by Salar Abdoh
We’d been together on the ever-shuffling musical chairs of several magazine and newspaper staffs for years, always keeping that uneasy distance, not caving to the intimacy that traps folks who work on deadline in closed spaces. Readers knew her for her short biographies of famous commanders of the Iran-Iraq War, martyrs all. Capable and cool under fire, she ended up eventually running the show wherever she worked and had to play nice to the men who got depressed over her no’s and the women who labored to bring her down a notch or two. She was from the northeast, and like a lot of the women of that region of Central Asia, her attractiveness was wholesome, round-faced, smiling, and crimson, and maybe that was why she got accosted so much. She was exotic in an exotic land.
“Saleh!” She held my gaze. “Why did you stop sending in reports? We heard all kinds of rumors about you. At one point, Dodonge from State TV had everyone believing you’d gone over to the enemy.”
“That son of a whore would do that! Dodonge wants the Syria coverage all to himself. I ran into him near Golan, you know. There was nothing going on. But he had some Syrians start shooting in the air for effect while his boys filmed him for Channel 1. He lied right into the camera and said there was a battle in progress!”
We sat in Café Lowkey between Bahar and Mofateh. It was a small place that served the finest kookoo sabzi in town. The best part about the joint was that no one we knew ever went there because it was next to a mosque and had no toilet. Atia kept looking at me as if I were a brother gone awry. There had been a moment, after enough years had passed, when we considered becoming lovers. Then the moment passed because, for starters, H had called Atia in one day and read her the riot act. It was just after my “questionable” short story collection was published, when H was not sure of my loyalties. Six months later H didn’t care one way or another if the two of us were lovers, because by then it had been established that the short story collection, which sold a total of sixteen copies, was hardly some foreign plot to bring down the government. Nevertheless, Atia and I had already let H’s intrusion make the decision for us. It was as if his nosing into our lives was a source of assurance rather than anxiety. We didn’t have to listen to him. But we did. When it really counted, we did. The things that we were not certain of, a guy like H could decide for us. He was like a holy man you go to for advice, a therapist.
“Saleh, we’re not talking about Dodonge here. It’s you. What’s happened to you?”
“I was looking for life’s meaning,” I said uncertainly.
“In Syria?”
“One has to start somewhere.”
One day I had watched a caravan of refugees being shifted from one place to another. There is something shameful in witnessing the hunger of an honorable woman. A mother, child held tightly to her chest, walks by not glancing at you and not asking for food, even though she’s half-starved and her feet are sore and blistered. Maybe she had been a teacher in another life, a musician, a nurse, a housekeeper; she asks for nothing except that you—you who are not a part of her solution but, she suspects, a part of her misery—go away and take the soldiers you’re with along with you. You are searching for life’s meaning and this woman marches her misery march. What do you do? What do you file in your report? What is it you all want from us? she says. Says it matter-of-factly. As if reason had anything to do with why any of this was happening.
“Why don’t you get married, Saleh? Settle down.”
“H called me in. Told me I can’t go to Syria again.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I am. And I have a question for you: why don’t you get married? Better yet, why don’t we marry each other!”
“Then our mystery would disappear. Two more reporters get married to each other.”
“Mystery? We’re a couple of underpaid writers in a filthy, polluted city you can barely breathe in.”
Atia stared at me. “Sell one of those paintings Miss Homa gave you and you’ll be a millionaire. You can relax at home and think about all the literature you’ll write that no one will read.”
“I only have one painting from the great Miss Homa.”
“Well, her sales are going through the roof, aren’t they? Sit on that work one more year, sell, and get out of this business.”
“Keeping my mother in a nursing home is not cheap, you know. Even if I sell Miss Homa’s painting, I’ll still have to work.”
“Shame on you, Saleh, for keeping your mother in a nursing home.”
“Will you look after her then?”
“I can’t even look after myself.”
Our banter went on. In this town, writing for a living was a juggling act. You had to have seven balls in the air at all times or you’d sink. Some guys ran phony private classes for a living, scuttling from one part of town to another giving lectures on symbolism and metaphor. Others like me and Atia, we did a little of everything—a theater review here, an art review there, the biography of a martyr, a day-in-the-life of a future martyr, a film script about a sniper in Iraq—whatever it took to bring the bread to the table. One of my luckiest breaks was that the Citizen had needed an art reviewer when I’d needed a decent nursing home for my mother. For three years every Friday I made the rounds of the gallery openings in Tehran and would pick a couple of shows to write about. It was another side job but it gave me an in—into the moneyed class who shuttled between Dubai, London, and Tehran, fixing prices and making deals with the international auction houses. Theirs was a bulletproof way of laundering money and getting around the economic sanctions the Americans had on us. The money laundering was an art in itself; using inflated prices for contemporary art was true genius because no one could accuse you of being in the black market for frowned-upon ancient artifacts. For a penniless reporter, this mostly just meant occasional world-class food at parties where women strutted about in evening dresses that cost more than an entire combat operation at Khan-T. But it also gave one a chance to find that rare, one-in-a-thousand real artist whose cause one might champion. I’d done that with Miss Homa, who had returned the favor one day by gifting me one of her works, a medium-sized one-by-one-meter painting rendering the inside of a mosque’s classic blue dome. Atia was right: Miss Homa’s prices had really gone sky-high in the last couple of years and I could sell the painting.
The two of us looked up at the same moment and saw Dodonge, the reporter from the Syrian front, standing at the door of the café smiling. From the way he was smiling I knew he’d followed us here. He wanted something.
“If it isn’t one of the Defenders of the Holy Places! How are you, Saleh?”
“What do you want?”
“I want you not to go to Syria anymore.” He smiled at Atia as he said this.
“I was already given the message. You don’t have to worry.”
“Oh, I’m not worried.”
“Yes you are.”
As a TV reporter the man had a hundred thousand devoted fans who followed his postings religiously and treated him like a king. He was the indisputable hero of the Syrian front. Now I understood why I’d been hauled in by H for that chat. Dodonge must have been the instigator. He worried about posterity. Men like him who worked with film still had a complex about the written word. They didn’t want it interfering with their carefully calibrated image. Syria belonged to Dodonge and he was here, after my interrogation, to rub it in.
Once again I realized that everything I’d suffered in the past few years was at the hands of people somehow associated with the camera, either in front of it, like Dodonge, or behind it, like Saeed. You’ll never convince me that pushing a button is as hard an act as executing even a mediocre sentence, let alone a good one. But it was the Dodonges and the Saeeds of the world who received all the glory while the likes of me and Atia were lucky to get the equivalent of two good meals from a translation job that took a month’s labor. This is how the world is and we suffered the malady of writers the world over: envy.
Dodonge’s eyes stayed on Atia
. “You should grace us too for a coffee one day, Miss Atia.”
“Who’s us?” Atia asked coldly.
“Me. Dodonge, at your service.”
“Are you finished here, Mr. Dodonge?”
“Oh, and this.” He dropped a small flyer on our table. “I’ve written a book about my war experiences. I’d like you to attend the launch. Both of you.”
I was about to say that he must have hired a ghost writer, because he couldn’t string together two coherent sentences on paper if his life depended on it. But Atia spoke first.
“And where will this launch of yours take place?”
Dodonge smiled. “It’s a surprise. Even for you, Miss Atia.”
“What do you mean, even for me?”
“Ah!” He smiled, nodded, and was gone.
Atia and I sat there silent. Depressed. I felt violated. Maybe Atia did too.
“Speaking of marriage,” I said, “I need you to come somewhere with me.” I explained to her Nasif’s situation back in Syria.
“So now you’re fixing marriages for these guys? What are the chances of any of them even coming back in one piece?”
“Well, the widow will at least receive a stipend from the government.”
“You are an idiot. You think this is what these women think about? They want their husbands back. They want to be a part of life, not death.”
“Atia, you are the one who writes biographies of martyrs.”
“It’s a job.”
“I rest my case.”
“And no longer. The Citizen made me chief editor of their film section.”
“No one deserves such a prestigious position more. Congratulations!”
She reached for the last of the kookoo. Our waiter was a familiar young theater actor who had dressed up like Charlie Chaplin today. Chaplin with a beard. He shuffled over, winked, and set down two teas with rock candy. “Mr. Saleh, I preferred it when you wrote art reviews. What’s with writing about the Defenders of the Holy Places? I didn’t take you for one of those guys.”
I nodded to Chaplin. “Doesn’t the Bureau of Public Places give you a hard time about looking like a homeless Westerner from a hundred years ago?”
“They don’t mind Chaplin too much. I just tell them I’m practicing for a play.” He smiled. “Chaplin’s films were mostly silent, you know. Mute. The Bureau of Public Places likes things mute!”
Atia sucked on the rock candy as the kid walked off. I watched her. And loved her. It was an uncorrupted love, born of having fought in the same trenches, the same battles over every crumb of culture, every little weekly column we might scrounge and get past censors without having to completely sell out. I now realized that aside from the Defenders of the Holy Places, who had a habit of dying on me, I didn’t really have another true friend here. Atia was it.
“Saleh, now that I’m running the film section, the boss wants you to come home from the cold and take over the art section for the Citizen.”
“For that prostitute Mafiha?”
“You don’t give him enough credit. But yes, him. Mafiha.”
I looked curiously at Atia. Something was off. “Say, how is it Mafiha suddenly makes you the head of film?”
“What, you think I don’t deserve it?”
“Of course you do. But men like Mafiha don’t just hand one a plum. They usually have a motive.”
Atia glanced away. “What if I said there was one?”
“A motive for you to run the film section and for me to head the art section of the most widely read publication in the country?”
“Yes,” she said impatiently.
I didn’t want to know what the motive was. And didn’t care. Mafiha was the kind of guy who took and took. There was a difference between him and a man like Dodonge. Dodonge actually believed in the fight in places like Syria. He wanted to carry the fight everywhere, right to the Wailing Wall if he could, as long as he got to shine and play the hero. He was an image maker. But one who didn’t mind dying for that image. I was sure in the back of his mind he was already looking forward, preparing for his martyrdom. But he wanted it to happen on his own terms and on a grand scale. Mafiha, on the other hand, was a pure wheeler-dealer; everything in his hands turned on the axis of profit. He had hounded me before to take over the art section, but not because he thought me capable as a manager, which I wasn’t. But because I happened to know Miss Homa, the shining, dying star of Tehran’s art world who would not give Mafiha the light of day.
“I can’t do it anymore, Atia. I can’t write art reviews. I never believed in them to begin with.”
“You don’t have to actually write them. Just run the ship as chief editor, like I do with the film section.”
“I’m not like you. I’m no good at that stuff, Atia. I don’t know anything about managing people.”
“What are you good for then?”
I thought about the red house at Khan-T. Defending it. I hadn’t been much good at that either. The whole ordeal had been an exercise in futility anyhow. The enemy had probably already retaken the place. Or pulverized it. But there hadn’t been time to think about all that back then. This was what I wanted: to not think. I wanted to disappear the way that Proust guy had disappeared in Iraq.
“In any case, I have a job to do. I have to go back to Baghdad.”
“Says who?”
“H.”
I told her about the book and having to bury the thing at the Eye of the Horse, only to have it resurrected in front of me in H’s interrogation room.
“Saleh, are you even supposed to tell me any of this?”
“Certainly not. If H finds out I told you, he’ll make my decade miserable. Yours too.”
“Saleh, please visit your mother.”
“I will. I’ll go as Charlie Chaplin. I’ll put on a show at the nursing home.”
Atia didn’t laugh.
* * *
My mother hung on to life in such a foul mood that one of the health aides at the nursing home had called it “bad taste.” It was as if Nane-Saleh only stayed put for the sake of the endless Turkish soaps she watched on television. She had never forgiven the universe for fooling her into marrying a man who did not know how to make money—my old man. She forgave the world even less for having her make that mistake a second time.
I made up for the guilt of having committed her by spending nearly every penny I made on her habitat. Five years earlier she’d buried that second husband who had squandered his own considerable inheritance and left her nothing. After that she had started going downhill herself.
As I watched her now I felt the onset of the occasional blindness in one eye that I’d experienced first back in Iraq, in Karbala. It usually became more acute when I was around death and the dying.
“Saleh, why have you come here? Go! Leave!”
“But I love you, Nane joon.”
“You do not. You only come here to watch my suffering. Scribble, scribble—that’s all you are good for! Like your wretched father. You are not a man. You are a monkey of a man. Your poverty does not interest me.”
“Nane, I’m not rich, but I’m not so poor either. Look around at where you live. Not just anyone can afford this.”
“Why do you have them call me Nane-Saleh? My name is not Saleh’s Mother. You’ve been hanging around Arabs too long. You have become an Arab.”
“Thank you.”
“What do you mean, thank you?”
“Arabs are not like us. Their blood is warm. They mean what they say.”
“No one means what they say. You are such a fool, Saleh.”
“Nane! Why won’t you look at me?”
“I don’t want to look at you. I’m busy.”
She had not been this chatty in months. It was a good sign. Unlike most mothers of the Middle East she showed her love, or those rare tiny bits of it, solely through scolding. It wasn’t love to write home about, but I took it.
Her gaze never wavered from that TV. On the screen was ano
ther Turkish chef d’oeuvre with a lot of colorful Ottoman period costumes and casual overacting. I left her to her room and the make-believe. There was an ancient woman next door who wailed three times a day for exactly five minutes—as if she were calling the morning, noon, and evening prayers—warning everyone within earshot that Churchill was attacking from the south and the Bolsheviks from the north. She was living a loop of Iran and the Allied invasion of the country in 1941. It would have been funny had the place not smelled of mothballs, cleaning agents, urine, and insolent nurses.
I wish I could tell you that my heart was heavy as I left that place. That I missed the woman who had birthed me. But what I mostly felt was an absolute resentment that included almost everyone in this city. Sleepwalkers. I would have not minded bringing the war here for just fifteen minutes—maybe up in one of the posh neighborhoods of the north side where they hired dirt-poor Afghan laborers to wipe the ground of their palatial homes where they showed off gold-plated shower heads and toilet seats. There is something about coming back to peace that makes a man rot from inside. Not every man, I am certain, feels this way, and not everyone wants to rain rockets on people who do not know, or feel, that there is a war next door.
But I felt it. Because I was rotting from inside.
* * *
Back at the house, the synagogue was jumping. There was a great big red table that had been moved out into the courtyard upon which men and women were setting plates and dishes. I thirsted for a feast like that. For happiness. For the living. The blindness in the left eye was like fireworks. There were starbursts of lights, and objects flitted about as if on holiday. I could still ride the motorcycle but it wasn’t easy with just one eye. Dimensions became tricky and everybody seemed to be wearing a gigantic neon hat. With artillery shells, sometimes it looked like it was raining meteors. I would stand rooted to my spot mesmerized by my own nonseeing. Green and yellow smoke would turn into a cacophony of more color and I imagined genies of various shapes dancing on these fields of death of my own private Middle East. As men ran every which way shouting in Arabic to take cover, I stood there like a child, overcome by my ineptitude, thankful that I wasn’t a soldier but a witness, a periodically blind one, free of having to grease a weapon or kick a dead enemy combatant in the ribs.
