Man of My Time Read online

Page 2


  “One more thing,” she said. “There will be a memorial dinner and I’d like you to attend.”

  “I’ll be busy with meetings,” I said.

  “You can’t make time for one dinner in your father’s memory?”

  “Fine,” I said. We remained silent, neither of us volunteering a farewell. I looked out my office window at Mashgh Square, shimmering from the morning rain. A boy passed by on a bicycle, his wheels unsteady, wearing a T-shirt with a green comic book character I was too old to recognize. I remembered how my mother used to pick me up from school each Thursday with a new Tintin volume, which would be my companion for the entire weekend.

  “Well, that’s all,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Don’t overextend yourself,” she said. “I am grateful that you agreed to take the ashes and that you will attend the dinner.” After a long pause she added, “For years I accompanied your father on his walks. But this past year I couldn’t, because of the arthritis.”

  She said the arthritis, as though I had been in her life all along and was privy to its misfortunes. “So he was alone when he collapsed?” I said.

  “Yes, he was alone. A jogger found him and called for an ambulance. The hospital didn’t notify me until two hours later.” She lit up a cigarette. “Imagine, found like that by a river, as though he had no family.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you have a family?” my mother asked.

  “A daughter,” I said, leaving out the fact that I had not seen her in three years. “Her name is Golnaz.”

  “Good,” said my mother. “Good for you.” She hung up the phone.

  * * *

  AS THE ELDEST SON of the deceased I would need to appear appropriately mournful. Nothing less than gray would do. Or navy blue, at the least. I had three good suits, all light-colored. I considered asking the Minister to lend me a suit but he was a head shorter than I, and besides, the last thing I wanted was to embroil him in my family drama. I had never spoken to him about my parents, except to give him the kind of information that could be readily found in a government dossier: names, dates of birth, dates of disappearance, and the like. This pursuit of the proper attire would encroach on my preparations for the visit to New York. I still had to revise the Minister’s speech to the General Assembly, and come up with a book selection, in keeping with our habit of reading a volume inspired by each city we visited. This had been the Minister’s idea, to prevent us, he said, from becoming “birdbrained handshakers,” polluted with manifestos and resolutions. So in Paris we had read Balzac’s Père Goriot and in Rome, a book of poems by Pasolini. For New York I had yet to make a selection. As the city that had engulfed my family, New York seemed to me the most foreboding place on earth, and also the most illusory.

  In the end I bought a steel-gray suit I couldn’t afford and I chose DeLillo’s Underworld, as daunting, brilliant, and sinister as the city we were visiting.

  * * *

  AS I WAITED FOR OMID on the corner of Forty-Third Street and First Avenue, I half expected to greet the little brother I had seen for the last time under the fluorescent lights of Mehrabad airport, looking queasy and far younger than his sixteen years. When he approached, I shuddered, not because he still resembled that boy, but because he seemed the replica of my father as I had last seen him—a man in middle age, handsome still but with a paunch, tall and inwardly cracked like a Greek column, a memorial to some realm of expired grandeur. I could tell from his searching eyes that he didn’t immediately recognize me, which did not surprise me.

  After I let my daughter slip out of my life, my physical transformation began. My hair fell out, first by numbers then in clumps, with such speed that I stopped lamenting the loss of each strand and began reciting collective eulogies as one does when faced with a mass grave. When I had lost enough of it I decided to shave my head altogether. I don’t know when exactly I began to lose weight—so preoccupied was I with my hair—but I remember coming out of the shower one morning and being stunned to find the man staring back at me from the steamy bathroom mirror: tall, broad-shouldered, deep black eyes cradled inside ashen crescents, a naked skull, and not a gram of excess fat—an exquisite, indignant creature.

  * * *

  “OMID!” I called out over the chaos of Midtown Manhattan at noon. “Omid, Omid…” Saying his name over and over soothed me like a refrain suddenly recalled. When he saw me, he froze for an instant, then his face opened up. He walked toward me with restraint. We stood facing each other, awkward, while journalists and cameramen bypassed us from all directions, visibly annoyed by our moment of inaction amid so much frenzy. We reached for each other, and if I were a religious man, I would have said that this was the closest I had ever come to experiencing God. There was a feeling of utter timelessness, a sense that nothing that had come before and nothing that would come after mattered. Only this.

  “Shall we sit somewhere?” he said. “Did you have lunch?”

  At a nearby bodega we got turkey sandwiches. He told me that normally the Halal Guys would be two blocks up but because of the General Assembly all the food vendors had been barred.

  “The Halal Guys?” I said.

  “Don’t laugh,” he said. “They’ve built an empire from kebab.”

  * * *

  AFTER SOME BACK AND FORTH with the security office I finagled a visitor’s pass for Omid. We found a subdued corner in the Rose Garden, in the shadow of the General Assembly building. Aluminum crinkled as we unwrapped our sandwiches, thirty-eight years of unspoken words between us. It was Omid who began. He told me about his studies in literature, the years he spent writing poetry before taking up translation, first of the literary variety, and later, when he decided to get married and have a steadier income, of the bureaucratic kind. Mostly, he said, he translated affidavits for those seeking green cards, and land restitution forms for those who had left home so long ago that they had forgotten even their language.

  “And Mother?” I said.

  “She carries on,” he said. “But she lives in a time warp. She stays up into all hours of the night listening to old Sattar and Googoosh records and bidding on memorabilia on eBay. You should see her apartment. She has a set of plates from the 1971 gala in Persepolis, every possible banknote and coin, magazine clips about those final days in Panama and Cairo, a tea set that the seller swore belonged to Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, and a silver gelatin print of one of Naser al-Din Shah’s chubby wives. I call the apartment the Golestan Palace.”

  “Bābā didn’t mind?”

  “Bābā had lost his ability to mind anything,” he said. “Especially during his last year.”

  When I asked him about his wife and child, his face darkened. “Divorced,” he said. “She cleaned me out. All I do now is work and pay alimony. And I hardly see my son.”

  “Your ex-wife is American?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “The daughter of an Iranian real estate developer in Los Angeles. I don’t know why the family fortune wasn’t enough. She needed my meager translator’s scrapyard, too. And you?” he asked. “What have you done since we left you at the airport? We heard rumors…” he said. “Are they true?”

  “I don’t know what you heard,” I said.

  “Rumors about your job at the prison,” he said. “People said you were working for the Ministry of Intelligence, that you became an interrogator.”

  “It was complicated,” I said.

  “Hamid, are the rumors true?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They are probably true.”

  For a long time we sat in silence, our half-eaten sandwiches on our laps, like two awkward boys in a schoolyard at lunch hour. I worried that a photographer might take our picture for an amusing sidebar to the day’s hard news—look, even the Islamic Republic breeds humans! It would be the kind of article Americans love, affirming their self-proclaimed ability to see humanity even in their enemy, and in so doing, reassuring themselves of their own magnanimous heart.<
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  “What happened to you?” he finally said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I meant well, I believe.”

  “Did you?”

  “In the beginning, yes,” I said.

  “And later?”

  “Later it became something else.” I looked up at the September sky. The clean fall day reminded me of Tehran before the pollution.

  “We all do what we need to do at any given moment,” Omid said. “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner,” he went on, quoting the old proverb—to understand all is to forgive all. His clemency had surfaced so quickly that I doubted its sincerity; I imagined it was an aphorism he had adopted to defend against the sorrows the world had inflicted on him.

  He looked at his watch and withdrew a mint candy box from his pocket. “Here are bābā’s ashes,” he said.

  “This? That’s all of bābā? I was expecting some kind of pewter urn.”

  “Khar nasho—don’t be an ass!” he said. “You want to carry a ten-kilo urn of bone and ash back to Tehran? Of course it’s not all of him.”

  “So where is the rest?” I said, the familiar outrage surging again. “A dead body must remain intact,” I continued with the authority of a holy man. “You committed a sin, taking the poor man apart like that.”

  “The poor man?” he said. “Where were you all these years, you asshole, when the poor man was alive?” His voice was losing its practiced restraint.

  It never failed. Push anyone hard enough and you arrive at the essence. I stared into my brother’s black eyes, mirror images of my own, and said, “What happened to understanding all and forgiving all?”

  Sirens sounded around us as a motorcade left the building. “The American president,” I said. “His entire speech this morning was against us.” I remembered how only a few years earlier this president’s predecessor and the Minister had shaken hands in the hallways of the General Assembly, an unrehearsed, momentous event, as spectacular as Vito Corleone sitting down after all the bloodshed with the Five Families.

  “Listen,” Omid said. “I want to put the past behind us.”

  “Give me the candy box,” I said. “I will take the ashes.”

  He placed the box in my palm.

  “Where shall I scatter them?” I said.

  “As you see fit. We only just found out that he wanted to be buried there.”

  “No one had seen his will?”

  “He had a mystic will—the kind that’s sealed until death.”

  “Leave it to bābā to have a mystic will,” I said.

  He laughed, that boyish chuckle of his that I had forgotten but which now assaulted me with a memory of the two of us one summer at the beach in Babolsar, building in the sand the city of Uruk, of the king Gilgamesh. We did this to impress our father, who had a fascination with The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian tale of friendship and kingship, immortality and mortality. It was, he said, the oldest known preserved written literature in the history of the world, and even though it was a narrative told from the point of view of our ancient enemies—the Mesopotamians who would one day become the Arabs—he read to us from it nightly, telling us, again and again, the tale of the mighty but tyrannical king who found goodness, and ultimately wisdom, through the death of his dear friend Enkidu. That summer day, Omid and I, giddy with the sun-drenched hours of freedom before us, carried pails of water from the sea from sunrise until day’s end, and we fashioned the dwellings, date grove, clay pit, and even the temple of Ishtar, believing that we would forever live together within our own city of sand.

  “Omid,” I said. “Come back to Tehran. It’s a different place now. So much is happening, pushing in all directions. It may be ugly, and wild, but it’s alive, and in its wildness it reminds you that you’re alive, too. You—all of you who left and never returned—are frozen in time. You have one final memory and you keep playing and replaying it. And you have already bred a new generation with no memory of their beginnings except for the occasional kebab they eat with their relatives in some restaurant in New York or Los Angeles, an old pop icon’s record playing in memoriam. What’s holding you here?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “but time. Too much time has passed. It’s like a caesura in a poem. Once you have that break in the line, you can’t go back.”

  “When did you become a poet?” I said.

  * * *

  WE PARTED WITH A PROMISE to make up for lost time, starting with lunch the following day. As he exited the UN gate he held up his hand in a Vulcan salute as he used to do when we were boys, then dissolved into the crowd on First Avenue. I held the cold tin box in my palm. My father.

  2

  LYING ON THE HOTEL BED IN THE DARK I stared at the tin box, glinting in the red neon glare of the delicatessen sign across the street. Look here, old man, I said out loud. Even in your last will and testament you demanded the impossible—to die in one corner of the earth and be buried in the other. I opened the box and stared at the ashes, which were alabaster and grainy—nothing like the gray cinders I had envisioned.

  As a boy, I would lie next to my father as he would nap and I would slide down on the bed until my feet were lined up with his, pretending that his right foot was the best friend of my left. Now I held the box and realized that I didn’t even know the size of his feet. All these years, a whole lifetime, and I could not tell you the size of my father’s feet. An avalanche of things I didn’t know descended on me. What time of day was he born? What was his favorite subject at school? Who was his first kiss? How did he feel the first time he walked into the university to teach art? And the day I was born, was he joyous or perturbed? I had spent so much time defending my own existence to my father that I had overlooked his existence.

  I got up and stumbled to the fridge. Miniature Bacardis, Veuve Cliquots, and Johnnie Walkers, sized for a gnome, faced me with scorn. There was also a vial of Kahlúa liqueur: to mix with what, exactly?

  Looking out the window, I saw pedestrians hurrying toward their encounter with their storied city, whose harshness, I imagined, stood in stark contrast to its promise. This, I understood, was the gamble of New York, the gamble that my own family had made. But like any gamble, it required luck to work out. And as the saying goes, the house always wins.

  In the morning the Minister and I were to meet with the Americans over the return of stolen artwork, found in the possession of a Geneva-based dealer who had smuggled a drawing to New York some years earlier, and was about to sell it to a private collector for a considerable sum. Federal agents had seized the work and had stored it in a warehouse in Queens. The drawing—The Pilgrim, by Reza Abbasi, court painter for a time for the Safavid king Shah Abbas—portrayed an old man on pilgrimage to the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad. It had been stolen from the shrine’s museum, and the custodians, one of whom—Mostafa Akbari, a man who for decades had been my Rasputin but who no longer spoke to me—had in recent months turned its theft into a matter of national indignation. No friend of the Minister and his foreign policy, Akbari knew the artwork’s repatriation could be used as gasoline to ignite the collective psyche.

  Symbolism aside, Abbasi was important to me because he had once been among my father’s preferred artists, and in later years—long after my father’s flight—my own. With his signature calligraphic lines, he was the first to forgo princes and heroes in favor of the everyman—dervishes, merchants, pilgrims, and scribes—and to turn the ordinary into something worthy of depiction. Why the Americans refused to hand back the drawing can be attributed only to malice. While in recent years they had returned several stolen items, they had now resumed their vengeful ways. And the Minister and I, were we to return home empty-handed, would be offering the Mashhad grumblers fodder for their false grievances.

  * * *

  SOMEONE KNOCKED. “Room service,” said the voice.

  A young man in a three-piece suit entered and placed a silver pot of boiling milk and a lone glass on the table. “From the Minister,” he said. “He wishes
you a good night’s sleep.” I thanked him and gave him the compulsory New York tip, which was someone’s daily salary in Tehran.

  That a man of my age and history should need warm milk in order to sleep was absurd, but the habit had taken root in me decades earlier, when, sleepless, I would tiptoe into the kitchen in the middle of the night to find my father, also awake, in his pajamas and felt slippers, sipping boiled milk and reading. Something about the midnight darkness stripped my father of his veneer, and on those occasions he seemed to me as no more or less than a man, like a flower reduced to its anther. After pouring me a glass he would fetch my coloring book and pencils, and we would sit together in silence, I coloring, he reading, until sleep would overtake us both and we would retreat to our respective bedrooms to wait out the darkness, each taking comfort in the other’s unspoken vigilance.

  * * *

  AS THE MILK BEGAN TO SOOTHE ME, my phone buzzed. A text from Noushin. She had been pestering me about a divorce and had dragged me to court three times. The judge would see us next Wednesday at ten in the morning, she informed me. “And Hamid, this time please don’t play games. I want nothing from you. Only a signature.”

  When I thought of us as we had been in the beginning, I yearned for her, still. The night we met, some twenty years earlier, she had been rounded up with her hip friends at a loud party held in her apartment uptown. Because a bootlegged copy of the film Z by Costa-Gavras was found in her VCR, the police had sent the group directly to the detention center. I interrogated her as I did the rest of them, going through the routine questions—how much alcohol had she consumed, who supplied it, why were the women so scantily dressed, why did the men look like hoboes, and other inquiries that made me feel like a customs officer checking off compulsory boxes on a form. But there was something about her that made me pause. She had the sullen, angular beauty of Anouk Aimée, my mother’s longtime screen heroine, and I imagined her driving at nightfall too close to the edge of a mountainous road, envisioning an escape from the tedium of the visible world. She answered my questions courteously but with a hint of annoyance, which charmed me. Annoyance rarely emerged during a first interrogation. But the times were changing. It was the summer of 1997 and reformists were high on their labbādeh-wearing candidate’s victory to the presidency. I attributed her insolence to her relative youth, her graduate art degree, and her generation’s newfound sense of entitlement. Tolerance, civil society, dialogue among civilizations—in those crepuscular years of the last millennium these words had infiltrated conversations, carrying echoes of the Austrian Hans Köchler and our own Ayatollah Haj Agha Nourollah, the old constitutionalist from Isfahan. I, too, was feeling more optimistic than I had in years, believing that we would, at last, align ourselves with what we had set out to achieve so long ago.