The Moving Prison (15 page)

Esther took a sip of lukewarm tea and carefully set her cup back into the matching bone-china saucer in her lap. Biting her lip, she looked again at the plywood box sitting in the study. Ahmed Dabirian’s oldest son had delivered it early this morning. He told her Ezra had ordered it and presented her with a bill. Grudgingly, she had allowed him inside and given him the money.

Even a casual glance inside the box showed that the outside area did not match that within. Surely an experienced customs inspector would see that there was space at the bottom of the box unaccounted for by the visible inner dimensions. She doubted the wisdom of Ezra’s apparent plans for the hidden compartment. If they were discovered taking hard currency out of the country, no receipt or endorsement from Mullah Hafizi would save them.

Since Ezra’s delivery from Evin Prison, Esther’s attitude toward emigration from Iran had undergone a drastic change. She was now in an agony of eagerness to leave. The distress of her husband’s imprisonment, combined with the frank hostility of the search party, had made her a willing accomplice in the plan to escape to the West. As if these weren’t enough, their daughter feared for her life if she returned to school. Of course Ezra had agreed that keeping Sepi at home was for the best.

Esther was willing to abandon every shred of property and wealth they owned to facilitate their departure. But Ezra still went along with his plans, keeping his own counsel—to protect her, he said—making his careful, studied moves. Now, instead of being angered with his intent to leave, she was frustrated by his tedious, silent preparations, his apparent nonchalance. She wanted nothing more than to quit the churning cauldron of chaos that her country had become. She wanted to scream at him, to tell him to hurry up, to get them out of this cursed place. But Ezra plodded along, ordering a shipping crate with a false bottom, as if they had all the time in the world to pack their goods and make an orderly departure.

Moosa came downstairs, scratching his tousled hair and yawning. Esther looked at him, worry creasing her eyes. Why was he staying out so late, especially in times like these? Every night, rifle fire could be heard in all quarters of the city, as
pasdars
skirmished with resentful supporters of the Shah, or with
mujahideen
guerrillas. Even the mullahs had taken to wearing guns in these days of madness.

Walking home from the bus stop, Esther had seen graffiti sprayed on the wall: “
Qalat kardeem
—We made a mistake.” Too late, some had realized the dangers of placing so much power in the hands of the long-repressed mullahs. Yet her son had taken to roaming the streets at night. She didn’t know where he went on his mysterious nocturnal trips—and was not certain she wanted to know. Perhaps the country’s insanity was infecting all its citizens. Moosa glanced at her, then away, as he plodded sleepily into the kitchen.

She heard the clink of a cup and saucer, followed by Moosa softly cursing.

“Mother,” he called in annoyance, “why is there no coffee?”

“The propane tank is empty, and there’s no heat for the stove.”

Again she heard the mumbled swearing. The fuel oil company had made no deliveries for weeks now, and no one knew when they would resume, if ever. Several evenings the electricity had gone out, due in part to the well-connected but inexperienced workers now in charge of the generating stations. Such was the confusion of these days.

She felt Ezra’s hand on her neck, followed by the warmth of his lips on her cheek. “Good morning, my love,” he smiled, walking past her into the kitchen. Pensively she watched his back as he moved away. He was dressed as if to go out. Glancing a final time at the wooden box, she got up and followed her husband.

“Where are you going, Ezra?” she asked, pouring the tea down the drain and carefully rinsing the cup.

“I must go and keep a promise I made while I was in prison,” Ezra said, a hint of sadness in his voice.

“To a fellow Jew not as fortunate as I,” said Ezra. “He asked me to take a message to his wife and child, and I thought I’d do that his morning, since the weather is warm and clear.” Ezra tore off a hunk from a loaf of pita bread Esther had baked the night before. He moved the containers in the refrigerator until he found a jar of marmalade, and began spreading it on his bread.

“What happened to this friend of yours?” mumbled Moosa around a large mouthful of bread.

Ezra paused, knife in hand, and looked out the window toward the cherry trees in the side yard. The echo of rifle shots rattled in his brain, and he closed his eyes for an instant. “He was shot,” Ezra said finally, and resumed spreading the marmalade.

Esther looked at him sharply. “Do you think it’s safe, so soon after your release to go to the home of an executed detainee? Surely the mullahs have the place under surveillance.”

“I made a promise,” Ezra interrupted, his eyes momentarily hardening with resolve as he looked at her. Esther looked away, sighing as she selected a tomato from the produce basket and began slicing it into wedges.

“Besides,” Ezra continued, “my friend said the wife is now at the home of her parents.”

Esther shook her head in helpless frustration. Did Ezra imagine the mullahs didn’t know the locations of all the relatives of this executed Jew?

Ezra chewed the bread slowly and washed it down with a glass of tap water. Moosa craned his neck around the doorway, looking into the study. “By the way, Father,” he asked, “what’s the box for? You thinking about going into the smuggling racket?” he joked.

Ezra peered intently at Moosa, then glanced over to Esther. She had stopped paring the tomatoes, standing with her back to him, her face half-turned, waiting for his answer.

“The box is for shipping the Isfahan carpet to America,” Ezra answered carefully. “Nothing more.” He placed his empty water glass beside the sink and began walking out of the kitchen.

Esther could not contain herself. “Ezra, any customs inspector with one eye and half a brain will notice the dimensions of that box. Please don’t tell me you plan to take our money in that … that thing.” Her eyes challenged him to reply.

He looked at his wife and his son, then smiled ever so slightly, shaking his head. “You two are quite the suspicious types. Perhaps you should go to work for the customs service.”

Esther huffed in exasperation as she rolled her eyes. Moosa shook his head and took another bite of bread.

“Well, I’m off,” Ezra announced, starting toward the front door. “Moosa, don’t worry about going to the bazaar today. I’ll change the currency myself for a while.”

Moosa grunted and nodded.

“Good-bye, Esther, my darling,” Ezra called cheerily.

Esther chewed savagely on a tomato wedge, pointedly ignoring him. She heard the front door open, then close.

SIXTEEN

Sepideh’s eyes fluttered
,
then opened. She lay on her bed, sunlight filtering through the curtained and shuttered windows of her room. Without moving, she gazed around the familiar room. Lately, Sepi had wanted to do little but sleep. Like an addict, she sought the black oblivion of slumber as the only refuge from the living nightmare that swirled about her. Yet with each awakening, dread and depression resumed their intimate, dreary vigil within her soul, hovering like carrion birds just beneath her ceiling, awaiting only her stirring to descend and resume feeding. Groaning, she rolled over and closed her eyes, willing herself back toward the bleak refuge of unconsciousness.

But it was already close to noon, and she could not, despite her best efforts, return to the somnolent cave of unbeing. Her eyes fell on the book resting on her bedside table. It was a volume of poetry, a textbook from her literature class. A class she had attended ages ago, in another life, before madness reigned.

Wearily, without consciously willing it, she sat up and opened the book, leafing idly through its pages. Her eye paused. On the page before her was a work of the poet Saadi. Without knowing why, she read:

Human beings are members of one another,

For in creation they are wrought of the same fabric.

When one is afflicted,

All suffer.

You who scoff at the wounds of others,

Are unworthy to be called human….

The words, once only a series of lines to be memorized for a grade, now spawned a dark ache at the back of Sepi’s throat. The taunts of the boys’ gang resounded in her ears.
“Jew trash. Tramp, Infidel.”
She had known some of them, had romped with them on the playground of her primary school. Yet their faces had been as closed, as clenched with hate, as those of total strangers. They felt no empathy for her, no more pity than wild dogs circling wounded prey. Such cold malevolence was beyond her experience, beyond her ability to cope. She could not bring her mind and emotions to accept the possibility of the unimagined dangers now inhabiting the world she had always thought so safe. It was like walking out to Marjan’s kennel to feed him and having him suddenly slash at her with his fangs. Or as if her father’s flower garden had been overgrown during the night with poisonous thorns.

And Khosrow. Though he had defended her, she had not heard from him since that last, awful day at school. Not a letter, not a phone call—nothing. She felt abandoned, betrayed. Had his feelings for her, his affectionate teasing, all been a sham? A pleasant ruse to be dropped when no longer convenient? Perhaps he did not actually despise her Jewishness, but was he embarrassed by it? Was he secretly relieved that she no longer came to school, that he need not bear the curses of the others as they rebounded from her onto him? To be hated for one’s ancestry, or to be an embarrassment because of it—the two appeared much the same in the hopeless, gray world she now inhabited.

A knock came to her door.
It was probably Mother,
she thought tiredly,
come to badger me about being in bed so late.
And then came Moosa’s voice. “Sepi? Mind if I come in?”

She pulled her robe from the bedpost where it hung and tugged it on. “Yes, come in,” she said, tying the sash about her waist.

Moosa opened the door, eyeing her thoughtfully. “Isn’t it a little late to be in bed?”

Sepi rolled her eyes.
First Mother, now Moosa. No one understands.

He sat down on the edge of her bed, still studying her listless posture, her vacant expression. “What happened to you at school was a terrible thing,” he said finally. “It was unfair and wrong, and the boys who did it should be horsewhipped.”

For the first time, her eyes flickered toward him with something that might have been interest.

“And I don’t blame you for feeling hurt and abandoned,” he continued. “This family has always been law-abiding and loyal; now with the mullahs in control, it seems that counts for nothing. You didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to you, just as Father did nothing that should have landed him in Evin Prison, just as Abraham Moosovi did nothing that should have gotten him executed.”

She was watching him steadily now, but still said nothing.

“Injustice is the rule of the day for anyone who’s not Muslim,” he said, his eyes roaming somewhere beyond the walls of her room. “The country has come apart at the seams, and it’s a bad time to be in the minority—any minority.”

For the first time, she spoke. “So what do we do? Renounce our Judaism, become Muslim converts? Is that the way?” Her voice was a flat, inflectionless mirror of hopelessness.

“No!” The word came out sharper than he intended. “Sepi,” he went on in a gentler tone, “there are three possible responses to what is happening to us right now. And it’s very important that we choose carefully, and not simply allow the choice to be made by default.”

She said nothing, but her eyes indicated her willingness to listen.

“First, we can despair. Give up, quit. Drift along passively and allow events to knock us about however they may. That’s the worst choice of all, I think. It means they’ve already beaten us. It means we’ve admitted that they really do have the right to do whatever they want, since we’re unwilling to help ourselves.”

She would no longer meet his eyes, but her dead expression of moments ago was shifting to one of indignation and perhaps a little anger.
Good
, Moosa thought.
She’s still got some fight left, down in there somewhere.
“The second choice is to change to fit the circumstances,” he went on. “To make plans, to figure out a way around difficulties—how to get away, perhaps. That’s what Father is doing, Sepi. He has felt all the same pain, all the same fear, all the same persecution you’ve felt—only more. And his answer is to adapt. But at least he’s moving, he’s doing something. He hasn’t quit, not for a second. It means he’s still alive, still fighting in his own way.”

There was a long silence. Despite her unwillingness, she found herself unable to resist asking the question, “And the third way? You said there were three possibilities.”

Moosa turned his head away. Several more silent moments passed before he again looked at her. “You can get angry,” he said quietly. “You can push back.”

The speed of her reply surprised him. “And which have you chosen?”

He stared at her for the space of ten heartbeats. Then, without a word, he got up and left the room.

Ezra consulted the address he had written on the envelope, then looked again at the numbers painted on the dingy plastered wall beside the gate. The house stood on Avenue Ismaili, a small street in a slightly rundown neighborhood, and Ezra looked about him nervously as he knocked at the gate. He had not seen anyone following him or observing his movements, but he could not help feeling exposed. Again he knocked, anxious to get inside, away from passing eyes.

Finally he heard the slap of leather-soled feet on the hard-packed dirt of the courtyard inside the wall. As the steps approached the gate, a low, cautious male voice asked, “Who’s there?”

“I am Ezra Solaiman. Are Jahan and Maheen Ibrahim here?”

“Why are you here?” Suspicion hardened the tone of the voice inside the gate.

“I bring a message from Reuben, Jahan’s husband.”

“Reuben isn’t here. For all we know, he’s dead. Go away.” Ezra heard the grinding sound the man’s foot made as he turned to leave.

“Wait!” Ezra called. “Yes, you are right. Reuben is dead. We were cell mates in Evin Prison. Just before we went in to the mullahs, he gave me a message for Jahan. He gave me an envelope—here, let me put it under the gate.”

He heard no more footsteps. Looking a last time at the envelope, he placed it on the ground, and scooted it under the gate with his toe. For five or six heartbeats there was no sound. Then he heard the man take two paces. His clothing rustled as he bent down to pick up the envelope. Then came a long silence. “Wait here,” the man said at last, and he walked quickly back to the house.

Several minutes later, Ezra heard two sets of returning footsteps. He could discern the soft, muffled sobs of a woman, even as the man demanded roughly, “Why have you come?” Ezra decided to appeal directly to the widow of Reuben Ibrahim.

“Jahan
khanom
,” Ezra said earnestly, “for me, your Reuben was a blessing sent by the Eternal. His advice was of great help to me in prison. He made me promise to bring this message to you if I got out alive. And I have brought something else for you and little Maheen. Please let me in. I won’t be able to fulfill my promise to your martyred husband if you don’t.”

A moment more she sobbed quietly. Then a key rattled in the lock, and the latch clicked back. Slowly the gate swung outward, and Ezra stepped into the courtyard of the father-in-law of Reuben Ibrahim.

Jahan was short and slightly overweight. Her round, pretty face was ringed by jet-black curls. She wore a somber gray dress and daubed grief-reddened eyes with a wrinkled handkerchief. Just behind her stood her father, a round, balding man with a thick, wiry gray mustache. This man now gestured toward the house.

“I am your humble servant, Ismail Menachim,” he said. “Come in,
Aga
Solaiman,” he said. “I apologize for being rude to you. These days, one can’t be too careful.”

“Please. I, of all people, understand your caution,” Ezra assured.

“When I saw Reuben’s handwriting on the envelope …” Jahan began. Her voice caught. After taking several deep breaths, she went on. “… I knew for certain he was dead. In my heart I have been trying to prepare for this moment, but …” She leaned against the door frame of her house and covered her face with one hand.

Tenderly, Ezra patted her shoulder. “I am so very sorry, Jahan
khanom
. Your husband was a brave man, a true hero. He didn’t deserve the treatment he got from the mullahs.” He felt sympathetic tears burning the corners of his eyes.

Presently, Jahan’s father pushed the door open. “Please, come in. Our house is humble, but you are welcome here.”

A few moments later, Ezra perched uneasily on one of the two chairs in the sparsely furnished parlor of Ismail Menachim’s home. The room was small, but very clean. Floral drapes covered the windows, and assorted rugs, the stock and trade of Reuben Ibrahim, covered the linoleum floors. Seated across from Ezra, Jahan trembled with silent sobs as she held her face in her hands. The sorrow in her parents’ faces, as they stood silently on either side of her, was a faint echo of the anguish that covered the grieving young widow like a shroud.

Ezra longed to comfort her, to assuage the pain of Reuben’s unjust death, but the only words he could summon to his mind seemed so shallow, so empty. What could he say, after all? That he was sorry? That her husband’s death was senseless? How could such inanities heal the raw, gaping wound in Jahan Ibrahim’s heart?

He stirred and heard the rustling of the paper sack in his coat pocket. He had stopped by a candy store on his way here, to get a treat for the child. Now he produced the bag of
gaz-i-Isfahan
.

“Where is Maheen?” he asked. “I brought her a present.”

Jahan dabbed at her eyes with a saturated kerchief, struggling gamely to smile. “How kind of you,
Aga
Solaiman! Maheen, come in here, darling.
Aga
Solaiman has brought you a gift!”

The child timidly peeked around the frame of the doorway from the hall. Eyes downcast, she remained where she was, one thumb in her mouth. She appeared to Ezra to be no more than three years old. Her face was a heartbreakingly familiar version of her father’s, and her mother’s dark ringlets circled the shy, pudgy face. Clearly Maheen was uncertain of Ezra and, though intrigued by the notion of a present, was unwilling to enter the room with a stranger.

“Come here, Maheen,” her mother urged. “come meet
Aga
Solaiman.”

Maheen glanced worriedly from Ezra to her grandparents and mother, the thumb still lodged in her mouth.

“Please, Maheen, come here,” said Jahan. Then, to Ezra, she explained, “The
pasdars
came here looking for Reuben. She was very badly frightened. Even now, when we must go out, she hides her face in my shoulder when we encounter any man she does not know. And sometimes in the night, she awakens screaming….” Jahan’s voice faltered.

Ezra felt his heart breaking with pity for this child, this innocent one rendered fatherless by the ruthless ambitions of men. Maheen, hugging the wall, edged into the room, her eyes fixed warily on Ezra. Reaching her mother, Maheen climbed onto her lap. Only from that sanctuary did she extend a hand toward the bag Ezra held on his knee.

Slowly, with what he hoped was a kind smile on his face, Ezra handed the bag of candy to the child. Maheen peered inside, her fear overcome at last by curiosity. Taking a piece of the white crunchy confection, she at last withdrew her thumb from her mouth, popping the
gaz-i-Isfahan
inside and chewing noisily.