The Moving Prison (23 page)

The shape was that of a man. Through the open window, she heard Marjan half-barking, half-growling at him. Remembering the instinctive hostility of the dog toward the
pasdars
who had come, she felt her face blanching with dread. The bell rang again as she madly pondered what to do.

“Mother?” Sepi’s voice sounded at her elbow. “Who’s at the gate? Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“How do I know it isn’t the mullahs, come back to carry us away?”

“Let me see,” said Sepi, elbowing her aside and craning her neck to see the stranger at the gate. “He looks familiar, he …” Sepi suddenly gasped. “It’s Khosrow!” She looked at her mother, her face a shifting map of uncertainty, as if her heart dared her eyes to believe.

The girl whirled about and raced for the stairs. “Sepideh!” Esther called after her. “Stop! You don’t know why he’s here!” But the footsteps never slowed, pounding down the staircase and slapping into the marble-tiled foyer. Esther heard the front door flung back against the wall and an instant later saw her daughter racing down the walk toward the gate. “Quiet, Marjan!” she heard her shout, then, “Khosrow! I thought I’d never see you again!” As Sepi opened the gate, Esther turned away from the window.

Sepi came through the gate toward Khosrow, her steps slowing with indecision as she stared intently at him for some sign. And then, heedless of who might see, he took two quick steps toward her and enfolded her in his arms. Neither of them spoke for a full minute. Then, he held her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

“Sepi, I am so sorry. I’m ashamed of the way I’ve treated you. And … I admit it … I tried to forget about you. I tried to listen to my father and have no more to do with you, but … it just wasn’t right, Sepi. I was wrong to—”

“I understand,” she softly interrupted. “These are terrible times, Khosrow. People do things out of fear and prejudice that they wouldn’t do if they weren’t so frightened. You at least tried to defend me from those … those boys. I am grateful for your courage.”

“Courage!” Khosrow barked the word derisively. He could not meet her eyes. “No, Sepi, I am not brave. If I were, I wouldn’t have spent the last weeks trying to pretend you don’t exist. If I were brave, I wouldn’t have listened to my father telling me to blend in, to go along and avoid the notice of the fanatics. If I were brave,” he said, finally turning to look at her, “it wouldn’t have taken me this long to decide to ask for the privilege of seeing you again.”

She looked at him, uncomprehending.

“Sepi,” he said, taking her hand in his, “I want to see you again. I don’t care what the others think, what my father thinks. I … I care very much for you, and—”

“Oh, Khosrow,” she said, biting her lip and looking away. “I … you can’t.” Tears of frustration burned the corners of her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks.

“Sepi! What is it? What did I say?”

She shook her head, her hand covering her mouth. “It’s not what you said,” she managed. “It’s just that …” She clenched her jaw against the sobs that begged for release, took several deep, shuddering breaths before facing him again. “Khosrow, I … we … are going away.”

“What?”

“My family is leaving. Leaving Iran. We are going to America.”

His face wore the expression of someone who has just been stabbed by his closest friend.

She took his hand. “Come inside,” she said, leading him toward the gate. “The street isn’t a good place to talk.”

He allowed her to lead him, still not quite believing what he had heard. It was impossible! He had finally resolved to become a man, to use his own mind and set his own course, and Sepi, his intended destination, was leaving?

She sat on an ornamented chaise of whitewashed wrought iron and beckoned him to sit beside her. “Khosrow. Listen to me. Sit down here.”

Woodenly, he obeyed.

“Someone once told me,” she began, “that when bad things happen, there are three ways to react. You can give up, you can adapt, or you can become angry. I don’t think you should give up, Khosrow. And anger won’t do any good, in this case.” She placed her fingertips on his chin and gently guided him to look at her. “I think you and I must adapt. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do about our leaving.”

He felt as if all the air had left his lungs. He thought of the way he had felt at the beginning, when he knew he was starting to care for her, how the exhilaration of his emerging feelings had transformed every moment of those days. Life had seemed bigger, colors were brighter, smells were richer. Now he knew he would never again experience those feelings in that same way, and he resented the loss. He groped for words that would change things, that would set them both back at the beginning, would erase all the harm that had intruded on their blossoming relationship. But such words didn’t exist. He knew deep within himself, though he loathed admitting it, that Sepi was right. The world had changed … for the worse, surely. But still, they had to adapt.

“I will never forget you,” he said finally. “And, perhaps—who knows? I may come to see you in America someday.”

She smiled at him through the tears cascading down her cheeks. “Perhaps.” But in the silence they both knew the possibility was remote.

“Sepi, I … I want you to know that …” He swallowed, then went on. “I want to tell you that even though I behaved badly toward you—”

“But, Khosrow—”

“Even though I did,” he persisted, “you have helped me learn a valuable lesson, which I desperately needed. And for that reason too I will remember you.”

Wiping her eyes with a palm, she asked, “What did you learn?”

“I learned that no one can make you into someone you don’t want to be … unless you allow it.”

She looked into his eyes for a long moment, then smiled again. “I think I learned the same thing,” she whispered.

“You told him
what?”
Ezra exclaimed, his eyes wide with disbelief. He held a butter knife, and the skin of his knuckles whitened as his fist clamped tighter about its grip.

“I told him … that we were leaving,” gulped Sepi, her nostrils flaring with the panic spawned by her father’s suddenly wrathful visage. “I … I care for him, Father,” she explained guiltily, dropping her eyes to her plate and kneading her hands in her lap.

“And do you care nothing for your family, that you would place our safety in jeopardy?” grated Ezra though clenched teeth.

“Father!” exclaimed Sepi in consternation. “It’s only Khosrow.”

“And has he no parents, no family to whom he may tell this news you have passed on?” demanded Era hotly. “And is this one to whom you have confided our plans not a Muslim?”

“What about the Hafizis?” interrupted Esther in a brittle voice. “Are they not Muslim?”

Ezra’s eyes bulged outward at his wife and daughter, the first challenging him with a stony stare, the second weeping softly. With an inarticulate groan of strangled rage, he rose from the table and stalked out of the room.

Moosa, who had been sitting with his eyes carefully averted during the foregoing exchange, swallowed the bite of veal he had been chewing, following it with a long draught of water. Carefully replacing the glass beside his plate, he asked softly, eyes still downcast, “When will … when do you leave?”

Esther, hearing her son’s implied exclusion of himself, whitened visibly. There was no reply for perhaps a full minute. Suddenly, Sepi realized what her brother had said.

“Moosa! You’re coming too …” The question died in birth, as Moosa looked steadily at his sister, shaking his head. Like her mother, Sepi’s face blanched, her eyes widened in horror at the understanding that there would be three passengers on the departing flight, not four.

“Moosa, why?” The last word was scarcely more than a whisper, a throttled plea for something Moosa knew he could never deliver.

Thrusting another morsel of food in his mouth, he mumbled, “It’s just … something I have to do.” A host of tangled feelings twined about within him, but he could never hope to frame them in words that would make sense. Instead, he shrouded his face in silence, chewing food he couldn’t taste in a house filled with emotions he couldn’t allow himself to feel.

“The day after tomorrow,” whispered Esther, in answer to her son’s question, as if the reply had only now managed to sunder itself from the frozen despair of her consciousness. “The flight leaves the day after tomorrow.”

Moosa’s knife fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers.
The day after tomorrow!
“What time?” he asked, his abruptly louder voice betraying the steel band of panic clamping his chest.

Ezra stepped into the doorway of the dining room. “Why do you ask, Moosa?” he demanded. “What’s the matter?”

“What time?” Moosa shouted, suddenly standing and knocking over his water glass in his startling frenzy. “Tell me!”

Esther involuntarily jerked her forearm in front of her face, as if to fend off an attack. “Our plane leaves at nine o’clock in the morning,” she gasped, realizing with horror that she was terrified of her own son.

Moosa stared at them, his fists clenching and unclenching.
Nine o’clock. They should be long gone before ….
As his breathing slowed in the silent room, he became acutely conscious of their eyes—wide, staring, frightened, and fixed with a horrid fascination on him. How to explain to them, to defuse the effect of his inexplicable anxiety?

”Tell no one,”
came Ari’s warning in his ear.
“We could all be dead.”

“Never mind, I …” He groped about for some plausible explanation for his outburst. “This decision about staying here … it has been very difficult for me, and …” His mouth opened and closed a few more times, but no more words came to him. “I’m very tired. I’ve had enough to eat,” he mumbled, crumpling his napkin and tossing it on his chair. He strode to the doorway, past his father, and up the stairs.

The quiet darkened as the unmoving occupants of the dining room silently contemplated the desolate shape of private despair.

TWENTY-FOUR

Akram Hafizi sighed as she set the plate of rice and cold mutton before her husband. “I can’t help it, husband,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron as she fetched the tea glasses. “I can’t escape the feeling that something is going to happen.”

“What would you have me do,” questioned the mullah, allowing more than a hint of impatience in his voice, “renege on my promise to Solaiman? After all he has done, all the turmoil he and his family have suffered?”

Sadly she shook her head. “No, no.” She heaved another deep sigh as she sat down across the table from her husband. “You must perform for them the things agreed upon. And it is certainly a wonderful house,” she wavered wistfully. “Still …”

They bowed their heads for the benediction. “In the name of Allah the Merciful and Compassionate,” Hafizi intoned. He tasted the first morsel of rice, a thoughtful look on his face.

“And getting the Solaimans out of Iran is not the only concern,” continued Akram, after she had taken a swallow of tea. “Even after we move into the house, the problems won’t be over.”

“What do you mean?” asked her husband finally, unwilling to continue the conversation, but wearily accepting the fact that his wife had more on her mind—words that would be uttered.

“You know how things can change,” replied Akram, carefully scooping a spoonful of rice atop the portion of meat on her fork. “Look at the Islamic revolution which has just taken place. Decades of Pahlavi rule vanished without a trace; everyone associated with the Shah is dead, imprisoned, or in hiding.

“
Allahu akbar
,” commented Nader Hafizi wryly.

“What I’m saying,” pressed Akram, giving him an admonitory look, “is this: how are we to know the same thing could not happen again—only in reverse? Look at the violence in the streets! Still mullahs and
pasdars
are attacked by secret supporters of the Shah and groups of radicals.”

“Not without justification, in some cases,” observed the mullah, scraping the last of the rice onto his spoon.

“Granted,” countered Akram, waving her fork like a pointer at Nader, “but entirely beside the point I’m making. Who knows when a counterrevolution may occur? If such a thing happens, do you imagine there will be no retribution taken against anyone deemed to have profited from the Ayatollah’s rule? And what more visible target than two old people living in a sumptuous house earned by nothing other than the emigration of those who bought and paid for it?”

“But that’s not the way—”

“I know that!” she interrupted. “I’m not talking about fact; I’m warning you about perception.”

Nader Hafizi took a slow drink of tea.

“The next time, it could be you sitting in Evin Prison instead of Ezra Solaiman,” she said quietly. “And who will come to your defense?”

The phone jangled in its cradle. Mullah Hassan swiveled about in his desk chair, picked up the handset, and placed it to his ear. “Yes?”

“When the Iraqi mullah arrives, there will be trouble,” murmured the voice on the other end. “Be ready.”

“Of course,” responded the mullah. “And may Allah bless you for your help.”

“Forget that!” snapped the voice. “When do I get my money?”

“
After
your information proves correct,” growled the mullah. “You will be met in the usual place.”

“The house on Avenue Ismaili?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” snarled Mullah Hassan.

The line went dead. With a look of distaste, the mullah pressed the toggle button, then dialed another number.

“Yes?” came the answer.

“Our source has communicated with me again,” said Hassan, quietly.

“Shall we make the usual arrangements for payment?” asked the voice.

“I think not,” replied Hassan. “I believe his usefulness to us has neared its end.”

“What will you do, then?”

“I think we should make an alternate settlement this time—a permanent one.”

There was a pause. “Understood,” said the voice, finally.

“Good,” said Hassan. “See to it.” He hung up the phone and swiveled his chair away from the desk, to gaze out the window into the Tehrani dusk.

“Put all the valises and handbags at the foot of the stairs,” Ezra said. “Everything else is done.” He looked at his wife and daughter, their faces scored by stress. “Then go to bed and try to get some rest. It’s already close to midnight, and tomorrow is a full day.”
Surely the understatement of the year
, he thought.

After they had gone upstairs, he sat alone in the study. A single desk lamp illumined the room, casting a pool of cheerful, yellow light about his desk, but shrouding the rest of the study in an indistinct darkness. He stared in thought at his hands folded on the desk top.

What else was to be done? Nothing that he could see. Every preparation, every precaution that he could imagine had been taken. Everything now rested in the hands of fate. What was the Arabic word?
Kismet
. Everything now depended on
kismet
or Allah, whichever one preferred to call it.

He ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. A deep weariness, one that sleep could not remedy, had been slowly seizing him these past days. Now that he was near the end of his journey, it had all but mastered him.

He was tired—and not only from the final preparations for departure. He was bone-weary of the constant caution, the never-ceasing need for watchfulness and alertness. He was fatigued by the endless cycle of taut expectation and numbing depression, of heartbreaking hope banished by the nagging crone of fear who wrapped her limbs about him in an embrace that could not be dislodged. Having reached the ragged end of his own inner resources, he longed, more than anything, to lay his burden somewhere else, on someone else—but on whom?

Esther? Hardly. He was not even certain their marriage would hold together, once the crucible of Iran no longer bound them in an uneasy alliance. He had heard that in America, divorce was far more common than in the East. Perhaps Esther would seek such a permanent exit from his presence, from the reminder of the turmoil for which he knew she blamed him. He longed to reach out to her, to bridge the chasm gouged between them by their troubles. But she was too tightly bound by her own pain, her own sense of loss, to grant any foothold on her side of the abyss. He dangled helplessly in the darkness of her mistrust, suspended on the fraying rope of his own good intentions.

And Sepi. A bubble of grief burst in the back of his throat at the memory of the carefree dark-curled child who had toddled happily about their lives—wasn’t it only yesterday? Of all the bitter prices demanded of them by the trouble in this country, he most regretted the loss of Sepi’s innocence. In time she would begin to mend, and he hoped desperately that the process would accelerate. But never again would she be able to see the world with a child’s acceptance and lack of caution. And, he feared, his last chance for such a vision vanished with hers.

Moosa. A melee of anger, bewilderment, and distress rioted within Ezra as he contemplated leaving his son in Iran. Indeed, he had no choice, for Moosa had made it more than plain that he rejected any notion of return to America.

How had it happened? Ezra had tortured himself repeatedly with this question since the first night he had seen the revolver smirking at his son’s waist. He and Esther went to great pains, even in the days of the Shah, to secure Moosa’s passage to America. Supporting him while he was a student there meant a ceaseless series of logistical and financial obstacles, but it had been well worth it—or so he thought until now. Their son was a professional; he had a place and an identity in the free haven of the West. But now, through some bizarre incongruity, he choose to turn his back on all the opportunity and potential that America offered.

What witchery had beguiled Moosa? What siren song had captured his will, that he could choose the violence and cruelty of Iran over tolerant, democratic America? Was it the unfortunate death of Nathan Moosovi that whispered in his ear a dark chant of revenge? Or was it Iran herself calling out to Moosa? Demanding the life of the son as the price of his father’s passage?

Ezra laid his head on his arms and sobbed silently in the tiny circle of light atop his desk. Whatever else he managed to take from Iran, he could never recover what he would leave here.

Blearily he raised his head from his arms. His eyelids were sticky, his back stiff. He looked at his wristwatch—2 a.m.! He must have fallen asleep. He rose, wincing as the kinks of sleep twanged along his arms, back, and legs. Slowly he paced from the study to the foyer. He stood in the semi-darkness beside the luggage and the carpet box. A deep sigh wrenched loose from the weariness in his chest.
Only one thing left to do,
he thought.
Then, to bed.

Moosa looked for the thousandth time at the clock beside his bed. Six o’clock. Morning scratched feebly at the window; it was barely light enough to announce the coming of dawn.

He had lain awake all night, his mind endlessly gnawing at the possibilities of what the next day might bring. His family was leaving, and he was going into the most dangerous situation he had yet faced.

“Tell no one … father, mother, sister.”

He sat up on the side of his bed, still wearing yesterday’s clothing. Considering the day’s plan of action, he saw little need to tend his appearance. Rubbing his face, he decided to get out of the house.
Better to be gone when they wake. Better not to have to face them.

Feeling more alone than ever before in his entire life, he tiptoed to his door and eased it open. He held his shoes in his hand as he crept toward the stair.
Yes, better this way,
he told himself again.
No need to prolong the pain.

“Moosa.” He stiffened. It was his father’s quiet voice. Turning, he waited in dread.

Ezra stood outside the closed door of the master bedroom. He too, despite his fatigue, had been unable to sleep. “Where are you going?” he asked his son.

Moosa hunched his shoulders defensively. “Out,” he grunted, giving a terse jerk of his head.
“Tell no one.”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I was already awake,” replied Ezra.

A long silence ensued, dropping between them its dead weight of unspoken words and sundered dreams. At last, Moosa moved toward the stairs. “I’ve got to go,” he said, his eyes refusing to meet those of his father.

“Moosa!” The word was quiet, but the echoes of grief and loss made it ring in the dead air of the stairwell. The son halted a final time, without turning around.

“Whatever happens,” Ezra whispered around the anguish swelling in his throat, “remember that I love you!”

Moosa wavered atop the stairs.
“We could all be dead.”
Slowly he turned his face toward his father and, as if lifting the weight of the entire world, raised his eyes to Ezra’s silently pleading, mortally wounded face. The son nodded once, blinking back tears, and hastened down the stairs and swiftly out the front door. He closed it as quietly as an apparition and was gone.