The Septembers of Shiraz (18 page)

The guard rests the sword's glistening tip on Farnaz's neck, pressing lightly. “Find the damn certificate, Sister!” he yells in her ear. Her body is stiff under the blade. Isaac stretches out his arm across the desk and holds her hand. “Please, Brother, just another minute,” he says to the guard.
To her he says, “Think, Farnaz. When was the last time you saw it?”

“The day they came to search the house. I had left it here,” she points at an open drawer. “And then, wait!” She lets go of Isaac's hand and walks to a corner, where stacks of files and papers are piled up high. “They emptied the drawers, and didn't put everything back. The rest they put here.” She collapses the pile onto the floor and rummages through the paper rubble. Lost birth certificate—further proof, Isaac thinks, of his arbitrary existence.

“Here!” she says finally. “Here.”

“Good, let's go. We've wasted enough time.” The guard takes the rifle in one hand and the sword in the other.

“Brother, the sword,” Isaac says. “You forgot to put it down.”

“No, I didn't forget. I'm taking it.”

“But…my dear Brother, this isn't really a weapon, it's just an antique. You know that, right?”

“Let's go! Just a few hours ago you didn't know whether you were going to live or die. Now you're arguing with me about a sword? Let me tell you something.” He leans forward and whispers in Isaac's ear, “Don't relish your freedom just yet. You go free when I tell you you're free. Understand?”

 

T
HE MARBLE FLOOR
of the bank, just scrubbed for the morning rush of customers, calms him. Sandwiched between the driver and the guard, he walks to the desk of Fariborz Jamshidi, his old friend.

“May I help you?”

“Fariborz, it's me. Isaac Amin.”

The man stares at Isaac with furrowed eyebrows. “Isaac? Isaac Amin? What happened—” He examines the guard then the driver, then Isaac again. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“I would like to withdraw my savings, all in cash.” Isaac endorses the withdrawal form and places it on the desk, along with his birth certificate. The banker stares at the documents, his hands flat on his desk. He does not take them.

“You heard the man, Brother!” says the guard.

“Yes, right away.” Fariborz takes the papers and retreats in the back, where several other bankers have already gathered, surveying the scene. Isaac knows them all—Keyhani and Farmanian, and the young, flirtatious girl, Golnaz. He nods, forcing a smile, but they all look away, except for the girl, who smiles back.

His banker returns with five bulging canvas bags, which he places by the guard's feet.

“Good,” the guard says, his eyes gleaming the way they had back at the house, as he held the gilded sword.

 

O
UTSIDE, THE SUN
now bright in the sky, Isaac stands back as the guards throw the bags into the trunk. There it goes, his life's hard work, his long hours at the office, the missed school plays, the late dinners, the promise to his children that they would never know the meaning of envy, the promise to himself that he would never become like his father.

“Aren't you getting in the car?” the guard says.

“Aren't we done?” A chill runs through his body. Is it possible that they will still kill him after robbing him?

“Yes, you are free now, Brother. But don't you want a ride back to your home?”

“No. I'll manage from here.”

“As you wish.” The guard rests his hand on the car handle. “Congratulations, Brother Amin. You are one lucky man.”

From the sidewalk Isaac watches the car drive away from him. People pass him to the left and right and he realizes that he is blocking the entrance to the bank. He steps aside. He looks again at his feet bulging out of the shoes, pulls up his pants, now many sizes too large. The stains on his clothes are much more visible here in daylight than they had been in the dim light of his cell. He searches his pockets for a coin to call Farnaz, but he has nothing. He remembers how as a boy he would stand in front of the movie theater, his hand-me-down pants too large and his pockets empty, and wait for Ahmad-agha, who would pass by the theater yelling “
Shahre Farang—Foreign
City!” On his back the old man would carry an ornate metal box, inside of which were three-dimensional images of distant places—of a medieval castle in England or a Parisian café on a summer afternoon—places far away from the bare street in which he stood. This peek into a foreign land had a small price of a few cents, but Ahmad-agha always let Isaac look in for free. “One day, Ahmad-agha,” he would tell the old man, “I'll send you a real postcard from a place like this.” To which the old man would say, “
Inshallah
, my boy! And better yet, take me with you!”

H
e smells of sweat, and blood, and of something else, an acrid smell, like a disinfectant—formaldehyde or ammonia. He cries for a long time. “It's all finished now,” Farnaz repeats in his ear. “You're safe.” But he can't control himself. She leads him to the bathroom and runs a hot bath. “No, no baths,” he says. “My skin…I have cigarette burns, and my feet…No baths. Just a quick shower.”

Bent over the sink, he avoids his reflection in the mirror but glances at it periodically, like a motorist peeking at the gruesome remains of a roadside accident. He walks to the toilet and sits, fully clothed. Farnaz lingers, curious to see what they have done to him, but realizes that he won't disrobe in front of her. “That's it, Farnaz-jan,” he says. “I don't need anything else.”

 

A
T THE KITCHEN
table he is quiet. “That shower felt good,” he says after a while. “We didn't have real soap there.”

She wonders why he did not shave. The six-month-old beard, bushy and white, makes him look like an old man. His hair, wet and streaked with the traces of the comb, has thinned noticeably, revealing a peeling scalp. She serves him rice and kebab, and as she rests the plate in front of him, he shuts his eyes, breathing in the meaty vapors rising from his food. He smiles at her. “I can't believe I am sitting here with you, eating this food.”

“And neither can I.”

He eats quickly, stopping only for occasional sips of water.

“Be careful,” she says. “Don't eat too fast. Your body may not be able to take it.”

“Yes, I know. But it's so good!”

After a while she asks, “What did they accuse you of?”

“Of being a Zionist spy.”

“A spy? How absurd!”

“Yes.”

Outside, the lunch hour clamor of children at the nearby school fills the street. The wooden wheels of the knife sharpener's cart roll by. “Bring down your knives,” the old vendor yells with his hoarse voice. “Sharpen your knives!”

“Spring is approaching,” she says. “All the vendors and menders are out again. Just the other day the quilt mender passed by. I'll have to call him in one of these days.”

He nods, looking down, chewing more slowly now.

“So you went with them to the bank?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“How much did you give them?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes, everything!” He looks up, but not at her. “Should I not have done it? Is my life not worth it?”

“Of course it is. Of course it's worth it! I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked. Not now. I asked only because something terrible happened while you were gone. Morteza and the other employees looted your office. There is nothing left. No office, no employees, no equipment, no stones.”

“Really? Morteza?” He moves his spoon back and forth along the side of his plate. “Well, at least we still have the Swiss accounts. There is enough there for a good, decent life.”

They stay at the table for a while, neither of them touching the food or saying a word. So much silence to be stirred, she thinks.

“Isaac, you may find me ill-equipped for your pain,” she says. “But I want you to know that your absence was very difficult for me. I suffered also. Maybe not like you. But I did.”

“I know.” He lets go of the spoon and looks up. Even his eyes seem to have thinned, if such a thing is possible. “The whole time I was there I thought of you and the children. I talked to you and embraced you and lived among you. At night I held the idea of your body in my arms, smelled your lotion on my mattress. Now that I am here, I feel like a dead man resurrected.” He gets up and kisses her forehead,
then limps across the kitchen floor. “I think I will go and lie down. You were right about the food. I'm not feeling well.”

She clears the table, hearing all the while his slow, painful progress to the bedroom. Outside, melting snow drips from rooftops, making it seem like it's snowing all over again. So many times she had fantasized about Isaac's return, but none of her mind's creations resembled this tired afternoon, where a cold light moves on half-empty plates, and she finds herself alone in the kitchen, separated from him by the walls and endless corridors of the house.

When she lies down next to him on the bed, he is already asleep, a pained snore emerging from his half-open mouth. His eyelids flutter over their gray, hollow sockets. Looking at his beard closely, she sees the blisters under the hair and understands why he had not shaved. His arms sag, the skin loose and wrinkled over the bones, resembling the arms of old men who spend entire afternoons in teahouses throwing dice onto the backgammon board, testing their luck as they wait out their final years. She unrolls his sock and discovers his swollen foot, one toe bluish, the soles marked by unhealed lacerations. Looking at the foot she realizes that she will never know what happened to him—even after he has described it all down to the last detail.

She lies back down and holds his limp hand. She remembers that summer they first met in Shiraz, how one time she went back with him to his apartment and sat next to him on his sun-flooded bed, the windows wide open, the breeze tickling the curtains, the sun bright and high in the sky, approving their languor. Time did not press them
then. He recited a poem and they laughed at his dramatization. With the ceiling fan circling above them like a whirling dervish, they spoke of the future, that vast medley of constellations whose brightest stars, they believed, would become theirs. Later that summer, when she mentioned Isaac to her family on a weekend trip to Tehran, the reaction was lukewarm. “We know the Amins,” her mother said. “The father is no good. And who doesn't know about the syphilis he gave his poor wife?” Like a salesman, Farnaz sat with them in the garden and told them how hardworking Isaac was, how literate, how kind. “One can shut the town gates but not people's mouths,” her aunt said, taking bird bites out of the piece of bitter chocolate that she took nightly with her Turkish coffee. “And what will people say? That a daughter of ours has married one of the Amin children? Such shame!” Her mother nodded, in agreement with her sister. “We did not raise a daughter so we could hand her over to wolves,” she said in that absolute manner of hers that made any dissenter reconsider his position, if not out of persuasion, then out of fear. Her father, who had been reclining in his chair, flipping his worry beads and sipping his arrack, said, “The Amins were once a noble family. This boy's great-great-grandfather was a reputed rabbi in Mashhad. His great-grandfather had amassed a fortune importing silk from India. It was his grandfather who ruined the family name, after he married that crazy girl from Kashan. He spent all his money on her fancy and later on her folly. He even sent her to a sanitarium in Switzerland, back in the days when only the king had set foot in Europe.” “Yes,” her aunt chimed in.

“Such beauty, that girl! People still speak of her green eyes and black hair. But they say she had an unlucky face, the kind of face you should avoid on the New Year.”

It was eventually agreed that Isaac's roots were actually noble, that his family name had suffered a few bad harvests, and that he would be the one to resurrect the Amins' old glory. And so he had. What no one had predicted was that he would also lose it.

H
abibeh chops off a fish's head and slides it into the overflowing trash can, but it slips and falls on the floor, the eye gazing upward. “Help us prepare this dinner for your father. Aren't you happy he is home?”

Shirin has not yet seen her father, or rather, he has not yet seen her. “Your father has come back,” was all her mother said when Shirin returned from school that afternoon. Once upstairs she added, “He is resting now. He is very tired.” Walking past her parents' bedroom she saw his horizontal body framed by the doorway, a bushy white beard on his chin. He seemed small on the bed, the way she imagines a child would look in an adult coffin. He looked at her through half-open eyes, but he did not seem to see her.

A car honks outside. “It's Abbas!” Habibeh calls from the kitchen. “Come, khanoum, come!”

Minutes later, in the garden, Abbas the gardener is crouching over a lamb, a knife in his hand. He pulls back
the animal's head with one hand, and with the other slices its throat. Blood gushes out, flowing over his bare hand and forming a small puddle near the pool. The lamb falls.
“Allaho-Akbar!”
Abbas says. “Thank God for Amin-agha's return! May he live in good health!” He wipes the sweat beads above his mouth with a handkerchief, the knife hanging from his coat sleeve like an extension of his arm.

The smell of blood fills the garden. Shirin tucks her nose into her shirt collar and stands aside as Abbas hoses the ground. Night is falling, the streetlamps coming on one after the other, casting a funereal light on the dead animal. The dog runs up and down the staircase, agitated.

Why do people thank God with blood, she wonders. For as long as she can remember, Habibeh and Abbas, who could not afford to buy a whole lamb themselves, urged her parents to do it for them and have it sacrificed, so that they could thank God properly, as their religion demands. While her parents would oblige them, her mother would refuse to watch the killing, and would forbid Shirin to witness it also. But today her mother had stood there and watched, without flinching, without saying a word—not even to Shirin.

In the kitchen, the cooking resumes and half an hour later Abbas appears with a tray of meat, cut up into large pieces of rib, thigh, shank, and intestine.

“Look at this meat!” Habibeh says.

“May God accept our gratitude,” Abbas says. “I packed up the rest and put it in the freezer downstairs, Farnaz-khanoum.”

“Thank you, Abbas. You and Habibeh should take some
for your families. And we'll distribute whatever is left to neighbors tomorrow.
Inshallah
, God will accept our offering.”

The lights go out, the city going black. The refrigerator's hum comes to a halt. Only the blue flames flicker under the pots. “They're bombing Tehran again!” Habibeh says. “The Iraqis are bombing Tehran!”

“It could just be another blackout,” Abbas says. “If they were bombing we would have heard the sirens by now.”

As they scramble for candles, a soft glow appears in the doorway. Behind it is her father, his face lit up from below, the white of his beard stark in the night. Abbas, who had received no warning of his altered appearance, gasps, whispering, “
Bismillah—In
the name of the Lord!”

“Hello, Abbas-agha,” her father says from the doorway. “I scared you…”

“Amin-agha! No, I didn't…” He walks to him and shakes his hand. “Welcome back! We just sacrificed a lamb in your honor. May you have nothing but good days before you.”

In the candlelight her father resembles a Dutch painting—Rembrandt's
Old Jew Seated—whose
reproduction he had kept above his desk for years. Looking at the old man painted in so many shades of brown—at his gaunt, aged hands and his downcast eyes—Shirin had once said to him, “This painting is so sad, Baba. Why do you keep it here?”

“One day,” he had said, “you will understand it. And then you will find it beautiful.”

He walks to her now and kisses her forehead. “My Shirin,” he says. “I didn't think I would see you again.” His
lips feel chapped against her skin. She sits without moving, letting herself be kissed. She wraps her arms around his waist and brings her head to his stomach, but feeling the protruding bones of his ribs against her cheek, she lets go. She looks at the floor, at his injured feet.

“Did you sleep well, Amin-agha?” Habibeh says.

“Yes. But when the lights went out I thought I was back in prison.”

“I keep telling them the Iraqis are about to bomb us, but they don't believe me.”

He pulls out a chair and sits, with some difficulty. “If they bomb, they bomb.” He smiles. “There isn't much any of us can do about it.”

“Very well,” Habibeh grumbles. “If we are going to get blown up, at least let's do it on a full stomach.” She shuts the curtains and pulls out several heavy white candles.

“Why these candles?” her mother says. “Don't we have others?”

“No, we finished the others during the last blackout. What's wrong with these?”

“These…These I light on holidays to commemorate the dead.”

“If Iraqi bombs fall on our heads, we'll need these to commemorate ourselves, khanoum-jan.”

 

T
HE THREE OF
them pass the bread and the salad and the salt, smiling at one another occasionally. Shirin tries to think
of something to say, but she cannot come up with anything. Her parents don't talk either.
What was prison like
, she would like to ask.
Were you alone, or did you have cellmates? Were people cruel to you? What happened to your feet?

“Are you happy to be back, Baba?” she finally says.

He breaks off a piece of bread. “Yes, very,” he says.

Then why do you look so thin, so sad—so old?
She finally understands that painting.

 

B
Y THE MEAL'S
end some candles continue to burn calmly while others flicker wildly, casting stormy reflections on the opposite wall before guttering out. Her mother had once said that if a candle goes wild it means that the person in whose memory it has been lit did not leave this earth peacefully, that the person is still searching for harmony in the other world. Shirin wonders whose spirit is trapped in the flickering candles. Mr. Politics? His wife, Homa? Her father's cellmates? Are there enough candles in the world to account for all those who have not left peacefully?