by Dalia Sofer
I rode north through lonely villages, reveling in the smell of cow manure and earth, and parked my motorcycle on a side road, taking a piss in an open field and relishing the landscape, free of humans and their burdens.
By the time I arrived at the seaside the sun was high in the damp northern sky, the air full of saltwater and fish, seaweed and grief. I stopped at a teahouse for breakfast, and as food and drink warmed my stomach I considered again what I had done. I may have been heartless, but no one, I convinced myself, could accuse me of being thoughtless. I was three months into my fortieth year. On my birthday, as Noushin and I had walked home from dinner, the news of her pregnancy still convulsing in the stifling August night between us, I had looked for the first time into my future. Finding only the black shadow of a wasted man, I had understood that the kindest act I was capable of was to fabricate for Noushin and the baby an escape route from me.
I rode along the coast as far as Bandar Anzali, which happened to be H.’s hometown. The Caspian seaport, free of holidaymakers, stood sober and dignified. Teahouses were shuttered and summer villas locked for the season. By the misty lagoon, where fishing boats were unloading the morning’s haul, a boy’s kite fluttered low in the sky like a woman’s headscarf. I thought of H. and the fake story I had shown him about the fire in Anzali. I thought of his face. Always his face, his stabbing eyes and his impish goatee.
Behind the clouds the sun was still making its midmorning ascent. Eleven in the morning—this was the hour when Noushin would normally call me from the gallery. Had she gone to work that morning? Did she tell anyone that I had disappeared? I thought of Akbari, and his intolerance for disappearances orchestrated by anyone but himself.
My absence from my shoddy life made me feel like a child peering at the plastic replica of his own city through a snow globe discovered in some dusty souvenir shop. At the harbor, the whitewashed nineteenth-century clock tower—once a lighthouse—stood tall and solitary. I took long sips from my bottle, followed by deep breaths afterward. Seagulls descended along the seashore, indifferent to me and free of judgment. How long had I looked for a place far away, one like this with a lighthouse that was once a beacon for seafarers in the blackness of a Caspian night? Standing at the foot of the edifice I asked it for direction with the goodwill of a novice pilgrim at prayer, but all I got was a silent announcement of the hour—twelve minutes past noon. The day had already half vanished.
At a pay phone I called Noushin. “It’s me,” I said stupidly when she picked up.
“Oh, you’re alive,” she said, her voice breaking.
“I hate to disappoint,” I said.
“I’m in no mood for jokes,” she said. “I thought you were dead, with that junk motorcycle of yours.” She blew her nose. “Where are you?”
“I am in the most tranquil place on earth,” I said between sips. “Before me are a sea, a lagoon, fishermen, a clock tower, and the mist of an autumn day.”
“Stop that fake poetic nonsense,” she said. “You rode all the way to Anzali?”
“Noushin,” I said. “You and the baby will be better off without me.”
She was quiet for some time. In the background I could hear khanoum Modaress, the gallery owner with an assortment of Hermès scarves, bossing around some underling.
“We will be better off without you?” she said. “You should have thought of that before you slept with me and certainly before you married me.”
“This baby wasn’t in the plans,” I said.
“Accidents happen,” she said. “I believe you had something to do with it.”
“I need air,” I said. “I need to be away from all that city soot and corruption.”
“So what are you going to do? Rent a cabin and live by the sea? Become a fisherman?” She laughed mirthlessly.
“Why not?” I said.
“Hamid,” she said. “You say you want to get away from the soot and corruption. But these have nothing to do with the city.”
“What, then?” I said.
“The soot is from the life you’ve lived,” she said.
“The life I’ve lived suited you just fine until now,” I said. “Who’s been supporting you while you work part-time for next to nothing in that stupid gallery, and who’s been funding you while you go out and pursue your grand photography projects? The source never bothered you before, khanoumeh Taheri, so why the sudden crisis of conscience?” Never before had I called her by her maiden name.
“I never liked the life you chose,” she said.
“I don’t give a damn that you didn’t like it,” I said, with such abandon that the seagull feasting on a breadcrumb near me leapt away. “The point is you never objected.”
“I objected many times, and you know it. And each time you told me you’re doing it because you’re influencing things from inside. Hamid, it’s enough. Get out of there and let’s start over, with the baby.” She paused for a minute. “I love you,” she said.
“Noushin, I’m sorry,” I said, and hung up without saying goodbye, knowing well that once the ashes of our conversation had scattered, my longing for her would return. Why was it that I could only love her in absence?
* * *
MY DISAPPEARANCE PROMPTED rumors that I had become unhinged. I, too, wondered if I was losing my mind. Akbari inquired if he should pay me a visit. “I just need time to clear my head,” I said. But I was not sure what that meant or how one goes about accomplishing such a task.
I rented a studio overlooking the port, listening to foghorns and fishing boats drawing near and sleeping long hours on the flat mattress of an old wooden bed that creaked every time I turned this way or that. The apartment was scarcely furnished: a kitchenette with a working gas stove; a sink; a fridge; a square table with a naked lightbulb above it; two snuff-colored chairs, vestiges of the 1970s—that decisive decade of my youth—and an ottoman with stains that I preferred not to think about. A gray mouse occasionally appeared from behind the stove; in time, I looked forward to his visits.
Each day I sat at the kitchen table for hours with a glass of tea, under the glare of the lone bulb, contemplating my present through the progression of my history. If I examined my life through the prism of a dossier—as I had grown accustomed to examining all lives—then I could have said that mine, the entire arc of it, had been a misprint. I, Hamid Mozaffarian, promising art student, deemed by professors as “clever”—son of Sadegh Mozaffarian, founder of the Art Encyclopedia, and Monir Farahani, so-called offspring of Qajar kings—had ended up, somehow, as an interrogator, the arbiter of others’ guilt and innocence, greasing the pulleys of Akbari’s apparatus of law and order. But when I contemplated myself as a man and not a dossier, then the incongruousness of my present no longer perplexed me: my life, as so many before mine, was but a series of wrong turns.
I wondered what I would have become had I resumed my studies at the university. For the first time I questioned the prophecy Akbari had given me decades earlier, that on the day I betrayed my father, I had embarked on a one-way road. Had there truly been no going back? It was now too late for such ruminations. I was a veteran of the penal system, and far too old to return to university. In any case, Akbari, who could not abide the escape of one of his protégés, would retaliate for my desertion by charging me with the death, all those years ago, of the judge. Our legal system knew nothing of statutes of limitation. We were in servitude to a divine order, where sins have no expiration dates.
All of this I wrote off as life’s regrets.
What I could not write off was the reality of my forthcoming child. The perpetuation of myself in the form of a baby nearly drove me to madness. That this decision was not in my own hands but in those of another human being, a woman who claimed to love me, added to my torment. I considered writing a letter to my father. Maybe, I thought, in going back I could go forward. I wanted not only to confess but also to explain. But after the salutations, what would my first sentence be? The first sentence sets the intent,
everyone knows that. Apology or indignation? Acknowledgment or expiation? What does a man who isn’t there say to a man who vanished?
On a walk by the lagoon early one morning I remembered swimming in the Caspian with my father, who once reached out to me in the water, his colossal fingers encircling my wrist. I let him maneuver me back to the beach, back to my mother, who lay on a towel in her yellow swimsuit, her skin devouring the sun. “You are quite a sorry sight, Monir,” my father said. “You look like a burned chicken.” My mother looked up, squinting, and shut her eyes again, resuming her interrupted bliss. But interruptions can’t be erased. Soon her eyes opened and she got up. “I’m going for a walk,” she said without waiting for a response. I looked at my mother’s disappearing body as she headed for the water, then at my father’s hand, feeling myself alternating between the two, and as I got up to run after my mother I heard my father say, “Sit with me, Hamid. For once, just sit with me.” We sat together wrapped in our towels, listening to the conversations of others.
“How old are you?” my father said.
I thought it possible that he truly didn’t know. “Turning nine in August,” I said. I reached for my glass marble, the one with the snow owl, tucked in my mother’s beach bag.
“I’d like you to tell me a story,” said my father.
“What kind of story?” I said.
“Any story,” he said. “Something interesting.”
My mind was a blank as I felt my wet swimsuit cling to my skin. “I don’t know any…”
“Come on,” he said. “You never speak, unless poked. You live in your own absentminded head. Make yourself known, my son! Or at the very least, heard.”
“A real story?” I said. “Or a made-up tale?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said with a loud sigh. “Whatever you prefer.”
I plundered my mind for a story, anything to save me from this tribunal I had been summoned to, with no warning. But it was as though someone had pillaged what little might have existed inside my head. I found nothing there, and nothing is what I offered my father.
A vendor approached with cones of ice cream.
“No, thank you,” my father said to him. “There is no pleasure eating an ice cream alone.” The man looked at me with pity in his eyes, and walked away.
* * *
SO MY FATHER WAS A COLD MAN, and perhaps something worse, if one were to take into account his betrayal of his friend H. But wasn’t I, in comparison, hoarfrost? If cruelty had a hierarchy, I had outperformed my father fiftyfold. A billion cold fathers must have walked this earth; few produced sons such as I. Of course, blame at the father’s feet was the psychologist’s justification, while absolution of the father was the geneticist’s vocation. Where then, was the truth?
* * *
AFTER THE FIRST MONTH, the mouse, finding me an agreeable roommate, never left. He slept in a crevice under the stove and came out when he was hungry or bored. Often I left him crumbs of bread and cheese, and I watched him as he gnawed a sliver of food, content. On a few occasions I woke up in the morning to find him sleeping on my mattress, his tiny body curled under the arch of my foot. That he neither knew nor cared about my past comforted me. I thought it absurd that I had formed a friendship with a mouse. But this, too, is what a man is made of.
* * *
WHEN I RETURNED to Tehran I was four weeks away from becoming a father. For Noushin’s sake—and the baby’s—I should have kept my distance. After all, if I had gotten nothing else from my seclusion in Anzali, I had gotten this much: I understood the mayhem I was capable of. But I was not willful enough to stay away. Instead I made a vow—even briefly believing it—that I would become, as they say, a better man.
Noushin, naturally, didn’t let me back into the apartment. I rented a run-down room downtown, offering her the illusion of choice, but I persisted with my quest to regain entry into my former life with the same stubbornness that months earlier had propelled my absence. I showed up nightly with tins of caviar I had brought back from Anzali, along with sweets and massage oils and the best wine I could manage. I cooked dinner for her, rubbed her swollen feet, rested my lawless head on the baby’s heartbeat. And I sang to them both, usually one of my old Dariush tunes, which I used to sing when Noushin and I were courting: Kouho mizāram roo dousham / rakhte har jango mipousham / mowjo az daryā migiram / shireyeh sango midousham / ageh cheshmāt began āreh, hich kodoum kari nadāreh … I will put the mountain on my shoulder / wear any war uniform / take the wave from the sea / milk the sap of a stone / If your eyes say yes, none of these will be difficult …
* * *
SLOWLY SHE RELENTED, and by the time she was giving birth, on a rainy night in April, I was fretting and pacing in the fluorescent-lit hallway of the hospital like any husband who has been there all along.
When I saw the baby, twelve hours later, it was spring in the hospital room. Lilacs by Noushin’s bed. White curtains fluttering by a sunlit window. And the baby, a red poppy, in her bassinet. But the first thing I felt for the child was not love but pity; I was the seedbed of her existence, the hollow ground from which her life would have to germinate.
32
FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF HER LIFE I was attached to the baby with a terrifying ferocity. Often, when holding her head, I would touch the fontanelle and think how easy it would be to break her. At such times I would place her back in her crib, admonishing myself for harboring such thoughts. Noushin interpreted my interactions with the baby as lack of devotion.
Still, for those two years we spent in the three-room apartment we shared on Arjantin Square, we cooked and ate, slept and laughed. The pop songs rotating in our CD player made us believe in the possibility of belonging, to each other and to the idea of our family. With hand puppets that I constructed with foam and Ping-Pong balls and bird feathers—a bespectacled cat, a bearded dog, a long-lashed canary, and a classic Pahlevan Kachal, the bald-headed hero of the puppetry of yore—I performed for them nightly, dressing up the figurines as mullahs, fighters, professors, and princesses, and making up stories of love, loss, valor, and honor that would have pleased my father that day on the beach. In this makeshift world love didn’t always survive but loss always had meaning, and valor sometimes faltered but honor, above all, prevailed.
As I watched the laughing faces of my wife and daughter during those nights I marveled at my own capacity for transient love, and I wondered how long this love could be sustained. To keep our story going I created ever more complicated adventures for our puppets, so much so that they began overtaking our lives: Noushin and I talked in their voices and accents even when communicating with each other during the day, and the baby, just beginning to speak, was learning to imitate them all. What harm was there in living life as a play? None, I convinced myself, but another voice—the sober one excluded from the game—never tired of reminding me that all plays must come to an end.
33
THE PUPPETRY ENDED, as most things, with a confession.
Up at dawn as usual, hours before work and world, I sat in bed, tilting my limbs toward gravity, one foot to the floor, then the other. A body trapped in its own trance. I watched Noushin, asleep after another night spent soothing the child. Our child, sleepless, like us.
* * *
ON THE STREET, at that hour, company could be found in strays—dogs and men. On a sycamore tree by the newspaper kiosk I noticed an engraved heart, lovers’ initials locked inside. No doubt the heart would soon vanish along with the tree, cut down to make room for another government building.
At sunrise kiosk shutters were unrolled and vans unloaded newspapers, thousands of words adding up to naught. People trickled out of homes, sleepwalking toward their daily newspapers. I did the same, then walked to a nearby café, just opened for the day.
Along with reports of a workers’ strike in Abadan and Ahvaz, and of hundreds arrested in Khorasan for partaking in “corruption networks,” I read this headline:
CLERIC CALLS F
OR ARRESTING DOG OWNERS
Hojatoleslam Hasani, a Friday prayer leader in Orumieh, has denounced the moral depravity of dog ownership and called upon the judiciary to arrest all dogs and their owners, saying, “I demand the judiciary arrest all dogs with long, medium, or short legs together with their long-legged owners, otherwise I will arrest them myself.” In June, the police banned the sale of dogs and stipulated penalties for dog walking in public, which has become fashionable in some neighborhoods, in North Tehran especially …
Were we living inside a prank? Some dreamed-up cartoon strip with no end?
* * *
ACROSS THE STREET Noushin was heading to the grocery store with the pram. I almost hid behind the curtain, but it was too late; she had seen me and was walking toward the café.
She sat across from me, struggling to fit the pram in the tight space between tables. “You left so early,” she said. “God forbid you should help me with the baby. Did you forget I had a photo shoot this morning? I had to cancel it and reschedule.”
“What photo shoot?”
“For the series I’ve been working on, about how all the old houses of Tehran are being destroyed to make room for high-rises. This morning I had arranged to photograph the house of Anis al-Dowleh, the favorite wife of Naser al-Din Shah. It’s that building on Mowlavi Street that’s now the headquarters of the butchers’ union. I told you about it already.”