by Dalia Sofer
“I’m sorry, I forgot. I have a lot on my mind.”
“Hamid, you need to help me out,” she said. “I don’t know how long…”
The waiter interrupted her. She ordered tea and looked out the window.
“What don’t you know?” I asked.
“I don’t know how long I can carry on, like this.”
I watched her, the lavaliere kissing the crater of her throat—an Italian cameo that she never removed, not even when we made love. It was a memento from her father, who had abandoned her and her mother in the winter of 1984, when Noushin was twelve. She had told me about the necklace one night early on in our relationship. Her father, she said, had offered it to her before he left the country for what he claimed would be a one-month business trip but what would turn out to be for good. He had picked her up from school on a Thursday, and they had driven to the video store to select a movie for the weekend, as they often did. They settled on Being There, with Peter Sellers as Chance the gardener, with the raunchy scenes naturally censored out. On the way home he had bought her ice cream, and in the car he had presented the cameo necklace—a portrait of a woman carved into a sardonyx shell. That evening they had watched the movie with her mother, and had laughed together at Chance’s unlikely rise from gardener to Washington insider. The next morning, before dawn, her father was gone.
The tea arrived and she stirred it absentmindedly as she looked out the window, at a woman shouting at a motorcyclist who had nearly run her over. “I don’t know how long I can carry on,” she said again, this time mostly to herself.
“Noushin,” I said. “Please don’t complicate my life. You know what I have to contend with in that hellhole every day.”
“Ever since we met you’ve been telling me that you are there because you are ‘undermining the system from inside.’ I think I let myself believe you, because of our own first encounter. After all, you let me go so easily, and all my friends, too. But you can’t possibly be releasing everyone. So what do you do with the ones you keep?… Hamid, how do you live with yourself? Please quit. Get a decent job.”
“This isn’t a sports game,” I said. “I can’t switch sides, just like that.”
The baby’s squeals and her plastic giraffe banging against my chair earned us the peeved gazes of others. I picked her up and sat her on my lap, and this, the illusion of being safe, was enough to calm her.
That’s when I told Noushin everything. My betrayal of my father—the germinal act of my downfall. The judge, the bubblegum soapsuds, Akbari’s threats to arrest me for the judge’s death each time I spoke of quitting. And H. His face, always that diabolical face.
Beads of sweat formed on her neck as I spoke; in a different time and place, I would have kissed them. When I was done she looked at the baby, now asleep, then stared at me, as if for the first time. I don’t think she had ever allowed herself to imagine to what lengths I had gone, in that dark room where she, too, had once sat, and in which our romance had perversely been born.
“The answer to your question,” I said, “is that I don’t live with myself, not really. But I have a question for you, too: how have you lived with me, all this time?”
She looked around the café and didn’t speak. After a while she said, “Being in the presence of violence that chooses not to harm you is its own kind of drug. Getting up each morning with the knowledge that you’ve been spared can fill you with a kind of elation. In this type of existence, each outlived moment is accompanied by the thrill of averted annihilation. It’s a bizarre way of being, a teetering between the desire to be harmed and the desire to be spared.”
“But why are you teetering between these two desires?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “For the same reason you are, I suppose? Each morning when you show up in that hellhole, as you call it, you, too, are in the presence of violence that has chosen not to annihilate you, but could.”
I reached for her hand across the table and squeezed it, and we held on to each other, as two porcupines hugging.
Sunken in revelation as in quicksand, she let go of my hand and sat back, the sun in her face, tapping her teaspoon on the wooden table. The sound dissolved in the din of the café, where the day was now unfolding, as any other.
34
MY BREAK WITH AKBARI occurred over a dead goldfish. It was Nowruz 2009—the vernal equinox, another new year. My daughter, just a month shy of nine years, had for some time been downhearted, so much so that the school principal had asked to see us before the holiday. “The girl is withdrawn and solitary,” she said, stiff as a starched laboratory coat, tortoiseshell glasses at the edge of her nose—the kind of woman for whom the memory of good sex was as dusty as the underside of Margaret Thatcher’s bedframe. “Golnaz no longer interacts with her friends and her grades are suffering. Maybe life at home is difficult?” I thought it a clever trap to have said, “Life at home is difficult,” and not “her life at home is difficult,” an invitation to us to expose the jagged intimacies of our family.
Noushin sat brooding in her chair, staring down at the linoleum tiles; I knew she was on the verge of confessing to a decade of acrimony. Leaning forward to preempt my wife’s eruptions, I said, “It’s possible that I haven’t been as present at home as I should have been. Because of work, you see? Nothing that should concern you in the least, I assure you, khanoum.”
The principal seemed to recoil at the mention of my occupation; she was well aware of my involvement with the Ministry of Intelligence. “I understand,” she said. “I have no doubt that Golnaz is in a loving home, and that this is just a phase.” Closing the child’s dossier and forcing a smile, she continued, “Well, eideh shomā mobārak, happy new year to you.”
* * *
OUTSIDE, in the cool sunlight of a March afternoon, a burst blood vessel swam in Noushin’s right eye. She brought a ridged fingernail to her mouth and chewed on it, pacifying herself. Somewhere, I imagined, far beyond where we stood, orange blossoms bloomed and rosewater was distilled from newborn petals. And we, what had we to show for this new season?
I held her hand and she held mine as we always had, and we walked together down the narrow street, where a group of bicyclists, surely younger than we, sped past us, propelled by their still immaculate belief in their own possibility.
“I’ll get a goldfish for Golnaz this Nowruz,” I said. “Each year she asks for one and we never get it.”
“You know how I feel about that,” she said. “After every new year people dump their goldfish in the rivers and thousands end up dying. It’s a cruel tradition.”
“So we won’t dump it,” I said. “I’m sure Golnaz would love to keep it.”
“Do as you like,” she said. “At least you’re finally interested in the child.”
Across the street a vendor stood behind his cart of fire-roasted beets, filling the afternoon with sweet steam. “Do you want a beet?” I asked her.
“A beet?” she asked incredulously as she picked up her pace.
“Noushin,” I said. “I’m sorry for my ways.”
We walked home, the spring in our nostrils indifferent to our diminishing options.
* * *
GOLNAZ NAMED THE GOLDFISH Bolour and in the two weeks leading up to the new year she was less solitary, cheerful even. She placed the fish in a glass bowl that she decorated with gravel of different colors, and she talked to it and fed it and sang to it when she thought no one was looking. I found it mysterious that a creature so tiny and delicate could ignite in a child such joy, but remembering the three-legged cat in our garden I understood that the fish was lovable because it was blameless. Encouraged by her good humor—however short-lived—I decided to celebrate the new year properly, with all the heraldry the occasion required—the apple, the green grass, the vinegar, the samanoo, the senjed, the coins, the garlic, the mirror.
Noushin was not around much that week; her first photography book, whose publication had been delayed for four years, was
at last scheduled to be released later that month, but was at the last minute again preempted by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which deemed several images—her self-portraits—“questionable” and “subject to further examination.” The problem was the lavaliere that appeared around her neck in every photograph. For one thing, the officials objected, the woman carved into the cameo had a seductive gaze, not to mention that sweetheart neckline of her dress, which suggested cleavage. Furthermore, the cameo’s repetition in so many photographs was in itself suspicious. Was it supposed to symbolize something? Noushin insisted there was nothing subversive about the object’s repetition—in her father’s absence the necklace had simply become an extension of herself, like a phantom limb. The officials, not renowned for sentimentality, remained unmoved and suggested that she Photoshop the necklace out of the images. This was not possible, she countered, since the Ministry had previously approved the photographs and one thousand copies of the book were already printed. “Well, khanoum,” one of the officials said, “the previous administration left us in 2005. It’s now four years later and it’s about time you bid farewell to our predecessors’ lax ways. They may have approved, but we disapprove—it’s as simple as that. However, bear in mind that when all options have failed, there is always the magic marker. You could, very easily, just black out your neck.”
Undeterred, she returned daily to the Ministry, where she submitted herself to an interview that concluded vaguely and offered nothing but a postponement of a definitive verdict regarding the acceptability of the book. It was—she said one night between sips of the borage infusion that she drank for her frayed nerves—like being stopped at a border, neither apprehended nor admitted.
It was up to me, then, to create for Golnaz a new year’s celebration that would not interrupt the calm she had found in her cohabitation with the fish. I spent two days shopping and chopping, cooking and cleaning, and that afternoon, when Golnaz arrived home from school, I felt no shame greeting her, as I usually did. I had placed the goldfish in the center of the table, next to the mirror, which shimmered in the spring sunlight, and it was this reflection of the red fish and the harmony around it that brightened my daughter’s face as she entered the room.
* * *
I DIDN’T NOTICE when Akbari came in; in the daytime we left the front door unlocked. Golnaz was in the living room playing Pokémon and I was finishing up the cooking in the kitchen. From the open windows came the sound of a ball bouncing against a wall and the laughter of children freed from the confines of school. As I stood by the simmering pots contemplating my strange and accidental happiness, I heard a man’s voice resonating in the living room. I ran out and was startled to find Akbari in his newsboy cap, arms crossed against his chest, cheering on as Golnaz stabbed the keys on her pocket Nintendo.
“To what do I owe this honor?” I said.
“Where are your manners?” he said. “You don’t wish me a happy new year?”
“Yes, eideh shomā mobārak. Well?”
“Have you made up your mind about my offer?”
The day before he had informed me that he would be moving to Mashhad to help run one of the country’s biggest charitable foundations, with stakes in scores of businesses. He had offered me a position at the helm of one of these, a fruit canning factory. “Hamid,” he had said, grabbing a handful of noghl—sugar-coated almonds—from a bowl on his desk and pouring them into his mouth, “if you accept, you could become a rich man faster than I can swallow these almonds.” The almonds were from his son’s wedding a week earlier, an event that I could not attend because of a sudden and embarrassing pain in my scrotum.
The money I could gain by accepting his offer was naturally a lure. Charitable foundations had become the economy’s chieftains. Having been, for centuries, beneficiaries of gifts and donations—known as waqfs—they had further expanded their assets after the revolution through the confiscation of factories and land whose owners had fled, disappeared, or been imprisoned. With their vast holdings they collected rent from hotels, shops, and farms, and through their construction division they built everything from airports and bridges, to roads and industrial water pipes. Many of the bosses were clerics with deep ties to Sepah Pasdaran—the Revolutionary Guard—though at times these very bosses also competed with Sepah. The entire affair was a labyrinth no one fully grasped, and I imagined that being involved with one of these foundations would be like running Disneyland, where everything a visitor saw, touched, ate, heard, or even smelled was owned or operated by Mickey Mouse.
When Akbari proposed the job, I did—at least initially—imagine myself in a vintage Porsche Carrera, pressing the gas pedal with the tip of a Ferragamo boot, driving with my family by the Mediterranean Sea on a road overlooking the Cap Canaille—Noushin’s dream destination. But as I stood before him with my testicles on fire, I was reminded of the reality of my life and the lassitude of my middle-aged bones. There was, too, the old dogged question I could never be rid of, How far are you willing to stray? “I’ll think about the offer,” I had said.
His appearance on the new year was his way of demonstrating his displeasure at my hesitation. He turned now to Golnaz, who was still slumped in the corner of the sofa, her fingers banging on the Nintendo keys even more fiercely than before. “What do you think?” he said to her. “How would you like to live in a big house in Mashhad?” She ignored him and kept on playing. But when he added, with that loud, commanding voice that was so familiar to me, “Listen when someone is talking to you!” she dropped the game and looked up, her brown eyes wide and repentant.
Seeing the two of them face-to-face agitated me; I sensed the dual sides of my life catastrophically colliding. The pain, which had dulled since morning, shot once more into my scrotum.
“I’m not going to Mashhad,” I said.
He raised a bushy eyebrow. “Maybe you don’t realize that I am granting you a great honor,” he said.
“I didn’t become a revolutionary all those decades ago to end up canning peaches in some factory in Mashhad,” I said.
“The factory is part of something far bigger, and more powerful,” he said. “You know that very well.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be part of something big and powerful anymore,” I said. I looked at Golnaz, and at our new year’s spread, interrupted.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Have you had those balls checked yet?”
The previous evening, as we were both heading home, I had stupidly told him of my pain, forgetting that one must never share intimacies with a man like Akbari. A memory now came to me: a breathless moth in an airtight jar on my bedside table. I, a boy of eleven, sleepless in bed, watching its struggle with a flashlight, listening to its muffled wings through the glass.
“My balls are fine,” I said. “I am just tired.”
“We spent decades sowing seeds,” he said. “Don’t give up before the harvest, you fool. This is our reward.” He gripped my forearm and leaned toward me. “Besides,” he continued, “we’ve become brothers, you and I. We’ve been in this together, at every step, haven’t we?”
This last invocation sickened me most perhaps because it was the truest. Yes, we had been in this together. For how could I deny that though my fascination with Akbari had over the years transformed into revulsion, there remained something of the original pull, a certain attraction to his lawlessness and cruelty? That his vulgarity, which so contrasted with my own polished and privileged upbringing, freed me from myself, and erased my ineffectual boyhood … That in his presence I became blind to suffering and could do with impunity what I dared not do when alone … That even as I learned to defy him by releasing increasing numbers of detainees, I remained, in the end, forever in his debt, for he was the one who had taught me how to play God … The idea that a goldfish and a new year’s meal could turn me into a different man now seemed laughable; how could the life I had traced on this earth be so easily undone?
“Let us be,�
�� I said to Akbari. The shooting pain was now radiating into my gut and I collapsed on the sofa, next to Golnaz, who was holding on to a throw pillow with a torn seam. “Please,” I said. “Let us be.”
“From the day I met you,” he said, “I knew you would falter. There was a piece missing in you, an essential piece. I tried, all these years, to fill you out, make you more substantial. But you are a hollow man, and a waste of my time.”
“Get out of my house,” I said. “You are nothing more than a provincial mercenary, and no matter how many ladders you climb, you will remain the lizard that you always were.”
For some time he stood, staring me down with black eyes as he had done, decades earlier, with my father. Then he leaned over the coffee table, reached into the fishbowl with his liver-spotted hand, and pulled out the goldfish, which writhed in his tightening grip. Golnaz watched him, voiceless, and by the time she buried her face in the sofa armrest, the goldfish lay dead on the coffee table, and Akbari was gone.
35
LATE IN THAT SUMMER OF 2009, Noushin left me for the first time. It was the summer of mass demonstrations against a rigged reelection, the summer of bloodshed and batons. Each night she would congregate at Tehran University or Azadi Square with her friends, among them an artist she seemed enamored with, a fellow named Bahman, one of the originators of public art in Tehran in the 1990s. He had staged throughout his career bold exhibits on roadsides, in the backs of trucks, and inside abandoned warehouses designated for demolition. His most popular feat was a reproduction in a condemned warehouse of his childhood home: linoleum-floored kitchen, blue gingham vinyl tablecloth, tarnished samovar, white lace curtains—the surfaces that furnished a man’s memory. Thousands came to see the exhibit before a demolition truck arrived one morning at dawn as scheduled, knocking down the decrepit building and with it Bahman’s replica of his past. Interviewers asked him why he had selected a site doomed for extinction and he had said, “Without the extinction the artwork would have been nothing more than a banal exercise in nostalgia.”