My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

  Yes, I would have remained the provincial cousin who knew how to be useful, carrying Nilou’s mother’s grocery bags on the way back from the market, paddling in the waters of the river when the whole family went to picnic on a boat, serving the halva twice a year on polished copper trays, a long frail silhouette with scrawny legs and clothes that were never the right size, stuck between his father and the edge of the frame in family photos. For Nowruz, so many people would drive their beautiful cars, the neighbors watching from their windows, squeezing into the small cul-de-sac where we lived to invade the house. Conquerors, calm, sovereign, with a quasi-colonial disdain, they would bring gifts. They were cheerful and polite. They would marvel at the garden. My mother’s geraniums (“Oh, they’re magnificent”), my father’s orange trees (“Oh, they’re beautiful”), the oranges (“Oh, they’re delicious”), the watermelons and pumpkins hitched to the cracked girders of the balustrade (“Oh, they’re adorable”). I was there to welcome them, dreading my father’s arrival. He would come on his moped, always in a rush. It was without fail his worst period, the high season of work, either in winter, when the cuts of dark flannel, pinned with his clients’ measurements, were piled on the shelves of his store, like so many promises he couldn’t keep, or in summer, during the harvest of the Bombyx mori cocoons. These were the times when Niloufar’s family wanted to eat halva at Aunt Fakhry’s house, and there was nothing to do about it. When my father arrived, always late, he was a little disconcerted by his wife’s family, already settled into our “charming little house,” waiting to be served halva. He would greet the guests, excusing himself. For my father excused himself endlessly, for everything and for nothing. It wasn’t enough for him that he did it, he forced me to do it too, to ask for forgiveness. The reason didn’t matter. Then he would give me inappropriate and useless orders, to go fetch who knows what, a chair for someone who had no intention of sitting, or water for another who wasn’t thirsty. His face blushed at every question they asked him, no matter how harmless, often out of pure politeness, just to make small talk. He would force himself to give the best possible response, but I knew that it was wasted breath, for they had already forgotten the question, and no one was interested in his answer. It always happened in the same way. Upon their arrival, they would set up in the courtyard, under the pretext that they preferred the garden, when really it was because they were too lazy to take off their shoes. My mother would end up inviting them in with their shoes on, a favor she only accorded two or three times a year, to important guests. They sat on the chairs arranged along the walls and ate, delighting in every bite. They were right to do so; my mother’s halva was famous. Then they left, promising to return the next year. Immediately, my father, grumbling out of the corner of his mouth that his day was shot, would mount his moped in a hurry to make up for lost time at work. My mother would unwrap the presents, always the same, vases and other crystal objects, look at them with an annoyed expression for a little while, then carefully put them back in their original packaging, for the shelves and the mantel were already full of gifts from previous years. Those vases would inevitably be recycled as gifts at the next occasion, and would make a long, festive journey through the family, passing from hand to hand, ending up back at their starting point. Then my mother would take out the rugs, declared impure, sullied by the guests’ shoes, lay them out in the courtyard, and wash them under running water. Soaking wet, they weighed as much as a dead donkey when I laid them out on the terrace before returning the chairs to the neighbors we had borrowed them from. The rugs dried over a few long days, the drops continuing to fall on our heads, and our “charming little house” would go back to how it was before the Tatars passed through. Empty, sad, uneventful.

  A few days later, the photos from the visit would arrive in the mail. A thoughtful gesture on the part of our guests. They would be placed in the family album. One of them was of particular importance. A family photo that my mother demanded each time. Always in the same place and in the same arrangement. The different vintages of each photo, placed side by side, showed the evolution of our lives like a strange diagram. The frame was always the same, with the red brick wall, the row of pots overflowing with geraniums, the sunlight at the end of the day speckled by the orange tree branches. The only thing that changed was the silhouettes. From photo to photo, my mother got a bit fatter, and my father grew paler and less and less distinct. As if the camera’s focus wasn’t functioning for him. At this rate, we would have ended up not being able to see him at all anymore.

  The Doctor was also putting on weight, but remained solidly the Doctor, with his spread legs of a Doctor, his prominent stomach of a Doctor, his piercing gaze of a Doctor who, even in the photo, was examining you, for free, taking your temperature, probably through déformation professionnelle. Niloufar’s father was someone who knew everything. One of those people who looks at you just to remind you of that fact, and that you know nothing. The exact opposite of my father, who would always say that he knew nothing about anything and give me discreet taps in the presence of guests while raising his eyebrows, in a codified body language, to remind me that I should keep quiet like him, that I had to listen to the others like he did. Always someone else who knew more than you. Then, in the middle of the frame, Niloufar’s mother, who remained unchanged. Tall and slender, shielded from time. Smiling with her large mouth adorned with her impeccable teeth. So impeccable that they were all you saw. Then at the two ends, like brackets enclosing the gathering of our parents, us. Nilou and I. We were growing eagerly, trying to escape the frame. Obliging the invisible photographer, often a cousin summoned to the rescue, to retreat a bit more each year to enlarge his field of vision. Each time unveiling a bit more of the decrepitude of the walls, the ugliness of the doors and windows, the impoverishment of our home.

  I had forgotten those photos, though their trace had never been truly erased from my memory, until the day, years later, when I happened upon the old albums with the padded leatherette covers. They were arranged in a storage room behind a wobbly door, shut with the heavy padlock of oblivion. With the years, we see things differently. Through the magnifying glass of time, I was able to see those photos and all they concealed. I discovered that each of them contained two images. Two images that were completely distinct, displaced visions from two worlds, reunited in the same frame, bound by a strange invisible adhesive ribbon. In the photos, my parents and I were dressed in our best outfits, while Niloufar and her family were wearing their everyday clothes. We had the elegance of ordinary people, while they had the elegance of the rich. We were striking forced poses. They looked like themselves. Happy eaters of buckwheat halva, ephemeral guests of our humble abode. Then Nilou and I, unchanging, planted on either side of the frame, she, rather bored, me, looking haggard, and in the center, my mother and her niece, Niloufar’s mother, two childhood friends, reunited once more, their shoulders brushing, the two of them staring straight at the camera. Niloufar’s mother unveiling her brilliant smile, my mother her legendary warmth. And I was finally able to distinguish, nearly visible to the naked eye, beneath the glue worn down by time, the demarcation line that separated our two worlds. The two universes, so distant, whose point of connection was the two women, our mothers. Despite a thousand details that distinguished them, a secret linked them forever. Something that took me a long time to discover. Yes, the established order of history had been broken. I would not continue down the path that had been drawn for me. I would not calmly maintain my place in the family tradition. On the wrong or right side of the demarcation line.

  That morning, in Villa Rose, entering Niloufar’s bedroom, deaf to the alarming click of that notch turning once more in the complex mechanism of our relationship, I had just crossed a line, perhaps the final rampart, beneath the incredulous gaze of the Caspian, where in the background the first waves of an impending storm on the coast were already unfurling.

  §

  I was thirteen years old, and it was the first tim
e I had found myself alone in a bedroom with a girl, and it was Niloufar’s room on top of it. I can tell you I was petrified; my eyes were darting around like a fish that’s been suddenly taken out of its bowl and thrown in the pool. My brain kicked into high gear. I registered everything I saw involuntarily. I observed this place with the many eyes of a strange insect. The eyes of all my peers. How many of the people I knew dreamed of being there, in my place? I breathed in the air, inhaled the perfume, and memorized the objects. The personal effects of the young girl scattered here and there. The layout of the room, the placement and geometry of the objects. I noted every detail. I registered everything. To satiate my curiosity? Not only. Because I knew that soon I would recount it all. I would give the details, this room lusted after by all my friends, so many choice goods at the end of the aisle in the front window of my shop. Then distill them in small quantities, between two puffs of hashish that they would offer me generously, or sprinkle details over the course of an anecdote, as if it had escaped from me, to watch my friends’ eyes open wide, their faces withdraw, their fists tighten, and maybe even see the misplaced hand of one of them feeling his crotch. Yes, I would take everything to resell, drop by drop, at top dollar, bathed in a strange mixture of pride, amusement, and guilt.

  The room was almost empty. Niloufar only stayed there a total of two months of the year. On the walls, not a single image. No photo of a singer, actor, or other manly idol, no couple intertwined in front of a sunset or any other romantic landscape common among young girls her age. No, none of that. The walls were totally bare. A few boxes piled up served as a bedside table. The bed had been pushed up against the side window. Through the other, bigger window, the sea entered the room. The bulk of the delicious disorder of her bedroom was made up of clothes, thrown all over the place. You could see the pebbles and the shells collected on the beach in abundance. A few scattered books. My eyes feverishly traversed all the corners of the room. Then suddenly stopped on a piece of lace poking out from the heap of crumpled clothes at the foot of the bed. Something that could have been lingerie. Panties? A bra? That’s at least what I imagined, hoped for… To the right of the door, the gutted armoire revealed a glimpse of a few articles of clothing hanging from the rod. I recognized her blue dress. A long dress with straps that she would often wear during her night stroll. Over in Chamkhaleh, this night stroll was a veritable institution, a rendezvous no one would have missed for anything in the world. I have to tell you all of this so that you understand.

  Chamkhaleh, our seaside resort, was constructed over the years along a strip of silvery sand, which then became its main beach. It was populated by wooden houses, bungalows with straw roofs and bamboo walls. All the houses were bordered by the river, which ran along them for a few coastal miles before eventually joining the sea. Giving the town, seen from above, the appearance of a peninsula. There were at most a hundred homes. Only a few notable ones were suitable as permanent homes. That strip of land formed a separated place with an insular ambiance, governed by its own laws. At that time, there was no bridge yet, so to access it you had to cross the river by boat. The journey cost a few cents, not much, but, over time, it added up. Cars were transported on a ferry. That crossing was a bit more expensive. The ferries didn’t run at night. From late afternoon until sunrise, we felt as though we were cut off from the rest of the world. A feeling that was reinforced by the insular ambiance of the peninsula. Later on, they built the bridge, and then the cars and the tourists from the capital started arriving en masse. The longtime residents still talk about that time. They recall with regret and nostalgia the era of the ferries, the boats, and the simplicity of Chamkhaleh. No electricity and no running water. Chamkhaleh was only lively for two months of the year, but what months they were! It was like those two months didn’t belong to the same calendar as the other ten. Even the most traditional families loosened the reins on their children. The storekeepers and the most respected bigwigs walked around in their shortened pajamas in the garden, showing off their hairy chests and legs. Their wives wore colorful clothes, their scarves slid back a bit on their heads. Slightly more skin was exposed to the sun and to the gaze of others. We listened to music and laughter. The bottles of arak circulated in secret—even in the homes of those who went to the prayer each Friday. It was the time for summer love. It was like a sort of carnival that lasted sixty days, at the end of which we took off our masks, put our clothes back on, became teachers, shopkeepers, weavers again, or, like my father, tailor-merchants, until the next summer. At night, after the sunset, this summer population went out like an army of shadows to invade the seashore.

  Our future Mecca, “Vaveli,” didn’t exist yet. It appeared a few years later. The history of Vaveli is important, I’ll tell you about that, too. Because the village didn’t have electricity, at night we were guided by torches or small gas lamps. Thus, that strip of land, barely a few miles long, cloistered by the mouth of the river and protected by the warm summer nights, was where the most joyous lovers’ games of our lives took place. During these nocturnal exoduses, everything happened by feel. The lovers had to find each other, had to know how to recognize the object of their desire blindly. It was an art. You had to speak the language of the night, send signals with your torch, sing, position yourself well, have a strategy, guess at movements, calculate trajectories to find yourself in the right place at the right time, then exchange a look or a smile at the opportune moment, pass a love letter or, for the bold, steal a kiss—and amidst all that, Niloufar’s blue dress, so recognizable, was of the utmost importance. She only wore it at night. Why, we never knew. A long dress, with a low, sweeping neckline. We searched for it at night, on the dirt paths. On the humid sand at the edge of the sea. The blue of her dress shone beneath the headlights of the few cars that circulated on the shoreline. The wealthy bigwigs bringing their families out. At that time, there were a lot of American cars on the road, Chevrolets, Cadillacs, with long solid hoods the girls could sit on without fear. Young people were all over. On the fenders, on the hood, sometimes even on the roof. The adults were in the cars themselves, father at the wheel, mother in the passenger seat, sometimes wrapped in a chador, but a chador that was purely for posterity’s sake, with cheery colors and patterns, often sliding down onto her shoulders. It was summer, it was night, the hajji2 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 was the source of fleeting bliss; it illuminated in the darkness the face of your sweetheart, her silhouette, and maybe more, depending on the intensity of the backlighting and the thickness of her summer dress. Countless palpitating, ephemeral apparitions. Once Niloufar and her friends arrived, things took another turn. The Doctor’s car became the vessel of all desire, the point of confluence of all lust, a moving diamond recognized by its shine, the sound of its motor, and, especially, its blue flag. In Chamkhaleh, that second, nocturnal life was even more important for us than the first. If daytime brought the joy of swimming and showing off our skin, the sun and games, night was the realm of dreams, the infinite kingdom of the imagination, of love and desire. The lost moor where everything was possible. It lasted as long as it lasted. We squandered our sleep without keeping track. We weren’t stingy with our youth. Then it all faded on the sixtieth day of summer vacation. As if the tear-off calendar of this country only lasted sixty pages. The last page was torn off with the first rain of autumn. The festivities ended suddenly, taking everyone by surprise. The exodus began in the opposite direction. We woke up with a hangover. We dropped everything, unconsummated love affairs, unfinished stories, like so many gaping wounds. We put everything in the deep freeze to be brought out again the following summer. Everything was repacked in no time. The pickup trucks were back in business. The village emptied as if it had been suddenly infected with the plague. But the love affairs remained fresh, the wounds kept bleeding, and the tears stayed warm. They were merely put in a state o
f suspension for the ten months that would now have to pass, as quickly as possible, until the next summer. Back in town, like our parents who were changing their clothes, we, the young, were disguising ourselves once more as high schoolers, as children of good families, no one brought up our nightly escapades. Struck by a strange amnesia, we behaved once more like strangers. As if the stories of the summer had been written in chalk, washed away, effaced by the autumn rain. The love letters, the stolen kisses had never existed. As if, during the nights of love, that carefree land had been populated by other people. It was a tacit pact, respected scrupulously by us all.

  §

  I’ll remind you that I was barely thirteen years old, and she, sixteen. It was an important age difference, as demonstrated by the family photographs from the years in question. Niloufar was easily a head taller than me. She had all the attributes of a woman, while I was still a little boy. I had the thin body of an adolescent, the frail shoulders and the still-smooth, sad legs of a skinny kid. I didn’t shave yet. The peach fuzz discolored by the sun on my chin didn’t impress anyone, and the fact that I knew how to get hard and even masturbate was still an untellable secret. In sum, I was a kid; she was a woman. And once in her bedroom, I felt this reality and all its cruelty. Niloufar handed me a towel, changed in a neighboring room, and jumped on the bed, dressed in one of her typical worn T-shirts and cut-off jeans. At ease, lying on her back, legs spread, as relaxed as a woman could be in the presence of a child, or a eunuch, someone who is not in the running. No, I was not in the race. Her spread legs, the deep valley between her breasts, her belly button that her ridden-up T-shirt exposed without her paying any attention, all served to remind me of that reality. I don’t know how long I remained there, stupefied, speechless, trying somehow to cling to something. But there was nothing. The emptiness had filled me. The more time passed, the less I existed. I realized that I was taking up less and less space in the room and, at that rate, if I didn’t do something about it, I would soon disappear. Just like my father who would become transparent, then invisible, at our gatherings. I was about to burst into tears. I was able, I remember, with great effort, to gather my spirits. I had to do something, anything. I started to move. Transgress the invisible circle drawn around my feet. The punishment corner for the sins committed, not by me, but for which I was paying the consequences. The congenital honesty and the pathological abnegation of my father and the unlimited kindness and warmth of my mother. The harmful virtues of my parents. The phobias and the softness of my lineage. I was a young sprout on a dead branch. Roots buried in black, infertile earth. The circle that enclosed me was perfect, without a break, opaque. A line, only visible to my eyes, like a high and thick wall erected just for me. Yes, once more, I had crossed the line. I had even dared to touch things from the other world, open a few books, move a few objects. On the windowsill, the same window from which I would look out at the sea years later, through broken glass. There she had displayed some of her underwater treasure: shells, pieces of coral and pebbles of all colors, covered with dried algae. “I didn’t know that the Caspian had red coral,” I said. She told me that in order to see it, you had to go even further than where we had been, and you had to know how to dive. She said it without bragging, in a way that was purely informational. Then she grabbed a big book with lots of drawings and began to flip through it with the boredom of a young woman in her bedroom. After a while, the expression had vanished from her face. She seemed completely absorbed by her book. She was no longer paying attention to me. By ignoring me, she had started to turn back into what she had always been: a distant cousin, in all senses of the term. I had finished my lemonade, I had dried off, I could thus go back to my world. Which is what I did. Except, just before I left her room, she called me back, sitting up on her bed, the book still open in her hands, staring at me with a strange look.