by Dalia Sofer
“Friendship?”
“You jackass. Thirty years, we’ve known each other.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I will be over soon.”
So it had always been with Akbari: I surrendered to him every time.
I made myself a cup of coffee and went down to the backyard, where I sat on a lawn chair, next to the narcissi. I spotted a milky white lizard—Akbari’s namesake—climbing along the brick wall in the winter sun. I watched its spasmodic movements as it reached the top and returned to the ground, avoiding the glass shards left behind by the building’s residents who, lured by the promise of the flowering backyard, had been congregating there nightly with food and drink. They came even though they knew that no flower would blossom until spring.
Akbari arrived with aviator sunglasses and an orange down jacket; he looked as though he were headed for a ski trip in Dizin. He pulled an empty chair next to me, sat down, and handed me a heavy envelope.
“Who knew you were also a gardener,” he said. “But is it imaginary? Where are your flowers?”
“I’ve been planting bulbs,” I said. “They’ll bloom in the spring, assuming I’ve done everything right.” As I spoke I felt ashamed of this time lapse between the planting and the promised bloom, a period of absence that could only be negated by hope.
He watched me like a parent indulging a child’s preoccupation with a new toy.
“Thanks for the loan,” I said. “I’ll reimburse you.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I won’t need the money once I get to Mashhad.”
“And when would that be?”
“When this business with the demonstrations is finished. Today it flared up again, on account of the Cat’s funeral. But it won’t last. These things have a way of running their course.”
Removing his glasses, he leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes against the sunlight. He had the rosy cheeks of a man who sleeps soundly through the night.
“You’d never believe what I found today,” he said. “I was cleaning an old drawer in my office and there, crumpled in the back, was a piece of paper I had picked up from your console the day I came for your father’s papers. On it was the General’s phone number. It brought back some old memories!”
“What general?”
“The landlord at your family’s house. The air force man, the guy with the polo shirts who liked horseback riding and Italian crime novels.”
“My God, the General … But I thought he escaped. Anyway, that phone number was useless…”
“The number was useless, but it was written on the back of a receipt from a telephone store. We decided to check it out and see where it would lead. And that’s where we found him! He was hiding in the shop basement crouched in a corner, surrounded by hundreds of receivers and wires. He looked like something out of a cartoon.” Akbari chuckled and tapped his knee. “When we ambushed him I said, ‘Expecting a call, General?’ He didn’t appreciate the joke.”
“Well, it isn’t funny.”
“Idiot,” he said, crushing a few shards of glass under his boot. “If it weren’t for me you would have ended up like him. The prosecutor was on your tail back then, because of your doodles all over town. I was the one who sang your praises and kept him from arresting you.”
“I know. But why did you do that?”
“For one thing, I admired what you did to your father. Not many men would have had the guts. But there was more.”
“More?”
“You were a prize catch. That a man of your background should serve in our ranks somehow satisfied me. Being among us went against every grain in your body, and yet I could tell that a part of you enjoyed it. What greater suffering is there, tell me, than a clash between a man’s façade and his interior? I dangled the judge’s death over your head all those years so you wouldn’t quit.”
“So you enjoyed seeing me suffer?”
“I never thought of it like that,” he said. “But yes, we all did.”
“Who’s we?”
“All of us—the whole gang. Those of us who lived our entire lives in the backwaters that you only visited for a month or two on that storied Che Guevara motorcycle of yours. ‘Here comes aghaye philosophe, with his French books and his Star Trek stories!’ we would say when we saw you. You believed yourself superior to us, and we knew it. You were like a great salamander in a field of lizards, similar in appearance but in truth of a different species.”
“Why tell me all this?” I said.
“Why not? You’ve defected. And besides, maybe I like you a little bit.”
I thought of my daughter’s mournful face as she watched her goldfish wiggling wildly in Akbari’s fat hand. “What a vocation you’ve made,” I said, “of the pain of others.”
“You’re no holy person either,” he said.
A neighbor from the second floor—a recent divorcee who I knew had been taking maximum advantage of her new status as a single woman—arrived in the garden with a book. But seeing Akbari, whose prosecutorial face everyone recognized from the newspapers, she turned back around and disappeared into the building.
“It’s a fine feeling,” Akbari said with a coy smile, “to be feared.”
“Do you ever have misgivings?” I asked him.
“Misgivings? About what?”
“Everything,” I said. “For example, not heeding the Cat, on that summer afternoon.”
“Let it go already,” he said. “Why lose sleep over the death of people whose organization was repeatedly bombing us?”
“The organization, yes. It would bomb us to this day if it could. But those who were killed that summer weren’t the actual bombers; they had been in prison for a long time and had no hand in the plot.”
“That’s a technicality,” he said. “They belonged to an organization that did have a hand in it, don’t you see? Maybe that’s where you and I have differed, all along. You believe that each man is responsible for his own actions and nothing more; I believe that a man doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that his affiliations either condemn or exonerate him.”
I thought of Khavaran, that cemetery of unmarked mass graves where the bodies had been dumped, afterward. It had once been a cemetery for religious minorities, but after that summer it became something else. I had never had the courage to visit, and in any case, what was there to see? People said it looked nothing like a cemetery, that there were no tombstones, no signs, no markers, that it was a wasteland, nothing but clods of soil clumsily turned over. They called it la’natabad—the place of the damned.
“But what about all the others who were detained?” I said. “Many of them had no affiliations whatsoever.”
“Every person has some kind of affiliation,” he said, “whether or not he carries a card. Whoever was arrested was detained for a good reason.”
“You know that’s bullshit,” I said.
“All this tree-hugging is turning you into a sentimentalist,” Akbari said. “It doesn’t suit you.” He slapped my cheek. “Get it together, Hamid. You’re better than this.”
“What’s wrong with this?”
He got up and straightened his puffer, which was a size too large. “What are you going to live on, your flowers?”
“There is no shame in that,” I said. “My uncle…”
“Listen, Hamid. Some people create and others destroy,” he said. “That’s the way of the universe. With all your so-called erudition, you haven’t understood this yet? You and I are among the destroyers. Stop trying to negate it, you’ll only make yourself more miserable.” He put on his shades. “So long, brother,” he said.
37
AS I RODE THE MOTORCYCLE words looped in my mind. Noushin, I’ve been making changes. I’ve quit the job. I’m taking horticulture classes. Don’t laugh, but I am becoming a gardener. Please give me another chance.
The sun was blinding, and as usual I’d forgotten my sunglasses. I struggled to keep my eyes open but in the harsh light tears started
falling.
“You…” was all she could bring herself to say when she opened the door. She was in a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. “You’re so thin…” she added.
“I’m sorry to show up unexpectedly,” I said. “Can I come in?”
She sighed but stepped aside.
The first thing I noticed when I entered was Golnaz’s purple barrette on the coffee table. And a doll on the floor.
“She’s at school,” Noushin said. “And my mother is out for groceries.”
She sat on the sofa facing me, crossed her legs, then leaned back. “Well?” she said.
As I tried to retrieve my prepared speech I couldn’t help staring at her bare legs. How many times had I kissed those kneecaps, which now seemed unknown to me, as though they belonged to a woman I had just met? I diverted my eyes and tried to concentrate. I’ve been making some changes, I rehearsed in my head, as I had done the night before in bed and that morning in the shower. But somehow the rest of the words had deserted me.
“Do you want tea?” she said. “Or lunch, maybe?”
I had no intention to linger; her mother was bound to return at any moment. “I’ve been making some changes,” I said.
“Oh?” she said, standing up.
My faintheartedness disturbed me; for decades, my entire adult life, I had been the one before whom people scrambled to remember prepared speeches. What was happening to me? I cleared my throat. “I’m asking you to come back,” I said.
She tightened the bathrobe sash around her waist.
I told her of my foray into horticulture and the garden I had planted in the backyard, and of how the neighbors were assembling there nightly. Naturally I didn’t say how, late into the night, people sometimes got rowdy or melancholic or belligerent, how their voices traveled up to my bedroom, aggravating my sleeplessness. To inject reality into my creation would be to strip it of its wonder.
“So you’ve become Chance the gardener,” she said, laughing.
“I suppose so,” I said. “But in reverse! I’ve gone from government insider to gardener.”
As we laughed together I sensed the distance between us beginning to fill. But soon she added, “You sound like a deposed dictator promising reforms. It’s too late, Hamid.”
“It can’t be too late,” I said. “Are you still in love with that artist friend of yours?”
“That’s over,” she said.
“Then why haven’t you come home?”
“I didn’t leave you to be with Bahman,” she said. “I was with him just so I could leave you.”
“You succeeded. Now come back.”
“We’ll see,” she said as she ushered me out, as cagey as the clerks she contended with at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON I RODE to the cemetery to visit Uncle Majid’s grave, something I hadn’t done in years. In the decades since his death the cemetery had filled up nearly to capacity, causing administrators to stretch its boundaries and offer multitiered plots. I avoided the crammed martyrs’ section, dedicated to those fallen in war and combat, and with the help of my mobile phone and the cemetery’s Bluetooth system, I was able to locate my uncle’s grave.
I tiptoed through the maze of tombstones. A dry winter wind shook the branches of the pine trees, carrying with it a faint smell of tar. Several funerals were taking place at the same time and I avoided these as discreetly as I could. I walked on until I found Uncle Majid’s grave, visible through dust and a pile of rotting leaves. I dispersed the leaves, wiped the grave with my winter scarf, and sat on the ground next to my uncle’s grave, knowing that it was empty but for the scattered bones of a foot. I was sorry for the way he died, and the way he lived. I was sorry for his loneliness.
From a parked car outside the cemetery walls came the sound of a lone setār, the wistful notes of the stringed instrument puncturing my heart with a cleft of light; it was, I thought, a recording of Ostad Ahmad Ebadi, among my father’s favorites. I looked at the two empty plots next to my uncle’s, purchased decades earlier by my father for himself and my mother. For the first time since their departure I remembered my parents not as my adversaries, but as human beings with whom I had, once upon a time, shared a home.
38
WE FOUND A WAY BACK TO EACH OTHER, Noushin and I. Or so it seemed during the first months after she returned. In the carapace of the apartment, we held on all winter, suppressing vicissitudes with sleeping pills and poetry. Modest gardening commissions came from acquaintances, and as the first breezes of March thawed the earth, I believed that I was, at last, finding my way out of my past.
Frequently newspapers featured articles about Akbari’s work at the foundation in Mashhad—a new hospital, a refurbished school, more housing for the poor. What no one wrote about were the accompanying photographs and the gradual shifting of his appearance—manicured nails, tasseled suede loafers, Rolex watch. Next to him in these images stood the foundation’s custodian, a cleric whose religious credentials were as mutable as Akbari’s veneer: though for years he had claimed on his website to be an ayatollah, he had downgraded himself to hojatoleslam after the press had begun poking at his seminary records and his mysteriously absent theological theses.
I remembered a trip to Mashhad with Akbari some four years earlier. We had gone to visit his youngest brother, Mohsen—the last of ten children—enrolled at the famed seminary the Mashhad hawza. Akbari claimed to barely know his brother; the boy, he said, was still in diapers by the time he had left home at twenty. But he remained fond of Mohsen, because he found him unblemished and earnest, and therefore, he added—amusing.
We met Mohsen at a restaurant near the Imam Reza shrine, drowned by the sound of cranes and drilling at a construction site nearby. Throughout the meal Akbari, who had had a few months of seminary training after the revolution, teased his brother, whom he called the Theologian, on his research for a senior cleric who was writing a book on gender justice in religious law. “All teachings,” Mohsen said defensively, “have as many interpretations as there are interpreters. You could have a patriarchal interpretation, a humanist one, a feminist one…” Akbari pinched Mohsen’s cheek as he used to do with me. “Feminist interpretation?” he said, laughing.
Afterward we attended nocturnal prayers at the shrine, where we sat on red carpets in the majestic courtyard under a cool October moon, surrounded by thousands of pilgrims, the lights of the blue dome and the minarets glinting in the night sky. When the prayers concluded around two in the morning, scores of volunteers emerged with their brooms, sweeping in tandem like Viennese waltzers. I shut my eyes, remembering that Attar himself had walked these very courtyards in the twelfth century, and sensing Akbari’s body next to me—the pungent scent of his Davidoff cologne mixed with his sweaty socks, I felt a strange sadness over the cohabitation, in a single city, of so much beauty and so much deceit.
Now, settled in my refurbished life as gardener and family man, I encountered Akbari’s photographs in the newspapers with the equanimity of a retired hunting dog.
* * *
“A GALLERY IN NEW YORK has offered me a show,” Noushin said one morning in June as we sat at the breakfast table, between us bread and jam.
“All of a sudden?” I said.
“No … I’ve been talking to them for some time.” She crushed a lavender flower in her hand and brought her palm to her nose.
Dread had already flared up inside me. I sensed her announcement as a harbinger of doom.
“You don’t seem pleased,” she said.
“I am,” I said. “Congratulations.” The sound of my knife scraping butter on bread slowed down time.
“There is one thing,” she said, twirling her teaspoon now. “They want my Interrogator Series.”
“Your Interrogator Series? You mean the photographs of me?”
“Yes, those,” she said.
I had read somewhere that during the reign of Henry the Eighth the punishment fo
r a toilet cleaner who had dumped filth on the street was to stand knee-deep in one of his own buckets of shit, wearing a headdress declaring his crime. Noushin’s announcement struck me as similar—a postmodern pillorying.
“You can’t,” I said. “Give them something else. You have so many other series. The one of the Tehran metro, for example. The one about street art, or the one about the destruction of old houses and the rise of skyscrapers.”
“I’ve proposed all of them. The Interrogator is what they want.”
“Of course it is.”
“I knew you would react like this,” she said. “But why do you care? It’s in New York City, the other side of the earth. And the gallery is obscure. How many people do you think will see it?”
“If you make someone stand naked in a public square, it doesn’t matter if one person sees him or one thousand. It doesn’t even matter if no one comes. It’s the act itself that counts.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I must do this. It could be my big break.”
“I won’t allow it,” I said.
“You won’t allow it? They are my photographs.”
“They are my photographs!” I said.
“You are mistaken,” she said. “They are photographs of you. But they are my creation and they belong to me.”
She left the table, dumping the lavender in her teacup.
* * *
IN A CAFÉ that afternoon I sat with a newspaper I didn’t read. Around me swirled gossip, soccer scores, politics, philosophy, the folding and unfolding of love affairs. Before me was a glass of freshly brewed tea with a mint leaf inside, reminding me once more of H. You may try to put me out of sight, but you will see me every time you bring a glass of tea to your mouth, because I will be right there, sitting across from you, a face you will be unable to get rid of. For the rest of your days, aghaye Mozaffarian, you will be having a discourse with me.
Now, twenty-seven years later, my reply to H. formed itself in my mind: You could say that we are like the Greek symbolon, a single coin broken in half—a witness to an exchange.