“How do you know when I’m lying?” She sprayed a few drops of her blood onto his gurney. “Are these lies?”
“You’ve lost all feeling for the truth.”
“Shhh.” Kashfi cut the thread and knotted it. “The dead aren’t entitled to make so much noise.” He flung a shroud into Maryam’s lap. “Take off your chador, and get into this, quick,” he said, and shut off the light.
Darius filled his eyes with the image of a ghost in a frenzied striptease. Maryam was back on the gurney when the lights came on again, smoothing the folded chador against her body beneath the shroud. Devoid of color she was the loveliest corpse he had seen, an advertisement for the grave.
“The truck leaves for Behesht-e-Zahra in the hour before sunrise.” Kashfi slipped off Maryam’s rubber prison sandals and gave them to her to hide. “It does not make any stops en route. Get off the first time you feel it slow down. The cemetery is crowded at all hours these days. You don’t know what you may encounter there.” He shook Darius’s hand. “Good luck,” he said, and then went back to Maryam, and removed two silver rings from her fingers. “Find a place for these, too,” he said to her, “unless you want the grave diggers all over you.”
Maryam’s gurney was wheeled into the corridor. Darius lay with his eyes closed and his hands folded across his heart, perfecting his attitude of death. Soon Kashfi came for him, and he was placed beside Maryam. A rough bandage chafed his wrist, and her warm hand nestled into his. Had anyone asked he would have said that indeed he must have died because already he was in heaven, a place of fantastic expectation where nothing was as it seemed to be, and falsehood was legal tender.
16
DESCENDING FROM THE HEIGHTS of Evin, Darius shook harder with every lost meter of elevation—an inversion of physical law he explained away with the theory that absolute zero emanates from the grave. His shroud was paper thin; it afforded no protection from the wind that poured under the canvas top of the Bedford truck. The mound of bodies on which he was riding shifted as the truck careened around a corner, and a clammy crevasse opened up and swallowed him.
He touched bottom holding his breath, and began clawing his way back to the top. A moan rose from the knot of corpses, and he swept the blackness for Maryam. The hand he grabbed was ice cold and scabrous. He threw it down and searched for warm flesh, pulled Maryam close and clung to her, bobbing in a putrifying sea.
The squeal of brakes announced a sudden stop. The load pressed forward, and a body tumbled between them, a woman still wet with blood that was not quite cold. Maryam gagged as Darius freed them from her embrace.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
In the dark he heard her retching. The truck banked sharply, and he braced against the weight of their traveling companions as it speeded up again on an unpaved surface.
“How far till we’re there?”
“I don’t know where we are,” he told her. “We must have taken a detour.”
Through a tear in the canvas he looked out into a starry void in orbit around a van’s single taillight. The roadbed was paved in crushed rock and dirt. Other than the van disappearing in a gray smokescreen theirs was the only vehicle on it.
“Better get dressed now,” he said.
Maryam slipped on her chador over the shroud. With no place to stand Darius struggled into his pants. One leg was on when his shoes slid away, and he tunneled through the bodies to retrieve them. Maryam held his jacket behind his back, and guided his hands into the sleeves.
The dry heat of the southern slums billowed under the canvas, but neither of them could stop shivering. The truck lurched over an obstacle in the road, and as it slowed they crouched behind the tailgate. Orange traffic pylons glowed in a sodium vapor haze as a young Guardsman peeked inside, laughing nervously. A voice that otherwise was indistinct clearly pronounced the word “Advance.”
Darius was certain they were entering Behesht-e-Zahra via the long avenue that led past the tomb of the Imam and the sections where the martyrs of the Revolution were buried. They turned twice more into the furthest corner of the cemetery, a potter’s field where Evin disposed of martyrs to private causes.
A cement mixer was parked beside a trench from which the sun seemed to have risen out of the pebbly ground. Laborers molded of the same sandy compound lining the bottom of the excavation used long-handled hoes to prepare it to be filled and sealed.
Darius was clambering over the tailgate when the truck squeezed between the pit and a hill of turned earth, and the driver left the engine running and went around to the back. With Maryam he retreated into the mass of corpses, which had reassembled as an exclusive club that now barred them admittance. The driver held his fingers over his nose as he lowered the tailgate and glanced distastefully at his cargo. He was younger than Maryam, with the desert tan and strong white teeth of a peasant who was still new to urban living. Darius took Maryam’s hand and together they came forward. The driver froze, and his skin turned as glossy as anyone’s in the truck. His knees moved up and down, but his feet were stuck to the ground. Delivering himself of a girlish shriek, he ran to the gang of cement workers, and Darius saw him gesticulating wildly as he led a charge to hallowed ground.
Darius lowered himself slowly from the tailgate. The light slap of the ground against his toes was as painful as a session on the whipping bed. Maryam sprinted for the cemetery wall with Darius several steps behind. He boosted her over the waterstained bricks, and pulled himself up after her, and they kept running till they lost themselves in the twisted lanes around Bijan’s house.
“Where can we go?” Maryam asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that we’re free.”
“It was too easy,” Darius said. “It worries me.”
“Easy? I hope I never have to go through anything so easy again. When you relax, that’s when I’ll worry.”
“Worry now. Worry for Kashfi, when they find out we’re gone.”
Streetlights drew them to a main thoroughfare, an avenue of shuttered food stalls and small shops. A muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer at a corner mosque, and they crossed to the other side and kept to the shadows away from the men straggling to services. A cruise cab stopped for them unasked. The driver brought them north past the railroad station following Darius’s instructions for avoiding the Komiteh roadblocks. The upholstery reeked of tobacco smoke and spoiled fruit. Maryam rolled down the windows, and fumigated the interior with fresh air.
“Shabbaz Avenue,” Darius said, and stone worry beads dangling from the mirror clacked rhythmically as the cab swung east. Darius looked out at street sweepers maneuvering wide brooms along sidewalks buried in trash. From the old power plant he called the turns to a gray brick wall crumbling under years of neglect. In the dying garden surrounding a traditional home a birdhouse hung in the yellow canopy of a plane tree. “Stop here,” he said.
“The fare is two thousand rials,” the driver said.
Darius opened the door. “My money is inside the house.”
“Pay me right now.” The driver reached over the seat, and pulled the door shut. “Pay me, or I will call the police.”
Maryam scoured her chador, and tossed a silver ring into the front.
“This is worth tens of thousands,” the driver said. “How can I make change?”
“Give us what you have,” Maryam said.
The driver emptied his change maker, and raced away laughing. A finch had come out of the birdhouse, and Maryam paused in the garden to hear him sing to the early morning sun.
“Whose place is this?” she asked.
“A friend’s.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“Completely.”
Maryam peered inside a window. “It doesn’t look like anyone is home.”
Through the streaked glass Darius saw tracks in the carpeting made by the cart from the morgue. He went into the garden for a dead branch, and smashed the door p
ane closest to the knob. Stale, arid air rushed out as though an ancient tomb had been violated. Maryam hurried inside ahead of him to explore all the rooms, and soon he heard water rumbling against the bottom of a metal tub.
“You wouldn’t expect to find a bathtub in an old home like this,” she said to him.
“Mehta was full of surprises.”
The bedroom closet contained three or four suits that might fit him, shoes to wear over several pairs of socks. In a cardboard crate brittle with age were several shapeless dresses among a dozen black chadors. He tossed a flowery chemise with puffed sleeves at Maryam. Draping it against her body she made it youthful and exotic, but as he nodded his approval she let it drop to the floor.
“I lied,” she said. “To Ashfar. There’s no locker, no key. It was just something to get them to leave us alone.”
“Why tell me now?”
“So you understand.”
“The mycotoxins are nothing to me anymore.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m holding out on you. That I ever did. If I’d known where they were, I’d have told him when he had you on the whipping bed.”
“Since when does it matter what I think?”
“You still don’t trust me.”
“I trusted you to lie to Ashfar and Bijan,” he said, “and wasn’t disappointed.”
She was in the shower a long time, and came out wearing one of the clean chadors and with a towel wrapped like a sayyid’s turban around her wet hair. The hot water was used up when it was his turn in the tub. Sitting on the bottom, he played the cold against his bruised muscles.
There was no shaving cream in the medicine chest. He toweled the mirror and stared at himself in the steamy fog. His ordeal showed in hollow cheeks, and residual swelling around the eyes. His beard had come in full and thick. With short hair and his collar open he might have been any loyal, tired son of the Revolution. In Mehta’s best suit he looked ten years older.
Maryam had taken up residence in the kitchen. The oven and two burners were lighted, and he stood close and enjoyed the heat against his damp skin.
“I found some canned salmon in the pantry,” she said. “It’s almost ready.”
She brought him fried fish and rice, and tea, and though the salmon was burned on the edges and cold inside he couldn’t get enough of it. Maryam watched him eat before she served herself. She sat beside him taking slow, thoughtful bites, and when he finished before she hardly had started she filled his plate again.
“I was sixteen the year I made up my mind to martyr myself in the cause of the Shi’ites,” she said abruptly. “A boy I thought I was in love with had left me for my best girlfriend, and I was going to have revenge on both of them by dying for Iran.”
Darius put down his fork with a piece of salmon still on it.
“Eat,” she said. “Learning to cook was my singular accomplishment as a soldier for Islam. At least have the fruits of my training.” She tasted what was on her plate, but had no appetite. “I ran away to Teheran again, and Sheik Salehi arranged for me to be sent to ‘The Institute’ at Manzarieh for religious indoctrination. There I was taught how to hide explosives under my chador, to make myself human shrapnel. That was the extent of my instruction as a guerrilla.”
“You?” Darius said. “Your vanity would allow you to die like that?”
“Don’t laugh. It was what I wanted. I still hated my friend and the boy, and now I hated myself for having come to that miserable place. When we were asked who wanted to go to Lebanon to fight, I was the first to give her name.” Maryam looked at her plate again, and made a meal of a forkful. “Manzarieh had been a country club compared to the camp of the Sayyidah Zaynab Brigade. ‘Search for the Jew behind every depravity’ was the watchword of the mullahs there. The girls all were zealots. Many were terribly ugly and had known rejection their whole life. Like me, they would take out their unhappiness on an unsuspecting world.”
“But first upon themselves,” he said. “It’s the psychology of the camps.”
“Where were you when I needed someone to tell me why I was the most miserable person on earth?”
“You saw action against the Israelis and their Christian allies?” he asked.
“Our days were spent in prayer, and in waiting. I was bored every minute until I met Leila. She also had come to Lebanon for the wrong reason, and saw no way out but the martyr’s end we were promised. To ease her loneliness she had stolen some of the hashish that was used to give courage to the girls who were about to blow themselves up. To ease mine she taught me to smoke it. Things were not so dismal anymore. There was hope for us yet, if we could stay high all the time or get away.”
Maryam reached under the table and brought up two bottles of Russian vodka of a fine label that Darius had never seen in the evidence room.
“Where did you find Stolichnaya?”
“There’s an unopened case under the sink. I’d trade it all for two grams of hashish.”
She filled his tea glass with the vodka, but took none for herself. “In the spring of this year, three girls were requested for a special mission. I had learned never to volunteer for anything unless I wanted to make good my martyrdom. Leila advised me to put my name forward as it would mean a break from our tedious existence. The other girl chosen was Sousan Hovanian, who was new to the camp and to us.
“We were returned to Iran and flown to Mashad. Revolutionary Guards drove us by night to the Afghanistan border at Jannatabad, and gave us over to a party of Islamic resistance fighters who had come to Mashad for medical treatment. We traveled with them by horse caravan over the Zulfikar Pass. The best thing I can say about the men is that they were too weak to bother us. The mountain valleys all are cultivated in opium poppies, and I began to understand what we were needed for … began to think I did.” Maryam paused, and did not resume again.
“Yes, go on.”
“I’m sorry I started. What difference does any of this make? We owe it to ourselves to forget the things that motivated us when we were in service to Iran, that seemed so important we would give up our lives for them.”
“And if we could,” Darius said, “what cause would take their place in your heart?”
“Myself,” she said without hesitation. “All that concerns me now are my plans for the future—assuming I have a future.”
“Someone has to remember those things.”
“Why? To remember how we were duped, and used as if we were less than human?”
“Yes,” Darius answered. “That’s why.”
Maryam sighed. Then she said, “The wounded fighters were bringing antihelicopter missiles into Afghanistan. On our best day in the mountains the horses made fewer than fifteen kilometers. We established contact with the main body of guerrillas at their base overlooking the highway to Herat, and were greeted with news that our camp in Lebanon had been overrun by the Israelis. We cried all night. But these were tears of joy. Without discussion we decided to return to our homes, and put out of our minds that we had ever been Brides of Blood. I was in favor of throwing the parcel the Afghanis gave us into the first lake we came to. Leila said no, that if we were picked up by the Revolutionary Guards, we would need what was inside to bargain for our lives.”
Maryam sniffed the vodka bottle. “How can you drink this vile stuff?” she asked.
“We divided the plastic bags of heroin among us and taped them to our bodies as we had learned to hide explosives. Leila left for Iran in the morning, and Sousan the day after that. We were to meet one week later at the Rudaki Hall opera house. A blizzard closed the Zulfikar Pass for four days, and I lost three days more en route to Teheran. You can’t imagine my relief when I found Sousan waiting for me, and she brought me to Saltanatabad Avenue.”
“The apartment was hers?”
“Hers and Leila’s,” Maryam said. “They had sold one bag of heroin to a drug dealer from south Teheran, and were negotiating to get rid of the lot. The money that was left over from household e
xpenses went for the first nice clothes they’d had in years. They didn’t understand why I wanted no part of the deal. After talking about it long enough, neither did I. What could be more fitting, they argued, than for the people who supported the camps to be polluted by drugs, while we came away with something to show for our wasted lives?”
“Where was your part of the heroin?” Darius asked. “You weren’t still carrying it taped to your body?”
“Mehrabad Airport. In a locker. So, you see, I don’t lie so much as you think. The dealer was a hopeless addict who called himself Najafi. The big money he promised was always coming the next day. In time I came to feel the apartment was my home. I brought back my share of the drugs, and put it in the freezer with all the rest. While we waited to become rich, Leila began acting strangely, sleeping until noon, not eating or keeping herself clean. Najafi had taught her to smoke heroin, and it was all she cared about. Sousan and I were worried the Pasdars would pick her up on the street, so Sousan moved to Najafi’s to keep a close eye on her. Next time I looked in the freezer, it was empty. I had no money, nowhere to go. I didn’t even know where to reach the other girls. Then Leila came home with her insides torn up. It wasn’t the Pasdars who had found her, but your friends from SAVAK.”
“You’ve seen what good friends of mine they are.”
“Leila said they would do the same to me if we didn’t turn over the heroin. She became hysterical when I told her I didn’t have it. Sousan had fallen in love with Najafi, and taken it all.”
“And the mycotoxins?”
“The first I heard about them was from Rahgozar. He had been chasing after them for months. He was several days behind when he lost track of them near the Zulfikar Pass, and by the time he caught up to me in Teheran they were gone again.”
“What did he want with them?” Darius asked. “The Russians didn’t need them, since they were the first to synthesize yellow rain.”
“He told me the Red Army had brought stocks of yellow rain into Afghanistan, but lost them when a cargo plane was shot down by the Islamic guerrillas. They weren’t missed till the Soviets got into bed with the West, and began retrieving their chemical weapons all over the world.”
Brides of Blood Page 29
