The Septembers of Shiraz (21 page)

R
eclining against the wall and hugging one knee, the boyish man sits on the floor and sips his tea, closing his eyes every now and then, as though he were just succumbing to a narcotic. His partner, a balding man about a decade his senior, sits next to him with a stiff back and nervous eyes.

“So you say you have no passports?” the older one says.

“Our passports were confiscated when the Revolutionary Guards searched the house,” Isaac says. “But our daughter's passport still exists, and I can make a family passport out of that.”

“Good! That will speed things up. Use bleach to erase the names and dates.” Sipping his tea he says, “We've taken many people across the border,
sarkar
. But you will need God as your partner throughout this adventure.”

Isaac enjoys not being called “Brother.” Hearing the word
sarkar
—a friendly way to refer to someone as “boss,”
pleases him. “Yes, I've called on God many times already this past year,” he replies. “I hope he'll continue to answer.”

The young man places his tea on the carpet and extends his bent leg. “Well, bring God along if he makes you feel better,” he says as he smiles, “though of course he'll have to pay a fare like everyone else. But more importantly, remember this: You'll need to wear warm clothes, in many layers, because the mountains are freezing at night. You'll need to be well-rested, because we have a long way to go, and we can't have people slowing down or falling asleep on us. Stopping on the way is not an option. Besides, it will be dark, and if you don't keep up with the group you'll get lost. And you'll need cash in case we get caught. The border police on both sides are vigilant but easily bought. Of course, there are no guarantees. Some of them are more zealous than greedy.”

Isaac looks at Farnaz, sitting on the floor and pulling an undone thread from the lining of her navy uniform. In the furtive atmosphere of the smugglers' apartment, where the curtains are closed and tapestry-covered pillows line the walls, she has let her scarf slip down to her neck, maybe in anticipation of freedom. “How often do you get caught, Mansoor-agha?” she says.

“Not often. Twice in the past two years. The first time it was with one of the shah's generals, the second time with a family of eight. The family was let go, with some cash of course, but with the general it got ugly. When they found out who he was, they shot him on the spot.”

“And you?”

“Us? We pay a fine and they let us go. If we happen to
be transporting some valuable goods, we give them a whiff of that also. We're repeat business for them, so they look the other way. It's the passengers they're after. But don't worry, Amin-khanoum,” he says, reaching for the samovar and replenishing his tea. “Like I said, it's not often.” He pulls out a cigarette from his shirt pocket, then removes the whole pack and throws it in Isaac's direction. “Help yourselves. It clears the head. There are matches on the table next to you.” He reclines again, cigarette in mouth. “So let me explain the route again. You will arrange a ride from Tehran to Tabriz, where you'll have lunch. Make it a hearty lunch because you'll need your energy. In the afternoon our people will meet you at a designated place and you'll ride with them to a village near the border. We'll pick you up from there and the rest, well, the rest is a surprise.”

“A surprise? I've had enough of those this year, Mansoor-agha,” Isaac says. “What do you mean by ‘surprise'?”

“I'd rather not get into details now,
sarkar
. Suppose you get arrested again between now and when we leave. I cannot have you revealing any details. All you need to know beyond what we've told you is that the road is fairly safe, and most people make it. As you know, your sister and her husband got through just fine.”

“
Fairly
safe?”

“You may be used to things being precise, Amin-agha. In your business you measure stones by carats and look at them under magnifiers. Our business is the opposite. Everything is approximate. Nothing can be predicted. There are so many factors: the weather, the people patrolling the border on any
given night, encounters with snakes and foxes, the Turkish police on the other side—I could go on and on…”

Settling back into his old life is no longer possible, but forging ahead requires courage Isaac is not sure he has. And what about his wife and daughter? Should a man deliver his family to the mountains like that? “And the fee?” he asks.

“Thirty-five thousand dollars per person for the two of you, forty thousand if you want better accommodations, which means that we would take care of you personally all the way. For the little girl the fee would be forty-five thousand, if you want us to guarantee that should something happen to both of you we would arrange for her to join relatives somewhere.”

“Her brother is in New York.”

“Then that's where we would send her. You'll have to give us his telephone number beforehand.”

The thought of his daughter, orphaned and dependent on two smugglers somewhere in Turkey, makes his heart lurch with fear. Farnaz flashes him the same terrified look she had when the guard had held the sword to her throat and she couldn't find the birth certificate.

“How do we know you'll really send her to her brother?” she says. “What prevents you, two men with admittedly questionable ethics, from trafficking her?”

“Nothing would prevent us,” the young one says, exhaling his cigarette smoke in the stuffy room. “Just as nothing would prevent us from taking off with your money and leaving you stranded. In these matters you have to follow your heart. If you feel you can trust us, then you should do it. If you don't, then of course, you shouldn't.”

“The chances of something happening to both of you are very slim,” the older smuggler says. “I wouldn't worry too much about it.”

“Very well, we'll think about it and get back to you,” Isaac says. “And should we decide to go ahead, when would the trip take place?”

“September,” the young one says. “In the summertime traffic is high because of the warmer weather. But the chances of getting caught are higher as well. In September the traffic is lighter but the weather is still tolerable.” Then, looking down at Isaac's shoes he says, “Besides, you need to let those feet of yours heal. You can barely put your weight on them. I know what they do to people's feet in prison, Amin-agha. There are no secrets here. But we can't have someone in your condition on this trip. Make sure you take care of yourself by then.”

Isaac looks down at his shoes, overstretched to accommodate his swollen feet. Was it not enough that his wife had been pestering him to see a doctor, frightening him with the grisly consequences of neglected wounds? That his humiliation should be visible to the world makes him want to go home, lie in his bed, and cover his body with a blanket—out of sight. “All right, Mansoor-agha,” he says. “We'll be in touch.”

“Yes,
sarkar
. Think about it, but don't think too much. If you think too much you'll end up doing nothing.”

 

O
UTSIDE HE REACHES
for Farnaz's hand and they walk together in silence. They pass by a one-legged man in a wheelchair, who reminds Isaac of Mehdi. On the windowsills of the neighboring homes are oval trays of grass, announcing the arrival of
Nowruz
, the Persian New Year.

“Look, it's the New Year already,” Farnaz says. “People are growing their grass. And we forgot to grow ours.”

“It's not too late. If we get the seeds today we'll still have it in time. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” she says. “I'd like it very much. We should celebrate it here one last time.”

So she wishes to go ahead with the trip. She has insinuated it without coming out and saying as much. He does not press her further; he too believes that they should go.

“And the mirror,” he says, “we'll put it in the middle of the table this time, not at the edge!”

“No, not the edge.” She laughs.

He had been the one who had placed the mirror on the ceremonial table that previous year, along with the rest of the ritual items—the goldfish, the painted eggs, the grass. They had just arrived at their beach house, where they liked to spend the holidays, and he remembers the scent of humid cedar rising from the wooden beams of the ceiling and fusing with the smell of cooking—which would begin as a single note of caramelizing onions and would expand as the hours progressed, becoming an orchestra of scents—of meats, spices, and herbs. He recalls too the curtains moving with the breeze, the distant breath of the waves, and the open windows forming an invisible artery through the
neighborhood, the sounds of clinking dishes and laughter traveling from one house to the next. But when the lights went out—another blackout, so frequent in the early days of the war—he hurried in the dark to the dining room console for a candle, knocking against the mirror along the way. For an instant, he stood completely still, knowing that one black, silent second separated him from that devastating sound of shattering glass. The sound brought with it his fretful wife, who knelt to the floor in her white dress and picked up the broken pieces, mumbling, “Oh, but it's bad luck! A broken mirror on the New Year is such bad luck!” He had knelt beside her, telling her that it's just glass, nothing more, that it's all just a silly superstition, but she shook her head, saying it's not a superstition, it's a fact. Her doggedness irritated him, but not because he found her conviction ridiculous. On the contrary, he, too, believed in the silly superstition, and wished that someone could convince him otherwise.

 

T
HE WARMTH OF
her hand comforts him now, and he tells himself that maybe things will turn out all right: they will leave the country and start over in a new place, together with the children, in a matchbox apartment in a Manhattan high-rise or in an anonymous clapboard house in an American suburb, where people will mispronounce their names and where they will eventually stop correcting them, laughing instead at the botched words.

At night he lays out his tools on the dining room table:
bleach, cotton balls, toothpicks, a fountain pen, paper, and the passport. He places some cotton on a toothpick, dips it in bleach, and erases his daughter's name, letter by letter, then her birth date—the day, the month, the year. The ink dissolves, as though the birth had never occurred. He practices the handwriting of the official who issued the passport, the curl of his As, the length of his Ms, then writes his own name, his wife's, and his daughter's. Tomorrow they will have a family picture taken, to replace his daughter's photograph, taken a few years earlier, when her front baby tooth had just fallen out. He remembers that tooth and imagines how she must have placed it under her pillow, anticipating the tooth fairy. But the fall of the tooth having coincided with the fall of the shah, he and Farnaz had forgotten all about it. He sees her now, lifting the pillow the following morning and finding the tooth still wrapped in its tissue, where she left it.

Later, in bed, he asks Farnaz if she had, by any chance, left a present under Shirin's pillow when her front tooth had fallen.

“What tooth?” Farnaz says in her sleep.

“Her front tooth, the first one that fell.”

“I don't remember,” she mumbles. Then turning to him, she says. “No. I'm sure I didn't.”

He lies awake, sorry that for his daughter—as it had been for him when he was a boy—a fallen tooth was just a fallen tooth; there were no fairies.

I
n the car, on the way to the Caspian, where they will spend the week-long spring vacation, her parents tell her of their planned departure. It has all been arranged with smugglers, the same ones that Shahla and Keyvan used. They will leave in September via the border of Turkey. But you can't tell anyone, her father says, not even your friends.

There are no friends left, Baba, so no need to worry
.

Sitting in the back, groggy still at this early morning hour, Shirin watches the road shift color from gray to yellow, becoming a pale gold as the morning hours pass. Her mother peels fruit, the red gingham kitchen towel on her lap, infusing the car with the smell of citrus. Music plays on the tape player, a pop song whose singer has long fled.

“I still don't think this trip is such a good idea, Isaac,” her mother says, handing him an orange slice. “We should keep a low profile.”

“We
are
keeping a low profile,” he says. “We're going
about our lives as if everything were normal. Shirin is on vacation, and we're going to our beach house as we always do. Besides, is it written on our foreheads that we are planning an escape?”

Planning an escape
. What kind of escape, Shirin wonders—like Papillon, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or something more leisurely and altogether bucolic, like the Trapp family? And what if Leila's father finds out about the files between now and September? Will all three of them get arrested this time and get sent to prison? Do children go to prison? If they go to war, why not prison?

Looking out the window, she realizes that they will never travel on this road again. Miles of asphalt disappear under their wheels, bringing them closer to the sea and to the end of their lives here. Yet it is not sadness she feels, but an emptiness, a certain guilt even, for not feeling sad enough. A departure like this, so definite, should devastate her. But it doesn't. She tries to memorize her surroundings—the ridges on the rocks, the color of the sun as it illuminates the road, the stretches of sea coming in and out of view according to the curves of the road—knowing that someday she will miss them. But there are too many details to remember, too much to record in a single viewing, and she wishes now that she had paid more attention back when she believed that, like the mountain, and the sun, and the sea, she would always be there.

Sheets hang on washlines in the garden of their beach house. A black Jeep is parked outside. “What's this?” her father says as he gets out of the car. He walks to the door
and tries to open it, but his key won't work. A bearded man opens the door.

“Good afternoon, Brother.” She hears her father through the open windows of the car. “This is my house. May I ask what you are doing in it?”

The man shrugs. “It's now my house.”

“
Your
house? Who gave it to you? I didn't sell it, and I certainly didn't donate it.”

“The government gave it to me. You already have a house. Why do you need another one?”

“Brother, what kind of a question is that?”

“A serious one. I serve the revolution, and I didn't have a decent house. You serve only yourself, and you have two houses. It makes perfect sense that, like you, I should have a comfortable house. You understand?” He looks over at the car, squinting his eyes to better see Shirin and her mother. “Now if you are not happy, all of us, your wife and daughter included, can hop in my Jeep and pay a visit to the Revolutionary Guards.”

Her father walks back to the car, shaking his head and mumbling something. “Well!” he says, slamming the door and turning on the engine. “Looks like we'll be renting this year!” He laughs bitterly as he puts the car in reverse and pulls out of the driveway. “You have two houses so I took one!” he says. “Ha-ha! Just like that! Can you believe it?” He presses on the gas, making the wheels screech forward, not once looking back at his confiscated property. “We will find ourselves a cottage on the beach, and no one will prevent us from enjoying our holiday. After all, they can't confiscate the
sea, can they?” He laughs again, a violent laughter, making him pull to the side of the road to let it pass. When he calms down he wipes his tears and drives on, slowly now, craning his neck to the right and left as he looks for a “To Rent” sign. And there, at the edge of the sea, he finds it, a white house with blue shutters and muslin curtains that sway in the wind, a hammock swinging between two trees in the garden, and a terrace looking out on the water. “Ladies,” he says. “I'm going to call this house's owner and settle the rent. And then I'm going to take a long, uninterrupted nap in that hammock. Don't wake me,” he sighs, “unless it's to feed me.” He gets out of the car and breathes the salty air. “Isaac!” he says as he slams the door and bangs his fist against the car's roof. “Live long enough and you will witness it all!”

Here is her father, Shirin thinks, the narrator of his own ghazal, invoking himself at the end, his hands in the air.