House of Sand and Fog (5 page)

F
RIDAY WAS THE BEST AND WORST DAY SO FAR. IT WAS BEST BECAUSE
I worked it straight through, cleaning my normal residential plus the reservoir house job and the pediatric office I’d skipped the day before. There was a fog bank pushing in from the beaches and on another day it could’ve sent me over the edge, the way it covers the town in gray, but Friday I just tuned it out and cleaned with more energy than I’d had in a long time.

My customers leave me a key in their mailbox or under a rock on their lawn, which means no one is ever there except for a dog or cat, and I can work alone and fast, chewing gum and listening to the Walkman I keep clipped to my shorts; Nick’s old tapes mostly, loud fast rock that keeps me moving at a good pace and keeps me from thinking too much. When I woke up early Friday morning at the El Rancho, I made up my mind I was going to stop wallowing in my problem and start concentrating on the solution instead. I had to turn it over to Connie Walsh. She
was
my lawyer. By the time I was dressed, I’d convinced myself I’d hear something positive by the end of the day about getting my house back. So instead of booking my room through the weekend, I went down to the office and paid another thirty-one dollars for Friday night only.

I got back to the motel just before the end-of-the-work-week traffic heated up on the freeways. My arms, legs, and lower back were tired out, and my sweat had dried three times on my skin, but before I took a shower I called Legal Aid and Gary had me wait on the line almost five minutes before Connie Walsh picked it up: “I’m sorry, Kathy, but evidently the county has already sold your house.”

I stood still and took short, dry breaths.
“What? How?”

“The auction date’s been set for months, Kathy; that was in the mail you’ve been throwing away.” I pictured my mother’s round face, her eyes dark and flat-looking. I heard my brother Frank, who told me and Nick the house was ours as far as he was concerned; he might want his half in twenty years, but hey K, One Day at a Time, right? Then I felt the tears come, my stomach twisting up. “Those mother
fuckers.”

“Can you get that to me Monday morning, Kathy?”

“What?”

“Your copy of the tax statement. Hopefully I’ll have their paperwork by then, and we can go from there, all right?”

Connie Walsh was quiet on the other end. I wiped my nose and asked her what she was planning to do.

“Just what I said, Kathy. We’ll demand they rescind the sale or we file a lawsuit against the county.” She said not to worry too much, then reminded me to get that paperwork to her Monday morning.

I spent the first part of the night in the steel storage shed across the street looking for the signed tax statement from the county. But it was already too dark to see much, and I didn’t have a flashlight, so I drove to a convenience store on the other side of the freeway to get one. The streets were fogged in and the air was wet and too cool for shorts. Back in the shed I found one of Nick’s old sweatshirts and pulled it on. It was black-and-white with the logo of a band he used to play bass for years ago. It was clean so didn’t smell like him, but I could still picture him in it, lying on the couch while he read a paperback with the TV or radio on, sometimes both. That was always how he read.

After over an hour going through my boxes and bags, my neck stiff from holding the butt of the flashlight between my chin and chest so I could use both hands, I almost gave up when I remembered my trunk. I pulled two full trash bags off it, then lifted the heavy wooden lid. Inside were things I hadn’t even looked at since moving west: old clothes and shoes, towels and blankets, a dozen rock albums from high school—mainly the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers, but no paperwork.

“Hello?”

I screamed and swung around and dropped the flashlight. A man picked it up and shined it in his face. It was shadowed and I stepped back, but then recognized the crooked mustache. Deputy Sheriff Burdon smiled, then handed me the flashlight, and I took a breath and let it out. “Shit, don’t
do
that.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well you
did.”
I put the pictures back in the trunk, then stepped out of the shed and padlocked it, squeezing the flashlight between my ribs and elbow. My heart was still beating fast, and it was completely dark now. Fog hovered in the lot and street. In the light from the security lamps over the sheds I could see Lester Burdon was wearing jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker.

“Did you get hold of Legal Aid?”

“Yeah, thanks.” I turned off the flashlight and began to walk across the lot. My bare legs felt cold, my nipples were hard against my shirt, I didn’t know how I felt about him being here. “You working under-cover or something?”

“Excuse me?” He looked down at his sneakers. “Oh, no, I’m off. I just—I drive by this way. I thought I’d check in on you, see how you’re holding up.”

He sounded like he meant it, and he seemed even softer than the day before when he’d led those men in kicking me out of my house. When we got to his car, a Toyota station wagon parked at the edge of the lot near the chain-link fence, I kind of hoped he’d keep talking; Connie Walsh was the first person I’d had a real conversation with in over eight months, and that was more of an interrogation than a talk. I wanted one, even with a sheriff’s deputy in the fog. He was looking across the street past the motel to all the tractor trailers parked behind the truck stop. I could hear the bass drum of the country band through the walls, cars moving over the freeway bridge down the block. He looked back at me, his face all somber. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee, or something?”

“That’d be all right.” I told him I had to put on something warmer first. He waited in his car in the motel lot and I changed into the same clothes I’d worn to Legal Aid. I rubbed deodorant under my arms and ran some eyeliner under my bottom lashes.

We both agreed the truck stop would be too loud, so we ended up at a Carl Jr.’s a mile past the freeway on the outskirts of San Bruno. The place was brightly lit and smelled like fried chicken and potatoes. I hadn’t eaten and my stomach felt hollow, but I didn’t want to order food and change the offer of drinking coffee together into something else. We sat at a table by the window. Deputy Burdon had taken off his jacket and was wearing a striped golf shirt. His arms were tan, and the gold of his wedding band stood out bright against his skin. His mustache was as crooked as it had been the day before, his dark eyes a little moist. I had to be looking at the most serious man I’d ever met.

Our coffee came. I added Sweet’n Low to mine but he sipped his black, his eyes on me. On the ride over he’d asked me if Legal Aid had a lawyer for me yet and I told him yeah, then Connie Walsh’s news about the county already auctioning off the house. Now he looked down at the tabletop and shook his head. “Boy, they don’t fool around, do they?”

“It’s not hard to rescind these things, though, is it? That’s my lawyer’s plan.” I felt shaky at his reaction. I lifted my coffee cup, but then put it back down; I felt a little sick to my stomach. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of my mouth.

“I really don’t know much about that, Mrs. Lazaro.”

“Kathy. Nicolo’s my maiden name.”

“It suits you.” His eyes stayed on mine a second, then he glanced out the window. I wanted to ask if he had any kids; I wanted to know that, but I didn’t ask and took a drag of my cigarette.

“Anyway, we never should have been charged a tax at all, and I only own half the house in the first place. My lawyer’s confident, though, so I’m trying not to harp on the negative.”

“Your husband hold the rest?”

“My brother. He doesn’t know about any of this yet. No one does.”

The waitress came by and topped off our coffee. Lester Burdon smiled at her, but sadly, I thought, like he knew something about her that wasn’t good. His face changed when he saw me studying him and he sipped his coffee.

“Do you have any kids, Mr. Burdon?”

“Two.” He put his cup down and folded his elbows on the table. His eyes were on mine again, but this time he didn’t look away and neither did I. I wasn’t used to being looked at so closely, to being seen.

“My husband left me eight months ago. No one back home knows that either.”

“You always keep so many secrets?”

“Just when I have to.”

He kept his brown eyes on me, and I looked away to stub out my cigarette.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“I think so.” He nodded once, the way cops do.

I
T WAS A
short and strange ride back to the motel. Neither of us talked and the fog still moved slowly through the streets. The lights over the diesel pumps at the truck stop looked misted at the edges, so did the blue and red neon beer signs in the bar window, and across the lot the tall yellow letters of the El Rancho Motel over the office, all dulled and spread out a little.

He pulled into the lot and I put my hand on the door handle. “I want to go back to my house, but I’d have to break a window just to get in there.”

He touched four fingers to my knee, lifting them just as quick, but they left a warmth in my leg that loosened something in me all the way to my diaphragm.

“Do you mind if I give you some professional advice?”

“I guess not.”

“Keep your head and do it all through your lawyer, Kathy. If I were you, I wouldn’t even drive up there until the keys were back in my hand.”

He looked dark-eyed and somber again and I didn’t want to get out of his car, but I didn’t want to stay either. “Thanks for stopping by.”

He looked at me with his handsome face and crooked mustache and I got out and closed the door, watching his little station wagon turn up the foggy street, its taillights vanishing in no time.

S
ATURDAY AND SUNDAY
all the coast towns were fogged in. I spent the weekend in my room smoking and reading magazines, watching my own color TV I’d pulled from the storage shed. When I got hungry I went out for fast food. Late Sunday night I drove under the freeway to go buy cigarettes and a Snickers Bar and when I got back, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw Lester Burdon’s car pull away from the curb across the street, its small foreign engine straining to shift gears.

I
LOOK AT MY NADI OVER THE PIZZA WE ARE EATING UPON THE FLOOR
of our new home. She is dressed in a fashionable sweat suit the color of roses. She wears no cosmetics upon her face, and there are shadows beneath her eyes. Esmail has worked very hard all weekend, and he reaches for a fifth slice even before he has finished chewing his last. But Nadereh will not return my look. She has spoken to me very little, in Farsi or English, since I yelled and broke her cassette player by throwing it in the bedroom of our pooldar apartment. We complete our eating and I give my son permission to leave the sofreh for his room. Nadi rises to prepare the samovar.

The movers finished with their business by nightfall yesterday, my wife working until midnight bringing order to her new room, the largest, with two good windows overlooking the rear lawn. My room and Esmail’s are smaller and face the front grass and the street and woodland beyond, and we will share the bathroom as a family. Even though she would not speak to me, I enjoyed listening to Nadi talk with the large moving men in
English,
informing them please to be calculated, and please to work slowful and avoid to shatter very supreme furniture, thank you, sirs.

I lie back upon one elbow on the carpet, but I can no longer see my wife in the kitchen area due to the bar counter and its stools. This is something quite western, the design of a drinking saloon in one’s own home, and if I were not planning to sell the property to Americans, I would have it removed. The sound of televised laughter comes from Esmail’s new bedroom. Yesterday he was excited to discover this hill brought as many programs to his screen as the pooldar apartments, and for two hours today, after he had organized his room, my son rode his skateboard down the long hill of Bisgrove Street again and again, those minature wheels sounding on the road like a quite distant F-16 in the clouds.

Nadi rests the tea and sugar at my bare feet, then quickly removes the empty pizza container and returns to the kitchen, which she has been putting into order all the afternoon. Upon the sofa are unpacked boxes, lamps, folded drapes and blankets. She is reserving this room for last, which is good, for I know she has enough work to keep her busy for at least the first week. Fardoh, tomorrow, I will for her purchase a new cassette player and even a new tape or two, Googoosh perhaps, that zeebah Persian woman who is a less sentimental singer than Daryoosh.

I rise and carry my tea out the front door and walk barefoot upon the grass. The blades are long, at least two centimeters, and as I walk around to the side of the house I make a note to purchase a grass cutter as well, something used, nothing extravagant. The sky has lost most of its light and my new neighbors have turned on the lamps in their homes. I was disappointed there was no sun all the weekend long, only that strange cool fog, but I am grateful for the tall hedge bushes around our little bungalow, and I like the heavy smell of pine they release into the air. Through the kitchen window I can barely see my Nadi working for she has turned on no light. Tomorrow begins my new work, that of buyer and seller. I will give it the best hours of the day, like any office position, and that is what I must do with my room, arrange it with a proper desk and chair and a telephone and perhaps a typewriter as well. But first I must become a seller; I must double my investment with a buyer very soon. And of course this must be handled more delicately than anything else. I cannot push Nadi too far too quickly, asking her to pack and move again so immediately. Perhaps I should wait a month or two for her to settle herself here, away from all the lying and play-acting of our life at the high-rise of our ruling pooldar. But will it not be more difficult, after I sell the home on the open market for a fair price, to ask her to move once again? But then I will of course be able to show her eighty or ninety thousand dollars in our hands, the opportunity to purchase another auction property to sell for profit or even begin a business of some kind right away.

I regard the slope of the roof above me, the sky growing quite dark, and I decide to telephone a najar as well, a carpenter, to give a price for the building of a widow’s walk. I can then refer to this bungalow as Waterview Property, and in the meanwhile, my wife and I may sit together in the early evenings so high on the house and hill, to look out at the sea, and the sky.

T
HE NAJAR IS
a polite young man, not quite thirty years, and he has given to me a price of eleven hundred dollars for the construction of a widow’s walk. We will not be able to enter this from inside the home but must walk outdoors to new stairs in front of the kitchen window in order to reach the roof. There is no other affordable way to construct it, the najar assures me, so I accept this compromise, but I will not inform Nadereh of her window.

This morning, Monday, while my son rides his skateboard down the hill of Bisgrove Street to explore the town of Corona in the sunshine, I spend time here in my new room organizing it as an office, and I have no time to waste. As soon as I rid my desk of all unnecessary papers and boxes I begin immediately to write an advertisement for the sale of this house. I study the language used in other realty advertisements of the town’s newspaper, and I use the same for my own, yet I do not feel I am qualified to name a price. So many of the homes advertised sound no larger or more well-maintained than this bungalow, and they are in “quiet residential areas” as well, but the prices for these homes are well over one hundred seventy thousand dollars. My fingers begin to shake; I am once again in amazement at the low price I paid for the home and I imagine if I could sell for even one-fifty I would more than triple my investment. Outside my door and down the hallway, Nadi works in the living-room area. From time to time I am able to hear her voice as she speaks to herself. It is a habit she has always possessed and I am pleased to hear it for it only comes when she is deeply involved with a project or task of some kind.

Early this morning she rose from her bed with the rest of us, her son and I. She for us prepared toast and tea, and when she poured for me I thanked her and she said: “Haheshmeekonam, Behrani,” which is the proper response, though I have never cared for her using my family name when addressing me. When we were younger she called me Massoud-joon or, often, Mass. But for many years now—since the revolution I am quite certain—my Nadi has called me Behrani. One evening in our large apartment in Paris, on the Right Bank of that dirty but beautiful river the Seine, Nadi had a long telephone conversation with one of her sisters in Tehran. After hanging up she began immediately crying. I gave her a few moments of solitude, then I went to comfort my wife but she pushed me away and yelled very loud in Farsi she should have never married me, a kaseef soldier! None of her family were forced to leave the country;
their
names were not upon a
death list,
just
her
because she married
me
and the filthy kaseef air force and it is all your fault, Behrani! Our country is ruined because of
you,
you and your SAVAK friends!

It was then I hit my wife very hard across the face with my open hand and she fell to the floor and lay there crying, “Man meekham bemiram.” I want to die, she wept. I want to die.

Of course I would not have let her stay upon the carpet in that fashion if our son was in the home, but Esmail was playing in the streets with his young French friends, so I allowed Nadereh to lie upon her face and weep. Because she was quite wrong of my involvement with the secret police, SAVAK. I had very little to do with any of their affairs. And of course she before never complained of all our privileges; she never complained of the maids and soldiers she used for the upkeep of our home; she never complained of the skiing trips in the mountains to the north, or of our bungalow there overlooking the Caspian in Chahloose; she never complained of the fine gowns she was able to wear at the parties of generals and judges and lawyers and famous actors and singers; she never complained when on a Sunday afternoon I would order Bahman to drive our family to the finest movie house in Tehran and of course there would be a long queue of people waiting, but I was dressed in my uniform so we never waited, we never even paid; we were ushered up to the balcony reserved for the Very Important People, away from the crowd. And yes, I often saw fear behind the smiles of these theater managers as they bowed and led us personally to our seats, and yes, no one waiting upon the sidewalk outdoors dared make a complaint I may hear; but there was no blood on my fingers. I purchased fighter jets. I was not with SAVAK.

But there were moments in my career I had spent time with these men. In the final years, every Thursday evening, five or six of we senior officers would meet at General Pourat’s home for vodka and mastvakhiar. And how I have wished for that sort of company today. At the high-rise of pooldar Persians in Berkeley I attempted to organize some of the men together for an occasional evening, but these young doctors and engineers have spent so many of their years being educated in the west they do not even know the proper way to drink with each other like men; they do not know that the oldest and most experienced in the room is the saghi, that he, and only he, holds the vodka bottle and he will fill, or not fill, those cups around him. Each Thursday evening at Pourat’s, he, of course, was the saghi. In his large home a soldier would escort us to the den where we gentlemen would remove our shoes at the doorway, and we would sit in a circle on the dark red carpet from Tabriz. In winter, there was a fire burning in the tall stone fireplace behind us. Two or three musicians and a singer would stand in the far corner softly playing songs more than a thousand years old and still only a third as old as our country. Hanging on the east wall was a long woven tapestry of Hazrat Abbas and his holy companions charging down the sand hill of Karbala, racing to the thousands of enemy soldiers who would yield them to martyrdom.

And in front of each of us was placed a small earthen cup, relics from Pourat’s family in Isfahan. A box of long Havana cigars lay closed, for we never smoked until our host did first, nor did we dip our two fingers into the chaser, as Americans might call it, the bowl of mastvakhiar—that wonderful sour yogurt mixed with bits of cucumber—that moment would not come until after our first drink of cold Russian vodka, which Pourat would pour as soon as he entered in a smoking jacket, silk pants, and fine Parisian socks. He was a handsome man, khosh teep, and bald with wide shoulders and a flat belly. Of course we would stand, but Pourat would wave us back to the floor and he would make a joke about one of us, something he may have heard that week at Mehrabad, and we always laughed at Pourat’s jokes, not out of respect, but because he was truly an amusing man. Sometimes he would tease one of the younger or more ambitious men by passing his cup over while pouring the very first drink, something a saghi rarely did, for the main purpose of a saghi is to keep a man from drinking more than he is able. The young senior officer with the empty cup might lower his head out of shame, his face a reddened study in concentration as he attempted to remember how he may have insulted the general. But then Pourat would laugh quite loudly, as would the rest of us, and he would pour the vodka for the relieved and smiling young man, then fill all our cups.

When we toasted our health, each man, including Pourat, attempted to tap his cup beneath those of the others, which is a true sign of respect in Persia. “Man nokaretam,” we say, meaning: I am your servant. And of course each man wants to honor another more than himself, if it is truly deserved, so he will not allow his cup to stay higher when they touch; he will instantly lower his cup to the bottom of the other man’s as if to say, “No, I am
your
servant.” But the other will sometimes insist by lowering his again and more than once I have seen grown men lower their cups in this fashion, each after the other all the way to the floor, then stand to fistfight over who respects whom the most. But at Pourat’s this would never occur. We prided ourselves on being not simply high officers, but Persian gentlemen as well.

One winter evening, General Pourat invited a seventh man to his home, his nephew. He was dark-skinned and younger than us all, with not more than thirty-three or thirty-four years. He possessed good looks, the wide jaw, small nose, and deep eyes I would see in film actors, and his physique was quite fit and powerful-looking beneath his finely tailored dark suit. Each time he raised his vodka cup to drink, his upper arm muscle would bunch into a round stone, and when one of the men commented on the young man’s power, Pourat said, “Yes, Bijan outlasts them all at the zur khaneh.”

One of the older gentlemen seated beside me began to speak of his boyhood in Rasht, how he would go with his father to the zur khaneh and witness all the large men there, half naked and sweating, lifting the milos over their heads while the chanter sang and played the domback drum in front of a fire and the hot stones a boy would pour water over to bring on more steam. And I did not care for the fashion in which Pourat’s nephew listened to this story; he drank his vodka and dipped three fingers, not two, into the mastvakhiar, and as he licked his fingers clean he would not even look at the older man speaking of his boyhood in Rasht. The young man kept his eyes on his stocking feet in front of him as if he were hearing something for the five hundredth time, something he of course knew completely before he’d heard it the first. When the gentleman beside me finished telling the story of his father and the zur khaneh, Pourat poured each of us more vodka and when we raised our cups in a toast to our past and to our traditions, I watched to make sure the younger man, this Bijan, held his cup low out of respect, which he did, though his face appeared impassive, and it was plain for me to see that here was a boy who was not only accustomed to being admired and looked at and listened to, he expected it as well.