by Dalia Sofer
“I was surprised when I heard you had chosen cremation,” Jacques said, in the matter-of-fact style of a Frenchman. “That’s uncommon, no?”
Utensils clinked in the room’s silence. “It’s what he wanted,” my mother said.
“Better than ending up in one of those sad graves along the Long Island Expressway,” Doctor Albert said.
“The ultimate cemetery is the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano,” Azar said. “The most magnificent mausoleums you’ll ever see. All of Milan’s important families are buried there. What luck,” she said, sighing, “to find yourself there at the end.”
“Surely they can make room for you, Azar-khanoum,” another woman said. “With your talent you should have long graced the runways of Milan.” She was also wearing a macramé cardigan, only in pearl white. I noticed that several of the octogenarian women had on versions of this dreadful sweater, and I understood that Azar must have sprouted some kind of homespun fashion business in her old age.
“But nothing beats the Okunoin Cemetery in Mount Koya, Japan,” a youngish man said. “I was there last year for our company’s merger and a Japanese colleague took me there for a visit. Imagine, ten thousand lanterns illuminating the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi, the founder of Shingon Buddhism. Truly breathtaking.”
“How lucky,” Azar said. “You were in Japan?”
“Yes,” the man said. “And actually all over East and South Asia. China, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia…”
“If you ask me, the most beautiful cemetery is Père Lachaise in Paris,” my mother said. “Think of it, Balzac and Oscar Wilde debating the human condition while Piaf croons ‘Je ne regrette rien’ in the background. And nearby there is Proust.”
My mother, I was quite certain, had not read a word of Balzac, Wilde, or Proust. When I was a child she read only the newspaper and the occasional magazine, and I doubted that this habit had been reversed once she had arrived in America. To be sure, her guests were no better informed than she was, and so everyone nodded in agreement that a place holding the bones of so many luminaries must indeed be a fine destination.
“I think Hedayat is there, too,” said Doctor Albert.
Several people confirmed this, referring to the grave of Sadegh Hedayat, the modernist writer whose work no one read or understood. Still, everyone, even expats, had heard of Boof-e-koour—The Blind Owl, the writer’s best-known and least comprehensible book, and most knew that the author had gassed himself in his rented Parisian apartment in 1951. These two factoids were sufficient to give any dinner party an air of intellectual gravitas, and this one was no exception.
“When were you in Paris?” Jacques asked my mother.
“We were there the first time with the boys,” my mother said, gesturing at us—the boys—men in our fifties silent at the dinner table, still hoping our mother would speak well of us to others. “I think it was 1972. From there we went to Rome, then Venice, then Vienna, and finally Munich. It would have been a fabulous summer, were it not for Hamid’s outbursts.”
That summer had nearly killed me. My father, from the beginning, declared that on this trip he was going to be a free agent because he planned to spend half a day in front of each Titian and Caravaggio, and he didn’t believe any of us would have the stamina to accompany him. So we were stuck with my mother. In France we hopped from one château to another, from one Louis to another, royal antechamber to piss-chamber. Rome became a race to see the highest number of artworks possible, and by the end of the week I had visions of the Madonna and Child, in streaks of gold and lapis lazuli, every time I shut my eyes. Venice was a tiresome serenade of gondoliers who convinced my mother that life in Italy consisted of handsome men in striped shirts singing O sole mio to swooning ladies, and Vienna and Munich, those Teutonic lands of self-flagellating ostriches, were a sad parade of Baroque palaces and indigestible servings of blood sausage and memorials.
“Hamid is awfully quiet,” Azar said with a catty smile.
“Tell us, Hamid,” said the dentist. “Which is your favorite cemetery?”
I looked up from my plate and saw all faces—some reproachful, others embarrassed—turned in my direction. Clearing my throat I said, “The most incredible gravesite, in my opinion, is that of the old prime minister Mossadegh. His tomb is at his old residence, where for many years he had lived under house arrest.”
No one replied. I knew that they did not wish to engage me in a political discussion. I was yellowcake at their dinner table.
“I visited his house last year,” I continued. “It’s in Ahmadabad, not far from Karaj. A quiet place, unmarked and barely visited. Everything is as he left it, even his old pistachio-colored car, still parked in the garage. The land around the house has grown wild, and on the morning I visited, crows were cawing and a wet wind was blowing. Inside the living room, at the center, sits the coffin, like a coffee table. It’s covered with a dark cloth and a vase full of roses, candles, and the like. All around there are framed black-and-white photographs of the man, and as I stood there, so close to his bones, I thought it was the most mysterious thing, not only where one ends up but how one ends up. So much depends on the story,” I continued nervously. “And who gets to tell it. When he died many newspapers said his death had gone unnoticed. They said that as his ambulance brought his body from the hospital to his home for the burial, everyone was busy shopping in the bazaar as though it were a day like any other. What they failed to mention was that the Shah had forbidden his family to put a death notice in the papers.”
“But he has since gotten his due, wouldn’t you agree?” Jacques said.
“Nowadays,” I said, “he is both a legend, and forgotten. Historians hail him, but ask anyone in Tehran to tell you where his house is and they will look at you as though you had asked for directions to Middle Earth. We are obsessed with him and we also want to forget him. I think that like most humans he was magnificent as an idea but he failed as a man. And so we love him, but we are also bitter, like the progeny of a noble patriarch who was, in the end, unable to protect his disloyal family.”
“Enough, Hamid,” said my mother. “No one wants to hear about your visit to Mossadegh’s house. Or your theories either. Next thing I know you are going to convict those of us who moved to America of being retroactively guilty of the coup.”
A few guests chuckled.
“I convict you of no such thing,” I said. “In fact, what people rarely mention is that the Americans and the British weren’t the only ones at fault. We, the nation, also failed the old man. So many were complicit with the Shah and his backers … So many, including the clerics.”
“The clerics?” the businessman said. “But haven’t they always been against the monarchy?”
“Like everyone else,” I said, “the clerics, throughout history, have switched sides back and forth as it suited them. In that instance a monarch was better than a so-called Communist.”
“All this shape-shifting is too confusing,” my mother said. “Who can keep up?”
“What everyone knows,” I carried on, staring now into my mother’s bloodshot eyes, “is that America was the ring leader of that coup. And you must have made your peace with it, since you carry an American passport.”
“This country took us in,” she said.
“Yes, it took you in. But it’s also part of the reason you had to leave yours in the first place. It’s like the cigarette corporation that sells you the cigarette first, then the nicotine patch.”
“You are one to teach history lessons,” my mother said under her breath.
“Why did you invite me here tonight?” I said.
She gave no answer.
“You invited me,” I said, “because I am an extra in your farce, just as I had been when I was a boy. Without me your stage is incomplete. And yet you never could stand me, because I was unable to behave as you wished me to. I don’t blame you for resenting me. The truth is I have embarrassed you time and time again. Mother,” I added, “you and
I are fire and water. We cancel each other out.”
“I invited you,” said my mother, “because you are my son.”
We were trapped in an ache from which there could be no exit. Omid looked pale and impassive, just as he had on his last night in Tehran, nearly four decades earlier, when he had stood in our bedroom and conducted a triage of his belongings, condensing his life into one suitcase.
“I was asked to make a speech tonight in memory of my father,” I said. “And I had prepared just such a speech, about fathers and sons, disappointment and love, absences and reunions. It was, I think, a beautiful speech, and it may have momentarily offered us all a feeling of warmth, maybe even harmony. But I will give no such speech. Instead I will tell you something…”
My mother swirled her drink, the ice clinking against the glass. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you won’t give a speech. You’ve already talked too much and no one wants to hear any more from you.”
I took a breath and considered leaving. My face felt hot; my eyes, too, were cinders. A cold sweat was breaking on my forehead. I reached into my pocket for a tissue, but instead grabbed the tin candy box, which felt soothing and cool against my clammy palm. “As I was saying,” I continued as I settled back into my chair, “instead of the prepared speech I will tell you something that I have never before revealed to anyone, except to my wife, who no longer speaks to me. It’s about a crime, not in the legal sense, but in the human sense. Perhaps then, the right word for it is sin. Only one other man knows of this misdeed, and that’s the man who carried it out on my behalf. Mother, I was the one who orchestrated the seizure of bābā’s encyclopedia papers, the wiping out of his life’s work. I asked a fellow revolutionary to do it.”
My mother’s face drained of all its color. Leaden half-moons cradled her eyes.
“I know you wish me to leave now but are too stunned to say so.” I folded my napkin and got up. “Goodbye,” I said. “I am sorry, for us both.”
No one moved as I made my way across the living room and out the door. In the hallway, as I waited for the elevator, I heard chairs stirring and voices murmuring; it felt like the aftermath of a robbery. Someone double-bolted the door from inside. I thought of lingering to eavesdrop but didn’t. What difference did it make, what they said about me, when everything had already been said, so long ago?
I stood still, my reflection in the stainless-steel elevator doors distorted and alien, like a face gleaned in the lid of a pan. The doors opened at last and I pressed the lobby button. When I turned, I saw Omid standing before me. Looking at his face, his long lashes and the skin under his jaw only beginning to slack, I was filled with an aching love for this brother I had failed.
“All this time … It was you? You destroyed bābā’s lifework?” His voice trembled as he spoke and the veins on his temples bulged alarmingly. “Why did you make this confession?” he continued as the doors shut and the elevator cables inched downward.
“I thought it was time for you and Mother to know.”
“Why now?”
“I don’t want to live a lie anymore.”
“That’s what you tell yourself,” he said. “But Hamid, everything you do, everything you have ever done, has been for your own benefit, and your own benefit alone.” Shutting his eyes, he added, “How many people you have destroyed…”
As he spoke something ruptured in my ear and a ringing sound echoed in my head. “Omid,” I said, “I never killed.”
“There are many ways to annihilate a life,” he said.
The ringing intensified, buzzing in my head. “I committed my share of misdeeds,” I said. “But there are things you don’t know. About bābā.”
“What things? How dare you vilify the man any more than you already have?”
“This is the truth, Omid. I learned it from Yasser the day before the Black Friday demonstrations. Bābā was arrested after the Mossadegh coup, and under pressure he ratted on many, including his best friend Houshang, the artist. Later, when he worked for the Ministry of Culture, he threatened on multiple occasions to have Houshang arrested. Omid, I’ve seen the letters. They carry his signature…”
The elevator opened and I stepped into the marbled lobby. For some time Omid stood quiet, but as the doors began to shut he held them open and said, “Why don’t you focus on your own actions? What you did tonight was the culmination of a project you began decades ago. Tonight, on your father’s memorial, you laid the final brick in your life’s masterwork, which has been the destruction of your family. Well done, brother. Your magnum opus is complete.”
PART TWO
31
WE WERE GOING back empty-handed. The past disowned, the future rebuffed. And Reza Abbasi’s sixteenth-century drawing of the pilgrim still captive in a warehouse in Queens.
From the plane’s oval window I watched New York dissolving. Steel, glass, velocity. I imagined the millions pushing against one another, and my brother among them. I thought again of his kitchenette and his dead dog and his lemon tree. And his final words to me. Throughout my life I had been called so many things—glass boy, fighting cock, revolutionary, Captain Prick, prosecutor’s shadow, Minister’s vizier, woeful destroyer. I was, in fact, all of these.
The mood on the plane back to Tehran was manic. Food was circulated and teacups refilled. Lurid jokes were exchanged as in a boys’ locker room and spitballs were tossed across the cabin. The Minister, drafting a letter, ignored the chaos.
“They’re all so pleased to be released from the diplomatic drudgery and to be going home,” I said. “Look at them. You’d think it was the eve of Eid.”
“When we land they’ll be reminded that Eid has to be validated by the Ayatollah,” said the Minister.
It’s true that the end of Ramadan wasn’t certified by a calendar, but by experts sent by the Ayatollah throughout the country to witness the new moon’s crescent, marking the start of the lunar month. “Yes,” I said, “the Ayatollah supervises even the moon.”
As I spoke I noticed a security agent in a corner of the plane eyeing me. He was from the old guard; I recognized the type as a reformed junkie spots his own kind.
In every revolution the old guard, once feared, becomes over time as anodyne as an uncapped bottle of acetone. Remembering the hotel concierge’s cuff links, I wondered how Mao, for instance, ended up on cuff links, wallets, and teacups designed by the chic fashion houses of Shanghai. One way to lighten the world’s mistrust of our country, I thought, might be to emblazon a neon-tinted image of the Ayatollah on a pair of cuff links or on a stylish gym bag. That would surely rid the man’s image of the dread it inspired. For who, after all, would be scared of a Warhol-style mullah?
* * *
LIKE CHILDREN COLLAPSING after a sugar rush, the men suddenly fell into silence and the engine’s drone filled the cabin. There was a time, decades before, when a flight held the excitement of elsewhere. Now, no matter the direction, it was only a reminder of nowhere. My father’s ashes, heavy in my breast pocket, made me think of the coffee dregs stuck to the bottom of my overturned fortune cup when I was a boy. “A stain at the bottom means sorrow in the heart,” my fortune-telling mother would say every time she read my cup.
I shut my eyes and saw Noushin and Golnaz in court before a judge with their catalog of grievances.
My last memory of my wife was of the lilacs I found crushed on the sidewalk on the day she left. A quarter of an hour after she was gone, when I began sensing the funereal stillness of the house, I rushed downstairs, and seeing the flattened petals on the pavement—Golnaz had tucked a few stems from our garden in her mother’s purse that morning—I ran down several streets to the deserted bus stop, calling out her name in the noontime hush of a city sitting down to lunch. I stood for some time on the street corner, foolish and lost. An old man asked me if I was all right and for some inexplicable reason I said, “My father used to call me a fighting cock.” The man’s milky eyes were unhurried. “What they call you is of no impo
rtance,” he said. “What matters is who you are.” He walked on, his body a museum of bone and loneliness.
Well, who was I? I was the one who had designed Noushin’s departure from the get-go, carving an exit for her—slowly, imperceptibly, chiseling centimeters off the cement of our togetherness with chronic bouts of absence. The first time I abandoned her she was four months pregnant with Golnaz. My vanishing was neither premeditated nor impromptu, say, in the style of an Updikean antihero stepping out for a pack of cigarettes and never returning. It was somewhere in between. By this I mean that it was an act I could have foretold, though no exact timing was ever assigned.
The night in question was not unlike any other. Insomnia—mine, which always triggered hers. Between us the whistle of the teakettle on the stove, the sweet smell of boiling milk, our nightly ritual of appeasement and pacification. The reading of poetry out loud, which we did together during these bouts of sleeplessness, taking turns, each mothering the other until one would fall back asleep and the other would follow.
I was lying groggy on the sofa, my head on her bare lap, feeling the bulge of the baby against my forehead. Noushin repositioned herself, moving her stomach away to make more room for me, as though apologetic, somehow, for the child growing inside her. She read a Shamlou poem to me, and as I sensed my eyes shutting to the sound of her voice, I woke up in a panic, breathless, and feeling myself penned in by the walls of our apartment, I put on some clothes and headed out. “Where are you going?” she said. “I need air,” I said. She asked if she should come with me and I said no, there was no need, I would be back in a few minutes. “Just need some air,” I said again, and she nodded, understanding no doubt that air was akin to a void and could include neither her, nor the baby.
Even as I ignited the engine on my motorcycle—a secondhand Yamaha I had bought when my old Harley finally collapsed—and rode in the blackness of that November night, I believed I would be back before long, as I had promised. But as I rode on, past the construction cranes on Arjantin Square and the unlit shops of Valiasr Street, I merged onto Hakim Expressway, and sensing my own momentum with my unhelmeted head I pressed the gas, going faster and farther, mosquitoes colliding with my bare forehead, the city limits vanishing behind me. In Karaj, at dawn, I stopped at Emamzadeh Taher cemetery, where Shamlou had been buried a few months earlier. Flashing my Swiss Army light on the graves, I found my way to his, and I watched the day breaking, despite everything.