The Septembers of Shiraz (16 page)

H
is sister answers the phone. “Parviz!” she says.

He unclenches his shoulders as he hears her voice. He has not called home in a while, not only because calls are monitored, but also because of his hope, however faint, that his parents would eventually call him with good news. They hadn't. “How is everything?” he yells over the crackling connection.

“Baba still hasn't returned from his trip. We've had no word.”

A faint conversation overlays their own. “But who can understand?” a woman is saying to another. “
Zendeghi hezar charkh dare—Life
has a thousand wheels.”

“And the two of you?” Parviz says, wondering if others can hear him. “Are you well?”

“Yes,” she says. “We are fine.”

He asks her about school, Habibeh, her life, and she says everything is going well. At some point he notices that the
conversing women have vanished; whether they hung up or the line was simply diverted, he cannot tell. Before hanging up Shirin sends him a kiss, which makes him hold on to the receiver, the dial tone as flat as the afternoon stretched out before him. He is not scheduled to work today but almost wishes he was. What to do with so many empty hours?

 

“T
HE PEACE LILY
is easy to care for,” Mr. Broukhim is telling a young woman as Parviz walks in. “It thrives in most environments and you don't need to do much for it.” The woman rubs the plant's leaves then gingerly pokes the soil. “I don't know,” she says. “Every plant I've ever owned has died on me. It's a curse.” The old man laughs. “This one,” he says, “does not need that much water or light. Like a lover who's easy to please, it makes few demands and brings much pleasure.” The woman looks at him with stern eyes. “Mr. Broukhim,” she says. “You forget where you are.”

“That was close!” Parviz says when she is gone. “I thought she was going to call the cops, or worse, the Rebbe!”

“These pious women are testy, aren't they? No sense of humor. Everything is an insult.”

“All the more reason to be careful!”

“Ah, Parviz-jan, if you knew how tired I am of being careful…Well, what can I do for you?”

“Is Rachel here?”

“No, she is off today. She switched her days. You're not starting to like this girl, are you?”

“Me? No, no, of course not. She's a friend.”

“Good. That's the last thing you need. A religious girl and her entire clan! Because they come as a package, these religious types, Parviz-jan. You know that, right?”

Her personal items—a blue scarf, some hair clips, a telephone book—scattered behind the counter, suggest an intimacy that Parviz knows he will never experience with her. “Yes, I know,” he says.

“I am a bitter man, Parviz-jan, so maybe you shouldn't pay attention to me. I have lost so much. My wife not only left me, but robbed me as well. My profession deserted me. I was once one of the best cardiologists in Tehran. I studied in Paris and Geneva. But here they tell me my license is no good. They tell me I have to start all over again—study, take tests—like an eighteen-year-old. I have no energy for all that! In this country, I feel like a ghost. Maybe it's because I am old already. I am at that point in my life where the days ahead of me are fewer than those behind. I envy you, Parviz.” He sighs. “I envy your youth.” He walks away to greet a customer who asks him for yellow chrysanthemums.

Outside Parviz wonders how he could be anyone's object of envy. His youth is doing little for him, except robbing him of the right to suffer. Pain, he has come to realize, is the domain of the elders, their suffering always more noble and more justified than that of a boy like him, who is expected to find thrills in his new environment and to lock his short past in the cellar, only to retrieve it, years later, like a bottle of wine, and share it in brief sips with dinner guests.

 

H
E WALKS TOWARD
the Brooklyn Bridge and then across, continues walking through the city, the skyscrapers casting their long shadows on sidewalks and depriving the pedestrians below of the final minutes of sunlight. New York is a masculine city, he thinks, vertical and with rough edges, with none of the curves of a Paris subway entrance, for example, or the enameled dome of an Isfahan mosque. New York is all steel and glass, economic and functional. It is a city where circles are rare. In his mind he traces halos, rings, wheels of fortune, clocks—all instruments of confinement on the one hand, and hope on the other. Walking along the grid of Manhattan, its numbered streets and parallel avenues, he tells himself that what this city is missing is more roundness. And the people who live here—stacked not only side by side but also on top of one another, always running out of space, time, and breath, paying large sums for slivers of air and settling down in the sky with their cats and dogs—reach upward, continually, without ever returning to themselves.

He walks through the evening, stops at a diner for coffee and eggs, and watches the other patrons, whose number dwindles as the hours progress—families becoming couples and shrinking into loners, who walk in, disheveled, with their newspapers and books, ordering a cheeseburger and fries and pretending that this is exactly how they wish to spend yet another evening.

Around three in the morning, on his way back to the
bridge, he passes through the Fulton Fish Market, watches the delivery vans, the stacked crates, and the fishmongers, their faces covered with soot, warming their hands over small fires that burn inside trash cans, haggling with their customers. The cobblestone streets, bloodstained and slippery, smell of seaports—a familiar smell—reminding him of the port city of Ramsar by the Caspian, not far from his family's beach house. That he is awake at this hour and able to smell the sea pleases him, and he tells himself that to understand the world, and even find in it an occasional reprieve, a person must always alternate his hours of sleep, his road to work, the places he visits, the foods he eats, and even, perhaps, the people he loves.

A
few early risers are at the teahouse, sipping and smoking, some shielding their eyes with sunglasses to cover up the damage of a sleepless night. Farnaz sips her tea, waiting for Keyvan to speak. But he doesn't. He looks tired and thin. He could use a pair of shades, like the others.

“What's on your mind, Keyvan?” she says. “You sounded terrible on the phone.”

He throws two sugar cubes on the table like dice, then picks them up again. “Shahla and I are leaving,” he says finally.

“What? First Javad, now you…”

“Two days ago Shahla was attacked. She was returning from the hairdresser's and she had put on her headscarf very loosely—you know, she didn't want to ruin her hairdo. Some men jeered at her then threw some kind of liquid on her face.”

“I can't believe what I'm hearing. Was it acid?”

“I don't know. When she came home her skin was all red. I washed her face with water for a long time, but it didn't help. Now the burning has gotten better, but her skin has patches of red that don't go away. She has tried all sorts of remedies. All day I see her peeling cucumbers, preparing bowls of milk and rose water, dipping sponges in her mixes and massaging her face, but nothing seems to help. And she refuses to see the doctor. I brought him to the house but she locked herself in the bathroom. He stood at the door for two hours, the poor man, trying to coax her to come out. She wouldn't. She was too embarrassed. ‘The doctor has known me for so long,' she said to me afterward. ‘How can I show him this face?'”

“It might heal still. It may just be irritated.”

“Yes. That's what I tell her. But that face. It's all she has. At least that's what she thinks. ‘I'm disgusting,' she says to me. ‘So go. Find yourself another woman.'” He rubs his eyes with his palms, gently, as if shielding them from light. “After all these years, she still doesn't believe that I actually love her.”

The server picks up the empty glasses and replaces them with fresh ones.

“Hajj-Ali,” a young man drawls. “You got eggs today? This tea is so good it deserves a sunny-side up.”

“Eggs?” The server laughs. “We haven't received eggs in over a month. But maybe in your haze of hashish you've missed the war, Kazem-agha.”

A few men chuckle. The lax attitude of the teahouse surprises Farnaz. These men must know one another. Each
morning they must force themselves out of bed, their only comfort the prospect of meeting other vagrants. To be sitting here at this hour among them disturbs her. What happened to her morning routine, to her family at the breakfast table, to the sunny-side up in her pan and the milk boiling on her stove?

“I've decided we have to get out of here,” Keyvan says. “This country is no good anymore.”

“Where will you go? And what about your house? And your belongings?”

“I'm tired, Farnaz. I don't care about the house. Besides, I'm sure they'll come after me, too. Why wouldn't they? They already got Isaac and they're after Javad. With my father's connections to the shah, I'm an even better target.”

And what about me, and Isaac? she wants to ask.

“We'll be going to Geneva, where my parents are. There are good doctors there. They may be able to help Shahla.”

Yes, Keyvan. Go to Switzerland and fix Shahla's face. And why not? I would do the same if I could.
“Good luck,” she says. “Give Shahla my best. When will you go?”

“In two weeks. It's all arranged. Friends of mine who escaped a few months ago referred me to a couple of men with a good reputation. We'll be smuggled out through Turkey. Let me give you their information, Farnaz-jan. No doubt you will need it, too, hopefully with Isaac.” He jots down a name and telephone number on a piece of paper and hands it to her.

In the back of the teahouse, Hajj-Ali breaks down a sugar cone, the sound of his hammer echoing in the room. The
men sipping their tea are quiet for the most part. An advertisement on the radio announces a shoe sale downtown.

“Look at this place,” Keyvan says after a long silence. “Half of them are junkies.”

“It's been getting worse lately, hasn't it?” she says. “There are more of them now.”

They leave some change on the table and walk out. It's a cold day, misty and humid. They stand outside, facing each other, neither of them willing to be the first to walk away.

“Did you bring an umbrella?” he asks. “It may rain.” He looks like he may cry.

“Yes, it's in here,” she says, pointing to her purse. “Well, good-bye, Keyvan-jan.
Inshallah
we will see each other again soon.” She hugs him and walks away. For some time, she senses his eyes on her back, knows that he is watching her as she disappears in the rush-hour clamor of the boulevard.

Walking past the shopkeepers standing in their doorways and killing the morning in gossipy clusters, she remembers Shahla and Keyvan's wedding, that lavish affair at the villa of Keyvan's parents. In her white silk dress Shahla floated among the guests, picking up a sugar-coated almond here and a nougat there, strands of pearls woven into her hair, her dress rippling around her. Her round face, which tended to bloat during her depressive episodes that she referred to as “passing clouds,” looked sculpted and radiant, so she walked with her head held high and her back straight, her clavicles forming perfect dashes below her elegant neck, as if to say, Take note of this lovely face. Guests flocked into the garden along the gravel path, greeted the newlyweds,
found their seats by the wooden trellises on the side of the house, drank arrack and ate caviar, snapped their fingers to the
santour
and
tombak
, and broke into song. That a palace of the shah and his queen lay a few miles above this villa in the Niavaran hills cast a gilded spell on the evening, so that the guests, pleased with the party for its extravagance and with themselves for being part of it, stayed on until light broke out. And throughout it, Shahla, more preoccupied with the china pattern than with her groom, laughed and danced, pleased to put an end to her quest. “
Noone khaharet too roghane
—Your sister's bread has been dipped in oil,” Farnaz whispered to Isaac, to which he said, “Yes, I believe her life's work is finished.”

Thinking now of Shahla's disfigured face Farnaz feels a deep pain, not just for Shahla but for the loss of what she had come to represent—shameless extravagance, which others both enjoyed and ridiculed, much as they did their government and their king.

“Amin-khanoum!” a man calls.

She sees the cobbler standing by his shop and smoking a cigarette. “Ali-agha, how are you?”

“Fine, thank God. And you, khanoum? We haven't seen you in a while.”

“Yes, well…”

“You know, I have a pair of shoes here for your husband. They've been ready since September. He never picked them up. He forgot?”

The cobbler's ignorance of her misfortune is delicious to her. For a while she says nothing, allowing herself to linger
in his world, where Isaac has not disappeared but has simply
forgotten
his shoes. “He has been busy,” she says, finally. “Let me pick them up while I'm here.”

She follows him inside the shop, where rows of shoes hang from their heels on metal rods along the walls. She examines the empty shoes, forlorn under the sheen of their polish, like children in an orphanage dressed up for prospective parents. She spots Isaac's among the others, the shape of his feet still imprinted in the leather's memory. “There,” she says, pointing to the familiar pair.

“Eagle eyes,” Ali-agha says, reaching for the pair with a pole. He places them on the counter for her approval and she runs her fingers over the leather, flipping them over to inspect the soles.

“Very nice, Ali-agha. Thank you.”

He slides them into a bag and hands them to her, and she takes them, like a widow leaving a morgue. She walks home with the bag looped around her wrist, the shoes banging against her thigh, as if kicking her for interrupting their repose.