The Septembers of Shiraz (17 page)

H
e sees his world in black and white: Filthy snow, a hollow sky, the gray cement of the walls—water stains, like giant ink spills, eating into them—and his own skin, an ashy patina enveloping his body. Even the wounds on his feet, hardened and crusted, have lost their red. He has come to think of color as something fantastic that exists only in his mind—the red of a tomato sliced and salted at the lunch table, the deep blue of a lapis lazuli on Farnaz's finger, the honey hue of his daughter's hair in the sun. As a young man he shunned color, his camera, filled with black-and-white film, swinging around his neck like a dog tag. In the first years of his marriage, he photographed Farnaz everywhere, in parks, in teahouses, in the living room—her young, bare legs on the coffee table, looking into his viewfinder with the exasperated air of a much-too-photographed actress, but pleased, nonetheless, with the attention bestowed on her. The children, too, he photographed in black and white. He
preferred the mystery of gray scale to the nakedness of color, believed it to be more substantial, more archival—better suited for memory. Later, as the years passed, he craved color. He switched films and compared grains, and his prints, unlike his life, became more and more saturated, filled, like a canvas, with splashes of longing.

The cell is cold. He walks away from the window and crouches on the floor, wrapping himself with the piece of burlap meant to serve as a blanket. He tries to remove the insects trapped inside, but they are stubborn and stick to the weave. He lets them be. On cloudy days like this he cannot tell the time of day; he believes it must be afternoon, but can a single afternoon be so long?

What was it that the old fortune-teller in Seville had said to him? At Farnaz's insistence he had sat before her deck of cards, his future spread out on the table in the form of knights and castles. “A five of cups,” she said in her broken English, then, “
Ay, dios mio, la tarjeta de la muerte también, el número trece
—the death card, señor.” The cards—one depicting a stooped man draped in black, the other a skeletal figure in medieval armor on a white horse, terrified him. There were other cards, of magicians and chariots and priestesses, but they seemed inconsequential in the face of those two. He sat still, losing his breath in the small room, the hot Andalusian night weighing down the red velvet curtains and seeping through the arabesques of the railing of the mezzanine, where, upon entering, he had seen a little albino girl surveying the customers below. Even she, he thought, was now privy to his black future.

“Don't worry, señor,” the old woman said with garlicky breath. “La tarjeta de muerte does not mean actual death. It is the end of something and the beginning of something new.” Behind her, smoke from a lemongrass incense rose all the way up to the mezzanine and the albino girl, who looked at him with her white eyelashes and sneered. “And the grieving man?” the old woman continued. “Yes, he, too, represents the loss of something. But you see his bent figure looking at the empty cup before him? Look carefully and you will see that there are two full golden cups behind him. A door is closing on you, my dear sir. That is all.”

Is that all? Remember, my dear Farnaz, how sorry you had been that evening, your face pale even as you laughed and shrugged, saying to me, like a mother to a child, “Such rubbish! These so-called clairvoyants like to scare people. Forget it.” But I didn't forget it, and neither did you. Later as we stood in a restaurant by the tapas bar, drowning the oracle of that August night in sangria, you were quiet, and maybe even sad, a little. After all, had you not forced me into the fortune-teller's shop to get back at me for what I had forced you to endure all afternoon? “No, no, I cannot watch animals murdered in this way,” you had said all along, but I went ahead and got the tickets anyway, didn't I? As we sat in the stadium, the sun hot and still above us, the matador in his beaded suit parading below and the big, doomed animals pierced with one, two, three, four spears—each spear drawing a louder cheer from the crowd—I looked at you and saw the pain in your face, and still I thought, She'll get over it. Who comes to Seville without watching a good
bullfight? So you had gotten even with me, my Farnaz, and you were sorry. So was I.

He opens the Koran that Hossein has brought him, practicing his high school Arabic on a random
verse. Qul aaoothu birabbi alfalaqi, Min sharri ma khalaqa
—“Say, I seek refuge in the Lord of the dawn, From the evil of what He has created.” He reads the verse out loud, the sound of his frail, raspy voice foreign to him, but calming him nonetheless. In his middle years he had let go the habit of reading out loud. Rather, he listened. At night he fell asleep to the crackle of the BBC on his shortwave radio, at dawn he awoke to the sound of the morning broadcast and the national anthem. When the children were younger, he listened to his wife reading to them, her fables overtaking his newspaper. Why had he not also read to the children, he who as a young man had hoped to become a storyteller? Why had he come to regard such activities as necessary for the children but superfluous for him—better suited for Farnaz who, as a woman, could afford to be superfluous? Sitting behind his desk at the office, a verse from a favorite poem would sometimes come to him—“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,” or “Can drunkenness be linked to piety and good repute? / Where is the preacher's holy monody, where is the lute?” He would welcome these unannounced visits, allow the verse to tickle him like the memory of an adolescent crush, then shoo it away from his mind with the documents before him, waiting to be signed.

Looking out, he sees the snow falling again. He lies
down on his mattress and looks at the flakes caressing the air like gossamer. The prison is calm tonight—no rattle of locks, no footsteps in the courtyard, no sound of a little boy running up and down the stairs above his cell. Even the ants, busy with the sugar cubes he has left for them, seem exact and orderly, as though parading to a hushed symphony they alone can hear. He falls asleep, so comforted by the order of things, that when the familiar rattle approaches his door he is convinced that the sound is rising from his own head, nothing more.

“Brother Amin! Get up.”

He opens his eyes and finds three guards before him.

“Follow us,” one says. The other two stand above him, each one sliding a hand under his arms and lifting him to his feet.

He tries to speak but his voice won't come. “Where?” he manages to say. “Where? Where?” They drag his body out of the cell and through the dark corridor, lit only by the flashlight of the leading guard. The wounds of his bare feet scraping the concrete floor send currents of pain through his body. He feels a terrible tightness in his chest, his heart contracting like a fist. “Please,” he says. “I am not well.”

“That does not matter much now,” the lead guard says. He unlocks one metal door, then another, and soon Isaac finds himself in the open air, fresh snow falling on his face, a cold wind blowing through the holes of his burlap blanket. The ice on the ground numbs the sores on his feet. It becomes clear to him that his time has run out. He waits for his life to flash before him, but nothing comes, except for
a deep, black desire to weep. Even weeping does not come easily.

Dragged to the end of the courtyard, he is told to face the wall and lift both arms in the air. He lifts his tired arms up slowly, and it is at this point that they come, half images of his life blending into one another and passing through him so quickly that he cannot grasp them; only the pain of their loss remains.

“Allah-o-Akbar!”
a guard shouts. Isaac hears the sound of boots crushing snow, the pull of a trigger, then the firing of a bullet which bounces against the wall and falls on the snow, followed by another, then another. He stands still, his arms in the air, urine streaming down his leg, afraid to move to the right or left. “That's enough!” a guard yells. When the last bullet bounces off the wall he listens, disbelieving, to the silence around him. “Let this vermin sit in his own shit and recognize what he is up against.” He falls on the snow, facing the wall, afraid to face anything but this wall.

Lying on the ice, he thinks of the warm mattress in his cell. Another memorized verse comes to him—“No whiteness lost is so white as the memory of whiteness.”

W
alking in the rain, Shirin watches people's expressions hardening, the women tightening the knots of their headscarves, the men pulling up their coat collars to their ears, the city retreating into itself, clenching its jaw. The taxis, bright orange under the gleam of streetlamps, stop on corners and collect passengers. At a newsstand she reads the headline, “Hundreds of Martyrs Killed in the Shatt-al-Arab.”

In school that morning they had discussed the war, the teacher beginning the class by hanging posters of soldiers, some of them children, on the walls. “Which one of you would volunteer?” she had asked, and two girls, out of forty, had cried, “I would! I would!” Leila had raised her hand also, with less certainty than the other two, and said, “Yes. I think I would.” When the bell rang the teacher announced that those who had volunteered to go to war—even though the question had been hypothetical—would be excused from homework.

“You would really volunteer?” Shirin had said to Leila after class. She knew that they were not supposed to talk, but the idea of Leila going to war terrified her.

“Yes. If my mother would let me. My father has already told me that he would not refuse. But my mother, she is stubborn.”

“My mother says they're using the children to clear the mines.”

“So what? Someone has to clear the mines. And it's better to save the grown-ups for the real fighting. You know, they give you your own key when you volunteer.”

“A key?”

“A key to paradise. Because if you are killed in combat you are a martyr and you automatically go to paradise.”

“If you go to paradise, wouldn't God open the door for you? Why would you need a key?”

“I don't know!” Leila had said, annoyed. “You and I really should not be talking.”

 

W
ALKING NOW AMONG
the chadors and umbrellas, she thinks of the city as something black and permeable, filled with holes through which people fall and disappear. “Tehran, the black city,” she repeats to herself. She thinks of the cities she has known and assigns a color to each. Isfahan, the blue city, Paris, the red city, Jerusalem, the ivory city, Venice, the gold city, Jaipur, the pink city. In Jaipur her father had held her hand as they walked past the rose-colored buildings, and
he had told her how they had all been painted pink in the nineteenth century for the visit of a British monarch—she cannot remember which one. She had liked the idea of a city changing its color for someone's visit the way people change clothes for a party. In foreign places he seemed to her a different man, lighthearted and playful. At their hotel, once the palace of a maharaja, he told her that the ghost of the Indian prince still roamed the hallways at night, and she let herself be convinced. In the car on the way to the Taj Mahal, he sang along with the radio, even though he did not speak a word of Hindi; when he was at a loss for made-up words, he simulated the sound of a tabla, tapping on the wheel, and she laughed, sitting in the sunlit backseat, watching the colorful saris go by, and the occasional snake charmer wooing his reptile out of its basket. She loved the fact that snake charmers really existed.

“Shirin-jan, what are you doing on the street all alone?” A neighbor stops her.

“I'm just going to buy bread down the street.”

“Any word from your father?” she asks.

“No.”

“You poor girl,” the woman says, straightening her scarf. “Say hello to your mother.”

 

N
O ONE OPENS
the door when she arrives home. She looks under the doormat to see if a key has been left for her. It hasn't. She stands by the gate and peeks in at the garden—the
accumulated snow, stained yellow with the dog's urine, and the jagged teeth of icicles hanging from the swimming pool's edge. That pool was once clear and blue, and she remembers swimming in it, in the shallow end, while Parviz and his friends dove from the terrace into the water, trying to impress the beautiful Yassi who lounged in her white bikini on a pool chair, her sunglasses crowning her head, her brown legs stretched out long in front of her. Afterward, when they had showered and dressed, they would gather around the kitchen table smelling of soap and chlorine, and eat cherries picked that morning from the garden, just washed and dripping in the sieve. She remembers that lightness that comes after hours of swimming, and the sweetness of the summer's first cherry, eaten under the hum of air conditioners.

The dog runs to her and sticks her muzzle through the gate. Then, getting up on her hind legs and stretching out her large, sculpted body, Suzie reaches for the latch and presses until the lock comes undone. She stands back, watching Shirin enter, wagging her tail.

W
hat jars him out of sleep is not the sound of the bullet itself, but the thump of the body falling to the ground a second later. Afterward there is always silence. He wonders what they do with the bodies. Most likely they leave them on the ground and pick them up the next morning, like dishes left over after a dinner party.

He lies awake and waits for morning, when the brownish hot water and piece of bread brought to him will remind him that he is still alive. Each time he drifts back into sleep the leaking faucet interrupts him, the drops loud and defiant, so he wakes up and lies still, watching the objects around him—the sink, his shoes, which he has not worn since the lashings, the Koran, still open to the page he last read—all of which slowly merge with the objects of the many rooms he has slept in throughout his life. Drifting in and out of sleep he sees the muslin curtains of his room in Shiraz where he spent so many summers reading and writ
ing, the porcelain pitcher on the night table in the French countryside, the mints left like anonymous letters on his pillow in Geneva, the jade Buddha in Tokyo, the dragon painted on the ceiling in Hong Kong, his bed at home, in which he fell asleep wrapped in his comforter, the hair on his arm brushed by his wife's breath, and the hemp sheets of his boyhood home, rough against his skin, not unlike the burlap blanket covering him now.

He wonders if something of him remains in those rooms, if a curtain pulled open so many years ago to reveal a sunny provincial day still holds his fingerprints in its folds, as if to say, Isaac Amin was here. He understands now the scribbles on monuments and sidewalks, even in toilet stalls—a name and a date inscribed for future visitors, a sorry attempt to communicate with people of another era, to say to them, I once was. He remembers how on a summer stroll along the promontory of a southwestern French town, once a Victorian resort, he had seen such an engraving—
Jacques 1896
—and the sadness he had felt on seeing it. He saw this Jacques with his walking stick and tailcoat, breathing in the cool Atlantic wind, discussing with friends topics of his day—Debussy's
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
, or the Dreyfus Affair—before returning to his hotel for afternoon tea. And as he stood in the sun, looking at the autographed rock, Isaac felt jealous suddenly of those who would stroll on the same promenade centuries after him.

When the door opens, it is still dark. He sits up on the mattress.
Has the time come?
Two guards walk in. “Brother, follow us,” one says. He is led down the stairs to the same
room where he last saw his interrogator. Mohsen sits behind the same desk, tapping his nine fingers on the table. The stump of the tenth moves up and down. “Brother, Brother,” Mohsen says. “We've seen so much of each other. Surely you must be getting tired of me, as I am getting tired of you.” He points to the chair facing him. “Sit.”

His file has swollen, scores of papers jutting from it.

“What can you say in your defense?”

“I say what I said before. That I am innocent. But I will also say this: that I followed the wrong path in life. I pursued material wealth, which in the end brought me nothing.”

“Nothing? Look at your villas, and your carpets, and your paintings, and all the other things you've amassed. You call that nothing? And the trips you took, and the cars you drove. I could go on and on.” He shuts the file and looks up. “Me, I have nothing. I live in one room with my wife and my son. We have one kilim under our feet and we roll out our mattresses at night to sleep. We have no oven, but a portable gas stove. For two years my son wore the same shoes because I couldn't buy him a new pair. In the end I had to cut the front, so his feet could grow.”

“Yes, but look at me now, and look at you. I sit here before you, my fate in your hands. My daughter, with her closet full of shoes, has no idea where her father is. Can the shoes help her? And can the cars save me? ‘The power of AbÅ« Lahab will perish, and he will perish. His wealth and his gains will not exempt him,'” he quotes from the Koran, reciting verses he has memorized.

Having spent long hours with the Koran—the only
book they had allowed him to read—he had memorized much of the text, and as he lay awake on his mattress one night, the verses buzzing in his head, it occurred to him that a display of his newfound learning may help him. Wouldn't reciting a few well-chosen verses demonstrate his wish to repent? It could, he also knew, backfire, making him look like a desperate opportunist trying to earn himself a few points. Playing and replaying in his mind his next interrogation—which he believed would be his last—he had come to the conclusion that with a man like Mohsen, one had to take risks.

Mohsen nods. “Well said, Brother!” he says. “I see that you have been using your time wisely.” He looks down at his hand, at the space where his finger should have been. “I did the same thing when I was in prison. I read. Those were difficult years, but the Koran gave me hope.” He places his elbows on the table and leans forward. “You know that I bring my boy here every day?” he asks.

“Yes. I hear a boy run up and down the stairs above my cell. Brother Hossein told me he is your son.”

“I was not supposed to have any children. Not after what I went through. You know, Brother, I once sat in a chair very similar to the one you are in now. So now that the tables have turned, why should I have mercy on you?”

“Because I have nothing to do with the people who caused you pain.”

“But you do! You looked the other way, and that's enough to make you an accomplice.”

“Yes, you are right about that. I was blind, and I recog
nize that now. Please, Brother. If you say you once sat in my chair, then you must know my fear, and more than that, my dismay at never seeing my family again. You are a father, and I am sure you understand this.”

“I not only know your fear, but I smell it. I am afraid I have gotten addicted to it.” He gets up, his chair letting out a loud screech against the concrete floor. He paces the room several times. “You're a tough case,” he says finally. “Your file is clean. We did not find any evidence of spying for the Zionists. And yet, the way you lived condemns you…”

“Brother, I can change my ways. And to prove my sincerity, perhaps I can sustain the cause of the revolution with a generous donation.”

Mohsen stops pacing. “Yes? How generous, Brother Amin?”

“As generous as necessary.”

“Brother Amin, I have received similar offers before. None were satisfactory. I need a more specific answer.”

“My entire savings.”

 

I
N THE CELL
a guard forces Isaac's feet into his shoes, the leather unable to expand enough to accommodate the swelling. He leaves the laces untied and taps him on the back. “Hurry, let's go.”

The soles of his feet pleated like a fan at the bottom of the shoes, Isaac limps as fast as he can to keep up. In the
hallway a masked guard rushes to him, and says, in a voice that he recognizes as Hossein's, “Brother Amin! Are you being released?”

“Let's go!” the other guard yells. He pulls a black handkerchief from his pocket and ties it around Isaac's eyes, then nudges his rifle into his lower back. “Move!”

He is taken up the stairs and through a metal gate, then dragged across the courtyard—the same path he traveled the night of Ramin's and Vartan's executions. Another gate rattles open and he is shoved inside a car. Seated by the window, he realizes that the handkerchief, hastily tied, has left him a sliver of vision, and looking down he sees his own deformed feet, then the black boots of the guard, next to him. Near his feet is a plastic bag filled with gold watches and jewelry.

They drive away in the early morning. Through the blindfold he can feel a bright light and he knows it will be a sunny day. A cool wind blows on his face from a crack in the window, and as the car makes its way down the mountain he sees patches of green peeking through snow, and the ridged trunks of trees firm in the ground. Lightness overtakes him. As the road disappears under the car's wheels he replays his conversation with Mohsen. Quoting from the Koran had been a good idea. It had shifted the tone of the interrogation, turning it into a conversation. “You're much smarter than I am, Amin-agha,” Ramin had said. “Me, I'm a bad liar.”

Am I smart then, Isaac wonders, or just a good liar? Maybe one is not possible without the other. Was Ramin a fool,
or just fatally honest? And what about the contribution that I am about to make to this revolution? How will my money be used? To build more prisons, to buy more bullets? In buying back my own life, will I facilitate the death of others?

He senses the city approaching. Through the exhaust fumes of the morning rush hour he smells bread rising in coal ovens, raw meat just brought in from slaughterhouses, fish hauled overnight from port cities, boxes of produce unloaded on fruit stands. The nervous honks of cars excite him, and he sits back and listens to the sounds of feet on sidewalks, buses going by, shops opening, children on their way to school. He imagines his wife at the kitchen table, drinking her tea and reading the paper.

A man has a right to want to live.

 

“W
HERE IS YOUR
bank?” the driver asks.

“The bank is near my office. But we must first go to my home to pick up a piece of identification. I assume you know my address.”

“Don't you have your driver's license?”

“My wallet was never returned to me, Brother.”

When his blindfold is removed he sees his own street, unchanged. The guard seated next to him is biting his lips, his mouth contorting to the left and right as his teeth mutilate the thin layer of skin inside. Isaac feels a rush in his stomach as the car slowly drives up, the numbers on the plaques above the iron gates getting closer and closer to his.
Here is the blue paisley curtain of the Sabatis' kitchen, there is the red bicycle of the Ghorbanis' little girl; they kept it on the porch even though the girl had long ago been sent to relatives in London. He wonders if his own wife and daughter have already left for school. He wishes now that he had asked the guards for a few extra minutes to wash and groom himself; the thought did not occur to him at the prison.

As they approach his house he imagines it as he left it—his newspapers on the coffee table, the cool blue bedspread of his room, his green pajama pants hanging on the bedpost, his daughter's clogs in the living room, tripping someone. When they arrive the gate is open, so the car rolls in with ease, and parks behind Farnaz's car. She is home, he thinks, his heart lightening, like a boy brought to his mother at the end of a long, cruel day.

The dog howls, and as Isaac exits the car and walks to the house she runs to him, barking with both joy and violence. “Make it shut up!” the guard says, his rifle pointed at her. Isaac embraces her and she rests her muzzle on his shoulder, tickling his ear with her warm, wet breath. The door opens. In front of him, firm and familiar, are Farnaz's feet in her black pumps. She kneels down and helps him get up. “Isaac!” She says. “My God! It's really you.”

He holds her hands. For the first time since his arrest he feels tears forming in his eyes. He fights them back, knowing that once they come, he won't be able to stop. Farnaz, already crying, brings his hand to her mouth and kisses it, right between two knuckles, the spot that, strangely, he too had kissed in prison.

“Save the hugs for later!” the guard says. “We're not done here.”

Farnaz lets go and steps aside. Isaac enters the foyer, where the smell of laundry detergent and freshly brewed tea remind him of the life that he may yet live. He climbs the stairs with great pain, leaning on the banister and slowly pulling himself forward. The guard follows close behind and Farnaz, by Isaac's side, stares at his feet, holding back her questions.

In his study he finds that nothing is where he left it. Files and papers have disappeared. “My passport, Farnaz-jan, where is it?”

“The passports were confiscated,” she says.

“I need some kind of identification for the bank.”

Farnaz opens drawers and closes them, her hands unsteady. “I'll get you your birth certificate. But I'm not sure where it is.”

“Brother,” Isaac says to the guard. “I am sorry for delaying you. It must be here somewhere.”

“I don't have all day,” snaps the guard. He walks around the room, his rifle pointed upward, and examines the books on the shelves, the photographs, the sword collection on the wall. “Where did you get these?” he says, pointing at the swords with his rifle.

“I collected them, Brother, over the years. From different places,” Isaac says.

“You like swords?”

“I like the workmanship.”

“The workmanship? How about the functionality? You don't like that?”

“I never tested it,” he says, forcing a laugh.

The guard moves in on a sword, runs his free hand over the gold engravings on the handle. “Take it down.”

“Brother…These are just for decoration. I mean…”

“Take it down!”

Farnaz lifts her pale face, the deep lines around her eyes visible in the harsh light of morning. She has aged in his absence. Isaac removes the sword, which has left a half-moon imprint on the wall, like a smile. “Look at all the engravings on the handle, Brother,” he says, distracting the guard as long as he can. “This one dates from the period of Genghis Khan.”

The guard rests his rifle between his legs and holds out his hands, palms upward, like a pilgrim awaiting blessing. Isaac carefully places the sword into them, and steps back, allowing the guard to lose himself in the object. He looks at Farnaz and she shakes her head. “It's gone,” she mouths, and looks back down again.

Why is it that every towel, every sock, every piece of underwear, is always in its place, but something as crucial as his birth certificate is lost?
He feels something akin to rage rising in him, but realizes that what he feels is not potent enough to be called rage; it is a loneliness, a hardened sense that no one can come through for him, not even his wife.