by Salar Abdoh
And what about the other martyrs of that fight in Syria?
Even in death some people were luckier than others.
At the Citizen, Mafiha seemed chirpier than ever. All the young women at the literary desk paid him more attention now that he was at last married and supposedly unavailable. He bantered with them and went to the gym and then to the sauna with the heads of the Censorship Department every afternoon to plead our cases. He was a hero, because everyone assumed that he fought for us to be less censored by the powers that be.
This all was a losing fight on my end. It was no fight, really. The fight was in northern Iraq and Syria and Yemen, yet I was here and didn’t know why. Men were dead and when I remembered them I had a moment’s pause, nothing more. My grief did not plumb deep enough to know tears, and even if there had been tears—in the way that people went on and on at martyr ceremonies—those tears would have been artificial, manufactured. I thought of that other martyr of the Syrian front, Nasif, who had pretended to be an Afghan: a man goes to the lengths of pretending he is from another country so he can go and fight a war and he gets killed for it. The mayor’s office and the Martyrs Foundation were not even giving him the benefits of a proper martyrdom back home. They had decided not to put up posters for him since he had gone to Syria to fight as an Afghan under false pretense. They would have to put up his posters in Afghanistan instead, which was beside the point, because over there no one would remember him or cry for him. He had never even been to Afghanistan. If there was ever a catch-22, this was it: Nasif went unremembered in two countries because at the end of his days he had belonged to both and neither.
During this time I received another e-mail from the scholar who could not come to our “excellent” country. I still had not answered this entity, ostensibly a woman, and had no idea what to say to her. The safe thing was to say nothing and forget it. I had had enough trouble from H about writing a short story where my neighborhood synagogue made a cameo. To go researching for a foreign scholar about the old Jewish neighborhoods of Tehran while this war was still on and while I was a part of it, I just didn’t know . . .
But what if she was genuine? Her reality played at the fringes of my mind. And each time I drove the thoughts off.
More weeks passed. The first showers of the season came to the north end of the city and one could glimpse snowcaps over the mountains surrounding Tehran.
It was Atia who finally broke the ice on the ground floor of the Citizen one day. She asked about my bad eye and wondered if I needed recommendations for a good doctor.
“I can see again, somewhat, if that’s what you’re asking. Turns out what I needed is this special eye drop. It’s very expensive. You can only get it in the black market. But now that I’m working under you, I can afford it. So, thank you, I suppose.” I started to go.
“Saleh, are you mad that I married or mad that I married Mafiha?”
I looked around. No one was supposedly watching and of course everyone was. “Is this a conversation we should be having now?”
“Probably not.”
I motioned to leave again.
She said, “There’s something I must tell you.”
“Another bombshell?”
We stood there for a moment and I recalled something. We had been in the middle of a combat operation with Cleric J and the other men of the mokeb tagging along, when a bomb blew up right near me. Beautiful green smoke enveloped everything. Just then I was doing something that no one in their right mind should have been doing at that moment: I was on a cell phone talking to Atia in Tehran. It was suicide, but this was far from a professional war and everybody and their mother was on their phones anyway, taking self-portraits of their own goddamn demise. My ears were ringing and I spoke into the phone: “Atia, I think I just died. I’ll call you later.”
I was convinced there had to be a giant round hole in my stomach. I reached and touched myself. Everything was there, no missing body parts, no bleeding out, no shortness of breath or feeling cold. I should definitely not have called Atia again, but I did. “Atia, I’m not dead.”
She had cried into the phone.
“Another bombshell, yes.” She glanced away from me on the busiest floor of the Citizen, swallowed hard, and said, “Mafiha is coming out with a new book.”
I shrugged. “Man’s a regular factory of new works. When is he not coming out with a new book!”
“This time he has a coauthor.”
“Nice. So you guys are already writing books with one another. I thought you and I would do something like that one day. But I guess the Book of Life had other plans for us, Atia.”
“Don’t philosophize.”
“All right. So who’s the lucky man or woman he’s writing this book with.”
“It has already been written.”
There was a long pause and I waited for her to go on. But she just stood there. I remembered her when she was fresh out of the university. Young girl from the provinces. Full of ideals. Those first monographs she’d written for the Martyrs Foundation—they had changed the equation. It was the first time someone had written about our war heroes not as flawless, but as men who had greatness and not such greatness in them, warts and all. She’d received a lot of flak for it. The Ministry of Censorship wanted long chunks of the books out, but Atia stood her ground. She’d fought to explain that heroes would be that much more interesting if we saw them in their entirety and not just as removed icons we could not touch. They’d eventually listened to her, because Atia was that kind of woman. She did not back down. She was the one who asked the hard questions when she went to interview the “big men” of the regime. She had upended the landscape of biographical writing in this country, and she’d done it single-handedly.
What was she trying to tell me now?
“Atia, you can either tell me or not tell me who the lucky coauthor is. It really doesn’t matter. It’s not my concern.”
“Dodonge.”
“Him?” My voice cracked. “The charlatan of the Syrian front?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“It never is. But what do I think, my dear Atia?”
Just then Mafiha appeared by the exit. He looked our way, smiled, and went to the elevators without stopping. I felt nothing.
Atia said, “You think I sold out!”
“There’s nothing to sell. Everything has already been bought and sold in this country. I know a lot about that. I’m an art reviewer, don’t forget.”
“You also write about war.”
“Oh that! I guess I lost my way for a while. I would ask you what their book is about, these two brilliant gentlemen. Let me guess: one of them is prowar and the other supposedly against it. Wait! Is the book some sort of debate then? Like a meeting of two great minds debating a subject?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, well. These guys really do know how to catch a tailwind.”
“Saleh!”
“What?”
“There’s something else.”
“I’m listening.”
“The Citizen is being bought out.”
* * *
I’d already done six art reviews for them. This would be the seventh and last before the Citizen changed hands and we all left en masse. This sort of thing happened so often that Atia and I and the others were used to it. Some merchant or politician with ten thousand kilos of dirty money under his mattress would come in and buy out wherever we worked. Then he’d oversee everything we did because he wanted the paper as a platform for his political ambitions. Sooner or later, working at the journal or newspaper or publishing house would turn to shit and we’d all leave anyway. The only good thing that came out of this was that we were savvy now and did not linger until things turned nasty. We left immediately.
This was going to be my last review. The show was being held at Tehran’s Modern Art Museum. I gave Mafiha the slip and went alone on opening day, even though I was almost certain Miss Homa wouldn’t be there fo
r him to try to hustle. Miss Homa never came to these things.
I was wrong. She was there, waiting.
“You have been avoiding me.”
“Miss Homa, it’s not every day someone asks you to kill them.”
“Is this what I asked of you?”
That day I’d visited her, she’d said she wanted me to take her to Iraq. To Karbala, to be specific, so that she could die there. But she wasn’t sick or dying, I’d reminded her. She’d smiled to that. Then I saw the halo, like the ones I saw hovering over every single martyr-to-be that I’d come across in my life. That certain shimmer that tells you the person is ready to go. At first I put it to the blindness of that left eye. That world of exquisite dancing lights which sometimes softened the blows of life. Even when Atia had told me that the Citizen was being bought out and that Mafiha and Dodonge were coming out with a book on war and peace together, I’d observed how much better it was at times to be half blind that way. Not fully, but just enough to see the world through a prism that took away its ugliness a little. As if one were looking at it all through one of those kaleidoscope tubes we used to twist and turn when we were kids.
“Why Karbala?” I hadn’t asked the question that day but I asked it now.
And her answer was ready-made: “Because of Imam Husayn, the grand martyr.”
“Miss Homa, you’ve lived one of the fullest lives I know of. Now you are suddenly religious?”
“It has nothing to do with that. And it has everything to do with it.”
During our chat people kept coming up to her to congratulate her on the show. It was a group event titled, Women of Art over Five Decades. But because this was her moment, even though there were eleven other artists in the show, a good half of the spiral space of the museum had been dedicated to her work alone.
“Why me? You could snap a finger right now and half of Tehran would jump at your command. They’d fly you to Karbala first class.”
She looked tired and thoughtful. She began to say something, but just then I saw Mafiha appear from around the corner. People stood in groups, chatting, pretending that even though death was everywhere they were still not alone, that they were with friends and that this was an important event. Instead of plastic cups of wine they held grape juice in their hands, they smiled vacantly and nodded their heads, they pointed to this or that canvas and said things.
I didn’t know what they said. I had done something I’d never forget or forgive myself for. When they brought Ali-Akbar’s body parts out of that school, I had been filming and talking into my camera. Had I known that leg was Ali-Akbar’s I wouldn’t have erased the video. But I’d erased the only final memory I had of the martyr. Him with his baggy military shirt because he hardly ever ate. Just skin and bones really. Skin and bones and the best damn shot in a company of snipers. Dead because he stepped like a fool over a trip wire.
Mafiha pulled up alongside us and beamed at Miss Homa.
“This is my boss,” I said with practiced respect in my voice. He was Atia’s husband, after all, even if he wasn’t technically my boss after the sale of the Citizen was complete.
Miss Homa nodded.
Mafiha switched gears into his usual chatter and I lost the words. Something about wanting to do a complete sketch on her for an art magazine overseas, France maybe, or the United States. My mind drifted. I thought of the British writer Graham Greene in the Suez reporting during a war. Getting shot at grew tedious after a while. He became bored. War was mostly boring. But it also depended on a lot of other things. You can’t get bored when somebody is screaming Allahu akbar from two hundred meters away and vowing to cut off your head. Boredom has no place there. Boredom runs away, because you can’t.
When I moved back into the conversation, Miss Homa was talking.
“Which part of my negative answer do you not understand, sir?”
“I know people abroad, Miss Homa,” Mafiha said. “The article I’d do would—”
“Would what? Make me famous?”
“Miss Homa, you already are famous.”
“Increase my prices?”
“Well!”
“Not interested.”
Mafiha was smart enough to know when he was rejected. He bowed and removed himself. More people came over. More deference toward Miss Homa. It was like watching an opera.
I said, “All right. I agree. I’ll take you to Karbala.”
“What changed your mind all of a sudden?”
“This place. It’s horrible.”
“Saleh, I will explain in more detail why I must go. Please come see me this week. When do you think we can leave?”
“When the ratings of the Abbas show on television reach the moon.”
“Is this a joke that I should understand, Saleh?”
I watched her. I thought I knew why she wanted to go to Karbala. In the winter of her life she had suddenly become too famous. What was she going to do with this fame so late in the game? It was almost a slap in the face.
I said, “It is only half a joke, Miss Homa. I’ll visit you next week. I promise.”
“I want to be over there for Arbaeen.”
I had been hoping she wouldn’t say that. The thought of Miss Homa walking alongside ten million other pilgrims converging by foot on Karbala on the fortieth day of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom didn’t suit me at all.
She seemed to read my mind. “If you don’t take me, I’ll go by myself. I’ll get a plane ticket to Najaf and walk the seventy-five kilometers to Karbala with the pilgrims.”
I stared at her some more, believing every word she said. “That does not give us much time.”
“Less than three weeks.”
“You seem to have everything worked out.”
“At my age, one does. There may not be a tomorrow.”
“You still have not told me why you wish to do this.”
“Do you ask this of every pilgrim?”
“No. Only one pilgrim. You, Miss Homa.”
“When you visit me next week, I will explain. I will have our tickets ordered for Najaf by then.”
I started to object, but then saw there was no point. A light peck on the cheek and I left her to the admirers who were waiting to move in for small talk and signatures.
* * *
There was nothing I liked about this museum. It was a prerevolution structure that they said was a copy of the famous Guggenheim building in New York. I thought the place redundant and the stuffy spiral architecture more like a giant human aquarium. Still, the place carried one of the richest contemporary art collections ever assembled anywhere on earth in its basement; it came from a time when the country had been flush with new oil money before the revolution.
My phone rang. It was Cleric J from Iraq. Not a good time to answer a call from the war.
I got a glimpse of a burly artist I’d written poorly about two reviews ago. He made three-meter-long eyesores of nothing but black paint, and just the word love inscribed in a corner of the canvas in the thuluth script of Arabic with gold letters. The review had brought in a string of phone calls to the Citizen and physical threats. They were mostly from collectors who saw a bad review as a drop in their investment.
I decided to make myself scarce.
Outside, Atia and a group of theater actors were chatting away. I tried to shove off, but she’d seen me.
“You’ve barely been here.”
“I’ll come back when it’s less crowded.”
In her hand she held a postcard-sized invitation. It was for the Mafiha-Dodonge “War & Peace Talk” in a bookstore the next evening.
I pointed to the cards. “You are really working hard for your man, aren’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“What are they going to talk about? That there are two sides to a story? That sometimes you need to have war, but that peace is really much better? Could have fooled me!”
“Why do you always have to be such a killjoy?”
“You know, your hu
sband just tried to work Miss Homa . . .”
“And?”
“She’d have none of it.”
Atia laughed. “He tries too hard sometimes.”
“Just sometimes?”
“I’ll put your sarcasm down to your hanging around so many dead men. It can’t be good for your mind, you know. You are an encyclopedia of trauma.”
“I don’t have any trauma, Atia. My only trauma is that you went and got married.”
She pointed to her theater friends. “See all those people over there? They all say you’re working for the state promoting war. They say you’re an informant. A stooge. A warmonger. An opportunist.”
I knew most of the people she referred to by face. A predictable lot. They never got tired of shoving Chekhov or Samuel Beckett down people’s throats. Throw them in a real Beckett landscape, like the town of Baiji in Iraq after the enemy had finally retreated from there, and they wouldn’t last half an hour. There’s nothing more absolute than square miles of rubble after a prolonged battle. Nothing more soul-crushing and thorough. Beckett knew something about that. These people hadn’t a clue.
Suddenly I wished Mafiha had given me the theater desk too. I’d know what to do.
“I’m an informant?” I shrugged. “Yes, I inform on war.”
“You know that’s not what they mean.”
“If I’m an informant, what’s Dodonge, your husband’s new best friend? The guy has made himself a virtual hero on other people’s miseries in Syria.”
“Dodonge is different than people like us.”
“Meaning he has never read Kant or Rousseau? Never worked for any literary journals?”
“Yes, something like that, Saleh.” She shoved one of the invitation cards into my hand. “Come tomorrow night if you like. Or don’t come. I don’t care.”
