The Septembers of Shiraz (24 page)

Despite the darkness Isaac feels the other passengers' eyes on him. Again he has been singled out, as he had in prison. Why is it, he wonders, that wealth must always be accompanied by guilt, if not shame? Had he not worked hard for it, and had it not, in the end, saved his life? Had it not ensured his family's comfort, as it does now—his wife and daughter the only ones of the group seated safely inside the truck? Why the constant indignation at a man who dares to live well? Does living well imply selfishness? Was he—Isaac Amin—a selfish man?

The truck wobbles forward, stones bursting under the tires and hitting the sides of the vehicle. The night is cold, the wind made more piercing by the truck's speed. From time to time the woman's foot, extended because of her pregnant stomach, touches his right calf, but she does not seem to notice. He lets it be, the small, jeweled foot stirring in him a certain instinct—fatherly, he thinks—but perhaps simply masculine.

The truck comes to a stop. They are told to dismount and walk to a stone house on a hill. Inside a few people are seated on the floor, filling their plates from platters of rice and potato stew. The two smugglers from Tehran are there also. “Amin-agha! Good, you made it,” the young one says, rising and wiping his mouth.

“Mansoor-agha, what's all this?”

“A quick meal before we set off. Sit. Eat.”

“What do you mean ‘eat'? I'd like to get going.”

“You'll see what I mean when we'll be walking through the mountain at three in the morning in the bitter cold. This is not to entertain you, believe me. You must eat if you want to withstand the trip.”

Isaac examines his fellow passengers: the pregnant woman; three young men with round faces and dark, pensive eyes—brothers, no doubt; a few middle-aged men; an older man wearing a fedora; a young, quiet boy of sixteen or seventeen, who reminds him of Ramin Ameri; and a man about his own age, with salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in a white suit. Isaac sits next to him.

The man offers Isaac a plate from a stack near him. “Your first time?” he says.

“Yes, first and last, I hope,” Isaac says, taken aback by the question.

“It's good to hope. But one can never be sure. Me? It's my third time.”

“You got caught twice? And here you are again. You're strong-willed.”

“No. Just desperate.”

“What happened when you got caught?”

“Money bought my freedom. Actually, my father's money, God bless his soul.” The man has the lean, elegant build of an aristocrat and the face of a poet, capable of irony, but too injured to use it. The white suit, not the most convincing camouflage, must not help his chances, Isaac thinks. The man's penchant for tragedy is endangering the whole group.

Afterward they are told to relieve themselves in the woods and they stream out of the house like schoolchildren, taking turns, two or three at a time. Farnaz, Shirin, and the pregnant woman head out together. Isaac walks out with the man in white. Urgent urine, his own and the man's, drills into the ground.

“So why do you think you got caught twice?” Isaac says, thinking again of the white suit.

“Some people are born with bad luck. I may be one of them. The things I touch turn to dust. I squandered my father's money. I studied music in the best schools in Europe, but I turned out to be a third-rate pianist.”

You're lucky to have been a third-rate pianist, Isaac thinks. Had you been first-rate, you would have been dead.

“Now that music is banned altogether,” the man continues, “there is nothing left for me in this country. This white suit, it's from my wedding band days. I wear it to remind myself of my failures, so that I may start fresh in a new country. It's ridiculous, at my age, to dream of starting over, isn't it?”

Unsure of what to say, Isaac drops the subject. When
they reach the house he sees rows of horses parked outside.

“You said nothing about horses, Mansoor-agha,” Farnaz is saying to the young smuggler.

“Come, get on the horse, Farnaz-khanoum,” he says. “Don't worry. I saved you the best one.”

Isaac watches his frazzled wife being led away and feels responsible, somehow, for her distress. He holds Shirin's hand and stands in line. A large, uncooperative horse is brought to him, and he is told to mount it, with his daughter. The horse fidgets, refusing his passengers, turning right, then left, then in circles, and stops, finally accepting his fate.

The group sets off, each horse guided by a villager. Stones and gravel roll under the horses' hooves. He holds his daughter's cold hands, wrapped around his waist, and taps them gently from time to time to keep her awake. He hums to her, a little song that he would sing when he would drop her off at school, “
Ressidim-o, ressidim. Dame kouhi ressidim—We
have arrived, we have arrived, we have arrived at the foot of a mountain.” The night is brisk and black, revealing little. He looks for his wife among the moving shapes, but sees nothing. He trusts she is there, on her small horse, looking for him also. The only visible shape is a pale dot far ahead of him, which he knows is the man in white. Why hadn't the smugglers made him cover up? This seems typical of his country—the fondness for drama, exhibited by the man, and the lack of attention to detail, demonstrated by the smugglers. And me, Isaac asks himself, why didn't I protest? He wonders if, by renouncing his old life, he has also surrendered his old self: he is no longer the one in charge.

Hours later the horses are brought to a halt and they dismount in a field of wild vegetation. With his stiff back he walks through the stalks, as tall as he, holding Shirin's hand, looking for Farnaz. The joy he feels at finding her reminds him of what happiness is.

They walk for hours in the dark. In the distance patrol lights glimmer, spinning like a carousel. “That's Turkey, over there,” Mansoor says from time to time. “We must follow the lights.” But the lights don't seem to be getting any closer, and Isaac wonders if they will really make it across by dawn. He holds his wife's rigid hand, and watches his daughter, a few meters ahead of him, holding Mansoor-agha's hand. They tread quietly through the unmarked path. From time to time people whisper to one another and count heads, making sure no one has been lost. The pregnant woman trails the group.

Isaac thinks of the cities ahead of him—Ankara, Istanbul, Geneva, New York—and of the cities behind him—Tehran, where his home stands, empty now of life; Ramsar by the Caspian, its air filled with fog; Isfahan, with its domes of blue; Yazd, where brick alleys shelter its inhabitants from the daytime heat and nighttime freeze of the desert, and where the undying flame of the Zoroastrians burns in a small urn of oil; and his beloved Shiraz, the city of his youthful summers, where he discovered both poetry and Farnaz, and where, along the mausoleums of the medieval poets Hāfez and Sa'di, he recited verses, finding his future in them. Occasionally passersby would see him with his books and ask him for a Hāfez oracle, and Isaac, who in his younger days
believed in such divination, would oblige
them:
“What's on your mind?” He would ask, and people would say, “my sick mother, my dying father, my dreadful job, my poverty, my dead-end marriage.” It was usually the dejected who sought divination. He would open the divan of Hāfez for them, and the first verse that would catch their eye was believed to hold in its letters the answer to their question: “The wheel of fortune is a marvelous thing: / What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?” or “Not all the sum of earthly happiness / Is worth the bowed head of a moment's pain.” Come September he would pack his bags and head back north to Tehran, knowing that in eight months he would return. The Septembers of Shiraz, unlike this September, held in them the promise of return.

They arrive at a Turkish village at dawn. The runaways trickle into a makeshift house—a bare room, really. They find a spot on the floor, keeping silent and to themselves. Isaac smiles at the man in white, covered now with mud and grime. The man nods and smiles back, holding up his right thumb.
It's ridiculous, at my age, to dream of starting over.
But the promise of milk and honey keeps us going, doesn't it? The pregnant woman arrives last, holding on to her stomach. People get up and make room for her; space is all they have to offer. Sitting in the bare room with his wife and child, Isaac thinks of his mother, now on the other side of the border, alone.

A few hours later a truck carries them from the village to Ankara, where they wait for a bus to Istanbul. It's a cool, sunny morning, white linen floating outside the houses'
windows. A woman across the street dusts her carpet by her window, another waters her anemones. Here, too, Isaac thinks, people carry on with their lives, as they no doubt do in the neighboring town, and the town after. Here, too, people want hot coffee, cool breezes, clean sheets, good love.

He will soon have to arrange for a fake entry stamp on their passport and visas for Switzerland and America. In Geneva, their first stop, he will visit his banker to retrieve the remnants of his life's work, and no doubt visit Shahla and Keyvan, who by now must have settled into a small apartment somewhere, maybe overlooking the Saint Pierre cathedral, or Lake Leman, which will distract them with its annual springtime regatta. Once in New York, they will plan, together with Parviz, for the weeks, months, years ahead.

But for now he looks at his wife, with whom he has shared an education in grief, and at his daughter, who is falling asleep standing up. Later in Istanbul they will sit by the Bosporus, squirting lemon on their grilled fish, remembering the Caspian and imagining all the waters that await them, elsewhere.