Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

by Hakakian, Roya

  Noori had looked forward to this evening for days. His old friend Sadegh Sharafkandi, nicknamed “the Doctor,” was in town and Noori was on his way to a small dinner in the visitor’s honor. The nickname had originated in the early 1970s, after Sharafkandi received his PhD in analytical chemistry from a French university. But like most degrees that the students of his generation earned, it became useless at home, no more than a glorified line in his biography. After returning from France, he began to teach chemistry in a school in Iran’s Kurdistan, only to find that his pupils, stricken with poverty and prejudice, could not contemplate atoms and molecules. They did not need a teacher. They needed an advocate. And so he shed the chemist and fashioned himself into an activist. For him, and most educated youth of his era, activism was not an ambition, a career, or even a choice. It was an inevitable detour along the way to a future good enough to afford the likes of chemists.

  Twenty years since his days in France, the young scientist was now the chairman of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan, founded at the end of World War II to attain equal rights for the Kurds. The party, beloved by the Kurds though banned in Iran, was recognized in Europe, and the Doctor had been invited to address the annual International Congress of the Social Democratic Party. The event was a rare occasion for the Doctor. It brought him to Europe from his clandestine underworld in the mountains of Kurdistan.

  For most Iranians, Kurdistan was a forsaken place where the news was often grim, a reminder of some of their history’s inglorious moments. But Noori was not afraid to stare the ugly past in the face. He likened Kurds to Native Americans. The comparison was hardly exact, he knew, but he drew it nonetheless to provoke those of his compatriots who readily castigated America for its sins against its own people. After all, both people were perennially haunted by a historic tragedy that had come to them through loss of territory. Both were more indigenous to the regions they inhabited than those who ruled them. Though the word “tribal” was no longer used to describe them, each community had steadfastly maintained, against all assaults, its unique culture, language, tradition, and way of life. The mountains had once been the Kurds’ only home, their source of life and livelihood, the landscape they eternally celebrated in folk tunes as their “best friend.” They still wore traditional costumes—men in loose-fitting shirts and pants, with shawls wrapped around the waist; women in iridescent, ankle-length dresses and headgear. And they still suffered. The Kurds were Sunni—a minority of nearly four million among Iran’s fifty million Shiite. Their ancient territory, last intact in 520 ad, once stretched from southern Turkey and northern Iraq to western Iran and eastern Syria. Military attacks over the centuries tore it apart, leaving the Kurds to perpetually fight to reconquer the lost land, or at least win enough autonomy to live according to their own traditions.

  For Noori, the avid reader of history, 520 ad was hardly a distant past. He often quoted the famous line “Iran is where the Kurd is,” to say that the Kurds were the very essence of the Iranian tradition, and being at peace as a nation had to begin with peace for the Kurds. Besides, Noori had a debt to the Kurds. In the early 1980s, when the new regime had begun to persecute secular intellectuals, Kurdistan became a safe haven for many on the run. Shohreh and Sara had already left for Germany, but Noori, forced into hiding, fled to Kurdistan. The Kurds safely smuggled him on horseback across the border. For having reunited him with his family, he never forgot his debt, not even in Berlin.

  A balmy early autumn day was ending in a tender drizzle. He had almost reached Prager Street. His destination was the northernmost end of the block, in a narrow cul-de-sac cars usually avoided. Shaded by tall elms and plane trees, the restaurant at number 2A nestled just where the curve of the blind alley began. On one side stood an elegant six-story building with balconies overlooking the street. On the other was the backyard of a nursery school where the colored eggs of Easter still dangled from the branches of autumnal trees, giving the surroundings an air of innocence.

  When the telephone rang, Parviz Dastmalchi did not answer it. He had looked forward to spending a few quiet hours stretched on his living-room couch, reading through his manuscript. The prospect of publishing a first book had eclipsed all the misfortunes that could have otherwise spurred a midlife crisis: divorce, separation from his only child, Salomeh, and a lonely life in exile. Writing, though he had started late, kept his spirit in place while he made the necessary adjustments.

  But the phone kept on ringing and, at last, he answered it.

  “Excellency, how goes it?” came the sound of his best friend Noori, whose voice was tinged with distress. Parviz immediately asked what was wrong.

  “No one’s here,” Noori answered.

  “Where’s here?”

  “The restaurant. Where else?”

  Puzzled, Parviz asked why Noori was there at all. For a few moments, each answered the other with questions of his own, until Noori relented. “Stop with the Q and A, Excellency! I’m here with the Kurds. With the Doctor and his two deputies. And you? Why on earth are you home? I told you about this days ago.”

  The charge of not being on time or missing a date was not one Parviz, who preached punctuality, took lightly. In his calendar, as he read aloud from it to Noori, the dinner was marked for the following night.

  The distress in Noori’s voice gave way to resignation. “Aziz told you it was on Friday, didn’t he? The buffoon has been calling people, telling them to come Friday night. How he got that into his head is beyond me.”

  The Doctor, Noori explained, had long been booked on an early morning flight to Paris on Friday and various receptions at the conference had claimed every other evening on his schedule except Thursday.

  Learning of the blunder, Parviz said, “Aha! This is what I call a disaster of the quintessentially Iranian kind! We’re never on time. We can’t coordinate a simple meeting and we wonder why the mullahs are running our country. Bah!”

  But Noori, in no mood to self-reflect, said, “Spare me the punditry for now! There’s just the four of us and Aziz. The place is dead, Excellency! You’ve got to come! You’ve got to come and make me look good.”

  Parviz knew he had to go. Yet he could not help resisting. His work day was to start unusually early the next day and sleep was not something he did without anymore.

  “Come now!” Noori replied with loving banter. “Stop sounding like an old man. We won’t start dinner without you. Praise the Almighty!”

  • • •

  Praise the Almighty, the famous sign-off by the devout atheist. It was loyalty to their twenty-year-old friendship that moved Parviz from his couch that night—loyalty and also hope.

  The year 1992 seemed full of promise. The eight-year war between Iran and Iraq had long ended. The Ayatollah was mostly a memory. Extremism had lost its allure for Iranians. The nation had distanced itself from its radical rulers. Many among the exiles believed 1992 was about to deliver what 1979 had only promised and that it was time for the opposition to prepare itself. The new president, Rafsanjani, had lifted the ban on many publications the Ayatollah had outlawed. He spoke of moderation, tolerance, and national reconciliation. He had issued a call inviting all exiles to return home: “The motherland needs its children to set aside the old divisions and return home to rebuild what years of war destroyed.”

  Only a few thought the call to be a ploy to lure the opposition back to the country to annihilate them once and for all. The rest welcomed it as the sign of a new, milder political season. Since the revolution, nothing had divided the diaspora the way Rafsanjani’s conciliatory gesture had. The opposition that had mostly spoken with one voice against the regime was torn asunder by the sudden friendliness of the old enemy.

  Noori was among the hopeful. And it was hope that had moved him to arrange the gathering that night. He had invited several of the most notable local exiles to meet the Doctor over dinner, thinking the encounter might draw them —members of Iran’s disarrayed opposition—into unity. He be
lieved they were on the cusp of change and that repatriation was only a matter of time, though the fancy word meant nothing to him other than simply going home. He had written many articles citing the latest political developments as proof that the tide was turning in favor of reform in Iran. Yet no amount of polemical smoke could cloud his true motive, at least not to those closest to him. He regretted the uncompromising attitude, the radicalism, of his university days, though he still kept the guise of a wiry rebel: earth-tone Che Guevara attire, large spectacles, and a bushy mustache that curled under his fleshy upper lip. Over twenty years of activism, first against the Shah and then against the Ayatollah, had only led to what he, on good days, referred to as “a historic failure of infinite proportions,” and on bad, by whatever single-syllable vulgarism that came to his restless mind. He rarely said so, and when he did it was only after a few drinks, but all radicalism had got him was from bad, a king, to worse, a cleric. The thought of forever remaining a dissident and growing old in exile dispirited him. Idealism had led him to a profession he had hoped would satisfy his desire to make a difference in the world. He and Parviz were both working at the Red Cross supervising the resettlement of refugees in Berlin, each raising a family on a social worker’s salary but while Parviz was content, Noori felt expendable. Age had brought him the opposite of what he had expected. Instead of forgoing the loss of small things, he longed for them. He did not want new and better things, but the old imperfect ones he had known as a child. He dreamed of his family home, especially the third floor library he had built—sawing, sanding, and staining each shelf to last a lifetime—his lifetime.

  In a few minutes Parviz was dressed and the lateness of the hour did not keep him from composing his trademark boyish yet professorial look—the first owing to his ready, mischievous smile and full head of chestnut hair, which refused graying, and the second to the immaculate dress shirt and sharply pressed trousers on his small frame. He grabbed his parka and the article, “The Kurds of Iran Today,” to read on the road.

  By the time Parviz arrived, the boxed menus and the wrought-iron fixtures at either side of the restaurant’s entrance were already lit. The nights were growing chilly, and the sidewalk tables had been carted to storage. Only a stack of white rubber chairs remained, beside a row of potted junipers. Even after a year of being in Iranian hands, the restaurant had kept its Greek appearance. On the front window the image of four doves circling a windmill remained, along with the words Taverna Restaurant scripted in antique lettering above the name—Mykonos.

  For nearly a year, 2A Prager Street had been the haunt of the diaspora. But its popularity was no reflection on the owner. Aziz, a fellow exile, knew nothing about running a business, nor was he a connoisseur to be trusted with matters of taste or decor. The expatriates came because they saw pieces of themselves in the restaurant’s awkward ambience. Nostalgia made the imperfections of the place endearing, as did its imperfect host, Aziz, dear in Persian, the language of their nostalgia. The dirty gray carpeting, the institutional white paint on the walls, the potted vines thickly layered with dust, the plastic flowers with missing petals, and the unframed, sun-faded posters of the Greek isles tacked here and there all reminded them of the flaws of their displaced selves. Mykonos was familiar. Mykonos was what they thought they deserved. And Aziz, despite his inadequacies, knew how to invoke their sympathies so that tolerating his poor cooking seemed like their duty, an exercise in patriotism.

  Inside, Parviz found Maria, the blonde Ukrainian barmaid, leaning on the counter, listlessly listening to the lone customer in the main hall. Aziz had been turning away customers, except this loyal, mildly hunched German regular who, from his usual table by the bar, exchanged an occasional line with the barmaid. Making a crisscrossing motion with his hands, Aziz had apologized to everyone who walked in that night in his broken German, Chef no here. He sick. Kitchen closed.

  Noori’s voice could be heard in the main hall as he fumed in the back room of the restaurant. “Tell me this! Tell me only this! How could you say to people Friday night when I’d clearly told you Thursday?”

  Of his original list of sixteen guests none had shown up. Aziz’s voice echoed, stammering an answer, “Listen, Noori mola.”

  Mola, as in “mentor,” had long been Aziz’s term for Noori. “You said Friday night. I swear on my two children’s lives, you said Friday night. ‘Aziz,’ you said, ‘call ’em up,’ you said, ‘tell ’em we’re meeting the Doctor at Mykonos on Friday night,’ is what you said.”

  The answer flabbergasted Noori, who threw his hands up and refused to say more than, “Impossible!” But Aziz would not give in. “I don’t hold a candle to you, mola jaan, but my memory is rock solid. Friday night is what you said.”

  They were seated around a long, wobbly table Aziz had arranged by joining three small tables together. At the head, the Doctor and Noori sat side by side, their backs against the wall, facing the open room and the Doctor’s two deputies. Had there been no confusion about the timing, the meeting would have been a rare chance to hear from the Doctor, the beloved regional leader who had national potential. But by eight-thirty, Parviz was the only one to arrive.

  They all rose to welcome Parviz. “I was in my pajamas when Noori called, thinking the meeting was for tomo—”

  With a gentle pat on the back, the Doctor interrupted Parviz to stop the exhausted argument from starting once again. Aziz resumed his duties as host. He ran a scraper over the tablecloth to clear crumbs, lit the candles, and emptied the ashtrays into his palms before walking away. Noori cast a last look of dismay in Aziz’s direction, then turned his attention to Parviz. He offered Parviz the other empty seat beside the Doctor, but seeing beer on the table Parviz chose to sit across from them, where he had an uncluttered path to the men’s room. No sooner had they settled in their chairs than they rose to welcome two other unexpected arrivals. Two Iranian cabdrivers had stopped to pick up dinner but Aziz had urged them to stay, hoping to make up for the missing audience.

  Within minutes, a last guest arrived.

  “Huzzah! Look who’s here!” Aziz rushed to the door. “Our own Mr. Mehdi, who’d otherwise never set foot in my joint.”

  Mehdi, who was a former wrestling champion, pressed a sinewy forearm to his chest, giving a gentle bow, and greeted everyone. Aziz, trying to lighten the mood, exclaimed, “This way, please! Let the champ get through! Mr. Mehdi! Mr. Mehdi! You’re just as rare a sight around here as the absent Prophet Mahdi you were named after.”

  Mehdi was there for Noori’s sake who had called earlier that evening urging him to come. A star athlete and an engineering graduate of Sharif, Iran’s most prestigious university, Mehdi could have remained in Iran relishing his status as a celebrity. But the glories of fame fell short of life’s daily indignations once he left the ring and crossed the threshold from wrestler to citizen. At least living as a cabdriver in Berlin afforded him consistency—he was the same invisible immigrant wherever he went.

  “You’re a gem to come,” Noori, brimming with gratitude, whispered in Mehdi’s ear, then offered him the empty chair on his right.

  “With all due respect, Doctor, you ought to take better care of yourself. You need security. You need guards,” one of the guests began, once everyone had settled around the table.

  But the Doctor waved away the advice. Bodyguards were an expensive indulgence to the Doctor, who represented an impoverished people. Or perhaps it was the metaphysical streak in him, in every Iranian, that made him dismissive of death, as if his cause was too great to yield to mortal concerns. The Doctor’s security had long preoccupied the thoughts of his supporters—something he always tried to ease by telling a favorite anecdote.

  “‘Life and death are the two sides of the same coin.’ A Peshmerga fighter in the mountains of Kurdistan taught me this. With his walking stick, he drew a line in the dirt, stood to one side of it, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘Kaak Doctor, this is life.’ Then leapt to the other side of the line, looked
into my eyes again, and said, ‘This is death, Kaak Doctor.’ He taught me to see how closely death shadows us all. There’s no point in fearing what’s always with us. There’s no telling when, but a few seconds is all that separates us from the next world.”

  How fatalistic, Parviz thought. What he believed the Kurds and all disenchanted Iranians needed was not a mystic but a pragmatic leader who refused to surrender, most of all to death. But before he had sounded his objection, the Doctor had moved on and was answering a question about Kurdistan and the state of its people. The Doctor was an attentive listener. He compensated for his lacking charisma with avuncular gentleness. His civility was endearing. He spooned condiments into everyone’s dish and cordially got up when anyone rose from his seat. Even in his fiercest official pose—decked in combat uniform with a gun strapped to his back—the balding, full-cheeked Doctor looked no more menacing than a crossing guard at an intersection. Had he not been born among a persecuted people, he would have been a professor or a researcher in a laboratory. But all that was left of his years of learning was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and the title Doctor.