The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  Raphael’s Son was nothing if not a shrewd businessman, and he had spent the better part of his life charting the path to revenge and riches, but it wasn’t until he shook John Vain’s hand and felt it tremble ever so subtly that day in his office that he knew he could finally put his money to good use.

  “I’ll lend you any amount you need,” he promised John Vain, “and I won’t charge more than the banks.”

  There was only one condition.

  __________________

  She arrived in the midst of a February rainstorm, walked toward him under a slate sky in her faded dress and scuffed shoes, an umbrella mangled by the wind and useless against the rain in her right hand and a manila folder wrapped in a white plastic bag in the left, and for a minute Raphael’s Son thought he was going to break down and cry, fall to his knees and thank whatever god had created this moment, let him live long enough and come far enough to see his own and his mother’s every prayer answered: the evil young queen of yesterday reduced to a mere supplicant; the irony of the white grocery bag apparently lost on her; the need—her need—to beg for money if only for a friend. But then Elizabeth finished crossing the street and stepped onto the sidewalk that was paved with purple bougainvilleas torn from the vines by the storm, threw the umbrella into a trash can and flung the wet hair away from her face, and by the time her eyes caught his, he knew that the balance of power had not shifted at all; no matter how changed the circumstances, she was still the lord of the castle and he, the tramp at the gates.

  It shocked him that he still felt so small before her, that he had spent a lifetime musing about this scene—right here, in front of him, he standing under the awning of the building’s entrance and she still in the rain—only to find that the scale had not shifted at all.

  * * *

  She had been to see him once before, barely two hours after he had met with John Vain, just as Raphael’s Son was closing the window and getting ready to leave the office. He happened to glance at the street as she fed the meter, and he was so overcome with anxiety, he had to grab on to the frame so he wouldn’t keel over. Then he pounced toward the door and locked it from inside, turned the lights off, and pressed himself, barely breathing, against the wall while she knocked for close to three minutes.

  Afterward, he told himself he had hidden from her just to prolong her ignominy, make her go back a second time, but he knew that it was fear, old and rusted but embedded in him still, that had made him avoid Elizabeth. He didn’t go to the office for the rest of the week, just called the answering machine a few times to check for messages. There weren’t any, which disappointed him, if only because he would have liked to know that John Vain and Elizabeth were looking for him.

  On Monday morning he decided he had made them wait long enough. As always, he parked his car in the alley behind the building, walked across the street to buy coffee at the 7-Eleven, then doubled back to the office. Under the front awning, he closed and shook his umbrella. He was trying the wipe the paper flowers that lined the sidewalk off the soles of his shoes when he felt a familiar sense of dread, turned, and saw her.

  “I’m Elizabeth Soleyman,” she said in Persian, as if he didn’t know. Her hand was wet from the rain, but she extended it anyway and they shook. She was still in the downpour, soaked to the bone, he imagined, but he couldn’t force his body to get out of the way so she could come into the lobby. She waited a few seconds, then squeezed around him and through the door. She threw her hair back again, wiped her dripping face with wet hands.

  “I’ve tried to catch you a few times,” she said, still shaking water off. “I thought if I came early enough today . . .” She stopped, gave him a knowing look, and smiled.

  Upstairs he unlocked the office, turned on the lights, and invited her in. He might have offered her a towel if he had one, or he might have let her sit there wet and shivering, but she said something about the bathroom and disappeared down the hall. When she came back her face was dry and her hair and dress were damp but not dripping. She sat down in the armchair on the other side of the desk. He still hadn’t said a word.

  “You wanted to speak to me.”

  Suddenly, he didn’t know why he ever thought he could make her beg. He may be rich now, much richer than she. He may have managed to get her to come begging, albeit for someone else. But he could see that for her, it wasn’t a matter trading money for dignity. She wasn’t asking for acceptance or legitimacy or love. That’s why she had been so quick to respond when Raphael’s Son sent word with John Vain: he’d lend the money if Elizabeth asked.

  Now she was here and smiling at him, and in a minute she would ask for the money and then it would be over, Raphael’s Son would have played out the only hand he ever had.

  “I didn’t invite you here to talk about money,” he heard himself say. He realized that the phone was ringing, had been ringing for some time, but he ignored it till the machine picked up. He lifted a pencil from the desk, turned it over in his hands and examined it, then said, “I have something I believe you’d like to know.”

  She frowned slightly and narrowed her eyes, cocked her head to the side as if to understand him better. He turned the pencil like a windmill between his index and middle fingers, but his eyes didn’t leave her face.

  “I believe it’s important to you.”

  Suddenly, her face went pale. Her eyes, so neutral, like yellow glass, darkened with what he hoped was anxiety.

  Raphael’s Son swallowed the bile that had filled his mouth. If he couldn’t get the satisfaction of watching her debase herself, he was going to make sure she didn’t leave unharmed.

  He threw the pencil onto the desk, pushed back in his chair with his fingertips on the edge, and said, “You wanna know how your kid died?”

  __________________

  The young maid they had recently hired, a girl from Manzel’s hometown, had let Raphael’s Wife into the house.

  Elizabeth remembered the girl—fifteen years old according to her birth certificate, though there was no telling whether the information was correct. She had light-green eyes against white skin—a beautiful face if you saw it wrapped in a chador—which is why Manzel had chosen her as a bride for her oldest son, paid the milk-money and bought the bus ticket to have her sent to Tehran. Manzel and her husband might be lowly servants in the capital, but in the eyes of their townspeople up north they were nothing short of aristocracy: they had a house and a car and two sons who went to university and worked in offices.

  The girl’s family had been more than eager for the union to take place. They married remotely—a mullah performing the ceremony on her end—and Manzel rented a one-bedroom apartment for them on the Avenue of the Tulips.

  At the bus depot in her white chintz chador, the bride was just as ravishing as everyone expected. She was also very shy; she didn’t make eye contact and wouldn’t let a strand of hair or a millimeter of skin show except her face, which was a good sign; it meant she was pure and obedient and easily trained. When they arrived at Manzel’s house for the family’s first meal together, she kept her chador on even in the women’s room. Later, when it was just she and the groom, he insisted on seeing her unveiled, even took off the first layer of her clothes to examine her more closely, but there was no convincing her to let him see her hair—she had worn a head scarf under the chador, and this she wasn’t willing to shed.

  For two days, Manzel’s daughter-in-law kept her head covered. On her third night in Tehran, she took off the scarf and stood before her husband and his mother—green-eyed and fair-complexioned and entirely, unmistakably, bald.

  * * *

  The marriage was automatically annulled because the bride’s family had misrepresented her qualifications. Manzel’s son wanted to ship the girl back to her parents but she begged to be allowed to stay. She would rather die on a street in Tehran than endure the humiliation before her family and their neighbors. They were all seething with envy over her union, she said as she threw herself at Manzel’
s feet, counting the minutes till the groom saw just how defective she was and chucked her out.

  Manzel khanum knew what it was like to be fundamentally defective and beyond repair. She too had married a man who had no idea she was mute and didn’t find out for nearly a week. But for the fact that Manzel had a stable job and that her employers had agreed to hire him as well, her own husband would have returned her and asked for a refund the minute her secret was revealed.

  She didn’t have the heart to send the bald girl back, so she took her to Bagh-e Yaas instead.

  “I’ll be happy to work just for food and a place to sleep,” the girl begged, but Elizabeth wasn’t interested in taking on a slave. She gave the girl Manzel’s old room and a salary, sent her to school, and insisted that she complete her homework before tending to household chores.

  * * *

  “I don’t know how my mother got her to help,” Raphael’s Son answered the question he could see dawning in Elizabeth’s eyes. “I don’t think the girl hated you. I think she wanted to hit back at Manzel.”

  He thought for a moment, then laughed bitterly.

  “Isn’t it stupid? To think you can hurt a servant by taking away the spoiled little runt she has to care for instead of her own kids?”

  They were sitting at eye level on either side of the desk. Without seeing Elizabeth’s hands, Raphael’s Son could tell that they were shaking on her lap and that her knees were trembling too, that between anger and anticipation, hatred and elation, her soul was stretched and tormented to the limit.

  “Because of you,” he told her, “my mother had to work nights in a hospital. She washed floors and emptied chamber pots, and when she came home she smelled of blood and shit and illness. Every once in a while, she’d see women in the maternity ward whose child was stillborn or died soon after birth. She couldn’t get over how devastated these women were, like it was the worst thing that could happen to a person.”

  He paused, then added, “Or so they thought. I guess there are worse things,” he chuckled, “like not knowing if the kid’s dead or alive.

  “One night, a mother and child were brought in after an accident. They’d been on the sidewalk outside their house, down near Telegraph Avenue, and some rich kid in a lime-green BMW drove right into them. He was barely eighteen years old, didn’t have a driver’s license—but since when does that stop anyone from driving?—and when he saw what he’d done, he backed up and tried to escape but people blocked his way forward and back, dragged him out of the car. He’d had a fight with his dad, he said. He was driving fast to blow off steam.

  “They called the cops to come arrest the brat, but his father arrived with some colonel or sergeant or other piece of filth from the army, and they just took the kid away and had his car towed and that was it. The woman he’d hit survived, but her child died of her injuries. The driver’s parents sent him away.” Raphael’s Son chuckled again. “He’s probably right here, in LA. Maybe he’s a doctor. His family sent a messenger to the hospital with a bagful of cash—a gift, the guy said, for the woman’s ‘troubles.’”

  To his astonishment, he saw that Elizabeth was crying. She must know how this story ends, he thought.

  “My mother would clean after the woman every night. She asked her how she’d like to make up for her dead daughter. One rich asshole had taken the kid from her; why not have another rich asshole,” he stopped, tipped his head toward Elizabeth, “that would be you—pay with her own child’s life?”

  He felt a surge of wild, brutal emotion about to blow his chest open. He trained his eyes on the newspaper on the desk, tried to slow his heartbeat and quiet the pain in his temples.

  “You made her into this,” he mumbled. Then he stood up and leaned forward over the desk, let out a howl that stunned them both.

  “You!”

  He saw Elizabeth then and realized he had gotten his wish: hit at the weakest spot and made her splinter and bleed.

  “The bald maid unlocked the door after you went to sleep. My mother wasn’t going to kill your little shit. She was supposed to fill in for the dead kid. But she choked on the rag, so they threw her away.”

  __________________

  Only a handful of years earlier, they might have been able to verify at least parts of the story. Elizabeth or Angela could have called Manzel and her husband, asked them to go back to the hospital where Raphael’s Wife had worked and see if anyone remembered an accident victim who lost a child. She would have been noted not so much because of her injuries as the cause of them: the son of a prominent family, a lime-green BMW. Of course the driver would evade justice. In this country, at this time . . . If they hadn’t been killed by the mullahs, the driver and his family would be living in the West, stripped of their titles and status and the unstated law that the mighty are held accountable only to those more powerful than they. Most likely, they wouldn’t own up to the truth even if Elizabeth found them.

  * * *

  For three years after she left Iran, Elizabeth had wired money to Manzel every month. The Iranian rial had crashed so badly that a few dollars went a long way—even with all the shortages of food and gas and other basic commodities. Then the bombing of Tehran began, entire swaths of the city were leveled, and families were dislocated for good. Children were dragged off from behind their desks at school, put on buses headed for the front, and chained together as human shields. Some escaped the country by land and vanished outside its borders. Most ended up in one of the makeshift martyrs’ cemeteries that had become commonplace in Tehran, lying full of holes or in pieces under colored lights, green and black Islamic banners, and handwritten signs congratulating their parents.

  One day Elizabeth realized that the money she wired was not being claimed at the other end. Someone who knew someone who had heard of Seyyed Mojtaba seemed to recall that he had fallen victim to the internal struggle for power within the clergy, sided with the wrong faction, and been stripped of his rank in the Sepah-e Pasdaran. He had had to evacuate Bagh-e Yaas, and move in with one of his wives’ families. He slept with a dozen machine guns and a cache of explosives under his bed, and was convinced that his old comrades were coming to kill him on some mullah’s orders. He was last seen naked in a mortuary near Yazd, his body riddled with bullets and his neck broken by a former ally’s boot. His parents could not claim his body or have him buried for fear of being identified as equally seditious.

  * * *

  That’s the last Elizabeth and Angela heard about Manzel and her family. Without them to investigate Raphael’s Son’s claims, Elizabeth had only her instincts and common sense to draw from. She decided the story was ugly enough, Raphael’s Son’s delivery of it bitter enough, for it all to be true.

  __________________

  Raphael’s Son never took John Vain’s calls or agreed to see him after the encounter with Elizabeth. He told her as much before she left—that he had no intention of helping any friend of hers—though he wasn’t sure she heard him or cared.

  He made a point of walking behind her down the narrow, dark staircase. Outside, the rain had thickened, and now there was a low fog, so that he couldn’t see from the edge of the sidewalk past the double yellow lines in the middle of the street. He wondered if Elizabeth might get hit by a car as she tried to navigate the crosswalk. He hoped she wouldn’t, that she would have time to feel the full impact of what he had told her.

  * * *

  Without the loan Raphael’s Son had promised, John Vain scrambled to find a new source of income. At first, he tried to persuade his old pals and patrons to enter into a partnership (“You put up the money, I’ll do all the work, you get 70 percent”) for a new restaurant. As chagrined as they were by the change in his circumstances, and as much as they wished him well and hoped he would recapture the old glory so they, too, could bask in its light, these people knew better than anyone just what a lousy businessman John Vain really was. They had been the beneficiaries of his famous generosity for too long to believe it would ever
change or yield a different consequence.

  He took a job as a maître d’ at Jimmy’s in Beverly Hills, but he was too proud to accept tips and therefore made nothing beyond minimum wage. He had been staying at the Chateau Marmont on a monthly rate, but now he couldn’t make ends meet so he moved into a ground-floor apartment off Los Feliz Boulevard near Western. All around him were XXX movie theaters and seedy bars and male and female prostitutes—the down-and-outs of Los Angeles with whom John Vain had always felt at home. He had just started as a barback at Musso and Frank when McPherson called with news: he had made a deal with the feds, given up his mortgage broker’s license, and agreed to pay $500,000 in fines. He was moving to Tennessee, where he had family and taxes were low. He was thinking he’d go into the God business and become a preacher like his famous kin, the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

  “As for you, my friend,” Brady told John Vain in a voice that already suggested Father knows best, we must bend to His will, “you’re about to be sued for fraud by Bank United, the FDIC, and the FBI.”

  __________________

  On January 2, 1994, John Vain was sentenced to thirteen years at the federal prison in Lompoc. Before he turned himself in, he wrote a letter to Elizabeth and Angela. In it, he said that for him, the hardest part of what had happened would be “to know that I have let you down. I proved myself unworthy of your friendship, and for this I’m sorry beyond words.” Then he made a promise and a request.

  The promise was that he would take himself as completely out of their lives as possible, “so that my shortcomings will not smear your good name.”

  The request was that “should you be tempted, out of pity or graciousness, to visit me in my soon-to-be surroundings, you spare me this final humiliation.”