by Dalia Sofer
The night Noushin met him at some art reception, a few weeks after the goldfish incident, she tucked Golnaz in bed with a song—I think it was something by Shajarian—and an origami she had made with newspaper; I remember the word compensation imprinted on the bird’s wing. Afterward, she began spending time with him, meeting for coffee and going to museums, encounters that I initially encouraged because they took the onus off me, but whose frequency was beginning to vex me.
During those summer riots their mobile phone exchanges multiplied; a nation’s collective discontent, they seemed to believe, somehow sanctioned their private transgressions. Though I was pleased with the demonstrations—for I, too, wanted to be rid of the incompetent president—I was also in my legal right to have my wife arrested for partaking in them. Naturally, she was aware of this, and it was with defiance that she put on her green headband each evening and sent breathless texts to her lover to arrange the night’s rendezvous, right under my nose. Often I wondered if she was protesting the government, or her life with me. To spare us both the embarrassment of our marital collapse, I watched her in silence and chose to say nothing.
Akbari, meanwhile, was as contented as a man who stumbles onto an unannounced banquet. In his final hour, just as he was preparing for his grand move to Mashhad, scores of demonstrators were put before him, awaiting his investigation. He postponed his departure. The nation needs me, he said.
On the morning of July 22, when the alarm clock rang, I opened my eyes to an empty bed. It was five o’clock and Noushin had not come home. I lay in bed, feeling under my calves the mattress’s tired ribs. The familiar pain, which had diminished since the new year and for which I had yet to seek medical care, was suddenly back in force, a jackhammer in my scrotum.
She appeared in the doorway after dawn, a tear in her sleeve, a bruise on her right cheek. When she opened her mouth to speak I saw that she had a chipped tooth. “They got Bahman,” she said. She walked to the bed and sat on the edge, smelling of caked blood and gasoline. “Hamid,” she continued. “Will you help him?”
“There are people above me,” I said.
“I know you can get him off if you want to,” she said.
I cupped her bruised cheek in my palm. “Why would I want to?” I said.
She pushed away my hand. “It was never like that,” she said.
“You think I’m an ass? All this time, right under my nose.”
“This isn’t about me, it’s about a man’s life.”
“There are thousands more, like him,” I said. “Why should I save this one?”
Looking down at the floor she said, “Because I love this one.”
* * *
I STARED AT THE CEILING as she got up and packed a bag, opening drawers and armoires, removing from our shared space foundations for a life apart—clothes, underwear, hairbrush, face creams, books.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“To my mother’s. I’ll take Golnaz with me.”
“How long are you going for?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I need time to think.”
“Think about what?”
“Just think,” she said.
“You pick up and leave, just like that?”
“You, of all people ask me this?” she said. “How many times did you pack a bag?”
“So this is retribution?”
“Oh, Hamid,” she sighed. “Not everyone thinks like you.”
* * *
I STAYED IN BED as she went to Golnaz’s room and listened to their muted voices—Noushin explaining, Golnaz protesting, the sound of drawers opening and shutting, bags being zipped—echoes of another absence being born.
She ran a bath, as she did every morning. The sound of water filling the tub made me believe that this was a day like any other. She wouldn’t leave me, I reassured myself, not for long, in any case. Let her have her little adventure. God knows I had had my own over the years. Sooner or later she would tire of it and come home.
I made myself get out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom, steamy from her bath, and I watched her naked body as she lay in the water, her eyes shut. Bruises marked her rib cage and forearm. I wondered who had dealt these blows and whether it was someone I knew. Something propelled me to shave, an act that I knew would cause a small uproar: a government man walking around with the face of a Gillette salesman. At the sink I reached for my razor, but no matter how many times I wiped the mirror, the steam rose again, erasing my face. I could have opened the door but the last thing I wanted was to ruin Noushin’s bath.
I shaved without a reflection, finally, tracing the blade along my chin from memory. Naturally I missed a few spots and cut myself more than once. When I was done I stood over the toilet, and as urine burned its way along my penis and dribbled into the bowl, I saw drops of blood accompanying it. The terror of demise liberated me from my reality.
* * *
ON MY DESK, that morning, his dossier was among the dozens stacked, waiting for my attention. I read through it—he was born in Shiraz, had received his art degree at Tehran University and his masters in London. Divorced, no children. His public art projects had been written about internationally, deemed by the foreign press as “groundbreaking,” and “conflating the private space with the public realm in a highly dichotomous society.” This man had not only stolen my wife, he had also stolen the life I had meant to live. I called him in.
“State your name,” I said.
“Bahman Borumand,” he said. He had the calm, obstinate face of a man with a grievance; I had once carried the same face.
“You have been charged with vandalism, acting against national security, and disturbing public order. What do you say in response?”
“I am innocent,” he said.
“Aghaye Borumand,” I said, “do you know a woman named Noushin Mozaffarian?”
“No.”
“Don’t try to protect her. By lying you exacerbate the situation. So I ask you again. Do you know Noushin, who works at Anahita Gallery?”
“I don’t.”
“Tell me the truth, you fool. Because I already know the answer. It’s right here in your dossier. If you deny it you’ll make things worse for both of you.”
“I know a Noushin who works at Anahita Gallery,” he said, hesitating. “But her surname isn’t Mozaffarian.”
“Taheri, then?”
His earlier defiance gave way to alarm in the manner of a lover. “Is she all right?” he said. I could barely hear him.
With my chin burning from the razor cuts, I was sure I looked ridiculous—a man who can’t even shave properly. “She is fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about her. She was taking a bath when I last saw her.”
“You are familiar with Noushin?” he said.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said, shutting the dossier. “She is my wife.”
He swallowed so hard that his Adam’s apple bobbed along his throat like a sinusoid.
“You still claim you are innocent?”
“What is this interrogation about, exactly?” he said.
I sat back in my chair and watched him. He was tapping a foot on the floor, his ears sticking out like a fly’s antennae. Poor stupid man. If I hadn’t felt that finishing him off would be akin to doing away with myself, I would have sent him to Akbari at once.
“Get out of here,” I said.
He must have thought I was bluffing because he didn’t move.
“Didn’t you hear me? You’re free. Go, and quietly.”
He got up. “Thank you…” he started.
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Just get the hell out of here.”
* * *
AT MY DESK for the rest of that morning I did nothing but read a growing pile of dossiers. Around noon I got on my bike for air and tea. I rode up to the local café, where people had already begun streaming in for lunch, mostly the regulars from the prison and some new faces—no doubt families of the detainees. Akbari was there
, on the terrace, biting into a sandwich. By the time I had started a U-turn he had already seen me. He made a strange gesture—part military salute, part requisition—and called out my name. “Have a bite,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
I parked my bike and walked to his table. It was a faultless summer afternoon, the mountain air crisp.
“Sit down.”
I did as he asked.
“May I order you some food?”
“I have no appetite. I just came out for air.”
“What’s with the close shave?” he said. “Your face looks like a baby’s ass.”
“It was time for a change,” I said.
“Making progress with the dossiers?” he said as he chewed the last bite of his tongue sandwich.
“Coming along,” I said.
“Rumor has it that you’re stalling,” he continued, slurping his Zamzam cola with a straw.
“That’s why it’s called a rumor,” I said.
“Hamid,” he said. “I’m watching.”
“Watch all you like,” I said. “There is nothing to see.”
“But you are wrong: there is always something to see,” he said.
* * *
I RODE NORTH ALONG THE RIVER, soothed by the sound of the stream. I thought of Bahman Borumand, roaming free, no doubt at that very moment exchanging sweet words with my wife. I thought of their reunion, later, and of their tender embraces. But instead of jealousy I felt only exhaustion, the weariness of a man trapped in the wrong life.
I rode some ten kilometers north to another teahouse, and as I settled on a carpeted banquette in the silence of plane trees, the pain resurfaced, knifing me now in the left flank. I cursed myself for my terror of doctors. Nauseated, I doubled over and vomited my breakfast, which I had eaten alone that morning at the dining room table as Noushin and Golnaz paraded before me, back and forth, gathering their belongings—one last pair of shoes, one more doll, and the identical turquoise necklaces I had bought them both one summer from Neyshabur, on my way to Mashhad with Akbari. The image that replayed before me now was of the two of them standing before me with their suitcases, looking like matryoshka dolls, indistinguishable in every way except in size.
The waiter offered me a kitchen towel to wipe my mouth. “Forgive me,” I said. “I think I must be very ill.”
* * *
“STONE,” SAID THE DOCTOR, to my relief. “Kidney stone. Go home and wait until you pass it.” He handed me painkillers and recommended I drink fluids. “But only water and infusions,” he said. “Leave the other stuff for a better hour.”
I returned to the empty house and spent the rest of the day in bed sipping Noushin’s borage tea while the city convulsed around me. I remembered my father’s gallstones, his “knife attacks,” as he used to call them. We, Mozaffarian men, were skilled at one thing: making stones.
I stayed home that evening and didn’t turn on the lights at sundown. Lying in the clotting darkness I pinched my own skin, remembering my youthful body from my revolutionary days. I missed my old self as one may miss a dead friend.
Before dawn it came—the stone—crushed gravel streaming into the toilet along with my urine and blood. Returning to bed and lying on Noushin’s empty side, I allowed myself an hour of sleep then woke up, relieved but agitated, to scour the house like an ambush predator. I am not sure what I was looking for—perhaps after so many years employed by the Ministry of Information, snooping had simply become a way of being. I found nothing remarkable—crayons, notebooks, poorly folded clothes, half-filled handbags carrying the remnants of a forgotten day: dry-cleaning receipts, crumpled tissues, tampons, lip gloss, hair bands. But in Noushin’s closet, next to her row of boots that stood guard like an army, I saw stacked crates of photographs, among them a box bearing my name and below it, in quotes, “The Interrogator.” Inside were photographs of me, in black-and-white, chronicling my transformation from baffled revolutionary to aging captive of a life gone wrong.
I laid out the photographs on the floor in chronological order. The first, which Noushin had taken when she had been arrested, on that summer night a decade earlier, stunned me. Though I had seen it countless times before, I now noticed a pleading in the eyes, the kind you see in nineteenth-century photographs of people in ill-fitting suits staring helplessly at the camera. Engorged veins along my temples and the sides of my neck threatened to erupt at any moment.
The photographs that followed, twenty-seven in total, portrayed me in various positions of struggle. In one, taken in our living room, I was standing by the console, my arms crossed, wearing the tan python camo military jacket I had purchased from a Chinese website, looking down at Akbari—he was at least a head shorter than I—and nodding to him in absentminded deference. In another, dated February 2009—just a few weeks before the goldfish episode—I was holding my daughter’s hand outside the prison gate, a yellow grocery bag filled with dossiers hanging from my arm. In this photograph I was looking to the side, and Golnaz, in her school uniform, was looking up at me.
I lay down on the floor, on top of the photographs, my body still convulsing from the passed stone. I shut my eyes, and the world became distilled to sound: the neighbor’s hammer pinning a nail into the wall; the gurgle of the toilet tank replenishing itself; a leak in the faucet; the hum of car engines on the street below; glasses jingling in the kitchen cabinet next to the refrigerator. And, suddenly, this: my father’s voice as he called out my name from the departure gate at the airport, Hamid! Hamid!
36
AFTER THE PASSING OF THE STONE and a week of indolence, I submitted my resignation, aware that Akbari could checkmate me at any moment, as he had threatened for decades, with the judge’s death.
For a month I browsed the classifieds, each listing offering me alternate versions of myself—car mechanic, accountant, schoolteacher, magazine illustrator. Corpse washer, even. This last one seemed the most just for a man with my corpus of wrongdoing. In the end, having settled on becoming a gardener, I enrolled in an evening horticulture class that began in the fall and allowed me to immerse myself, on Mondays and Wednesdays, in fantasies of a life preoccupied with plants and bulbs. My classmates—housewives, amateur ecologists, and a few earnest young men eager to learn a craft—quickly bonded with one another but seemed unsure of what to make of me. Their wariness only grew when the teacher asked us to introduce ourselves and I said, “Hamid Mozaffarian, hoping to find a way.”
In class, as the students discussed cycles of renewal and death, I would doodle in my notebook as I used to in school. Often, unexpected memories would grip me—the chipped snow owl encased in my vanished marble, for example, or the star jasmine vine that Uncle Majid planted one spring for my father’s birthday along the south wall of our house. I remembered how the following winter, when all else was dead or dormant, the jasmines turned red.
* * *
FOR THE DURATION of that fall and early winter, I was a bona fide gardener. In the backyard of our apartment complex I planted perennials reputed to survive in confined spaces—little lantern columbines, two-tone lavender with silver foliage, and in the sunniest section, where Golnaz used to host tea parties for her dolls, a row of paper-white narcissus flowers. For some time I debated including tulips, those ubiquitous symbols of martyrdom whose image marked our murals, our stamps, even our flag. After digging the soil with the garden fork one afternoon I held the tulip bulb in my hand, remembering that this crescent-shaped flower had once been more than a symbol: it was simply a flower—Uncle Majid’s favorite. I added a bed of red and yellow tulips, ten in total.
I didn’t read newspapers, and turned on the radio only for the music programs. My bank account was depleting, especially as Noushin had withdrawn a large portion of the funds. Thoughts of livelihood were expelled from my life along with the noise of the world. So when the phone rang one December morning and I heard Akbari’s scratchy voice on the other end of the receiver, I held my breath, aware that reality had finally caught up
with me.
“Dead,” he said.
I had not spoken to another human being since the fall, except for the occasional exchanges with my classmates and the shop girl who advised me on bulbs and soil. “Who’s dead?”
“You haven’t heard?” he said. “The Cat! They’ve turned his funeral in Qom into a mass protest, but it will blow over soon. Son of a dog has been pestering us for twenty years. Well, no more gorbeh nareh. The Cat has finally exhausted his lives.”
Images of that sticky summer afternoon looped in my mind. Flies around the fruit bowl. The blowfly inspecting flesh. And the Cat appealing to us to spare the prisoners’ lives.
“But that’s not why I called,” he continued. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry things got so bitter between us. What are you doing with yourself? You disappeared again.”
“I’ve been here,” I said. “Gardening and studying horticulture.”
He laughed. “At least come up with a lie that suits you.”
“I’ve never been more truthful,” I said.
“Are you well?”
“Well enough.”
“Happy?”
“Enough,” I said.
“Holding up financially?”
As was his habit, he had cracked the eggshell of my reserve. “I’m broke,” I said.
“I’ll bring you some cash.”
“What is it you want?” I said. “A man like you doesn’t just bring cash.”
He paused. “Friendship means nothing to you,” he said.