The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  Things became easier once war broke out between Iran and Iraq and the regime had to direct its resources to the effort. Elizabeth wrote to Manzel and her husband under a false name and they wrote back. Their other sons, they reported, had taken care of them until the war, but now they had all been drafted and sent away. As for Mojtaba, Manzel and her husband cursed him every day and night for bringing disgrace to their name, and they were aided in their wishes by the Black Bitch of Bushehr who, having believed herself within reach of her dream, had seen it snatched yet again—this time by Mojtaba.

  __________________

  For Raphael’s Wife, the year of bloodshed that led to the ruination of the old upper class was a time of rebirth and empowerment. She relished the sight of cars burning and store windows being smashed, the news of the shah’s departure from Iran and the subsequent saga of his shuttling from country to country, unable to gain entry into any one, even the same United States whose interests he had represented so faithfully for thirty years. She loved the middle-of-the-night raids by street thugs now called Revolutionary Guards, the dragging of secular nationalist ministers and military leaders before revolutionary courts where the trials lasted three minutes and were followed by summary executions on the roof, the pictures of the naked and bullet-ridden bodies of dead rich men—killed because they were rich—pasted on the front pages of the evening newspapers. For her, each one of those men was Aaron Soleyman, every one of those soldiers and bankers and politicians a pillar that had buttressed his advantage.

  Where was he now to hiss in that cold voice, “In this country, at this time, you and your kind don’t hold a prayer against the likes of me?”

  * * *

  Raphael’s Wife was so busy celebrating the Soleymans’ demise, she forgot she was a Jew—at least in name—and this, an Islamic revolution. She forgot that the mullahs had been the Jews’ biggest persecutors for a thousand years, that the only reason they wanted the shah gone was so they could take his place. The first chance she got, she rushed out to the Interior Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran where, she must have thought, the new rulers were holding a fire sale on fairness and equity. She stood in line for a day and a half, her ever-present plastic bag filled with real and forged documents, and when her turn finally came, she emptied the contents of the bag onto the desk of some unwashed and unshaven clerk in combat fatigues stolen from God only knows which army depot, and said, “I’ve come for my son’s name.”

  You had to feel sorry for the woman. She was either insane or stupid to think that the mullahs would spend a hundred years in virtual exile, then make the biggest comeback of the century, only to hand over the country’s riches to anyone who asked.

  The clerk gave her sixty seconds to tell her story, then asked if her claim was on the estate of the same Aaron Soleyman who had been declared taaghooti and whose widow was on the run from the regime.

  It was.

  And was the house, Bagh-e Yaas, the mansion on the Avenue of Tranquility?

  It was.

  The same that belonged to Seyyed Mojtaba?

  __________________

  Raphael’s Wife never recovered from the stab wound to the heart where the revolution had promised her relief.

  The first thing she learned as she stood by, helpless once again, and watched Mojtaba move into Bagh-e Yaas with his wives and children, was that there were two kinds of mos-tah-zah-fin—oppressed and exploited—in Iran: the kind that would remain oppressed, and the kind that would go on to become the new oppressors. The second thing she learned was that everything that was bad under the old regime only became worse under the new one.

  The old regime might have trampled the weak and only thrown crumbs at the people; this new one slaughtered man and beast and stole the skin off their backs. Raphael’s Wife learned this when she appealed to the Ministry of the Oppressed for help against Mojtaba, and was rewarded with a two-day-long interrogation, followed by a beating that left her permanently incontinent and with a broken hip. Her son learned this when he applied for a new birth certificate as Soleyman, Son of Raphael, and was summarily arrested, flogged, and forced to confess to being a Zionist because of his “ties” to Aaron Soleyman.

  Once it became evident that the mullahs would outshine any dictator, alive or dead, in greed, duplicity, and willingness to kill, Raphael’s Wife, at least, had the moral rectitude to accept responsibility for having bet on the devil to save her from God’s cruelty. The rest of the “dispossessed,” the million of Iranians who had marched in the street with their fists in the air, demanding Khomeini’s return, now cried foul and appealed for help to the same “international community” whose interference in the country’s affairs they had condemned a year or two earlier. The more honest among them would later admit that they had been either mad—to repeat history hoping to reach a different result—or stupid. The rest complained that the revolution had been “stolen” from them.

  Can you complain of being robbed if you invite the thief into your house, hand him the keys, and ask that he please take charge?

  __________________

  Raphael’s Son was eighteen years old when he was arrested by a truckful of young street thugs in military fatigues bearing automatic weapons. No longer the helpless if reticent boy in a man’s woolen pants with the cuffs rolled up, being dragged around by his mother on a mendicant’s pilgrimage through upscale neighborhoods and luxury stores and high-rise offices that were forbidden to the likes of him, he had a street urchin’s manners and a farmhand’s education, no charm or good looks, and no money. In their place was a yawning, bottomless gash carved into him by every bit of indignity and embarrassment he had suffered by “those rich Jews,” and a single-minded resolve to pay them all back.

  He had studied them his whole life, understood their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. He knew all about vulnerability—this bastard son of a woman who had made a career of being wronged and slighted. He hated the perpetrators, yes, but hated his mother just as much for being maligned. Appeal to the hangman’s sense of justice is what she had done. Curse the executioner just as the ax fell upon her time after time. Trample her own and her son’s pride into a reeking mess of raw animal innards that she held up as proof of her impotence to the enemy she hoped to defeat.

  Even before he was old enough to do the math, see his mother for the grasping old woman that she was and the story of his conception for the fool’s gospel she preached, Raphael’s Son had understood that weakness was no defense against the mighty. He suffered not so much from his circumstances as from the shame, the public humiliation, the utter dismissal by people who seemed to know much more about him than he knew about himself. He could have tolerated his poverty, his fatherlessness, the insanity, even, of a mother who made a profession of being evil; the nearly intolerable aspect was being pointed at as if he didn’t exist, talked about as if he didn’t matter, told day after day that he simply, fundamentally, wasn’t.

  So he retreated into himself and, from the vantage point of the invisible, studied the sources of his torment. Years later, in America, he would still remember the sound of the doorbell at Bagh-e Yaas, the shade of the paint on the metal gates, every square centimeter of the parts of the yard and the house where he and his mother were allowed. Without admitting it to himself, he would paint the walls of his house the same colors, pick the same kind of furniture. He would despise smart, outspoken women who, he imagined, had resembled Angela as a child, loathe “career women” whom he viewed as replicas of Elizabeth. Even at his most successful, he couldn’t enter a roomful of his peers without hearing the long-ago laughter of the boys every morning when the teacher took roll. She called everyone else by their first and last name. She called him “Raphael’s Son None.”

  It was a fraught and painful predicament to be in—this wanting to belong to a world that punished you, to be accepted by people who laughed at you. It would have been easier, less internally divisive, if all he had to do was to get away from the cause of
his suffering. But to long to be embraced by the same individuals whose very name made you cringe?

  He knew he wasn’t what or who his mother claimed; he could see that he bore no resemblance to any of the Soleymans, that Raphael’s Wife was older than most grandmothers. He knew no human could be pregnant for thirteen months. But it’s one thing to know, and something else to believe.

  Believe that you have no one but a mother you detest. That you’re wanted by no one, recognized and valued by no one.

  So he had no choice but to think he should have been accepted and welcomed, embraced and feared, by the community, the family, that had rejected him.

  And then, just as he was strong enough to fend off his mother and mature enough to plan his own war, just when the revolution leveled the playing field for the haves and have-nots, the Muslims he knew turned against him for being a Jew and the Jews he wanted to be recognized by abandoned the fight and stole off for the West. They took with them the boldness of the once-untouchable ghetto dweller who, overnight, became part of the master class in Iran, the greenness of the carpetbagger who believes he can carry an entire civilization in his slight, battered suitcase.

  The gilded castle Raphael’s Son yearned to be admitted to, the elusive universe of legends and actuality, desires and dissent, that had rejected him—Elizabeth Soleyman and her surviving daughter—had gone elsewhere and, by so doing, made him once again invisible.

  __________________

  It took four months and a whole lot of scars and broken bones for Raphael’s Son to convince his captors that he did not qualify either as a Zionist or as a taaghooti. By the time he was released, he had realized there was no advantage in being a son of a felled and fallen dynasty, no matter what his rights of inheritance. On his way home from prison after the months of captivity, he recited under his breath, “Ash-shadu an laa ill-laaha illa-lah”—“I testify there is no God but God.” This is all that was required of anyone who wished to convert to Islam; he didn’t need to go to a mosque or study or answer questions in order to become Muhammad “Jadid al-Islam”—New Muslim.

  His conversion was not so much an act of surrender of his rights or ambitions as it was a declaration of war by other means. For the first time in his life, being unknown and insignificant to the world became an asset: he grew a beard and went around in a white dress shirt buttoned around the neck but with no tie, a smart blazer over a pair of khaki pants, and combat-style Doc Martens looted from a distributor’s warehouse and sold on a street corner for a quarter of the retail price. He commanded his mother to stay home and out of sight, picked up a string of worry beads, and started to say namaz five times a day where everyone could see him. He went to Friday prayers at the mosque and to nightly gatherings of self-appointed moral police in the district. He told the head of a local chapter of the Sepah-e Pasdaran that he knew of dozens of taaghootis—women as well as men—whose past and ongoing criminal deeds they should investigate. Once they were arrested and jailed, he sent word to their families that he might be able to arrange for their release through his contacts among the Pasdars.

  It was a game of blackmail and extortion that everyone he targeted recognized and still had to play. The cash payments and deeds of trust, the ownership papers and promissory notes, the wedding rings and antique silver bowls and silk rugs and fur coats the prisoners’ families provided in exchange for Raphael’s Son’s intervention would not guarantee their loved ones’ release or safety. But the consequences of not paying were appallingly clear.

  When the war started with Iraq and young men and teenage boys were called to the front, Raphael’s Son extended his services to anyone who could afford to buy his way out. That was easy in the first half of the war, when the country was chock-full of unemployed, able-bodied men all too eager to offer up their earthly lives in exchange for a permanent seat in Khomeini’s paradise, seventy-two virgins and eternally mild weather included. One phone call from Raphael’s Son and 20 percent of his fee shared with his “people” in the Ministry of War was all it took to spare a thirteen-year-old from having to walk in front of tanks as a human minesweeper. But then the cemeteries were crammed full and new graves couldn’t be dug fast enough, Saddam Hussein was having a field day with the mustard gas and other weapons of mass destruction he had made with help from the United States, and the dead men’s families had worn themselves out with all the celebration and festivities in honor of their sons’ and brothers’ martyrdom. Raphael’s Son had no choice but to raise his fees, and even then he could not guarantee that the waiver he obtained would be permanent.

  In six years, he amassed nearly $3 million, much of it from “clients’” family members already living in the United States and Europe. By then, his mother was little more than a leaky, trembling bag of bones wrapped in a dark chador and cared for only begrudgingly by her son. A lifetime of pounding and clawing at doors she had failed to open for herself or him, of setting others to ruin without managing to build for herself, of using him—this is how he saw it—to make herself legitimate, had left her completely alone and entirely unwanted.

  In the spring of 1986, Raphael’s Son paid a distant maternal cousin, a kosher butcher’s apprentice named Joshua Simcha, $5,000 to smuggle Raphael’s Wife out of Iran. Free now and unencumbered by his mother, he turned his full attention to the task of avenging himself against the taaghootis and wrongdoers of his childhood. They might have forgotten him—those rich and educated Iranians who had left the country rather than face the truth that they were no longer relevant or respected; but he—Raphael’s Son—remembered them.

  LOS ANGELES

  Tuesday, June 25, 2013

  __________________

  “I don’t care what it looks like,” Leon told O’Donnell in his office. “The wife might have helped him escape, but she didn’t kill him.”

  There were only two chairs in O’Donnell’s office—an ergonomic executive desk chair for him, and a metal-framed, no-seat-pad-or-armrests, sorry-excuse-for-a-seating-implement for guests. The latter was so narrow, it barely contained the entirety of Leon’s frame.

  “Couldn’t you get something with armrests?” He asked the same question every time he sat in that chair. In response, O’Donnell always smiled and turned his hands palm-up, as if to say, It’s the best I could do, which they both knew wasn’t true. O’Donnell didn’t like people coming into his office and lingering, bringing with them germs and viruses and the smell of cigarettes and garlic and whatever else clung to their skin and clothes. As it was, he had two air purifiers working overtime in a 25’ x 30’ space.

  Leon wiggled on the chair until he felt semisteady, then assumed a “this is a teachable moment” tone and attempted to bring his boss up to date.

  Forget, for a second, that Neda was half Raphael’s Son’s weight, with bird bones and not enough strength to lift a ten-pound dumbbell above her head at the gym; that even if surprised, Raphael’s Son could have crushed her forearm with one hand. Forget, also, that she didn’t have a single nick or cut on any of her fingers; that she had endured nearly eighteen years of living with Raphael’s Son and had no special reason to want to be rid of him now. Or that, with him dead, she would have been poor by the standards to which she was accustomed: Raphael’s Son had no life insurance, and had not kept written record of where his assets were hidden. And, of course, forget that there was no body and no weapon, no witnesses or other clues.

  Leon wanted O’Donnell to understand that women like Neda never—not once, ever—made a decision of such importance on their own. Neda, especially, looked and acted like she couldn’t order off a restaurant menu without getting an anxiety attack.

  Leon’s gut told him that Raphael’s Son was not dead. He was just hiding somewhere with the money. He had staged the “accident” and coached Neda to report seeing him bloody and lifeless so he would be declared dead, the case against him abandoned, his creditors giving up on trying to recoup any of their assets, and he could go right on cheating helpless old
widows into ripe old age. Even assuming he was dead, however, there was no chance—none at all—that Neda was the killer.

  For the first time since he had become a detective, Leon felt that being Iranian gave him an advantage in solving a case.

  “The fact is,” he explained to O’Donnell, “Iranian Jewish women do not kill.” Even if they did—and they don’t—they would not kill their husband. Not violently, anyway, and not all at once. It’s that simple and Neda, unaware as she was, had to have known that. Even Sabya—the legendary crazy woman of the old Tehran ghetto who, in time, was immortalized as an adjective—sabya-esque means frighteningly, uncontrollably, violently insane—never killed anyone. Once or twice, in the days when divorce was not an option, a wife might have poisoned the bastard slowly till you could see daylight through his liver, or she might have tempted him into a heart attack by turning on her feline charm, but even then there was no telling who exactly was to blame. Men did smoke a lot in those days, and most cigarettes were unfiltered. And besides, this is California, home of community property and no-fault divorce. You don’t have to kill the guy to get rid of him.

  It’s true some things have changed for Iranian women since they came to the United States. Cheating on one’s husband, which was rare to nearly nonexistent, is no longer out of the question. But having a nice, quiet affair with a friend’s husband in Bel Air while your own spouse is off chasing hookers in Southeast Asia is not nearly the same thing as sending the man to his grave. The only time in thirty years any Iranian Jewish wife is known to have made an attempt on her husband’s life was in the early ’80s: they had been married for half a century and he still got on her nerves. It was soon after they had moved to America and all people talked about was how easy it is for one’s children to become prostitutes and drug addicts, or to marry “foreigners,” or to be killed on the way home from the library by some lunatic with a gun. People killed for pocket change, the wife had heard. So she asked her South American gardener if he would kill her husband for three hundred dollars; he agreed, if she also paid for the weapon. Then he went to the police and turned her in.