His Canadian passport bore no mention of a wife or child, so he married in 1970, and again in 1977. They were young Ashkenazi women with pure souls and untouched bodies who should have given him many children but didn’t manage even one. The doctors couldn’t find what was wrong with the women and Moussa knew, though he kept it to himself, that he was not sterile—and yet, who is man to think he can bend the will of God? In 1985 he handed his second Canadian wife her Jewish get and resolved to accept his childlessness as punishment for having left Jahanshah. Two years later, on a business trip to Toronto, he met an Iranian Jewish widow at the Chabad house, and married her.
The new wife was past the age of fertility, but she had a fifteen-year-old daughter from her first husband. The girl’s name was Shabnam, but Feri called her Shab for short. This struck Moussa as unsavory, since shab means night in Persian; he believed a person’s name affected her fate, which is why, he explained to Feri, Iranian Jews do not give their children the names of people who had had unhappy lives. In Shab’s case, the name had already left a gloomy handprint because the girl was given to dark, melancholy moods that lasted for weeks or months. She was forever withdrawn and pensive, distrustful, it seemed, even of her mother. The one thing she had going for her was her talent for art, but she used that to sketch the same few images over and over, as if to tell a story she thought must be heard but that she couldn’t tell any other way.
It snowed a great deal in Edmonton, but it didn’t rain much, and that was a good thing for Shab because she tended to take the rain personally, slip into a deep depression at the first few drops and remain there, nearly catatonic in her darkened room, and burning God only knows what kind of incense or scented candle that emitted a smell of the sea so strong, it clung to the plaster and wouldn’t be washed off.
Moussa and Feri tried to get the girl help. They had her seen by a dozen psychiatrists and twice that many therapists. They sent her to art camp and yoga and meditation classes and put her on a series of mind-body diets. Feri, who took every one of the girl’s depressive episodes as a personal affront, was convinced that Shab was “God’s punishment for every bad thing I’ve done.” Moussa, who in an attempt to absolve himself of the original sin of having abandoned his first family, had started to adopt orphan and abandoned boys, feared she was sent to remind him of the suffering he had caused to his own child. As for Shab, all she would say about the source of her anguish was, “I have a feeling I don’t belong in this world.” On her eighteenth birthday in 1990, she got into bed, closed the blinds, locked the door, and cut her wrists with a razor blade.
__________________
You couldn’t blame the man for not knowing: he had left Iran in 1960, sixteen years before Jay Gatsby blew a hole into Aaron Soleyman’s head, then threw himself out the window to defend his honor. Until then, Moussa had not been to Tehran and never even heard of the Soleyman family. Afterward, he went to hide in the farthest corner of a faraway continent, sought refuge from the occasional Iranian tourist under his black hat and bushy beard, avoided all reference to his family of origin. That had been easy with the two Ashkenazi wives who couldn’t find Iran on a map and didn’t believe it was their place to ask questions anyway, and it had been equally easy with the Iranian one—Feri (for Fereshteh)—who revealed little and inquired even less. She had told Moussa she was from a prominent family in the city of Kashan, which explained, he thought, her private nature—Kashi Jews having been historically secretive—and that they still lived in Iran. Her husband had died when he climbed on the flat roof of their house to shovel off snow, slipped on the ice, and broke his neck. After that, she said, his family turned Feri and her daughter out. Her passport, which she had to obtain with the help of her own father, bore only her maiden name.
Moussa had no reason to doubt Feri’s story when they met in Toronto. He was more concerned with revealing his own past transgression to her. Before he proposed, he told her about his Iranian wife and child, “so that you understand that I’ll be held accountable in this world or the next.”
Feri had no interest in Moussa’s divine reckoning; she cared only that he was a decent man with a lot of money, which mattered a great deal if you were getting old and living in a very cold place with an emotionally delicate child. She wasn’t stupid enough to reciprocate his honesty by revealing to him her own past: men like Moussa, no matter how guilty themselves, did not forgive women like her. So she listened and nodded and told him yes, she was sure he was already in good standing with Adonai. It was only after Shab had killed herself and Feri was overcome with pathos, when she knew that her marriage would not survive the suicide and that she couldn’t stay in Edmonton anyway, that she told Moussa the truth—about the affair she had had with the teenage nephew of her first husband; about Jay Gatsby shooting Aaron Soleyman; about the old widow who had revealed the affair and subsequently promised she was not done with the Soleymans yet, not by a long shot.
__________________
In 1977 Fereshteh Gatsby was a divorcée and a widow with no prospects, money, or children, and a scar on her reputation that made the one on Cain’s forehead look like a beauty mark. Of all the survivors of the melodrama that was the fight between Aaron and Raphael’s Wife, she—Fereshteh—had sustained the biggest losses. Yes, Aaron’s children were fatherless and his wife a widow, but Elizabeth had inserted herself into the business and was doing just fine as a single mother. No doubt, she would marry again, have more children.
So when Raphael’s Wife came calling, Fereshteh let her into the house, even took some pleasure in hearing her curse Elizabeth. She listened as the Black Bitch proposed an alliance against “that daughter of a mad math teacher,” but Fereshteh drew the line at harming the children.
“And what would we do with it?” she laughed at the idea’s madness. “Where would we hide it and what good would it do, anyway, except get our necks into a noose?”
Child abduction, like many other crimes, was punishable by death in Iran.
She showed Raphael’s Wife the door that time and asked her not to come back. But Fereshteh was still living at the house on Molavi Avenue, within walking distance of the hospital where Raphael’s Wife worked nights, and so she stopped by every few days, rang the bell, and pounded on the door till she was let in.
They would keep the kid for only a few days, just long enough to scare Elizabeth and make her understand how vulnerable she was. They would have her drugged and quiet in Fereshteh’s house because it was the last place anyone would think to look. Raphael’s Wife had a friend working in the Big House who could be trusted to unlock a door and keep her mouth shut. She—Raphael’s Wife—could sneak out of work for an hour without being missed, but she would need a car to drive her to Bagh-e Yaas, wait for her, and drive her and the child back.
Just a few days—that’s all. They would keep the kid for just a few days.
They would take the younger girl because she’d be easier to carry. It would give Elizabeth a taste of what it was like to be truly helpless and at the mercy of others. Then they would release the child—frightened, still drugged, too young to be able to give a useful description—on a street somewhere.
Fereshteh knew this was a bad idea every time she heard it on Molavi Avenue, and she knew it was a bad idea as she sat in her “getaway car” that freezing February night on the Avenue of Tranquility. When she saw Raphael’s Wife emerge from the yard gates of Bagh-e Yaas with a gunnysack tossed over her shoulder, Fereshteh had the urge to drive away as fast as possible and not look back.
But she didn’t. She waited for Raphael’s Wife to get in with Noor, drove the Black Bitch back to Razi, and took the girl home.
__________________
She didn’t wake up one day and decide she was going to keep Noor. That’s not how the biggest blunders usually happen. You slip one centimeter at a time until you’re too far down to pull yourself up and out, so you keep descending. Or you stand still, do nothing while the truth crawls away and out of r
each. This is what happened with Feri: she didn’t take Noor so much as she was left with her.
The response to Noor’s disappearance was much bigger than either Feri or Raphael’s Wife had envisioned. They expected the police, even the secret service, to get involved, Elizabeth to go searching alone or with people who offered to help, a news alert or two. Then they would turn the kid loose and have a good laugh. Feri would go back to solitary confinement on Molavi Avenue and Raphael’s Wife would chalk up one more win for the widow’s sigh. It was bold and reckless, and, yes, stupid, but it wasn’t meant to be a national affair.
What did she expect, Feri would later ask herself, when a child from a prominent family is abducted from her bed with her mother next door and a crew of servants in the house? When the punishment for kidnapping is as severe as it is for murder. When the missing child’s mother is as single-minded as Elizabeth.
For weeks, Feri could not leave her house. She kept Noor half-drugged by blowing opium smoke in her face, tied by the foot to a bed, force-fed. The house was big enough and surrounded by a good two acres, plus the usual ten-foot brick yard wall. Feri hadn’t been able to afford a servant since Gatsby died and she didn’t have any friends who might miss her. She certainly didn’t want Raphael’s Wife to come around—she was the main suspect, no doubt being followed.
When Feri did start to go out, on brief errands to buy food or other necessities, she locked Noor in the bedroom and rushed back as soon as she was able. She waited till Raphael’s Wife called, then unleashed her anger and demanded that “you wait for me in the alley behind the hospital tonight, I’ll bring the kid and leave her there, and after that, she’s your problem.”
“You do that,” Raphael’s Wife warned, “and she’ll freeze to death or wander into the street and be hit by a car—and believe me, they’ll trace her back to you in no time.”
They had to wait for the commotion to ebb.
The girl was still like a terrified, trembling cub cornered in a dark cave, but she had stopped wailing every time the opium wore off and was easier to feed. She wasn’t throwing up or wetting herself anymore, which was a great relief because Feri couldn’t stand to touch the stuff but couldn’t suffer the smell either. Then the cold abated and the ice thawed and one morning Feri woke up to a voice on the radio announcing that “the late Mr. Aaron Soleyman’s missing daughter has been found.”
“If you let her go now,” Raphael’s Wife called from a pay phone near her house, “now that no one’s looking for her anymore, you can bet she’ll be picked up by the Gypsies or stolen by a madam and sold.”
“Buy her a fake birth certificate and take her to farangestan—the West. Lose her there and no one will be the wiser.”
* * *
The Canadian embassy issued visas faster than the Americans, and they asked fewer questions.
__________________
Any minute now, Angela thought as she watched her mother’s face through Monsieur Varasteh’s account, Elizabeth would raise a hand, stop the hoax, and say, “Please, sir, I’ve heard enough, you must take your fairy tale and sell it to one more desperate than I.” She was so blank-faced, so very still and silent, she could not possibly have believed a word the man had said.
Any minute now, one of the sons would stand up and proclaim that the old man had played a game—“This is it, ladies and gentleman, a bad joke at an especially inappropriate time, we apologize for the inconvenience, we don’t do much by way of entertainment, you see—it’s read Torah all day long and copulate with the same woman every night, it can get dull from time to time, so we put on our coats and hats and fly 1,800 miles to strangers’ homes and hold fake confessionals for fun.”
Because, really, if Varasteh had brought the truth, what would it prove but the utter futility of knowing?
* * *
All her life Angela had banked on the difference between truth and fiction, and the importance of identifying one versus the other. When her father died and no one would tell her what happened or why, when Noor was taken and no one knew who took her, when they left Bagh-e Yaas and Tehran and the only country they had ever called their own, all that time Angela sustained her senses by telling herself there would be time—if only she stayed strong and able to defend herself—there would be time to learn the truth.
What else is there—once you’ve counted the losses you could not prevent, withstood the harm you never thought possible—but that bit of solace that comes from knowing the how and the why?
* * *
Any minute now, Angela prayed, Elizabeth would call it a night and walk out of this room and this second truth, this other version of what became of Noor. She would go back to the story she had heard from Raphael’s Son and believed, the one that had felt like a cataclysmic wave that emerges out of nowhere and hits you every day and slays you all over again. She would go back to the child she had mourned and buried in Iran, mourned again and buried in LA.
__________________
That night, as Angela drove home, it started to rain on Mulholland. The street was dark and windy, the lights of the valley a thousand feet away, the road visible only as far as the reach of the car’s headlights. But every time a drop of rain hit the windshield, Angela saw a flicker out in the blackness. It went on and off in half a second, but then another one appeared, and the heavier the rain became the faster it fell, the more the flickers lit the horizon, every one of them the phosphorescent blue-white of the trees of Angela’s childhood, and after a while there were so many that they hung like a moon fallen from the sky and onto the road before her, light radiating from its cold, bare surface, and it was on this moon that she saw for the first time the shape of the man people called Raphael in the stories they told of Iran, all lit up from inside and surrounded by moths and trailed by the creatures whose existence Angela’s Princeton-educated, truth-seeking mind had never contemplated seriously, and he was so real and vibrant, so sure-footed in his journey on this other land, Angela had to pull to the side and stop the car, watch him through the rain that came down now like a sheet, and tell herself, it’s true what those old Iranian women used to say when she still listened: it’s not where you are that determines what you see, it’s where you look and what you choose to believe.
And yes, it’s also true what Iranians say about the past trailing you like a spell.
__________________
Elizabeth was falling backward into the sea, like an anchor finally released from its mooring, and the closer she came to breaking the surface, the more her body longed for the water. It was midday, the sun a blinding white glare, the waves smooth and lazy in the heat. She floated for a second or two before starting to sink. Then the glare fell away and the world turned black and white.
* * *
What had she done, Elizabeth the Great, with the life she was given? What had she made of the years that the others—her siblings, husband, daughters—did not have?
To push through the wall of wordlessness that surrounded her from birth, converge with the soul of another, contain and soothe their injured heart. That’s what she had wanted.
It’s what she had chased from the first night, that Shabbat at the Big House where she saw Aaron. She knew where the pearl lay within the oyster—that this urgent need was quenched only through the connection between one living thing and another. She had tried; she had wanted to build that bond of tenderness. But it wasn’t enough to feel; one must find the words through which to speak, discover the path through which to reach, before the door is closed and all is lost.
Elizabeth had lost her parents and siblings to the curses of a widow who had the door slammed in her face. She lost Aaron to the vengeance of a man who was not allowed to cross the threshold of a forbidden kind of love. She lost Angela to the anger that replaced her yearning for a mother’s warmth; lost John Vain to the shame that replaced his unrequited love. She lost Noor once, then lost her again.
What had she done, Elizabeth (the Great; the Ice Queen) Soleyman
, but stand on the other side of the door?
* * *
She was still sinking, but she could hear the rain coming down in sheets, sense the agitation of the servants who rushed from room to room, shoving towels against the baseboard to catch the water that came through the hinges on the windows. She could hear them yell at each other to close one door and another, banging on her bedroom door to wake up—“Wake up, Miss, the rain is falling too fast, it has filled the soil and turned into a flash flood, there aren’t enough drains in this town to absorb it all, wake up and let’s go on the roof, we may get thrown off by the winds but at least we won’t drown, wake up, Miss, you’ve seen this rain before and you knew to walk away, you came from the water, a drop of rain that should have fallen like all the others into the Caspian but instead landed in a woman’s womb, you’re part flesh, part sea, you can’t scream your fear or pain or even your love, when you let go it turns into a flood and takes too much, wake up, your daughter, the one you lost, must have been the part of you that’s water, you couldn’t hold onto her any more than you can to this flood of rain and mud and broken branches and dead leaves that have crashed through the roof just at the end of the hallway and are coursing toward us now, you still have another child, this one’s all flesh and resolve and certainty, wake up, Miss, we have to leave now or we’ll be trapped in the mudslide, this house is built like a fortress, it could withstand machine-gun fire and maybe even a tank’s, it’s earthquake-proof up to 7.3, burglarproof as the US Mint, but it can’t forestall the might of a single drop of rain multiplied by millions, wake up, Miss, the water has pulled the door out of the wall, whatever’s calling you from the other side, whatever shadow or promise beckons, it can wait. There’s still time.”
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 34
