by Dalia Sofer
29
AFTER MY BOTCHED INTERVIEW WITH H., I was, for a decade, Akbari’s diligent subordinate. I lived, in those years, in an inlet, caught between recklessness and terror. I became a man unknown, every hour transporting me further from the flower bed of my self. To make my existence more bearable I instituted rules: never allow an interrogation session to surpass five hours; keep water and sweets at hand should someone in the room—myself included—be on the verge of collapse; never aggress physically, but establish from the outset that aggression is possible.
At regular intervals I received letters from my family, thick envelopes bearing my father’s calligraphic script. In the top left corner, a strange address in New York. In the center, his old address in Tehran—now mine. I opened none of them. I was terrified of what the letters might contain, words of rancor or kindness or both, words that would undo me, and the life I was so feverishly not living.
To counter these letters I came up with a ritual. Each week, from the boxes of family photographs I had saved, I would select a few images—of the four of us on picnics or driving north to the Caspian; of my parents drinking cocktails at the now outlawed smoky nightclubs; of Uncle Majid in his bowler hat and woolly cardigans; and of my paternal grandparents, both dead, and my maternal ones, now residents of Paris in an apartment on Avenue Montaigne. I would place these photographs in a manila envelope validated with the newly issued stamps bearing the likeness of the Ayatollah, and mail them to a fictional person residing at my family’s address in New York. I didn’t write my father’s actual name so as not to arouse the suspicion of the authorities, who might have concluded that weekly packages addressed to someone in America bearing my own surname might signal some covert, nefarious activity. And so I would perform my weekly triage, deciding which memory should take precedence over others, which moment of the past should be granted the right of passage. My favorite part of this ceremony was inventing the name of each week’s addressee. I selected these at random, from the phone book or from mythologies. One envelope went to a Mr. Reza Esfandiari (with myself as the sender), another to a Mr. Rostam Sistan (with the sender a Mr. Sohrab Samangan), and still another to a Professor Gilgamesh (with the sender a Mr. Enkidu Khodābiāmorz). Later, I addressed the envelopes to those who had once sat across from me, whose dossiers I had examined more thoroughly than my own fingernails. These names, I imagined, would be as anonymous to my father as names picked from the phone book, except for this one, the last: Mister H. Habibi (with the sender, Mister Khorous Jangi).
After that, my family’s letters stopped, and I, too tired of being the trickster, resumed the role I knew best: humorless arbiter of fates.
* * *
IN THE ABSENCE of the letters and my own mailing ritual—the final filament of contact with my family—the house became an uninterrupted eulogy. I lived in it year after year as a ghost, aging and ageless. In August 1990, a year after the death of the Ayatollah, Akbari and a dozen prosecutors and interrogators showed up one evening at my place with a cake and a present wrapped in newspaper, to surprise me for my birthday. They sat around the dining table, rowdy, pouring freely from the bottles of vodka they had wangled from somewhere. I tore open the newspaper wrapping—it was from earlier that summer, with some headline about the arrest of the members of the Freedom Movement—and I was stunned to see a single-breasted houndstooth overcoat, with notched lapels and fully lined in chocolate brown silk. I had not thought these men capable of such largesse.
“Well?” Akbari said.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s time you stepped out of the 1970s and said goodbye to that sad shearling coat. It’s 1990, my brother, and you’re thirty years old!” He pinched my cheek.
One of the men—the Intelligence Ministry’s representative to Evin—who two summers earlier had also been present at the meeting with the Cat—arranged thirty candles on the cake, taking care not to mess up the chocolate-hazelnut icing. Akbari shut off the lights and they all sang “Happy Birthday” in the dark. “Make a wish!” someone said.
I sat in front of the flickering candles, surrounded by the men’s silhouettes. What could I ask for, and from whom? Unable to come up with anything, I made from providence this lone request: May I find my way to the simorgh.
I wore my new overcoat throughout that winter while my father’s shearling hung in the closet, over the box that contained his reading glasses, the Pan Am matchbook, the Marie Antoinette table lamp, and all the other knickknacks that testified, when I myself could no longer believe it, that even I had once belonged to a family. The following winter, when Akbari caught me wearing the old shearling again, he said, “Bāz gardad be asleh khod har cheez—everything goes back to its origin.”
30
TO ENTER A FATHER’S HOME for the first time on the occasion of his memorial can unhinge a man. Standing in the living room in my steel-gray suit, stiff and alone, I found myself surrounded by scores of faces, a few vaguely familiar, containing something of the young selves they had been when I had last seen them. Oddly, my mother was not present.
They were huddled in clusters, older ones on the teal settee, younger ones standing in tight circles, the women in three-inch heels holding tall drinks next to their metrosexual husbands who reached now and again for hors d’oeuvres circulated by a silent Hispanic woman—the housekeeper, I assumed. I was neither greeted nor spurned. I walked, invisible, across the living room, and stood by the pier glass, in front of which was a framed portrait of my father in his middle years, stern and defiant, but with an inward smile, which disturbed me, because it was a negative of the image I had stored in my memory all these years, of my father, unsmiling. Next to the photograph was a memorial candle flickering in the breeze of an open window. No one seemed to notice that it was about to throw the sage silk curtains into flames. Normally I might have said something to the host—in this case, my mother—but I felt myself nothing more than a witness to this assembly.
In a vitrine nearby were the memorabilia Omid had told me about, china plates and framed defunct banknotes and gold Pahlavi coins displayed like war medals—the spoils of my mother’s sleepless hours spent bidding on loss. I peeked at my watch; I had been present for only fifteen minutes. This night, I warned myself, would have no terminus. The looming hour of my speech made me anxious, so I rehearsed it in my head. Was the quote from Shamlou too much? I felt now that it would go over the heads of this crowd, and I imagined them staring at me, bored, baffled, contemptuous even. I should have chosen something more popular, maybe a quote from Rumi. Surely even they had come across a few poorly translated verses of the poet on a meditation pillow.
“Well, well…” A voice rose behind me. Female, hoarse, bitter. My mother.
I turned around. It’s one thing to witness a parent’s gradual decay across decades, another to see it all at once, with no forewarning and no prologue. She, my once-girlish mother with the lustrous black hair and wide-set chestnut eyes, seemed no different to me now than an old lady with a dyed bouffant to whom you might offer your seat on a crowded bus.
“What happened to your hair?” she said. “There are no bald men in our family. Both your grandfathers had a full head of hair until the end. And your father, too, khodā biyamorzatesh. He may have lost much in his life, but not a strand of hair ever went missing from his beautiful head.”
Before I could reply she said, “But you’ve kept your figure. That’s something, at least. And you are taller than I remember. Have you grown? Well … what will you drink?”
“Water,” I said.
She eyed me with suspicion then called the housekeeper. “Sandra,” she said. “Bring a glass of water for this gentleman. Apparently he is more pristine than the rest of us.” She walked off, toward the front door, which presented her with new guests: Ali Rahimi—celebrated author of A Man Named Yasser—accompanied by a no-nonsense blond woman in cargo pants, who I assumed was his wife, and two anemic girls in pigtails a
nd metallic leggings. The woman offered my mother a white box. “An organic pecan pie from our bakery,” she said. “We get the nuts from a small family farm in Louisiana.” My mother thanked her lavishly though it was obvious to me that the offering was a disappointment.
Seeing me, Ali bit his lower lip and whispered something in his wife’s ear, and together they walked to the opposite corner of the room, where admirers assailed them with congratulations on Ali’s book publication. I looked out the window at the ashen river, the lone witness to my father’s final breath, and I thought again of my mother’s words when she told me of his death, Imagine, found like that by a river, as though he had no family. Along the promenade, just slipping into dusk, joggers ran back and forth with no aim except to postpone their mortality. A woman was practicing yoga, her body in a half-moon pose like the hands of a frozen clock. Another sat alone on a bench, an unread book on her lap, watching the sun’s descent behind the dimming city.
A trembling hand took hold of my arm. It belonged to a centenarian, veiny and shrunken, leaning on a cane with a gargoyle ferrule. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he said. “I am Doctor Albert, the dentist. You used to accompany your father on his dental visits.”
“How could I forget?” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said, laughing. “I haven’t practiced since I came here. But how did you get away from me? You never gave me a chance to work on your teeth.”
“I’m surprised you recognize me, after all this time.”
“I’d recognize those eyes anywhere,” he said. “I used to look at you when you were a boy, and I would think to myself, If one took the time to see beyond the sorrow in that child, one might even see kindness.”
“I must ask you,” I said. “Why did you refuse to give anesthesia?”
“It was my training. I studied dentistry in Austria in the late 1930s.”
“But you were practicing until the 1970s.”
“I suppose I believed that pain should not be masked.”
The housekeeper brought him a chair and he sat. He surveyed the room, which, aside from the framed photograph of my father and the memorial candle, seemed no more muted than any New York party. “I kept in touch with your father over the years,” he said. “I had always been very fond of him. There was a seriousness to him, the way he studied and worked on that encyclopedia all those years. You’d think he was doing God’s work. But he was not the same man after he came here. Something cracked inside him.”
“What’s done is done,” I said.
“Yes…” He sat quiet for some time, spinning the gargoyle-tipped cane. “Do you know,” he said, suddenly upbeat, “that some years ago, maybe ten, a small plane crashed into that building across the street? Right there, on the thirtieth floor. I happened to be visiting your parents that afternoon. I remember that your mother was watering her gardenias by the window and your father and I were playing backgammon. And there it was, a terrible explosion. Boom!… The entire block shook and fire broke out. Black smoke rose to the sky. In the plane were a Yankees pitcher and his flight instructor. Both were killed, of course. A woman inside the building was scorched by a fireball. An Iranian woman, the wife of a cardiologist. But she survived.”
I imagined the baseball player mumbling some prayer as his plane shattered the walls and windows of the ill-fated woman, whose life, until that moment, had probably been unremarkable.
“I was heartbroken for the pitcher,” he continued. “You know, when I arrived in this country, I took to baseball right away. Even though it’s all about money now, there is still something innocent about the game. To tell you the truth it’s one of the things that made America acceptable to me. How can I explain? It’s the way you may love a troublesome child only when he is asleep.” Laughing, he pointed at my father’s portrait. “This fellow, on the other hand, didn’t care for the game. I tried so many times to convert him but he remained as stubborn as a mullah.”
At that moment, Omid arrived with a lanky, long-haired teenager in a Frank Zappa T-shirt who seemed a stranger to this crowd. With his hands stuffed in his pockets and his refusal to smile, the boy’s face nevertheless contained a trace of my brother’s gentleness.
“My son, Arash,” Omid said.
I shook the boy’s hand. “Hot Rats is still one of the best albums of all time,” I said.
He gave me a blank look.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Omid said to me. “Kids nowadays wear the T-shirts of the old bands but no one actually listens to the music.”
“There was a time when Zappa was more than a logo,” I said. “Have a listen,” I told the kid. “It’ll be worth your while.”
He nodded and looked down at the paisley motif on the carpet under his sneakered foot.
“Is your speech ready?” Omid said.
“It was, until I got here. Now I’m rewriting it in my head. Yours?”
“I was never a performer,” he said. “I’m dreading this.”
Someone began tinkering on the piano, Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik—a little night music.” When he finished a few guests lightly applauded. “Can anyone really play?” a woman in a tobacco-brown dress called out.
“Hamid can play,” my mother said. “He played like an angel when he was a child, but God only knows what happened since.”
Conversations dissolved into whispers; everyone knew my story, or at least their own version of it. I had been laid bare as the son with the malignant past. I looked to my brother for guidance but found none; his face—part pity, part indignation—had nothing left to offer.
“Well? Will you play something for us?” my mother continued. “In memory of your father, whom you loved so much.”
I had anticipated my mother’s bitterness, but had not expected it to be so public. I kept my composure as best I could and sat down at the piano, resting my fingers on the cold and unyielding keys. Through the throat-clearing in the room I sensed the guests preparing themselves to witness a man’s familial bankruptcy with both dread and glee. I shut my eyes, and what came to me was a piece I had played one winter morning when my father, just returned from Uncle Majid’s funeral, had sat on the sofa and said to me, “Play something to get me through this black day.”
I had been sitting at the piano, practicing as I was expected to do for hours every weekend. From the kitchen came the scent of butter and eggs and chives; it was almost lunchtime and I was hungry. Not knowing what my father was asking of me, I turned the pages of my exercise book, given to me by Mme Petrossian—the Armenian lady who had fled Ottoman Anatolia and who offered me lessons every Wednesday afternoon—and stopped at Moonlight Sonata. I played the first movement, which I had only recently learned and which made me think of the crippled cat I had loved and lost the night I had slept under the apricot tree with my uncle. My father sat with eyes closed and though I made many mistakes, he listened until the end. “Hamid,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing, losing a brother.”
Now, sweating under my new suit, I glanced at Omid, then at my mother. I pressed one key, then another, and another, until both hands were obeying my memory of the notes and I fell into the adagio of the sonata, the melody hushed and full of things unsaid. I was overtaken by memories of bygone summers, of our old house in Tehran, of the cool scent of wet earth after a morning rain and of the lacecap hydrangeas, of my father and my mother and Omid. I thought, too, of Noushin—of how I had once loved her—and of Golnaz, my absent daughter. I did not play for myself or for them or even for grief at things lost, but for the disappointment that united us, for the constellation of our heartbreak, for the betrayal, the love, the destruction.
When I was done I heard my mother crying in the kitchen and another voice, a woman’s, offering words that failed to console. Omid, lost in thought, stared at a cigarette burn on the carpet. I looked up, not at the room but out the window—at the city beyond. Twilight separated the horizon now like the bones of a catfish. My mother emerged from the kitchen,
and directed the guests to the dining room. “Everyone must be hungry,” she said. People stretched limbs and resumed talking, released at last from the talons of grief.
Ali Rahimi excused himself. He couldn’t stay for dinner, he said. “The children…” he added, pointing at the girls. “It’s a school night.” My mother, who had reclaimed her good cheer, intervened. “Nonsense,” she said. “You must eat something.” But he was already putting on his jacket and his wife was tightening the laces of the girls’ suede Adidas.
“Let the man go,” Omid said. “He must have a good reason to go home.”
Ali thanked my mother, mumbled some condolences, and left.
* * *
TRAYS OF RICE AND STEW arrived from the kitchen, followed by pitchers of doogh—which the younger guests didn’t recognize. “It’s a yogurt drink with mint,” my mother explained, and everyone, in deference to the deceased, forwent gluten sensitivities and lactose intolerances and agreed to eat and drink with abandon. I sat at the table next to Omid, who remained silent.
“You played beautifully,” Doctor Albert said.
“Maybe he is still an angel,” an old woman said in a bitter, cutting voice. I recognized her downturned mouth and realized it was Azar, Uncle Majid’s wife. She wore a homemade peach macramé cardigan and was holding her fork with a tissue. She was, apparently, still a germophobe.
“What a table you’ve laid out, madame,” said a blue-eyed old man. “Your husband would have been happy.”
“Thank you, Jacques,” said my mother. “Please eat well to make me happy also.”
Jacques—the Frenchman I had nicknamed M. Hulot—was one of my father’s researchers from his encyclopedia days. How they were all resurfacing from his past.