The Septembers of Shiraz (22 page)

A
festive spirit fills the Mendelson household for many days and nights. On the seventh day following the birth of the twins, both boys, Gottze dank, scores of well wishers stream into the brownstone to witness the circumcision of the infants. From his basement window Parviz watches the passing legs, paying special attention to one pair in stockings—thin, almost boyish—whose owner, he knows, is Rachel, because of the low-heeled pumps with the bows he has seen her wear before. He puts on a clean shirt and goes upstairs.

The house overflows with guests, the men in their black suits and hats gathered in the living room, filling their plates from a long buffet table, the women in the dining room and kitchen, preparing more food for the men and helping themselves to healthy portions. He spots Zalman in a corner, laughing with a group of men. Since the incident with Rachel, his guilt amplifies whenever he is in Zalman's
presence. But he tries to act as natural as he can. “Mr. Mendelson,” he says, “Congratulations!”

“Parviz, you came!”

“How is Rivka? I don't see her.”

“She is a bit tired. She's lying down. That's why we're not celebrating at the synagogue. It was a difficult delivery. The little devils didn't want to come out! Did you eat? Shall I fix you a plate?”

“Don't trouble yourself. I'll get something in a minute.” But Zalman heads for the buffet table and Parviz has no choice but to follow. “I have good news of my own. My father was released from prison. I heard from him the same night your twins were born.”

“Really?” He stops and turns around, his eyes wide. “Mazel tov! And you didn't tell us anything?”

“Well, you've been so busy with the babies. And since the shop has been closed…”

“What a beautiful day,” Zalman says. “So filled with blessing!” He fills a plate with salads, salmon, bagels. “Here, my boy. Eat!”

Music comes on, a joyful European Jewish tune that sends the men dancing in a circle, their arms locked around one another, their feet kicking the air in tandem. On the other side a few women dance also, holding hands, their long colorful skirts creating a kaleidoscope as they swirl around the room. In the corner, next to a bookshelf of heavy brown volumes with Hebrew lettering is Rachel. In her blue dress, her hands behind her, she surveys the dancing women and glances, every now and then, at the men's section. She
notices Parviz and looks away, then walks to the circle of dancing women, breaks it off by unlocking two hands and closes it again with her own, and spins with the others, becoming, like them, no more than a spiraling strip of color.

Later, for the ceremony, she stands at the threshold of the living room, her feet still in the dining room but her torso bending forward into the men's section. Parviz plays and replays the kiss—the snow, the street, her hand, their lips. Zalman and a younger, slimmer version of himself, a brother, Parviz realizes, walk to the rabbi, each carrying one of the swaddled infants on a white pillow, while Rivka, looking pale, waits for them, leaning on the wall behind the rabbi. The twins, oblivious to the procedure they are about to undergo, sleep soundly. In a few moments, Parviz knows, their shrill cries will fill the room, drowning the rabbi's prayers and the congregation's “Amens.” He thinks of photographs he had seen of himself as an infant, carried in much the same way on a pillow by his own father, and imagines how his father, too, must have undergone the same thing, each generation welcoming the next with an irreversible scar—a covenant with God, yes, but perhaps also a covenant with pain, instilling in the newborn—still in his milky, talcum-dusted present—the notion of suffering, both past and future.

Afterward the twins, exhausted from their ordeal, are taken to a bedroom along with their mother. The others disperse, regaining their previous posts by the buffet table or on sofas. Red wine flows freely among the guests, a sweet, innocent wine that Parviz first mistakes for grape juice, drinking it in large quantities until someone calls out to him, “Take
it easy on the wine, my boy, or we'll have to carry you out of here on a white pillow like the twins!”

“Wine? This? Oh well!” he says, refilling his cup, as do the others, laughing now, clinking their glasses in the air and yelling “
L'chaim—To
life!” Rachel stays in the doorway, surveying this room then the other. He eyes her through his wineglass and she looks at him finally, and smiles.

“You are fond of my Rachel,” Zalman says, tapping his back.

“Mr. Mendelson! You scared me,” he says, the wine nearly spilling out of his glass. “Me? No, I'm not fond, I mean yes, of course, since she is your daughter, but no…” He feels his face getting hot. He breaks into a sweat.

“Relax! She is a pretty girl. I may be her father, but I'm not blind.”

Parviz hides his blushing face behind his wineglass. “Yes, I'm fond of your Rachel,” he mutters.

“You shouldn't be,” he says, without his earlier cheerfulness. “Unless you are willing to live a life of Hassidus, of observing orthodox practices. My Rachel,” he says, looking across the room with sad, worried eyes, “is already confused. She has her heart in both worlds, here and outside. I don't want to introduce any temptations to her.”

“But shouldn't she be the one to decide?” Parviz says, trying to temper the nervousness in his voice. “You can't force spirituality on someone.”

“You can. I am proof of it. I once almost renounced it all for a girl because I was young and was thinking only of my own happiness.”

“Whose happiness should you be concerned with then, if not your own?”

“Ah, but you see, that's the difference between your world and mine. I look at myself not as an individual, but as piece of a whole, as a brick in the house. A few broken bricks and the whole house falls down. I may have sacrificed a temporary happiness, but look at what I've accomplished. I have eight children, counting the twins, God bless them, and I'll probably have at least another two before I throw in the towel. If my children each have ten children of their own, and their children do the same, in three generations little old Zalman standing here before you will have brought one thousand decent, observant Jews into the world! Now isn't that something?”

“Well, yes.” Parviz smiles. “If you look at it that way.”

“That's the only way for us to make up for the extermination of our people, Parviz, you see? We have to resist temptation.”

“But I'm a Jew also, Mr. Mendelson. Would it be so terrible for Rachel to end up with me?”

“You're a Jew, yes. But let me speak frankly here. If the two of you marry, the chances of her giving up Hassidic practices are much higher than you taking them on. So slowly your union, as innocent as it may seem, will dilute the religion, watering it down so much that in three or four generations what was once heavy cream will only be skim milk. You understand?”

“Yes, I understand. I think.”

“Good! Now if you really, honestly, believe that you
want to become a Hassid, then come and see me. But please, don't think you can become religious for a girl. That sort of thing doesn't last.”

Zalman is right about that. As much as Parviz has come to like the Mendelsons, he does not have the drive, nor the desire, to lead a life similar to theirs. And unlike Zalman, he cannot live according to a global calculus, counting his off-spring like a census bureau. He realizes that he cannot plan his future; he can only remain open to it.

He walks out on the porch and leans forward on the railing, watching the five o'clock sun cast its brilliant rays on the produce stand on the corner. The reds of the tomatoes and the yellows of the bananas calm him. The days are getting longer, and will continue to do so until June, when second by second, they will shorten, an insidious evaporation that will make itself noticeable sometime in late October, when someone will look out a window at the five o'clock dusk and sigh, “Winter is coming! Turn on the lights!” So it will always be—the warm days of spring and summer giving way to the bleak nights of fall and winter, when anticipation for brighter days will begin all over again. In time, he realizes, his own darkness, like the winter he just lived, will lighten. Standing here and enjoying the remaining minutes until sunset, Parviz thinks of how this same sun, some eight hours ago, cast a similar light for his father, as he took his tea in the garden, or went for a long walk, as he liked to do before dinner.

A
ny moment now, Isaac knows, his father will die. Afterward, he will have to stand above the body and look at it, knowing that whatever it was that he once expected from it—love, or maybe even the initiation of an embrace—won't come after all.

“Isaac,” his mother says. “Why are you sitting on the ground,
aziz
? It's dirty!”

“It's all right. It's cooler here than inside.”

She wipes her forehead with a tissue. “I wish it would rain already.”

In the garden of his parents' home, where cypresses offer him some relief from the heat wave that has been choking the city for two weeks, he watches the cigarette smoke exit his nostrils and slowly merge with the oppressive air. He looks at her, at his diminutive mother, wrinkled like a dried apricot. “Come with us in September,” he says. “What are you going to do here, all by yourself?”

“Me? You think I have life left in me for a trip like that?”

“But how can I leave you here all alone?”

“You have a family to think of. And besides, how much time do you think I have left?” She runs her fingers through his hair, the way she did when he was a boy. “We should go inside, Isaac-jan,” she says. “I have a feeling it won't be much longer now.”

He puts out his cigarette and gets up, his muscles stiff and tired. He wonders if
he
has life left in him for a trip like that.

The room smells like disease. He walks to his father's bedside and holds his hand.

“This is it,” his father says.

“Don't give up hope yet, Baba-jan.”

“Hope?” He laughs weakly. “What hope? It's finished.” He repositions his body with great effort, his arms shaking as he tries to move his torso upward, but fails. “So much pain!” he says.

“Do you need something? A glass of water, maybe?”

“No. And where would it go, this water, since I can't pump anything out? I'll explode!” He tries to laugh.

Isaac forces a smile. Since the end has been determined, it is the waiting that seems intolerable to him, each interminable minute infused with the possibility of death, yet passing uneventfully.

“The doctor was here this morning,” his father mumbles. “He asked me…what is your name and what year is it. I answered. I still have my head, you see? Then he said, ‘The Caspian, what is it?' And I looked at him, for a long time. I knew…I just couldn't find…‘Water,' I said. ‘It's water.'
And he said, ‘Yes, it's water. It's called a sea.' A sea, Isaac! I couldn't remember the word!” In his agitation he lets go of Isaac's hand and slowly lifts his arm, twice tapping the air before letting it rest again by his side. “All your life…you think of this…You ask yourself…‘Will I die in my bed…or in some freak accident?' But no matter…you never know what it's like until it starts…It's terrible…this thing.”

“Calm down, Hakim,” Afshin says. “You're getting yourself all excited.”

“They say a calm overtakes you as you're about to go. But it's not true, it's just not true…”

And with that he goes. Afshin leaves the room in tears and Isaac stands there alone, watching the body, frozen now in a gesture of protest—the palms facing upward, the fingers slightly curled, the brow furrowed. Like an undesirable diamond, Isaac thinks, his father had been hard but had “bad cleavage.” He broke easily.

 

T
HEY BURY
H
AKIM
Amin on the last day of August in the Jewish cemetery in Tehran, next to his father, the heartbroken siphon of the family fortune, his grandfather, the silk merchant, and his great-grandfather, the rabbi from Mashhad. Aside from the rabbi performing the services, only Isaac, his mother, and Farnaz are present at the funeral. Isaac watches the casket being lowered into the ground and the earth covering it, bit by bit, until it can no longer be seen.

His father will be the last of the Amins to rest here.

A
letter arrives, from a certain “Jacques Amande,” postmarked Paris: A

Farnaz reads the letter twice before running to the bedroom, where Isaac is placing a handful of gemstones in a pouch. “Isaac! A letter from Javad. He is in Paris! He has an apartment in Montmartre.”

“That devil!” Isaac laughs. “No doubt he got himself an apartment there to be close to the cabarets. Ah, that little devil,” he says again, and his face opens up, a hint of playfulness returning to his eyes. “We're next, Farnaz-jan! We're next.”

“Yes, we're next.” The escape assembly line—people waiting their turn to cross the border and settle like dust on the world map. “If we leave this country without taking care of our belongings, who in Geneva or Paris or Timbuktu will understand who we once were?” Shahla had asked once, and perhaps she was right, after all. Even if they make it across the border, Farnaz wonders, what will become of them on the other side?

“Mostafa is bringing the rest of the payment for the house this afternoon,” Isaac says.

“He'd better. He's getting this house at a bargain, that opportunist!”

“You should be happy we've even managed to sell it in such a short time.”

“Yes, I'm happy. But the house is worth at least five times the price you settled on.”

He throws the pouch on the bed. “The price I settled on? You think I had a choice? We are leaving, Farnaz. What part of that don't you understand? We are leaving in two weeks. You should be happy we got a buyer at all. Those smugglers, they're calling me every day, asking me for the money. And I tell them, it's coming, it's coming!”

“All right! You don't need to yell.”

“But I do!” he says, walking to the bathroom and
splashing his face with water. “I do need to yell, because I can't take it anymore!” Hunched over the sink, he looks at his wet face in the mirror. “I don't have much left in me,” he says, calmer now. “If it weren't for you and the children, I would probably just stay and wait out my final years with my mother.”

“What final years? What has gotten into you? You're not even sixty!”

“I will be. In a couple of years.”

“You have many years ahead of you, so stop talking like an old man.” She sits on the bed and opens the pouch, freeing the stones on the blue satin bedspread, against which they sparkle. She runs her hand over them, their hard, still unpolished edges pricking her skin. “You think I really want to go?”

“So now you don't want to go? You're the one who kept insisting, remember? What are you saying?”

“I'm saying what you're saying. That I don't want to go, but that I will go, because I have no other choice. Somehow I don't have the right to say that, do I? Coming from me it sounds like ingratitude. But I am tired also, and like you, I've lost much.” She pushes back the stones and lies down on the bed. The heat persists despite the air conditioners working at full capacity. She watches him, still hunched over the sink, looking down. She realizes that her husband will from now on have the monopoly on grief, for the simple, inarguable fact that he has been in prison, that he has faced death, many times over, and has seen and heard others die. Her own unhappiness, negligible next to his, will have to
be suppressed if they are to continue their lives together, because there is simply not enough space between them for that much sorrow. She hears him crying now, the way he had the night he heard of Kourosh Nassiri's execution. She lies on the bed and listens, without interrupting him.

She leaves the house, knowing that when she returns, it will no longer be theirs. She drives for a long time, her hands shaky on the wheel, the sun on the windshield, blinding her. Everyone's story must come to an end, she knows, but to prepare for the end, as they have—to liquidate one's belongings and sign over the deed to one's house—is not unlike selecting a casket, lying in it voluntarily, and shutting it from inside.

She stops the car to run one final errand: returning the sixteenth-century miniature to Javad's friend. The thought of spending some time in the shop surrounded by antiques comforts her, and she tells herself that if Shahriar Beheshti is not busy she'll stay for a while and have a cup of tea with him. But when she arrives, she finds the store empty and shut. She walks up and down the street, looking for it, mistrusting her memory of the exact location.

“Are you looking for Beheshti?” a carpet seller smoking outside his shop calls out.

“Yes. He closed?”

“You mean he
was
closed,” the man says, walking toward her. In a lowered voice he continues, “They came after him too, khanoum. They seized everything, all his antiques, the poor man. And when he started protesting, they blindfolded him and took him away in a van.”

She peers inside the shop through the glass. Nothing is left but dusty shelves, and a glass filled with turbid tea on the counter, along with a half-eaten sandwich, surrounded now by ants—Shahriar Beheshti's final lunch. “Looks like they got him recently.”

“Yes, just last week.”

She thanks the man and walks away, the painting still tucked under her arm. She decides to take it with her on the trip. Like them, the antiques dealer may one day cross the border, and show up in America, where he may look for them, or in Paris, where he may run into Javad at a sidewalk café. She would return it to him then, and he would hold it—this painted sheet that will no doubt become as dear to him as a lost child—the only item to remind him of times past.