My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

  I arrived at night, as always. The town was in a peaceful slumber, nestled around its bazaar and its double-arched bridge, folded in on itself under the rain. I walked without thinking. Without lifting my head. I could have found my way just by following the noises, the smells. A few rare passersby walked by me without a glance. After ten minutes of walking, I crossed the bridge. It was the rainy season, and the river was flooded. The dark, torrential water was wrapping, menacingly, around the pillars. Then I detected a scent of rosewater and camphor. I was in front of the mosque. I had arrived. In the small cul-de-sac, I stopped in front of the metallic double-leaf door. It was three in the morning. The door of our house awaited me with the incredulous eyes of its two iron knockers. Those concentric circles had always coldly spied on me. I had returned to the ground zero of my destiny. Not as a conqueror, but in the skin of a vagabond. There was nothing for me here. It was no longer my house, and the people who lived there were no longer my parents. I had made a mistake. I shouldn’t have been there. I turned around. I had to flee. No matter where. Then the door opened, and I saw the face of an old woman who strangely resembled my mother. Behind her was my father, hair white, back stooped.

  The table was set, my favorite meal awaited me, stuffed eggplants with crushed walnuts. I sat down, I started to eat, the old couple stared at me in silence. I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down in my bed. I was home.

  Once more, I had to remain invisible, but this secrecy was more bearable to me than my previous life. I suddenly had time to reflect, to read. Of course, all my books had disappeared. My parents had gotten rid of them. A rather common occurrence in those years. Books were thrown out by the dozens, by the thousands, buried, burned, flung into the water. Concerned families set about the task quickly, deeming the books harmful for whatever reason, their title, their cover, the name of the author. I dug around the family library, among the few books that had been spared by the parental censure. There was, of course, the indispensable Divan of Hafez, the Quran, the Nahj al-Balagha, but also my father’s books, the ones he kept in his own personal cabinet, where, as a child, I had found with stupefaction the almost naked photo of the voluptuous singer Hayedeh. I read Amsal o Hekam by Dehkhoda, Masnavi by Rumi, Rubaiyat by Khayyam, then more obscure books, like Kitab al-Kafi. Then I reread them and reread them again. With each reading, they seemed different. They were saying the same thing. But I was changing. I was growing older as I turned the pages.

  My parents asked me no questions about my years away from them and the reasons for my return. I was there, and that was enough for them. I lived by the schedule of the house. My father got up at six in the morning. He rushed through the rapid couplets of his morning prayer, uttered without conviction, his voice muffled by the whirring of the samovar sputtering in the kitchen. Once dressed, he had his breakfast, a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese dipped in sugary tea, put on his shoes with the help of an old shoehorn, then left the house. He went to work on foot. No longer a silkworm merchant, just a tailor, without any surplus clients, he no longer needed his moped, which he had sold anyway. As soon as the door shut behind him, my mother turned off the samovar.

  She woke up long before my father. She spent some time first in a dark room, praying. Her relations with God were essentially confidential, like an affair. She granted herself the right to interpret the rules and religious rites as she pleased. She took liberties with the divine. For example, I knew that she replaced the monotone chant of Al-Fatiha and the piercing Ayat al-Kursi of the five prayers with other verses from the Quran, which she chose depending on her mood in the moment. Then she sang the entire day. Since my earliest memories, she had always sung, but now, for the first time, I had the time to really listen: it was a sort of improvised blues. She was complaining about her life, her destiny.

  Often, at night, I would sit in front of a window that overlooked the street. I would listen to the familiar murmur of the river flowing a few steps away, the rain falling on the roofs, the water gurgling in the gutters as before. But something had changed, which I noticed without ever going out. That city was no longer the city I had left behind me five years earlier. It was dying in silence. It seemed deserted, in mourning. I could no longer hear the racket of children when classes ended, the ruckus of young people at night, the songs of drunks in the middle of the night… The only thing that remained was the slinking gait of opium addicts at dawn, coming back from the dens.

  One night, a car honked in the street, three unambiguous beeps, which suddenly wrested me from my torpor. But no one had had wind of my return. And besides, all my former friends had disappeared, taken by the war or imprisoned, some shot, others on the run. Hossein was waiting for me in front of the house, like in the good old days, at the wheel of his busted car. Hossein was probably the last of my friends from my high school days who was still around. He had always been indifferent to my renown, to my status as a political activist, to the solemnity I displayed in public. Even when I had reached the height of my glory, he would still tap me on the shoulder, like when we were in school, to heckle and tease me. He had the ability to bring out the dreamer, the shy boy I was at heart. With him, I could finally let my guard down, take off the mask and exist without shame. He probably owed his survival to his political indifference. Even at the most decisive moments of the revolution, he didn’t get involved. He had followed all the uproar with a touch of condescension, as if it didn’t concern him. A good truck driver’s son, he dreamed of only one thing: becoming a truck driver in his turn and establishing a connection between our town and Tehran. A dream that he would realize a few years later.

  I never knew how he had learned of my return. In any event, I climbed into his car, and we took the road bordered with marshes that led to Chamkhaleh. I had nothing to fear. The village was completely deserted. The cold and rain had chased everyone away, including the Basij. Hossein drove me to a cottage I had never been to before. Clearly, he had planned it out. The small house was heated. There were things to eat and drink. As soon as we sat down, he lit a brazier mischievously, to heat up an opium pipe. I had never tried opium, but I knew it would be pointless to resist.

  It was winter. The Siberian winds shook the windows and blew through the zinc slats. Hossein seemed to know what he was doing. He must have had practice to be able to handle the pipe with such dexterity, bring it to the right temperature, then, after cutting the opium, place the piece in the right spot, heat it up so that the perfumed and velvety smoke would rise just enough, find its way through the hole in the pipe and arrive at its destination. After a few puffs, I felt a knot unravel in my chest, my muscles relax one by one. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it? In the moment, in any case, I finally understood why people abandon everything for this feeling of comfort, whose extent I had barely glimpsed. Already, by the second puff, I felt that I was breathing more easily, as if air was penetrating my lungs without encountering any resistance. The world had become small, so small that I could take it in my hand and put it in my pocket. Its troubles, its vicissitudes, its disasters were far away, they seemed futile and insignificant. We left the house, high as kites, for a short walk. Between fits of laughter, we embraced each other and made promises as sincere as they were untenable. But, mostly, we scratched each other. Yes, we spent the majority of our time scratching each other. Opium makes the skin ultra-sensitive, as if each cell of your skin were suddenly endowed with an autonomous intelligence. We scratched each other slowly and mutually, in a kind of virile and fraternal caress, floating in our narcotic euphoria.

  As if we had been attracted by a lover, our steps in the deserted streets led us toward Villa Rose. It was standing there, sad and silent, like a washed-up cruise ship. Beneath the silver light of the moon, it seemed smaller and drabber than before. The bad weather had faded the pink color of its facade, turning it into a pale yellow. The sea had advanced and was unfurling at the foot of the black gate, now rusted, and its outer wall, which we skirted. I climbed on the electr
ic pole behind the building to step over the wall and jumped into the backyard. Hossein stayed in the alley to keep watch. The doors and windows of the villa had been sealed. The terrace, covered in seaweed and dead leaves, testified to several years of abandon. I made a tour of the house. Nothing remained of its splendorous years, of its erotic aura engendered by the beautiful occupants of times past, of its powerful magnetism. I retraced my steps. Just as I was about to hop back over the wall, something caught my eye. The window of the garden shed, broken for a long time, had been replaced with plastic, and bits of fabric and cardboard acted as a door. As I approached, I got the feeling that someone was in there. Niloufar?

  §

  I’m telling you, despite the years, I remember the shiver I felt in that moment. My blood completely froze in my veins, and the euphoria of the opium dissipated all at once. I pushed on the old unhinged door and entered. There was an old blanket, rolled up in a corner, melted candles, piles of newspapers. And, on the windowsill, three seashells in a row. Why did that make me think of Niloufar? Why was I so sure she had been hiding there? I had no proof; it was just a hunch. But who else could have been hiding there? What hand other than hers could have placed those seashells on the windowsill? I had missed my meeting with her, the last one. That’s what I thought then. I was wrong, of course—there would be others.

  Niloufar had not gone into exile in the mountains of Kurdistan, as I had imagined. She had returned to Villa Rose. That’s when my mother told me that she had come to see me. She had even stayed with my parents for a few days. My mother had stuffed her with her finest dishes because she had seemed so emaciated, weak, sick. She had slept in my bed. Then she had taken off again, without leaving a message for me. Where had she gone? Perhaps she was still in the area, with a member of her father’s family I didn’t know about. I could search for her. I would have confessed everything to her, as I am to you today. Even if I would have come off as a traitor, a terrible person, even if she would have hated me, I would have told her that I had lied. Maybe I could have broken her deadly certitudes, her dangerous faith, by breaking myself, the deceptive icon that I was. Tell her that I had never believed those words, those ideas, that it was all lies, an affect, a pretext to exist in the eyes of others, hers first and foremost. Then she might have changed her mind. Would it have saved her? Perhaps. But I did nothing. I didn’t try to find her.

  I had to get back on the road soon. No matter how high, no matter how thick, the walls will always reveal what they hide. Even drawn in front of the windows, the curtains leave a glimpse of the shadow that stands behind them. My presence at my parents’ house couldn’t remain a secret forever. So I packed my things. I put my money at the bottom of a bag, under a few articles of clothing, and threw the love poems of Nazim Hikmet on top, the only book I never got rid of. Then I boarded the bus for Tehran. As usual, I left at nightfall. A powerful sadness weighed on me. It didn’t dissipate until after the long Manjil Tunnel.

  The night before my departure, I sensed a presence in my bedroom. It was my father. I wasn’t surprised. When I was a child, he often came in like that, discreetly, late at night, on the way back from his silkworm farms or his workshop. He would approach my bed on tiptoe. I would pretend to be sound asleep. Did he realize? I never knew. He would lean over and stare at me for a moment. Then he would stroke my forehead with his hand, rough like sandpaper, before placing a kiss on my cheek or my forehead. Those might have been the only caresses I ever received from him. That night, his kiss was firmer, lingered longer than in the past. I think it was the most affectionate kiss he’d ever given me.

  The Guardians of the Revolution picked me up at the bus station; I’d barely even set foot in Tehran. Four bearded men in khaki uniforms. I gave them my hands almost with relief and, on the seat of the huge Toyota that drove me to Evin Prison, I abandoned myself to the contemplation of the city through the window.

  Imprisoned in a country at war, as an enemy of the state: you could say that I’d hit the jackpot. What could I expect from my frightened and feverish jailers, uncertain of their own futures? In those years, life wasn’t worth much. Hundreds, thousands of soldiers gave theirs each day on the battlefield. Death fell from the sky, walked in the street. We breathed it in like air. So what value could the life of an opponent have, who on top of it is an infidel, a communist? Even just those few syllables that made up “komonist” sounded like a sentence.

  And yet I survived. After a few days of torture, they brought me to a dark room, warm and humid, like a Turkish bath. I cleared a path in the darkness, between the bodies that shared the poorly defined space, to the back wall. I had to wait for the light of day to grasp the incredible number of prisoners there. You, too, must have had that experience. I’ll spare you the details. If someone had told me that I would live three years in that hole, I wouldn’t have believed them. Even three days inside there seemed unbearable to me. Each night, in the wet heat of bodies, eyes riveted to the small opening at the top of the wall, I was certain that most of us wouldn’t leave that place alive. Fear was always in our eyes, all the more so because we were young, for the most part. Some of them even looked like children. They would cry at night because they missed their parents’ houses. Others had lost their minds and filled the cell, day and night, with their screaming and nightmares.

  Almost every day, they fetched a handful of men. Many never came back, or if they did, they were in a very bad state, beaten, broken. Sometimes they forced us to watch these scenes of public repentance, during which the leaders of dissident parties confessed to implausible crimes. I awaited my turn. But something told me that I would get out. I knew my jailers better than anyone. Thanks to my mother, daughter of a mullah, and thanks to my father’s books, I knew their thoughts, the rules they were abiding, their weaknesses. I preferred to deal with the old Hezbollahis, the educated Hajji, rather than the young idiots. With the former, I could at least stagger through the twists and turns of religious thought. My knowledge of the Quran and the Nahj al-Balagha had an impressive effect on them. I also knew how to gain the confidence of my jailers, my torturers, by commending their devotion and the difficulty of their task. They slowly warmed to me. That’s how I survived the interrogations, the humiliations, the heavy-gauge electric cable whipping on the soles of my feet. I evaded the traps; I slipped through the net. I told you, I am a survivor. It’s written in my DNA. Evin Prison was The Raft of the Medusa and my talents as a man-eater would come in handy one more time. Yes, like you, like everyone there, recounting their story, I ate the slimy and bitter flesh of friends, comrades, and brothers.

  At night, I drowned myself in the pale and infinite blue of the Caspian. I had become skilled at holding my breath. I could leave the reality of this world to the others, abandon myself to the call of the deep and slowly sink. Thus, sitting amidst my comrades, more than six hundred miles from the Caspian, enclosed between four walls, I was able to indulge in the pleasure of asphyxiation, the approach of death, in my head. Each night I descended a bit deeper, each time I went a bit further. Down there, in the shadows, I searched for Nilou. I watched for her soaked, silken hair, undulating over her shoulders, the shimmering sparks on her long legs, on her powerful arms, the sparkle of her almond eyes. She was waiting for me.

  The cell emptied and filled according to an obscure logic. The new arrivals took the place of those who left, who were transferred or liberated, but mostly executed. There were the passing birds, those who would be hoisted on the gallows or pumped full of lead in no time, and the “long-term” visitors, those who, like me, remained, settled into their corners, started businesses. I had a designated place in a corner of the cell, with the privilege due to my years served.

  Little by little, the population of our jail stabilized, after the tidal waves of the early days. By listening to the conversations of the prison employees, I had surmised that the war was about to end. Our liberation was near, we thought. But that was far from true. We were deluding ourselves. The
worst was yet to come.

  §

  The summer of ’88 arrived like a bad promise, and the Supreme Leader issued his grand fatwa, which he wanted to see executed before his death. They were to empty the prisons of all the dissidents, starting with the Mojahedin of the People. The war had ended without the Pasdaran needing to attack Baghdad on their way to Jerusalem. They had to get rid of the bitter taste of the Iraq peace treaty, which the Supreme Leader himself had called “a cup of poison.” What was the antidote? Who would pay the high price for our defeat? We would, the already-captured enemies. The troops without a flag, without a leader, and without weapons, who represented the forces of evil. You remember, don’t you? During the three months of summer ’88, thousands of prisoners, even those who had already been judged and were finishing their time, were sentenced again in summary trials and for the most part sent to the gallows, by a commando unit formed of three mullah judges. The silent massacre of five thousand defenseless men and women. And once more, I survived. I would stay long enough to learn the true suffering of the survivor. The infinite pain of the immortal. In spring ’89, the prison was almost empty. We could now breathe the oxygen shares of those absent from the air of the cell. Spread our legs in the space that was no longer occupied by those who had left. It was our own paradise. Death was no longer lurking, and, like all the captives of the world, we could finally die of boredom.