My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

  I read and reread that book. I possessed those words, stolen three times over. Once from their poet, once more from the one to whom they had been offered, and, finally, from the one who had offered them. I never parted with the book and, if it hadn’t been taken from me by force, I would have it still. I held onto it like a thief his chopped-off hand or a beggar his gold coin found in the dust.

  Niloufar wasn’t looking for something perfect. The world she came from was overflowing with useless perfections. In the end all that was flawed, all that fell short, benefited Mohamad-Réza in the eyes of Niloufar. Everything we consider a weakness only added to his strength. And, in this vein, he was disarming. Impossible to rival, no one could even compete. But, for all that, was he indestructible? No. No one is. He had his weaknesses. And most importantly one fatal flaw, a real fault that I was one of the few to know about. Something terrible, capable of leading to his downfall.

  §

  The summer was heading straight for its end. In a few days, we might have been saved by the arrival of the first autumn rains, but, that year, the clouds were slow to arrive. Summer persisted on the Caspian coast. As though destiny was at work.

  The future is not constructed on the pillars of the past, but on its ruins. I drank a few more cups of tea on the terrace of Villa Rose and discovered that my mother had married the sixth son of the merchant so that Niloufar’s mother could marry the Doctor and leave our little town. I was able to complete Niloufar’s mother’s sentences by matching them with the stories recounted by my own mother and my aunts.

  One Friday, my mother’s father, the stubborn mullah, the one we called “the headless sage” because of his gruff temperament and the mental lapses caused by epilepsy, the Sayyid, the self-proclaimed direct descendant of the Prophet, didn’t get up from his bed. They found him dead in his bedroom, a large book open to the first page on his chest. Everyone spoke about the presence of the book to emphasize his status as a man of letters. I think that he slowly suffocated himself beneath the weight of the book, they couldn’t stop talking about how hefty it was! Later, I found that famous book in our library; with its leather cover, it weighed over two pounds. It’s not surprising it got the better of the old man. In any case, he was dead, and taking care of the family fell to his eldest son, the “crown prince.” That’s what they called my mother’s eldest brother. That family was the worst inheritance one could leave a man, for, in addition to the boys, there were three girls, separated by barely a year, all approaching marriage age. Everyone knows that marrying three sisters at the same time is no small matter. My grandfather, the stubborn mullah, detached from the affairs of this world, had left nothing for their dowry and the eldest son had his own daughter to marry, his first child, his muse, the future mother of Niloufar. That’s when my paternal grandfather came into the picture, a rich rice merchant who had publicly declared that one day, at whatever cost, he would take one of the Sayyid’s daughters for one of his sons. Revenge, resulting from a quarrel between the two men, whose origin no one knew. The mullah, when he was alive, had always refused and had sent back the delegations who came on behalf of the merchant to ask for the hand of his daughters empty-handed, five times. He didn’t consider a family of merchants worthy of the bond of marriage. On top of that, my father’s father was known for being a usurer, the disgraceful occupation left in those times mainly for Jews and Armenians. But the stubborn mullah was dead, and his three daughters would soon become old hags without a dowry. What arrangement was there between the usurer and the crown prince? No one ever knew. But my mother, the eldest of the three, married the sixth son of the merchant, and the other two sisters married in their turn, bringing with them a suitable dowry.

  Not long after, unburdened of his task, the crown prince left with his family to live in Rasht, the big city, capital of the region. A few years later, the niece, my mother’s childhood friend, returned, accompanied by her husband, the young Doctor, to eat her first taste of my mother’s buckwheat halva. She was pregnant with a girl, while my mother was struggling to have her first child. Infertile, people assumed. But how could she conceive a child when she wouldn’t let the man she didn’t love into her bed?

  It was from Niloufar’s father, alias the Doctor, that I heard politics discussed for the first time. The Doctor had two distinctive qualities. The first, I’ve already described: he didn’t have any hair. The second, he was a communist and member of the Tudeh Party.4 You know that at that time, the lettered—that’s what we called those who had completed their studies—were divided into two groups: the supporters of Mosaddegh and the members of the Tudeh Party. The tradition in the North leaned more toward Tudeh’s communism. The proximity to Russia, the legend of Mirza Koochak Khan,5 and the Socialist Republic of Gilan6 certainly had something to do with it. Niloufar’s mother and her husband, the Doctor, were both aligned with the Tudeh Party until the 28 Mordad coup d’état,7 the dismissal of Mosaddegh, and the dissolution of the Tudeh Party by the Shah.

  After the coup d’état, the Tudeh Party, now outlawed, dissolved and its members hurried into hiding. The Doctor and his wife, originally from the North, naturally came to hide in our town. The Doctor was easily recognizable because of his scar. They said that one night, afraid of being arrested, they took off over the flooded river. They lived for some time in the Eshkevarat mountains,8 going from village to village. One hell of an adventure; they emerged as heroes. They loved telling us about it, like a rite of passage for the family. I quickly understood why there was so much interest in these stories. For us, in the North, we idolized the courageous, those who defied taboos. We had respect for the resistance fighters, the Jangalis,9 you know… the disciples of Mirza Koochak Khan. The photographs of him with a bushy beard and a gun slung over his shoulder, even though they were forbidden, could be found in many houses. Relics of a glorious and legendary past. Since then, I’d also dreamed of one day being hunted, having enemies on my trail, forging my own legend, having feats of war for people to talk about. Everything except being a man without a history and without a future, like my father. Those former Maquis, I saw them visit our area, triumphant, with their beautiful cars and their beautiful clothes, eating my mother’s halva with their beautiful manners. It had paid off for them to be rebels, so it could pay off for me as well.

  Mohamad-Réza was physically very strong. That’s precisely where his weakness lay. And that force, which I’ve already described to you, was generously spread throughout all his limbs, including his genitals. You’re a man, you understand what I mean. We have all felt that uncontrollable force between our legs. That autonomous muscle that wakes up first in the morning and goes to sleep last at night. That indispensable, cumbersome thing we lug around everywhere. Well, for him, it was ten times worse than for the rest of us. He possessed a penis of impressive size and his erection was a whole affair, a cramp that lasted hours, even days. Sometimes, he was even impeded by it, doubled over in a corner, incapable of getting up for fear of revealing his secret. I became aware of it, and then one day he professed its size to me in a surge of virile confidence. I knew that it happened to him on the embankment, too. At night, it was enough for a shadow to pass behind a window of the villa, with the minuscule possibility that it might be Niloufar, for his dick to straighten conspicuously, like a strange body that had been grafted onto him. And with such violence that he was in agony. He wasn’t proud of it, but it was stronger than him. He couldn’t fight against the urge. And so one night I went to find him with a surprise in my pocket.

  §

  I want you to know something: at thirteen years old, I was no longer a child, I knew what I was doing. I knew perfectly well. I had planned everything from start to finish, prepared everything in detail. I had a very precise idea of what his reaction would be. I knew that when he prowled around Villa Rose at night, he sometimes recited the Ayat al-Kursi10 to contain his ardor. That’s what the mullah had advised him. I knew that he avoided walking barefoot on Nilou’s footprints
in the sand, for fear it might provoke sudden ejaculation. That sometimes a sputter, a fleeting illusion, a color evoking something linked to his Nilou was enough to get him worked up. His love for Niloufar, was it all purity and poetry? I had a feeling it wasn’t. All his being, all the cells comprising him were obsessed with Niloufar. How could the cells of his penis have been an exception? I knew exactly what his sexual urges could do to him. I found him at the top of the embankment. To coax him down from his watchtower, I told him that I had something for him, a very special object that was worth its weight in gold. He followed me to a quieter corner. He was hanging on my words, waiting impatiently for me to unveil this mysterious present. When I deemed him sufficiently worked up, I handed it to him. He couldn’t believe his eyes. I heard him groan like a wounded animal. He was short of breath like someone who’s just been stabbed in the middle of his stomach. Then I heard him say in a painful sequence of spasmodic syllables, “It’s… it’s… it’s… it’s Ni… Ni… Ni… Ni… ?” I nodded my head yes. He was holding Niloufar’s black lace underwear in his hand and couldn’t stop staring at it. He hardly dared touch it. Then, mustering up a bit of courage, he slid his fingers over the fabric that had graced her crotch and over the coarser knots of the lace, as if it were an ephemeral object, fated to disappear. His eyes followed the curves of the seams, the circular stitches of the embroidery, to the small bow sewn on the front, which would lie between the pubis and the belly button. He remained like that for a long time, squeezing the underwear in his hand, and ejaculated abundantly, even before he had a full erection.

  Mohamad-Réza left, Nilou’s undergarment in his hand. Later, to thank me, he showered me in presents, did me a thousand favors. I knew the power this bit of lace had on men. I was captive too. But like everything with him, it was multiplied by a thousand. From that moment on, something definitively broke in him, a barrier had been crossed. Pandora’s box had opened in his brain. The genie of his outsize libido had emerged from the bottle and would never go back in. Neither the Ayat al-Kursi and its anti-erection effects, nor the talisman to calm his desire, nor any of the other surahs of the Quran could help him anymore. He started masturbating frantically. He did it as soon as he woke up in the morning, in bed. During the day, he hid himself in bathrooms, in an abandoned shack, behind bushes. At night, hidden in the darkness of the land around the villa. He masturbated in front of the sea after his beloved’s swim. Lying in the warm sand trampled by her feet. He masturbated and masturbated again. By the end, his body could no longer produce enough sperm for his repeated ejaculations. He touched himself violently, and that violence was only heightening. Ejaculation took longer and longer to come. He couldn’t control it anymore, but couldn’t give up. In the end, he was exhausted. He had nothing left in his testicles, his penis was bleeding, pumped empty. It was very painful, he confided in me one day. He was withering from this excess. His skin was turning yellow, his cheeks were growing hollow, and enormous dark rings were forming under his eyes. But he continued his strange obsessive activity, haunting Villa Rose, the surrounding pathways, and the seaside village. He had been a biblical romantic, with all the despair and the delicious poetic suffering that went along with it, and I had turned him into a person possessed, a sleepwalker, a phantom, a caged beast.

  Yes, my friend, I did that. Now, you might be seeing me in a different light. You can look at me with that contemptuous gaze you know so well. Yes, go ahead, look at me. Do you understand now why I came to see you? Judge me, it’s your turn now. Is that not betrayal? Is it not much more despicable than all the betrayal you could have committed or imagined? I warned you, what I did is on another level. It’s not a friend in arms I sent to the gallows, but a true friend. When we engage in politics, in a forbidden party, when we commit clandestine activities in a country under dictatorship, like Iran, we know the rules, more or less, right? To be denounced by a captured comrade is how it goes, isn’t it? But he, Mohamad-Réza, he suspected nothing, he had signed no pact, all he had done was love, too much or too poorly perhaps, but simply loved. No matter what he became next and what he did in his turn. Now, I’m speaking about a young man, seventeen years old, madly in love, who has not yet done any harm to anyone. You’re not convinced of my betrayal? Well, I’ll tell you what happened next. You haven’t heard anything yet.

  All I had to do was wait. Mohamad-Réza would wear himself out. That fire would consume him slowly and he would soon be completely out of my way. He was already almost there. His needs were now much more urgent, he approached Villa Rose more closely than usual. Poked his head into the garden with less discretion. Niloufar’s mother had noticed his persistence and had talked to me about it. Physically drained, he was even beginning to lose his best attribute. His voice. When he started to sing, his voice went higher and higher until it went off the rails. He didn’t sing anymore, he howled. The young man who had had a crystalline timbre and an impressive repertoire of poems was now blaring in a broken voice and repeating the same refrains like a scratched record. We had realized it very quickly, at night, around the fire, when he started to sing without anyone asking and at inopportune moments. As soon as there was a moment of silence, he would dive into the breach and croon a few couplets, then his voice would surpass everyone else’s, slide over the expanse of sand that surrounded us and muffle the sound of the waves, the cicadas, the birds. The world. We could hear only him. It was unbearable.

  From that point on, he no longer sang only when necessary for dialogue. This irrepressible need to speak that animated him, that sprang forth into the most beautiful and most fitting songs, had disappeared. It had ceded its place to a simple desire to exist. He wanted to claim his presence, his unfulfilled desires. From that point on, he screamed. His voice thundered in the night. I heard him from my place, for I was never very far from the villa, I too a wandering shadow. He stumbled, as at the beginning of a yawn, over certain refrains that he repeated ad infinitum. A stabbing ritornello of sadness. Today, years later, I still hear him, inconsolable, singing his despair to the stars, late in the Chamkhaleh night.

  The beauty of his songs had faded. Nothing remained but the nuisance of his nocturnal racket. The mysterious silhouette we hadn’t minded tolerating had become a cumbersome presence. He was starting to agitate the occupants of the beautiful house. All of them, except Niloufar. Naturally, they asked me to do something about it. Niloufar was opposed to it. She defended the singer who had lost his way, declared that singing was in no way obscene and that she didn’t understand why we had to put an end to it. What’s more, she had said without any intention of provocation or confrontation, but with perhaps just a bit of insincerity, that she still found his voice beautiful and pleasant to listen to. She had also asked me to intervene, but in the opposite sense. As for me, I did nothing but look after my own interests. Rather than arranging a meeting with him as Niloufar had asked me, or telling him to stop his serenades like her mother asked me, I brought Mohamad-Réza another treasure, a bra. Yes, I did. I couldn’t stop there. I had to stay consistent. It was the least I could do. Transgress with integrity. It was an orange bra that Niloufar often wore beneath her low-cut T-shirts and whose satin fabric straps were recognizable. Who in our entourage didn’t know this piece of her lingerie? We had seen it so many times on her, how its straps cut the golden skin of her shoulders into two unequal parts. Mohamad-Réza practically snatched it out of my hand, smelled it with relish, and went off alone with it for a moment. Other pieces of lingerie followed, like booster shots. Thus, I nourished the famished beast with the intimate parcels of my cousin Niloufar. The more I gave him, the more he asked for. He was at the end of his rope. His stammering was at an all-time high. He didn’t communicate anymore, practically never returned to the circle where the young boys hung out. In his eyes, I was his last friend. His sole confidante. He made the effort to speak to me, and I listened to him with patience. His words came out of his mouth one by one, reaching me in an infinite tornado. And when he couldn’t
find his words, he hung onto my neck to spill out torrents of tears. One day I noticed a smear of blood on his shirt. He said it was nothing, just a scratch from a night stroll, but I insisted, and he showed me the tattoo he had done on his chest with a sharp object. He showed it to me only, because I was his friend. He had carved a big “N” and then the other four letters that form “Nilou” into himself with a sharp object. A deep, oozing wound on the left side of his chest, where his lovesick heart was beating. A wound that wouldn’t heal, because he picked off the scabs each morning. He wanted to literally bleed for her.

  The shed was right at the foot of the wall, and its broken window offered an unobstructed view into Niloufar’s bedroom. I had planned my move. One day, I told Mohamad-Réza that the window he stood in front of at night wasn’t the best one. I had already located the foothold created by a cinder block protruding from the wall, the steel pole, and the edge of the framework. I brought Mohamad-Réza there one night. I showed him how to put his foot into the hole of the cinder block, grab onto the bit of metal, support himself with the pole, scale the wall, and use the roof of the shed to descend to the other side. Once over the wall, it had taken him some time to react. He was paralyzed, unable to situate himself in the night landscape. I was basically forced to place him opposite the window and to tell him, pointing my finger: “Look, down there,” for him to realize that we were a few steps from Niloufar’s window. The room was bathed in darkness, and the window was poorly lit. But things gradually came into focus and we could soon make out the interior of the bedroom. The bed along the wall, the armoire, the pile of books, the door. Everything was slowly outlined as our eyes adapted to the darkness. The bedroom seemed empty. I told him to be patient. A few minutes later, the bedroom was further illuminated when a door opened. A shadow stood out more clearly. Then things became defined more sharply and, finally, we saw the contours of the window, the frame where the fatal scene would play out. We saw, as though on a movie theater screen, a spindly silhouette, with long hair and a straight back, move from left to right. There was no doubt, it was her. At the sight of Niloufar, Mohamad-Réza was so excited that I feared he would blow his load on the spot. After a few back and forths, the silhouette stopped near the window, immobile, like a cartoon on pause. We remained petrified. Despite the feeble lighting, we could finally see her up close, make out the curve of her breasts, the disorder of her hair, the contour of her hips. She seemed naked, and even though the lower part of her body wasn’t visible, the darkness and our imagination took care of the rest. I remember hearing Mohamad-Réza let out a strange groan. A manifestation of pain rather than pleasure… He remained hunched over, in a pose of shock, biting his right index finger, completely absorbed in his contemplation, which somehow reminded me of that character often seen in Persian figurines. You must know what I’m talking about. Like figurines of Farhad, when he surprises the beautiful Shirin, naked, bathing in a fountain. Mohamad-Réza turned back toward me with a desperate look on his face. He was trembling. His eyes were misty, drowning in tears. Modesty kept him from doing anything in front of me. So I left him alone in the shed at the foot of the window, knowing that that would be his spot from then on, for all the nights to come.