My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

  We left Chamkhaleh again and went our separate ways just after the bridge. He seemed firmly to believe that he had made progress in the recruitment of a high-value member, and I was certain I had succeeded in hoisting my personal enterprise to a national level.

  Cyrus would be my representative in the high spheres, and my reputation or, more accurately, my personal life, would take on another dimension. For the moment, I existed fully in and beyond our small region. All I had to do was let the others do the work for me. They would peddle the news that I just had to half-heartedly refute or vaguely shirk. They would try to hide the relationship they had with me and, in doing so, would identify me more than ever. It was thrilling. All I had to do was be arrested, imprisoned for just a short amount of time, for something small, but just big enough, and things would be perfect. I would obtain what I wanted, the doors of numerous houses would open to me, I would be loved and idolized by the others, and among the others of course were women. I had plenty of proof that my status as an underground activist had a powerful allure over them. Women like to offer themselves to exceptional men. Courage and intelligence attracts them. That charm worked on many of them, but not on Niloufar. In any event, not as I had hoped. Niloufar was unlike any other woman.

  One day, I asked Niloufar’s mother if she had other books by Lenin or other similar works. She told me yes, then had me walk up a floor. The large house had numerous unoccupied rooms. She opened a door and behind it I found what I saw as absolute power. It was a large room that was dark but well ventilated. It was practically empty and, for that reason, the wooden boxes, filled with books, stored at the foot of the walls, captured all my attention. I started by taking a few out to read the title and the name of the author. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I knew intuitively that I was standing before a real treasure trove. Niloufar’s mother leaned over my shoulder and looked with me, as if she herself were seeing these books for the first time. Then I heard her say in a barely audible voice: “It’s the party’s regional library.” And she added with her customary contempt: “You know, the translation and publication branch was very active.” When she said “the party,” she meant the Tudeh Party. Naturally. I had never seen so many books in the same place. “They have a strange odor, don’t you think?” she added with a hint of mischief in her voice. She was right; in addition to the odor of ink and old paper, the books emanated a scent I couldn’t identify. Then she left me alone with the books, but, before she left the room, she turned back toward me to say: “Remind me to tell you their backstory. You’ll see, it’s incredible.” And she told me their backstory that very night. In a lowered voice, as if we were surrounded by eavesdropping ears. “The walls have mice, and the mice have ears!”

  After the dissolution of the Tudeh Party, it was no longer possible to keep these books. They had to disappear and, as the director of the regional library, that difficult task fell to Niloufar’s mother. She had taken them one night to burn in a field. As you know, we have a track record of burning or burying books in this country. Our history still bears the dark traces. But she was never able to complete the task. “They were like my children,” she said to me, sighing in her armchair. “Burning a book is like burning a person.” So she had brought them to one of her uncles, who is also my uncle, a rice merchant. He had large warehouses, and she hoped to find a place to hide them there. But her uncle had refused. Too risky, he had declared. That’s when she’d had a stroke of genius. She bought an entire truckload of rice. She and a few friends removed some of the rice from each sack and replaced it with a few books. The sacks of rice stuffed with books were all placed in a truck. Then she sent the cargo to the other side of the country. The person who received the cargo, a member of the party or another trusted person, in on the plan, made up a problem, the quality of the merchandise or its elevated price, and sent the cargo back to the sender. And the operation would repeat, headed for another destination. Thus the party’s books crisscrossed the entire country several times, until things calmed down. The police pressure dissipated, and the books ended up in these wooden boxes, safe and sound, in the Doctor’s house. Hence the strange odor they emitted. The odor of rice.

  §

  I was finally arrested in the winter of 1978, a month before the shah’s departure. Four men dressed in plain clothes showed up at my house. They rifled through my things, read the scraps of paper they found here and there, and took me, me and a few of my books that had been deemed suspect. My parents remained silent. My father just shook his head when I passed in front of him, as if to say “You asked for it.” Everything unfurled in perfect silence. No handcuffs. The neighbors noticed nothing. My parents listened scrupulously to the police advice and didn’t speak to anyone. I was freed a few days later. I followed the same instructions. I didn’t speak to anyone about the arrest. But it didn’t matter, because everyone knew. Including Niloufar.

  Soon after, Cyrus got back in contact with me. He wanted to meet again: this time, he wanted to bring along a member of the delegation. He didn’t say anything more. I knew that he couldn’t and that I shouldn’t ask any more questions. I assumed a “member” had to be someone important. I suggested we meet in Rasht and I asked Niloufar if we could use their house for the meeting. I remained very vague about who would be there. Niloufar welcomed my demand with a certain enthusiasm. She must have found it exciting. She took care of the arrangements, chose a day when her parents would both be away, dismissed the servants, and cleared out the place so the meeting could go as planned. She even kept watch from the window and surveilled the street to guarantee our security. That day, Cyrus came accompanied by a man who was about forty years old, balding, and wearing round-framed glasses. They moved through the splendor of the house without making any remark, almost too rapidly for it to be natural. I knew that wealth always had an effect on people, no matter what side they were on. We sat around the walnut table in the living room. They questioned me again, asked me my opinion on things. The man with the round-framed glasses seemed interested in my responses. He noted everything in small handwriting on cigarette papers, all while displaying a slightly dubious air, somewhere between astonishment and stupor. He was surely someone important in the hierarchy of the organization. I had been successful once more. In the end, he seemed won over and acquiesced to the majority of my proposals.

  The meeting lasted three hours. Then they left, one after the other, in five-minute intervals. The exchanges we had bore no importance. If you asked me what was said that day, I wouldn’t be able to remember anything in the slightest. What mattered was that it happened in the Doctor’s home. Before Niloufar’s eyes. What mattered is that she was at the window, signaling to me that everything was okay, that I too could leave safely. It was the expression in her eyes, which I interpreted as admiration. It was the first of a series of meetings we would have in that house.

  The books were arranged by theme. World history, religious history, antique Persian history. Then political books, many by Marx, their white covers stamped with his hairy effigy. Capital, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, Anti-Dühring, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” Then Lenin’s works. Then philosophy and literature, in particular Russian literature, which I read avidly and hungrily. And the more I read, the more I realized that the key to power was there, buried like grains of rice in the twists and turns of the books that were sleeping in those wooden boxes. I put my memorization capabilities to full use. At that age, my head was like a big empty hard drive, capable of storing tons of megabytes that I registered and reproduced, adding my own personal touch, my knowledge, during meetings and debates that we organized in secret. That’s how I became the king of the mythmakers. “Mythmaker” is the least denigrating adjective that I can use to describe myself. In my head, I developed a strange machine capable of developing all sorts of ideas, theories, and arguments. I was able to grab hold of absolutely any idea and to erect a heap of things around it. Weave a web dense and solid enough t
o confound anyone. Except, knowledge without engagement is the worst thing. And even if my power was linked to the lack of education within my entourage, it was still power. How could I not revel in it? How could someone ask a powerful person not to? My notoriety extended even into my own family. I was able to talk, knowing that they were listening to me attentively. When I felt that delight, I put my powerful instrument of mythmaking into action. I remember that at the peak of my craft, when we were gathered as a family in the respectful silence of the group listening to me, I turned toward my father to see if he finally felt avenged for his silence, for the contempt I knew he felt, through the eloquence of his prodigal son. But, each time, I noticed with astonishment that my father was the only one who wasn’t listening to me. He was, as always, red with shame, secretly suffering per usual. One day, he confessed to me just how much he hated my soliloquies, my erudite tirades, my speeches. He found me vulgar, boastful, and dishonest. He said that I was the failure of his life and that he bitterly regretted not having passed down to me even a bit of abnegation, good sense, and honesty, values indispensable to being a good man, in his eyes. He was right about that. He saw things as they were, my poor father!

  The protests were happening more and more frequently, do you remember? With each protest, there were one or two deaths, those fallen under the bullets of the Shah’s army. Their burials broke out into riots and there were more deaths, and so on, like a vicious cycle. 17 Shahrivar 1357,11 the soldiers shot into the crowd of a big protest. “Four thousand dead on Jaleh Square!” Four thousand, they said! Can you imagine? The bigger the lie, the better it takes. How many died that day? How many really? Eighty? A hundred, at the absolute maximum. I don’t want to cling to macabre numbers. A crime is a crime, and even the death of one innocent person is intolerable. But okay, it was one more lie in the terrible machination of the 1979 Revolution. And once again, we all took part in that lie. We had all relayed it, without making any effort to verify the information. For all of us, the most important thing was the fall of the shah. A puppet of imperialism, according to us, the people of the left, an infidel enemy of Islam, according to the religious. We know now that it was neither one nor the other. Death to the king! That was our only slogan. Every fist raised for that. Every mouth repeated it. And the shah left. It was the second time that his people had forced him out. The first time, as you know, he left in 1953, and returned after the famous American coup d’état, incited by CIA agents who were aided by spies, the bribed crooks from the slums, and prostitutes. And with the complicity of the Tudeh Party, which didn’t stop them from being among the victims of the purges after the shah’s return. But, this time, the shah seemed to be gone for good. The dominant feeling was that it was the end of an era. We feared the reaction of the fanatical monarchists who had remained silent up till then, or an about-turn from the royal army. Another coup d’état… Those were the catchphrases of the time. They told me to leave the city. “For my safety.” But I wasn’t in danger, for the Shah’s regime had no more henchmen. It was too rotten on the inside to have them.

  §

  Regularly, depending on the events, the political climate, the police pressure, or the rumors that weren’t always based in reality, I took refuge with Niloufar. Even the Doctor conceded that I was safer with them. During that time, he was still an influential man, and the police treated him with respect. Niloufar’s mother welcomed me warmly, she was happy to contribute to the struggle in this way that would lead to the overthrow of her old enemy. As for Niloufar, she didn’t seem at all affected by my presence, but I had learned to decipher the tiny signs of excitement that disturbed her usual indifference. She was like an unpredictable flower that would suddenly open, passing from one state to another in a matter of seconds. She would suddenly interrupt what had seemed to hold all her attention and invite me into her bedroom and lead me into the twists and turns of her reflections like a stubborn little girl, without a care for the time that passed. She was no longer the spoiled child that cared about nothing. She had become hypersensitive. Determined to face all the injustices of the world. She was walking in the footsteps of giants. Carrying the weight of the world. She wasn’t afraid of anything. She wanted to respond to the call of the deep. Remain underwater until the final victory of the people. And she asked me to help her. She wanted me to transmit to her all that I knew in one sentence. In one word even, if possible. And at night, she would sometimes let me sleep in her bedroom. I am not very big, as you can see. At the time, I was much skinnier, and her couch suited me perfectly. I was happy. I shared her bedroom, breathed the air she breathed, listened to the melody of her breath, the crinkling of the sheets when she turned over. I woke up before dawn, I didn’t have to move. From the couch, I let my eyes wander. The darkness of the room gradually dissipated, and I was able to see her. Sleeping in her bed, dressed in a simple shirt or in one of her legendary tank tops, her arms stretched along her body, her black jellyfish hair smeared over the pillow. I spent long minutes watching her closed eyes and the black arcs of her eyelashes. I ran over the sinuous paths of her body. She breathed slowly. Air filled her large free-diver’s lungs. Her breasts undulated beneath the covers. The wrinkles of her forehead were erased, just like her dimples. I could have spent a lifetime staring at her. Carried out a bizarre relationship with her, just like the one Mohamad-Réza had lived during his nights, separated from her only by a window, sharing the night air and the song of the stars. Did he envision the same things as me? Or something more subtle, more exalting, more intoxicating? Didn’t he possess the most beautiful part of her, despite everything? For the proximity she shared with me was not an advantage. If you knew her even a little bit, you knew that it was in fact the exact opposite. If I had slept in another room, I could have hoped. There would have been at least the tiny possibility that she would come in the middle of the night to upturn the established order once more, to which she alone held the secret. But here, in her bedroom, right next to me, she was putting the maximum amount of distance between us. Despite all my vain efforts, she turned me into the little boy that I was trying so hard not to be. She relegated me to the place of observer, hopeless lookout. No matter what I did, I was no better than Mohamad-Réza in her eyes, I couldn’t even hope for more than him. To be considered as something other than a voyeur, a solitary pleasure-seeker, a masturbator. Objectively, I was even worse. Mohamad-Réza, at least, took the risk of scaling a wall, of putting himself in danger, naked. He hadn’t promised honesty, fraternity, and camaraderie. He hadn’t lied. He was true to himself. A desperate lover, devoured by an outsize desire. I was an impostor, aware and tired of my own schemes.

  Despite what Niloufar’s mother insinuated, her husband, that man we called the Doctor, didn’t feel at all threatened by what was going on in the country. He had never dreamed of transferring his money abroad nor of leaving the country, as a number of his colleagues had done. He was even, in his own way, in solidarity with the people on the streets. Little by little, he started to speak nostalgically of his years in the Tudeh Party, his days of combat, his feats of battle. The revolt we were living in had made everything resurface in his mind, like the shipwrecked cadavers floating on the water. An ancient flame had reignited in his eyes. He, too, was secretly dreaming of his revolution. When I think about it, I am more and more convinced that at the end of the day there is never just one revolution, but a multitude of revolutions. Everyone makes his own. Everyone pursues his dream. Only, the sum of individual dreams does not amount to a common dream, but rather to a collective nightmare. So the Doctor, that old lion, was reliving his youth, remembering his meetings with his students, the unionists. He was recalling the relics of the speeches on the “fraternal” parties around the Soviet countries. He had rediscovered the party’s accent and somewhat outdated vocabulary. He was analyzing the causes of his failure, deploring those wasted years of combat that could have been avoided; he had forgotten nothing of those years. On those nights, after one of his tirades, bla
zed hot, he would take out a bottle of whiskey from his stash, serve us a double and start to dream, pretending not to notice his wife’s mocking smile. We drank to the glory of the people. Those were good people. And they were the last. He spoke to me in a miraculous imitation of the accent of his fiercest enemy, his wife. It’s true that, after the coup d’état in 1953, he had escaped by the skin of his teeth and had been able to slip by without passing through the checkout. But he would pay the bill years later, and with interest!

  22 Bahman,12 there was an uprising in Rasht, and everywhere else. Niloufar’s mother had declared loud and clear that she wanted to “finish the job left undone thirty years ago.” And for nothing in the world did she want to fail her mission, not this time. That day, the driver dropped us a few streets from the main town square. He wasn’t able to go any further because of the traffic. We went the rest of the way on foot. Following on the heels of thousands of others. On the main square, in the middle of the crowd, the last king of Iran was solidly seated on his immense bronze horse and had no intention of leaving. In one hand he held the reins of his pure-blooded steed, with its protruding veins and long mane, rearing, legs spread enough to see its imposing testicles and the immense penis in its sheath, no doubt implying the virile force of its rider, and, with the other hand, he was giving a military salute. He dominated the square, not at all worried about the rearing horse balanced on the platform, nor about the people swarming at his feet, growing louder and louder, more and more menacing. The general euphoria was at its height. The people were chanting aggressively: “Death to the king!” Their intentions were clear. They wanted to tear down the statue of the king. Everyone did the best they could. A dozen people had managed to climb onto the platform and were attempting to unbolt the statue. Others had slung a cord around the horse’s neck and were pulling. The statue resisted. The horse was mounted on its hind legs, hooves solidly anchored in concrete, fixed in a final silent whinny, carrying on its bronze back what remained of its rider’s waning power, the future fallen king. Niloufar’s mother cleared a path in the crowd despite her weak shoulders. Putting her elegance and good manners aside, she successfully pushed the others away and advanced toward the statue. She was light and agile, as if the numbness of thirty years of sleep had suddenly left her. She was almost running, forcing us to speed up to follow her. Once under the platform, she had found her youth again. She was crying out with the people, wanting to scale the concrete wall herself, down with the king and this time for good, even if it meant tearing down that nasty horse with her own hands. Breaking its legs with her own teeth. But, at the last moment, she opted to give her daughter a boost so she could climb in her place. She encouraged her to climb higher, and Niloufar climbed all the way up, finding herself on the horse’s hind quarters in no time, then on the shoulders of the rider. She was the one who put the cord around the king’s neck, as around the neck of someone condemned to death. An act that provoked immense joy in the crowd. And tears of joy in the eyes of a mother who was finally seeing her daughter achieve the work that she herself had begun thirty years prior. The crowd applauded and launched into frantic slogans, pulling on the cord to the cry of “Death to the king!” But the steed stood its ground, and its imperturbable master continued to salute the unleashed people. As if he were continuing to see his subjects, the same ones that had cheered in former days at the passing of the royal vehicle, chanting his name, rushing to kiss his feet. As if he were insisting on hearing that “Long live the king!” that those same mouths had so often uttered. “They reinforced it, the bastards,” Niloufar’s mother remarked with rage. She remembered that, under Mosaddegh, the horse had tilted more easily. Tilted, but not fallen! After the American coup d’état and the return of the Shah, they had erected it again so that it would continue to loom over the square, the cars that drove around, the to-and-fro of an amnesiac population. The same people that had cried “Long live Mosaddegh!” one morning and “Long live the king!” that same night. The same people who promised to take to the streets by the millions if someone tried to touch their liberty or their leader and who then hid the night of the coup d’état, when they had carried Mosaddegh away with his hands tied. Who had slept with their heads under their pillows so as not to hear the gunfire that split Fatemi’s heart.13 A people whose promises you should be wary of, for the masses are desperately shortsighted and endowed with a reptilian memory. The proof is that for two hundred years, at each major turn of history, they always make the worst choices. With each bifurcation, they travel down the worst path. Yes, the bronze beast had been reinstalled in 1953, and they had used that opportunity, predicting the days to come, to anchor it very solidly on its pedestal.