Tehran Noir

by Salar Abdoh

  The cigarette fell from the man’s mouth. “If you want a better-model car to pick you up, best move uptown,” the man sneered. “I’ll take you uptown myself and drop you off in a profitable corner if you like.”

  “Mind your own business. I’ve come to get some fresh air, all right?” She had to laugh at her words—getting some fresh air next to all that garbage!

  The car rolled out and she could hear the man’s voice saying something about her ankles looking like marble.

  The sanitation department men showed her where the park was and a street cat seemed to want to lead her in that general direction too. It turned out to be a small park with some old spruce trees and a few sorry-looking pines. There were several metal benches around a small empty pool. The cat sprang into the pool and meowed.

  She spoke to it, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

  The cat continued to meow. She went and sat on one of the benches. Somewhere nearby a voice was saying, “You’ll get so high in a minute you’ll be crawling on the ground.” After a while the same voice added, “The Public Decency patrols be damned!”

  The cat had come closer to her and was waving its tail.

  She spoke to it again, “I asked are you a boy or a girl?”

  A different voice answered, “The cat’s a eunuch, miss.” He was a tall cop with a baton in hand. “What are you doing here this time of night?”

  “Sitting down.”

  “Your identity card?”

  “I left it at the desk in the guesthouse.”

  “Go back home. Now!”

  “Home? You mean the guesthouse?”

  “Whatever shithole you belong to, return there now. Don’t linger.”

  “But I came outside to get some air.”

  She was bleeding a lot today and could see the cop’s eyes following the trail of her blood trickling from her crotch down to her ankles and onto her high heels.

  She stood up and shuffled back in the same direction she’d come. The cat followed her each step of the way. “What? Looks like you’re as lonely as I am. How about you remain my guest tonight?” She picked up the hairy animal and planted a kiss on its nose before climbing up the stairs of the flophouse.

  After finishing with the blog, I sent out my résumé and left the Coffee Net without bothering to say goodbye. The street off of Komeyl Boulevard was mostly military. One side of it was housing for army personnel and the other was a sprawling barracks protected with a double row of barbed wire. On the walls, as far as the eye could see, they’d painted pictures of war martyrs. Martyrs and their words of wisdom before they went happily to their deaths.

  I kept on walking till I was back at Razi Circle. No sign of that soldier who had been guarding the hole. No sign of the woman and her moans and groans either.

  It was time. I ended up at an old flophouse nearby. You could tell the building went back a ways. It was not one of these cardboard-box affairs they built these days. Its brick facade and latticed windows definitely set it apart from all its surroundings. I got to chatting with the desk clerk, thinking he might give me a discount on the room. I told him about my job hunt and some of the ridiculous ads they’d put in the paper that day. I told him a story about Qazvin Gate, one of the original twelve city gates of old Tehran, and how in the last century they used to have a guy sitting at it all the time, writing up the funeral processions that passed through so they would be reported to the royal court.

  “Qazvin Gate was right around here,” he concurred. “Now it’s lost, like everything else. Probably hidden inside the belly of the central train station or somewhere like that.”

  He looked fifty but was younger. Good-natured and fat. Kind of guy you like right away. He was also baby-ass bald and kept scratching his head with all ten fingers. I think he could tell I was feeling low, because right away he added, “Don’t you worry about a thing here, friend. Our guesthouse is a safe place for everybody. They come here from all over the country. Soldiers. Officers. Laborers. Office workers. College students. And another thing, all our rooms have a study desk. Yes. I’ll take care of you. Count on it.”

  Out the window of the lobby my eyes fell on a pair of ravens. I asked, “Is there a chance a man could get a real drink around here?”

  “Don’t even think about booze in these parts. If they catch you, it’s seventy lashes of the whip. Then they’ll just throw you in the slammer with the drug addicts and alcoholics.” He pointed with his index finger. “Their detention center is right around the corner behind the railway station.”

  * * *

  It was stifling hot that night and the cockroaches wouldn’t leave me alone. From the room to my left I could hear the sound of someone working a sewing machine. Several times I thought to peep through the keyhole to see who it was. Though I already knew it was just another poor Afghan with a tall order of funeral shrouds he had to finish. The desk clerk, being helpful, had volunteered, “There’s an Afghani in one of the rooms next to yours. The guy sews night and day. If he makes too much noise with that sewing machine of his, let me know and I’ll shut his electricity off.”

  The lights to the room on the other side of me were already off. But I could hear heavy breathing in there. After a while I couldn’t take it anymore and went and looked through the keyhole. It was dark. Still, I could just barely make out a pair of bodies enmeshed in each other rolling around on the bed. Maybe I was dreaming this. No, I wasn’t. I’d simply fallen into the chasm of my own thoughts and there was no way out of it. I was picturing myself walking the streets of this endless city, newspaper in hand, looking for work that wasn’t there. I was a textiles designer and a man who was still dodging his military service after all these years. If only I’d finished those twenty-seven months of compulsory army duty and gotten them out of the way when I was younger! But it was wartime back then. And if they saw so much as a hint of fuzz over your lips, you were sent in for a quick boot camp and then off to the front lines.

  Even so, I really should have turned myself in the day they showed up at our farm. Didn’t matter how afraid I was. Hadn’t I seen enough corpses already? Every day they’d haul in more dead soldiers and bury them in our village. I thought of that soldier at the pit in Razi Circle; him too—they would have delivered his corpse during that decade of never-ending war.

  Now this black hole of what-ifs was driving me up the wall. This was just the first night here. How many more nights could I last like this? What was I supposed to do during daytime? How many more job ads should I answer? What if I returned empty-handed back to our village and faced the wandering ghosts of the dead in those deserted fields? My father used to always say, “Don’t go wandering, son. Nest the bird of your dreams in your own house. Even if it’s a house you don’t yet possess.” That was his refrain: “Seize the day. Don’t let time slip away.”

  But the only thing I had left was time, time to let everything slide by. Maybe I could go get a job in that other sweatshop I’d visited today. The one with the four Afghans in it. Three men, one woman. All of them in a trance with the work of spool and thread and needle, and those sewing machine pedals with the interminable din they made. Those Afghans too were working around the clock making corpse shrouds. For some reason seeing all that white cloth on special order for the dead had made me dizzy and I’d gagged. Which then inspired the sweatshop boss to try to revive me with a nasty concoction of lemonade.

  The guy had had an awful stutter. “You are an engineer. A d-designer. You know s-something about t-textiles and the rules of b-burial, I hope, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Look! M-Muslims need to be buried with v-various cloths. A l-long and a shirt. The long has to cover from b-belly button to the knee of the corpse. And it’s b-better from ch-chest to the feet that you—”

  I cut in, “But my proposed design does not go with—”

  He didn’t want to hear what I had to say and kept stuttering away, “Sh-shirt must cover whole body. Long enough to m-make a kn-knot down th
ere . . .”

  I was getting ready to gag again listening to him go on like that. And may God bless the ancestors of one of the Afghan tailors who caught a finger in a sewing machine just then and began screaming. The boss turned to the Afghan and I got out of there with quickness—far away from that moldy basement filled to the brim with reels upon reels of yarn and fabric for the dead.

  My bed! It stunk of industrial alcohol and there were drops of dried blood all over the sheets. The bird of your dreams, my father had said. If he could see me now. I started to imagine I was leaving the city from the old Qazvin Gate when my friend the Coffee Net owner suddenly showed up in my head: “Come with me.”

  “Where to?”

  “Office of the main cemetery at Behesht e Zahra.”

  I pictured him walking ahead of me a few steps, emptying some kind of liquor into his gullet like there was no tomorrow. “On a night like this, it wouldn’t do not to get shit-faced drunk. We need to forget the world, my friend.” He had turned and was staring at the pair of old soldier’s boots I’d just bought—the very boots that had gone to war but ended up in the Gomrok District today. We were standing now in front of an enormous building somewhere south of the city. “Listen, this is the place where they keep the fanciest machines for finding missing corpses. You know, the same ones they used during the war to find dead soldiers. Go look in their files; maybe you’ll find your own name there.”

  I imagined us entering the building and going up the escalators. There was a room full of ledgers and metal filing cabinets. The wind blew hard out the window.

  “That’s right, friend, all of our names are here. Me, you, everyone.”

  Enough daydreaming!

  I rolled off that stinking bed and splashed some cold water to my face in the bathroom. Surprisingly, there was actually an imported bar of soap on the sink. Made-to-order for a quick jerk-off. I threw the soap out the window. Then my eyes fell on a picture someone had taped to the bathroom mirror. It was Marion Crane in the movie Psycho. No doubt this was the doing of some penniless film school graduate who had come to the city looking for work and ended up here like me.

  The guy had wanted to be remembered.

  Out of boredom I killed a few more cockroaches with my sandal. There were train whistles from the near distance. My stomach hurt from all that gas trapped in my belly. Back in the bathroom the bidet had a screw loose and as soon as I turned it on, water hit the ceiling. It wouldn’t turn off, so I left it as best I could and returned to the room.

  I peered through that keyhole again.

  Soldier M.R. from down the road. There was a reddish light in there now and I could see him plainly on that bed. He was holding onto a woman’s body beneath him. The woman’s eyes were open.

  I don’t know how I fell asleep, but I did. And I was immediately back in my diary again. I was back to that woman. I seemed to have decided to name her “Sheen,” as in the letter Sh.

  Then I woke back up and glued myself to the keyhole once more. I was trembling. First there was Soldier M.R. Then there were others. Or at least I imagined there were others and they were pouring alcohol on the woman’s nude body. I was sure I saw everyone. Even the unmistakable hands of the desk clerk who at one point had begun to tie a corpse shroud on the belly button of the dead body. I thought I even saw the sweatshop manager: him of the stutter and the white shrouds. His words were still in my head—For a M-Muslim, you have to co-cover everything. Kn-knees. B-Breasts. Then there was my friend the Coffee Net owner—Listen, brother, in this insane city, who knows what’s real and what’s not. Who’s dead and who’s not. Where’s that thin line between life and death? You know, they’ve taken her corpse to the medical examiner’s office. They’ve confirmed it was rape. They’re still looking for the killer . . .

  I slept.

  In the morning I woke up to police sirens and ambulance alarms. I ran to the window. Several uniforms were leading Soldier M.R. and the desk clerk out of the building and throwing them in the back of a police car. Next they brought the woman’s corpse on a gurney and placed it in the ambulance. I was running a fever and my face was drenched in sweat. In a few minutes the uniforms would be searching the rest of the building and they’d start asking questions. They would knock on my door. They’d want fingerprints and signatures from everyone. Maybe they’d call me in as a witness. Whatever was going to happen, I must get rid of this notebook. That was the first thing I had to do, throw away the diary. I had to dump it somewhere far, far away. Somewhere behind the old Qazvin Gate where no one would think twice to look for it for a thousand and one wretched eons.

  A STONING BEFORE BREAKFAST

  BY AZARDOKHT BAHRAMI

  Salehabad

  Afterward, people would argue with me that it had been more than twenty years since they stoned anyone to death in Tehran. Sure, it still happened in the provinces now and then; they still stoned adulterers in places far from the capital, far from this cultured and sophisticated metropolis that we live in. You would read about a man or woman wrapped in a tall sack and placed in a hole dug in the ground. Then they’d cover their heads and invite the neighborhood to gather and stone them—smash them from a designated distance until they were good and dead. Yes, I know all about the laws of stoning. I have studied the subject. But I’m here to ask you two things: One, does it really matter if this particular stoning took place twenty years ago or last week? And does it really make a difference if it took place in the middle of Tehran or a hundred miles away?

  It doesn’t.

  They stoned my Elika.

  And they did it right here.

  And this is how it happened:

  A young man is shouting in the crowd: “Kill that piece of dirt!” But folks just stare at each other and then glance away. In the last half hour a good forty or so people have gathered to form a semicircle around her.

  One of the women asks out loud why they haven’t covered her face. She insists that this is the law. It’s as if she’s some kind of Minister of Stoning. Again she asks why they brought her here wearing a white shroud. Shouldn’t she be placed in the usual sackcloth? Shouldn’t her hands be inside the hole as well? Again, no one answers her questions. And after a while the woman retreats and walks away from there, mumbling under her breath and disappointed in this flawed carrying-out of a stoning so early in the morning.

  I see Elika’s lips moving. She’s talking to herself. Quietly. She must be exhausted. Maybe she’s still hoping, as I am, that Liza will arrive. Liza will. But it won’t change a thing.

  Now another stoning expert, a second woman, wonders why Elika’s hair is still wet. It shows through the white headdress they’ve put on her.

  An old woman in a black chador whispers next to me, “You know, before putting them in the hole they are supposed to wash them. I’m sure that’s the law. They must wash them with cedar powder and camphor.” Then she gestures to the woman who’s been wondering about Elika’s wet hair and adds in a mocking voice, “Well, they haven’t brought a hair dryer to blow-dry her hair, have they?”

  A young man picks up a couple pieces of rock and throws one of them at Elika. It doesn’t hit her. Immediately one of the two officers runs up to the man and says something in his ear. Then he points to haj agha and the young man nods and takes a step back and drops the other piece of stone and waits.

  Elika scans the crowd. I’m sure she’s looking for Liza. Liza had visited her a few months ago back in jail and sworn she’d find the girl. If she did, we don’t know about it. Because we haven’t seen Liza since then.

  Now a sharp voice from behind me asks what we are waiting for. “Let’s finish her already.”

  Another woman joins in, “May you fry in hell for making sinners out of our men.”

  An old woman adds, “May you fry twice in hell.”

  A couple of people laugh at this. But most say nothing.

  Her back must be in pain. Or maybe it’s itching like mad. She’d always be scratching herself when
ever we left the house together. She’d laugh and joke that it was all these Islamic clothes that she was allergic to. I wish I could go up to that hole and somehow scratch her back for her and take a look at her wounds. We would always take turns scratching each other while making howling noises like dogs. We’d usually do that on the big sofa. The same big sofa all four of us used for our customers. Kati didn’t like the job all that much. She’d say she wished the men would hurry up, fuck, and leave. But Elika said that wasn’t fair. Some of the men were truly attentive to us. We had to appreciate them. She’d insist that there were customers and then there were customers. In the mornings we’d meet at the infamous sofa and laugh at the stupid things the men had done the previous evening. The nervous types. The ones afraid of their wives. The ones who couldn’t keep it erect. The list was as long as the neighborhood.

  The court had judged that she should also be lashed a hundred times. I wish I knew when they did that. Does she still have the gashes on her back? I wish somebody would just pick up a couple of huge rocks and quickly finish her off.

  Sixty or seventy people are here now, all of them with one eye on haj agha and that man from the prosecutor’s office. But haj agha is in no hurry. Maybe he’s waiting for more people to show up. Maybe he wants the entire fourteen million people of Tehran to come here at the northernmost point of Khorsandi Street in the Western Salehabad District. When he first showed up in the morning he gave us a long speech. Something about the law and religion and keeping the foundations of the family strong. And so this devout crowd has gathered near the intersection of Tondguyan and Azadegan freeways to make the foundations of their families strong. Families who mostly make their living off the drug business and whose daughters disappear from their homes before they’re fourteen and, if they’re very lucky, end up selling themselves to high-rolling Arab sheikhs down south in the Persian Gulf.

  I wonder who those little kids are. They are too young to know what they’re here for. Maybe they’ve just come along for the show with their fathers. There are also several young men whom I’ve never seen before in these parts. It’s as if they’ve come for a party. They wear expensive jeans and spotless shoes. Haj agha’s special ass-kissers. They’ve picked up the largest stones they could find and are ready to go. I guess they weren’t here when haj agha gave another lecture about the lawful size of the stones. They’re not supposed to be bigger than a walnut. It’s these guys I count on. I’m hoping they’ll start and finish the job as fast as possible. Smaller stones will just prolong the torment.