* * *
Sixty-two years ago in the Square of the Pearl Cannon in Tehran, a lone exiled woman planted her hope at the gates of the Palace of Roses. She fed it with her words and tears, tended it with love or hatred, blasphemy or faith, till it grew into a shy and imperfect boy who became a wicked man who nevertheless yearned for love and acceptance. That I joined the others in denying him acceptance is what I cannot forgive myself.
Because of Jonah, it seems to me, I’ve been given a chance, in this very new city in this very new country, to collect the first blossom of that old and damaged shrub that was the sum of all of Raphael’s Wife’s dreams. The earth in Bagh-e Yaas might have been poisoned by the widow’s sigh, the house my grandparents and aunt and uncle lived in might have been haunted by the ghosts that were orphaned when Raphael died. John Vain’s ninety-nine years of good luck might have been stolen by a puff of the witch’s breath, and Dr. Raiis, the healer, might have been trapped in a curse that made him an assassin.
But now here’s Jonah, wronged by his father—yes—and proof that Raphael’s Son too had been wronged, proof also that the wrongs of the past need not yield new sorrows, that for every hundred wrongs this world will do to you, there will be, one day, a right—a tiny, flickering light in the heart of a small, abandoned child—and that all you have to do (all I have to do) is cup your hands into a bulb around the flame and put your faith in the existence of a dawn, the possibility that every colorless creature will someday become a kaleidoscope and every bloodless ghost will at last find a beating heart, and that I—who have sought for so long a Truth big enough, clear and true enough, to explain for me the inexplicable—that even I will be satisfied with the wonder, and the mystery, and the quiet promise of a pinhead of light in a dark and distant sea.
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Thank you: Ibrahim Ahmad, Johnny Temple, and everyone at Akashic; now I know why they love you. Henry Dunow, for saving the book from its author. Barbara Lowenstein, for twenty years. Victoria Meyer, for being so good. Jeffereia Grayson, for saving Leon from his maker. David Wolpe, for the gentle warning.
Whatever the outcome, my intentions were good.
BONUS MATERIALS
Excerpt from "The Gravedigger's Kaddish" by Gina B. Nahai
from Tehran Noir, edited by Salar Abdoh and available from Akashic Books
"The Gravedigger's Kaddish" by Gina B. Nahai
"The Gravedigger's Kaddish is Gina B. Nahai's contribution to the anthology Tehran Noir, edited by Salar Abdoh, the latest addition to Akashic Books' award-winning, city-specific noir series. For more about Tehran Noir—which includes fifteen brand-new stories by Iranian authors—and the Akashic Noir Series, please scroll to the end of the story, or follow this link.
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The first to die were the carp, which became cloudy-eyed and disoriented, circling the lake in slow, awkward patterns and developing ulcers on their gills and in their kidneys till they washed, wasted, ashore. Then the seagulls started to go blind and slam into things, or they fell, midflight, into the water or grass, or stopped eating till they died of anorexia. By June, little kids who stuck their hands out of the paddleboats to feel the water went home with burned skin, and the old Russian and Iranian men who sat in the shade and played backgammon all day complained of headaches and nausea, and the few fishermen who were dumb enough to cook and eat the bluegill and tilapia they had caught and frozen before the blight had to be rushed to hospital.
The daily joggers suspected environmental calamity. They called and e-mailed the parks department, their councilman’s office, city hall. They started a “Save the Lake” social media campaign, sent videos of sloshed birds and moldering fish to websites that covered the goings-on in the Valley and Los Angeles proper. If this were a little fishpond in Beverly Hills, they said, every resource in the city would have been drawn upon by now; if it were a swimming pool in Santa Monica, seven different environmental groups would have filed suit in state and federal courts. But this was Van Nuys—60 percent Latino and the rest are black or Armenian or Asian or Iranian, they got bigger worries than a lake being polluted in the park. They were lucky they had a park at all.
The good news was that some years ago, property owners around the park had strong-armed the city council into renaming part of the area “Lake Balboa”—which, truth to tell, sounded considerably more upscale than plain old Van Nuys—and that quite a few buyers fell for the posturing and paid a premium for the name, even poured good money in by renovating an old house or tearing it down to build a new one, which meant they had a bigger stake in not letting their investment turn into a cancer cluster. Among these residents were a husband-and-husband couple, Donny and Luca Goldberg-Ferraro, who had spent the previous nine months remodeling and redecorating their house. The younger spouse, Luca, was a fairly successful film producer with an even temper who, like anyone even remotely connected to the business in LA, believed he should not be subject to the same limitations as other mortals. For a while, he followed the news about the lake with dispassionate curiosity, trusting, as he told Donny, that “the city will take care of it.” Then he noticed the scent of garbage that sometimes blew in the wind, and confessed to being “slightly irritated.” A few weeks later, when a stray seagull crashed headfirst into their window and left traces of blood and feathers and brain tissue on the glass, he declared in the most docile tone, “I’ve run out of patience with that lake.”
Donny was a writer with a good two decades on his husband and absolutely no interest in the park or the lake or, really, anything that had happened in the world since the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994. He had published two dozen novels and was still writing well into his seventies, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had left the house except to go to a doctor’s appointment or a fancy dinner with Luca. He had bought the house with money he made from selling his first book in 1962. Inside, he hung giant black-and-whites of old movie stars, Garbo and Dietrich and Bette Davis, on all the walls. He had silk flowers in the foyer and synthetic grass for a lawn, and he kept the curtains closed and installed only peach and yellow lightbulbs in the chandelier and the floor lamps. His favorite part of the house was a glass coffee table he called “the cemetery” because it was covered with Lalique and Daum crystal figurines, “à la Tennessee Williams.” The table was situated close to the window where the seagull had met its abrupt end, which was the only piece of the whole matter that interested Donny—“Can you imagine if the window were open?”
That was on Sunday morning, July 21, 2013. On Monday, three more birds met an untimely end outside Donny’s crystal cemetery, prompting Luca to wonder aloud if he should “have my intern look into the matter of the lake.”
Donny let a full minute pass, then announced, “My dear, fuck the lake.”
But the next morning the front lawn was littered with avian remains, and Luca realized he was going to have to help cure the infestation or learn to live with the scents and sights of bird vicsera.
On Wednesday the intern, a Harvard Business School graduate who was “working his way up”—that is, for free—with Luca, reported that the lake, in true LA fashion, was “staged.” Rather than a natural occurence, it was a twenty-seven-acre, ten-foot-deep hole that had been filled, in 1992, with 72 million gallons of reclaimed sewage water from a nearby treatment plant. The park where it was situated had started out as Balboa Park but had more recently been renamed Anthony C. Beilenson Park—after a former congressman from the twenty-fourth district.
To Luca, the natural next step was to call the congressman at home.
* * *
Thursday morning a truck pulled up in front of the lake, and two men in official-looking uniforms started to collect samples. They came back the next day in hazmat gear to gather more samples and install orange glow-in-the-dark Health Hazard! Do Not Touch! signs. On Saturday, the district’s representative on the city council made a personal appearance at the park. He wore a brand-new pair of Ray-Bans, a too-
starched safari suit, and sunscreen with too much fragrance. Fashion statement notwithstanding, he looked genuinely absorbed in the report whispered to him by the city’s “pollution complaint investigators” and “water-quality control agents.” He had barely driven away in his black-on-black Subaru with the two college-age assistants forever tapping on their smartphones when the website of LA Daily News erupted with the headline, Gold Discovered in Lake Balboa.
* * *
The ensuing flash mob pummeled the grounds of the park and made scraps of the rental bikes, boats, and kayaks. Within the hour, the Japanese cherry blossom trees were stripped naked and the jogging path was pockmarked with ditches, and so many people converged on the lake and waded into the water with their shovels and pans and buckets, the fire department had to call in riot cops to break up the fights. The 101 and 134 freeways were backed up for miles in both directions, and surface streets turned into parking lots and police and news helicopters fought for airspace above the area. Their noise, combined with the sound of cars honking and pedestrians’ voices, awakened Donny from his Ambien-induced, Xanax-aided, total-darkness-in-the-room-plus-black-eye-mask sleep that he likened, fondly, to being dead. Downstairs in the living room, he found Luca at the window, binoculars in hand, listening to his intern dish the details of the story on speakerphone.
The soil and water samples taken from the lake indicated not the existence of pure gold, but an inordinately high concentration of a number of chemical compounds found in gold. According to Wikipedia the compounds were known as “gold salts.” At a reasonable concentration, if refined and mixed with other elements, they are sometimes used in treating illnesses and in certain medications. At higher doses, they can cause gold poisoning.
For the first time in recent memory, Donny became interested in the news. He went up to the window and took the binoculars from Luca, then called their “butler,” Mehdi, from the kitchen to bring coffee.
“He’s late,” Luca reported. “He’s called my cell four times already.”
A middle-age Iranian man with washed-out good looks and a pathological drive to please, Mehdi had “been with” (that’s how they put it, because it sounded more elegant than “worked for”) Donny and Luca for nearly three years. He had started as a temporary chauffeur for Donny in 2010, to drive him to his physical therapy appointments after a knee replacement, and slowly moved to full-time status as housekeeper and cook and personal shopper and that amorphous hireling that is de rigueur for every ardent wannabe or unemployed has-been in LA, “personal assistant.” He was so polite and deferential, so utterly self-effacing and low-maintenance, he could be a nuisance if not kept in check. Obsessively punctual, he synchronized his watch with the clock in Donny and Luca’s dining room and made a point of being neither late nor early by so much as a minute. On the rare occasions when some calamity held him back by any fraction of an hour, he went into a state not unlike an anxiety attack that could only be tamped down with a cocktail of high-potency benzodiazepines.
He called twice more that morning to say he was still stuck in traffic, and he sounded so shaken up and harried, Luca suggested they “call it a day and let you go home and rest.” Only that wasn’t an option because the gridlock stretched in both directions, so Mehdi hacked it as long as he could, then simply turned off the engine, left the key in the ignition, and walked the rest of the way to work.
He showed up with his shirt drenched in sweat and hands visibly shaking, so overwhelmed with apprehension that he stuttered like a pro. The minute he started to apologize for his lateness, Donny raised a hand and signaled for him to shut up.
“My dear man, your abjectness is irritating.”
Donny was still at the window with the binoculars, and he had stationed Luca on the computer and left the TV on CNN so they wouldn’t miss a second of anything.
It took them both a minute or so to understand, from his silence and obvious confusion, that Mehdi did not know about the lake. Astonished, Donny lowered the binoculars and turned to him.
“Come here,” he said, and Mehdi started toward him with jittery legs. His face was glistening with a new sheet of perspiration and his palms left tracks when he wiped them on his pants. He was rounding the corner of the Lalique cemetery when Donny added, “Haven’t you heard? They found gold in Lake Balboa.”
He said this with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, as if the gold had been discovered on their own property, and he expected Mehdi to at least feign excitement, as he did, just to be polite, whenever Donny or Luca shared with him some good news of their own. Instead, Mehdi let out a soft, truncated yelp, sank to his knees, and let the binoculars fall out of his hand.
His father had said they were going to buy shoes. Instead, they took a taxi to Vanak in North Tehran. There was snow everywhere, but his father insisted that the driver let them out a few streets away from their destination, so that their shoes and socks, even the bottom of their pants, were wet and frozen over by the time they reached the house. They waited for the buzzer, then hiked through the giant metal gates and up a long driveway. Mehdi shivered with cold, but his father had been perspiring since before they left home, and now he had to stop every few minutes and wipe his face with the side of his lapel. On either side of them, tall, naked trees, their branches powdered with snow, rose like ghosts over icy flowerbeds.
The front door was unlocked, so Mehdi’s father, Alireza, had only to push down on the brass handle to let them in. But he had started to shake, and his hand was slippery from the sweat, so he gave up after two attempts and turned to Mehdi for help. Inside, the house was dark and cold and utterly quiet, as if no one had lived in it for decades, but Alireza seemed to know where he was going. Down the long hallway and past a black marble staircase, he led Mehdi into a round dining room with a circular table and twelve chairs. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t wander out and don’t come looking for me.” But Mehdi followed him anyway, because he was afraid of being alone in this strange house and afraid too that Alireza would not come back for him. He had gotten as far as the bottom of the staircase when Alireza turned around and saw him.
“Go back and close the door,” he snapped, “or I’ll quash you,” but by then it was already too late.
Golnessa Hayim—barefoot, flat-chested, and dark as a Gypsy—stood against the second-floor railing in a purple satin dress with one blooming rose painted on the front, and a single slit carved into the hem right up to the tip of her white lace garters and the mouth of her red, naked vagina. Her hair was a storm of black curls and her eyes were bottle green and transparent as glass, and when she smiled at Mehdi, he saw her one gold tooth and realized, to his utter delight and acute horror, that this was the shameless, ruinous, Jew-whore woman his mother had often raged against in the last few months.
Spellbound, Mehdi had the urge to follow his father up the steps and into Golnessa’s arms and chest and soft, hollow places, though he was only eight years old and still thought his penis was for urinating. His eyes would not relent; they were locked into Golnessa’s green gaze so that he had to walk backward to get away while Alireza, who had forgotten his son already, climbed two steps at a time and fell into Golnessa with a loud, aching moan that coursed through the house and made Mehdi’s legs go limp.
He waited, alone, in the dining room. He was too nervous to sit, too agitated to walk without feeling as if his knees would buckle. Every few minutes, he thought he heard a sound—footsteps approaching, his name being called—only to realize it was just an echo in his ears. When he couldn’t stand the tension anymore he ventured back into the hallway.
The rest of the house felt like no one had lived in it for decades, but Mehdi thought he could sense heat transpiring through the door frame of one of the rooms upstairs. Then he heard the song.
“Dar in haal-eh mass-tee safaa kardaam.”
Golnessa’s voice spilled down the steps like warm water.
“Tow-raa eyy khodaa man seh-daa kardaam.”
It was an ode to G
od, a plea by a devout subject lost in euphoria and beckoning Him closer—though there was no mistaking, right at that moment, whom Golnessa beckoned.
* * *
That she sang so ably and with such abandon, people said about Golnessa, was no doubt thanks to her ancestors, who were traveling Jewish musicians from Shiraz—city of fine wine and loose morals whose women were considered de facto prostitutes. Besmirched from birth, Golnessa’s mother was dark and similarly flat-chested and plain as a stick figure drawn with coal on a sidewalk. Her only choice in marriage was a gravedigger’s son from that poorest of Jewish ghettos, the mahalleh in Yazd. Golnessa was her fourth child and first daughter, and she turned out to be the last as well because the pregnancy upset some essential symmetry in the mother, thinned out her blood or siphoned the milk of her muscles so that, even after her body had expelled the infant and rid itself of the extra fluids, her legs felt heavy and slack and reluctant, they fought her when she tried to walk and shifted if she stood, no matter how much vinegar and salt and mustard seeds and sage and turmeric she wrapped them in and how much garlic and coriander she added to her food or even how many freshly cut foreskins she swallowed at circumcision parties. She went from walking with a slight gait to dragging one leg around to walking with a pair of wooden sticks to, when Golnessa was about six years old, dragging herself on the ground.
On the bright side, Golnessa had come with her own, albeit unsubstantial, dowry—her lower left incisor, fully grown and permanent at birth, was pure gold.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 38
