The Septembers of Shiraz (20 page)

“Yes, well…” The line breaks off, letting through fragments of words drowned in static. “…I am back…but you know…”

“Good. That's great.”

“And you? Are you well?”

“Yes, Baba-jan, yes.”

“I woke you up, no?”

“No, it's all right! I was up.”

“Go, go back to sleep. I just…Be well, my Parviz.”

“You, too, Baba.”

He holds on to the receiver, the dead tone soon followed by a repetitive beep and a mechanical voice urging him to hang up. “Good, that's great,” was all Parviz had managed
to say. He sits in the dark, the phone on his lap. His father sounded old, and depleted, as though the very act of speaking had diminished him. He is becoming an old man, Parviz thinks, and I remain a boy. Who will care for whom, then?

He lies awake, stares at the red lava lamp on the table next to him, the crescents—anemic blood cells—swimming inside it. “My father is alive,” he repeats in the dark, disbelieving.

He wishes he could share the news with someone, but aside from Zalman and Rachel, both at the hospital, he doesn't know anyone who would care enough about him to appreciate being woken up at two in the morning. He considers calling Mr. Broukhim, but reminds himself that with all the wine and hashish, Mr. Broukhim no doubt has a throbbing headache.

H
is desk is the only object in the office left untouched.

His files are scattered everywhere, the calendar still open to the date of his arrest, the scribbled appointments now infused with the knowledge that they would never be met. Even the glass of tea is where he left it, filled now with greenish layers of fungus. Everything else, including the furniture, the stonecutting equipment, and the jewels, is gone.

But he is not finished. He thanks God now for the banks dotting the Rhône in Geneva, where he had had the wisdom to wire money over the years, knowing, as many before him had known, that a Jew should not leave all his eggs in one basket, even if that basket happens to be his own beloved country. He also has several stones stashed in the bank's vault; luckily his banker had been clever enough not to mention these to the Revolutionary Guards when they seized Isaac's savings. He makes an inventory of the stones in his head: two emeralds from Colombia, dozens of rubies
from India, five sapphires from Burma, and five diamonds from South Africa, one of which—a pure, perfect, stone—he had hoped to transform into his career's masterwork.

He sits on an empty box behind his desk, his pants cinched with a belt, the extra fabric strangled in pleats. Of his sixteen employees, only Farhad, his best stonecutter, had taken his call and offered to come in. He wonders why he even bothered to ask the man to come; there is nothing to cut here. He picks up the receiver—the telephone on his desk is the only one they spared—but doesn't know whom else to call. He hangs up. Above him the ceiling creaks. He dismisses the sound as an illusion, an echo of Mohsen's little boy running above his cell. But the steps continue, interspersed with the squeak of the closet door he had intended to oil for sometime. He walks through the empty corridors and goes upstairs, where he finds Morteza sitting on the floor, a heap of papers in front of him.

“I see you haven't missed a day of work, Morteza.”

“Amin-agha! You're free!”

“Yes. Apparently not many around here thought it possible. I'm surprised your mother didn't tell you.”

“I haven't talked to my mother for some time.” Morteza scans the empty room with his bearded, narrow face. “I, for one, was sure you would be released. That's what I kept telling the others, but you know how it is.”

“Yes. And what might you be doing here now?”

“Now? I was trying to figure out what was taken from you Amin-agha. I wanted to keep a record for you.”

“I am not an imbecile, Morteza. I know what took place here. My wife told me everything. You are a thief.”

“Me, a thief? How can you say that, Amin-agha?”

“Then show me this so-called record that you are keeping for me.”

“Well, I just got started,” Morteza mumbles.

“Look, I am tired. I have no strength left for such games. Whatever you stole is now yours. We both know that. There are no courts for me turn to. At least have the decency to look me in the face and admit that you are a crook.”

“I would not talk this way if I were you, Amin-agha” Morteza says. He gets off the floor, pulls out a cigarette from his pocket, and lights it with deliberate indolence. “You see,” he says, exhaling and approaching Isaac. “I have a document in my pocket that could make a lot of trouble for you.”

“What document?”

“The past has a way of coming back to haunt us, doesn't it, Amin-agha?”

“What document?” Isaac demands. He feels dizzy as he watches Morteza prance in front of him. Is it possible that this third-rate impostor will have him sent back to prison?

Morteza pulls out a faded, crinkled paper from his pocket and unfolds it. He reads, “Sale of one ruby and diamond pendant to the empress and…” He looks up, speaking now with an affected accent: “Shall I read the attached note from her majesty? Here it is: ‘Thank you, Mr. Amin, for your impeccable workmanship. Iran is proud to have an artisan such as yourself. You have a light hand, which I am sure will make countless women feel like empresses in their own right.'”

One of the first pieces Issac ever designed was this pen
dant for the empress. He was cocky then, and young. Having served two years in Paris as an apprentice to a jeweler, he had returned to Tehran, locked himself in his dark studio for five months, cutting and polishing stones, combining them to form a pendant inspired by a Chinese temple. Stunned by his own creation, he had delivered the necklace to the shah's palace personally, with a note, “For Her Majesty's Consideration,” and she had actually replied, the very next day, through a small, severe man in a black suit and dark sunglasses, who showed up at his apartment and handed him an envelope filled with dollars, along with the handwritten note. How distant it all seems to him now. That period of his life, which he spent in his Tehran studio, discovering the brilliance of stones, now sparkles in his mind like the red, radiant ruby he had offered the empress. “That was so long ago!” he says. “It means nothing now.”

“But that's what made your reputation, was it not? Didn't all the women with cash in their pockets flock to you after that, thinking if he is good enough for the queen, he must be good enough for me? This paper establishes your link with the shah. And you know what that means.”

“Give me that letter.”

Morteza folds the letter and puts it back in his pocket. “This piece of paper, my dear Amin-agha, is your death certificate. Why should I give it up so easily? You're lucky I didn't find it sooner.”

“You've already stolen all my jewels, Morteza. They are worth millions. You know that. What else could you possibly want?”

Morteza bites his lower lip—just like his mother, Isaac thinks—and plays with the tip of the letter protruding from his pocket. “I want the diamond,” he says finally. “The one you brought back from Antwerp. Where is it? I looked everywhere.”

“No, Morteza,” Isaac says, his steady voice belying his fear. “I'll give you any other stone, except that.” An image of Ramin holding a cockroach in his fist sends a sudden shiver through his body. “What has gotten into you?” he continues. “We are friends, after all. Your mother has lived with us for twenty years. You are like my own son—”

“No. Not
lived
with you. She has slaved for you. And I am not like your own son. You never treated me like your precious Parviz.”

“Such nonsense!” He walks to the window, opens it to let in the clean light. He does not want to give up that diamond, not simply because of its value, which is not negligible, but also because all his adult life he had searched for a flawless stone, one that could assure him of the possibility of perfection. Precious stones were accidental secretions of the earth—of volcanic eruptions and sedimentation—yet nearly all of them possessed a perfect internal order, called crystalline state—manifested by a regular arrangement of atoms repeated one hundred million times per centimeter. But even in this perfect world of gemstones other hierarchies existed—classifications according to hardness, cleavage, color, luster. Thus a diamond, the hardest stone, could also have “bad cleavage,” meaning that it would break easily, or could contain fractures, which would interrupt the paths of light
rays and reduce its luster. The diamond he had found was a pure, colorless, eight-carat stone, classified as exceptional white.

He remembers meeting his broker, Yacov Yankevich, a Hassidic Jew, in a dim house in Antwerp, on a clear day, not unlike this one, the wooden shutters wide open, the flawless diamond placed on a blue velvet cloth before him. “It's a rare one,” Yankevich said. “You won't be sorry.” Walking back to the main square, the stone in his briefcase, he thought about creating another pendant for the empress, or for the shah's sister—a woman with considerable influence on her brother—or perhaps even for a foreign dignitary. But as he reached the café where Farnaz sat with her espresso, waiting for him in her sundress, her shoulders rubbed that morning with sunscreen lotion, smelling of the ocean and the many summers they would yet spend together, he wondered if this diamond should be for her. Many summers later, when he still had not morphed the stone, it occurred to him that perhaps he did not deem anyone worthy of its perfection.

“I'll give you another diamond, also of very high quality,” he says. “And a sapphire.”

“Stubborn Jew! Bargaining all the way to your grave! I want the diamond, or this little piece of paper will be sent to the office of Imam Khomeini.”

Isaac looks at Morteza's tall, fidgety body. He is just a boy, really. Just a few months ago he was fetching tea, filing papers, typing letters. “Listen to me, you little snitch,” Isaac says. “I am on better terms with the office of Imam Khomeini than you may imagine. After all, I've just become one
of their biggest contributors. All it would take to get
you
in trouble would be a phone call from me, informing them of all the additional items that I would have liked to donate to the cause of the revolution had they not been stolen by a small-time thief called Morteza. Do you understand me? So hand me that piece of paper and get out of here!”

Morteza shifts his weight from one leg to the other, as though considering the gravity of the threat. He crosses his arms, bites his lower lip, looking down, at the heap of papers on the floor. He runs out, finally, the letter in his pocket.

Isaac considers running after him, but he can hardly walk, let alone run. He stands by the window, waits for Morteza's stomping steps to die down. He watches him as he makes his way down the quiet street—one more person exiting his life. He thinks of the first day he had brought Morteza to the office, remembers the eagerness with which the boy took notes and answered the phone, and the satisfaction he himself had felt at taking in a boy with small prospects but ambitious goals, the kind of boy who made no secret of his appreciation, thanking him for the smallest charity—a free meal, a ticket to the movies—gratitude he knew he would never receive from his own children. How does such affection turn into such hatred? Do people cease loving someone when their perception of themselves changes? Did Morteza once care for me, he wonders, because he needed me? And now that he no longer needs me, is he really willing to have me killed with that letter? But I am the same man. I am still Isaac Amin. I have not changed.

He feels a heavy pain in his heart and does not know
what to do with it. The last time he had felt a pain like this, on the day he learned of Kourosh's execution, he had released it in the grinding sound of the stonecutting machines and the buzzing activity around him. But today, in the bareness of his office, the pain lies heavy in his chest, becoming a burning, unfamiliar mass. He walks into the sleepy afternoon. His street has thinned out, the neighboring businesses closed or barely functioning. Like his livelihood, his city has been liquidated, and he knows now that he must leave it at once.

I
saac brings the scissors to his chin and clips off his beard, the white, coarse hairs falling into the sink. He glides the razor along his jaw, working his way around the cigarette blisters—two pink, wrinkled circles on his right cheek. Let the world see them, he thinks, these unsightly reminders of pain. As the last patch of hair disappears, his bony, naked reflection stares back at him from the foggy bathroom mirror. He recoils at the transformation of a once handsome man: two craters have formed on each side of his face where his chin and jaw intersect, and his brown eyes seem lost inside deep, gray sockets. His head—his entire body, in fact—has shrunk, suggesting the skeletal frame under his ashy skin.

He stands for some time in front of his closet, his clothes—costumes of his previous life—now foreign to him. Despite the rising spring temperatures he chooses a heavy sweater to add mass to his diminished torso. He forces his feet into his shoes; the foot lashings, he decides, are not to
become public knowledge. Thinking back on that episode, of himself lying facedown on a plank of wood and getting beaten, he does not remember the pain—only the shame.

Sitting on her side of the bed, Farnaz is slipping her legs into dark stockings, lifting each leg in the air with pointed toes like a dancer. She is wearing nothing but a brassiere and underwear, her back still guitar-shaped, her spine like well-adjusted strings, asking to be caressed. He leans across the bed, managing no more than a kiss on her shoulder, which she acknowledges by placing her hand where his lips had been.

They say little on the way to his parents' house. The smell of jasmine seeps into the car through the lowered windows.

“I've been meaning to tell you something,” Isaac says. “I saw Vartan Sofoyan in prison.”

“Really? I saw him…” she says, then pauses in mid-sentence. “When I went to look for you. Did you talk to him?”

“Yes, we ended up in the same block.” He considers telling her about his death, but decides not to. “I got to know him,” he says instead. “I found him to be a gentle soul.”

“Yes,” she smiles. “He is, I think.”

The other thing he has not told her about is Morteza's threat. He knows that if the Revolutionary Guards come back for him because of that letter from the empress, he won't be spared. What would be the point in telling her?

“I'm going to call Keyvan's men today,” he says. “We need to start arranging everything.”

Farnaz looks out the window, nodding. “I hid their number in a book. I'll look for it when we get home.”

“When did you say Habibeh is going to see her mother?”

“In August. For two weeks.”

“We need to sell the house and close the deal while she's away. Any price we can get. We should also try to sell small items, like antiques, maybe even jewelry. Things that she won't notice.”

She nods again, her eyes invisible under her sunglasses. He thinks she may be crying, but prefers not to know for sure. Knowing would require that he console her—something he is no longer capable of.

 

“I
SAAC?” HIS FATHER
says from his bed, lifting his head for an instant before letting it fall back down on his pillow. “Is that really you?”

“Yes, Baba-jan, it's me.” He watches his father's body, shriveled in places and swollen in others, looks for his hand under the blanket and holds it, feeling with his fingers the cool, wrinkled skin. The smell of urine permeates the air.

“Let me look at you,” his father says, coughing. “What did they do to you, son? I didn't think I would see you again. And this would be a bad thing. To lose all my children without saying good-bye. You know, your brother and sister both left without a word. From Javad I expected no more. But Shahla, too?”

“I'm sure it wasn't intentional Baba-Hakim,” Farnaz
says. “She was too ashamed to go out. She wouldn't even see the doctor.”

“Eh,” the old man says, dismissing the excuse with a sweep of the arm. “Too ashamed? Doesn't she know her parents will die here soon? And who doesn't have something to be ashamed of these days? Look at me! And Isaac! He doesn't look so good, either.”

Isaac wonders if shaving had been a good idea. Why did he decide to expose himself like this, especially in front of his father? “Where is mother?” he asks.

“I don't know. Probably cleaning. She disinfects all the rooms, day and night, rubbing all the furniture with alcohol.”

On the old man's night table, next to a small bottle of whiskey, is a framed photograph of Isaac as a boy of nine or ten, leaning against the palm tree in front of their home in Khorramshahr.

“Your mother found this recently while cleaning some closets and I asked her to put it here.” He smiles, toothless. “You may find the gesture overly sentimental. I suppose I'm getting sentimental in my old age.”

Seeing his own photograph by his father's bed unsettles him; throughout his childhood his father had not shown such interest in him. Why now, he wants to ask, now that everyone is preparing for a departure of one sort or another?

“You were a beautiful child,” Farnaz says.

“Yes, beautiful,” the old man says. “But moody. And reckless, too. One time he nearly set fire to the house…”

Not this story again, Isaac thinks. Of his entire child
hood this was the episode that his father seemed to remember best, the one that he recounted most often.

“He had built himself a little cabin outside the house with wooden logs,” his father goes on, as though he were telling the story for the first time. “And he did everything in that cabin: he slept there, he did his homework there, he even cooked there. Well, the cabin caught fire one day and the whole house was about to burn down. From that day on his mother forced him to live with the rest of us. Me? I didn't care one way or the other.”

He sees the house now, that two-room tenement at the end of an unpaved street, the wash hanging on lines, the teal-colored walls bubbled from humidity. For the first five years of his life he slept in one room and his parents in the other. As the family grew, their space did not expand; rather, he had to minimize himself to make room for newcomers, an obligation that turned his mother's syphilis and subsequent barrenness into a secret celebration. He recalls sleeping with Javad and Shahla in one bed, and the choreography needed to pass the night—the three of them simultaneously turning to the left or right like a troupe of showgirls. On summer nights, their bodies clammy from humidity, they would shrink themselves even more to avoid contact.

“Say a poem for me, Isaac,” the old man says.

“A poem? What poem?”

“I don't know. Any poem. In those days you knew hundreds of them by heart. How you used to get on my nerves with your poems! Now I have time for a verse or two while I wait for God to come and take me.”

“Be not too sure of your crown,” Isaac starts. “You who thought / That virtue was easy and recompense yours.”

His father shuts his eyes. He dozes off, his head falling to the side, his mouth a harmless organ with no teeth, hanging open.

Isaac continues reciting the poem though he knows his father is no longer listening. “From the monastery to the wine-tavern doors / The way is nought.” He stands over the bed and looks around the room, at his father's dentures sitting in a glass of water, the gums pink and lifelike; at the wallpaper with an iris motif, stained yellow and peeling; at the photograph of his father's mother as a young woman, before she had gone to a sanitarium in Switzerland; and at the wool house robe she had sent him from her retreat in the Alps, explaining through a brief handwritten note that all the male patients, the ones who were not entirely mad, owned a robe like this for their rest periods. From the day he received it, when Isaac was just six or seven, his father would put on the robe as soon as he would get home. He would wear it even in the summertime, when he would sit by an open window and fan himself with a magazine, beads of sweat bubbling on his forehead. Isaac found him stubborn then, and irrational—a child refusing to take off his carnival costume when the party is long over. Much of his interaction with his father was like this: an unspoken war, a mutual dislike, broken only occasionally, when his father would come home with a deflated ball he had found on the street, or an amputated doll—crippled presents but presents nonetheless, which made Isaac and the others run to him
and kiss his hand. But for every act of kindness came multiple punishments—being beaten with a belt for not returning the milk to the icebox, having to spend the night alone outside the house for having laughed too loudly. His rage without warning turned the children and their mother, like inhabitants of a fault line, into fidgety human beings.

He remembers how, for his twelfth birthday, his father had promised to take him to see a theater troupe from Tehran. He had come home late, as usual, reeking of arrack. By the time they arrived the doors had been shut, the audience inside erupting into cheers and applause. And the usher, a man his father had wronged one way or another—as he had most people who entered his life—refused to let them in. While his father cursed the man and yelled, Isaac receded into the cheers behind the closed door, the grand spectacle unfolding on the other side, away from him.

Looking now at his father, he sees not the despot he had known but an injured old man, softened by illness, still mourning the loss of his mother, who was taken from him when he was just a boy. He looks at the mother in the photograph: The stunning girl with the green eyes and black hair who went crazy. Of her middle and old age spent in Switzerland there are no photographs, and so no one knows how her face and body gave in to time. She had grown old in exile, anonymously, breathing in the cold, crisp air of the Alps, so unlike the hot, humid air of her Abadan.

Isaac thinks of his own imminent departure. He, too, will grow old in exile, breathing the unfamiliar, inhospitable air of another country. And of his final years perhaps nothing will
remain. Decades from now, when a descendant who does not yet exist will stumble upon a photograph of him, seated at a teahouse or walking along the Caspian, he will ask, “Who is this man?” And people will squint at the old photograph and say, “Oh, him? That's Isaac Amin, the man who polished his way out of misery but in the end lost it all.”