The Septembers of Shiraz (12 page)

“W
hat's your favorite flower?” Rachel says.

Parviz has never thought much about flowers. A few come to mind—roses, sunflowers, carnations; none would qualify as his favorite. He remembers the white orchids that his father would bring his mother. “White orchids,” he says.

“They're beautiful. I like them, too. But they can be temperamental if you don't give them the care they need—the right amount of sunlight, temperature, and humidity.”

“My mother loves orchids. I guess they suit her temperament.”

“Are you saying your mother is moody?” She smiles.

He has come to see her on the pretext of buying flowers for a friend. All morning in class he had pictured her watering her plants, making their leaves bow to her with the weight of the droplets. He follows her through the shop now as she shows him the flowers. She seems to have forgiven
him for the comment he made when he last saw her—about exporting religion.

“This one,” she says, “is a gerbera. With the round face of a sunflower, but more delicate. That one, over there,” she says, pointing at a wiry branch with white cotton blooms, “is a gypsophila. The flowers are so light, like fairy dust. But you have to tell me more about your friend. What kind of person is she?”

“My friend,” he says, “is reserved, but sweet. I don't know her that well yet.”

She looks at him with suspicious eyes. “Red camellias may be a good choice, or white daisies.”

Mr. Broukhim, shelving bags of soil, looks up. “Don't go down that road, Parviz-jan!” he calls out. “If I were you, I would buy yellow carnations, or purple hyacinths.”

“Don't listen to him.” Rachel smiles. “Yellow carnations mean disdain and purple hyacinths are for sorrow.”

It fascinates him, this secret language. In a world without words, people could communicate with nothing but plants. There must be a plant to express every emotion—love, joy, solitude, fear, grief, even hope maybe.

He buys the daisies, which Rachel explains convey affection, and when he arrives home he leaves them for her on the stoop, where she always stands. He wonders what it is about her that so appeals to him. She is not an exceptional beauty, nor is she particularly warm. He thinks of the girls he has come to know in class, attractive for the most part, but tiresome because of their forwardness. He thinks of those he had known back home—Mojgan and Nahid, and
even Yassi, his girlfriend of two years—how despite their teasing manners they safeguarded their honor, like jewelers awaiting appraisal of their stones—how pure, how precious, how much?

Rachel is unlike all of them. Her religiosity, which not long ago would have repelled him, now offers him something no one else has since his arrival: quietude. Maybe it's because he is incapable of such faith that he has deferred his unanswered prayers to her—being near her ignites in him, somehow, the hope that his father will survive.

 

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
he steams hats with Zalman, his eyes on the door. When, near sundown, she still hasn't come, he finds himself weak and feverish. “Rachel never brought you your snack,” he says as casually as he can.

“She called to say she wasn't feeling well,” Zalman says. “She went home after school.”

“A cold?”

“She didn't say. She just said she wasn't well.”

Like a driver who finds himself at a dead-end, Parviz first blames the poor signage, then the poor visibility, and finally his own poor judgment.

R
amin's mother and old man Muhammad's eldest daughter were killed on the same night. Their names appear in the paper's list of executed, and by the time Isaac and the other prisoners are taken outside for their weekly dose of air, in the early afternoon, the news has spread among the men like the warning of cholera in a damp city. The old man sits on the ground hugging his bony knees, the boy leans against a wall, arms crossed against his chest, glassy-eyed. And so it is, Isaac thinks, that three generations have bonded through death.

“This country has fallen into the hands of savages,” Hamid says.

Isaac braces himself for a long tirade from Reza, something about how the country was always in the hands of savages. But it doesn't come. Here, as with any funeral, the men are civil and appropriately somber.

“If they were innocent, then they are martyrs,” Reza says. “There is no reason to mourn.”

Hamid looks at Reza with his black eyes, but restrains himself.

“My mother is no martyr, she was a communist,” Ramin says. “Besides, there is no such thing as a martyr.” Then turning to the old man he says, “Muhammad-agha, don't worry. We'll get out of here and show these people what we're made of.”

The old man doesn't look up. For a long time he remains quiet. Then in his wrinkled voice, he says, “If the rug of your luck has been woven in black, even the water of Zamzam cannot whiten it.”

 

I
N THE CELL
, Mehdi is asleep on his mattress, his right foot a swollen mass, the toe now completely black. The unfinished wooden clog is on the floor, upside down. There is a fetid odor in the room. Isaac struggles to sit on the floor beside him. He watches his sunken face, all dry skin and bones, with two yellow lids marooned inside their deep, gray sockets. He puts his palm on Mehdi's forehead.

“Mehdi-jan, have you asked them again about your foot?”

“Yes, just this morning. They won't let me go to the hospital.”

The door of the cell opens and a guard shoves Ramin with such force that he lands facedown on his mattress. “You want to end up like your mother, you mule?”

“Brother, is the other guard, Hossein-agha, on duty today?” Isaac asks.

“Yes, later. Why?”

“He had suggested a verse from the Koran for me to contemplate, and I wanted to discuss it with him.”

“He'll have the night shift,” the guard says, eyeing Isaac suspiciously. “If you learn something, why don't you pass it on to this dimwit?” He points to Ramin and leaves.

Ramin tests the soreness of his face with his fingers. “A verse from the Koran, Amin-agha?”

“No, not really. I want to speak to Hossein about Mehdi's foot. He's the only one who may do something about it.”

“You're smarter than I am, Amin-agha,” the boy says. “Me, I'm a bad liar.”

Isaac looks at Ramin, his face still young despite all he has been through, his eyes deep and brown. They made this boy an orphan, he thinks.

He spends the rest of the afternoon on his mattress, waiting for the slit in the door to open. He plans to grab the dinner tray as it glides into the cell, its tarnished metal cold against his hand, and hold it long enough to ask Hossein for help. Something about Hossein, Isaac thinks, suggests a capability for empathy. Unlike the others, his hardness is interrupted, sometimes, by glimmers of kindness, as when he had escorted Isaac to his cell that first night, when he had brought him an aspirin, or when he had informed the prisoners about the increased executions. His warning may have been callous, but it was still a genuine warning and not just a threat—more than anyone else has offered so far.

From his window he watches the shimmering interplay of light and dark, and finally the arrival of dusk—the sad conclusion of another day. So the old man has lost a daughter, Ramin has lost a mother, Mehdi will lose a foot. And he, what has he lost today? Rather, what has he left to lose? He realizes that he must now think of his wife and children not in relation to himself, but as people whom he loves and for whom he wishes a good life. He cannot lose them because he has already done so.

The slit opens. The sickly light from the hallway appears as a yellow rectangle in the door, and the tray slides through. Isaac gets up and grabs it. “Brother Hossein, is that you?”

“Yes.”

He pulls in the tray and settles it on the floor, then places his eyes on the opening. Hossein's ash-gray eyes peer at him from the other side.

“Brother, Mehdi will die from his bad foot if something isn't done about it. They may say, So what? but a prisoner should only die of his crime, not of illness.”

“Why don't you preoccupy yourself with your own situation? Other people's health problems are none of your business.”

“Brother, even I, in my miserable state, cannot just sit here and watch a man die. Please help him.”

“I'll see what I can do.” His eyes look into Isaac's a few seconds before the metallic slit slams shut.

 

H
E TRIES TO
awaken his cellmates for dinner, but neither responds. Mehdi has passed out, from pain no doubt, and Ramin, sprawled on his mattress, mumbles a few words in his sleep. Isaac sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the tray, alone. There is rice on a tin plate, three very bruised chicken legs, and bread. In theory, he could eat the other men's portions to regain his strength, but he cannot even eat his own. He plucks the meat from the chicken bones and wraps it inside the thin lavash bread. He sits on the mattress next to Ramin, rests the boy's head on his arm, and brings the sandwich to his mouth. Ramin opens his eyes, and seeing Isaac, begins sobbing. “Amin-agha, they really killed my mother!” he cries. Isaac hesitates for a moment before drawing the boy closer, and it occurs to him that he hasn't held his own children like this in years.

Around midnight, the door opens and in come two guards with a stretcher, which in the dark looks like no more than a piece of wood. One man slides his hands under Mehdi's armpits, the other holds on to his ankles, and together they lower him onto the wood, where he lands with a thump. Mehdi shrieks, then mumbles, “Baba, Baba, why did you let them do this to me, why? Baba, Baba…” and Isaac thinks, how strange, that no matter how many years a man has lived and what he has seen during those years, in the end he still wants an answer from his father.

“Bijan Yadgar; Behrooz Ghodsi…” a guard calls out names. “Jahanshah Soheil, Vartan Sofoyan, Ramin Ameri, Isaac Amin…” Hearing his own name Isaac feels the terror hardened inside him over so many months spill through his body like molten rock. He sits still on his mattress, the
requiem of keys and locks drowning him. The men carrying the stretcher say, “Get up, both of you! Your names have been called.” Ramin opens his eyes then shuts them again, until a guard comes, grabs Isaac by his shirt collar and the boy by his ear, and drags the two into the hallway, where other prisoners are also gathered, among them the pianist.

The men are brought one flight down, into a fluorescent-lit room with chipping walls and blackened linoleum floors, a rusted metal sink, a snaking hose, a black bucket, and reddish-brown stains everywhere. It is cold here, and damp, with an unfamiliar smell, of slaughterhouses and bathrooms and ammonia. Isaac looks at Vartan, who stands stone faced, wringing his hands. Noticing Isaac he bites his lips and shakes his head. Ramin grabs Isaac's arm. “It will be all right, Amin-agha,” he says. “It will be all right. You'll see…And if not, then surely we'll meet on the other side. Who knows? Since we're innocent, maybe we are martyrs, after all.” He smiles, his nervous eyes scanning the room. “Seventy-two virgins may be waiting for each of us…”

The men are separated into two groups. At the end of the tally, Issac finds himself on one side of the room with two older fellows whose names he did not catch; Ramin and Vartan face him on the other side with the rest of the men, most of them in their twenties and thirties. The grouping is reminiscent of other selections he has read about, where the able-bodied were kept for labor and the old were parceled to the gas chambers.

The other group is escorted out. Isaac stands with the two men, suppressing a powerful urge to vomit. One of his companions, a tall emaciated man of about sixty with thick glasses,
paces the room; the other, a balding man who blinks two or three times per second, mumbles something to himself. The door opens and a guard walks in. “Follow me,” he says.

They walk out of the room and out of the building through a back exit. Isaac feels a gush of icy wind on his face as soon as they step into the courtyard, and he trembles, an involuntary tremor that takes hold of his entire body. Their footsteps are heavy and loud in the blue-white light of the moon, and as they walk he hears the emaciated man repeating, “
Allah-o-Akbar
,
Allah-o-Akbar
.” They walk for what seems to him a very long time. They make lefts and rights, deep inside the prison's belly. When they pass a group of men whom he recognizes as the young men collected earlier, he tries to find Ramin and Vartan, but cannot. “Isaac!” Vartan whispers. Isaac turns around but the guard presses a rifle into his lower back. They continue walking until they reach another building. The guard opens the gate and they are led inside, each man shoved into a separate cell. “You've been assigned to solitary,” he says.

Isaac's room is a square large enough to hold a mattress and a sink. As he is thrown inside it he crouches on the floor, trying to stop the tremor running through his wracked body. He knows he was spared this evening.

Lying still on his mattress, he hears a commotion in the courtyard. Then they begin, one after the other, the bullets flying in the air, men shrieking, men pleading, bodies thumping to the ground. Then nothing.

He thinks of Ramin, his death separated from his mother's by no more than a day, and of Vartan, his final audience a firing squad.

F
ive couplets, at the minimum, but no more than twelve usually. The first couplet establishes a rhyme followed by a refrain, a scheme repeated by the second line of each succeeding couplet. Each couplet should stand on its own, but must also be part of the whole. At the end, the poet often invokes himself.”

Shirin reads this definition of the ghazal, an ancient poetic form mastered by Hāfez, whose poems her father often recited after dinner, while shaving, or on long drives, when he would break the silence with a verse. Sometimes her mother would join him, turning the poem into a duet.

She skims the pages of her father's old textbook and reads the examples but doesn't understand them. Once after her father had explained a poem to her, something about how time and beauty are both unfaithful, she had asked him, “So what happens at the end, Baba?” and he had said, “There is no end, Shirin-jan. That's the first thing you should learn
about ghazals. There is no resolution. Imagine the speaker simply throwing his hands in the air.”

Maybe in life, as in a ghazal, there is no resolution. She finds relief in this idea of throwing her arms in the air. Maybe there are no solutions, nothing to be done. She abandons her father's book, along with her own homework, and gets into bed, under the blankets. That it's the middle of the afternoon makes little difference. If there is no real beginning, and no real end, what does time really mean?

The sound of the doorbell snaps her out of her nap. Who could it be? Another unannounced house search? A messenger reporting her father's execution? She gets out of bed and walks to her bedroom door, but doesn't dare to step beyond.

“What a nice surprise,” she hears her mother saying. “You're sure you won't come in for tea, Farideh-khanoum? All right, come, Leila-jan. Shirin is doing her homework upstairs.”

She walks down and greets Leila. “Is everything all right?” she says once they are alone.

“No,” Leila whispers. “My father has been yelling at me and my mother all afternoon. He says some files have been missing from the basement since my birthday.”

Shirin tries to speak, but her throat is so dry that her voice won't come. “What files?” she finally mumbles.

“I'm not sure. He said they are files of people who need to be investigated. I told you, didn't I, that my father works with the Revolutionary Guards?”

It occurs to Shirin that the missing file about Uncle
Javad makes her an obvious suspect. Why had she not thought of it before? Isn't it a matter of time before someone digs up the four files in the garden? “Does he know which ones are missing?”

“I don't know. What difference does it make?”

“No difference. I was just asking.” Sweat breaks out along her hairline.

“And you know what else?” Leila says. “After he yelled and screamed I saw him drinking from one of those whiskey bottles we found in the basement. And he is always saying how alcohol is forbidden.”

“What is he going to do about the files?”

“He wants my mother to find out who took them. We are supposed to interrogate all the girls who were at my party. He says if we don't, he'll do it himself. But he thinks it may be Elaheh.”

“Elaheh?”

“Yes. My father doesn't like her father. Baba thinks he should have been the one to get the position that Elaheh's father got as head of the prison. Apparently the two of them got into a big fight over it. Now he thinks Elaheh's father is trying to make him look bad.”

“Yes, Elaheh,” Shirin says. “Makes sense.”

“This is terrible,” Leila says. “How am I supposed to interrogate everyone? I'll have no friends left.” She sits on the bottom stair, buries her head in her lap. “I never had a birthday party before,” she says, looking up again. “I was so excited to have one this year. And all the girls actually came. I couldn't believe it. I guess they didn't come for me.
They came because they know who my father is.” She starts walking up the stairs.

“Of course they came for you,” Shirin says, consoling her friend but thinking only of herself, and of the trouble she is in.

Leila stops in the middle of the stairs. “You know, before the revolution, my father worked in a morgue. He once told me how he washed the dead people and wrapped them in clean white shrouds before delivering them to their families. He said he got a lot of mangled bodies from prisons, and this really bothered him. Back then, people made fun of him because of his job. Even I was teased at school because of it. Now that he is with the Guards, people respect him. ‘I went from being at the bottom of the garbage chute to being at the top,' he says. ‘Finally
I
decide who goes down.'”

The image of bodies being thrown down a garbage chute terrifies Shirin. “He really says this?”

“Yes, but please don't repeat it to anyone. I wasn't supposed to talk about it. I just can't believe he is going to ruin everything for me. How am I supposed to interrogate the girls?”

Shirin wonders if she'll be the first one to be questioned. Feeling dizzy, she holds on to the banister.

“At least I don't have to interrogate you,” Leila says. “My parents think that with your father already in jail, you wouldn't do something like that. Besides, you're so sickly and frail…. My mother also thinks it's Elaheh. ‘There is something about that girl I don't like,' she was telling my father. Which is strange, because I'm almost sure she let her win the musical chairs.”

“What if Elaheh denies she took them?”

“Of course she'll deny it. Everyone will deny it. I'm supposed to watch for people's reactions. My father showed me a few tricks.”

“Like what?”

“For example, if someone can't maintain eye contact with you while you're talking—that's a sign that they may be lying. Or if they wring their hands, or tap their feet…”

Shirin makes mental notes.
Maintain eye contact. Do not wring hands, or tap feet…

“I never asked you this,” Leila says. “Do you know why your father is in prison?”

“No.”

“He didn't work for Savak, did he?”

“What is Savak?”

“It was the shah's secret police. My father talks about it all the time. He says they killed and tortured thousands of people.”

“No, not my father.”

“But how can you be sure? These guys didn't even tell their own families what they did. That's why it was called a
secret
police. You know, Shirin, I'm starting to realize something: people always say one thing and do another. Take my father. He says alcohol is forbidden, but he drinks. Or my mother, she says she doesn't like Elaheh but she lets her win…”

And me, Shirin thinks. I say I didn't take the files, but I did.

 

T
HAT NIGHT SHE
lies in bed and thinks of her father. If people find out about the files, her father will no doubt be killed. Her mother, too, may be accused and sent to prison.

How could she have believed she would get away with this? She looks at the full moon, bright and low in the sky. She wonders if her father sees it too, from his cell's window.

I am foolish, she thinks. I am nine years old. Do I deserve to reach ten? I have one friend, but as of today I am more afraid of her than of anyone else. All my good friends have gone. I have not seen my brother in two years and I am starting to forget his face. My father, too, is becoming faceless.

She covers herself up to the chin with her blanket, but the chill running through her body doesn't let go.