The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  The body had been smashed to the bone with a rock or heavy object, then preserved, blood and flesh and hair and organs pushing through open wounds, in the ice. The gown looked like it had been soaked in blood, much of which had washed out in the stream, and pulled off the body and over the head, where the collar caught on the chin. The face was unrecognizable, but there was no mistaking the shaved head. The Gypsy woman, the police decided before they broke the news to Elizabeth, must have escaped through the hospital’s back door. Fearing detection and arrest if she were caught with a stolen child, she had bashed Noor’s head in, pummeled her body, then shoved it under the week-old mountain of hospital waste that had not been gathered and taken away because of the snow.

  __________________

  It’s not true, what they say about “what doesn’t kill you.” That’s a myth invented by people who can’t accept defeat, even as they’re being dragged, with ball and chain, into the gallows of destiny. What doesn’t kill you will nevertheless leave its mark, like those cracks you see after an earthquake in a house that just barely held itself together, that’s still standing amid the devastation, a thousand little pieces separated by a hair’s breadth but holding fast—for an hour, a year, maybe a decade—until the earth moves again, a tiny aftershock that registers nowhere but that—lo and behold!—levels the house.

  To survive a tragedy with a hard shell and a broken inside does not mean one is stronger. To endure does not mean one has defeated the opponent. What it does mean—what it meant for Elizabeth when they brought her Noor’s remains, when she took them to be buried on top of Aaron, came home to Angela and told her it was just the two of them, each was all the other had—is that you’ve learned to silence your pain, smother your longings, abandon your wishes, and accept.

  Elizabeth did not grieve for Noor because she knew that once unleashed, the storm would never abate. She counted her losses, reckoned with the enemy—Raphael’s Wife—and resolved to go on in spite of her. It didn’t matter anymore that Elizabeth had had no part, bore no blame, in the fight that had been brought to her. For the rest of her life she would wake up every day to battle the pernicious sigh of the Black Bitch of Bushehr. Every night she would dream of Noor, alone and horror-stricken, her hands and feet blue with cold as she cried silently for Elizabeth and felt her way, hopelessly, in the dark.

  __________________

  The summer after Noor died, Tehran was in flames. Smoke rose from the charred carcasses of buildings and melted frames of cars and buses and from the burning piles of tires that coated the air with a viscous, oily film that traveled in the wind and lingered for days in the stomach and the lungs. Every day, news of arrests and shake-ups and decrees by the shah’s government circulated amidst rumors of military coups, army crackdowns, foreign invasions. In August, 477 people were burned alive inside a movie theater in the southern city of Abadan. The cause was arson. All the exits had been sealed from the outside. The shah and his opponents blamed each other for the incident.

  By September, when school started, nearly half of every class was empty—the children having gone abroad with their families, or sent alone to boarding schools, or staying with friends and relatives in the West while they waited out the “disturbances.” Some of the teachers too had left the country; many others, sympathizing with the opposition to the shah, were on strike. That same month, army tanks and helicopters opened fire on protestors in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. The army announced that eighty-eight had died; the opposition put the number in the tens of thousands.

  In October, oil workers joined a national strike that had crippled the economy and brought daily life to a standstill. In November, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Shahs, Shadow of the Sun and Ruler of the Universe, went on television to admit that “mistakes were made” and ask for a second chance.

  In Bagh-e Yaas, the climate of anxiety and grief that had prevailed since Noor’s kidnapping was exacerbated by a mounting sense of imminent ruin. Manzel the Mute kept warning Elizabeth not to trust any of the other servants, or to allow strangers into the house for any reason at all. She came to work every morning with teary eyes and trembling hands, having endured yet another bout of arguments scrawled on scraps of paper with her teenage son who, like so many other cretins those days, had discovered that God spoke to him through a mullah’s mouth.

  * * *

  Manzel had been a child, a village girl from Chaloos, when her father enlisted her into service at Izikiel’s house. She worked seven days a week for a small salary plus food and a place to sleep. Once a year she took a bus back to Chaloos where she stayed for two weeks. When she was fifteen years old, her father went to Tehran to ask her employer’s permission to marry her off. A few months later, a young man with gleaming white teeth and a wooden leg knocked on Izikiel’s door.

  Manzel and her husband were sent to live in the servants’ quarters behind the Big House in Bagh-e Yaas. He took driving lessons and, once he had obtained a license, started to work as a chauffeur at Soleyman Enterprises. When their family grew, they moved again from the servants’ room to an annex built especially for them. Their children—four boys—were sent to a school paid for by Izikiel. The older ones eventually went to work for Aaron, got married, and moved out. The youngest, Mojtaba, was still living with his parents when Noor disappeared.

  He was an angry boy, forever defying his parents and teachers and even his brothers who, because of the order of their birth, should have wielded a great deal of authority over him. They told him that he should be grateful for the work that the Soleymans gave his parents, and thank God for the opportunity to go to school, to know that he would always have enough to eat, that he would not be separated from his family as a child and sent away to live with strangers just to earn a living. Mojtaba didn’t see these things—a sated stomach, a roof over his head—as a blessing; he saw them as an injustice that must be corrected.

  He had grown up watching his parents serve the Soleymans as if heeding a law of nature—as if some people were born to be masters and others to be slaves. He was eleven years old when Noor was born, and after that he felt he had lost his mother, who spent seven days a week caring for those two girls as if they were her own, even slept on the floor of their room on nights when Elizabeth or Aaron were away. Manzel dressed her sons in each other’s hand-me-downs, but spent hours starching the lace on the girls’ collars, bleaching the smallest stain out of their white socks. When her own children defied her or talked back, she beat them with a stick till they fell in line. When Noor screamed and demanded attention, Manzel lavished her with kisses and sang her to sleep.

  Manzel was alarmed by the intensity of her son’s ill will toward the Soleymans. She thought it was the fault of that mullah he had been going to see of late, at the mosque where she and her husband went on Muslim holy days. When he was younger, they had tried to convince Mojtaba to take Koran lessons and go to Friday prayers, but he had never shown an interest until the old mullah was sidelined by a young new arrival. This man had a way of speaking to Mojtaba and the others boys that excited them. They went to see him every Friday, then during the week after school. They studied Arabic and learned to read the Koran, but mostly they sat cross-legged on a dirty rug and listened to the mullah talk.

  By thirteen, Mojtaba had become a devout Muslim who criticized his mother for wearing her chador too casually, and swore under his breath every time he saw a revealing photo of a woman in a magazine or on a billboard. He insisted that his parents and brothers should not be working for Jews, that Manzel should not eat at a Jew’s house. At fifteen, he dropped out of school rather than sing the national anthem and swear allegiance to the shah every morning before class. In the weeks before Noor disappeared, he started to warn his father against driving unveiled women in the company car, or skipping his five-times-a-day prayers because they conflicted with his work schedule, or referring to the late Aaron as agha—sir.

  “There’s only one agha,” he said, meaning the grandest of all grand
mullahs, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had sworn to bring down the shah and restore the kingdom of Islam on earth. He was in exile in Iraq, smuggling audiotapes of his sermons into Iran and distributing them through the network of mosques around the country. Rumor had it that on a clear night, his silhouette could be seen on the surface of the moon.

  __________________

  For over a year, Mojtaba pressured his mother to stop working for “Jews and monarchists.” In December, he came to Bagh-e Yaas with four other young men and threatened to beat up or kill her boss unless Manzel quit work right then. She left sobbing and apologizing, Angela hanging on to her until she was wrenched away by Mojtaba.

  At the headquarters of Soleyman Enterprises, all but a few dozen employees were either on strike or showing up to work only to spend the day discussing the sacredness of the ayatollah’s dicta against the monarchy. Managers who dared remind the staff of their duties were branded as enemies of the revolution and marked for future reckoning.

  Like other religious minorities in the country, the Jews were deeply loyal to the shah. To him they owed their recent freedom, literacy, civil rights, and wealth; the end of 1,400 years of ghetto life, massacres, and forced conversions; the license to proclaim themselves “real” Persians. Without him, there was no telling what would become of them and other minorities, if they would be imprisoned or killed as often as in Iran’s Shia past, or expelled at gunpoint from the country as in nearly every Arab country since 1948. Many started to liquidate what assets they could, and went abroad to wait out the troubles. Elizabeth, however, had no such intention. She had a child and husband buried somewhere in that vast and turbulent country. With or without the shah, her only interest was loyalty to her departed family.

  * * *

  Twice in January, Manzel snuck away from Mojtaba’s grip and rushed to Bagh-e Yaas to warn Elizabeth of what was coming. The mullahs and their posse, she said, had drawn up extensive lists of Zionist and imperialist Iranians, all of them wealthy and prominent and, by extension, corrupt and godless. Any day now, the forces of Islam would crush the fist of tyranny, the shah’s soldiers would stand down, and the army of God would exact just punishment upon the sinners. When that time came, anyone connected to Soleyman Enterprises would be a target.

  Later that month, the shah and his wife left the country. In February, Khomeini returned to Iran after twelve years in exile. In March, Habib Elghanian, one of the leaders of the Iranian Jewish community, was imprisoned for the crime of Zionism. In April, a national referendum was held whereby 82 percent of voters approved the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Iran. On Wednesday, May 9, Elghanian became the first Iranian Jew to be executed because of “corruption,” “contacts with Israel,” and “friendship with the enemies of God.”

  News of Elghanian’s arrest stunned the Jewish community in Iran and abroad. In the days that followed, other Jews were arrested and held on charges of Zionism. Prisoners had no right to an attorney or to a trial; often, their whereabouts were unclear and anyone who tried to contact them would himself be imprisoned. At this rate, it would be a matter of time before Elizabeth fell into the mullahs’ hands.

  * * *

  Do you know, miss, what they do to women in those jails?

  __________________

  On July 22, Elizabeth’s name was printed in the afternoon paper on a list of Zionist spies and enemies of God. That night and the next morning, state-controlled radio and television ordered her and the others to turn themselves in. At two p.m. on July 23, a truckload of armed men with dark beards poured into the main offices of Soleyman Enterprises to arrest Elizabeth. Their leader, Seyyed Mojtaba (the title seyyed having been conferred upon him by a mullah in recognition of his service to the revolution), announced that they had come to “wipe a stain off the face of the republic.”

  With his gun drawn and an automatic rifle slung on his shoulder, Mojtaba led the men as they tore through the quiet hallways and mostly vacant offices, past terrified employees who did their best to avoid being seen, and stunned onlookers who had observed the men enter the building and followed them to satisfy their curiosity, the ragtag militia kicking open doors and smashing glass partitions as they called out Elizabeth’s name until they had searched all seven floors and the garage as well and came up empty-handed. Then Mojtaba ordered everyone back into the truck and directed the driver toward Bagh-e Yaas.

  __________________

  She had left in the dead of night. On July 21, she had walked out of her second-floor bedroom with the lights off and Angela asleep in her arms, down the black granite staircase with their shoes in her hands so as not to awaken the servants. In the yard, the poet’s jasmine was in full bloom, glowing on the vines in the light of a full moon, emitting a scent so sweet and viscous, it made the lizards slow and lazy as they emerged from the cracks in the yard wall.

  Earlier that day, during the hour of the siesta, Elizabeth had packed a suitcase each for herself and Angela, hiding them in the trunk of her car. In the evening, she had waited till the servants had locked the house and gone to bed. She had hoped for a cloudy night, but the sky was a deep, limpid indigo gleaming with the electric silver light of the moon. Beneath it the garden—the ancient maple trees, the rose beds, the redbrick pathways winding through grass lawns and freshwater pools—looked like a fairy-tale kingdom asleep under a thousand-year spell.

  The metal gates screeched when Elizabeth opened them. Beyond them the alley was empty, its cracked and uneven asphalt surface glowing dark and bare in the moonlight. Rather than turn the engine on, Elizabeth put the car in neutral and let it slide backward until it had cleared the metal doors. Then she sat there, behind the wheel, and stared through the still-open gates at the enchanted forest and the tall, darkened castle of her childhood and early youth. She saw the eight-year-old schoolgirl who went alone to her first Shabbat dinner, and the young man with the transparent eyes who called her “little one.” She saw Madame Doctor waving as she pulled away in her car to go to the office, and the professor wading through knee-deep water, grasping at books and toys, cooking utensils and picture frames that had been set afloat, yet again, by the ghosts who lived in the pipes. She saw Noor asleep in her bed that last night, and the footprints in the snow leading away from the house. Then she got out of the car and closed the gates.

  * * *

  On a dirt road off Vanak Avenue in North Tehran, Manzel’s husband waited for them in the beat-up taxi he had started driving since Mojtaba forced him to leave his job with the Soleymans. Elizabeth left her car and slipped into the cab with Angela. They drove for three hours, toward Manzel’s hometown of Rasht. All the way there, Manzel’s husband prayed to the Imam Zaman—the Prophet Muhammad’s twelfth disciple, who had fallen into a well and from there into occultation—to help them at the crossing. On the last stretch of the trip, Elizabeth fell asleep in the car and dreamed of the Big House. It was still night but the servants, who had remained at their job only to spy on her and the girls, were awake. Elizabeth’s bed was unmade, still warm from her body. Her clothes were still in the closet. Everything was exactly as it had been only hours ago except that she—Elizabeth—had been erased from the picture.

  __________________

  They would have to traverse a thousand miles in hiding. From Tehran to the city of Van in Turkey, the journey was fraught with danger. If they avoided the military police and border guards in both countries and survived the gruesome conditions, they could rest in Van, then take a bus another five hundred miles to Istanbul. That’s all Elizabeth knew.

  * * *

  It was dawn when they arrived in Rasht on the Caspian. The July air was heavy and humid, but sweet. The Caspian Sea was in fact an immense lake, its water devoid of the saltiness that would otherwise seep into the air and blow in the breeze. The house they had come to sat across the street from a harbor, backed by a softly rolling, emerald-green hillside. There were two rooms, an outhouse, and a lopsided addition with a ceiling too low
for an adult to pass below without bending. Outside, a woman sat on her knees next to a hole in the ground. She rolled pieces of fresh dough into a ball, beat it with the flat of her hand, and slapped it on the inside wall of the hole. Minutes later, she reached in again with her bare hand and peeled the bread off with bits of coal and blackened stone stuck to it from the wall. These she picked off with her fingers even as they still glowed hot.

  A little girl, younger than Angela, with braided pigtails and a sheer yellow head scarf, brought tea and bread. Just then Manzel’s husband came in with another man.

  “My cousin will drive you to Zanjan,” he said. “There, you’ll change drivers to Tabriz. I don’t know them but they’re safe.” He put his hand gently on the cousin’s shoulder and nodded. “My cousins know you’re precious to us. They wouldn’t give you over to bad people.”

  He rubbed his hands together and peered down at his shoes.

  “You must forgive me, khanum. I’m your servant and so is Ahmad,” he turned to his cousin again, “but the rest of the way,” his voice almost broke with embarrassment, “I don’t know how to say this, it reflects badly on Manzel and me, I know.” His head hung even lower now and he wouldn’t look up, so Ahmad came to his rescue.

  “Khanum, it’s dangerous work. They hang anyone they catch smuggling people, and you—your excellency—”