by Salar Abdoh
* * *
Candace Vincent was in his office.
It had begun three months earlier. The beginning of the spring semester. She had come to the office one day asking for his help. “Professor, I want to soar. I want to write about my hood like it really is.” She wanted to keep it real, she insisted. Write about how it was to be a single black woman, just shy of thirty, raising two little boys in her public housing apartment in the projects across the river in the Bronx. Would he help her? Would he give her guidance once in a while?
It was odd that she’d come to him for this kind of mentoring. It wasn’t exactly a part of his job description. But all right, yes, he’d read her stuff. And they didn’t have to be just class assignments. He’d make corrections. Give suggestions. “I’m available to you, Candace.” But, really, it was more for himself that he was doing it. Helping this student was, he decided, the point where he’d start to make a new life for himself here, in America. You had to start somewhere, and why not with Candace Vincent? And so for three months he had been reading about the minutiae of her life—the drama of dropping her kids at school every morning, then the ordeal of waiting and waiting at a half-dozen government offices any given week for food stamps, benefit cards, housing, health insurance. A never-ending merry-go-round of hustle and bureaucracy that reminded him of how people lived back in Tehran. A world removed from his own but also familiar. And slowly, an unlikely distant camaraderie had blossomed out of this back and forth. One that was pure. It didn’t ask for much except to be at the other side of an e-mail exchange.
But now it was nearing the end of the school year and Candace was in his office again, worried that since she would no longer be his student, he’d forget her and not want to read what she had to write.
“Will you let me keep e-mailing you my work, professor?”
“Of course.”
She looked away and said, “My two boys’ pops is getting out of jail soon.”
“Is it a good thing or a bad thing that your man’s getting out?”
She shook her head. “He ain’t been my man for a long time. Just my babies’ father. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. We’ll see about that. But whatever happens, you can be sure I’ll write to you about it.”
He stood up and she came forward and gave him a big, warm, sisterly hug. She pulled back, looked at him, and said, “You are all right in my book, professor.”
He told her the feeling was mutual.
Then a half hour later Malek was waiting outside of the head of the English department’s office.
In his e-mail, the department head had written that it was urgent he see Malek before the faculty scattered for the summer. Now the man stuck his head out of the office, saw Malek sitting there, and made a motion for him to come in. He was one of those bouncy little administrators too full of jittery enthusiasm. Malek would often see him in the far-flung wings of the building checking to see if the plants in other departments had enough water. It had been exactly three years earlier that he’d received an e-mail from this guy on behalf of the college asking, out of the blue, if he’d be interested in joining their faculty as a resident journalist. It was to be a one-year trial, and if things worked out they might renew Malek’s contract from year to year. After five years, there would even be the possibility of a permanent position.
Even before Malek had sat down, the department head asked, “Do you think you might publish something next year?”
“I’m working on it.”
“What does that mean?” The man’s voice sounded hurt, like Malek had wronged him. He was a Texan with an unusually high voice. His disappointment needed focus and Malek’s failure to publish even one article about the Middle East in the two years he’d been there gave him an opportunity to pout a little. “I brought you here because I saw promise in the book you wrote. I fought to get you this residency.”
It hadn’t really been a book. More like a patchwork of reports from the sidelines of America’s wars, and Malek had come upon it mostly by chance. After Berkeley, it had taken him another seven years to complete that doctorate in Middle Eastern studies. Seven years of studying a school of Sufis, Muslim mystics, who had lived in Basra, in modern-day Iraq, a thousand years ago. Mystics who went on endlessly about how God’s light shone on everything and everyone. Not that that was a useless thing to study (somebody had to do it, Malek supposed), but the year was 2002 when he’d gotten that degree, America was already in Afghanistan and was getting ready to go into Iraq, and there weren’t exactly a whole lot of universities looking to hire someone to tell them about the Muslim mystics of a thousand years ago. So he’d packed up and returned home. Sina had already been living back in Tehran for some years and when Malek got there his old friend helped him pick up interpreter jobs until Malek was on his feet and had his own clients, journalists who came for their rounds from time to time, people like Clara Vikingstad. The years of graduate work had honed Malek’s Arabic too, so he had turned out to be that rare interpreter who could carry a Western reporter not just in Iran and Afghanistan, but also Iraq and other Arab countries. After a while he was an interpreter in high demand, his name in the address book of every foreign correspondent between Berlin and Los Angeles. This way he’d gotten to see his share of the interesting and slowly started writing little reports on the side and having them published in Asian newspapers and online. Before long, somebody somewhere had gotten wind of the material and offered to put them out in a collection. There had been a couple of fair reviews online. And then out of nowhere this Texan with the high nasally voice had written him an e-mail, asking if Malek was interested in joining their department to teach students how to do creative reportage. Malek’s take was: Why not? Living in Tehran and moving around constantly in that region was getting to be tiresome anyway. Eventually you just got bogged down in the details. Another suicide bombing. Another high-level assassination. Another missed unmanned drone missile that killed forty members of a family in the middle of a wedding. You became cynical and then you became self-conscious of your own cynicism and posed for it. It was a bad cycle. Bad enough that Malek had already started toying with the ever-present opium between Tehran and Kabul.
Yes, he would go back to America and teach creative reportage, whatever that was. The Texan’s offer was a godsend, a lifeline. And considering that including his undergraduate years Malek had studied more than a decade about those Muslim mystics, maybe it was some sweet poetic justice that he was finally being offered an academic job. He’d earned it.
“I’m working on something now,” he now said to the department head. It was an outright lie. He had nothing. He had put that book together because he happened to be in the middle of those wars and simply recorded what he saw. He wasn’t a Clara Vikingstad or any of the others he’d done interpreting for. He wasn’t a pro. He had written because he was a witness. There was a difference.
The man took several pills of varying colors from a pillbox on his table and downed them all at once as if they were candy. He then took a swig from his coffee and eyed Malek. “There’s another matter.” Malek waited for him to spit it out. “We’re hiring someone else on the same lecture-line as you. He’s coming in September.”
So that was the real reason he had been called in here today. The department head had wanted to break the news to him that they were hiring someone else to compete for the permanent teaching position.
He didn’t really know what to say to the man. In a way, it was generous of him to let Malek know this. This was a “heads-up” kind of meeting. You better write something new about that Middle East of yours, Professor Malek. Or you’re history. “I’d like to meet this person,” Malek said, just to have said something. “My new colleague.”
The department head suddenly brightened. Maybe it was the pills working quickly. “I tell you what.” He fished in his desk and brought out a book. Winter in Babylon. Author, James McGreivy. “It’s a fantastic book. This is what your new colleague wrote. It cov
ers some of the same things your book does. Well, not really. The man’s a former Marine captain. Iraq, Afghanistan, all that. It’s a good book. It might inspire you. You should read it.”
“I already did.”
The department head looked stung, as if the notion that Malek would actually read other books was beyond him. He said, “Well, what did you think of it?”
“It’s brilliant.”
“How so?”
“It has truth.” Then to really rub it in, Malek added, “I’ve even used parts of it to teach my own classes.”
By the time Malek left that office, the English department had taken on the festive air of end-of-year celebrations. There were wine bottles lined up and young, underpaid graduate-student teachers were drifting in to eat from the generous spread laid out on the long table. Malek stood there for a moment watching. The first year, not sure if his contract was just going to be temporary, he had mostly stayed a stranger to the place, keeping a low profile and sticking to the classes he had to teach. The full professors, he knew mostly through what they taught, the Shakespearean, the Americanist, the Victorian, and so on. But this past year—maybe because the department head was putting pressure on him—he’d begun to pay more attention. He came to the faculty meetings, sat in the back, and listened. There were factions, he’d noticed. They fought. Mostly over nothing. It was an arrangement of low-key corruption where the department head and his cronies had the run of the place. They gave each other promotions and assigned themselves light teaching loads and generally had a ball with the little fiefdom they had going. As soon as Malek understood this scheme, he accepted it. The department head may have been just slightly dishonest, but at least he wasn’t killing people. In Baghdad, Malek had watched a whole neighborhood go up in flames over who’d get to inherit the electric generator the Americans had left behind by mistake. One was a world of flesh and blood, the other of text and ink and boredom and irrelevance.
He wondered how Captain James McGreivy of the United States Marines would fare here next fall. The fellow really had written a good book about the war. But what had possessed him to give up all that adrenaline and want to come to a place like this just to teach? How would he be able to stand it?
The thought made Malek revisit something that had happened the previous semester. There had been a Latino kid in one of his classes, Ezequiel. “Call me Easy,” he’d told Malek. Easy had done all right in class for the first few weeks. Always polite, always on time and handing in lukewarm pieces he’d written about not much of anything. Then one day, out of nowhere, he’d written of how he’d done a part of his New York State National Guard tour of duty out of Base Speicher near Tikrit in Iraq:
Do you know, professor, what a fifty-caliber machine gun can do to a family of four Iraqis who didn’t see your hand signal to turn their car around? I looked you up the other day online, man. I saw some of the stuff you wrote. YOU KNOW how it was over there. But you stand here and smile at these dumbasses in your class like the world is all fine and dandy and we should all go to the mall in New Jersey and buy Christmas gifts. You think that’s honest? You and your kind, you ain’t shit, professor. This whole place ain’t shit. This country ain’t shit.
The kid had been all of twenty-five years old, and he had perfect spelling, and he’d never come back to Malek’s class after writing him that note. Malek had waited for his return, unwilling to drop him from the class roster until the very end. And for the rest of those weeks he’d walked these hallways expecting some sort of bad news about the kid and vaguely blaming himself for it.
You and your kind, you ain’t shit, professor.
The following semester he had taken Candace Vincent under his wing—Candace, who knew nothing of the war but could sometimes write like an angel.
End of Excerpt
___________________
More about Tehran at Twilight
Included in Library Journal's Books That Buzzed at BEA Roundup, the first word on titles and trends from Barbara Hoffert, Editor.
Included in Publishers Weekly's Fall Preview (Literary Fiction)
"Abdoh deftly captures the uneasy atmosphere of 2008 Tehran, swirling with betrayal and corruption." —Library Journal, Books for the Masses/Editors’ Picks BEA 2014
"Tehran at Twilight is a remarkable meditation on violence, and on all the ways one bears witness to pain . . . At the center lies the story of two friends whose paths have diverged, and of love restored between a mother and a son. A smart, eloquent novel." —Dalia Sofer, author of The Septembers of Shiraz
"Connecting the dots of the shadow lives of Iranian, American, and Iranian American double and triple agents, and their double and triple stories in Iran and Manhattan, Baghdad and Berkeley, Abdoh also tells a tale of mothers and sons, using espionage for infrared insight into concealed identities. The startling truth embedded in this tight novel: We Are All Iranians." —Brad Gooch, author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara
"Tehran—bloated, capricious, corrupt, and with its various secret police agencies competing against one another—becomes a ripe setting for this roman noir . . . Move over Scandinavia: there’s a new kid on the noir block." —Hooman Majd, author of The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay
"A smart political thriller for our modern times." —Laila Lalami, author of Secret Son
The year is 2008. Reza Malek’s life is modest but manageable—he lives in a small apartment in Harlem, teaches “creative reportage” at a local university, and is relieved to be far from the blood and turmoil of Iraq and Afghanistan where he worked as a reporter, interpreter, and sometime lover for a superstar journalist who has long since moved on to more remarkable men.
After a terse phone call from his best friend in Iran, Sina Vafa, Reza reluctantly returns to Tehran. Once there, he finds far more than he bargained for: the city is on the edge of revolution; his friend Sina is embroiled with Shia militants; his missing mother, who was alleged to have run off with a lover before the revolution, is alive and well—while his own life is in danger
Against a backdrop of corrupt clerics, shady fixers, political repression, and the ever-present threat of violence, Abdoh offers a telling glimpse into contemporary Tehran, and spins a compelling morality tale of identity and exile, the bonds of friendship, and the limits of loyalty.
Tehran at Twilight is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
SALAR ABDOH was born in Iran, and splits his time between Tehran and New York City, where he is codirector of the Creative Writing MFA Program at the City College of New York. He is the author of The Poet Game and Opium. His essays and short stories have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, BOMB, Callaloo, Guernica, and on the BBC. He is the recipient of the NYFA Prize and the National Endowment for the Arts award. He is the editor of Tehran Noir.
ABOUT THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES
The Akashic Books Noir series was launched in 2004 with the award-winning anthology, Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all new stories, each taking place within a distinct location within the city of the book. Stories in the series have won multiple Edgar, Shamus, and Hammett awards and the volumes have been translated into 10 languages. Every book is available on our website, as eBooks from your favorite vendor, and in print at online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. For more information on the series, including an up-to-date list of available titles, please visit www.akashicbooks.com/noirseries.htm.
ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES
BALTIMORE NOIR, edited by LAURA LIPPMAN
BARCELONA NOIR (SPAIN), edited by ADRIANA V. LÓPEZ & CARMEN OSPINA
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BOSTON NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS, edited by DENNIS LEHANE, JAIME CLARKE & MARY COTTON
BRONX NOIR, edited by S.J. ROZAN
BROOKLYN NOIR, edited by TIM MCLOUGHLIN
BROOKLYN NOIR 2: THE C
LASSICS, edited by TIM MCLOUGHLIN
BROOKLYN NOIR 3: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, edited by TIM MCLOUGHLIN & THOMAS ADCOCK
CAPE COD NOIR, edited by DAVID L. ULIN
CHICAGO NOIR, edited by NEAL POLLACK
COPENHAGEN NOIR (DENMARK), edited by BO TAO MICHAËLIS
DALLAS NOIR, edited by DAVID HALE SMITH
D.C. NOIR, edited by GEORGE PELECANOS
D.C. NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS, edited by GEORGE PELECANOS
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DETROIT NOIR, edited by E.J. OLSEN & JOHN C. HOCKING
DUBLIN NOIR (IRELAND), edited by KEN BRUEN
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INDIAN COUNTRY NOIR, edited by SARAH CORTEZ & LIZ MARTÍNEZ
ISTANBUL NOIR (TURKEY), edited by MUSTAFA ZIYALAN & AMY SPANGLER
KANSAS CITY NOIR, edited by STEVE PAUL
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LONG ISLAND NOIR, edited by KAYLIE JONES
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