by Salar Abdoh
I hadn’t a shadow of a doubt about this anymore.
I called Hassan and asked him if he still intended to see Abi the Lisp tonight.
“Are you out of your mind, brother? Of course I’m going to see him. This is what you call opportunity. And you? You coming?”
I didn’t know, so I didn’t answer.
“I tell you what,” he said. “Think about it. I don’t mind going alone. Or I might take one of the neighborhood boys with me.”
I tiptoed out of the house without anyone noticing. I’d been made to feel guilty from every corner lately. There was my girlfriend who’d already sent me her ultimatum. There was my sick mother in the other room whom I hadn’t been taking enough care of lately. There was my aging father who could do little for any of us and who kept saying that he only wanted to see me married and settled before he was dead. There was the newspaper and the hardly scintillating articles I’d been putting out recently.
Asghar’s case was beginning to feel like a bad marriage—I couldn’t live with it, and I couldn’t let it go so easily. What would happen if I showed up with Hassan at the teahouse tonight? I couldn’t go on shadowing Abi the Lisp forever. And even if I did, what made me think he’d turn around one day and show me where he’d buried Asghar’s body? Worst part of all this was, what if Abi the Lisp somehow got suspicious of me? Then I’d be putting Hassan’s life in danger too.
I was in the middle of these thoughts as I walked aimlessly on the streets when my cell phone rang. Asghar’s father. I was debating with myself if I should even answer it when the phone went quiet. Now I noticed there had been six missed calls. All of them from Asghar’s dad. I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t realized he’d been calling.
I dialed his number.
He was crying. “They’ve found Asghar’s body. The police called me. They said they found him in the Rey District.” His voice broke up and he fell into a fit of uncontrolled sobbing. In between, he managed to tell me that Asghar had been strangled with a rope and then stabbed countless times with a knife. They’d only managed to identify him by his ID.
I felt gut-punched and disoriented. All I could do was tell him to wait for me. Then I hung up and quickly hailed a motorcycle cab to the medical examiner’s office on Behesht Street where the poor man had been called to claim what remained of the body.
Cold wind hit my face on the back of the motorbike. Again I had a dozen thoughts racing in my brain. Yesterday I had shaken hands with the probable killer of Asghar, and today I was about to go meet Asghar’s father. What could I possibly tell the old man? If I said anything at all—which I didn’t intend to—would he not ask me what had kept me from telling him and the police this news until now? Would they understand a reporter’s need to pursue a story to its last detail and get it right?
Asghar was dead. That was now the indisputable fact. What would telling anyone about Abi the Lisp accomplish at this point? Would it bring Asghar back? No. What it would accomplish was, arguably, another round of revenge. This time on me. And maybe not just me, but also Hassan, who was well known now by the thugs who frequented the Chaman teahouse. I thought about my mother and sister and father again, and even my fast-disappearing girlfriend. I pictured my own funeral—if there was even to be a funeral and I didn’t just end up buried somewhere down there in the Rey District.
And then I tapped the biker-cabbie on his shoulder.
“We’re not there yet, boss.”
“I know. I’ll get off here.”
“The fare remains the same.”
I gave him twice that and started walking in the opposite direction. The phone rang again. It was Asghar’s dad.
I didn’t answer it. I had other work waiting for me at the crime pages of the newspaper.
A WOMAN’S GEOGRAPHY IS SACRED
BY LILY FARHADPOUR
University of Tehran
The shock of the blast is so loud that I find myself thrown to the foot of the bed. My first thought: tomorrow is the anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq; maybe someone is playing a terrible joke on us. Ali is sitting bolt-upright in the middle of the bed, staring down at me and looking like he’s just been walloped over the head.
I can barely bring words out: “What happened? Are they here? Have the Americans finally come for us?”
We stare at each other for a second longer and then both run to the window. All the car alarms in the neighborhood are barking together, a deafening ruckus. The building across the street does not have a single window that isn’t smashed to pieces. Still, the sky looks impossibly lovely on this early morning in mid-March. It hints of freshness and spring, of the Persian New Year and hopefulness. But then my eyes naturally follow the length of our blood-spattered window where a human finger presses against the glass like an exclamation point. As Ali opens the window to reach for it, I hear the sound of a woman screaming above the din of the car alarms. Ali has the bloody finger in his hand now and examines it curiously while I gag all the way to the bathroom.
By the time I come back he’s already dressed and heading outside. I have no idea what he’s done with the finger.
I call out to him, “Wait for me!”
“Bring your voice recorder,” he yells back, and hurries out.
He’s already grabbed his camera, naturally. Because this is how it is: to be a reporter means to have no life at all. Worse still is when your husband is the senior reporter for the crime pages while you work the city desk. It’s then that your life turns into one never-ending bout of chasing accidents and robberies and murders and having to meet deadlines.
But there’s another point of view to all this, one that Emily, my close friend, confidante, and supervisor at the city desk, reminded me of the other day: “Stop complaining! You and Ali have a good thing going. Have you already forgotten the crappy no-life you had with your last husband?”
Maybe Emily is right. Though maybe not 100 percent right. Truth is, I still don’t know if I was the one who ran away from my ex’s horrible moods, or if it was he who left me because of the way I make my living. I mean, what kind of a life is this? We spent most of yesterday in front of Evin Prison. A woman had murdered her husband and was set to be executed. Ali was there too; he was there because we still don’t know if reporting on executions should go to the city desk or the crime pages. Emily had already written an article about the efforts to try to commute the woman’s death sentence. So in the end we decided Ali would write about her execution while we’d cover the public effort to keep her from being hung.
This is our life.
As for Shahla, the condemned woman, she was hung anyway. No stay of execution.
Which means both Ali and I got our reports in for the day. We earned our keep.
Back on our street, broken glass carpets the block. The ambulance was unbelievably fast getting here, and they’ve already managed to cover what appears to be half of a body in a white sheet. A white sheet soaked in blood. The air is heavy with the scent of smoke and burn. The police have the area perfectly cordoned off. This is what you get for living so close to Tehran University: efficiency from the authorities. They are so afraid of student demonstrations in this area of the city that they’ll be at your doorstep in a flash if anything happens, let alone a blast of this size.
The police won’t let Ali take pictures. As soon as he sees me, he comes over, grabs the voice recorder out of my hand, and pushes for an interview with the cop who appears to be in charge. I try listening, but Orzala’s screams are deafening. Orzala is the wife of the Afghan super from the building across from us. And then there’s Aqdas khanum, who is trying her hardest to find out what Ali and the policeman are talking about. Aqdas khanum is the neighborhood busybody. You can always find her behind her kitchen window surveying the street. I’m still in a daze and wondering at the doggedness of this woman who looks as animated as I’ve ever seen her. Then I turn around and see Abbas agha, our street sweeper, casually brushing bits of burnt flesh onto his
dustpan and dumping the contents under the white sheet. This does it. I start to gag again. I hear someone calling out Ali’s name and telling him I’m about to pass out.
When I open my eyes in Ali’s arms, he says quietly, “Nasir is dead. He was carrying a bunch of fireworks for Chaharshanbe Suri when the whole thing blew up in his face.”
The ambulance finally leaves. The car alarms have quieted down. But the blood on the asphalt is still there. And Orzala, Nasir’s young wife, stands in the middle of the street and weeps uncontrollably. Next to her, her frightened daughter Khorshid pulls on her mother’s chador and screams.
Poor Nasir! Only yesterday I bought fireworks from him to take to my nephews and nieces at my mom’s house. The Afghan had been the super of the ten-story building across the street for only a few months. Once in a while I’d pay him to clean the stairways in our little building too. He was small and quick and spoke with a delicious Kabul accent that stayed in your ear long after he’d stopped talking.
I still cannot wrap my mind around the fact that Nasir is dead. I’d been in the middle of writing a feature article on Iranian women who marry Afghan men when Nasir and Orzala moved into that building. In a way, they were perfect subjects for my piece, because although Orzala was born in Herat in Afghanistan, her family had escaped the civil war there and she pretty much grew up in Tehran. She doesn’t have an Afghani accent at all and Nasir happened to be her cousin. It was an arranged marriage which allowed Nasir to move to Tehran from Kabul, then with Orzala’s father’s help he got the job in the building. It was really a dream job for Nasir. And the only person in the neighborhood who gave them trouble was the racist Aqdas khanum, who is convinced all Afghans are thieves and cutthroats. One time a few months back, I saw her slapping Nasir and Orzala’s little girl. I went up to her and told her if she ever put a hand on that child again she’d have to deal with me. Ever since then, she hasn’t said one word to me. But today she’s on a roll. I can even hear her telling the policeman how nothing good ever comes of Afghans.
Ali sits me down on the curb. “If you’re feeling better, I’ll go back and talk to that cop for a bit longer.”
I nod, then get up and head over to Khorshid, Orzala’s daughter. Several of the other women from the neighborhood join me. Slowly the little girl’s crying stops. We take turns caressing her until her grandmother, Orzala’s mother, shows up. Ali comes over. He has that look that seems to say he’s already completed a full day’s work. I have a thousand questions to ask him, but he pulls on my hand. “Let’s go. We need to be at the paper.”
* * *
The whole way to work I’m in a daze. Nasir blown up, just like that! Gone. What can you possibly say about something like that? As soon as we get to the paper, Emily rushes over and hands me Shahla’s file so I can write more about her execution yesterday. She seems so distraught over yet another hanging that I can’t even bring myself to tell her about what happened this morning on our own street.
“You didn’t sleep last night, did you?” I ask her.
“It’s about losing, you know? It’s about the taste of this kind of defeat. I mean, the poor girl was hopeful we could somehow save her. I talked to her husband’s brother and got him to finally relent. But that mother-in-law, that witch, when it was time for the hanging, she asked to pull the seat from under Shahla’s feet herself. Of course they let her. It was her right. Her fucking right by law. She was hell-bent on an eye for an eye, and she got exactly what she wanted.”
“We could write about that. What do you think? We could write how she insisted on qesas to the very end.”
“And have the authorities come hassle us? Like I said, qesas is law. She had the right to pull that chair. They don’t give a damn why Shahla killed her husband, or if it was an accident; they just care that she killed him.”
“The poor girl didn’t want to live in a village.”
“Exactly. So she kills the husband. It was wanting to be back in Tehran that made her do it.”
I shake my head. “Wanting to stay in this monster of a city is that important for women, isn’t it?”
“You and I take this place for granted. But a girl like that—she gets to be herself here. She can go to school, work, make money, go to the park, to the movies. She can stop wearing a stupid chador. So what’s she supposed to do? Remain in the village with that mother-in-law while her husband stays in the city and pretends to work? No. She had a right to want to be in Tehran. And I guess she was willing to do a lot for it, including murder.”
“I can’t write about all this, can I?”
“Of course not. They’ll send their thugs in and close down the paper. Even this useless anti–capital punishment campaign we have going is getting us in trouble. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of calls and e-mails I get sometimes.”
We both grow quiet for a minute and I have a feeling we’re thinking about the same thing: a woman kills so she can stay in the city, so she can be free. Call it murder for freedom, if you will. Murder for a place of your own. I could have a field day with an article like that, if my hands were free to write it.
Finally I walk over to my own desk, put the headphones over my ears, and begin listening to Shahla’s voice from the interview telling Emily why she killed her husband:
It’s true. I’d promised I’d either kill myself or I’d kill him. But I just wanted to scare him. Because he wouldn’t listen to me. I was born and raised in Tehran. How could I go live in a village? And next to that awful woman, his mother. My husband was a laborer, construction worker. Said he couldn’t afford the rents here. So he took me and my daughter back to his village and left us there. He pretended he was sleeping at the building sites in Tehran. But he was lying. He had met some woman who had money and an old, dying husband. Mohsen drove her around. You know the rest. I’m certain it’s that woman who’s making sure I’ll hang. She’s the one spending the money on this.
Nowhere in Shahla’s file is there a mention of this other woman. I listen on:
After a while he would barely ever come visit us. The last time he came, we had a big fight. I told him I wanted to see where he was working. He said I couldn’t. I said he’d be sorry. Either I’d kill myself or him. Like I said, I wanted to scare him. I thought if I put some rat poison in his food he’d just get sick and that woman would forget about him. I swear I didn’t know rat poison could kill you.
The headphones are still on my ears and I’m typing away, but I can feel commotion in the newsroom. Emily puts a hand on my shoulder and with her other hand slips a note under a stack of papers on my desk.
I take the headphones off.
She seems frightened. “Keep this address. It’s the case of that under-eighteen kid they plan to hang. Remember? I’m supposed to be at the victim’s family’s house tonight. Maybe we can get them to pardon the boy. But you’ll have to go instead of me if . . .”
I’m staring at Emily in disbelief, not quite understanding all that she’s saying. Somebody runs into the newsroom and shouts, “The Security Police are downstairs. They’re coming up!”
The newsroom doors swing open. There’s more than half a dozen of them, uniformed and plainclothes. Behind them staggers the editor in chief of the paper, looking stunned. The security men are polite. They call Emily’s name and several others who work the politics desk.
Emily casually lets her cell phone drop into my lap. “There’s a lot of names in there. Hide it.” Then she starts to slowly walk toward the man who has called her name.
When they’re all gone, there’s a moment when the newsroom is in freeze-frame. Then everybody starts talking at once. The editor in chief tries to calm us down. “It’s not like they haven’t done this before,” he keeps repeating. He’s right. It’s really more like mowing the lawn for them—just haul a few journalists in every few months to make sure they don’t get cheeky. Though it’s usually the politics desk people that get thrown in jail.
I examine the piece of paper Emily has lef
t me. The address is near Vanak Circle. Eight p.m.
I let Ali know about it.
He doesn’t look worried, but asks, “You really want to go there?”
“I think so.”
“It’s not safe. You do realize they arrested Emily for this very reason, her activism against the death penalty.”
“I know it.”
“All right then,” he sighs. “Let’s go home. I want you to get an interview out of Orzala. Afterward, I’ll take you myself to the address Emily left you.”
This is what I like about Ali, his talent for staying calm and carrying on. Our closest friend just got arrested in front of us and we’re going home to get an interview out of Nasir’s wife.
He drops me off on our street before driving over to the police station to see if the cops will reveal anything new. When Orzala lets me in, I notice that more than seeming shocked, she appears restless and ill. She holds her little girl in her arms. Her mother is there too. Except for the small New Year’s spread on the mantelpiece and the little goldfish beside it, the house looks exactly like a few months ago when I’d come to interview her for my article. It’s your typical single room belonging to a building’s super, with the kitchen and fridge on one side and the rolled-up bedding on the other. The satellite TV is on. Next to it is an open closet, nearly empty save for a new set of child’s clothes and an unworn red manteau on a coat hanger.
I comment on their New Year’s clothes and wish them a good year.
It’s the most inappropriate thing I could have said under the circumstances, of course, and I curse myself for it. In return, Orzala’s eyes begin to water and she lets out a flood of tears and words: “Just this morning I had a fight with Nasir over the clothes. Yesterday he gave me money to buy something for myself and for Khorshid. Then he came home really late. He’d been out trying to sell all those fireworks for Chaharshanbe Suri. I told him he couldn’t bring fireworks into the house. He said he just brought a few for Khorshid. He was lying. I had no idea he was hiding a whole pile of them in the storage room too. I showed him what I’d bought and immediately he started yelling at me. He said we were going back to Afghanistan soon. Did I think a woman could wear a red manteau over there? He ordered me to go return it.”
