Contents
Preface
My Part of Her
Notes
About the Author, Translator and Introducer
Preface
“Why was this country handed over to mullahs? In exchange for what? No one knows… Because, starting in 1979, they have been far less free, their lives more difficult than before.”
In the ’80s, when I was a girl, my family drove to the Caspian Sea on holiday. We rented a villa and visited the mountain villages. We gawked at Western toilets, slept under mosquito nets outside, grilled corn in the garden. We waded into the sea, the men on one side, women on the other, fully clothed. I heard my parents whispering stories of the seaside before… Women in bikinis, their black hair inking the water, couples eating smoked fish and flirting on the sand. I heard about an Iran that no longer exists, and I sensed the specter of a coming-of-age that I would never live for myself. The youthful explorations of my parents’ generation, on beaches and in villa sheds and in crevices of the mountain, was a birthright yanked away over two summers in 1978 and 1979, when those same students and hot-blooded activists made an astonishing error.
It has been a jagged stone in their hearts, a collective regret, for forty years.
Like many his age, the narrator of Javad Djavahery’s novel My Part of Her is tortured by his own complicity. At times he tries to explain it away. “The masses are desperately shortsighted and endowed with a reptilian memory,” he says. “The proof is that for two hundred years, at each major turn of history, they always make the worst choices.”
But his torment isn’t just about an ill-fated plot to free the country from imperialism and Western plunder (goals that even the most mournful of the revolutionary generation don’t disavow), but about a lifetime spent in self-preservation, betrayal, hubris, and cowardice. As a boy, he despises his kind-hearted, soft-spoken parents for their deference to the educated and the rich. At the same time, he is ashamed by their working-class trappings, the good halva and the well-washed rug. He sees himself as activist, scholar, Svengali to a circle that, over time, widens to include underground communists and revolutionaries.
Broken by his own most human instincts, he takes solace in books, and in the memory of Nilou, his mother’s first cousin, after whom he lusts with the egoism and self-loathing of a child, peddling her trinkets and underthings to fellow village boys. Nilou’s family escapes to the narrator’s Caspian village each summer, and though he claims to love her, she is only a symbol of his class struggle and of the secrets of adulthood. She is something to possess and brandish about. He boasts when he is allowed into her bedroom, when she confides in him, when she allows him into her mind via the books he brings to her.
He is despicable and yet he has come to understand something vitally important—and he imparts his wisdom in a vitally important way.
In my work with asylum seekers I learned that their biggest hurdle is to be believed, first in asylum interviews, then in every future interaction with the Western-born. The trouble is that, to be believed, they must tell their stories differently. One asylum lawyer told me that Iranians start every story at the beginning of the universe.
And so, I chuckled when Djavahery opened like every grandfather and great-aunt and toothless uncle I’ve known:
“I have to start from the beginning and things often start much earlier than we think. Let me tell you a bit more about the Caspian Sea… ”
For me, the choice is defiant, and assurance that what’s coming is a true story, told in a true way, in an Iranian way. There will be no kowtowing to the Western reader in these pages. There is no room for that gaze, because this is a story about our part in Iran’s undoing. It is a collective reckoning with ourselves, with our part of her—the monster we created.
Given that, Djavahery’s artistic choices move me. His confessor’s voice, situated decades later from somewhere in the West, harkens back to an old Iranian style of storytelling. The story is told to a specific person we never see, for an unstated and devastating reason we somehow understand. The unnamed narrator himself isn’t a realized character so much as the universal “writer,” a voice of reason, caution, experience, and shame (that very Iranian sentiment). We might even think of him as “Javad” without presuming autobiography. And then there are the archetypes: the broken boy who returns a villain; the unsullied beauty capable only of good.
A Western critic unfamiliar with our storytelling will dismiss these as unrefined—they are deliberate and, in a story shrouded in regret and altered by deep memory, powerfully true.
Djavahery is a screenwriter, and his descriptions are precise and cinematic. He describes village roads in pre-revolutionary north, the young loitering “on the fenders, on the hood, sometimes even on the roof… It was summer, it was night, the hajji at the wheel already had a few glasses of arak in his blood. Everyone was swimming in happiness. The roads were bumpy. The cars drove slowly. The gleam of their headlights… illuminated in the darkness the face of your sweetheart, her silhouette, and maybe more… ”
Though I was transported to the kind of summers that I missed, I wasn’t allowed to linger, for Djavahery never fails to remind us of the catastrophe to come. “Who could have believed that the majority of those Don Juans of the summer, those youths full of promise united around a fire, writhing with laughter, telling salacious stories, quarreling for a yes or a no, showing their muscles… were destined for the worst suffering, for horrific deaths? That many of them would return in wooden boxes… That the sand would be stained with their blood, for executions would take place on the beach itself, in the calm of the morning.”
And yet Djavahery hints at a horror beyond the loss of life. Something bigger has been struck down and buried. The sea, once an invitation to boundless freedom, a passage to other lands, has become a public hammam, a place of “entertainment without pleasure,” without the night strolls, the bonfires, the prowling boys and joyous swimmers. The people who inhabit it are a different species. They are undead. “People who settled for the sea mutilated in this way. Summer vacationers like we had never seen before. Who were they?… These women who were bathing fully dressed, these men who were strolling in exclusively male groups. Not shaved, with extra-long bathing trunks.”
Djavahery is unsparing in his condemnation. None of this was inevitable. This repression, the annihilation of joy, youth, and love isn’t an outgrowth of misplaced idealism. It was a collective human failure, an entire country destroyed by revenge—“of the past on the future… The revenge of the peasants on the city-dwellers. And we, with our complicity, were only feeding the monster that was growing in the shadows, secretly multiplying.”
Even so, the story ends on a seaside, in a moment brimming with hope, at the moment of one heart’s triumph over a whole lot of human stupidity. It is a confession and a prayer, an ode to bygone days, a love letter to joy and sex and youth, a warning to the young, a thrilling memory of old Iran. Djavahery reminds us that men and women are destined toward ruin but also toward each other, that we must take care, as “the domain of evil is far vaster than that of good. Much more complex, much deeper.”
—Dina Nayeri
My Part
of Her
I saw it on the waterline, between the sky and the sea. You know, that fine line of foam in the morning, when it’s calm, that separates the milky sky from the pale blue of the water. Oh, that blue! I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. I don’t know if it exists anywhere else. It’s a very specific blue that the Caspian reveals, on certain days, at dawn.
Barely visible, it seemed to be drifting out to sea, like an abandoned object, at an unknown distance, maybe one hundred, maybe two hundred yards away, difficult to tell in the tumult of the sea. It
wasn’t a lure caught in a drifting net, carried by the current, nor the back of a sturgeon come to enjoy the heat of the morning sun, nor a gray seal from Russia. No, the fishing boats didn’t go that far out, and fish never remained for very long at the surface; as for seals, it wasn’t the season.
I had it in my sights, and I wouldn’t have let it go for anything in the world. It was morning, and I was swimming in the sea, joyful, drunk on my youth. To swim out far from the shore was a family tradition. Even a matter of local pride. We northerners love to brag about being good swimmers. The air was sweet, the weather seemed at rest. Almost completely still. As if that dawn would last forever. Not a hint of wind to disturb the silence. Just my breathing, the lapping of the water around my body, and in the distance the muffled hum of a world that I had left behind. But the sea was not calm. A sea never really is. A mysterious force continued to heave the millions of gallons of salt water up and down in a haunting motion, as regular as it was unpredictable. That force. I loved to feel it within me, near and frightening. I loved to play with it, graze it, all the while knowing that it could destroy everything if it pleased, in an instant. Everything. But not me, because I was a part of it. I was swimming, and the tranquil weather was only a facade, the hands of the universe continued to move. Suddenly, everything sped up, the solar disc broke free from the horizon, and its low rays covered the surface of the water, like thousands of stars, a wild spectacle, blinding, dazzling. During all this time, I had kept my eyes riveted to it. I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want it to disappear into the rise and fall of the swell. Between the ripples and the glistening stars. In the misleading distance of the sea. But I lost it. It disappeared, as though devoured by the water. I swam farther out: if it was somewhere, it had to be there, but there was nothing. Only water billowing over invisible hinges. Only the blue sky to infinity. Only my amplified solitude. I started to swim frantically. Chopping the waves with all my strength. I stopped, later, out of breath. I had surely gone out too far, I said to myself, and turned back. The sandy shore was almost invisible. I could scarcely make out, veiled in the morning haze, the top of the water tower. Then the sight of land was gone, leaving nothing around me but monotone horizons, shades of blue, as far as the eye could see. The black stain, the small blemish on the smooth skin of the water, had disappeared. Drowned, erased, as though deleted from the page of the sea, as if it had never existed. There was nothing for me to do but turn back around like on other mornings, return to the shore, empty-handed. But I didn’t. I continued to search the horizon. Something told me that it was there, within reach, that it would resurface, that I had to wait.
I let myself float in the serene gravity of the water, almost immobile, cradled by the sea, carried by the currents, waiting for time to pass, for the stars to disappear. Gradually the sun was draped in a series of clouds. The blue of the sea had turned darker, the light had softened, and I found it again. It wasn’t a thing that was drifting with the current, but a person swimming, someone rushing in a precise direction, toward the open ocean. Quickly I resumed my crawl to catch up. And I saw her. Bingo: a woman! And not just any swimmer, but the famous morning swimmer of the Caspian herself. I let myself be carried by a gentle swell. From the top of the wave, I could better observe her. It was definitely a woman. The straps of her bathing suit were visible on her shoulders, and what had once resembled a clump of rope dragged by the current was her long black hair floating in the water, behind her neck, over her shoulders. She was swimming like a fish. Truly. She moved without displacing the water around her. Her arms, more efficient than a sturgeon’s fins, cleaved the surface of the sea, softly, like a sharpened blade. I approached with great effort. When I reached her, the sun, that killjoy, blinded me. In the shimmering of the water, her image reached me sporadically, in flashes. She changed position, turned onto her back. She had seen me or had felt my presence. I yelled, in a cry muffled by the water: “Hey!” She turned toward me. She pushed her hair back so I could see her. Then I was certain. It was definitely her, Nilou. I had finally found her.
§
You’re right to ask why I’ve come to see you after so long. You, my companion for those sad years… To speak to you about the Caspian at dawn, about a girl swimming in the sea? No! You’re not naive. You know I’m here for another reason. You’re wary. You’re wondering what the point is of digging up old land, if not to awaken demons of the past. And you came here, so far from your country, for a completely different reason. To forget, right? To live another life, right? Don’t worry, I’m not here to judge you. I did exactly the same thing. Like you, I wanted to turn the page, and I even believed, for some time, that I had succeeded. So much so that, sometimes, I amused myself thinking back on those years, returning to them, as one returns incognito to one’s childhood village, but one day I woke up and I knew, suddenly, that things couldn’t continue on as before. You’ll see. It’ll happen to you, if it hasn’t already, and you will know as I do that the life you spent wanting to forget was in fact nothing but a life devoted to remembering. I am here because no one else can do for me what you are able to do: understand me. You will do what you wish with what I have to tell you. Apologies for revealing this truth to you so belatedly. Had I shared it with you earlier, perhaps it would have helped you to better endure the terrible burden of guilt that, I know, has always weighed on you.
I won’t take long, but be patient. The truth I will confide in you is very particular. I have to start from the beginning, and things often start much earlier than we think. Let me tell you a bit more about the Caspian Sea, at dawn on a distant morning. A morning when you were perhaps not even born yet. About the sunrise. About the blue reflection of the sky over the sea. About a girl who was swimming alone, far from the coast. About the thirteen-year-old boy that I used to be. Those were carefree years. That was youth.
The swimmer that morning was my distant cousin, Niloufar, a sixteen-year-old girl, three years older than me, whom everyone called Nilou against her will. Three years apart, that’s a lot at that age. You know. She was already almost a woman. And I was still a child. She was beautiful and slender. She had an elongated face and dimples on her cheeks, inherited from her mother, who was my mother’s niece, even though they were nearly the same age. Niloufar had large black eyes, accentuated by a strange line, like freshly drawn kohl. Long curly hair, ebony black, and the gait of a satisfied predator. She was the most idolized girl on the coast. The most coveted, and also the most unattainable. For several summers now. Since her breasts had grown beneath her scruffy T-shirts. Those same faded T-shirts that she stubbornly continued to wear. Since her childhood legs had lengthened in her shorts to become the long, solid, and robust legs of a young woman in full possession of her powers of seduction. Since her mere arrival in Chamkhaleh constituted the major event of the summer in the eyes of her numerous suitors. And, that morning, I had heightened the legend surrounding her by discovering that she was an even better swimmer than people said.
§
She was now within earshot. I called to her. “Hey Niloufar!” It’s a magnificent name, isn’t it? Niloufar, nenuphar, water lily… She turned around and waited for me to reach her. Surprised? Not at all.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her between two strokes. But rather than responding, she let herself sink for a few moments, then, resurfacing, threw her head back with that exquisite gesture girls use to clear the hair from their faces, and smiled at me before saying:
“I should be asking you that. I’m here every morning.”
“I didn’t know you went out so far.” Far from the coast, I meant to say, but I stopped talking, out of fear that a slight trembling in my voice would betray my lie.
“So what?” she responded, looking me straight in the eyes.
That morning, she was even more beautiful than in my memories of the previous summer. She was floating in the blue of the ocean, as though effortlessly, her hair roaming around her shoulders like an enormous black j
ellyfish, and her body, slowly moving through the kaleidoscope of the sea, rendered her almost unreal. Suddenly she rolled over, plunged. Under the water, her skin shone like the scales of a strange fish. She dove, pierced through the water seamlessly, like a needle through silk. Then the hole closed up behind her. The sea returned me to my solitude. I looked around. But there was nothing. Only stretches of sea, water covering water, bathed in the sky. The sun had risen above the horizon line and the sea reflected a slightly darker blue. Since Niloufar had disappeared beneath the water, time seemed longer. I turned around, scrutinized the waves as I awaited her return, watching for her siren’s hair, the gleaming skin of her shoulders, but she didn’t resurface. She had simply left, without a trace. Eventually I started to worry. I dove down looking for her, I went as deep as I could, but the water was too opaque for me to see more than a few yards in front of me. Very quickly I needed air again, and I abandoned my mission, went back up. At the surface, the silence was even heavier, more harrowing. Seconds seemed to go on forever. So much so that I started to have doubts, as strange as that may seem. I must have dreamed it, or I was still dreaming. They say it happens to even the most experienced swimmers. They fall asleep in the warm water and drown in their sleep, confusing slumber and death once and for all. That thought made me panic. I wanted to wake up, but how can someone wake up when they’re already awake? Then she resurfaced. In the exact spot where she had plunged, fresh, not even short of breath. She had something in her hand. She held it out to me. “Here, it’s for you.” It was a piece of red coral. I had never seen anything like it. She told me that she had always practiced holding her breath, and now she could hold it for more than three minutes. “Three minutes is a long time,” I said to her, then we swam another hour, toward the sun, the open ocean. I kept close to her, close enough to feel her body through the rippling of the water. Close enough to hear her breathing. To feel the sprays of water cast off involuntarily by the movement of her limbs. But not sufficiently close for our bodies to touch. I reminded her that we had to head back before the sun reached its highest point, after which it would be impossible to find the coast again. Otherwise, we would have to wait another two hours. She replied that I didn’t have to worry, that she knew how to get back. Without being able to explain why, she always knew where the shore was!
My Part of Her Page 1