“I’m on the list,” Elizabeth finished his sentence.
Elizabeth guessed what the two men were getting at.
“I don’t expect anyone to do this for free,” she said. She reached into her handbag and took out a stack of American dollars. Every Iranian of means knew to stash dollars at home and in bank safe-deposit boxes in case of an economic or political meltdown. The smarter ones had also opened savings accounts and bought property in the United States. “There’s $3,000 here,” she said. “It’s all I have.”
* * *
It was decided that the smugglers on the Iranian side of the border would be paid $1,000, and that the Turks would take the same amount. The Turks had been known to take the payment, then turn the refugees over to border guards, so Elizabeth was instructed to pay half at the start of the journey and the rest at the end, when she and Angela were safely in the city of Van.
They sewed the money into the inside of Elizabeth’s dress, then sewed her watch and wedding ring into Angela’s undergarments. Manzel’s husband promised he would go to Bagh-e Yaas and take what valuables he could, sell them on the black market, and, once Elizabeth was settled in Turkey, send her the money.
“That’s dangerous,” she said. “If your son finds out, or the other servants report you . . .”
At this, Manzel’s husband broke into tears. Over and over, he apologized for his son’s wickedness, swore he would never have had a child had he known what God intended it to be.
“You must write to us so we know you’re safe,” he pleaded with Elizabeth, “or Manzel will never sleep again. You must let us send money to you as soon as you arrive in Turkey.”
He kissed her hand and caressed Angela’s hair, followed them to the car with a bowl of water to pour on the ground for good tidings. When the car pulled away, Elizabeth peered back through the rear window: he stood there crying, waving vigorously, until they merged onto the highway and he vanished.
__________________
They spent the night at a small hotel in Tabriz. The driver signed them in and walked them to the room, then snuck out when the attendant was away answering a call.
“Good luck to you,” he said with what Elizabeth thought was great sincerity. “Salaam-eh mara beh-reh-soo-need—give my regards.” To whom, it was not clear.
Elizabeth and Angela were hungry, but Angela was afraid to leave the room and Elizabeth decided it was best not to draw attention to herself by going out, so they sat on the lone bed and ate the stale bread and cheese they had brought for the road from Rasht. Elizabeth tore a piece of the bread with her hands, rolled it around a bit of cheese and half a walnut, and handed it to Angela. She poured tap water into the glass by the sink and brought it to her.
“Eat this,” Elizabeth said quietly.
Angela sat there, cross-legged on the rough blanket, ignoring the sandwich in her hand. After a moment, her knees started to shake.
Elizabeth was tired. “It’s okay,” she muttered, unconvinced.
At this, Angela began to sob. She had been quiet since they left Bagh-e Yaas, remained stoic and done exactly as she was told, but now she was loud and inconsolable. She had no idea what to make of all this; she wanted to go home, but she understood that “wanted by the regime” was a bad thing. She had seen the front-page pictures of rows of naked men lying in pools of blood with bullet holes in their heads and chests, heard the names of the wanted and the dead announced every hour on the radio.
* * *
They slept in their clothes, woke up at three in the morning, and went downstairs. Across the street from the hotel, a man stood smoking by a dented brown Volvo. When he saw them approach with their suitcases, he threw the cigarette on the ground and shook his head.
“Wear whatever you can and leave the rest,” he said. He walked to the front of the car and turned his back to them. “Hurry up. It gets cold in the mountains at night.”
Elizabeth carried a suitcase in each hand. Instead of following the man’s instructions, she remained in place, staring at the back of his head as if searching for the answer to some puzzle, until Angela tugged at her.
“We can’t leave them,” Angela said, grasping a handle with both palms, forcing it out of her mother’s hand. “We can’t leave our things.”
The driver was one of those weathered-and-sick-of-it-all Middle Eastern men who go straight from childhood to old age. One minute they’re playing soccer barefoot with a plastic bottle for a ball on the street, the next minute they’re working sixteen-hour days to make a pittance with which to support their parents and siblings. Their skin is dark and scarred from too much sun and their voices are coarse from too many cigarettes and their muscles twitch with anxiety and impatience because any minute now the sky might fall, because it always does for people like them.
He came over to Angela, put one knee to the ground, and said softly, “Daughter, where you’re going there’s no room for luggage.” He glanced up at Elizabeth. “They told you you’ll be on horses?”
They hadn’t.
“It’s either that, through our parts, or in a shipping crate over the gulf,” he said, standing up. He sounded sorry for them.
“This is not as bad as being locked up in a crate on one those smuggling ships, but you can only take what you carry on yourself.”
* * *
In the suitcase she had packed for Angela, Elizabeth had brought some of her and Noor’s clothes and favorite books. In her own suitcase, she had mostly pictures: all the faded black-and-white and waterlogged images she had collected on the wet and muddy trail of the flood the day her parents and siblings drowned, all the professional portraits of Aaron and the children on special occasions that she tore out of albums at the last minute, Angela’s first- and second-grade report cards, the children’s birth certificates, Noor’s nameplate.
She slipped the nameplate into her coat pocket. Though it was the middle of summer, she ordered Angela to put on all the warm clothes she could manage. Then she knelt next to the pile of pictures that lay inside the gaping suitcase, picked up a portrait of herself and Aaron from their wedding and two of Noor. She stuffed them inside her coat pocket, then took out the notebook that contained all the tips about Noor’s whereabouts, and set it away from the suitcase on the ground.
The driver was hovering over her impatiently, glancing toward the road, but Elizabeth remained mesmerized, as if unaware of danger. She drew a shallow breath and looked up at the driver.
Silently, she raised her hand, palm up and open, and held it toward him till he understood, fished his Bic lighter out of his pocket, and gave it to her. Here was her life—what remained of it, what she had chosen to save. She flicked the lighter and held the flame to the corner of a picture, then put it down in the open suitcase and watched it catch.
__________________
From Tabriz the road wound into the mountains, northwest toward Lake Urmia and beyond it the borderlands with Turkey. Late in the afternoon, they crossed the bridge and landed firmly in Kurdish territory. The driver took them to a mud hut in a village of fewer than a hundred people. The minute they got out of the car, they were surrounded by young Kurdish boys with aqueous eyes and knowing expressions who began to ask Angela questions she didn’t understand. They spoke a mixture of Kurdish and Persian, then tried Turkish, Kurmanji, and finally the broken English they had picked up by watching pirated American movies on smuggled VHS cassettes.
“This is where it’s going to get difficult,” the driver told Elizabeth. “You’re lucky it’s not winter.” He hesitated, as if measuring their chances. “You’ll be fine. Just don’t talk to anyone but your guides. Don’t ask questions. And don’t pay the Turks until you’re safely in Van.”
* * *
They spent the night in the safe house. In the morning, the smugglers put Elizabeth on one horse, Angela on another. A teenage boy with a long stick in one hand and a rifle slung over his shoulder rode in front; a tall, silent man, also armed, followed them. Neither would a
nswer Elizabeth’s questions about how long the journey would take or how the smugglers planned to avoid running into border guards along the way.
They took a circuitous route developed over decades of clandestine commerce, climbing ever higher into the mountains which hung more than five miles above the valley. The road was unpaved, barely wider than the horse, forever at risk of being blocked by one of the many boulders that hung precariously over it.
They paused around midday, sat in the shade of a rock, and ate more bread and cheese with dried walnuts. The sun set early that afternoon and the darkness was absolute. They stopped at a clay hut built into the side of the mountain. The boy boiled water over a kerosene lamp and made tea. The quiet one chain-smoked Marlboros.
“If we die here,” Angela whispered to her mother as they lay on a coarse blanket on the floor, “if these men kill us or we are eaten by wolves, no one would know we ever existed.”
Elizabeth was lying faceup. She rose on one elbow toward Angela. “That’s why we’re not going to die or let anyone kill us,” she said, stroking her daughter’s face. “Whatever it takes, we’re going to make sure they know we existed.”
* * *
They traveled on horseback for nine days with two different sets of guides. To avoid detection, they crossed into Turkey at night, still on horseback and across mountain roads. The border wasn’t marked but the guides kept riding until they were met by three other Kurds in a creaky minivan filled with used auto parts. They ordered Elizabeth and Angela to crouch in the back of the van, covered them with a tarp, and stacked the load of metal to block them from view. Like unscrupulous guides, Turkish police often turned refugees over to Iranian border guards in exchange for a bribe. Sometimes, they sold young women to brothel owners or wealthy men.
* * *
In Turkey, they stayed in a rundown boardinghouse crowded with other Iranian refugees.
Having never fathomed the predicament in which they found themselves, the refugees were at a loss for the most basic information: how and where to rent an apartment by the month, where to shop for towels and groceries, how to mail a letter and where to pay the phone bill and how to find a mohel to circumcise a newborn son. Two and three generations of anxious and disoriented men and women milled around in cheap hotels and dingy boardinghouses, reassured each other and the children that all would be well again soon, that it wouldn’t be long now before the CIA took action, invaded Iran, and restored the shah to his throne.
In the meantime, they followed the relentless stream of bad news from Iran, waited for calls that never came, stood in line for buses that never arrived. They spent entire days standing in the waiting rooms of embassies, notaries, attorneys—anyone who might approve their status as political refugees and give them a visa to somewhere else.
“Where to?”
Elizabeth had no idea.
* * *
From newer arrivals she learned that the Soleyman estate—the landholdings, the businesses, the bank accounts and jewels and even their Persian rugs and antique furniture and expensive clothes—had become the subject of a grab-now-and-prove-ownership-later campaign by Seyyed Mojtaba. He had moved into the Big House with his two wives and three children, and announced he was turning the place into a religious school. He was going around dressed like Fidel Castro and with an equally plush beard, arresting people for crimes against humanity or for wearing nail polish, sending the men before Islamic tribunals set up in various parts of town and presided over by mullahs. The trials took from three to fifteen minutes; defendants did not have a right to an attorney. Afterward, the men were taken onto the roof of the building and shot; the women were sent to jail to be raped—because Islam forbids the killing of a virgin—before being put to death.
In the midst of all this, Raphael’s Wife screamed in the wind and filed petition after petition with the Council for the Protection of the Innocent and Impoverished, wagging her faded documents and hurling insults and curses as she tried to establish ownership of all former Soleyman properties, including Bagh-e Yaas.
“Where to?”
* * *
In the second half of 1979, a struggle broke out between the various revolutionary factions in Iran—the nationalists and democrats and Communists and Islamic Marxists who, earlier, had joined forces to bring down the shah’s regime. In a fool’s gamble that none of the parties would later be able to justify, each plotted secretly to “use” Islam as a rallying cry to overthrow the shah before they took over.
They should have known better.
For a while, the factions fought each other and the mullahs for control of the country. But any hope that the more moderate forces would prevail upon the clergy and allow the exiles to safely go back were quashed when the mullahs won a referendum on the future shape of the government and conferred upon Khomeini the title of Vali-ye faqih—Supreme Leader and Custodian of the People. In much the same way as a group of cardinals elect a new pope who, by virtue of the title, is suddenly imbued with celestial qualities, a band of Muslim clerics had anointed one of their own with divine authority and unleashed him on the world.
Khomeini’s ascent to the holy throne was finalized and set in stone.
“Where to?”
* * *
In December, Elizabeth called the number Hussein Zemorrodi had given her. She reached a restaurant in Hollywood.
The first three people who came to the phone did not know a Hussein of any kind; the fourth one, a man who introduced himself as John Vain, laughed out loud when he understood the source of the confusion.
“Of course he works here,” he said. He spoke with a heavy American accent, but he switched to Persian after the initial exchange.
“He’s just such a loner,” John Vain said of Hussein. “No one knows his real name. They call him Hal . . . like in the film Space Odyssey . . . the mechanical brain . . . Did you see the film?”
Was Elizabeth Hal’s wife or girlfriend? Was she in Iran, or had she made it out already? Did she have a visa, a plan? Was she short for money?
“Call back in a few hours,” he finally said. “Hal should be here by then. We’ll make sure we get you over here ASAP.”
__________________
Jahanshah Varasteh (a.k.a. John Vain) was an Iranian Jew who owned a restaurant on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights, just outside Beverly Hills at the western tip of Hollywood. He was 6'4'' and lanky, all taut nerves and tense vivacity, and had a fondness for wearing cowboy boots that he bought during yearly trips to a shop in Austin, Texas. The shop was owned by an Irishman; the workers were all Mexican. They had trouble pronouncing his Iranian name, so after his sixth or seventh visit they started to call him John Vain for convenience. Jahanshah wasn’t a big movie buff but he could see the advantage of having a name that was easy to spell and remember, so he adjusted it to fit his initials.
Even before Iranians started to move to LA en masse, John Vain had a reputation for being extraordinarily kind to people in need. He was as generous with his time and goodwill as with his money—a full-service support system for every down-and-out friend or stranger who happened upon his path. After the revolution he was the first of the old-timers—the handful of families that had immigrated to Los Angeles in the early ’70s—to help the newcomers settle. For nearly two years he opened his house to every helpless mother or frightened teenager who showed up at his door, let the men use his restaurant as a makeshift office from which to conduct their business, and sat through the interminable string of stories every new arrival felt duty-bound to share.
John Vain told people he did all this for his own benefit—the pleasure of getting to know those he might otherwise never cross paths with, the peace of mind of feeling he had done what he could to make a life easier. It didn’t even bother him that most of the time he was giving away money he didn’t really have: Lucky 99 was always full, often with B-list actors (John Vain insisted they were “B+”) and their half-dressed hangers-on, but it had never turn
ed a profit because John Vain picked up more checks than he collected. His house in Trousdale Estates was worth nearly $200,000 dollars even before all the Iranians moved there and drove up the prices, but it was mortgaged for twice its value. His black limited-edition Cadillac Seville Gucci, complete with interlocking designer G’s on the vinyl top, headrests, and wheel covers, and the personalized plate ALAMRCN—All-American—was a special-order piece built for an Arab prince who drove it around for one summer and sold it to John Vain for much more than it had cost.
On the face of it, Hussein Zemorrodi was just another one of John Vain’s charity cases, hired because he needed to eat while he pursued his more lofty ambitions. He was a young man with dusky skin and prematurely gray hair, no practical skills whatsoever, and no idea how to get along with regular people. He had answered an ad in the LA Times for an “electrical engineer able to modernize a spectacular dining establishment.” He turned up carrying a small suitcase that he held between his right arm and hip because the handle was broken, volunteered that he knew less than nothing about the job for which he had applied, “But really, sir, my life’s mission is to invent things no one else has thought of.” Then he put his suitcase on John Vain’s desk and began to sort through a mess of papers and charts, looking exasperated and harried and apologizing as he searched for whatever it was that would help John Vain understand.
Hussein had been sleeping in his car, showering at the Y, working in the library, and eating what he could afford. Of course he would accept a job as “kitchen helper” at Lucky 99 if it meant he could work nights and have the days to draw on his graph papers, get all his meals for free, and sleep in the storage room. He even drew a salary in cash for doing things like taking out the trash and stacking cans and boxes, cleaning out the freezer, and picking up tablecloths from the laundry. Never mind he had a tendency to become sidetracked and take half a day to complete a job that should require a half hour. He was polite and harmless and extremely grateful to John Vain.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 14
