by Salar Abdoh
I rush back to Jesus: “Darling, I did tell you it’s just a fight between me and that sick bastard. Yes? I’m sorry you had to get pulled into it. I truly am. But the day I saw him looking funny at his own children when they were taking their daily showers, I knew I’d had enough. And the luck of the draw fell on you. I’ll be grateful to you till the end of time. And by the way, don’t worry about my getting caught. Won’t happen. I’ve thought of everything. When we’re done here, I’ll put my jogging suit on, I’ll change out of Naser’s boots, I’ll throw away the Porsche’s spare keys in the garbage bag, and I’ll stick the bag in the backpack.
“Then out the back and away from here. From the Sadr overpass to the park in Ekhtiyarieh, it’s only a half-hour jog. I’ll run around the park like always and make sure the guard there sees me. I’ll have to dump the pack beforehand, and don’t you worry, there’s plenty of places for that between here and the park. Some scavenger will have happy hunting; he’ll throw away the garbage bag and be on his merry way with the pack in no time. This leaves the most delicate part of our morning. I’ll go back to my parents’ home and they’ll think I’ve returned from my usual morning jog. The kids will still be sleeping. And I’ll start calling Naser. He won’t answer. Like I told you earlier, he went straight from the airport to one of his friend’s homes for an all-nighter buggering little boys. I know, you’re thinking this leaves a few loose ends. But I’m here to tell you otherwise. Say your pals at that paper stand identify you. All they saw was a black Porsche—and everybody knows Dr. Zarafshan doesn’t lend his Porsche to anybody, especially his wife. What? How did I drive the car out today without being seen by the neighbors? Good question. I drove it out at five in the morning yesterday when everyone was still asleep. By seven I had left it at a busy garage on Jomhuri near the Friday bazaar. There’s so much coming and going around there nobody has time to pay attention to you. So I left the car and took a cab back home. I know, I know: there are cameras all over the city. I can’t help that. Some things you just have to leave to luck. Luck and careful planning. In any case, no camera is going to get past the Porsche’s tinted windows, except when you and I were stuck in traffic in Pasdaran and you were collecting phone numbers from the ladies. And that’s okay. It wouldn’t have been right to keep you from collecting business, would it? Besides, I figure with all the evidence it’ll be such an open-and-shut case that they won’t ever get to thinking about cameras.
“Does all this satisfy your unquenchable curiosity? What? Still no? Listen, you really don’t have to be worried about Naser’s friends; I know these men. They’ll have been too wasted by the time he joined them to wonder if he came in his own car or a cab. These guys are all doctors and their sick schedules are in sync. As for my parents, they’ll just be waking up by the time I get home. Once the kids are up too, they’ll jump into my lap and I’ll make them cereal and toast and we’ll all sit together in front of the TV watching weekend cartoons. What do you think? Are we in the clear now?”
I take off the gloves and my nightie and throw them in the pack too. Now I’m looking pretty outlandish, standing here naked except for the pair of black gloves I’d kept under the surgical gloves, plus Naser’s three-sizes-too-big black boots. I drop down on the couch and suck on my gin bottle. Is this what ecstasy feels like?
All I can do is sit staring at my gutted Jesus for a few minutes more.
“You know what, my love? The best part of it, the absolute most gorgeous moment, is when Naser opens the door and sees all the blood and body parts on his floors. I can just picture it. His mouth hanging open, his knees giving out. By then I will have begun my strategic phone calls to nosy Mrs. Ebtehaj next door. I’ll tell her that I can’t find Naser and I’m worried. Mrs. Ebtehaj will hurry to our door. It’ll be eleven o’clock by then and Naser will be home. Say what? You’re asking me how I can be so sure Naser will get home by then? Because he’s the famous Dr. Zarafshan. His entire existence is by the book. Even when he sticks a bottle up a little kid’s ass, he does it with care. That’s right, I have the video on that one too. So no matter what kind of filthy exploit he’s been up to on Thursday night, he has to be home by eleven on Friday morning for the rest of the weekend. He needs his coffee, brewed by himself, and he needs to make sure the house is spick-and-span for the week to come. Now just imagine Mrs. Ebtehaj behind that door ringing our bell. Either Naser is so in shock that he automatically opens the door, or he’s desperately trying to get rid of every trace of you. Either way, he’s finished. Mrs. Ebtehaj is not one to give up. She’ll call the fire station, she’ll call the police, she’ll have the whole neighborhood behind that door wondering what’s happened to my husband. How sweet it’s going to be! Naser’s and his friends’ fingerprints all over this place from last week’s smut. One morning, when he was in a stupor from the night before, I made sure I got his prints all over the videos too. But today all Dr. Naser Zarafshan will be thinking about when the police bust open the door is that he needs to clean the house, clean his maman joon’s candelabra and his blood-smeared Marilyn Monroe.
“Sweetness, you’re getting on my nerves now with all your questions. Of course no one is going to believe his friends when and if they testify that he was with them all night. Who’s going to believe a bunch of pedophiles whose nasty work is all over those videos, videos that Dr. Zarafshan took for his own sick pleasure? Naser’s fellow sickos will be lucky if they’re not dragged into court themselves. At most they’ll say that they were too drunk to notice if Naser left in the middle of their party. Their lawyers and the hospital’s lawyers will spend any amount of money to keep things under the radar. So who is to doubt Naser could have picked you, his own little private marble Jesus, on his way home? Or picked you up earlier and left you here, so he could come back and properly butcher you afterward. What’s that, you say? Why would Dr. Zarafshan even do this? Oh, don’t be so naive, my love; by now everyone will know the famous doctor is a psycho. Even his own colleagues will testify to that, if they testify to anything. They’re all major stockholders in the same hospital. Their lawyers might even call me in and promise to turn over all of Naser’s stocks to me, no questions asked, as long as I don’t open my mouth. That way the hospital’s name will never be mentioned in Naser’s trial. They’ll pay everybody off, including the judge. And all I have to do is look innocent and sad and weep and visit my husband regularly. I’ll tell him I’m going to get him a top-notch lawyer. He’ll swear it wasn’t him who did it and I’ll say he was probably so out of it that he doesn’t remember anymore. He’ll cry and I’ll cry. I’ll promise him I’ll do anything to get them to only give him life without parole and not execute him. I’ll get him the best toothbrush money can buy so he can clean every little nook and cranny of his cell. If they allow it, I’ll bring him every kind of cleaning agent he asks for. I can just see him, on his hands and knees, scrubbing and scouring every inch of the prison to the end of his days. The great, very, very great Dr. Naser Zarafshan. Indeed, I have to do my best to commute his sentence to only life without parole. I have to spend some serious money on that and get him the best lawyer in Tehran. It’s the least I can do for my dear old husband whose Porsche I’ll be driving back and forth on my weekly visits to jail.”
IN THE FLOPHOUSE
BY FARHAAD HEIDARI GOORAN
Gomrok
I could hear the woman’s voice coming from the bottom of the deep pit right in the middle of that traffic circle. A sentry stood over the hole. Some soldier boy with the initials M.R. written on his uniform.
“Can’t you just throw her a rope and let her climb out?”
He glared at me. “My job’s to guard. Nothing else.”
His accent said it all. A Kurd from Kermanshah. Hometown kid. I put my own accent in high gear and told him to be a good sport and listen to the advice of a guy from back home.
He glared at me again and barked, “Speak proper Persian and I’ll listen to you.”
“All right then. Don’t yo
u feel anything for her? Look at this hole. She could be hurt. She could be pregnant.”
Soldier boy sneered, “Sure, must have been the cat made her pregnant.”
I persisted, “But what’s she done wrong? Why keep her in there?”
Now soldier boy stepped up and eyeballed me hard. “The Public Decency Patrol and the guys from the Office of Combat Against Corrupt and Immoral Behavior will be around soon. They’ll know what to do with the likes of her. Besides, what’s it to you? What do you do for a living? Huh?”
“I work in textiles and fabrics. I’m an engineer.”
He gave me a once-over and zeroed in on my beat-up shoes. “The last thing you look like to me is an engineer.”
I might have stood up to him a little more, but he was armed and I saw that he had his trigger finger ready. I didn’t like how he was scowling at me either. Suddenly I felt fearful and pulled back from him. There were trees in the middle of the traffic circle. Black trees thick with soot. I leaned against one that had a single crow perched on its branch. The bird kept flapping its wings but didn’t make a sound. That woman, though, the one in the pit—she was definitely making a sound. Bawling, I suppose.
I’d only arrived in town that morning at the Azadi terminal. Exhausted and thirsty, I’d gotten the Help Wanted ads right away and went to work. No time for stopping to eat or drink. I’d pop into one office after another and fill their job application forms. Sure, we’ll get back to you. That was mostly what I heard from one faceless human resources manager after another.
By sunset I was half dead and my stomach was sour and hurting from too much lemonade, which was the only thing I’d had all day. It was as if I could see that accursed drink making its way through my intestines. But I still had to get myself to a Coffee Net run by an old college friend of mine. There was one company that had asked for an e-mail attachment of my résumé. They were interested in designs of civilian and military clothes and they also manufactured shrouds for corpses. Your typical semigovernmental company with a hand in everything. I’d found them in a narrow old labyrinth of a building decorated with too many colored lamps. I suppose the lamps were there for Eid e Ghadeer celebrations. And, of course, there was another bearded human resources guy there with a stuffy white shirt and dark glasses sitting behind the desk telling me what I expected to hear: “First you have to give a design sample. Management will take a look at it. Then we might give you a call for an interview.”
Their ad had said something about designing a variety of dress gear for wholesalers, and it turned out they weren’t exactly particular about what designs you gave them. It was an orgy of designs, really: design for waterproof fabrics, design for black chadors, design for towels, design for sofa fabrics, design for velvet and corduroy . . . the list went on and on.
Now then, I happened to have a few designs just for a day like this and I’d stuffed them all in a plastic carry-on. Up until this particular company, the only things I’d been offered were a couple of nowhere jobs by those human resources automatons—job number one, overseeing a city garbage recycling program; job number two, manager of a private funeral home. I wasn’t interested. I hadn’t gone to school all these years for things of that sort. And I didn’t care if I had to walk around until I fell into a manhole like that poor woman.
Or else I could just return to the abandoned village of my father. But no, I was determined to make it right here in Tehran. I just had to keep walking this leviathan of a city until evening came, and then I’d find myself one of those decrepit old guesthouses near the Zakaria Razi Circle and rest for a bit.
Well, old Zakaria was right there, all right. As a statue. The great Persian Zakaria Razi, of the inventor-of-alcohol fame. Mr. Alcohol! And in his honor, they’d laid out empty bottles of booze around the statue itself. Ninety-nine percent pure medicinal and industrial alcohol in yellow and white bottles. To the south of the circle were a string of bicycle shops, and if you followed on down that road you’d eventually get to the main rail terminal. To the north were several secondhand shoe sellers on South Karegar Avenue. These guys had every kind of footwear you could think of, from half-rotted boots of dead soldiers to beaten-up safety boots for factory work. I managed to get me a pair of old boots with a nice recent shine on them. The secondhand dealer told me, “They may have been to war and back, those boots. But I tell you, they’re made for walking in Tehran.”
I didn’t disagree.
Now clad in my “new” boots, I caught a motorcycle cab off Razi Circle to Komeyl Bridge where my old schoolmate’s Coffee Net was supposed to be. The motorcab guy was dozing on his bike even as we rode. Poor junkie was a bundle of sniffles and nose drip and was jonesing hard. When I wrapped my hand around his puny waist it was like holding on to a skeleton. But he still got us there in one piece and soon I was standing in front of the Coffee Net.
At first my old friend pretended he didn’t believe it was me. “I would have thought you’d be six feet under by now.”
The man had always been a bit of a downer, to put it mildly. And I didn’t bother asking him what kind of a greeting this was after so long. I just needed one of those computer screens. He didn’t even bother asking me what I was doing there and how I’d managed to get his address.
Now he started nagging about times not being so good. “We don’t have enough customers,” he announced. “Sooner or later the bank’s going to take this place over and throw yours truly in jail.” He poured us some piss-weak tea from a flask. “So tell me, are you one of these Facebook fanatics now too, or are you still playing around with that damn diary notebook of yours?”
“I still have my diary. But I also got this blog going where I write down everything that comes to my head.”
“Like what?”
“Like writing about my old Kurdish village. Remember, I took you there one time? Remember when I showed you one of our Yarsan graveyards, you asked why they had the same words written on all the gravestones?”
“What words were those?”
“The dead always return.”
“Quit that talk!” he said with sudden worry on his face. “Or one of these days they’ll put a bullet in your head too, and in the heads of all your Kurds—and your Yarsan followers. Do you think I’m kidding? Just the other night they found the body of a girl near our house. Rape. But they left some dumb letter on her to make it seem like she killed herself. You think anyone is going to bother with the truth? You think anyone cares if she killed herself or someone killed her? Allah a’lam, only God knows, my friend. Only God!”
I’ll admit, he was actually one of those friends you’ll miss once in a while. But we lived hundreds of miles apart and didn’t much see eye to eye on anything. Besides, his chronic pessimism really got under my skin after a bit. He just never stopped braying about how hopeless everything was.
Now he said, “So, did you ever take care of your military service? Did the powers that be manage to finally pull you under their holy flag?”
“No, I still haven’t done my service.”
“You want my advice: go serve your time and come back before the next war starts.”
“But look at me, I’ve already reached my midlife crisis. How can I go become a soldier at this point?”
“Then you have to keep dreaming about a passport, or even a simple driver’s license, until the day you die. You know they won’t give you either until you put in your time.” He peered at my ancient but shiny boots and added, “Looks like you’ll be searching for a job till you drop dead too.”
* * *
As soon as I sat down behind one of those shabby computers at the Coffee Net, words started to pour. Hole in the ground . . . woman . . . Soldier M.R. I was annoyed at myself for not having had the balls to stick my head in the hole to at least see what the woman’s face looked like. I was dedicated to this blog and wanted it to be as true to life as possible. I wanted to describe that woman, but instead had to content myself with a description of her groans. Then
I described soldier boy. His dark skin, his hawkish nose. Soldier M.R. You could see he’d written the letters himself with a black magic marker on the pocket of his green uniform.
I spent a good two pages describing the Public Decency squads roaming the streets. I was scared of them. Scared shitless, to be honest. What if I could be a real writer and describe these kinds of feelings? What if I didn’t have to limit myself to just a notebook of diaries?
I wrote in the blog:
The woman squashed a fourth cockroach and threw it out the window. The smog blanketed the city from here all the way to the Elburz Mountains. “What a city!” she muttered to herself. “The south side scorches the earth, the north side snuffs out the sky.”
Now she went and stood in front of the mirror and got her lipstick out. Next she put on some rouge and fixed her ponytail. Then, before she knew it, she’d put on a pair of high heels, a bright wrinkled headscarf, and a low-cut manteau and was heading outside. The door to the flophouse smelled of urine. She walked past Razi’s statue and went and stood on the other side of the traffic circle. Lights flickered every which way and the monstrous sound of the garbage truck deafened her ears. She watched the men collecting the garbage. “Poor guys!”
A rundown white Paykan stopped at her feet. The guy stuck his head out the window and spoke through the cigarette in his mouth. “Where to at this time of night, missy?”
“Nowhere.”
