by Dalia Sofer
39
HOW EASILY THEY FIT INTO MY BACKPACK, her prints and the electronic drive! An incorrigible Luddite, Noushin had, over the years, delegated to me the task of backing up her work. That night, as she slept, her mobile phone lighting up with texts from Bahman Borumand—the bastard I should not have saved—I slipped out of the house with the backpack, and rode to my old office, where a shredder sat, ready for its one task.
Though my pass had long expired, the guards recognized me and let me through. The old grooves turned in the keyhole of my office door, and I was back, the desk nearly as I had left it; with the exception of seven model airplanes, all replicas of the Mirage F-1. My replacement was clearly war-obsessed.
I sat in my old Star Trek chair. Here I was again, Capitān Kir. I unzipped the bag and pulled out the hard drive, crushing it with a rolling pin I had brought for the occasion. Then I slipped the print photographs into the shredder’s mouth, one by one, and I watched, with relief and fear, as slivers of my black-and-white self rained down in the bin.
The next morning, Noushin left me. This time for good.
PART THREE
40
“AGHAYE MOZAFFARIAN, you, of all people?” the interrogator said.
The window blinds of his office, drawn all the way, blocked out the afternoon sun. I recognized his face but couldn’t immediately place him. Soon it came to me. I used to see him jogging in Park-e Mellat on the weekends, back when I would take my daughter there to see the first tulips. He had renounced his Caesar haircut in favor of a classic taper.
“Let’s begin with your biography,” he said as he extended pen and paper. “You’re familiar with the routine.”
“You already know me,” I said, jetlagged from the long flight from New York.
“We know you in a different capacity,” he said. “In this capacity we are strangers.”
“That’s absurd,” I said. “I am the same man.”
The mint candy box sat between us. On the lid was a picture of a bow-tied penguin in a clean, white, minty world. Only then did I realize how stupid the box was.
“Don’t make this difficult,” he said. “You have pen and paper. I’ll leave you to it.”
I sat before the empty page, pen in hand. I wrote down my name, my address, the schools I had attended, my work history, my position at the Ministry, and the reason for my trip to New York. I didn’t mention Noushin and Golnaz—my interrogator already knew I had a family. I didn’t include the names of friends either; I had so few left. When I was done, I sat waiting, tapping the pen on the desk. The senselessness of my life echoed in the room, and I wondered how long my interrogator would leave me there; among the most basic tactics, I knew, was keeping the detainee in a chronic state of uncertainty.
He returned some thirty minutes later with a glass of water, which he placed before me. I thanked him and took a sip—it was tepid and tasted of leeched plastic.
He scanned my so-called biography then looked up. “How did you, of all people, stray in this way?”
“I am as fallible as any man,” I said.
“You have to do better than that.”
“How shall I explain?” I said. “My story must be put into context.”
“Just give me the story, plain and simple,” he said. “I have no patience for context. The security man reported that for the duration of the flight you fidgeted with your pocket, which, it turns out, contained this.” He pointed at the candy box. “Contraband?”
“Mints,” I said, attempting humor.
“Suffering from a dry mouth?”
“Let it go, sarkār.”
He opened the box, stared at it perplexed, and as he dipped his index finger in the ash and brought it up to his mouth, I almost let him. Let one man poison the other, I thought for a moment before I held back his hand. “For the love of God,” I said, “don’t taste it!”
“Contraband?” he said again.
“Yes, contraband,” I said. “But not the kind you think.”
“Well?”
“It’s my father,” I told him.
He stared at the bits of bone mixed with ash glinting under the yellow glare of the table lamp. “Your father?…”
“He wanted to be buried here,” I said. “I am merely a son honoring his father’s final wish. And it’s only a small portion of him.”
“Where is the rest?”
“The rest is exiled, in America,” I said.
* * *
HE LEFT ME ALONE again to seek further guidance—the matter was beyond his jurisdiction. I sat once more, taking inventory of the items on his desk. I was not sure what I hoped to find—a child’s photograph, a handwritten letter—but there was no such object. Other than a glass of tea gone cold, the only item on the desk was a mechanical clock.
The room was hot. Night fell as I waited, and my travel clothes, already wrinkled and sweaty, now clung to my skin. A moth fluttered by the lamp, restless. It made a hissing sound each time it got too close to the bulb. I shut my eyes but sleep would not come. Which was just as well. For some time Golnaz had been appearing in my dreams as a baby, night after night. In one dream, I forgot her in the luggage compartment of a train, in another I dropped her in a soapy bathtub and watched helplessly as she was sucked into the drain along with the dirty water.
Outside the interrogation room, dim voices approached and disappeared. No one came. I got up, feverish, and paced, circling around myself like the mosquitoes I used to trap in glass jars when I was a boy.
Around midnight the interrogator finally returned with a piece of paper. “I spoke with Hojatoleslam Karimi,” he said, and read the note: “Breaking a dead man’s bone is like breaking it when he is alive. Cremation is a great sin.”
“A sin isn’t necessarily a crime,” I said. “What does the law have to say about it?”
“Don’t play the fool,” he said. “As you know, there are two sets of laws. You can argue all that with the judge.”
“May I keep the box in the meantime?” I said.
“Keep it,” he said. “But if you scatter even a particle of that dust, things will end badly for you. We’ve weighed it, down to the last speck.”
* * *
ESCORTED THROUGH CORRIDORS more familiar to me than the lines etched into my palm, I was shoved into a cell, and put in solitary.
How many men had I sent to this room? How many had spent their final night on this very mattress? My own father, I nearly sent. When I shut my eyes, a memory came, of me and my father playing backgammon under the apricot tree in the garden. It was the summer after the revolution, the summer of idleness and waiting, the summer that would end in betrayal and exile. With his friends and associates dead or gone and his encyclopedia sitting untouched in his study—papers in a state of chaos he no longer knew how to contain—he seemed to have lost something essential, that martial confidence with which he had made sense of himself. He sat silent for hours, moonstone tasbih in hand, prayer beads bouncing in a loop, playing backgammon when I invited him to play. He neither lectured nor listened to the discourses of others. On a few occasions he said, “God knows what became of H.…” I wondered if his betrayal of his old friend and the convictions of his youth were tormenting him, and I interpreted his private torment as a communal victory, for the revolution and for myself.
* * *
BUT VICTORY IS as saccharine and short-lived as a stick of chewing gum. Once you grasped the workings of the new regime, you understood, as so many had before you, that to survive was to comply. What no one warned you was that while you were busy surviving, you were witnessing the exquisite power of your own indignation blazing through your fellow men. You asked yourself, Is this destruction truly my doing? When you saw that it was, you dropped your head in disgrace, but you also congratulated yourself, for having become the demiurge you always believed yourself to be. You had grown, at last, into your own mythology.
41
SOMEONE IN A NEARBY CELL cleared his throat every
few minutes. The mattress gave off a dank, putrid smell, of sweat and sorrow, dread and grief. That mine should be added to it seemed like poetic justice, a Dantean contrapasso. But I was not afraid, not in the classical sense. My fate within these walls did not preoccupy me; I had lived enough, and outlived even more.
What I did fear was a voice that began corroding the inside of my brain—my daughter’s voice. Three years had gone by since she had left, but the night of her departure haunted me like one of those dreams in which you show up, late, at your own funeral. How can I explain? To explain would in itself be an act of indecency. I will, therefore, only recount.
* * *
A WINTER NIGHT, unremarkable at first. Dinner preparations, the evening news, the rattling of windows against the February wind. Despite this normality, which veered, almost, toward dullness, I felt a foreboding I could not name. As Golnaz and I sat through dinner and ate our fesenjoon, and even later, as we watched television for the latest soccer scores, I knew something was not right. She carried her phone nervously, stroking it and glancing at it when she thought I wasn’t looking. “What’s going on, Golnaz?” I finally said. She blushed, as she used to when she was a child, that good-natured girl who would follow me around the house with a straw in her mouth to inhale my cigarette smoke, and would accompany me every morning to the bakery for our daily sangak bread. “What? Nothing,” she said. “Give me that phone,” I said.
She looked at me the way those star-crossed men had back in the old days. Terror. Sorrow. A supplication for mercy. Those looks made me feel like God, astaghforallah—may God forgive me.
“Give me that phone,” I said again as I walked over to her. She was slumped in the love seat in her jeans and frayed Coldplay T-shirt, the scalloped lace rim of her pink bra peeking from her low-cut neckline. Underneath her thick black hair—disheveled as usual—was a face that frightened me with its nascent female beauty. “Leave it, bābā,” she said, clutching her phone. “Please.”
It was that “please” that nearly did me in, the sweet invocation, so helpless and almost heartbreaking. But I was a veteran, by that point, a succession of pleases dotting my past like medals. I confiscated her phone the way I would wrestle an object from an opponent’s grip.
The phone was locked. “Your password,” I commanded against her stunned silence. She refused to comply. This, too, I was used to. And this much I had learned: most people comply, in the end. I only hoped to God she would make it easy.
If I had to name one memory from the moment my hand gripped her upper arm to the moment she revealed the password some ten minutes later, it would be the delicacy of her bones. Having rarely touched her since she was a child—except for occasional kisses on her forehead—I had forgotten that she had been, and still was, small-boned, almost elfin. This realization did not stop me from lifting her and laying her, facedown, on the sofa, pressing her body into the pillow, allowing her to come up for air every minute or so only to reconsider her refusal. In those final moments before she surrendered, as I held her down and watched her back heaving like her goldfish of yore, I began crying for the first time in decades but still could not let go. I remembered how I used to be afraid of embracing her when she was a baby, how I had known, even then, that I would one day break her.
* * *
FOR SOME TIME afterward she remained curled up on the sofa, taking deep breaths and mumbling to herself. Lacking the courage to face her, I went to bed, tears running from my eyes. Had I nearly suffocated my own daughter? And for what? Text exchanges with some boy, an adolescent crush gone sour. What else had I expected to find? As I lay in the dark, I heard her bedroom door creak open, and the sound of her catlike footsteps scurrying across the living room and out the door. I let my daughter slip out of my life, just like that.
42
FROM THE HALLWAY came the familiar voice of the warden distributing breakfast. That he should find me in this cell, waiting for his offering, embarrassed me. To preserve dignity I decided to refuse food; sustenance and sleep were necessities I had been known to do without, far longer than most. The footsteps approached and the rattling of metal echoed louder.
When the door was opened, I was surprised to see the Minister. “I talked them into letting you go,” he said.
“Just like that?” I said.
“You know this place much better than I do,” he said. “Anything is possible here, isn’t it?”
“And my father’s ashes?”
“You can take them with you, but don’t speak of it to anyone.”
“How can I thank you?” I said.
“Don’t,” he said. “But listen, Hamid, you can’t return to the Ministry.”
“I understand,” I said. “In any case, I think I am done.”
We hugged as the old friends we should have been, and the scent of his aftershave filled my nostrils. I wished him well for the rest of his term. “Do you think things will turn out all right, in the end?” I asked, and he said, “I think not, as the world is inclining toward darkness.” I put on my shoes, straightened myself up as best I could; if I hurried, I could still make it to the divorce hearing. “So why bother?” I said. “I mean all this effort, the diplomacy, the meetings with this or that official. For what, really?” The Minister stood for some time, his eyes examining the scribbling on the walls—fragments of prisoners’ writings which must have added up to some kind of narrative. “What else can we do,” he finally said, “but try to act, if only for the historical record?”
* * *
NOUSHIN LOOKED WELL. Her skin had a youthful glow and her black eyes were clear and luminous. Being away from me had done her much good.
“Haj-agha,” she said to the judge. “This is my fourth attempt to get a divorce from this man. It’s enough.”
“Why do you seek a divorce?” said the judge.
She sighed. “I’ve already explained so many times. I seek a divorce because he has devastation implanted in him, and he makes it impossible for anyone to love him. Haj-agha, this man is radioactive.”
“What have you to say?” the judge asked me.
Words had abandoned me.
“My daughter is waiting in the corridor,” Noushin continued. “If he denies his brutality once again, I ask that she be allowed to come in and testify. Haj-agha, he is a selfish creature, an evil character, he…”
“Khanoum,” the judge said. “This man is a respected official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Please watch your tongue.” He turned to me once more. “What have you to say for yourself?” he asked again.
“As of this morning I am no longer with the Ministry,” I said.
“Very well,” said the judge. “But that isn’t our concern at the moment. Please respond to the lady’s characterization of you.”
The lady’s characterization. How could I argue with it? Clutching the tin box in my pocket I thought again of my daughter, and the idea of facing her here, in this courtroom, hearing her account of that accursed night, was more than even I could bear. “Yes, Haj-agha,” I said. “Everything the lady says is true.”
The judge waited, as though offering me a chance to reconsider. “You seem unwell,” he finally said. “Perhaps you wish to reconvene?”
Noushin knew better than to contest verbally. She crossed and recrossed her legs, unable to find for herself a calming position. She was wearing marine-striped espadrilles. I remembered her fondness for marine stripes, emblems of the Mediterranean summer vacations that she believed we would one day take together. For so long she had wanted picnics at the beach with white sundresses and wicker hampers, but the reality was always the same—sweat, city soot, wrinkled headscarves, clammy thighs, disappointment, the countdown back to the fall, to another winter, cold and dreary, when she would start again to dream of the summer, believing somehow that this one would be different, that this one, against all odds, would be dipped in the perfect shade of Mediterranean blue.
“No need to reconvene, Haj-agha,” I said. “As I m
entioned, everything the lady says is true.”
Noushin looked at the judge, her face flushed and confused. She brought a cupped hand to her mouth and held it there.
“Fine,” the judge said. “Then the rest is merely paperwork.”
* * *
GOLNAZ WAS IN the corridor on a bench. No longer the elfin girl, she was seventeen years old, and she looked it. When she saw me her face changed, from defiance to alarm and back to defiance again. She looked away from me.
It occurred to me that never before had she seen me with a shaved head, and this must have further stunned her—this appearance of a tall bald-headed man, who was once known to her as her father. I walked toward her, my heartbeat heavy and irregular. “Golnaz,” I said as I stood over the bench. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t speak. Her hands were interlocked on her knees as though in prayer; her fingernails were painted hibiscus. Up close, she resembled her mother as I first knew her, and this was a strange thing, to be so confronted with the physicality of a past that was no more.
Noushin came out of the restroom and caught up with us. She was peaceful, like someone who has been offered shelter after years of wandering the earth. “I suppose this is it,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Goodbye,” she said softly. I remembered how once, when she was pregnant with Golnaz and we both lay sleepless in bed, I had turned to her and said, “So much sorrow…” She stared at me, her eyes full of a love I was incapable of reciprocating. “You mean so much sorrow in this world?” she said. “No,” I said. “I mean in this bed.”
I held her hand now for a fleeting moment, and she let me. “Goodbye,” I said.