Azar Nafisi (33 page)

The apartment was in tip-top shape, everything in its place: the rocking chair, the kilim, the day's newspapers neatly folded on the table, the bed made. I wandered from room to room looking for some sign of disorder, some clue to this break in the routine. The door was open. He must have gone out for something—say, coffee or milk—and left the door open for me. What else could explain his absence? What else could it be? Could they have come to get him? Could they have taken him away? Once that idea entered my mind, it refused to leave. It kept reverberating like a mantra: they've taken him away, they've taken him away, they've . . . It was not unknown—they'd done it before to others. Once, a writer's apartment was found unlocked. His friends had found on the kitchen table the remnants of his breakfast, the yolk of an egg streaming across the plate, a piece of toast, butter, some strawberry jam, a half-empty glass of tea. Every room seemed to describe an unfinished act: in the bedroom, an unmade bed; in the office, piles of books scattered on the floor and over the big stuffed chair; on the desk, an open book, a pair of glasses. Two weeks later they discovered that he had been whisked away by the secret police, for questioning. These questionings were part of our everyday lives.

But why? Why should they take him? He had no political affiliations, wrote no inflammatory articles. But then, he has so many friends. . . . How do I know he isn't secretly involved in some political group, an underground guerrilla leader? The thought seemed absurd, but any explanation was better than none at all: I had to find a reason for the sudden absence of a man bound to routines, conscious of his obligations, always exactly five minutes early to his appointments, a man, I suddenly realized, who had deliberately created an image of himself out of his routines, bread crumbs for us to follow.

I went to the phone by the couch in the living room. Should I call Reza, his best friend? But then I'd worry him too—better wait for a while; maybe he'd return. And what if they come back and find me here? Shut up,
shut up
! Just wait, he'll be back any minute. I glanced at my watch. He's only forty-five minutes late. Only? I'll wait for another half hour, then I will decide.

I went to the library and scanned the rows of books, all organized by subject and title. I picked up a novel, put it back. I picked up a book of criticism and then I noticed Eliot's
Four Quartets.
Yes, not a bad idea. I opened it the way we used to open Hafez, closing our eyes, asking our question and letting our finger rest somewhere at random. It opened to the page in the middle of “Burnt Norton,” beginning with the lines “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless;/Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance/is.”

I closed the book, moved back to the couch and felt exhausted.

The phone rang. If it's a friend, he'll hang up after the third ring. And if not? What if it's him? He left the door open, he called my home and found no one there, he's calling me here. But then why no note? If it had been me, I probably would have forgotten to leave a note, I with my untidy mind, but not him—he'd remember. But what if he didn't have time to write, or
couldn't
write? If they had come to take him away, would he say, Wait, let me write a note to this friend, whom you can come and pick up later: Dear Azar, Sorry, couldn't wait for you. Stay where you are; they'll be back for you soon.

Suddenly I panicked. I have to call Reza, I thought. Better call him than die of anxiety. Two heads are better than one and all that. I called Reza and explained the situation. His voice was soothing, but did I sense a sudden panic rimmed around his soothing words? He said, Give me a half hour and I'll be there.

As soon as I put the receiver down, I regretted having called him. If something bad is going to happen, why involve someone else, and if he is okay. . . . I went back to
Four Quartets,
and this time turned to the beginning, the lines I used to read aloud to myself when I first studied Eliot in college:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

How had I missed that point about the unredeemability of the present when I had read it so many times before? I started to read aloud, walking in circles around the room:

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Now I came to a favorite part, and felt myself on the edge of tears:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

I repeated the last two lines, feeling tears, to my dismay, running down my cheeks. His friend finally arrived. I let him in, and immediately received his comfort and transferred to him my anxiety and fear. He held my hand and patted me on the back. Don't worry, he said. He's nuts—maybe he had to go to an emergency editing session. He's been known to disappear on one of those assignments for days. But when he makes an appointment the day before? Couldn't he have left a note? After a while we both sat down on the couch, holding hands, feeling forsaken and intimate with our doubts and fears.

We didn't notice the door open, we heard a key in the lock. He had forgotten he'd left the door unlocked. He came in and his first words were, I'm so sorry. I was out with the Kid. He looked very pale and, if arched eyebrows could sag, I would say that his had sagged. Fatigue fought with regret, with his realization of the anxiety he had put us through. Well, the least you could have done is get yourself arrested or come in with your interrogators, I said feebly. You say you were out with the Kid?

The Kid was his name for a grown-up man, eighteen and a high school senior when he first met him in one of his classes that year of the revolution. My magician had a special affection for the Kid, who wanted to go to medical school but was fascinated by his talk of Aeschylus and Chaplin. He passed the entrance exam with a first, only to be denied a place because he admitted to being a Baha'i. During the Shah's reign, the Baha'is were protected and flourished—one sin for which the Shah was never forgiven. After the revolution, their property was confiscated and their leaders murdered. Baha'is had no civic rights under the new Islamic constitution and were barred from schools, universities and workplaces.

The Kid could easily have taken an ad in the paper, like so many others did, denying that he belonged to the decadent and imperialist sect, disowning his parents—who, luckily, were out of harm's way in Europe—and claiming to have been converted by some ayatollah. That's all it would have taken and the doors would have been opened to him. Instead, he had admitted to being a Baha'i, although he was not even a practicing Baha'i and had no religious inclinations, denying himself in the process a brilliant career in medicine, for there was no doubt that he would have been a brilliant doctor.

Now he lived with his old grandmother and did odd jobs—he couldn't hold any one of them for long. He was currently working at a pharmacy, the nearest he would ever come to being a doctor. I had never met him, but I'd heard of him, of his devastating good looks, his love for a Muslim girl, who would soon forsake him to marry a rich older man and would later try to make up with him as a married woman.

The Kid had called just before lunch. His grandmother, who had been ill for a long time, had died and he was calling from the hospital, half-choked. He kept repeating he didn't know what to do. So my magician had left in a hurry. He thought he'd be back soon, long before my visit.

He'd found him standing in front of the hospital, beside a soft and boneless woman: the aunt. The Kid had almost cried, but crying in front of a godlike mentor was impossible, so he had been grown-up, his dry eyes worse than tears. There were no burial places for Baha'is; the regime had destroyed the Baha'i cemetery in the first years of the revolution, demolishing the graves with a bulldozer. There were rumors that the cemetery had been turned into a park or a playground. Later, I found out it had become a cultural center, called Bakhtaran. What were you supposed to do when your grandmother died if there was no cemetery?

I got up and started pacing around the room. You sit down, he said, pointing to a spot on the couch beside him. Sit here and be quiet. Don't fidget—that's a good girl. I said, Before you start up again, let me make a phone call. I rang up Bijan and told him to go to the party without me, I would join him later. When I returned, I heard Reza saying, It's amazing, this obsession with taking possession not just of the living but also of the dead. At the start of the revolution, the revolutionary prosecutor bulldozed Reza Shah's grave, destroying the monument and creating a public toilet in its place—which he inaugurated by pissing in it. I interrupted their conversation and asked if they wanted coffee. I brought out three mismatched mugs and set them on the table with a pot of boiling water and some instant coffee. He got up, went to the refrigerator and brought us a box of chocolates; always the perfect gentleman.

So the Kid had borrowed a car from a friend and was standing there with his sniffling aunt. He couldn't imagine leaving him with the aunt to take care of the corpse and decided to go with them, despite the Kid's strong protestations. He had thought of me and called my house, but there was no answer. No, he had not thought of calling Reza or any other friend. He had gotten into the car with the Kid.

They drove to the back of the hospital, and there, the corpse, already wrapped in a white shroud, was given to them. They each took hold of one end and put the corpse in the trunk of the car. They then proceeded to drive to a garden he had heard of outside Tehran for the burial. They worried they might be stopped—what would they tell the militia? How would they prevent them from opening the trunk? The Kid worried about the car. After all, it belonged to his friend and he didn't want to drag innocent people into this. Innocent people! my magician cried out. Can you imagine feeling guilty about trying to bury your grandmother, to give her any kind of burial, never mind a decent one?

I wanted to touch him, but the experience had put him outside of our reach: he was still there in that car, driving towards the garden. There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins—I'm sorry, I feel your pain? My magician and Nassrin were of the type who did not want sympathy; they expected us to understand and to tailor our empathy to the shape of their grief. Of course, with him it was worse: he felt guilt and anger.

They drove down the same highway they had taken so many times, towards the Caspian Sea. The land, the trees, the mountains, slipped by and the aunt did not say a word; she just sat in the back, and from time to time they heard her sniffles and snorts. The men could not talk about anything real; they made halfhearted small talk about last year's Oscars.

The garden looked like any other garden; behind the mud-brick walls, he could see the tall trees inside. They honked. An old man opened the gate and they were led inside. They were shown a few plots with headstones; two freshly dug plots were ready. Families of the dead had to perform the final ritual of washing the corpse and putting it in the shroud. The Kid and his aunt went into a small building, and my magician sat there holding a small bouquet of daffodils and narcissus he had bought along the way. The rest went by quickly, like a dream: placing the body in the ground, throwing earth over it, standing by the freshly dug grave for a few moments and leaving the flowers behind. The Kid paid the old man. They got back into the car and drove straight to his apartment, and now here I am, at your service. Looking at me, a sudden kindness blossomed in his eyes. And I apologize, he said. How thoughtless of me not to have thought of what you would feel.

We sat there for a little while longer. If we talked, I don't remember. Then I got up and said, Could you call me a taxi please, and he did. When the doorbell rang, it took me a while to put on my robe and then the scarf and to find my bag and say good-bye. We had not talked about the object of my visit—it all seemed rather pointless. Of course, there would be tomorrow and I would call again and arrange another visit and we would talk. For now, I kissed both of them on the cheek, thanked Reza and hurried down the stairs to the waiting car.

28

Two nights before the announcement of the first cease-fire in the war of cities, a few friends came over to watch John Ford's
Mogambo.
Mr. Forsati by now was in the habit of bringing me videos. One day, out of the blue, he followed me to my office, carrying a small parcel in his hands. It turned out to be a video of
Big.
From then on, he brought me films, mostly second- or third-rate American releases. It was said that the Islamists procured them from the sailors on duty in the Gulf, who were allowed to watch forbidden films, and smuggled them onshore. After a while, I began to make requests. I asked for classics, like
Jules and Jim
and
Modern Times,
or films by Howard Hawks, John Ford, Buñuel or Fellini. These names were new to him, and at first it was more difficult for him to find them, perhaps because they were of little interest to sailors. One day he brought me
Mogambo.
He said it was a gift. He never thought he'd fall in love with an old film, but there it was: he had, and he had a hunch I'd like it.

That night there was a blackout for several hours, obliterating the whole city. We sat by candlelight and talked and drank Vishnovka, a homemade cherry vodka, a few fairly distant explosions interrupting the otherwise calm flow of conversation. The next night it was announced that Iraq would accept a cease-fire if it could fire the last missile. It was like a game played between two children—what mattered most was who would get the last word.