I believed her. After all, what bad thing could happen to me? I was near her. That was enough to render all the craziness of the world logical. We floated on our backs, let our bodies drift with the current. It was a blessed moment. The first time that I had been alone with her, that I had really spoken to her. As if the invisible wall that forever separated us had finally dissolved in the warmth of the Caspian. Later, I learned that I was wrong, that the wall, made of our differences, would not break for so little. Then the wind picked up, and the sea started to thrash around us. We had to go back. She told me to follow her and started to swim in a direction supposedly leading to the shore. I swam with her as best I could, essentially at my maximum, if I’m honest. She was doing a perfect crawl, vigorous, rhythmic, and fluid, which she maintained until the shore materialized once more on the horizon, at first as an indistinct line, then thicker, then clear. The water tower, the straw roofs, the fences between the cottages, the world of the landed. Then she slowed down her pace and we were able to speak again. I asked her when she had arrived in Chamkhaleh, insinuating that I was not up to date, that I hadn’t noticed her arrival. I was lying, obviously, of course I knew when she had arrived with her family. It was, in fact, the most highly anticipated event in the village. How could I not know? She had arrived a week ago to stay, as she did every year, in Villa Rose, overlooking the sea. We had raptly followed all the stages of their moving in. The sudden liveliness of the house, the opening of the shutters, the table and chairs taken out of storage. The lights shining in all the rooms, her silhouette on the terrace, her first walks on the beach with her dog Tamba running behind her, and her solitary morning swims, which everyone spoke about without having any real proof.
For several nights, on the beach around a fire, passing around joints and drinking arak from a bottle concealed in a paper bag, that was all we spoke about. About Niloufar and her family. Those stories alone occupied the majority of our nights. Even if in my presence the commentary was draped in a light veil of modesty, more restrained, for she was my cousin after all. To be Niloufar’s cousin was no small thing. It was almost a full-time job. A position that had to be maintained with a great deal of tact. Not to come across as the intolerant cousin, ready to take up arms to defend her honor, nor the indifferent cousin who lets anybody advance without rite of passage. I had become, little by little, without realizing it, the guardian of the temple, the keeper of the keys of a fortified castle that held the most coveted jewel of the coastline—Niloufar.
I have a hard time explaining the incredible attraction we felt for Niloufar at that time. Okay, she was beautiful, I’ve already said that. Standing tall on her legs, her black hair always loose over her shoulders, the curve of her breasts visible beneath her worn out T-shirts. The unusual appearance of a scrappy boy, but with all the attributes of a girl. There was also the mystery surrounding her family. People who shared a corner of the sea with us each year, the fine sand, the sun and the pure air of the North, all while being very different. Everyone knew it. First there was her father. A man with an odd appearance, who people referred to, in exaggerated voices, as “the Doctor.” Emphasis on the second “o.” He was completely bald. And yet: very young. He had been afflicted with a sort of alopecia that had made him lose all his hair. This peculiarity was the subject of jokes and stifled laughs among my aunts that as a child I didn’t fully grasp. He was officially a doctor. His practice was in Rasht, the capital city of the region, sixty miles away. But his fortune didn’t come from his medical practice alone. He was a businessman. A man who people whispered had connections. At the time, the expression “having connections” meant a lot of things, including, among others, to rub elbows with powerful people, which is to say having access to the Shah’s inner circle. The legend was reinforced by the fact that he had served as mayor several times in that same big city, two or three terms, I can’t remember. Even in my family we spoke of him with a certain fear. Always in a low voice. Involuntarily throwing a wary glance left and right. As if something about him incited worry or should remain a secret. I had heard, surreptitiously, that he had disappeared after the coup d’état during Mosaddegh’s reign and lived in hiding for a few years before resurfacing to become what he was now. Even though, later on, I learned the reason behind his disappearance, his fortune, and the fear that he inspired in others, he remained, for me, an ex-fugitive, an outlaw who had turned rich and powerful. We saw him relatively infrequently. He only came to Chamkhaleh on weekends and holidays. Those were the days when bizarre vehicles surrounded Villa Rose. Big black cars often manned by drivers who, late at night, would kill time by smoking and chatting in front of the closed gate before leaving at dawn with their bosses in tow, the mysterious guests of Villa Rose. Outrageous parties, fantasized about by the locals, were in fact simply backgammon tournaments, as Niloufar’s father was addicted to the game. I knew it, without ever saying so, because the rumors of debauchery were more profitable for my business. Wealth, power, an elegant mother who looked like a Hollywood starlet and who we watched on her terrace, facing the sea, drinking tea and reading, so different from the style of our own mothers. All of that made Niloufar and her family different from us. But I think what made her so desirable, so indispensable to our summers, was simply her indifference. Her indifference to the opulence in which she lived. The richer you are, the less you need to show it; and the less you show it, the more people think you’re rich. She could walk around in clothes with holes in them, sneakers in tatters, or barefoot, and it didn’t change a thing. She possessed the elegance of a queen. She didn’t pay the slightest attention to the young men who crossed her path through a thousand ruses. Not a word, not a look, not a smile, except for that slight crease at the corners of her lips, which the others interpreted as contempt, but which I knew was only amusement. Niloufar was not a sad girl, neither reserved nor timid. Far from it. She would laugh with her friends, and most of all with her cousin Anahid, who came to spend a few weeks each summer at Villa Rose. During the summer, other female aliens arrived. Reunited, those young girls of the same age formed a joyous and boisterous band. All beautiful and, through a secret pact, all contemptuous of us boys. At each outing they sowed terror on the beach. Real outlaws.
But remember! This was Iran at the time of the Shah. You never really experienced that Iran. There was not yet even a single veiled woman on the coastline; scarves and chadors weren’t worn. Instead, there were those girls, with their tiny bikinis, their tank tops, their light dresses blowing in the wind, their bursts of laughter. They wriggled their hips on the hot sand. Roared with laughter. I promise you, the bronzed women of Malibu were nothing compared to such a sight. Everything was wrecked in the wake of their cruel procession. All that was left was lava, ash, and broken hearts. And despite that, faithful to their pact, there wasn’t a single breach through which the boys could have climbed, not even the most aggressive from the surrounding areas. They were all crazed, and the more desperate they were, the better it was for me. The more fervent their flame, the more successful my business, my prices went up, and I became vital. Indeed, by all accounts I was the only bridge to access the inaccessible Holy Grail of Niloufar. I was “the cousin.” That’s how I was introduced to someone new. “You know him? He’s the cousin.” Often, it wasn’t even necessary to say whose cousin I was! I wore that title like a rank in the caste hierarchy. And I profited from it. Of course. Why would I have done any differently? Discreetly at the beginning, then overtly. I profited in a thousand ways. I didn’t have to do anything, it was the cruel law of supply and demand. I was the only one who was able to join the band of girls from time to time. Who had the privilege of paddling in a boat, on the water of the river, with the girls inside. Who carried the fruit basket for Niloufar’s mother, handed her the apple she bit into. I had the secret password to enter the black gate of Villa Rose and to drink tea with her mother, on the terrace, in full view of everyone. Even if it was only an illusion. I paid in my own way for the privilege o
f being the cousin. And it was costly, much more costly than my friends could have imagined.
You know, I’m a child of the North. For me, the sea has always been the opposite of death. To die in the sea is unthinkable to me. Even today, I think that if ever, through some serious accident, I were to fall from a boat into the open ocean, I would be able to swim for as long as it took to arrive on solid ground. For me, the sea is tranquility, liberty, life. I believe that the sea could never portend anything bad for me, and on that morning, swimming toward the open ocean, while the sandy shore of the Caspian was veiled beneath the haze, I thought of everything that a young man of my age can think of, except death. Everything except suffering, abandonment, and betrayal. Because the force and the ardor of my thirteen years, the mother ocean, that calm blue, were there to shield destiny from my eyes. That terrible destiny. No, I wasn’t aware of it yet. Wait a bit longer, I’ll tell you, you’ll know everything. But in that moment it was nothing but an ordinary morning, it was the call of youth, at the beginning of a summer full of promises. Like every morning, I had eaten my atomic breakfast. That’s what we called it. Buffalo milk, sturgeon caviar, buckwheat pancakes, and fig jam. Believe me, at thirteen, with those substances in sufficient quantity in your blood, in a state nearing drunkenness, and alongside Niloufar, that strange spice, that time bomb, even the infinity of the sea and the waves far from the shore can’t tire you out. In that moment, distance becomes an exhilarating adventure; risk, a playground; death, a friend. The good and the bad, game pieces in a terrible business. So guess just how far a person so falsely powerful and thus prepared to satisfy his desires can go? What price is he capable of paying? Do you have an idea?
That morning, the boy who emerged from the sea was no longer the same as the one who had entered. The one who was swimming in Niloufar’s wake was someone else. I know now that my gentle Caspian was still a sea, and that morning it drowned me. The boat of my life had capsized. Another was swimming in my place, another who looked like me, but who was not me. That other had charged straight ahead. Incapable of reading this very story, although it had been written distinctly on the unfurling waves, on the sand trampled by the first passersby. Another who, with the innocence of someone drowning, the worst of the drowned, for he is unaware of his drowning, was only thinking of one thing: keeping up with that magnificent swimmer. She kept half a length ahead of me, swimming joyfully at three knots. Like a dolphin, and the distance only increased. I was thirteen years old, and I had just lost my last chance of remaining a child.
As soon as I was out of the water, I showed her my hands and my fingers, all wrinkled. She showed me hers, which were much less so. I told her it wasn’t all that surprising. That of course she was more of an amphibian than I was. My flattery amused her.
“You mean that I’m a real tadpole, is that it?” she said to me, laughing, throwing her head back so that I could admire her long neck and her impeccable row of teeth. Then she invited me over to have a drink at her house, “if you have time… ” Of course I had time. All the time she wanted. And later, in Villa Rose, I had just drained my glass of lemonade when she invited me to follow her into her bedroom.
§
She never knew that, on that morning, our meeting in the sea had been no accident, because since she had arrived, I had been watching for her every day in the stretch of sea in front of her house. A frantic quest that brought me a little closer each time, until the day when I finally found her. She couldn’t have known that someone was responsible for that series of events. Me. In addition to no longer being a child, I had started to play God. A strange god just as powerful as he was weak, both omnipotent and susceptible. Without that falsely fortuitous encounter, perhaps I would never have become for her what I would later. This story would never have existed for me to recount to you. I would have remained the distant cousin from the old branch of the family tree. A cousin whose intermittent presence didn’t come into contact with the life of the beautiful Nilou except for one or two times a year, without leaving much of a trace. With whom she didn’t share anything more than distant memories of vacations and a few yellowing snapshots in an old album that she might have shown to her children one day, saying: “Oh, that guy, he’s a cousin I saw during the summer. What was his name again?” Or something like that. I would have remained the person I was, the son of Aunt Fakhry. People liked my mother. The kind, adorable, affable Aunt Fakhry. They liked the stories she told. Stories that everyone had heard numerous times but wanted to hear again because she told them so well. Aunt Fakhry, beloved for her buckwheat halva, which people ordered in advance, to eat for Nowruz1 and at the end of the summer. Aunt Fakhry and her curly hair, prematurely gray. Aunt Fakhry and her legendary smile and good humor. Aunt Fakhry and her house that they called “small” and “warm,” in a “pleasant” neighborhood of a small “picturesque” town. “Right by the river, with a view of the mountain.” All you had to do was replace “warm” with “insignificant” to get an accurate picture. But they neglected to mention that the river was dry six months of the year, that its sludge was nauseating, and that we, the locals, the happy inhabitants of this “picturesque” and “pleasant” place, never lifted our heads to look at the green side of our magnificent mountain! We had other things to do. Yes, my mother, who was loved for reasons that I hated. I hated that they could love my mother for her halva, her kindness, her good humor, and her stories. And I hated that they opened the door to Villa Rose to me only because I was her son. We were from the other branch of the family. The ancient branch, the rotten branch. The part of the family that had remained in the little town of the North. A small town that, because of how the road maps were laid out, had found itself on the main thoroughfare that went from the capital to the seaside resorts on the edge of the Caspian. We could see the others passing through in their cars. The others who never stopped, unless they had to, who then immediately found themselves in the claws of deceitful merchants who sold them trinkets at exorbitant prices. At the time, that was considered dishonest. The concept of tourism didn’t exist for us. The visitors took off again, leaving behind a few coins and the dust of a poorly distributed modernity.
The other side of the family had answered the call of the real cities. They had the audacity to leave and settle down in Tehran, then in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, becoming engineers, senior officials, doctors, or generals in the royal army. As for us, we had stayed to guard the invisible temple of tradition, to keep the old local businesses going: grocers, jewelers, rice wholesalers, or tailors and silkworm merchants like my father. Thus my mother, according to the season and the circumstance, was the wife of a tailor whose business was between two other shops in the row of tailors, or the wife of a silkworm merchant. That was my father’s only interesting quality. Otherwise, in the row of tailors, the shops looked so much alike that I asked myself how it hadn’t happened already that my father or another tailor entered the wrong door without realizing it and ran his neighbor’s business. I shared my mother’s confusion about his profession. I never knew whether my father was a silkworm merchant and a tailor in his off-hours, or the other way around. In any case, his valiant worms only spun their precious cocoons once a year, leaving him the time to sew during the long winters of the North, hidden away in his shop. I understood the strange link between those two very distinct professions years later, when one morning I opened his shop and set myself up in his place. That mix of two jobs made it so that he was often away from home. During the cold season, when the worms were still in their eggs, he would take the measurements for his tailor shop clients with the help of a tape measure. He would write them in a notebook, whose pages were doubled with carbon paper, and he would pin the copy on the fabric brought by the client. For the pants, he would ask the men a very important question. He would ask them whether they were lefties or righties. He wasn’t talking about their hands, rather, alluding to the side to which the client typically arranged his intimate parts. He would note it down on
the same piece of paper, with either an “L” or an “R” circled. My father’s pants were reputed to be very comfortable. One of the rare prides of the family. Like all the tailors, he would always take on more orders for Nowruz than he was able to handle. Consequently, like all the other tailors, he was always running late as the New Year approached. He was forced to work late into the night. Those nights, I would bring him his dinner in a three-tiered lunch box, I would cross the avenue where one of every two shops still had their lights on. Behind the steamed-up windows, I would see men hunched over what would become, a few days later, a client’s New Year’s outfit. My father would eat quickly, in silence, too tired to speak, then he would hand the container back to me and resume his work. Often, he would sleep in his shop, on a makeshift bed, heaps of suits that were ordered and never picked up, but that he kept, just in case. In spring and summer, he was on the road, going from village to village to purchase worm farms in advance. Then he would go survey them. As soon as I was able to hold myself up on the pannier rack of his moped, he brought me along with him. He knew everything about silk and taught me patiently. It was the rare topic that made him emerge from his legendary silence. He would sit me down in the warm and muggy shade of the farms to listen to the shrieks of the silkworms. The sound of tons of mulberry tree leaves, devoured and digested by the insatiable Bombyx mori, then spat back out on a loop. The deafening din of the march of the caterpillars.
My Part of Her Page 2
