The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  The boss walked in at twilight. In the back, a single bulb screwed into the ceiling cast a white glow onto the plastic folding table. Beside the door, two table lamps on either side of the narrow entrance eked out a yellowish beam. In the kitchen, the fridge was emptied out and clean. Dishes had been washed and left in the drying rack. In the bedroom, the curtains were drawn. The bed was made, the drawers closed. A framed picture of a very young John Vain, his arm loosely around a woman, sat on the nightstand. A second picture—with the same woman and a younger one in a graduation cap and gown—was on the windowsill.

  The bathroom was spotless. On the right was a sink and a pair of neatly folded, forest-green towels. Next to it, John Vain hung from a pull-up bar nailed to the ceiling.

  __________________

  John Vain’s funeral services, at Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, were scheduled for one p.m. on Sunday afternoon. The date and time, along with a brief biography of the deceased, were announced at two-hour intervals on closed-circuit Persian-language radio, on Menashe Amir’s program on Israel Radio, and on Radio Iran, 670 AM. An Iranian rabbi recently relocated from New York was hired to recite the customary prayers, with a specific injunction that he was not to exceed his allotted twenty minutes at the grave site.

  All this had been arranged by Angela and paid for by Elizabeth. At the funeral house or on the phone with Raab Chaim, she had introduced herself as a close friend of the deceased, which was fine with the rabbi, he didn’t need to know any more, given Angela’s mother’s good credit and the fact that she did not balk at the fee he suggested. With the recession, people still died at the same rate, but “funeral specialists” were often called upon to issue discounts or interest-free payment plans.

  Angela had done her best to make the process both dignified and meaningful, but she didn’t know the first thing about Jewish law regarding burial of the deceased, and that became a problem on Sunday when having arrived at Eden ready to pray over a handsome casket and a sea of white flowers—a staple at every Iranian Jewish funeral—Raab Chaim was handed a small urn and shown to a 12' x 12' square in a wall. Pale-faced and scandalized, he explained to Angela that “real Jews are not to be cremated or buried in a wall, not if they’re observant in the least, not like that Reform and Reconstructionist bunch who’re really gentiles at heart—you can go hire one of those rabbis to stick an urn in a wall if you want but you’re not getting me to ruin my reputation in this world and the next by violating two of the most basic laws of Judaism.”

  * * *

  You had to feel sorry for Raab Chaim: he was a legitimate scholar (as in, he had actually gone to rabbincal school and graduated from it), and relatively moderate in his ideas. You would think this would count in his favor in this day and age, but on Long Island where he started his career, he had found himself increasingly marginalized by a host of younger, much more Orthodox (black hat and peyos and all the trappings) rabbis whose message had begun to resonate with the community. It was a fad of sorts—this tendency toward orthodoxy of the kind that had not existed in Iran. Jews who only a few years earlier had prided themselves on being “modern” (to the point of eating shellfish in public and admitting they went to shul twice a year at most) were becoming more and more observant and, as a result, abandoning the likes of Raab Moussa for more unforgiving rabbis with more draconian views.

  Having been rendered superfluous on the East Coast in the 1990s, Raab Chaim set his sights on the Jews of LA. He arrived here in the early ’90s, barely a step ahead of the winds of orthodoxy that blew westward and that brought with them small and large replicas of the same beard-growing, finger-wagging, fire-and-brimstone-promising individuals he had so wanted to escape—and this time, there was nowhere for him to go. For a while, he dug his heels in and tried to cultivate a conservative-minded but otherwise tolerant base upon which to build a congregation. But the more moderate Iranian Jews he wanted to reach out to had already met and married David Wolpe, the American rabbi, at Sinai Temple. Everyone else—the Iranian Jews in the Valley and the ones on the West Side who didn’t revere Wolpe because they found him too “permissive”—had their doubts about Raab Chaim’s devotion to the principles he had begun to preach.

  Struggling to keep a foothold in LA and having to supplement his income by giving private Torah and Hebrew lessons, Raab Chaim was not in a position to turn down an invitation to conduct any service, but nor could he go down in popular memory as the rabbi who had condoned the burning of a body and buried it in an urn inside a wall.

  It was bad enough that the man had committed suicide and that the next of kin consisted only of Elizabeth and Angela, and Dr. Raiis and his family. For Iranian Jews, having so few relations at one’s funeral was about the biggest insult imaginable to the dead. In Iran, Muslims and Jews would even hire professional mourners to mix things up at a burial. Theirs was, after all, a culture that measured a man’s popularity by the amount of tears shed at his grave site.

  They grieved—these Iranians—with the same spectacular intensity with which they entertained. They noted that Americans dressed better and were more social at funerals than they were at parties: to parties, they showed up in shorts and flip-flops, served potato chips and one dish, and called it a day at nine p.m. At funerals, they put the dead through professional hair and makeup. As for the family, if they were going to shed any tears, they would do it in private, then face the world with such pronouncements as, “I must move on to the next chapter of my life.”

  In the end, John Vain’s funeral looked totally American—simple, rushed, poorly attended.

  __________________

  Raab Chaim stayed for the services, but the job of saying kaddish fell to Dr. Raiis. Afterward, he drove out of Eden alone and didn’t tell anyone where he was headed. He put thirty-seven dollars’ worth of gas in his dented silver Hyundai with the bad alignment and the rattling exhaust pipe, and drove to Century City where he parked along the red zone a hundred feet away from Watt Plaza. He sat there with the engine running and his hands wet and clammy from anxiety, and waited for Raphael’s Son to emerge.

  Dr. Raiis was not a violent person. He had never wished harm on anyone except Khomeini, Ahmadinejad, and all the thugs and mullahs who had raped and robbed Iran and forced him to flee the country of his and his ancestors’ birth. Whatever hardship and indignity had been exacted on him in the thirty years since the revolution, he blamed on the fact that he was a man without a country. He didn’t expect America to make up for the injustice done to him by the government of Iran, or for his own failure to become financially secure. But he did expect some justice from the American legal system.

  In Iran, a person who could not pay his debts would stay in debtors’ prison until he died or made his creditors whole. His cohorts and accomplices would either follow him to jail or be so bereft of aabehroo they either escaped the country or came clean. In Los Angeles and New York and Tel Aviv and Taiwan, Raphael’s Son and the Riffraff Brigade’s only punishment so far had been the ability to go on a buying frenzy—all cash—to take advantage of sliding prices.

  Dr. Raiis waited in the car for three hours. His phone rang two dozen times, his wife and children looking for him, but he didn’t take his hands off the steering wheel or turn the engine off because he wanted to be ready.

  To access the parking lot of the towers, tenants and visitors had to cross a walkway. At 7:15 that evening, as soon as Raphael’s Son emerged from the building, Dr. Raiis put the car in drive and floored the gas pedal. He aimed directly at Raphael’s Son with the express intention of crushing him like the venomous arachnid that he was.

  Instead, the front wheel of his car hit the curb and exploded.

  * * *

  His wife and daughters bailed him out, and hired an attorney. Raphael’s Son insisted that the DA press charges, but Angela had a few good talks with her colleagues and in the end they settled for a warning and eighteen months of community service. The judge who signed off on the deal also suggest
ed yoga and meditation classes which were offered at a nominal cost, she took pains to point out, by the Beverly Hills Parks and Recreation Department, even to nonresidents of the city.

  __________________

  John Vain had left no note, confided in no one, made no attempt to put his life or death into a narrative that could be saved or remembered. In the end, all that remained of him, for Angela and Elizabeth and everyone else whose lives he had touched, was the memory of his kindness and the sweet, enduring faith in his own good luck. Maybe, Angela told herself, it was the constant shame, the pernicious guilt, that had consumed John Vain since Lucky 99 burned down. Maybe it was his new surroundings, the memory of that other house in Trousdale, all those wide-open spaces and sun-drenched rooms, a view of the garden from every part of the house, that got the best of him.

  What do you call that moment when we let go of the conviction, albeit illusory, that life will only grow larger? That the horizon will always expand?

  __________________

  The shivah was held at Elizabeth’s Oakmont Drive house, and was therefore among the most well-attended events of the decade. Every afternoon for six days (the seventh being Shabbat), the house filled with callers who arrived for the reading of the minhah. They stayed anywhere from five minutes to five hours, drank hot tea brewed with cardamom, and ate dates and peeled cucumbers served to them by harried, grumpy Armenian women who had been somebody back in Iran but who were now reduced to working as waiters because they didn’t speak English and didn’t have papers. In the evening, a lavish dinner was served courtesy of Roberto, a young Seventh-day Adventist from Guatemala who used to work at the Russian kosher butcher shop on Doheny and Pico, and who managed to parlay that job into a full-service Iranian-kosher catering business.

  Some of the visitors had known John Vain from the glory days of Lucky 99, and came to pay respects. Most were there to satisfy a long-standing curiosity about Elizabeth’s personal life, or what little of it they could glean by seeing the inside of her house. Still another handful were old friends of the Soleymans from Iran who had lost touch with Elizabeth after Aaron’s death, and used the shivah as a final reunion of sorts. There was Omid Arbab, Aaron’s childhood friend who had abandoned a wife and child in Tehran and followed a lover to America before the revolution. There was Miriam (as beautiful as) the Moon, who bore no trace of the good looks for which she had been known, but who still carried herself like a marine sergeant on a mission. There was Lili, the adopted daughter of that Russian homewrecker, Mercedez, who wanted to be a movie star in Hollywood; she failed miserably at the silver screen, but bought entire blocks of the city when they were dirt cheap and left them all to Lili. And then, on day four, there was the man who had come thirty years too late.

  * * *

  He walked in ahead of a row of younger men, all of them in long black coats and black hats, their eyes deflected toward the ground for fear of seeing any women, their faces pale from a lifetime of sitting indoors studying the Torah, following the old man like a flock of black birds as he trudged through the foyer and into the reception hall where he stopped dead, apparently stunned by the realization that in this room men and women sat together without any kind of partition, then lowered his head and turned his chin toward the one behind him, whispered an order of retreat, so that all the younger men stepped back against the wall lest their eyes stray onto a female shape. He waited until Stephanie Dalal, ensconced much too snugly in a black pencil skirt and a silk black top that set off her angry, salon-tanned neck, came up and invited him in. He told her he couldn’t—was there a room where men could sit and pray in a holy manner? That only drew a more truculent than usual “You must be kidding me” from the chief of staff. The man remained, neither challenging her nor retreating, drawing attention to himself and Stephanie until she gave in with a huff, led him and his flock to the more intimate sitting room. There they sat for the next three hours, humming prayers in one cadence and speed, the lot of them sounding like an entitled bee colony waiting to be recognized. At dinnertime they filed into the dining room without an invitation but did not touch even the bread or the wine lest it not be kosher enough.

  * * *

  They came again the next morning at seven, and waited at the gates on Oakmont until the attendant called the house and Gerald answered. They had come for the wrapping of the tefillin, they said, and again gained entry into the sitting room. They did this for two days in a row, while the rules of hospitality and good taste dictated that the sahib azza—person(s) in mourning—welcome them wholeheartedly. The other visitors speculated endlessly about the men’s identity, having started with the assumption that they were part of the league of black hatters who went asking for donations at the homes and offices of wealthy Jews all around the city, but that theory was put to rest by some who had seen the men arrive in a chauffeur-driven stretch Mercedes limousine.

  On the final day of the shivah, Elizabeth stopped in the sitting room.

  “What can we do for you?” she asked, and the old man responded, ever so courteously, “We’ve come to pray for the soul of my dearly departed son.”

  __________________

  Monsieur Moussa Varasteh, OC, Officer of the Order of Canada, an honor second only to the Canadian Order of Merit and bestowed by none other than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, had learned about the passing of John Vain from Angela’s column (okay, so there is one person out of seven billion who willingly reads the damn thing) and immediately ordered his assistant to tell his pilot to gas up his Learjet. Then he had packed his brood of black coats and crocheted kippahs and, in less than twenty-four hours, checked into the presidential suite at the Beverly Hilton.

  He had picked the hotel because it was owned by a Jew, and he chose to stay in it even after he learned, from an overly eager bellman, that Monsieur Varasteh should feel very special because he had been accorded the very great honor of sleeping in the suite where, only four months earlier, Whitney Houston had died. No doubt the bellman had expected the news to titillate Monsieur, inspire him to give a big tip and rush to take pictures in different parts of the suite so he could e-mail them to his friends. As it happened, in addition to being the only person in the universe who read Angela’s column, Monsieur was also the only person who did not relish the idea of bathing in the same tub as a dead celebrity. He was so put off by the prospect, in fact, that he briefly contemplated moving to the five-star Bel Air or Beverly Hills hotels, or even the Beverly Wilshire. But he quickly relinquished the idea because the first two were owned by an Arab, and the last one featured a restaurant by that famous chef who—hasn’t anyone else in this town noticed?—happened to hail from the same country that gave the world Adolf Hitler.

  Monsieur Varasteh was nothing if not a good Jew, but he would be the first to tell you that his religiosity had less to do with faith than with fear.

  * * *

  Twice in his eighty-four years, Moussa Varasteh had clinched the title of God’s Worst Subject on Earth, and no amount of prayer and good deeds was going to strip him of those colors.

  The first time was when he abandoned his wife and eight-year-old son in Ramsar and went off alone to seek his fortune. He was thirty years old and had worked every day since the age of six. His parents were poor and had five children, so they had sent him, the eldest, to work in a bottle factory ten hours a day. He handed his pay over to his mother every week and had barely enough to eat for himself, but he recognized his responsibilities as a son and didn’t complain or slack off. At fourteen, he quit the factory job and went to work as a runner for a fabric seller in the central bazaar in Shiraz. Then he was twenty years old and his mother thought he should get married and have children, which he did, again living up to his duties as a son and husband and father. Two years later, his wife complained that he would never make enough in the fabric shop to feed so many mouths, so he went to work for a tobacco exporter. His job was to sell Iranian-grown tobacco to American and Canadian cigarette makers who would mix
in the right amount of carcinogens and sell it, attractively packaged and at many times the price, back to Iranians. The more dealings he had with the Americas, the more Moussa Varasteh wished to leave home and country.

  He planned the departure carefully over many months. He picked Edmonton, Canada, as a future home because it was cold enough, far away from Tehran and unpopulated enough, his wife and son would likely not attempt to find him there.

  In Edmonton, Moussa looked for a synagogue or a Jewish center, and found a Chabad where he was served his first hot meal in weeks and told where he could find a cheap room to rent. The next day he went into a fabric store downtown, bought a bolt of the cheapest wool he could find, threw it on his left shoulder, and began walking the residential neighborhoods around the city center. He was nearly illiterate, and the only English he spoke was the conversational basics he had learned by dealing with Americans in Iran. He knocked on doors and stopped pedestrians on the sidewalk, sold the fabric by the yard for barely more than what he had paid, and didn’t stop till he had cleared out every last scrap. That was in 1960; by the year 2000, Moussa Varasteh was one of the richest men in Canada, recognized by the queen for his contributions to the country’s manufacturing trade.

  He had money now, but he couldn’t fathom going back to Iran to see his family, looking them in the eyes and explaining his absence. It wasn’t just shame; distance, if it’s great enough, will make the heart forget.

  He built Edmonton’s largest retail center, owned oil wells and petrochemical plants around the country, gave easily to philanthropic causes, followed Jewish law to the letter, and still not a day went by when he wasn’t reminded that he had betrayed and abandoned his wife and son.