The Septembers of Shiraz (9 page)

I
saac watches the dark clouds through the shoebox window, smells the wet morning air. Soon the sky disgorges hail, which taps against the black metal bars. Water enters the cell through the broken window, gathering into a puddle.

A light switches on outside and a pale band appears in the gap under the door, just before it is flung open. “Get up! Let's go. Showers!”

Mehdi places his feet on the floor but his bad foot can no longer support his weight. “Ah!” he moans and falls back on the mattress. “Didn't we just take showers?” he says. “Has it been a week already?” Isaac extends an arm and Mehdi holds on to it, leaning his body against it. Together they drag their way out of the cell. Ramin covers his ear with his hand. “Quiet, some quiet,” he mumbles in his sleep. Has the boy forgotten where he is? “Ramin-jan, get up!” Mehdi says, but the boy does not move.

In the hallway they join the flock of prisoners making
their way to the showers. The men disrobe and enter the stalls. Isaac has learned not to look at the naked bodies passing by, at the blistered feet with black nails stepping inside gray puddles on the slimy ceramic floor. He goes into a stall, under the frigid water, and rubs his body and hair quickly with soap. He washes his shirt, his underwear, his socks, knowing that the mildew will remain trapped in them, no matter how hard he scrubs. He steps out of the shower, his clothes on his arm, looking for an empty spot where he can get dressed. Others, like him, are walking and dripping, each man searching for a small space that will offer him a semblance of privacy. Suddenly, in front of him, he sees a familiar face, from long ago.

“Vartan? Vartan Sofoyan?”

The man, naked also, stops, startled. “My God! Isaac Amin!”

They stare at each other for a few seconds. They had never exchanged many words.

“So you're here too…” Isaac says. “How long has it been?”

“About two months. I was in a different block. And you, how long?”

“Almost three, I think. It's hard to keep track…”

“Yes, I know.”

A guard, watching them, approaches. His black rifle seems more threatening here, in the showers, than anywhere else. “You two think this is some sort of a salon?” he yells. “Get your ugly selves dressed and out of my sight.”

Isaac and Vartan nod to each other and walk in opposite directions. Minutes later, as he stands in a corner and gets
dressed, Isaac replays their interaction. That he had thought neither of his nakedness nor of his dislike for the pianist while they talked surprises him. He imagines the same must have been true for Vartan. Now as he puts on his pants and buttons his wet shirt, his resentment slowly resurfaces, and he feels agitated by the memory of the pianist's tall, naked body.

Through the water's gurgle comes a prisoner's cry, followed by guards' admonitions. In a nearby stall he sees Ramin, his nose bleeding, being stripped by two guards and shoved under the water. The boy's arms form parentheses on his emaciated torso, his hands cupping his genitals, shielding them from view. The water gathering under his feet and swirling into the drain is pink. “That'll teach you!” one of the guards says. “When we say wake up, we mean wake up. This is not the Plaza, you son of a dog.”

 

“I
WONDER WHAT
they're doing to him,” Isaac says to Mehdi when they are back in the cell. “I wish we had dragged him out ourselves.”

“Yes. I was so preoccupied with my own foot. And he is such a difficult boy. Actually, he is like so many of my students, arrogant and idealistic. It was infectious for a while, that idealism.”

“And you got caught up in it?”

“I don't know. There was a feeling that something was happening, and that we were the ones who were making it happen. We wanted to put an end to the monarchy. We
thought we were cheering for democracy. So many different groups marched together—the Communists, the Labor Party, the Party of the Masses, you name it. Add to that the religious fundamentalists. What brought us together was our hatred for the shah. But there wasn't much else to keep us together. In the end, we unleashed a monster.”

A pair of eyes peers through the opening in the door and a tray of food slides through. Isaac gets up and grabs it. There is cheese, bread, and tea. The two men sit cross-legged on the floor and eat in silence. The rain has stopped but the cell is humid and cold.

“Why are you here, Amin-agha? You still haven't told us much about your life.”

“I don't know, but I have two things going against me. I'm a Jew and I lived well under the shah.”

“To live well under the shah means you had to shut your eyes and ears. You had to pretend the secret police did not exist.”

“Yes, but at least Savak imprisoned and tortured people for one reason—to get information and discourage future subversives. You only got arrested if you actually did something. Awful as it was, the regime had a logic. This government simply wants to destroy human beings, regardless of what they may or may not have done. Its goal is to annihilate. They are after people's souls, Mehdi-agha. It's much more dangerous.”

Mehdi nods and sips his tea. “A year ago I would have hated you,” he says. “Now I don't know. We have more in common than I would care to admit.”

A guard calls for Isaac. The cheese still heavy in his
stomach, Isaac does as he is told. He is taken downstairs, to a different room this time. When he enters he looks for the missing finger on his interrogator's right hand, and finding it, he knows he is dealing with Mohsen again. Some three weeks ago the news that Mohsen had released a prisoner on the spot had spread throughout the prison, making the men more lighthearted, like children anticipating the summer during the final days of school. But when, a week later, he shot another prisoner just as spontaneously as he had released the first, anguish had resettled among the men. Mohsen is a wild card, people said. Who could know how to play him?

“Tell me about your brother—Javad,” Mohsen says.

“What would you like to know?”

“What does he do?”

“I am not very close to my brother.”

“According to the phone company's records, the two of you speak regularly.”

“Yes…but our relationship isn't one you'd call intimate. It's merely civil.”

“Help me be ‘civil' with you, Brother.”

“This is the truth, Brother. Javad likes variety. He's always changing jobs. One cannot keep up with him.”

“I see. It may interest you to know that he has a new job. Your brother smuggles vodka into the country.”

This is news to Isaac. He is not sure he should believe it.

“Islam does not permit alcohol, you know that, right?” Mohsen adds.

“Yes, of course. If my brother is in fact involved in smuggling, I have no knowledge of it.”

Mohsen walks behind Isaac, leans into his neck, and whispers, with a humid breath, “You know, I like you for some reason. And I want to help you. But I cannot do it alone. You have to help me. You see, we went over to your brother's residence several times, but he wasn't there. We also checked his so-called office, but apparently he hasn't been there in weeks. Where is he?”

“Brother, I really don't know. How could I? I've been here for three months. Like I said, he's a free spirit. He travels a lot. He's never in one place.”

“Bastard! You think you'll get away with it? You come from a family of
taghouti,
of promiscuous sinners. You think you can protect each other?”

“Perhaps there has been some mistake. My brother would not be one to engage in smuggling. He…”

“Shut up! The mistake, Brother Amin, is that I have been too lenient with you.” He walks away, stares at the view outside his small window—the concrete walls of another prison wing. “I am too tired for you today. I don't even want to see your face. Just know that one day, soon enough, you'll regret your lies and you'll beg me for mercy. But by then, my dear Brother, it will be too late.”

When Isaac returns to the cell he finds Ramin on his mattress, cleaning the spaces between his toes. He has grown used to the boy's foul habit and says nothing. He lies on his back. There is a putrid smell in the air, of humidity and urine and blood. He recalls the stifling humidity of Khorramshahr when he was a boy, and how he would pass the summers playing soccer in the street with Javad and a few neighborhood
kids, their soles so callused that they would not feel the heat under their bare feet. To cool off, he would often swim in the Karun River with his brother, trying to avoid the black lumps of oil—residue from the refinery—that the water would carry toward them from time to time. The viscous lumps seemed to him like shifting ogres, and he took them as bad omens, though he did not know why. Javad, on the other hand, did not swim away from them, but toward them, trying to capture them in empty pickle jars in order to sell them later. “We'll be oil tycoons,” he would tell Isaac. “You have to believe it!” Poor Javad, Isaac thinks, his impractical little brother, whose life so far has been a series of failed get-rich schemes, and whose boyish good looks, now fading, will no longer allow him to charm his way out of trouble. Where is he now?

The muezzin calls for evening prayers. Isaac covers his ears. The sound makes his chest tighten. Lately whenever he hears it, he feels as though he were being buried alive. He turns on his side. Ramin is still preoccupied with his toes.

“Ramin, you're not going to pray?”

“I'm not well,” the boy says. “And I can't pretend to be religious anymore.”

“I saw what they did to you in the shower this morning,” Isaac says, the image of Parviz never far from his mind when talking to Ramin. “You should at least pray here, in the cell. What if a guard comes to check up on you?”

“Amin-agha, are you a religious man?” the boy asks.

Were he not in prison he would have replied that he is not. He has always observed the essential holidays, but he is not a religious man, as such. Now he is not sure. To deny
belief terrifies him. In order to hold on to hope, he feels he must believe in something. “I may be becoming one,” he finally says.

“Not me. No matter how much I want to believe, I can't. Religion is for the weak, that's what my mother always said.”

“I thought this for a long time also,” Isaac says. “Now I don't know. It's possible I am just becoming weak.”

After a while the boy removes his shirt and begins exercising on the floor. His back is covered with bruises. On his right arm there is a tattoo—tall, beautiful letters, together spelling “Sima.”

“Is that your mother's name, tattooed on your arm?” Isaac says.

Ramin stops the exercises, caresses the letters. “Yes, I got the tattoo after they took her to jail.”

“It's beautiful.”

“So is she,” Ramin says.

“Tell me, Ramin, what would you be doing if none of this had happened?”

“I would be traveling. I want to see the world. I want to be a photographer.”

It pleases Isaac that the boy speaks in the present—I
want
to be a photographer, not I
wanted
—that all this, his dead father and his jailed mother and his own uncertain fate, is just a transitory phase, a simple interruption.

The door opens and a guard sticks his head in. “What are you doing here boy? Why aren't you praying?”

“I'm sick, Brother,” Ramin says.

The guard walks in and lifts him off the floor. “I've had
it with your antics. Sleeping in late, showing up to prayer when you feel like it. Listen to me! This is not some kind of vacation. You're in prison! Do you understand? You are a prisoner! You pray when we tell you to pray.”

Ramin looks straight ahead. He doesn't flinch. When the guard lets go of his arm he says, calmly, “Brother, I am not a religious person, but if I were, I'm certain God would forgive me for being ill.”

“You are digging your grave with your own hands!” The guard leaves, banging the metal door behind him and rattling his keys for a while before locking it.

“My God, Ramin,” Isaac says. “Why tell them you are not a religious person when you know that's the thing they hate to hear most?”

“I speak the truth. That should mean something.”

Isaac cannot remember the last time he had such convictions. Even as a boy, and later as a young man, he had been driven less by principles than by his desire to erase the stains on his life—the indifference of his father, the unhappiness of his mother, the rumbling of his stomach, the heat of his city, and the fear that, like his father, he would live an insignificant life.

All this, he had achieved, but the price had been a string of compromises, looped over one another like pearls, creating a life at once beautiful and frail.

He takes deep breaths to calm himself, filling his lungs with the foul air then draining them. The prison, a giant tomb, makes no sound.

W
hen they arrive, on an overcast afternoon in December, Farnaz does not hear the knocks. She stands by the kitchen window, looking at the street below, the homes with closed curtains whose owners have left one by one. The mailman is making his rounds, sliding envelopes through door slits. She imagines their thump as they fall into empty courtyards, letters whose destiny is to never be read.

The knocks grow louder until Farnaz sees them, two men with rifles standing outside her door. She takes a deep breath and walks down. Shirin is standing on top of the stairs, her hand clutching the banister.

“Hurry up!” a man's voice commands. The knocks grow more impatient.

When she reaches the foyer she takes another deep breath and opens the door. She examines the men, one at a time. One, with a bushy black beard and chapped lips, looks disheveled, even dirty, and were it not for his rifle she would
have taken him for a laborer. The other, dressed in a military uniform and standing in the back, has a very young face.

“We're here to search the house,” the dirty one says.

“Your papers?”

“No papers. We have orders.”

She nods and steps aside. They enter without wiping their shoes on the mat. The young soldier acknowledges her with a quick nod. They walk up the stairs, ahead of her. The bearded one starts with her bedroom, the other one goes to Shirin's room, rests his rifle on the child's bed, opens her closet, and begins gutting it, removing the clothes, and throwing them on the floor.

Farnaz takes her daughter's hand and together they walk to her own bedroom, where mounds of clothes are already on the floor. Walking back and forth, the bearded man steps on them with his muddy shoes. He reaches for the tie rack and dismantles it, sending the ties undulating to the floor. “Tell me, did your husband always wear ties?” he says.

“Most of the time, yes,” Farnaz says, unsure of the question's significance.

“So he took himself for a
farangui
—a westerner, didn't he?”

“No. He was a businessman. He wore business attire.”

“Couldn't he conduct his
business
in ordinary clothes?” He kneels to the floor and runs his hands through the tangled silk.

“I'm not sure what is considered ‘ordinary,' Brother. A suit and tie used to be quite ordinary.”

“You're wrong. This was ‘ordinary' for westernized dandies, not anyone else.”

“Brother, is my husband accused of being a dandy? Is that the charge brought against him?” A moment of silence follows and she reproaches herself for having said this.

“How unfortunate that you don't recognize the gravity of your situation.” He stands up and moves close to her, so close that his chest touches her breasts. His pungent breath hovers between them. She steps back, notices Shirin on the bed, watching them. Where is Habibeh when she is needed? Had she been here, she could have taken Shirin to the park or for a walk. Why had she decided to visit her family at the last minute? Was her mother really ill, as she had claimed in the morning, or had her revolutionary son warned her about this and she did not want to witness it?

When he is done with Isaac's side of the closet he turns to hers, adding her dresses and sweaters to the pile on the floor. He smiles when he gets to her underwear, retrieving the pieces one by one and holding them in the air just for a moment before throwing them to the floor. He picks up a box of sanitary pads, peeks inside it. He nearly says something but doesn't. Then, noticing a pair of onyx cufflinks in an open box on Isaac's nightstand, he says, “Your husband wore jewelry?”

“That's not jewelry. It's for shirts.”

“Show me.”

She grabs one of Isaac's shirts from the floor and attaches the cufflink to the sleeve. The last time Isaac wore the shirt with these very cufflinks was two years before, in the early days of the revolution, to a dinner party at their friend Kourosh Nassiri's house. There had been whiskey, pista
chios, kebab, Turkish coffee, music, and even opium, all of which allowed the guests to ignore their crumbling country and their fading futures. There, in that room, was the final gathering of the ambassadors to the past. Kourosh had danced and smoked most of the night, barefoot on his silk rug, hands stretched out wide and fingers snapping, coaxing all the women to abandon their husbands and join him for a dance. His wife, Homa, had laughed, herself groggy with more than a few puffs. “Kourosh-jan, what's happening to you?” she would ask, giggling. “Are you leaving me soon?” “No, Homa, don't you know? We're all leaving soon!” he would say, and laugh. After they killed him, their home caught fire, with Homa in it.

Farnaz slides her arm inside the sleeve to give it some shape, and as her hand emerges from the sleeve's end the man says, “Nice…very nice…” He takes the cufflinks and drops them in his pocket. “It's evidence,” he says.

She throws the shirt back on the pile of clothes, where it lies limp and wrinkled. Sitting on the floor and watching him unweave her life, she notices that Shirin is gone. “Brother, I'll be right back. I have to check on my daughter.”

“You're not going anywhere. I'm certain your daughter is fine.”

“Please. I'll be back in a few minutes. I just…”

“Sit, Sister,” he says, reaching for his rifle. “Let's not make this more painful than necessary.”

She sits back down. Looking at him rummage through her closets, his black eyes bulging with rage, she acknowledges, in a way she has not until now, that things might end
terribly. How can this rage, multiplied by millions, be contained, confined, reasoned with? Isaac may not come back after all. She looks at his scattered clothes, his shoes, the fedora they had bought in Rome during that snowstorm—awful reminders of his absence.

“You'd better have a good explanation for this,” he says, holding an old military cap. “Did your husband serve in the American military?”

She looks at the cap, weathered and lint-covered. She has always disliked it because Isaac had refused to tell her why it was so special to him, no matter how many times she had asked. That cap symbolized an expired happiness that did not include her—one that could not even be shared with her.

“No, my husband was not in the American military,” she says. “That was just a little something an American soldier gave him during the war.”

The man keeps the cap as evidence. He has already amassed eleven large bags—books in English, correspondence that Farnaz did not get a chance to rip up, and family photographs she could not bring herself to destroy, including one of Parviz with his classmates at a picnic, his arms around a girl, and one of Isaac in a bathing suit in front of his first car, a used 1954 Renault, laughing at the camera. She had taken that picture during their first trip together. They had spent the night in a motel where the pillowcases displayed the brown rings of unwashed heads and the hallways smelled of urine. She had been upset with him for taking her to a place like that, knowing, all the while, that he
could not have done better. For some time after they left the motel she was quiet in the car, looking out the window at the sinuous road down to the sea, wondering why she had married a man whose only belongings were one old suit, a few poetry volumes, and a photograph of his mother. Now that the conjugal contract had been signed, his talent, passion, and potential seemed impotent against the stench of urine. That marriage contract, she also knew, had brought a concrete, definitive end to her own aspirations, making her realize that those long years spent training her voice and studying literature, had, after all, been nothing more than a way to pass the hours while waiting for a husband and beginning her real life.

She rolled down the window. The air smelled of pine. He turned on the radio and Miles Davis's “Bye Bye Blackbird” came on. As the car inched down toward the water the spare, earnest sound of the trumpet calmed her, and by the time they reached the sea she felt tranquil—happy, almost. Was it the sudden shift in altitude that made her so moody? From several thousand feet above sea level they had driven to ninety feet below, and as she breathed the salty air she wondered if being so low and close to water somehow made one more sensible.

They wore their bathing suits and took turns posing for pictures with the car. Looking at him through the camera lens as he laughed and made faces, she felt an overpowering love for him—a love that, since their wedding, she had not felt when looking at him directly. Were these, then, the ingredients necessary for sustained love: salt, water, a prism?

 

S
HIRIN REAPPEARS
. S
HE
stands in the doorway, her eyes on the bags of evidence lined against the wall.

“Where were you?” the man asks her.

“I was hungry. I was in the kitchen.”

“Yes? And what did you eat?”

“I…I ate an apple.”

“Brother, please leave her alone,” Farnaz says. “She is just a child.”

“Tell me, little girl,” he says. “Is there mud in your kitchen?”

Shirin's eyes widen. She looks at Farnaz, terrified. There is, in fact, mud on her shoes and on the hems of her pants.

“Shirin-jan,” Farnaz says. “You went to the garden to play, right? Tell him that you went out to play. It's all right.”

“Yes,” she says. “I…I went out to play.”

The man examines the child for some time with squinted eyes. “Then why did you lie? This child is up to something.”

“Brother, please. You are scaring her.”

He nods, unconvinced. Shirin sits on the bed, her hands on her lap. Farnaz notices how thin her daughter has become. Has she been eating, sleeping, doing her homework? How will they go on, if Isaac does not return? Can she be a mother, Farnaz asks herself, without being a wife?

Hours later, in the living room, the men cluster all the furniture in one corner and roll up the carpet. They pull out
their knives and split open the pillows and sofa cushions, sliding their hands through the slits in the hope of finding more evidence sewn inside. From the tops of shelves and drawers they take down her trinkets—the porcelain creamer, the copper plate, the antique silverware—and park them in a corner of the room as if preparing them for an auction. When she sees her silver teapot, which had been missing for some time, she thanks them for finding it. “Look how happy a piece of silver makes you,” the scruffy one says, shaking his head. “There is no cure for your kind.”

“I bought this with my husband in Isfahan, right after our wedding,” she starts, but stops. How can it be explained, the joy of being in a strange city with a strange man, buying the first items to furnish their communal household—a teapot and twelve glasses? She thinks of all the hours she spent in bazaars and flea markets and antique shops in so many countries, picking these items one by one, considering their color and shape and history, holding them to the light to observe cracks and chips, and wrapping them in towels for the trip back home. A gray-violet glass vase she had bought from a Venetian artisan, now placed on the windowsill, catches the afternoon sunlight and reflects it in disjointed rays on the floor. She remembers so well the day she bought it: a wet and humid May afternoon, vaporetti swinging in the water, tourists stepping onto gondolas, and her walking with Isaac to their seaside hotel, holding a slice of Venice in her little bag. These objects, she had always believed, are infused with the souls of the places from which they came, and of the people who had made or sold them. On long,
silent afternoons, when Isaac would be at work and the children at school, she would sit in her sun-filled living room and look at each one—the glass vase, a reminder of Francesca, in Venice; the copper plate, a souvenir of Ismet, in Istanbul; the silver teapot, a keepsake from Firouz, in Isfahan. Living among these objects assured her that hers was a populated world.

“So many things, Sister,” the man says. “Why so many?”

 

T
HEY SEARCH THE
kitchen and the other bedrooms with less fervor. Around midnight, as they are about to leave, they realize that they forgot the garden. They stand by the glass doors and look out into the night. The dog, on the other side of the doors, barks violently.

“Sister, leash that mad dog so we can take a quick look in the garden.”

The image of Shirin with her mud-stained shoes and pants appears in her mind. It occurs to her that her daughter would not have simply gone out to play; that she may, in fact, be hiding something. “I'm scared of the dog, Brother,” Farnaz says. “She is really my husband's dog. Since he's been gone, the housekeeper takes care of her, and she's not here today. You're welcome to go out there and leash her yourself.”

The soldier glances at his colleague, then at his watch. “It's late,” he says. “I think we've done enough.”

They disappear with their bags of evidence. Farnaz bolts
the door, takes her daughter's hand, and leads her up the stairs. “What were you doing in the garden, Shirin?” she asks once they are in bed.

“Nothing.”

“Then why were you so muddy?”

Shirin turns on her side, covering herself, up to the neck, with the blanket. “This blanket smells like Baba,” she says quietly.

Farnaz spoons her daughter's small body and shuts her eyes. Huddled like this with Shirin, she remembers the early days of the war, when the terrible thunder of Iraqi bombs falling over a blacked-out Tehran would send the three of them to their hiding place under the stairs—a spot that gave them an illusion of cover but in fact was no safer than any other place in the house. There they would sit with a candle, and as they would wait for the bombs to pass, Isaac would distract them with puppet shows of singing cats and quarreling frogs—shadows of his nimble hands reflected on the opposite wall.