’re doing what we must,” he said. “Yet you have designs to thwart our efforts.” He helped himself to the leftover nougats in the bowl. “As I mentioned,” he added, sugar dust on his beard, “intent makes no difference, when guilt is clear. Do you know that Judge Emami was being considered as the next chief justice?”
“I didn’t know.”
“I could have you arrested right now. And you already know what would happen next.”
“Please,” I said, “have mercy. What can I do?”
“You can follow the line. No one knows about the tires, or the cigarette lighter. To keep it that way you will do as you are asked.”
“Yes,” I said, “I promise.” The tailor’s recantation from the previous night’s television broadcast looped in my ear.
“So get me that confession from H.,” he said. “Because I already have yours.”
28
THE CONFESSION. Its supremacy in the fate of the accused clarifies the meaning of the interrogation, which we called mossāhebeh—interview. The word imbued the proceedings with a sterile, altogether banal sound. But when you understand, as I did that winter, that the confession was the grand prize, the laurel crown of our Pythian games, then you can surmise that the “interview” was as unsterile as circumstances demanded. The confession was the sole evidence required for a conviction, the “proof of proofs,” as one of our jurists called it. And who better than the accused to provide the words necessary to marshal his own case to its inevitable conclusion?
Confession. Confiteri—to acknowledge, from fateri, to speak.
E’terāf, from ta’rif, to recount.
* * *
I WOULD, if I thought it useful, offer the account of my interview with H. I would write, for example, that when he entered my confessional and sat blindfolded facing the cement wall, listening to me as a Catholic hears the disembodied voice of the priest, he brought a finger to his forehead and placed it between his eyebrows, the spot known as the “third eye,” gateway to spiritual purity and the point of contact between the forehead and the prayer stone. That he whispered something under his breath, and when asked to repeat it, he said, “It’s just a line from a poem; it’s useless here.” That the tremor in his hand worsened as the day gave way to dusk, when, at last, he told me of his hypoglycemia and I offered him three pieces of rock candy. That when I removed his blindfold, and against all rules, I revealed to him the name of my father—and my o
wn—his green eyes narrowed and he said, “Pigeon flies with pigeon, hawk with hawk.” I would write, too, of how I pressed him, for names and monikers, dates and hours, opinions and dreams, beliefs and philosophies, crimes and sins, lovers and friends, and of how, by day’s end, he looked at me across the table, between us my glass of tea, and said, “Do with me what you will. But you will see me every time you bring a glass of tea to your mouth, because I will be right there, sitting across from you, a face you will be unable to get rid of. For the rest of your days, aghaye Mozaffarian, you will be having a discourse with me.”
I will not write of those things. Instead I will write of a bizarre memory that came to me as I sat across from H., failing to obtain his confession. As I showed him a forged newspaper with a fabricated story on a colossal fire in Bandar Anzali, the port city of his birth, and I blabbered something or other about the death of his mother in this fire, I was seized by the memory of a restaurant in Paris that I had visited as a child with my family—La Tour d’Argent—where we ordered, on my mother’s insistence, the famed dish, Canard à la Presse. The waiter, with the pride of an army general, explained that the duck, once plucked, is strangled, then roasted, stripped of its liver, breast, and legs, and pressed in a contraption similar to a wine press. The resulting carcass juice is flavored with the duck’s liver, cognac, and butter, then served with the aforementioned breast, and, for the second course, with the legs. At meal’s end diners were presented with a memento bearing the butchered bird’s serial number. Our family, we learned as my disgruntled father paid the exorbitant bill, had eaten duck number 486,557. Days later, in an old bookshop near the Comédie Française, I found a history book with a full page devoted to this storied restaurant and its ducks. I memorized the most illustrious of them: number 328, served to King Edward VII in 1890; number 14,312, served to King Alfonse XIII in 1914; number 112,151 served to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1929. One day, I thought, anatine historiography would teach ducklings about the massacre of their forefathers. I don’t know why this memory, out of so many others, presented itself to me at that moment, but I think that like H., I, too, was becoming delirious. In the end, long past midnight, long after I had concluded that I had no choice but to call in help, H., whose body bore the final traces of his commendable but vanquished stamina, collapsed from his chair to the floor, from hypoglycemia and forfeiture. Akbari, when informed, was livid. “I didn’t want a corpse, you idiot,” he said. “I wanted a confession so chilling that it would make the likes of him relinquish their pencils for the rest of their days.”
“What could I do? He had hypoglycemia,” I said. “And apparently a bad heart.”
“You let it drag on too long,” he said. “You had to intervene, before his blood sugar plummeted.”
“Intervene how?” I said.
“Intervene in such a way that he would have had no choice but to speak. You were soft, and a fool.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m losing my patience with you,” he said. He stared at me, and in his black eyes I detected a trace of emotion. Not love—as I don’t believe he was capable of it—but a certain affinity for the man he still thought me capable of becoming.
“You have one last chance at redemption,” he continued. “Mess it up and I give you my word: you will go down in history as the judge’s butcher.”
* * *
A WEEK LATER I received an anonymous envelope from France, with multicolored postage stamps depicting Marianne, so-called “Goddess of Liberty.” It contained a newspaper clipping of an obituary of H.:
DEATH OF AN ARTIST KNOWN AS “H.”
Houshang Habibi, 54, illustrious cartoonist and satirist, died by suicide (according to his captors) while in detention in Tehran.
The youngest of five children, H. was born in 1928 to Pirouz Habibi, a carpenter in Bandar Anzali, and Afshin Kazemi. Growing up in the 1930s he witnessed many of Reza Shah’s reforms, including infrastructure projects such as the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway, the banning of the chador for women, and the establishment of modern education, exemplified by the creation of Tehran University. He was seven years old when, in 1935, a backlash erupted in the Mashhad shrine, led by the clergy, who denounced the monarch’s innovations and corruption; this protest was heeded by the bazaaris and villagers, who also took refuge in the shrine. After a four-day standoff dozens were killed and hundreds injured, prompting many among the clergy to resign their posts at the shrine. When asked by his father what he thought of the clash, H. drew a caricature of the Keeper of the Keys of the Mashhad shrine releasing a giant gilded key while being chased by a rabid dog wearing an imperial crown. This drawing is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
After graduating from high school, H. enrolled at Tehran University’s School of Fine Arts, and was later sent by the Ministry of Culture to France to pursue a graduate degree at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
In 1949, along with the artist Jalil Ziapour, the writer Qolam-Ḥossain Qarib, the playwright Hassan Shirvani, the art historian Sadegh Mozaffarian, and the musician Morteza Hannaneh, he cofounded Khorous Jangi (The fighting cock), a literary and art society, whose name was coined by Qarib, and its logo of a Cubist-style rooster was designed by Ziapour. The fighting cock symbolized the society’s mission to “fight against the obscurantism and traditionalism that was detached from the realities of present-day.” Espousing a new language in art and literature, the society hosted gatherings and presentations by modernist artists and writers, and published an eponymous journal, whose first issue included “Khorous mikhānad (The rooster sings),” a poem by Nima Yooshij, the founder of “new poetry” whose renouncement of classical poetry echoed the efforts of modernist artists.
In the 1950s H., a supporter of the deposed prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, contributed regularly to Towfiq—the leading satirical journal of the period—with drawings that shed light on the plight of everyday people and mocked the regime’s corruption. He was not, however, immune to the government’s continued efforts to silence him: on multiple occasions in the ensuing decades H. was arrested and interrogated, and he served three terms in prison.
In 1971, H. traveled to Paris and collaborated with Le Rire, a satirical magazine. Having gained international acclaim, his drawings were increasingly featured in leading magazines such as Graphis (Switzerland) and Communication Arts (USA).
Drawing upon Persian folk art, miniatures, religious lore, and nineteenth-century lithographic illustrations, H.’s work is remarkable for its simplicity and minimalism. His drawings, often curvilinear, also reference the work of the artist Reza Abbasi (1565–1635).
H.’s numerous solo and group exhibitions began with his participation in the First Biennial Art Exhibition in Tehran in 1958, and culminated in a major solo exhibition at Galerie 66 in Paris in December 1981, just weeks prior to his latest arrest and alleged suicide.
I slipped the obituary into my pocket and went for a walk. So my father had betrayed his cause and his friend H., and I, the khorous jangi—namesake of their expired cause—had betrayed them both. But who had sent me this clip? An old classmate, an acquaintance from bygone underground meetings, someone who had heard what I had become?
At a café I sat at a corner table and looked out the window. Umbrellas were unfolding on the sidewalk as rain picked up momentum. A group of high school students arrived, laughing and drenched. They noisily pushed together several tables and gathered around it.
The older I get the more I dislike young people, I thought. And I am only twenty-two. Why do I feel so old? I lit a cigarette and brought it to my mouth. The students, who were discussing Attar’s Confederacy of the Birds, talked over one another. One said, “As with most Sufis, Attar is saying that to become one with God, the self must be destroyed.” “But God to him is not religion; it’s truth itself,” said another. A third, a good-looking kid with flaxen hair who made you want to invent your life all over again, said,
“What about love? For Attar, passionate love is essential to the destruction of the self…”
I remembered my own readings of the medieval poem, after the fateful motorcycle trip in the summer of 1977 that had made me long for unity and utopias. Locking myself in my stifling room, I had read Attar—a spiritual descendant of Mansur al-Hallaj—and I had traveled with the poem’s thirty bickering birds, led by their wise and humorous guide the hoopoe, who steered them to their spiritual king—the mythical bird simorgh, a kin of the phoenix. As it turned out, this spiritual king was none other than the traveling birds themselves: si means thirty, and morgh means bird—thirty birds. Where, I now wondered as I built a pyramid of sugar cubes on the wobbling table, was the hoopoe that could lead us back to the simorgh?
Feeling the damp and cold of the room, I put on my shearling coat—my father’s. At that very moment, a small mirror on the opposite wall fell to the floor, unprovoked. Everyone jumped, startled by the crash. “Lucky,” someone said. “No one was hurt.”
Two waiters arrived with broom and bucket, sweeping up first the large pieces, then the glass dust. They apologized and offered everyone free tea and sweets, a distraction that lightened the mood. I remembered my mother’s pronouncement about broken mirrors—There will soon be a catastrophe.
Superstition. Nonsense.
Fortunately, the mirror wasn’t mine. It was a communal mirror fallen in a communal room. I was, at worst, a witness. Or so I told myself. I remained at the table and sipped my tea, the scent of bergamot and cardamom soothing my nerves. But when I looked up, before me I saw H. Mine was the last face he had seen in this life. What had he seen? What kind of face?
The rain stopped and a pale sunset broke through the smoky sky. The students left and the place quieted down. I looked around the café, at the people who, like me, were trapped in the trajectory of some unknowable misfortune. And each person, I knew, already harbored within himself his own private boneyard.