My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

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  That same summer, one night in Vaveli, things almost changed once and for all. An event that could have been fatal, but that nevertheless seemed harmless to our eyes. Like a tsunami, it could have swept everything away, the competition between our suitors, my business, the circle of time, Villa Rose, and everything that constituted our feverish daily life in Chamkhaleh. It was just a few days before the unexpected departure of the German cousin.

  Few people know how Vaveli was created. Even among the longtime residents of Chamkhaleh, many are unaware. They believe this place was always here. With the “intz-intz” of its speakers that we heard from sunset until late at night. Its youth pressed up against its door. Its love stories, its quarrels, its illusions. Its creation dates back to the years without the bridge, without electricity, at the dawn of Chamkhaleh.

  At the time, when night fell, taking advantage of the veil of darkness, a man with a guitar would stand at the corner of the main avenue that led from the river to the beach and start to sing. He had an accent. He was not from the North. On this point, everyone agreed. Tall and thin, he had a funny look about him: he wore a hat that we understood later was a beret, and a three-piece suit, even though it was hot. His right foot propped on a crate of fruit, he would strum the cords of his instrument and sing. It was mainly his guitar that was the object of curiosity. Other than in movies, no one had ever seen one in real life. People would stop to listen to him, and the crowd around him grew every night. He sang popular songs and American tunes that those people didn’t know at the time. It was a lot of Elvis and Dylan, we learned later. Then, one night, someone else, a guy from the area, declared himself a musician, then another. The instruments came out of nowhere. They started to play together, as a band. They had not yet given a name to this place, but Vaveli, the place that would become our headquarters, the hotbed of the summer, had just been born. The singer with the guitar ceded his place without resistance. He continued to sing a bit further away, but with far fewer spectators, and didn’t come back the next summer. He didn’t come back, but the place remained. People returned there, attracted by an obscure force. Each night, a crowd would form, the makeshift musicians and singers would devote themselves to their favorite pastime. Then one night, a kind of circus tent, made of a few posts covered in jute canvas, was erected and two people proclaimed themselves cashier and doorman. The musicians were set up inside. It was probably the first cabaret on the Caspian coast. And why “Vaveli”? This name that means nothing seemed so evident to us that no one questioned it. But I think I know. At that time Googoosh—oh! that diva Googoosh!—so famous in those days, on her way back from a European tour, had sung a song, which became, like all her songs, a big hit. I don’t remember the title or the words, just the refrain: “I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe… in love, love, love, loooove,” she sang, shaking her head graciously with her short hair, whose style was copied by half of the women in the country. Then everyone started to repeat this refrain, only we were singing it incorrectly. We had collectively heard in the repetition of “I believe, I believe, I believe… ” a succession of “Vaveli, vaveli, vaveli… ” that no one tried to understand. No matter. Our native musicians played that song several times per night because it was so popular. We heard it from a distance. Carried on the night breeze, deformed by the poor-quality speakers and the amplifiers pushed to their limit, it confirmed once more: in Chamkhaleh, like everywhere in Iran, those words were nothing other than “Vaveli, vaveli… ” We agreed to meet in Vaveli. We went and paid the small sum, Charon’s toll, to pass through the rudimentary curtain that served as the door and enter a different world. A world whose modest decor, with its wooden benches, its hardly elevated stage in a half-circle, didn’t diminish any of its magic.

  At the beginning of the night, the girls would be on one side and the boys on the other. And the fathers or brothers on the right side to watch over the honor of the former. But once the night was in full force, they became so busy with other girls that that they forgot their own! Sometimes brawls broke out, a few punches were thrown, a switchblade was brandished, but it was never actually mean-spirited. Purely for show. Things quickly calmed down. The spectacle continued. The girls danced in the middle, the boys circled around them, the diameter of the second circle shrunk night after night. If vacation had lasted a bit longer, the two circles would eventually have joined. But the summer was short—and this lack of time saved the honor of the families, much more than the switchblade.

  That night, the intz-intz of Vaveli reached us from afar. I was walking on the beach with Mohamad-Réza. The waves were unfurling at our feet. He was in a strange mood and had asked me to spend some time with him. He wanted to confide something in me. “You are my friend,” he said on each occasion, with something in his voice that emphasized his sincerity. He stopped often, losing himself in the contemplation of the dark, slightly agitated sea. Bottle in hand, he was drinking Russian vodka from his father’s stash. He seemed both determined and resigned, suddenly conscious that time wasn’t working in his favor, tired of his role as an impassive spectator, a mistreated buffoon, the whipping boy. He couldn’t take any more, he wanted to be done with it. “I’m going to ta… ta… ta… talk to her,” he had declared, avoiding Niloufar’s name. “She’s going to la… la… laugh, sp… sp… spit in my face. And so what?” With those words, he had stopped, facing the sea, and was staring oddly at the waves that reflected the moon in the white line of the foam of their crests. I couldn’t leave him in that state. I took him by the arm and guided him toward the village. To where the speakers were hurling at full volume: “I believe, I believe… ” repeated over and over by the overworked speakers. I had to get him away from the sea, at whatever cost. He didn’t want to come. He didn’t care for Vaveli, like Niloufar, who never went, but he ended up giving in. Approaching the village, he emptied the bottom of the bottle in one go and followed me, staggering. I had just paid the entrance fee when I saw a blue silhouette on the other side of the curtain, an anomaly in the landscape. Then I saw cousin Anahid and the band of girls, and, in the middle of the circle, Niloufar, probably dragged there by the others. Niloufar had not noticed our arrival. I steered Mohamad-Réza to the other end of the tent, standing him in a blind spot where he couldn’t see Niloufar and her friends. Many knew the talent of my stammering friend and he was often asked to sing. If he got on the stage, I could imagine what would come next… “If I can’t manage to t… t… talk to her, then I’ll ss… ss… sing.” That night on the beach, he had repeated his pledge, which was already old news. And then it was the ideal moment for him. I saw him close his eyes, throw his head back, and unleash his powerful voice in a love poem by Hafez, and not just any: “No one, except my heart, in love since the dawn of time / Can labor for all eternity.” I had already heard him sing it. It gave you goosebumps. “Is there a more beautiful legacy than the love song / Under the azure vault, no one knows of any.” If he sang it in the presence of Niloufar, no one would be able to predict what would happen next, and that had to be avoided at all costs. My brain took one second to decide. I started to clap my hands to invite Mohamad-Réza to sing, chanting the title of one of the songs that he sang marvelously.

  It was a risqué song. I was quickly joined by the others, all turned toward him. Mohamad-Réza shook his head no, but we didn’t give up. It was a very difficult song to sing, because with each repetition the refrain sped up and added a stanza. It was hellish by the end, so much so that the audience couldn’t follow it anymore, settled for tapping their hands and feet. It always ended in a general ruckus. Mohamad-Réza resisted for as long as he could before climbing on stage, with me almost pushing him. He then started to sing without knowing that Niloufar was in the audience. We followed the words, clapping our hands. Some, standing, tapped their feet. Mohamad-Réza let himself go with the flow. He sped up with each cycle, inviting the audience to follow him. I observed Niloufar covertly. She was stupefied, didn’t imagine for an ins
tant that Mohamad-Réza was capable of doing such a thing. Then I saw her get up and walk out the exit, no doubt outraged by the words. On the stage, microphone glued to his mouth, Mohamad-Réza, who still hadn’t seen her, was drenched in sweat. He had drowned his sadness in alcohol and the levity of the moment. He was at his peak, savoring his stammerer’s revenge, his audience ecstatic at his feet. Vaveli was vibrating in the summer night. He could be heard from a distance. All the way from Villa Rose, where a girl was crossing the entryway alone, her blue dress pulled by the crude hands of the night breeze. Tomorrow, another day would rise, a day similar to so many others.

  In the end, Niloufar’s mother wasn’t all that precious. She didn’t object much to speaking about her youth. All you had to do was insist, and she would close her book, put it on the table, breathe deeply, and travel back in time to recount, with a certain nostalgia, anecdotes about her aunt and friend, Fakhry. Thanks to these stories, I learned about the other side of my mother’s life, I saw her other face. The more Niloufar’s mother talked about those old times, the more the mystery of my mother’s metamorphosis grew in my eyes. “Fakhry wasn’t afraid of anything.” She detested girly behavior, Niloufar’s mother continued, and did everything opposite. Ran faster than the boys, fought with rage, caught snakes by the head, and, when they played hide-and-seek, she was unfindable, choosing hiding places where no one would think to go. For example, at the bottom of the old wells of the house, where she would let herself glide down the wet wall. Once at the bottom, she would lift her skirt, enter the water up to her thighs, and let the others search for her as long as she desired to remain hidden. She was happy there, in the cool, daydreaming and singing long songs that she made up herself. I said she hadn’t changed in that respect. She still continued to hum those endless melodies while she was taking care of the house or the flowers in the straight paths of our garden.

  The stories of Niloufar’s mother strangely stopped at the moment when the two of them entered adulthood. When she got to that period, she became as evasive as my mother. I knew that these memories bothered her. I tried to figure out why. I didn’t know that she herself had disappeared at that time, for a little while, before reappearing, married to the Doctor. Meanwhile, my mother had married my father, the sixth son of a rich merchant. It was the marriage that had solidified the bond between two big families of the region. I had a hunch that the answer to the enigma lay there. The gaps in the stories of their youth, the black hole of the family history had to be there. Niloufar’s mother had married the young Doctor and had left to live in the big city, while my mother had remained to marry the sixth son of the merchant. An arranged marriage? Most likely. Had she been given as collateral, used as a connecting piece between two important families? Had one decided her destiny while the other had endured a choice that wasn’t her own? I thought I had uncovered the secret, even if, in reality, things were much more complicated.

  Parand had no chance. I knew that from the beginning. Later, when I knew Niloufar more intimately, my gut feeling changed in certainty. His Beach Boy look, his bare chest, and his mannerisms that came straight out of fashion magazines had an effect on many girls of the coast, but didn’t impress Niloufar at all. No one denied that Parand was handsome. He was a very popular boy. The girls of Chamkhaleh looked for him during their nightly outings and whispered to each other as soon as he arrived. After swimming in the sea, they would pass near the volleyball net to see him, would turn around at the sound of his motorcycle, but he was unavailable, obsessed with the foreign girl. So, in common agreement and without understanding that Niloufar had nothing to do with it, they had decided she was responsible and unanimously detested her. I don’t know if Niloufar had sensed this general feminine disavowal, but I’m sure that even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. How could she have? Everything that comprised poor Parand was the opposite of what held any appeal for her. In reality, he was the perfect sucker who didn’t pose any threat to my business. So I let him be. Let him sink as deeply as he wanted into his farce. He had spent a good amount of his father’s money stuffing me with sandwiches, or paying for my games of pool, or good hashish and everything else he could buy. It didn’t work. My job was simple, maintain two base sentiments in him: desire and hope. For desire, I didn’t have to do much. For hope, all I had to do was let him glimpse signs of encouragement from Niloufar. In the end, even if he gave up or walked away, it wasn’t a problem. I didn’t like that rich kid. I didn’t know yet that soon I would carry his coffin on my shoulder and celebrate his martyrdom on the public square in front of a violent mob chanting his name, screaming for vengeance. No, I didn’t know that yet, like many other things.

  For Mohamad-Réza, as strange as it may seem, things were different. Niloufar was truly intrigued by him. His beaten dog expression, his nightly songs, his persistence had conquered her legendary indifference to the male sex. A woman cannot remain eternally indifferent to so much love surrendered without the expectation or hope of anything in return. Little by little, Niloufar had become used to his presence. The stammerer had become her indispensable daily companion. During her walks, when she turned around, it wasn’t just to reassure herself that her dog Tamba was following her, but to verify the presence of Mohamad-Réza in the distance, beyond the dog. To see his shadow, his discreet silhouette in front of her door, the stain he made in the background of the landscape, at the top of the embankment. She had become used to falling asleep listening to his voice, and in the morning, she would discreetly poke her head out to verify that he was there, heightening the summit of the embankment with his seated half-stature. She had forbidden her friends from making fun of him, and the jokes about Mohamad-Réza had stopped. The rare times when he was absent, missing in action, she felt a strange emptiness in her heart, as if something indispensable was lacking from the order of things. On those days, during her walk, she would stop more often than usual to look for her dog in the distance. Staring at the surroundings with more attention, combing the horizon line with her gaze. Then when he came back, she would secretly celebrate his return. At night, she stayed up later than usual to listen to the melody of his melancholic songs, that voice that modulated itself, climbing and descending according to the comings and goings through the sandy paths around the villa. And so, on that morning, in her bedroom, lying on her bed, displaying that air of ennui young girls have, head tilted back, T-shirt hiked up above her magnificent golden belly button, to my great surprise, it was his name she had asked me.

  “Mohamad-Réza,” I had responded.

  She didn’t react to his old-fashioned name, she merely repeated it twice. Like a password she was trying to memorize.

  Mohamad-Réza’s father owned a small starch factory, Saleh Starch. You know it, I’m sure. The starch was sold in small green boxes adorned with cursive letters: “Made with the finest ingredients.” I had gone to his house several times. A large, classic house. Several layers of rugs on the ground signaled the important amount of money his father earned. A heavily furnished living room, velvet armchairs and couches covered in white sheets that were used at most two or three times a year. A Russian clock with gold trim hung at the top of the stairs that led to the first floor. Silver and china sets arranged in glass armoires. And many other gilded accessories. Mohamad-Réza’s mother didn’t wear a veil in the house, but put on a large scarf and a long coat to go out. His sister, like all the girls her age, went to high school in uniform. At their house, no library full of books, no record player, no four o’clock tea served with caramel and chocolate, no piano in the corner of the living room, none of that. There wasn’t, it seemed, any link between Mohamad-Réza’s world and Niloufar’s. Except perhaps money. But I knew that money held no importance in Niloufar’s eyes. I had a hard time imagining her in this place. You couldn’t even use the adjectives “warm” or “pleasant” for that house. And I also didn’t think that the manufacturer of starch could stand up to the Doctor, not any more than my father could. No, it was impossi
ble. On top of it all, Mohamad-Réza didn’t stand out through his intellect, though he was by no means an idiot or uncultured. I imagined him having his first fight with Nilou. He would inevitably be obliged to call her by her first name, even if only one time, and would thus burn up all his ammunition with the first “ni-ni-ni” that came out of his poor mouth. No, he had no chance. And yet, it was his name that she had asked me, of all the names of the boys who swarmed around her. She was turning her head toward him. Even if I was the only one who knew, it was to him she had offered a book. She had waited for me to reach the door of her bedroom before she threw me the work, taken from the pile of books on her bedside table, and said to me with a falsely indifferent air: “Can you give this book to Mohamad-Réza?” And added, seeing my astonishment: “It can keep him company on his perch.” It was a book by Nazim Hikmet, and not just any book: his love poems.

  Yes, the more Parand wasn’t a problem, the more Mohamad-Réza became one. Niloufar’s heart decidedly remained an impenetrable mystery. She was one of those girls you couldn’t say no to. The more impossible something was, the more attractive it became for her. I had guessed it. I had already seen it in her actions. She was always searching for a challenge, and if Mohamad-Réza was becoming one, there was nothing more to do.