The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  John Vain’s accountant and the restaurant’s manager knew better than to exercise their throats trying to explain that, far from earning his keep, Hal was likely to end up on a seventy-two-hour hold in some county hospital, that he was just taking up space and collecting a salary for work that should be part of other employees’ responsibility. John Vain just didn’t believe that helping others in need was a bad idea, no matter what the cost to himself. More importantly, he didn’t believe that anything he did, no matter how reckless, could ever result in serious harm.

  Years ago when he was a small boy in Iran, he had met a woman who sold him ninety-nine years of good fortune for ninety-nine tomans. He’d used up a handful of the years in Iran, but he brought most of them to America.

  __________________

  The hardest part of being an exile, the Iranians would soon learn, was the vanishing—not of the self, but of its likeness in the eyes of others.

  You see yourself, to begin with, as a reflection in a parent’s eyes. You learn who you are, what you are, by looking at that picture day after day until your world begins to expand and you find the image in many sets of eyes, and before you know it you’ve become real—a whole, separate person, carved and cast and endowed with life out of the idea that others hold of you. Everything you know about yourself is either an affirmation or a deviation from that idea. Everything you do, anything you become, is either in fulfillment or thwarting of that concept.

  Then all at once the mirror breaks and the world goes dark. You’re forced out or flee for your life. Your home becomes a gallows, your people, executioners. The fourteen-year-old who is saved by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and becomes the ward of Chabad because he has no family, the ten-year-old who is sent to live with an older sibling or an aunt, and who won’t see her parents again for thirty years. The poet who forsakes the language in which he writes, the writer who becomes uncomprehending and incomprehensible in the new country. What do they find, in their place of refuge, in the eyes of their neighbors, but a blank slate? A pencil sketch of a person with no name, no past, no way to define himself without the colors and hues in which he had been painted before.

  There is a part of this obscurity that unshackles and liberates, that allows one to reimagine and reinvent herself, to start again, unfettered. And there’s a part that lessens and devalues. For most, it turns “I am” into “I used to be.”

  That’s why immigrants congregate in communities—so they can hold on to what remains of themselves in the memories of others—why so many Iranians settled in New York and California in the aftermath of the revolution. The moment they arrived on either coast they called another Iranian—a sibling, an old colleague, a friend of a friend. They gathered in each other’s hotel rooms and in the Westwood Manor apartments, and waited for the news that the shah had suppressed the “disturbances” and that it was safe to go home. They sat all night by the large windows of Ship’s coffee shop in Westwood, drank hot tea, and told each other that the mayhem in Iran would soon be over; the shah would not fall; the West would not let him. They searched for the few Iranians who had come to America before them, asked for advice on how to rent furniture and where to go if they were sick. For most, this connection was enough to create a new footing.

  But what of a family like Elizabeth’s, already disengaged from the community and diminished through tragedy, who have nothing but memories with which to sustain themselves? A family of one and a half women, say—a mother in her midtwenties, an almost eight-year-old daughter—who have had to abandon the graves of the ones they lost. The first thing they learn in the new place is that, as difficult as it is to find themselves in the eyes of others, it’s nearly impossible to find any trace of those left behind.

  The dead and missing cannot cross borders; their exile is our forgetting.

  __________________

  Elizabeth landed in Los Angeles in May 1979, nearly a year after she and Angela had escaped from the country that promised to become their prison. She had no college education, not even a high school diploma, and no work experience. She could read and write English well enough, but she had trouble understanding or speaking “American” because her teachers in Iran (usually the spouses of diplomats or oil company executives on assignment in the country) had been mostly British. She had used up nearly all her cash while awaiting the visa that John Vain arranged for her and Angela, and she was already in debt to him for the attorney’s fees and other charges relating to her application as a political refugee. More than anything, she was alone.

  Unlike most other Iranians who quickly joined extended family and old friends upon arrival in LA, Elizabeth had only John Vain’s number in her pocket and no material possessions. She wasn’t the first young mother with a small child to have turned to John Vain for help. Other families had been divided in this way. Some husbands sent the wife and kids abroad but stayed in Iran to protect their belongings; others were under investigation and forbidden to leave. A good number were lingering in jail or had been executed.

  The wives, however, had been raised to think as little as possible, concern themselves only with domestic matters, and take no initiative whatsoever. If they were lucky or had any sense, they had gone from their father’s house straight into a husband’s in their late teens or early twenties. They had never traveled alone, couldn’t go from one city in Iran to another without written permission from their spouse. Suddenly they had to make every decision not only for themselves, but also for their children. They could recite poetry and sew, but they had to learn how to open a bank account and write a check; they could orchestrate the most extravagant meals for a hundred people at once, but they had to be told what to pack their children for lunch every day. That they rose to the occasion as well and as quickly as they did was, in John Vain’s mind, proof of an inherent ability that had, for centuries, been suppressed by the laws and traditions of the East. To get there, however, they needed a hand to keep them steady.

  * * *

  He was waiting for Elizabeth and Angela outside customs at LAX. He had come instead of Hal because you could never quite trust the man’s punctuality—he had the best intentions but he might show up on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday, or at eight in the morning instead of the evening. “And besides,” John Vain had told Hal, “the sight of you may scare the poor woman right back to Turkey.”

  By the time Elizabeth and Angela emerged from the terminal, they had been traveling for more than two days. They were sleepy and disoriented and smelling of airports and anxiety, hesitant to look anyone in the eye or smile back at all the strangers’ faces. Yet to John Vain, they looked like the family he had always wished he had.

  __________________

  The last time John Vain saw his father, in 1960 when he was eight years old, they were in the city of Gonbad-e Kavus near the Caspian coast. He had gone there with his parents because his father, who was due to take a long journey abroad, wanted their small family to spend time together. For a week, they drove up and down the shoreline, visiting major towns and small villages. In Gonbad, John Vain’s father took him to see the monument after which the city was named.

  In the eleventh century AD, a king had built himself a mausoleum in the shape of a two-hundred-foot tower made entirely of bricks. Upon his death, his body was to be placed in a glass coffin that hung from the top of the tower, away from human hands where he could see the sun rise every day.

  “That’s the difference between a man who becomes king and one who remains a slave,” John Vain’s father had told him. “The slave recognizes his limits; the king reaches for the sun even in the darkness of death.”

  Years later, John Vain would understand that the parable had been intended more as an apology than a life lesson by his father. Traveling west after their “field trip,” John Vain and his mother woke up in a motel room in Ramsar to find a hundred-toman bill next to each of their pillows. They assumed the father had gone out for an early-morning walk. Then they assumed
he was out buying lunch; on a daylong boat trip; on a fishing voyage out in the open sea; kidnapped by smugglers; arrested and imprisoned by evil Soviet border guards; tortured and killed and fed to wild dogs; or maybe—maybe he had gone to reach for the sun, alone and unencumbered.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, heartbroken after waiting endlessly for his father’s return, John Vain left his crying mother and walked into the small town. Dusk was settling in, bringing with it the smell of the sea at nighttime. Here and there, the small, yellowish flickers of gas lamps illuminated the leathery dark faces of fishermen, red flares from coal burning inside braziers reflected back from the eyes of teenage boys squatting on the sidewalk to grill chicken liver and kidneys on metal skewers. Little girls in chintz skirts and gold hoop earrings ran barefoot ahead of older sisters or young mothers, all curly hair and giggles.

  Just when he thought he should head back to the motel, he heard someone whisper, “You, there!”

  The woman had dark hair and narrow eyebrows. “Do you have any money?”

  She wore a transparent white chador that had slipped from her head onto her bare shoulders, exposing big white earrings and rows of white pearls.

  “What for?” John Vain asked.

  “Depends on how much money you have.”

  “What are you selling?”

  “What do you want?”

  He gave her the hundred-toman bill and said he wanted his father back.

  “How long has he been gone?”

  She laughed when he told her.

  “And you’re still waiting?” She stuffed the bill in between her breasts and pulled out one toman. She put the coin in John Vain’s hand, then folded his fingers around it and brought his little fist to her chest.

  “I’ll give you something much better than your father. Close your eyes and count to ninety-nine.” She held his hand against her heart. “I’m going to give you ninety-nine years of good luck.”

  __________________

  He had only to inhale Elizabeth’s scent, close his eyes, and remember the flare of magic that had lit up the night that time in Ramsar, to know that she had traveled twenty-two years and 7,500 miles to belong to him. He shook hands with her and Angela, explained that he had volunteered to pick them up because his time wasn’t nearly as precious as Hal’s. “He’s a genius; I’m just a short-order cook.”

  He was so exhilarated by Elizabeth’s presence, so enlivened by the awareness of the blessing he had received, he forgot to ask where she wanted to go or whether she had plans for where to stay.

  “Hal tells me you’re the smartest person he knows,” he said as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto Century Boulevard toward the freeway. “Which is scary, because he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. Either that, or he’s just nuts.”

  He talked all the way to within minutes of his house. At the light on Sunset and Foothill he fell silent, as if deflated by the sudden appreciation of the circumstances: he hadn’t told Elizabeth where he was taking her and Angela, and they hadn’t asked. They sat together in the passenger seat, the child asleep on her mother’s lap, her head resting in the nook of Elizabeth’s neck, the mother still and stoic.

  When the light turned green, he put the gear in park and shifted in his seat to face Elizabeth. It was the first time he had really looked at her. She seemed ageless, like a very old painting of a young woman.

  “I thought I had an eventful life until Hal told me your story.”

  He dropped his eyes when he said this because he couldn’t bear the intensity of her gaze.

  “I was lucky enough to have come here, to this town, some time ago. I’ve helped a few people and I’d like to do what I can for you.”

  He realized he sounded like he was reciting a prepared monologue, and blushed.

  “I have a largish house.” He turned to the side window, hoping to hide the redness in his face. Behind them cars were honking madly. “You’re welcome to stay as my guest.”

  The light had turned red and green again, and drivers were yelling at him from open windows, so he put on the hazard lights and waited for Elizabeth to say something.

  “It’s just . . .” he searched desperately for the right thing to say. “It’s just a . . .” He stopped, then started again. “You wouldn’t owe me anything. Not now. Not ever.”

  __________________

  John Vain was fourteen years old and poor as an honest banker when his mother sent him to America to make money. That he spoke only a few words of English, had a total of thirty dollars in his pocket when he boarded the plane at Mehrabad Airport, and no idea what to do once he landed in New York, was of little concern at the time: their next-door neighbor in Tehran had shipped her own twelve-year-old son to England a few years earlier with even less than what Jahanshah took away, and he—the neighbor’s son—was sending a fortune home every month. Jahanshah’s mother had considered England first, but his high school teacher had suggested otherwise: he wasn’t a good student and didn’t have the best manners or discipline. The teacher had said that “boys like him go to America,” which wasn’t a compliment to either the person or to the country, but it sounded reasonable enough to the mother.

  He landed in New York on July 1, 1960. He spent the first three nights at the airport, walking the terminals and looking out the windows at the tarmac and wondering if this was all there was to New York City. When he finally got the courage to step outside, it was to follow a Pakistani doctor he had met in the washroom who had offered him a ride into Manhattan. From what Jahanshah could understand of the doctor’s English, he too had come to America broke and without a friend. “I slept on subway trains and ate at a church,” he had said, or that’s what Jahanshah would recall later.

  For weeks he rode the subway into and around Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn, studying the maps and barely stepping out of the tunnels for fear of getting lost on the street. He lived on donuts and coffee from underground shops, and the occasional hot dog from a street vendor right above the subway entrance. It was midsummer and the heat and humidity were oppressive. By September, broke, he had gained enough courage to venture into a small radius around the Port Authority terminal on 40th and Eighth.

  His first job was as a dishwasher in a diner one block from the terminal. He worked twelve hours a day, starting at nine in the evening, for $150 a month. He was paid in cash and allowed two meals per shift. For a while, he rented a cheap room in a sleazy motel on 41st; then he discovered a church on Tenth and 39th with a separate staircase that led from the street up into an attic where, on any given night, a dozen or more men made their beds on the floor. By the time Jahanshah arrived in the morning, the night tenants had cleared out and the room, plus a toilet with a sink and a mirror, could be rented for three dollars a day.

  It was not an easy existence, but something about the dirty air, the grease-stained clothes, the neon lights and linoleum counters of the diner, the hours he spent working with gruff, disappointed older men or bright-eyed, eager young ones from places as far away and diverse as Bombay and San Juan and Tripoli and Accra, thrilled and elated Jahanshah. After a few weeks, he was promoted to busboy, which was the same thing as waiter since only two people worked the night shift, but it meant he could talk with the patrons and pour endless coffee refills and look the other way when they spiked it with something wrapped in brown paper. By Christmas, he was friends with all the employees and the regular customers at the diner. He knew the shop owners and bums and hookers and cops in the area, spent his lunch and coffee breaks smoking cigarettes and exchanging war stories about difficult customers with the cab drivers from the taxi stand across from the Port Authority.

  A week after New Year’s, his boss, an aging Latvian Jew who had sat behind the cash register of the diner every day for thirty-seven years without once staying home sick or going on vacation, lost his wife. He took a week off to sit shivah, then came to work and announced that he was going to sell the diner and go to LA to live with his
daughter. He had a brand-new Continental he wanted to drive across the country, but he didn’t want to travel alone because he was afraid of all the “bums and killers” who lay in wait for him “in places like Kansas.” Only a year earlier, the Clutter family had been murdered in their bedrooms by a pair of convicts released from the Kansas State Penitentiary. The Latvian, who didn’t fancy meeting the same fate, offered Jahanshah a free ride to LA.

  __________________

  To most people in LA, Elizabeth and Angela cut a mystifying figure—at once pitiable in their worn-out clothes and daunting in their air of self-sufficiency. They looked nothing alike, yet you’d never see one without the other. Elizabeth was small, quiet, much too demure for her age; Angela was feisty and boisterous and too assertive for her own good. To anyone who knew their story, they were sad reminders of what can happen when civil war breaks out within a family. To strangers, they were that increasingly common sight in LA—a new type of refugee that could not be easily classified.

  But to John Vain, from that first night when he dropped them off at his house, showed them the kitchen and the guest bedroom, then left to go back to the restaurant, Elizabeth and Angela were a sign from the universe that every good thing he had ever wished for would someday be his.

  “I’m going to marry your friend,” he announced the minute he saw Hal in the back room of Lucky 99 that night, “and you are going to be my best man.”

  To which poor Hal, who had temporarily forgotten Elizabeth, responded, “I don’t have any friends.”

  * * *

  Later that week, John Vain helped Elizabeth rent an apartment on Olympic and Spalding on the farthest edge of Beverly Hills. He chose the location because the school system was one of the best in the country, and the building far away enough from the swanky parts of the city to make the rent affordable. He bought them beds and dishes and furniture, enrolled Elizabeth in driving school and adult English classes at Roxbury Park, showed her how to take the bus from her apartment to Angela’s new school. At night, he drove them to Lucky 99, planted them at the best table in the house, introduced every one of his regulars to them, and boasted of Elizabeth’s intelligence and pedigree.