The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  “I’ll grow up and earn my own money,” he had promised. “I’ll make us richer than those Jews. I’ll make them see we don’t need them.”

  “And what does that make you?” Raphael’s Wife challenged him every time. “A bastard with no name. Belonging nowhere and wanted by no one.”

  Raphael’s Son didn’t dare tell her, but he never did buy into his mother’s cheerful certainty that “our time has come” just because Aaron had died. Nor did he believe for a moment that the rickety old woman with the bent spine and aching knees had the power to direct the universe to act in her own favor. He, more than anyone, recognized her uselessness not only in grand, cosmic affairs but also in the everyday struggle to stay alive and maintain one’s dignity at the same time. What struck him the night of Elizabeth’s visit was how pathetic his mother seemed compared to the younger woman, how small and old and unsightly she was as she made her threats and promises. He hated his mother for this, and hated Elizabeth even more. He hated her eyes that appeared to see everything and nothing at once. He hated the way the white paint on her expensive car glowed in the dark, how it reminded him and everyone else that she alone could get away from the squalor, the constant wanting, that trapped them.

  * * *

  Raphael’s Wife, her son concluded that night, was no match for Elizabeth Soleyman. It would fall to him to arm himself properly and reduce her to the same torment she could so easily impose on others.

  __________________

  Throughout most of the 1970s, Iran was flush with oil wealth and booming with development projects. Tehran’s expanding economy and an influx of tourists, foreign workers, and migrants from villages and small towns around the country, had created a heady and volatile sense of opportunity and danger, peril and promise, that was unprecedented. For a brief time, old and new, devout and blasphemous, rigid and lenient, commingled without coalescing. Shiny high-rise buildings tore through the ground next to ancient monuments; girls in hot pants and miniskirts rode the bus with women wrapped in black chadors from head to toe. Young men prayed at the mosque five times a day and gathered in underground cells at night to study Marx and Lenin; teenage girls listened to David Bowie and plotted revolution against the corruption of capitalism.

  In Bagh-e Yaas, Elizabeth absorbed her grief and responsibilities with the kind of cool rationalism and logical determination that was implausible (some would say impossible) in a woman. Gone was the shy and unobtrusive almost-houseguest who, even after she had married Aaron and bore him children, felt more comfortable eating at Manzel the Mute’s kitchen table than in the grand dining room. Gone too was the sensible little schoolgirl who, even as she clinched the title of mistress of Bagh-e Yaas, couldn’t seem to understand its usefulness.

  What emerged instead was a faithful and unfaltering guardian of the remains of a war that, though she was not a party to it, had cost her her life’s dream: the name, the estate, and what was left of the Soleyman family. The first thing she did was turn up at her husband’s office the day after the end of the shivah. By then, she had already morphed into an ageless, steel-faced creature who did not pay the slightest attention to the awkward smiles and sideways glances extended at her from every corner, had no problem cross-examining Aaron’s secretary, assistant, and any one of the string of men who walked into his office that day without knocking, just to see with their own eyes what they had heard the widow was up to.

  They found her sitting comfortably at his desk, reading letters and reviewing the papers that had piled up in his absence.

  Her only ally, that first day and in all the subsequent months when she fought off every direct and disguised attempt at taking over the estate, was an immaculately dressed and scrubbed and shaved and combed and cologned “attorney with friends in the all the right places” who had advised Aaron on business affairs and, out of loyalty to him, felt allegiance to his widow. He told Elizabeth about a highly controversial and widely unpopular piece of legislation imposed by the shah in his effort to modernize Iran. The set of laws known as the Family Protection Act (FPA) had been introduced in 1967, but they were only enforced beginning in 1975. Among other provisions, they granted women the right of inheritance. Daughters were allowed half as much as sons; widows could inherit up to one-eighth of the husband’s property. This was revolutionary enough, but the law also stipulated that for the purposes of dividing the estate, civil courts would have dominion over family and religious institutions.

  The law’s unpopularity stemmed as much from financial considerations by men as from the social implications of having women run around with money in their pockets. Worse yet was the outrage of allowing secular judges to meddle in affairs historically entrusted to mullahs and rabbis. Not that anyone believed the law would have real-world consequences in all but the most extreme eventualities. By far the majority of the country, especially its cloistered, uneducated, barely-allowed-to-leave-the-house-without-a-male-companion women, remained entirely ignorant of its existence on the books. Those who did know would nevertheless have to be cretins to think that either man or mosque would tolerate such anarchy in its realm. This was even more so among Jews who, traditionally, handled family affairs more privately than the larger Muslim community.

  But then there’s the one-in-a-million instance of a very rich man who goes and dies when he has no living father, brother, or nephews, leaves behind two young daughters and a wife who has no clue how a woman should act but can recite the entire text of the FPA the way her father could recite the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and what you get is a briefcase-toting, constitution-quoting lawyer in a double-breasted suit with a silk tie and matching pocket handkerchief filing briefs and serving notices on behalf of—what has this world come to when a widow can do more than sob and sigh?—Elizabeth Soleyman.

  __________________

  The great snowstorm of 1977 began on a Tuesday in February and lasted twenty-two days. By the fifth day, traffic in Tehran was at a standstill and schools had closed and the frozen bodies of stray dogs and street drunks were covered by piles of new snow that would turn to ice overnight and remain locked all winter. In Bagh-e Yaas, Elizabeth sat with her daughters in the midday twilight and rehearsed the multiplication table, assigned writing exercises, and practiced reading. Power was out and the phones were dead because the lines had caved under the weight of snow, and running water was scarce because the pipes had frozen and cracked.

  On the night of February 24, Elizabeth put her daughters to bed at eight o’clock, locked all the doors, and went into Aaron’s old study to work. At eleven, she looked in on them again, turned off the lights in the hallway and staircase, and went to bed. At seven a.m., she woke to Angela shaking her forcefully by the shoulder.

  In spite of the hour, the sky was still dark. A cold wind, like the sting of a viper’s tongue, cut through the air from the direction of the girls’ rooms. Before she had cleared the darkness out of her eyes Elizabeth heard Angela say, “I can’t find her.”

  Elizabeth bounded, barefoot, toward Noor’s room. The door was open, the light on. The window, unlatched and loose on its hinges, flapped back and forth in the wind. Below it in the yard, the ground was covered with five inches of fresh powder, unblemished but for a single line of footprints that led from below Noor’s window to the yard gates and, beyond them, a city of 4.5 million people.

  __________________

  They searched the house, then searched it again. Elizabeth called the military police and enlisted an army of officers and her own employees to comb the area around Bagh-e Yaas. She asked all of Aaron’s old friends in high places to call their contacts in the shah’s secret police. They put the word out to the legions of spies and informants in Tehran and its vicinity that a four-year-old girl with light-brown hair and a white nightdress had been snatched from her bed.

  The footsteps in the yard looked like a man’s. They led to the main yard gate closest to the Big House, and from there blended into a dozen others on the sidewalk along the A
venue of Tranquility. In the Big House, all the doors remained locked, and none of the servants had seen or heard an intruder.

  * * *

  Elizabeth’s first impulse was to blame Raphael’s Wife. If anyone hated the Soleymans enough to resort to stealing a child, she told the police, it was the bellicose widow and her truculent son. Her suspicion was echoed by Manzel and her husband, and by the other servants in the house, so the police descended on Raphael’s Wife just as she arrived home after a night’s work emptying bedpans and washing soiled linens at the Razi Hospital near Kennedy Street. Public transportation had come to a near halt because of the storm, so she had waited at the bus stop on Customs Square for over an hour in the early-morning freeze before deciding to brave the snow and walk home. She arrived cold and exhausted and covered in mud and slush to find three men in dark blue uniforms threatening to take Raphael’s Son to jail if he didn’t show them where his mother was hiding “Mrs. Soleyman’s daughter.”

  “In a shroud, six feet underground, with a dog pissing on it all day long,” is how Raphael’s Wife answered the question for her son. “That’s where I’ll put them all one day soon.”

  Her ardent wish notwithstanding, she claimed she had no hand in Noor’s disappearance.

  “I was rubbing shit out of metal toilets all night,” she said. “Go to Razi Hospital and ask for yourself.”

  Child abductions were rare but not unheard of in Iran. In nearly all the known cases, the kidnapped were not hurt. They were sold for profit or raised by an infertile couple, or they were held for ransom, or spirited away by Gypsies and put to work as beggars. In the old days when girls were married off as early as seven or eight years old, some ran away from home and surfaced in a nearby city. In more recent times a handful of women, having been divorced by their husbands and denied the right to see their children, stole them from the father’s house.

  For weeks, the servants in Bagh-e Yaas were interrogated by the police and private detectives. Neighbors, street vendors, beggars, and even teachers at the girls’ school were questioned multiple times. Twice after the initial interview, Raphael’s Wife was picked up in an army jeep and taken to the police station to answer questions. Her son was approached by ex-SAVAK agents turned private detectives and offered money in exchange for information.

  * * *

  Elizabeth had turned Aaron’s office into a search-and-rescue workplace. She memorized every detail, however irrelevant, paid for every tip, sent Manzel’s husband or drove herself to every location. She ran ads in every daily and weekly newspaper and magazine, promising a reward. She hired a government informant to watch Raphael’s wife and son. She had a notebook in which she wrote the name and information of every person she knew or every stranger who had contacted her or the police about Noor. She didn’t need the notes herself; she remembered every word, every digit, and every address without trying. She kept the written record for the police and the detectives, for Manzel and her husband, for Angela, even, in case it took that long—long enough for her to grow into adulthood—before Noor was found. In case Elizabeth died and left the task of finding the child to Manzel. In case the professionals gave up and new ones had to be hired.

  * * *

  A city teeming with new faces and multitudes of new immigrants every day; where more than half the female population was hidden under chadors; where a network of covered alleys and domed pathways connected old shops and houses thronged with occupants, and taxis and buses packed to double and triple capacity merged into and out of a maze of ancient streets and new highways. This was the torment of a woman at once incapable of delusion and unable to capitulate. She would never stop searching, yet she, more than anyone, was aware of the near-impossibility of finding Noor. She could be anywhere, invisible in plain sight; or she could be kingdoms and time zones away.

  * * *

  Years after the formal search for Noor had stopped and the mystery of her disappearance had morphed into an urban legend that haunted the children of Tehran’s rich and beautiful, those who remembered Raphael’s Wife still believed she had devoured the girl with the force of her widow’s sigh.

  __________________

  People called every day—well-meaning people, mercenaries who demanded money in exchange for information, policemen looking to supplement their salaries, street sweepers and local beggar women and even a resourceful Gypsy. They had seen a child who fit Noor’s description; they had seen a picture on a wall somewhere; they had heard of a barren woman suddenly coming into a toddler.

  A few hours before the Persian New Year in March 1977, a night nurse at Razi Hospital in Tehran admitted a five-year-old boy with severe dehydration. The woman who had brought him in, a one-legged Gypsy who, at first, claimed she was the mother, told the nurse that the child had refused to eat or drink for many days; he had to be force-fed to stay alive, and even then he was yellow and listless and hadn’t urinated in more than a day. He had a boy’s name—Ahmad—and a shaved head, which was common, but when she removed the many layers of clothing he was wrapped in, the night nurse discovered that the patient was in fact a girl.

  The night nurse had barely finished the call to the police when the one-legged Gypsy changed her story: the child was a friend’s; the real mother was too fearful of being blamed for the girl’s condition to bring her in. She might be five years old or she might older, or younger. She was being passed as a boy so she wouldn’t be shoved aside or beaten by other kids begging on the street or selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. Still, the nurse insisted that the police come in and talk to the woman.

  She placed the call at 2:15 on New Year’s Day. The police captain on duty promised he would rush over but took his time, drinking hot tea with sugar and smoking his beloved Oshnoo cigarettes until the nurse called again at 5:15. He still hadn’t arrived at eight when the nurse’s shift was over, so she took it upon herself to call the number advertised in newspapers and on the radio for information about Noor. The one-legged Gypsy and her boy-girl patient were still there when the nurse left the second-floor, thirty-bed hall reserved for patients with noninfectious diseases. She called the police station one last time to warn that she was going to leave the hospital, instructed the other nurses to keep a close eye on the girl until Elizabeth or the police arrived.

  At 8:40, no one on the floor recalled having seen a one-legged woman or a dehydrated child for some time.

  __________________

  That night, a man called on a crackling, staticky phone line.

  “Forgive me for calling so late,” he said. “I’ve been in America and just learned about the catastrophe.”

  He introduced himself as Hussein, which meant nothing to Elizabeth under the circumstances, as she could think of two dozen strangers by the same name who had called her since Noor vanished, and a few more who had been stopped and questioned by the police, by her own men, even by her and Manzel’s husband in the frenzied, desperate search the day before for the two fugitives from Razi Hospital.

  “I would have called sooner, had I known, just to express my sympathy. I don’t have children myself, you see, but I imagine it must be agony.”

  He sounded nervous, at once eager to explain and in a hurry to hang up.

  “Who is this?” Elizabeth asked with the remains of all the strength she could muster.

  The man paused. “Oh,” he said after a moment. It was clear her question had surprised him. He must have been certain she would know who he was.

  “It’s Hussein,” he said, disappointment spilling across the line. “Your old f—” he caught himself, “classmate.” He paused again, still hoping he wouldn’t have to say any more, then gave up. “Hussein Zemorrodi.”

  As if to console himself, or because he couldn’t stand the silence that followed even that introduction, he added, “Of course I didn’t expect you to remember. It’s been some time. And you must be preoccupied.”

  Eight years had passed since Elizabeth took refuge with the Zemorrodi household
when she had nowhere else to live. In the interim, he had finished high school, attended university in Iran, then transferred on a scholarship paid for by the shah’s government to Cal Poly Pomona in California. For her, that was a lifetime during which she became a wife, mother, widow, and finally now a woman searching for her lost child.

  “I wanted to say,” he murmured, “beside my sympathies, that is. My mother . . . I called to wish my family a Happy New Year, you see. She told me the police were in the house, looking for a woman they thought had . . .

  “At any rate, my parents are happy to help. They said the police went door-to-door all over the area.”

  “Is there something you wanted to tell me?” Elizabeth finally asked. Her voice was calm and steady and betrayed neither great anguish about Noor nor pleasure at speaking with her old friend.

  Hussein considered the question.

  “I was thinking. There must be a way to find people you lose. A better way than what we have. There must . . .”

  He fell silent again, breathing fast and urgently as if to keep up with the rush of thoughts in his head.

  “I tell you what,” he finally announced. “Take down my address and phone number. I’ll be working on this for a while, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m able to explain, but in the meantime, feel free to . . .”

  She memorized his information, never intending to call or write.

  __________________

  Toward the end of March, the weather finally thawed. All over Tehran, mounds of dirty snow that had been shoveled to the side of the road and remained frozen throughout the winter began to melt into muddy rivulets that streamed down the alleys and gathered in potholes and water storage tanks.

  On April 1, 1977, a street sweeper came upon a child’s white cotton nightgown, dirty and torn, in an overflowing gutter on the side of the street behind Razi Hospital. He tried to pull the gown onto the pile of garbage he was going to haul away, but he felt something heavy tug at it from inside the gutter. So he put his broom away and got out a shovel, dug up the dirt and stones and other bits of trash that must have been freed from some icy heap behind the hospital and dragged into the gutter, and found a child attached by the neck to the nightgown.