The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  Angela was thrilled at the great food and beautiful company, but for Elizabeth those were torturous evenings. She was still exhausted from being on the run and the anxiety of not knowing what to anticipate next. She felt a wakefulness, a blurry, constant disquiet, that had begun with Aaron’s shooting and only grown deeper over time. She had no idea how to make small talk or feign interest in strangers in high heels and silk suits.

  She tried, in her own polite Iranian way, to pass up John Vain’s invitations without offending him. It would have been anathema for her to admit a lack of enthusiasm or dearth of energy to take advantage of his hospitality. On the other hand, all her protestations of “we’ve already imposed on you far too much” did nothing to mitigate John Vain’s fervor for having her close at all times. He had been in America too long to remember the hidden meaning in some terms or be able to distinguish between their literal meaning and what they implied. He went right on showing up at Elizabeth’s door every night at seven, bearing gifts and good cheer and promises of great things about to happen, drove them to Lucky 99, and ordered Hal, relieved of kitchen duty, to keep them company while John Vain tended to the other guests.

  __________________

  Hal was glad—so very glad—to see his old friend again; he had such fond memories of their childhood together, of the math games they played during recess, the two months she had lived with him and his parents. He was honored to make Angela’s acquaintance­—she was clearly as smart as her mother and equally erudite. Children mature so much faster in the East, he told her. There’s more expected of them earlier, the world around them is older and more demanding; they are taught about duty, practicality, industry—it’s only here, in America, where even death is not quite real; do you know they lay the corpse in a satin-lined coffin, dress it up, and do hair and makeup like it’s going to a fancy ball instead of the grave? And damn if you’re not looked down upon if you mourn too much or for too long, if you don’t declare, before the headstone has been installed, that you’re going to pick up a cause, create a foundation, make lemonade.

  He spoke with his chin tilted slightly toward his chest so as to avoid insulting Elizabeth by staring directly at her. His hands, fingers interlaced, rested on the table in front of him as if in prayer. He even made an effort to appear presentable, wearing a Salvation Army tie over a white short-sleeved tennis shirt he had fished out of the lost-and-found bin at the Y. He had longish hair and a narrow jaw, a hint of gray in his week-old stubble, a permanent tick that pulsated in his left eye every few seconds.

  * * *

  Like any good scientist or engineer, Hal Zemorrodi suffered from undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. That’s what enabled him to pursue one goal at the expense of all else. Unlike good scientists and engineers, however, he was so determined to realize his vision, he failed to see the inherent flaws in his plans.

  A device that can track people from great distances, in darkness or light, by detecting the heat emitted by their bodies: that was his pipe dream and he felt he was close, he had it almost all figured out, yet every time he thought he was ready to create a prototype, something went awry and the entire edifice crumbled. He had been grappling with the same problem for so long he was ready to shred all his papers and stick a wire hanger into a light socket till his brain was good and fried.

  Whenever John Vain summoned him to sit with Elizabeth and Angela, he came to the table with all his charts and blueprints, his reams of notes, his 307 reasons why the world was waiting for his heat-detecting radar and didn’t even know it. As soon as he had dispensed with the formalities, he pushed the plates and glasses out of the way and spread his papers before Elizabeth, launched into a very polite but urgent explanation of what everything meant, and didn’t stop even after their food had been served. He continued as if convinced that Elizabeth had as much interest in the subject as he, kept apologizing to Angela for “boring you with all this,” but never contemplated stopping. By ten, when the place was buzzing and the noise level at its highest, Angela would be asleep with her head on her mother’s lap, and Elizabeth would be more pallid and exhausted than ever, but poor Hal was nowhere near done with his presentation.

  Finally, one night, Elizabeth interrupted.

  “It’s wrong.”

  Either because he hadn’t heard her, or because what she said made no sense, Hal kept speaking. She listened for a full minute before she repeated herself.

  Irritated, Hal shook his head, as if to discourage a persistent fly, and started again. She reached toward him, put her hand, palm down, on the chart he was referring to, and said, “Hussein! Your numbers don’t add up.”

  She might as well have told him that his entire life amounted to nothing. He stared at her blankly, took a deep breath, then dropped his eyes to the graph on the table.

  “You have no way of knowing that.” He sounded so wounded, it made Elizabeth wish she hadn’t said anything. “You haven’t studied the numbers,” he muttered without lifting his eyes to meet hers.

  Three years ago, she would have had no hesitation in responding, “I don’t need to have the numbers in front of me to study them, I remember every last one and I know you’re mistaken, my friend, they don’t add up no matter how badly you want them to.”

  Three years ago, she still believed in the inviolability of some truths and the necessity—the unqualified importance—of telling it like it is. She didn’t know yet that truth can kill you as easily as it can set you free; that there’s such a thing as one too many facts. That numbers can represent too many losses, too much time gone by, too little hope for miracles.

  “You’re right,” she said so softly her voice was nearly drowned out by the din around them. “I may be mistaken.”

  The next night, Hal did not show up for work or for dinner with Elizabeth. The night after that he went into the kitchen through the back door but hid every time John Vain went in to look for him. He spoke to no one, not even to answer a question or acknowledge a command, and slept in his car instead of in the storage room. He spent all of the next day poring over his files. In the evening, he was waiting for Elizabeth when she and Angela came in with John Vain.

  “There!” He slammed his suitcase on the table as soon as they sat. He was clearly daring someone; you just couldn’t tell if it was her, or himself.

  Hal wiped his palms on the frayed lapels of his jacket, then popped the locks of his suitcase. The top burst open, shooting up sheets of scribbled and crumpled lined paper. Grunting under his breath, he gathered the papers, forced a smile, and handed them to Elizabeth with the expression of a man who’s entrusting his sick child to the only doctor in the world who might save it.

  __________________

  That first year after the revolution, local Angelenos didn’t know what to make of the thousands of Iranians who suddenly populated the city. In the wealthier parts of town, residents who for decades had been accustomed to a certain kind of immigrant—working-class, non-English-speaking, skin-of-their-teeth types, mostly from South America and Southeast Asia—suddenly found a population of highly educated, worldly Iranians inhabiting large swaths of Westwood, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills. They shopped at Saks and I. Magnin on Wilshire Boulevard, ate at Chasen’s and Perino’s and the Luau on Rodeo, and fought vehemently over the check because everyone wanted to pay for the others. The men wore suits and ties even to the park on Sunday afternoons; the women walked around as if surrounded by a royal retinue. They went everywhere in groups, sat around at Ship’s coffee shop on Wilshire and Westwood half the night, or at Clifton’s in the Century City mall on Saturdays, as if they owned the rights to the land. They went to each other’s hotel rooms and apartments every day, ate dinner at ten on weeknights, later on weekends.

  In the schools, American parents were alarmed by the sight of so many dark-eyed, dark-haired children suddenly sitting next to their blond kids. Librarians couldn’t convey the concept of “no talking” well enough. Teachers, who didn’t know that par
ents in Iran are not allowed to interfere in the school’s business, complained that Iranian parents lacked the volunteer spirit, that, following Middle Eastern custom, they would arrive an hour late for a twenty-minute parent-teacher conference and fail to understand what they had done wrong. Once the hostage crisis broke out and wild-eyed young men badly in need of a shave screamed “Death to America!” at every television camera broadcasting from Iran, American-born children, blond and blue-eyed, long-legged and beaming with confidence, tormented the dark kids and called them hostage-takers.

  In neighborhoods with a large influx of Iranian residents, homeowners suspected a hostile takeover by these unruly strangers who turned off the air-conditioning in their homes and instead hosed down the yard twice a day (never mind the drought) in order to fight the summer heat, haggled for everything because where they came from the “asking price” was only a place from which to start negotiations. In Beverly Hills, white flight became a serious threat; those who stayed did so mostly out of a sense of patriotism, a Florida-style “stand your ground” mentality that pitted old Eastern European and South American immigrants of fifty years ago against the Iranians of the day.

  And yet there was also this: the laws of the United States and the spirit of generosity upon which it was founded assured a level of tolerance and opportunity rarely available anywhere else in the world.

  * * *

  Elizabeth had to find work, but she had no idea how to go about doing this or what she was even qualified to do. Every morning she woke up in the dark, made Angela a breakfast of white toast with Smucker’s jelly, then they both took the bus down Olympic to Rexford. From there, they walked the twelve blocks to the Hawthorne School where Angela had started midyear in third grade. She had been a top student at her school in Iran and she had no trouble speaking and understanding both English and French, but here she was identified as an ESL student and automatically assigned to the “slow” track. She was angry about this—about the way her well-meaning teachers spoke to her too loudly and enunciated too slowly, the way the white kids avoided the Iranians and the Iranian kids banded together and showed no interest in befriending the whites. She had discovered that the Iranian children all knew each other from some other place or time, that their parents had known each other in Iran and were friends in LA, that many of them seemed to be privy to every part of the Soleyman history.

  “They know everything about you and Dad and your parents and Bagh-e Yaas,” she told Elizabeth. “They ask me if we ever found Noor, or if you found out who stole her, or how she was killed. How come you don’t know them?”

  How to explain to a nine-year-old that you can be in exile even while at home; that Elizabeth had neither sought nor missed the sense of belonging that was so crucial to so many; that her self-sufficiency, her independence, would at once liberate and shut out both her and Angela.

  * * *

  From the school, Elizabeth walked up to the library next to city hall, sat on a bench outside, and read every single help wanted ad in the LA Times. She had no idea what a “résumé” was and wouldn’t have anything to include in it, so she only inquired after the jobs that didn’t require one. The few times she used the public phone outside the library to call the numbers listed, she found herself stuttering and incoherent, too intimidated by the questions and too mortified by having to say, “No, I don’t have a college degree, not even a high school diploma, I’ve never worked ‘outside the house’ before, I don’t have a car, I don’t know how to ‘greet’ customers in a retail store.” But she had no trouble finding her way around or remembering the routes, numbers, and times of the bus schedule; she had only to study those things once to have near total recall. So she started to show up at the addresses listed in “apply in person” ads, even planned to stop at random offices or shops and offer to work.

  They looked at her—thin, pallid, much too serious for a woman her age—and didn’t know what to think. She seemed too well off, too sophisticated to work as an assistant in a day-care center, or as a grocery clerk, but she was too inexperienced to be trusted with the care of the children or the cash register. She couldn’t start work till after eight and had to leave by two because she had a child, didn’t know shorthand or how to type or operate a switchboard, but she insisted she could do a full day’s paperwork on time, learn anything she was shown once. For the first time in her life, Elizabeth’s intellect was neither recognized nor deemed especially useful.

  And there was the scent.

  It must be a perfume she wore, people thought, something foreign and extravagant that evoked long-forgotten memories—a story they had heard in childhood, a day they had spent by the sea, an outlandish hope, a first kiss. It preceded her into every room and hallway, onto the bus, into the staircase and elevator, drew curious stares and tentative questions—what is that you’re wearing, what flower or plant is it extracted from, what country was it made in?

  Embarrassed, Elizabeth would offer a quiet, “I don’t recall the name, it was a gift,” and look down, waiting for the moment to pass. The sense of bewilderment would cast a pall over the conversation and she felt, more than ever, that she could neither explain nor evade her birthright.

  It had been different in Iran. She rarely went out, hardly met new people. Nearly everyone she came into contact with was either accustomed to or aware of her strange smell.

  “And do you plan to wear this perfume at work? Are you willing to use less of it? It’s not unpleasant—no—but it’s distinct and unmistakable, heady even, it makes a person want to lie down and look at the clouds.”

  * * *

  She was in her third week of job hunting, eating carrots and celery for breakfast and lunch so she could save her remaining money, when John Vain discovered what she was up to during the day. He still called or stopped by every evening to take her and Angela to Lucky 99 for dinner, but he was disarmed by talk of homework and school early the next day, had to swallow his disappointment, and, as he confessed to Hal, “take it like a man.” He had been away from Iran for so long, he had no idea how inappropriate all this was—a man lending a single woman money and buying her things when he was not a spouse or directly related to her by blood, his presence in her house when no one else was there to chaperone, even his addressing her by the more informal, intimate tow—you—instead of shomaa.

  He could sense her shyness, the hesitancy with which she accepted his offerings, but he attributed them to her pride. And he was tactful enough not to shout his eagerness to be with her every second of the day from every rooftop; she was, after all, still a recent widow. But time had a way of folding in on itself whenever he was near her, so that an hour became a minute, painfully precious and maddeningly short, then stretched monstrously when she was absent. So he came up with ever more innovative reasons to “touch base,” as he liked to say, which meant daily visits, albeit for just a few minutes, with or without an invitation.

  This—being impulsive and impetuous and “all-in”—was genuine John Vain. Even before he made the deal of the century and bought himself eternal good luck, when he was just a fatherless boy walking barefoot on a musty sidewalk in a little coastal town, he had not an ounce of caution or a grain of distrust to slow him down. He was what people in Iran called “large”—as in a person with largesse. He knew what he wanted the moment he saw it and he was always sure he would get it one way or another, no matter what the obstacles or how much he had to sacrifice. He was a promise, constant and unwavering, that the road through darkness would eventually, inevitably, lead to light.

  One Sunday he rang Elizabeth’s doorbell holding a bagful of brunch items, having dragged Hal in tow “for appearance’s sake, so I don’t come off as a mad stalker,” and found Angela alone at home.

  “She’s gone to the look for work,” the girl explained, trying hard not to sound either hopeful or angry. They needed the money, but Angela also needed her mother.

  “She’ll probably come back and say no one would hire her.”


  John Vain put the bag down on the three-foot-long kitchen counter, considered Angela’s statement to make sure he had understood, and silently blessed the strange woman who, long ago in a time of utter hopelessness, had for a pittance sold him ninety-nine years of good luck.

  __________________

  Elizabeth had responded to a recurring ad by a “domestic agency.” She knew “domestic” referred to family, home, and household, so she took three buses to Sherman Oaks, walked for twenty minutes from the corner of Ventura and Sepulveda to Van Nuys, then up two flights of stairs in a strip mall to the address listed in the ad.

  The door was open. Inside, two dozen women sat on metal folding chairs, handbags on their laps, speaking Spanish and seeming quite at home. The room was dark, with only a small window that appeared to have been painted shut. In the far corner, a middle-aged woman with drawn-on eyebrows and false eyelashes sat behind a metal desk, staring at the phone as if to will it to ring.

  “Good morning,” she said, motioning with her hand for Elizabeth to come in. The other women fell silent, glared at her from head to toe and back up, then started to talk to each other in Spanish. Elizabeth forced a smile and nodded at them, said good morning in English, slowly made her way to the desk.

  “Live in or out?” the woman with the eyelashes asked in Spanish. When she saw Elizabeth’s reaction, she asked, still in Spanish, “Don’t you speak Spanish?”

  A moment later she repeated the question in English. “Live in or live out? It’s a hundred dollars cash either way when you sign up, fifty a week for four weeks once you’ve found something. Do you have papers?”