by Dalia Sofer
To end with one of your own favorite expressions: bāz gardad be asleh khod har cheez—everything goes back to its origin.
Mostafa Akbari
47
I WOKE UP TO AN ORDINARY DAY. Kettle whistling, milk boiling. To say that what I had done offered me quietude would be a falsehood. But I did sense a correction in the alignment of my compass, and this felt like a compensation, however small. The recording was already fading into entropy. No matter. I had acted, for once, in deference to the future.
I stood before the sink, reached for the razor for the daily grooming ritual. But something propelled me to rummage through the bathroom vanity to find the shaving brush my parents had offered me on my eighteenth birthday, the last birthday we would be together. Declaring a truce for one night, we had had dinner at Café Naderi, then, at Omid’s request, had driven in my mother’s Fiat to Karaj for ice cream. My mother had sung in the car, an old Delkash tune, and my father had joined her with his untrained voice. The August night was heavy with their honeyed duet, the rosewater-saffron ice cream, and the scent of embarkations and farewells. We were, all of us, at our kindest, not wishing to undo the goodness that had so suddenly been born among us, a goodness that, like a queen of the night flower, would die by daybreak.
I removed the brush from its dusty packaging and held it under the faucet, warm water softening the bristles. I lathered it and brought it to my chin, the white badger hair against my skin a reminder of indulgences of times past. How different my life had turned out from the one my parents had wished for me at eighteen, the life of a man who would greet each day with a German-made black silvertip shaving brush, a man like my father.
The question of the ashes, I had yet to resolve. Now that I had them, I didn’t want to let them go. But I had promised my mother and Omid that I would scatter them. Where? The Caspian Sea? This struck me as hackneyed. The grounds of our old house would have been seemly, were it not for the fact that after I moved out the property was confiscated by a charitable foundation and was offered to a Basiji militiaman, whom I knew too well. What of the empty grave next to Uncle Majid’s, which my father had purchased for himself long ago? This last option seemed the most apt, but to bestow to the earth a handful of his ash in place of his body seemed wrong even to me.
* * *
MY PHONE BEEPED from the kitchen. I rinsed my face—I had cut my chin as usual—and hurried to it. I hadn’t heard from Golnaz since the tape’s release and had a premonition that the text was hers. It was. This is what she wrote in an attached letter:
I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t understand. On one of our walks you said, “The revolution was the expression of an impulse to create something new, not just a duplicate of Plato’s Republic, or the Magna Carta, or the French Revolution, or whatever else existed before. The revolution was a gesture toward self-realization, a manifestation of a people’s desire to honor itself.” This, I accept. But how does one account for what happened after?
Leave us now. We, your inheritors, don’t want to hear about your old revolution anymore. We want good friends, devoted lovers, nights of music, days of discourse and ideas. It’s life we want, and love … I’m sorry, bābā, for us both. Take care of yourself.
48
ON THE IDLING TRAIN TO TABRIZ a vendor walked in with a tray of sweets. I bought a walnut koloucheh, placed it on top of my cup of tea. Steam slowly softened the dough, and I took a bite. Butter, walnut, sugar, cardamom. A memory of my father’s writings being spirited away in the garbage bags circled my mind like a noose.
As the train pulled out of the station, a young man, breathless, walked into my compartment and placed his suitcase overhead. “I almost didn’t make it,” he said in a thick Azeri Turkish accent as he sat across from me. “My family would have been disappointed if I were to miss the celebrations.”
“Celebrations?” I said.
“Tomorrow is the winter solstice, shabeh yaldā,” he said. “Did you forget?”
I wanted to ask about his family but I was tired. The air was heavy with the smell of frying meat that wafted in through the half-open window. Somewhere on the platform, children were arguing.
* * *
IT HAD BEEN three months since I had put the ashes in my pocket. I had been to parks, the old bowling alley, the kiosk where my father bought his morning newspaper, and our family apartment, where I saw the current occupants, the Basiji with his wife and three children, the youngest still a baby, setting off together on some weekend excursion. I didn’t understand how a few grams of ash in a pocket could offer a man such condolence. But for the first time in decades, I felt accompanied, and safe.
I was headed to Tabriz because I wanted to see the Aladaglar Mountains, the presumed site of Uncle Majid’s demise, in the company of my father. When we reached Qazvin I walked to the dining car, propelled not by hunger but jitters. On the way I passed the diminutive tea vendor tucked into a compartment the size of a janitor’s closet. A tarnished samovar behind him, he was surrounded by tea, sugar cubes, and extra pillows and blankets. The old man appeared to have shrunk to accommodate the size of his room. I said hello as I passed, but he looked at me perplexed, his capacity for speech reduced to the necessities of a tea transaction.
In the dining car I shared a table with a mullah in a qabā eating chocolate pudding and playing a game on his smartphone, his fingers pounding the keypad. Every now and again he would say, “Damn, I died again…” Then he’d look up, take a breath, have a spoonful or two of pudding, and launch another game with redoubled resolve. I ordered a pomegranate soup, which arrived fast. It was the color of rotten cherries.
I looked out the window, at the docile cows, the pickle-green pastures of late fall, the sandstone houses, and the snowcapped mountain ranges of Qazvin becoming visible. My familiar aversion toward myself was matched at that moment only by my scorn for the world’s indifference to my actions. I pulled out the tin box and placed it on the table; the cleric was too engrossed in his game to notice.
Sadegh Mozaffarian—for this was my father’s name—the man I had failed to know. Son of Ahmad Mozaffarian, shift supervisor at the oil refinery in Abadan and census taker in Tehran, and of Nasrin Mozaffarian. I saw him as a newborn, his ill-timed arrival landing him in a raft teetering in contested waters, neither here nor there. And as a boy, running barefoot along the palm trees of the Karun, his birth certificate the only testament to his legitimacy as citizen and persona grata. Or later, as a young man in Tehran, wearing his first pinstriped suit and Oxford shoes, studying Caravaggio and Delacroix while listening to a recording of a lute, his favored musical instrument throughout his life. And later still, now husband and father, drinking Cointreau at some ministerial dinner, his monogrammed cigarette lighter kindling his Dunhills as he bequeathed to his fellow diners one of his famed monologues on the amaranthine history of art.
Here he is in Isfahan, where we traveled with Uncle Majid in my eighth year, at Ali Qapu, the portal to Safavid palaces. As we walk through the seventeenth-century edifice, where Shah Abbas received guests and dignitaries, my father falls into one of his homilies. Shah Abbas, he tells us when we reach the sixth floor, known as the Music Hall, that mightiest of the Safavid kings, in the process of uniting the country—politically, socially, economically, and religiously—also urged the artists of his day to create a uniform style, reflected in everything, from the tiles and murals that graced his palaces, to mosques and shrines and public squares, to carpets and textiles and book arts. As my father speaks, his voice amplified by the circular niches of the room, a crowd swells around us, tourists and locals passing through, all enthralled by the speech of the professor contextualizing for them a fragmented patrimony they are expected to make sense of. The more the crowd surges the more thespian my father becomes, and as he discourses on the expanded scale of ornamental motifs, say, the split-leaf palmette arabesque on the dome of the mosque of Sheikh Lotfollah, he seems to me clownish, a parody of himself. The apogee o
f his speech is the homage to Reza Abbasi, whose frescoes of rose-lipped, almond-eyed youths in rich textiles encircle us. These portraits, my father clarifies, were painted before the artist broke free of the court and evolved his own style, his subjects no longer the idealized youths of Safavid splendor but the everyman he encountered in the town square—the scribe, the horse groom, the pilgrim. The form of the paintings, my father continues, reflected the content, and vice versa. But by this point his audience is dwindling, and attention has shifted from art history to lunch. And we, captive family of the orator, hungry and silenced, linger with him in the deserted music room.
So the Safavids had created a narrative of themselves, and their art was designed to express this chimera. That is, after all, what humans have done since the beginning of known time, offering meaning to their existence where no meaning exists. Every dynasty, religion, government, tribe, generation, and family compiles a story of itself. Some succeed in fooling themselves and others about the authenticity of their tale, others falter. What I failed to see as I stood trapped in the Music Hall of Ali Qapu was that my father, too, as all men, had all along been constructing a chronicle of himself. He did this through the compilation of his encyclopedia, legitimizing his origins by turning himself into the lexicographer of our national heritage. Would he have succeeded, had I not ransacked his mythmaking? I, his son, who had undone him in a single act of biblioclasm, had not foreseen that annihilating his narrative would annihilate a part of my own.
* * *
BACK IN THE overheated train compartment my young roommate had already fallen asleep, beads of sweat on his brow. I draped my coat over the heater and opened the window, but its levers were loose and it kept closing. “It’s so hot I could cook an egg on my bald head,” I said to the old tea vendor as he made another round through the train. “Wait until we get to Zanjan,” he said. “Your bald head will be as stiff as a popsicle.”
In the heat, I, too, fell asleep and dreamed that I was young again. I was checking into a run-down hotel with H., somewhere by a sea, maybe it was Anzali. The clerk gave us two keys, but once upstairs we saw that the rooms assigned to us did not exist. We walked along the dark corridors, a lightbulb flickering on and off. H. put down his suitcase, and as he sat in the musty hallway he said, “Hamid, I’m very tired.” I said, “I know,” and sat down next to him. I held his hand, which was burning. I am holding H.’s hand, I thought in the dream. So he isn’t dead, after all, he is alive, he is here. Then he dissolved and I screamed, the way one screams in a dream, like a choking animal. When I opened my eyes the old tea vendor was holding a glass of water out to me.
As predicted, an icy wind swept through the compartment once we reached Zanjan. The train began its ascent, and the window banged open and shut, open and shut, heat and cold alternating, making us shiver. Suddenly, there it was, the tip of the rainbow mountain, which in my mind belonged to Uncle Majid. A “giant birthday cake,” as he had once called it. Look, bābā, I whispered to the tin box, we are here, together again with Majid. I shut my eyes and saw my father place a Märklin passenger car on a rail, oblivious of me, as was his way. But I didn’t mind his indifference, as I once had. I enjoyed watching him, and this, the knowledge that I could go on watching him for the rest of my days, consoled me. Remembering the seventeenth-century picture book my father had once offered me, I whispered the lines I had long ago memorized, The Memory, under the hinder part of the head, layeth up every thing and fetcheth them out: it loseth some, and this is forgetfulness.
At the Tabriz train station I said goodbye to my young companion, who had slept the entire trip, then bought a return ticket back on the night train. It was dawn in Tehran when I arrived, yet people were already shopping for the evening’s festivities. I found my motorcycle where I had parked it near the bazaar, and rode northward, craving air. But in the miasma of rush-hour traffic the day grew thick around me, turning each breath into something I had to think about. Bikes, mine included, snaked through cars with little regard for traffic lights. Pedestrians cursed at vehicles and at one another.
Uptown the air was cleaner, carrying within it a scent of oblivion. After breakfast I browsed the chic shops, postponing as long as I could the hour of my return to my ghostly home. In one shop I found flour sacks fashioned into designer pillows. “The rustic look,” the saleswoman said. In another shop, Swiss-themed, I considered dozens of watches but bought none. I did buy a cuckoo clock, maybe in memory of my mother and the Swiss boarding school of her romanticized girlhood, her edelweiss days at the Collège Beau Soleil in Villars-sur-Ollon, amid thermal baths and chalets overlooking Mont Blanc, just a short drive—as she liked to tell us—from the lakeside towns of Montreux, Vevey, and yes, Evian.
In one more café, instead of ordering the tea I had intended to drink, I asked for hot chocolate, the drink of my boyhood. Three women on the far edges of youth, smooth ponytails visible through sheer headscarves, sat at the café’s opposite end. With their bracelets jingling like wind chimes, they left lip-glossed stains on the rims of teacups that would soon be washed and refilled and offered to those who would come later in the day, and later still—a succession of washed-out kisses that would never meet.
* * *
BY THE TIME I left the café daylight was already dulling. A woman asked me for the time. “Almost five o’clock,” I said. She thanked me and walked away, but turned back. “Would you like to come with me?” she said. “An ensemble of young musicians is giving a concert in Parvaz Park for the winter solstice.” I thanked her and told her I could not attend, though by refusing the invitation I felt I was rejecting life. A grimace must have reflected my ambivalence. “Don’t worry,” she said, laughing. “It isn’t so serious, I assure you!”
As she walked away I surprised myself by calling after her. “I changed my mind,” I said. “I’ll join you.” We headed together to the park. She was fortyish, pretty. Angelic dimples and whimsical gray eyes. “Is that a bird in your bag?” she said. “A cuckoo clock,” I said. “How quaint,” she said. “You must be a romantic.” We entered the park in the half-light of dusk. “It’s possible that I once was,” I said.
The concert was under way when we arrived. An ensemble of five musicians with santoor, setar, kamancheh, ney, and daf. As I sat listening, music carrying me back to my own beginning, I felt myself a misplaced man. Were I, for instance, some forgotten hat, left behind in a train compartment, or a glove, dropped from a pocket of an unsuspecting traveler, I would no better understand my location in the world. But no matter. I was still here, after everything. I thought of that winter solstice of decades past, when I had sat for the last time with Minoo in the mirror shop.
A boy walked among the listeners, offering rosebud garlands for sale. I bought two, one for the woman and one for my daughter, though I knew that I would not be seeing Golnaz again. I placed one over the woman’s neck. She smiled, pleased with her decoration, then took the other garland from my hand and slipped it over my head.
“When I was a child in Khorramshahr during the war,” she said, “my parents and I would huddle next to the record player during the blackouts. Music would drown out the air raids. I don’t know why this memory came to me now.”
I gently kissed her forehead. “Everything will be all right,” I said, for lack of anything better.
The setar player was now riffing solo. The sound of his pear-shaped instrument vibrated in the winter night, convincing me, as nothing else had managed to do, to let my father go. I turned to my companion. “Excuse me,” I said. “But I must take care of something.”
She nodded and gave me a sweet dimpled smile. In a different time I would have tried to woo her. But I was too bone-weary for that.
I walked to the edge of the park. Below me, the outstretched city, lights flickering in the night. I remembered the city of sand Omid and I had once built on the beach in Babolsar, the dwellings, the date grove, the clay pit, and even the temple of Ishtar. I took out the tin box and opened i
t. My father’s ashes, like a flock of snowbirds, flew into the winter branches of a sycamore tree. Under my tired breath I said, Then I wept for seven days for the lost past with Enkidu, and for my future death surely so soon to come.
* * *
I RODE HOME, the rose garland around my neck shedding petals along the way. In the kitchen, as I poured myself a drink, my phone rang. It was Omid.
“There was an article in the paper this morning,” he said. “About that tape you released.”
I didn’t reply.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
“One right in a landslide of wrongs,” I said.
“Bābā would have been pleased,” he said.
“By the way,” I said. “Where did you scatter his ashes?”
“I couldn’t think of a place in America that had any particular meaning for him. In the end I poured them in one of the giant planters in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum.”
“Well done, brother! I also released the ashes tonight. In a park overlooking the city.”
“I think he would have liked that.”
“There was a concert for shabeh yaldā. An ensemble of young musicians.”
“It’s all theirs now,” Omid said.
“What about us?” I said.
“We are a skipped generation.”
Yes, we were a skipped generation, a hiccup in history. I held the phone and let myself feel our age—my brother’s and my own—not only in years, but in our increasing irrelevance.