by Dalia Sofer
43
IT WOULD BE TEMPTING, even for me, to interpret the absence of enmity during my final interaction with my wife and daughter as an indication of redemption for my character. After all, as the reformed sinner Saint Augustine, author of The Confessions—the first confessional book and as such the original autobiography—long ago contended, in order to write about the form of your life, you must first die, albeit symbolically. Only when born again through a process of conversion, argued the Doctor of Grace, are you able to make sense of your own story.
Centuries later the Florentine Dante Alighieri reincarnated the autobiography with a twist: instead of a conversion there would be a divine encounter, carrying the narrator from Inferno to Purgatory to Paradise, a full circle that would begin in ignorance and end in knowledge. The point is that in the autobiography there is a time-honored tradition of redemption and repentance, which is a concept dear to all: towbeh for Muslims, teshuvah for Jews, penance for Christians—who doesn’t appreciate a good metamorphosis story, a passage from wickedness to virtue? Even the contemporary secular tale, say, of the disillusioned drunk or the wayward hustler, hasn’t escaped this familiar trajectory, of darkness to light, anguish to liberation.
But I, Hamid Mozaffarian, despite my fondness for redemptive tales, had no such conversion. For those who live their lives through narratives of improvement, this may be a disappointment, perhaps even a betrayal. Still, I am not entirely arc-less. If what prompted the change in my behavior fell short of repentance, it was nonetheless a final acknowledgment of who I was, and a longing to shelter others from what I was capable of. My improvement, if you can call it that, lay not in an actual betterment of my character, but in the absolute acceptance of what the world had made of me, and of what I had made of it.
* * *
BUT AS I MENTIONED, the temptation for hopeful interpretation is a powerful elixir, and my daughter was among those who initially succumbed to it. One week after our encounter in the courthouse she sent me a letter, handwritten in a careful script.
Bābā,
For the first fourteen years of my life, I tiptoed past you. I skulked in the darkness of your sleepless nights, the infinite depths of your whiskey, the silence of your taciturn past. I was a makeshift child, in exile long even before my birth. When I left, on that cold morning in February, in a stranger’s unheated taxi, the road signs dim in the fog, I knew that from that moment on all signs would direct me away from home, from you.
Seeing you at the courthouse the other day unleashed something in me.
I don’t know where we can go from here, or if.
But I would like to find out. In two weeks I will be performing in a play at a small underground theater. (It seems I have a knack for acting.) I am inviting you to come. Details will follow.
Golnaz
44
INVITING ME TO AN “underground theater” was, I understood, my daughter’s reaction to my metamorphosis: underground meant illegal, and as such was not approved by the censors at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Was she daring me?
We gathered in an old bathhouse turned playhouse—two dozen spectators crammed along the brick corridors. Noushin, too, was there. She nodded at me coolly; this was no reconciliation. I sat in a corner, removed from the others, most of whom were university students.
The play, titled “Six Ministers in Search of a Government,” recounted the story of six actors who survive the crash of a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft carrying the entire troupe of a theater ensemble. The five men and one woman—my daughter—who had been on their way to a festival to perform their roles as six ministers in a cabinet, now find themselves in a strange land, where the population lives harmoniously and where a rotating panel of advisers administers the affairs of the state. The actors introduce themselves: the Minister of Happiness, the Minister of Loneliness, the Minister of Morality, the Minister of Privacy, the Minister of Authenticity, and the Minister of Fury, this last one played by Golnaz. They explain that as they have no identity other than their assigned ministerial roles, they must, in order to live, find a government to serve in. The attendants of the unnamed state reluctantly agree to let them form a cabinet and to dispense nonbinding recommendations. Over time, as the ministers’ counsel seeps into the citizens’ lives, the ad hoc cabinet begins to contradict the laws of the state, until no one—the six ministers included—knows whom to believe.
I watched my daughter—the Minister of Fury—managing rage onstage by offering the people farcical concessions—permission to laugh before sunrise, permission to sing in the shower, permission to pick one’s nose between the hours of nine in the evening and midnight. Her face was red from all the collective fury she could not contain, the smudged eyeliner on her lower lids leaving the appearance of faint bruises below her eyes, making her look sleepless or injured. As I watched her, an image of her as a baby in her bassinet appeared before me. Spring. Lilacs. White curtains quivering in the hospital room. It occurred to me that I would miss her more than anyone after I was dead, but soon I grasped the absurdity of this thought. Despite all my years on this earth, I was not cured of my solipsism.
* * *
AFTERWARD, AS HER FRIENDS surrounded her, praising her performance, I stood aside, waiting. She glanced at me from time to time, her eyes black and full of anger, but something else, too—a longing. She reminded me of myself at the Campbell’s soup party, all those decades ago, when I had lashed out at my father and Yasser about the government’s corruption.
Noushin whispered something in Golnaz’s ear and walked out. Was I to stand there all evening, waiting for my daughter to make time for me? I waved at her from a distance and headed toward the exit.
Footsteps followed me. I turned around.
“You aren’t going to talk to me?” she said.
“You seem very busy,” I said.
“Busy?” she said. “I was just chatting with friends. What did you think of the play?”
“It was a fine Pirandellian attempt.”
“That’s all you have to say about it?”
“What else would you have me say? You’ve been giving me black looks all evening. Or just ignoring me.”
“What did you expect? A red carpet?”
“Look, Golnaz,” I said. “I am no fool. I know what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“You are full of rage, and you need me to witness it. I lived a version of this with my own father.”
It was there, in an unlit corner of the theater, that my daughter fell to her knees, her voice breaking under the ochre brick vaults of the old bathhouse. Curled up on the tile floor, her silent, convulsing body became smaller, shrinking into itself. I stood for some time, unsure of what to do, watching her and surveying the exit. But something—maybe my father’s ashes, which I had been carrying wherever I went, or just exhaustion, an inability to keep on running—made me kneel beside her. I held her and brought her head to my chest, a forgotten gesture. I remembered how once, after her mother was gone, as she had sat at the kitchen table crafting a paper menagerie for her art class, she had intentionally pricked her forearm with the scissors and watched with fascination as blood surfaced from her skin. As I confiscated the scissors and yelled at her never to do that again, she—transfixed by the immediacy of her own mortality—smiled with something close to delight.
I held on to her now, more so for myself than for her. She smelled, as she had when she was a child, of powder and honey, vanilla and salt. She would not let go.
45
TEN—THAT’S THE NUMBER OF TIMES I saw Golnaz after our encounter in the old bathhouse. We had tea twice, took walks in Laleh Park four times, met for dinner three times, rode once on my motorbike to Tajrish, where we ate steamed beets and chargrilled corn. On our final encounter we browsed a bookshop (she bought a translation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and I bought nothing), then devised our way out of a makeshift quarantine with three other players at the Tehra
n Escape Room near Mostafa Khomeini Street, formerly known as Cyrus Street. I had assumed, given the nature of the game, that I would be the one to excel at it, but it was she who ended up unraveling most of the clues and deciphering the codes for our escape. “Never assume,” she advised our team, “that a watch is a watch or a pen a pen. In this universe nothing is what it seems.”
Our meetings were at first cordial affairs, nearly balletic in their decorum and restraint, but on the afternoon we rode to Tajrish she began to disclose more of herself, her circumspection giving way to undeserved trust. This pattern was not unfamiliar to me: I had long discovered that those who had lived their lives with caution often became reckless during interrogation. To protect her I tried, on multiple occasions, to steer her back to herself, to shelter her from forsaking words that she could not retrieve once spoken. But she viewed any such attempt on my part as a negation of who she was, which she equated to another form of assault.
For some time after leaving home, she said, she became obsessed with the Rubik’s Cube she had found in the drawer of our living room console and taken with her to her mother’s. “That cube,” I said, “helped me pass many hours at the job … back in the old days, you understand, when every now and again we would have downtime…”
We had left the bazaar and were walking toward the square, the snowcapped Alborz Mountains visible in the distance. “I understand,” she said. “Did you ever solve it?” I remembered how, whenever I could not bring myself to read one more dossier or walk into one more interrogation room, I would pull out the cube and rotate the columns, the endless combinations driving me into a trance that contained neither man nor file, only colored blocks, spinning, spinning, spinning. “I solved it just once,” I said. “In those days the advertisement claimed there were three billion configurations and only one solution. But it turns out there are multiple solutions … And you? Did you solve it?” She laughed. “Once I had solved it I could not unsolve it,” she said. “Which frustrated me. Because I wanted to go back to a state of not knowing, when anything was still possible.”
It was on the afternoon when we went to the bookshop and later to the Escape Room that we had our most intimate, and, as it turned out—final—conversation. “I took something else from your desk drawer the night I left,” she said as we walked along the edges of the old Oudlajan neighborhood. “Your notebook of drawings from high school. You had a character named Everyman Jamshid that was on nearly every page. He made me laugh—there was something so pensive yet sweet and earnest about him, with his sideburns and upturned collar and cigarette. And there were so many other drawings besides: caricatures of army generals as pigs, and garish kings trapped on Ferris wheels. And one that I liked in particular: a dandy riding a donkey, wearing house slippers with the image of Cyrus the Great woven into them. I could not believe that you were the creator of these images, that a man such as you had once upon a time been capable of humor.” She placed her hand on my arm—it was the first time, since “the incident” as she called it, that she had initiated any physical contact between us. “Did you miss the notebook?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t even notice it was gone.”
She was silent for some time. “That’s what’s absent nowadays,” she said. “Humor, and lightness.”
“How do you retrieve humor, and lightness?” I said.
“I think,” she said, “that they only come once you have traveled a sufficient distance from your own grief.”
“How far is sufficient?” I said.
“Farther than you’ll ever travel again,” she said.
“Do you remember the puppet shows I used to perform for you and your mother?” I asked. “Maybe you were too young, and have no recollection.”
“I have vague memories,” she said. “Flashes of the puppets and their squeaky voices and all of us laughing. But maybe this isn’t my own memory, but an echo of Mom’s recollections, because she never tires of speaking about that period, of the nightly plays and the familial laughter. ‘Back then,’ she always says, as though to appease herself for her lost years, ‘we were truly happy.’ But maybe she is right, maybe we were truly happy. Maybe that was the last time you allowed lightness to live through you. I wonder if it can happen like this, that grace can just take leave of a person one afternoon…”
I said nothing. Her indictment of me was brutal yet just.
“I did find the puppets,” she continued, “in that same drawer from which I took the Rubik’s Cube and the notebook. There was a bald one with a T-shirt that read Pahlevan Kachal…”
“Oh yes,” I said. “He was my favorite—the protagonist of most of the plays. The bald hero who saved the day. It’s too bad you don’t remember.”
“Well, here you are, so many years later,” she said. “You’ve turned into Pahlevan Kachal, except you didn’t manage to save the day, did you?”
“Golnaz,” I said. “Do you think you will ever forgive me?”
“Forgiveness isn’t the point,” she said. “The best I can do is try to understand. But I am not sure I am able to.”
Night was falling. A clean, black winter sky masked the day’s pollution. “When I was young,” I said, “after my family left, I slept on the roof whenever I could. The stars in their multitude comforted me when I felt very alone. I believed that we were all connected, somehow, in our separateness.”
“The problem with your generation,” she said, “is that it suffered too much and inflicted too much suffering. There isn’t any way for us to undo that history. We are all trapped inside it.”
* * *
I COULD NOT HAVE KNOWN, as we said goodbye by the metro station, that this would be the last time I would see her. In fact, we had made plans to meet the following Thursday for a movie. But as she descended the stairs and disappeared underground—she was on her way to meet friends for dinner—I was besieged by a restlessness I hadn’t felt since our reconciliation had begun.
46
WHEN I GOT HOME a rotten taste swam on my tongue, vanishing after a glass of water but soon resurfacing from deep within my throat. I grabbed some cheese and a loaf of bread and sat at the kitchen table by the open window. I ate voraciously, satisfying a cavernous hunger. The night whirled around me. I had pain all over, pain I could not explain, in my back, along my calves, in my bones, even in my groin. Heartache swells in the body, like lost time. Someone in the apartment upstairs was again rearranging furniture. The ceiling rumbled with the vibration of tables and chairs being dragged back and forth.
Before me I saw H., his keen eyes, his goatee, and his grit. Of the countless men and women who had over the years sat before me, his was the last human face I remembered. Those who followed had transformed, over time, into a faceless composite, reduced to nothing but colors and forms. If H. had lived in me as a painting by Goya, the others added up to a Rothko, as a mirror held up to my very marrow.
I knew what I had to do. I knew it because I had used up all other possibilities. It was time for the past—that black decade that began after our revolution and culminated in the summer of 1988—to infiltrate the future. In the console drawer, where I had kept the Rubik’s Cube and the old notebook and the puppets, was the recording of the Cat admonishing us. I was going to release the tape, even though I was well aware that the release would make no imprint, as those involved, chief among them Akbari, would deny the past with a shrug, as they had all along. And the population, riveted for a day or two, would soon let the matter slip back into the blackout from which it emerged. You could not call it oblivion, because in order to forget one first has to remember. And we, inheritors of an unclaimed past, could not be faulted for misremembering when denial was our primary language.
But what of Golnaz? No doubt after hearing the recording she would refuse to speak to me. She had already overstretched her heart; to stretch it any further would cause a rupture. Yet it was my last conversation with her that had triggered in me a desire to release the tape, to act, i
n the words of the Minister, if for nothing else than the historical record.
I had the recording converted to an electronic file the next day. Later, at my computer, as I reviewed the e-mail I had prepared for a dozen newspaper editors—reading and rereading it, the audio file attached as an ampersand—I felt incapable of pressing Send. Was my impulse to act for the sake of archival testimony worth the loss of my relationship with my daughter? But if, as she had concluded, the suffering that my generation had borne and inflicted could not be undone, then should we not, at the very least, offer our progeny this smallest of courtesies: the truth? What else was left for me, other than bearing witness?
* * *
THE TAPE’S RELEASE, as I had predicted, caused a minor uproar, followed by uniform disavowal. No crime could stick, because the fortress had been built in Teflon. On the third day after the news broke, I received a letter from Akbari:
As I said long ago, from the moment I met you, I knew you would falter. Well, you’ve done it at last. This time for real. Mobārak—congratulations!
Instinct dictated that I retaliate against you. But I reconsidered, not for charity (as you well know), but because your grand attempt at righteousness is inconsequential, not only here, but everywhere. This, my brother, is the reason: the world—that very world that for decades condemned us for our actions and denials—is now outranking us in both cruelty and duplicity. Look around you. From the Americas to the Caucasus, the world is draped in malice. Massacres, migrations, the exodus of people and their dignity—no one gives a damn! And in a great sea of darkness, what chance is there for the little goldfish that wanted to prove the possibility for justice?
If I were a man prone to sentimentality, I would have harbored resentment over your betrayal of our friendship. But sentimentality is not my trade. And if anyone is at fault, perhaps it is I, as you showed me your true colors early on. Didn’t our friendship, after all, begin with betrayal on the day you invited me to liquidate your father’s encyclopedia?