House of Sand and Fog

by Andre Dubus III

  And in front of each of us was placed a small earthen cup, relics from Pourat’s family in Isfahan. A box of long Havana cigars lay closed, for we never smoked until our host did first, nor did we dip our two fingers into the chaser, as Americans might call it, the bowl of mastvakhiar—that wonderful sour yogurt mixed with bits of cucumber—that moment would not come until after our first drink of cold Russian vodka, which Pourat would pour as soon as he entered in a smoking jacket, silk pants, and fine Parisian socks. He was a handsome man, khosh teep, and bald with wide shoulders and a flat belly. Of course we would stand, but Pourat would wave us back to the floor and he would make a joke about one of us, something he may have heard that week at Mehrabad, and we always laughed at Pourat’s jokes, not out of respect, but because he was truly an amusing man. Sometimes he would tease one of the younger or more ambitious men by passing his cup over while pouring the very first drink, something a saghi rarely did, for the main purpose of a saghi is to keep a man from drinking more than he is able. The young senior officer with the empty cup might lower his head out of shame, his face a reddened study in concentration as he attempted to remember how he may have insulted the general. But then Pourat would laugh quite loudly, as would the rest of us, and he would pour the vodka for the relieved and smiling young man, then fill all our cups.

  When we toasted our health, each man, including Pourat, attempted to tap his cup beneath those of the others, which is a true sign of respect in Persia. “Man nokaretam,” we say, meaning: I am your servant. And of course each man wants to honor another more than himself, if it is truly deserved, so he will not allow his cup to stay higher when they touch; he will instantly lower his cup to the bottom of the other man’s as if to say, “No, I am your servant.” But the other will sometimes insist by lowering his again and more than once I have seen grown men lower their cups in this fashion, each after the other all the way to the floor, then stand to fistfight over who respects whom the most. But at Pourat’s this would never occur. We prided ourselves on being not simply high officers, but Persian gentlemen as well.

  One winter evening, General Pourat invited a seventh man to his home, his nephew. He was dark-skinned and younger than us all, with not more than thirty-three or thirty-four years. He possessed good looks, the wide jaw, small nose, and deep eyes I would see in film actors, and his physique was quite fit and powerful-looking beneath his finely tailored dark suit. Each time he raised his vodka cup to drink, his upper arm muscle would bunch into a round stone, and when one of the men commented on the young man’s power, Pourat said, “Yes, Bijan outlasts them all at the zur khaneh.”

  One of the older gentlemen seated beside me began to speak of his boyhood in Rasht, how he would go with his father to the zur khaneh and witness all the large men there, half naked and sweating, lifting the milos over their heads while the chanter sang and played the domback drum in front of a fire and the hot stones a boy would pour water over to bring on more steam. And I did not care for the fashion in which Pourat’s nephew listened to this story; he drank his vodka and dipped three fingers, not two, into the mastvakhiar, and as he licked his fingers clean he would not even look at the older man speaking of his boyhood in Rasht. The young man kept his eyes on his stocking feet in front of him as if he were hearing something for the five hundredth time, something he of course knew completely before he’d heard it the first. When the gentleman beside me finished telling the story of his father and the zur khaneh, Pourat poured each of us more vodka and when we raised our cups in a toast to our past and to our traditions, I watched to make sure the younger man, this Bijan, held his cup low out of respect, which he did, though his face appeared impassive, and it was plain for me to see that here was a boy who was not only accustomed to being admired and looked at and listened to, he expected it as well.

  “What is your nephew’s position, Genob General Pourat?” This was asked amiably by Mehran Hafsanjani, a small man who held a high rank and was a specialist in radar communications. The young man looked directly at Hafsanjani and he insulted Pourat, his uncle and host, by answering ahead of him: “I am with SAVAK, sir.”

  Pourat immediately made a joke to us all to watch our manners, you never know what secrets these policemen have, but his nephew did not smile; he sat with his back erect, his thick arms resting at the wrist upon both knees, and he absently tapped two fingers on the carpet.

  “My Bijan was trained in America, in New York.”

  The handsome Savaki shook his head in a pretended show of modesty. I leaned forward. “And what did they teach you there, young Mr. Pourat?” I did not try to disguise the contempt in my voice, and my use of the word young, javoon, came out sounding like an insult, but I did not care; General Pourat was my oldest friend, the vodka was warm in my belly, I was a colonel. The handsome nephew looked directly at my eyes. “They taught us techniques, Genob Sarhang.”

  “What sort of techniques?”

  The young man surprised me; he glanced at his uncle to see if he should answer. Pourat nodded slightly, the light of the fire behind him in his eyes.

  “Torture, Genob Sarhang.”

  “They teach you this in America?” said another gentleman, a big radish of a bureaucrat named Ali.

  “Among other things.” The trace of a smile passed over the young man’s face.

  “I have heard some stories,” said Ali. “We all have.” He regarded General Pourat and cleared his throat. “I heard of a man in the Tudeh Party who was forced to watch his wife raped at the city prison.”

  Young Pourat waved his hand as if at a fly upon his nose. “That is only effective for so long. If you want real information, you must take their children. Make a subversive watch his little one lose a hand or arm and they will tell you everything.” He smiled, his eyes on his vodka cup upon the floor. “But the difficult part of the work is knowing whom to arrest.”

  Two men laughed.

  I had heard these stories as well. We all had. But I felt the vodka inside me turn cool. “Do you enjoy your work, Mr. Pourat?”

  The Savaki narrowed his eyes immediately. “Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. I serve Shahanshah, sir. I can only assume you do as well.”

  The musicians had just completed a song and the room was quiet. A dry log crackled in the fire, then shifted in the coals. I felt the heat of my heart drop to my hands and for a brief moment I imagined my thumbs buried in the young policeman’s eyes.

  General Pourat clapped his hands twice. “All right, all right, enough of this talk. You two surprise me. You are colleagues, you should act as such.” He turned to the musicians. “Play something festive!”

  The general poured us all more vodka, and the moment passed. Soon I was mast, half drunk, with the others and we lay back upon our elbows on the carpet to smoke cigars and listen to the music. Occasionally I would look over at the young torturer and see him gazing into the fire, his eyes empty, and I wished he would leave our group early and not come back, for I did not like to be reminded of the secret police and all the people they made disappear in our land, these students and professionals, wives, mothers, husbands, fathers, children, illiterate cargars living in small homes of mud and wood scraps less than a kilometer from the grand palace with all of its fine ornaments imported from around the world; I did not like to think once again that America, with whom I did close business in the purchase of fighter jets, had such a hand in all this; I did not like to think this was the manner in which our king retained his throne and our way of life; but, most of all, I did not want to accept that General Pourat was correct when he said the young policemen and I were colleagues, so, once more, I drank more vodka than I should have, and the rest of the evening I did not dip my two fingers into the same bowl of mastvakhiar as the young torturer Bijan.

  “Behrani?”

  My wife stands in the doorway. Since moving, she has dressed each morning in lady’s cotton trousers and a loose pullover shirt in which she can work. Over the last few months she has lost too muc
h weight. She wears a gold costume jewelry belt to hold her pants up and her hips look as slim as a boy’s. But she has applied cosmetics to her lips and eyes, and her thick hair is pulled up and back with a scarf.

  “Yes, Nadi-jahn?”

  “When must we move again?”

  I take a breath. “Not too soon. Perhaps once we get a buyer we will tell them to wait until fall. Would you prefer that?”

  She looks by me to the window, at the sun on our long grass, the road, the woodland beyond, her eyes becoming moist. “I will do as you wish, Massoud.”

  I stand and hold my wife, and for a brief moment she allows this. I feel the softness of her chest against me. I smell her clean hair, the familiar scent of lavender and tea. But she steps away and walks quickly down the corridor to her work.

  Nadi has always had more pride than a queen, and I am certain what just happened between us was an apology. But as I sit at my desk, I feel that caged heaviness in my belly that comes with a failure of courage, for it is I who should apologize; it is I who have helped to fly us so far off course.

  I WAS ON CORONA BEACH, STILL WEARING THE SHORTS I’D WORKED IN, leaning back on an El Rancho Motel towel. The sky was clear and blue, no sign of the fog that can float in whenever it feels like it. The tide was low, and green waves curled in long and lazy, spreading out on the wet sand where four kids squatted building a hill for a red plastic truck.

  My Monday job was a two-story duplex on the Colma River. The owner was a quiet CPA who had custody of his twelve-year-old daughter on the weekends. He had a beard and thick glasses and once he left me a typed note asking me out and I wrote in pencil on the bottom that I couldn’t, I was married, which was true, though Nick had already been gone for months. The CPA wrote an apology in a second note, and I’d felt like a liar and a chickenshit, and he never wrote any more notes, just left the check under a rainbow magnet on the fridge. After cleaning his small house, I drove straight to the motel and called Connie Walsh. It took her almost ten minutes to get to the phone and when she did she told me she was running late for court, she still hadn’t heard from the county, then she asked me to drop off my copy of the notarized tax statement. I told her I couldn’t find it. She said that wasn’t good news but keep your chin up; it’ll probably be in the records they’re sending. “And Kathy, I recommend you try and stay with friends. County bureaucrats are notorious for dragging their briefcases. This could take a few weeks to iron out.”

  “A few weeks?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  I was about to tell my lawyer that’s too long, I can’t afford it, but she hung up, and soon after the front desk lady buzzed my room and asked if I was checking out or staying another day. I didn’t know where else to go, but told her I was checking out. I packed my suitcase, then carried my TV across the street and locked it back in the storage shed. A trucker was backing his rig into the yard to turn around and as I crossed the street again he honked once, then stuck his head out the window, smiled hard, and said something to me I couldn’t hear over his engine. I should’ve given him the finger, but instead I went back into my room and packed two of the motel’s towels to take with me, revenge, I guess, for the broken TV, though I never told them it was broken.

  Behind me an engine with no muffler started up and I turned to see an old Malibu pull out of the beach lot, a First Things First bumper sticker above its rusted tailpipe. Nick hated those twelve-step, Higher Power slogans, especially when they were on cars he’d see on his way to work or just running errands. “Big Brother ruling you from somebody’s fucking tailpipe,” he’d say.

  “They’re not rules, they’re reminders.”

  “They’re fucking reminders to obey the rules, Kath.”

  But I didn’t feel that way. Every time I saw one—usually on a back bumper—I felt like when you’re in a crowded city street and you see a face you knew once and even if you don’t talk to that person you feel suddenly more tied to your past and present. When I was using I never liked seeing them. But after the program, whenever I saw one I felt a kind of sad attraction for whatever it had to say: Live and Let Live, Let Go and Let God, One Day at a Time, Take It Easy, Keep it Simple. Nick’s the one who got me to stop going to meetings. In the program they let you try both ways: AA, that says we’re powerless over our addiction and have to give it up to something higher, and RR, which is based on The Small Book, which has only been around a few years and says we’re not powerless, and thinking this just makes it easier to fail; all you have to do is recognize the Beast in you, the addict, the Enemy Voice that wants to use, accuse it of malice against you, remind yourself what a worthwhile person you are and that you treasure your sobriety, and then it’s not so hard to use all this against the Beast and not let it get what it wants. And they spelled B.E.A.S.T. in capital letters:

  B=Boozing opportunity

  E=Enemy Voice recognition

  A=Accuse the voice of malice

  S=Self-control reminders

  T=Treasure your sobriety

  This all left me cold, like a foreign language I’d never be able to learn. It’s where Nick went though, so I went too. But I missed the few AA meetings I’d been to, everyone sitting in a cloud of their own smoke, telling their stories and backing each other up, nobody any wiser or more together than anyone else.

  Nick loved the part about Enemy Voice recognition. On that five-day drive west in our new car, hauling a tiny U-haul trailer, he drank thermos after thermos of coffee and he’d go on and on about how there’s a part of all of us that wants to kill ourselves, K, even when things are going well, especially when things are going well. And the only way to beat it is with reason and ratonality. Like a mother or father with a young kid. And he’d smile and slap the steering wheel with both hands, looking over at me, his cheeks and chin bluish with whiskers. He was so sure about it I wanted to believe it, too. But there was always that nagging pull inside me. I’d look back out at the rushing white lines of the highway, or else put the passenger seat back and close my eyes; it wasn’t a problem for me to hear an enemy voice in my head and accuse it of malice; it was the next part, drawing on all this self-love everybody’s supposed to have deep down, then telling yourself that life without getting high is better. That’s what I could never do. And after the program, as I sat next to Nick at our weekly Rational Recovery groups in Cambridge, no one talked about being powerless and living life one day at a time, which was really more how I felt. Instead, we were powerful and rational—powerful because we were rational—and we talked about living life one life at a time. A lot of RR people had even given up smoking that way, so there was hardly an ashtray in the room, though there was coffee and we all seemed to drink a lot of it.

  I always left these meetings feeling like a fake. Nick didn’t though; we’d walk down the sidewalk across from the high brick walls of Harvard and he’d grab my hand and then kiss my neck, pulling me along, telling me there was a little voice in his pants he could only accuse of love. Sometimes we’d walk down to Harvard Square to eat or see a movie. I always wanted to do both, eat something heavy and delicious like lasagna or prime rib, then go to the small theater past the newsstand and all the teenagers in loose pants to snuggle down into the red seats in the dark with a large Coke and about ten chocolate peanut butter cups, just let the flickering light of the story shut up my rational, reasonable voice for a couple of hours. But then the lights would always come up and I’d blink to see Nick sitting beside me in a funk. Very few of the movie characters had control of any of their impulses and problems, and Nick said it was too depressing and exhausting for him to watch. So we stopped going to movies on RR nights. Soon we left the East Coast.

  So many nights after Nick left I’d just get into the Bonneville and drive. I’d drive up the coast and down the coast and I was always looking for that gray Honda. Most of the time I knew he was far away, though sometimes I pictured him living in a neighborhood less than ten miles from Bisgrove Street, playing bass in a band ma
ybe, living alone or with a twenty-year-old girl who had no intention of saddling him with kids, saddling him with anything. I’d still feel a little sick whenever I thought of him with somebody else, but I was sure if he was with anybody, she had to be young enough he could mold her into what he wanted. He was such a chickenshit. And I didn’t even know this until he’d been gone almost two months. I got the insight while I watched a rented movie. That’s what I did almost every night, right up until Deputy Lester Burdon showed up to evict me. I’d rent two or three movies and watch them back to back. Sometimes I’d even start in the late afternoon. Including weekends I averaged close to twenty a week. I knew how addictive this might look to anyone back in the program, or in RR, but I wasn’t putting anything into my body, not even cigarettes then, so I rationalized there was no real Enemy Voice to accuse of malice, was there?

  It was a porno I grabbed from the adult section and slipped in with two PG-13s. I read once that over ninety-five percent of men masturbate while only forty-six percent of women do, and I’d always thought I was somewhere on the borderline; I did it once every few months, not enough to ever miss. But when I put in the videocassette and heard the electric moan of the recorder pulling the tape along I was already wet and there was still daylight outside, so I went around and pulled all the shades, turned off the light in the kitchen, then sat on the floor as the credits came up yellow with names like Fiona Lace and John Rod and before they were over a young blond girl was on her knees sucking off a tanned Italian in a shirt, tie, and suspenders. I had seen skin flicks before, but not many, usually at parties where I was too loaded to see, so I was a little surprised when they started to fuck and I didn’t feel like unzipping my jeans. Instead I sat back against the couch with my ankles and arms crossed and watched as the man directed the blonde to do this and to do that, to bend over his desk so he could spread her cheeks and enter her from behind. Then I pictured my husband jerking off to this and I felt my stomach and insides get pulled down a second, and I jabbed the eject button and flung the tape behind me without looking.