The Septembers of Shiraz (23 page)

I
saac sips his tea at the kitchen table. Sunrise is still hours away. This morning he washed and dressed as usual, leaving his pajamas on the bedpost, his towel on the rack behind the bathroom door, his razor on the sink. Farnaz insisted on making the bed. “Why bother with the bed?” he told her.

“I don't know,” she said, fluffing and tucking. “Habit.”

He reviews his checklist one more time: passport, cash, aspirin, bandage, rubbing alcohol, gauze, the pouch of stones, and the diamond. Farnaz would take care of the clothes: extra underwear, one pair of pants, and one sweater for each. Her jewelry, whatever they had not sold, she would wear under her clothes; Shirin would do the same.

Habibeh appears in the doorway, her eyes puffy and bloodshot. “Amin-agha?”

“Habibeh! You are supposed to be with your mother!” His heart races as he watches her approach him. Had she known about their escape all along? Is Morteza downstairs with Rev
olutionary Guards, waiting to take him back to prison? “We thought you left yesterday. What are you doing here?”

“I came back last night.”

“Last night? We didn't hear you. Why didn't you say anything? Habibeh, what is this? What are you—”

“Amin-agha” she says in a lowered voice. “Calm down. I came back because I had to take care of something.”

For the first time he sees in her face something menacing and ominous. Is it the gap between her yellowing teeth? The mole on her cheek? Will this woman bring him to his end?

“A few days ago Abbas was working in the garden,” Habibeh continues, “and he found some files buried there.”

He scans the kitchen counter and spots the meat knife—its straight, glimmering blade and curved tip. Would he be able to use it if he had to? He steps back slowly, to bring himself within reach of it. I am not going back to prison, he thinks.

“Amin-agha, are you listening to me?”

“Yes, yes. But I'm not sure I'm following.”

“I'm telling you that Abbas found some very strange files buried in the garden. In
your
garden.”

“What files? What are you talking about?”

“I'm not sure. They seem to be files of accused people, people that the government is looking for.” She pauses, then hands him a muddy piece of paper. “One of the files was for your brother. Look.”

He reads,
Javad Amin, 54. Charge: smuggling vodka into the country, an advocate of indecency.
Under it is a log of the
many attempts to arrest him. Isaac wonders if he should believe what he is reading. How difficult would it be, after all, for someone like Morteza to fabricate a piece of paper like this? “Did Morteza put you up to this?” he says.

“No agha, no! You have to believe me. My son and I are hardly speaking. For a while I admired him. I thought he understood more than I did. But in fact he knows nothing. I realized this after he turned in his own cousin to the revolutionaries, on account of her being a communist. Now the poor girl is in prison, no one knows where. This revolution is destroying families.” She wipes a few tears, then looks at him, defiant. “I swear on the prophet Ali that the files were there,” she continues. “Abbas and I didn't tell you or Farnaz-khanoum because we could see how crazed you were already. And since we didn't know what to do with them, we left them in the boiler room. It seemed to be the safest place, safer than the garden. But last night, Amin-agha, after I left and was already on the bus, I found myself breaking into a sweat, in a way that has never happened to me before. You see, I know you're not going on vacation to the Caspian today, as you said you were. I know you're leaving, for good.”

“Of course we're going on vacation! You're imagining things, Habibeh.”

She looks down, a quiver in her voice. “No, no. You don't have to pretend anymore. Not with me. I've known it for weeks now. And last night, on the bus, I got so scared. I thought, what if someone, maybe the new owner of this house, finds these files and alerts the authorities? All sorts of thoughts passed through my mind, Amin-agha! I thought
maybe they'd catch you on your trip. So I came back and I burned the files during the night in that abandoned alley near the baker. I kept your brother's file just so I could show you. But I'll destroy that one too. I promise.”

He feels dizzy as he looks down at the paper again. He does not know what to believe anymore. “Who would put something like that in our garden?” he mutters.

“Agha, I have no idea. And I have to tell you something else: Morteza wanted to send to the authorities some letter that the empress had written you. Do you know about this letter?”

“Yes.”

“We got into a big fight over it. Finally I stole it from his pocket when he was napping and tore it up.”

“Habibeh…thank you.”

“No, Amin-agha. You don't need to thank me. You don't know how hard it is for me to see you go.” She wipes her tears with her sleeve. “I said some nasty things to khanoum some time ago. But you were my family—you, Farnaz-khanoum, and the children.” She looks out the window, then at the clock on the wall, about to strike five. “All right. I'll go see if khanoum needs any help.”

The news about the files and the letter unsettles him. How many people were plotting against him, Isaac wonders, and how many were helping him—all without his knowledge? He finishes his tea, leaving the empty glass in the sink as usual, and as he is about to walk away he glances at it, at this hourglass-shaped
kamar barik
that he bought with Farnaz soon after their marriage. He realizes that he just drank
from it for the last time.

Downstairs he starts the car to warm it for Farnaz and Shirin. Last night the temperature dropped considerably and the sky clouded, without bringing any rain. They opened the windows and welcomed the cool air as they sewed cash into the lining of their travel bags, slid bank notes into the belly of a transistor radio, and stitched the diamond, wrapped in fabric, to Shirin's underwear. But the cooler air has now turned into an inhospitable chill, and as Isaac looks out at the mountain, slowly revealing itself in the morning's first light, he tries not to think of the wintry draft moving through its folds and tunnels. At the northwest tip of the country, from which they are to exit—along the border of Turkey and not far from that of Armenia—the terrain, Isaac knows, is harsh, more erratic than the landscape visible through his window, the Ararat mountains falling into plains and becoming mountains again, the cold rising insidiously with the altitude, bringing with it dry, rugged winds that pierce the bones even through layers of wool.

Habibeh holds up a Koran and makes them pass under it for good luck. “You are doing the right thing,” she says, “to leave this country. No one has ever seen the eye of an ant, the feet of a snake, or the charity of a mullah!” The dog barks as they get in the car, protesting their departure. Isaac hugs her one last time, memorizing her musky scent. As they drive away Habibeh splashes a bucket of water on the back of the car—also for good luck—and Isaac watches her shrinking reflection in his rearview mirror, the empty bucket and the somber dog by her side.

They drive in silence through the streets of Tehran, just now coming to life—people on their way to work, tea brewing in the samovars of teahouses for the daily stream of idlers, who will come, as they do every day, to pass away the hours. Once on the highway they pass the incongruent suburbs, into which the city has spilled over the years, and drive on through miles of plains. The smoke of factory chimneys clouds the sky.

Just a week ago was the anniversary of his arrest. Isaac had remembered it, of course, his stomach churning as the clock's hands were about to reach half past noon—the exact hour of his captors' appearance in his office. But he did not make a fuss about it, and neither did anyone else. “They got me exactly a year ago” he said that night to Farnaz as he brushed his teeth, the words coming out of him like an afterthought, and she, preparing a box of family photographs to be shipped to Parviz in New York, said, “Yes, I know. I've been thinking about it all day. What a year!” He understood, as she did, no doubt, that any sense of relief at what they had survived would be premature, considering the trip still to be completed.

Passing through the town of Qazvin, the seat of power of the Seljuk dynasty in the eleventh century, and three centuries later, that of the Safavids, he sees the square with its loggia of colonnades and thinks of the countless hands that had governed the country, some generous, others despotic—all ephemeral. And they had all left their marks throughout the land, colossal remnants of brick and stone, like those built by the Achaemenids in Persepolis, or ornate monuments of ceramic, whose turquoise domes towered over cities—Shiraz, Isfahan, Qom. It was in the shadow of these past
glories that the country now lived.

“Before Isfahan, Qazvin was the capital of the Safavids, Shirin-jan,” he says to his daughter, cramming one final history lesson into her aborted repertoire. He watches her in the rearview mirror as she opens her sleepy eyes and looks out the window, then slumps back into her seat.

In Tabriz they stop for lunch, as instructed. He dips his bread in yogurt, feels under his teeth the crunch of the cucumbers diced in it. He remembers now their weekend lunches, when they would forgo the restaurant and eat in, setting up the table in the garden—the yellow striped tablecloth a canvas for the kebabs that would arrive from the kitchen, preceded by their sizzle and trailed by their steam like trains of a bygone era. There would be yogurt, creamy and unpasteurized, bought in pots from a village in the north, Beluga caviar from Bandar-e Anzali, rice from Mazandaran, fish grilled at the last minute, melon from Qazvin, tea from Lahijan, peaches from the neighbor's garden, cherries from their own.

“Who can eat now?” Farnaz says. “I feel sick.”

“Try, Farnaz-jan. We have a long day ahead of us. Try to think that tomorrow at this time we will be free.”

She looks at him, then at the mildewed vinyl tablecloth, her elbow on the table and her chin in her palm. “Yes,” she says. “I'd like to think that. But I'm still very uneasy about the fact that Habibeh was there this morning. And those files. What was she talking about? And that letter! You never told me about your altercation with Morteza. Why didn't you tell me?”

“What would have been the point? Now you know.”

“What else haven't you told me, Isaac?”

The pianist's voice echoes in his head again, how he had called out Isaac's name in the dark. One day I will tell her about you, Isaac thinks. Not today.

They abandon their car near the restaurant and walk to the Blue Mosque, where they are to meet two men in a black car. Farnaz glances one last time at her Beetle, which they chose for this trip because they believed it would be less conspicuous than Isaac's Jaguar.

“Stop looking back,” he says. “You'll turn into a pillar of salt.”

The men arrive, all beard and hair, and motion to Isaac to get in.

“Mansoor-agha sent you?” Isaac says.

“Yes, get in. Fast!”

They slide into the backseat, the car taking off before Isaac has a chance to shut the door.

“We must move quickly,” the driver says. “Remember this all along your trip. You cannot linger anywhere, because you may leave a trace, and these sons of dogs will smell you. Where did you leave your car?”

“We abandoned it on the street. But I replaced the license plate with the fake one Mansoor-agha gave us.”

“Good.” The driver watches Isaac in the rearview mirror with black, distrusting eyes. “You're going to be all right,” he says.

They drive for hours, through towns and villages no longer familiar to him, and he watches their inhabitants go
ing about their day—a woman in red slippers bent over a pail of dirty wash, three boys playing soccer on an unpaved road, kicking up the dust under their feet, a shepherd leading a flock of goats, the bells around their necks clinking. The two smugglers are not garrulous. They must make this trip several times a week, Isaac assumes, and so they have little interest in their trip or their passengers. From time to time they signal checkpoints to one another, but not much more. Farnaz and Shirin are quiet also.

As night deepens, Isaac traces the stars like a child connecting the dots, searching for a shape, as he once did in Shiraz, when he would recite to Farnaz the names of constellations—Andromeda, Aquila, Lyra—words he liked to say even if the shapes they suggested existed in his mind only. She would laugh, and say, “Tell me about Lyra,” and he would speak to her of Orpheus and his lyre, and how they were both thrown into the river, floating their way to Lesbos.

They arrive at a rugged road and the car comes to a halt. “Quickly! Quickly!” the driver says. “You must switch from this car to the pickup.”

Isaac grabs Shirin by the waist and glides her small, compliant body out of the car; Farnaz runs out of the other side. From afar he sees people seated in the back of the truck.

“The lady and the little girl go in the front,” the truck's driver says when he sees them. “You, in the back!”

He climbs in the back, where he carves for himself a spot to sit. He is surrounded by some fifteen pairs of feet—all male, except for those of a young, pregnant woman wear
ing sneakers with sheer flesh-colored stockings; on her left foot, under the stocking, the filigree of a gold anklet is visible thanks to the driver's flashlight. “Excuse me,” he tells the driver, who stands below, directing more people to the truck. “This young woman…she is pregnant. Maybe she can sit in the front with my wife.”

“No time for this,” the driver says, helping an old man climb into the back. “You mind your own business. Your family got the front seat because of the extra cash you paid. What do you think?” He gets in the truck, accelerating with a trained, furious foot.