My Part of Her

by Javad Djavahery

  The downsizing of the pomp of their lives was welcomed with a certain relief by Niloufar, but was more difficult for her mother. Since things had changed, she rarely left the house. Her friends, the benevolent Friday wives, had dispersed. Some had left the country with their families for the west coast of the United States of America, where the largest diaspora community of Iranians had formed. Others had switched sides, now went out veiled, in the company of a spouse metamorphosed into a bearded man. Her charitable works now served no purpose. At the house, Niloufar seemed even more distant than usual. She was busy with a strange task, leaving the house and returning at unusual hours. And when she was there, she often had a book in her hand, or was writing in a notebook, obscure notes in a tiny meticulous handwriting. A notebook with a laminated blue turquoise cover that I had given her for her birthday. The family was on the edge of imploding, in its last days. A thousand imperceptible details foretold it. One morning, they found Tamba dead. For a while, the little dog had been living practically forgotten in its corner. A recent memorandum had forbidden the ownership of pet dogs in Iran: they had been declared impure by the religious men in power. Deprived of its outings, after barking for a long time behind the door of the garden, the poor animal had finally abandoned the idea of going for walks and spent its days with its snout stuck out of a hole in the fence, content to observe the monotonous spectacle of the street. That’s how we found him, lifeless, lying on the ground at his observation post. After Tamba’s death, no more sporadic barking, no more pawing at the doors. The silence of the house had one less opportunity to be broken. The piano remained shut in the corner of the living room, the flowers wilted in the vases whose water was no longer changed, and the odor of oblivion spread through every corner of the beautiful house. And then I left the North for the capital. Tehran with its millions of inhabitants, its excess, and its anonymity seemed a better refuge for me.

  Before leaving, I checked on Niloufar one last time. She had changed a lot, trading her appearance of a young insolent innocent girl for that of a woman. She still wore old shabby clothes, found here and there, but she exposed much less skin than before. No more extra-short skirt, no more extra-large tank top, no more extra-plunging neckline. Now she sported a bob hairstyle. The black jellyfish of the Caspian was now nothing but a legend. Those few years had also elongated her face, hollowed her dimples. But the most striking change was her silence. She no longer confided her intimate feelings in me and preferred to occupy her time with more “important” things. She was modifying her theses, posing theoretical questions, initiating debates that kept us going until late in the night. I let her do it. The spectacle of her moving mouth and the expressions of her face took precedence over what she was saying. I would agree with her wholeheartedly, then I would add a detail at the opportune moment, as I knew how to do so well, just so that her eyes would start to shine. Ah, those ideas that I sprinkled like live grenades that she filled her pockets with. Yes, I let her do it. Rather than warn her about the danger looming over her, I preferred to feel her admiring gaze on me and had no other goal than to prolong it infinitely. I reveled in her attention, I didn’t neglect a single crumb of it, not an atom, and I asked for more still. Late, in her bedroom, drawing strength from the depths of my torments, I waited for her eyes to grow heavy, for sleep to take over her, and then I’d join her. Take her by the hand once more and bring her with me far away, to Chamkhaleh. Our Chamkhaleh. Cross the river by boat, travel beyond the wall of sand, jump the barbed wire, undress, and set off. Swim toward the open ocean. Go far, even farther than the fishing boats, the drifting nets, and the circle of seabirds, until all the noises of the world faded: the whining litany of the Quran diffused from the speakers perched on the roofs, the din of enraged men, the fury of the war, the cantor of “L’Homme nouveau,” the class struggle in search of justice and equality, the parade of misfortunes. Listen to nothing but the sea, the sputtering of the water, the mysterious cadence of the depths. Walk with her on the hot sand. At night, in the dark mazes of alleyways and side roads, in the gleam of the stars, try once more to decipher their obscure geometry. Listen to the night. Its distant rumblings. But, in the silence, someone was singing in a beautiful voice tinged with a former love. He was singing love poems, those of Nazim Hikmet. That’s the moment when I would withdraw my hand, the instant when everything became impossible again.

  So I would plunge with her, searching for a bit of coral. I would follow her, and this time, I wouldn’t stop myself, I would continue to descend without worrying about the lack of air, the tightness of my lungs. I would stay there. What did it matter… ? I would be one more shipwrecked person in that thousand-year-old sea.

  I left Niloufar’s house without saying goodbye to my hosts. The bus left at five in the morning from the main square. The same square where Niloufar’s mother had been eager to topple the equestrian statue of the shah. At that hour, the city was already bustling. The construction workers were warming themselves around a fire burning in a hollow oil barrel. The cars were driving around the pedestal of the statue, still empty, now surrounded by green flags flapping in the wind. On the bus, I sat next to the window. A light freezing rain was falling. A couple crossed the wet crosswalk. The man was wearing a tight vest and wool pants, and the woman a loose-fitting dress and a headscarf with a colorful pattern on her head, clothes typical of peasants in the North. The man was hunched over and moving slowly, while the woman, vibrant and alert, was walking ahead, stopping regularly for him to catch up. I watched them for a long time. They were the only tangible truth in my field of vision. Nothing else was true, neither the imposing fresco of the Supreme Leader on the facade of the town hall, nor the tricolored flag with “Allah” in the middle formed by four blades, nor the veiled women, nor the war song filtering through the loud speakers. The couple had disappeared into the morning haze. The bus had finally filled. It set off arduously in a cloud of smoke, in the din of its tired engine, with the audacious promise of bringing us all the way to Tehran.

  I set off leaving everything behind me, so many unfinished books like fleeting sandcastles abandoned by a child on the beach. The era had changed brutally. Our spring of freedom had turned into winter without passing through summer. Those few months of euphoria were coming to a close. Recess was over. No more public debates, no more free newspapers, no more sellers of dissident journals on the sidewalks. It was enough for the Supreme Leader to say that he didn’t read a particular newspaper for the bearded assailants to destroy its headquarters. Bands of Basij paraded in the streets and attacked anyone who seemed against the religion, the revolution, anyone engaging in anything supposedly disapproved by the Supreme Leader. We had to go into hiding again. But the members of our committee, in our small town in the North, had been too exposed to disappear overnight. Even the most cunning, the most adept, would end up being caught.

  Mahmoud “the jinn,” who had earned his nickname because of his incredible agility, who was present at all the events, participated in all the debates, ate at all the banquets, was arrested on a bus coming back from a meeting with activists from a neighboring town. He would be tortured, then shot after six months of incarceration. He was twenty-eight years old. Behrouz, baptized “the calligraphist” because of his very nice handwriting in which he used to draw our movement’s emblem on the walls of the city, was picked up one night in the street. He wasn’t there to do graffiti, but to meet his girlfriend. They broke his fingers so he could no longer write, then they shot him after a year of imprisonment. He was twenty-five. Nasser “the tough guy,” intransigent on political principles, was executed after a year and a half in prison, at nineteen years old. Then the others. One by one.

  I learned later that they had all, without exception, been questioned about me, had all endured abuse aimed at finding out my location. Which was useless, because they didn’t know. I was now swimming in the waters of Tehran.

  I was picked up by Cyrus upon my arrival. We changed taxi three times. Th
is journey alone seemed longer than going from one city to another in my region. Then we arrived at an apartment in the city center where we were welcomed by a young activist couple. I was introduced under a false name, Saïd, which was how I was known from then on in the organization. A basic introduction. I was a friend from the province. No point trying to hide it. My accent, typical of the North, was still strong. For the neighbors, I was invisible and, if someone showed up, they would introduce me as a friend of the husband, come to take care of a matter of inheritance. Life lived in secrecy came with strict rules. Our comings and goings were reduced to the bare minimum. The warning sign for the apartment was a flowerpot placed behind the window, visible from the street. If the pot wasn’t in its place, we shouldn’t enter, but go to the safe house, and if that too was compromised, that was that.

  Cyrus left. I set my bag in a corner. Tehran vibrated behind the windows and I experienced my first night of insomnia, which was followed by many others.

  I was accepted unanimously to the leadership of the party in the “central committee,” as they pompously referred to it. The central committee, where decisions were made. The heart of the factory. The furnace of lies. I participated in secret meetings, organized in different locations in the city. It was a whole ritual. On the way, they made us close our eyes or lower our heads so as not to remember the address. When we were almost there, they made us enter the meeting place one by one. We carried various innocuous objects, a child seat, a watermelon, a bag of potatoes. In the house, there was no time to lose. Even if our organization wasn’t armed, a military atmosphere reigned. We sat in a circle at the table, if there was one, otherwise on the ground. Everything was planned and timed. The agenda. The length of the speeches. The moderator. The meeting leader. In brief, it was a lot less fun than back in my town, where I had spoken and the others had listened. No place for discourse here. The rare times when I launched into one of my magisterial tirades, I was called back to order politely but firmly by my moderator comrade. No final applause, obviously. Then we left, preserving everything in our memories or in notes taken on cigarette paper. For the next meeting. We left the house as we had come, carrying our bric-a-brac in the other direction. We took our futile game very seriously.

  §

  During that time, I had countless nights of insomnia, as you must have experienced as well. That clandestine life is only fun briefly, then quickly becomes tiring. You spend the majority of your time trying to survive. You spend all of your energy hiding, respecting the rules of security, which in the end don’t leave you any time for anything else, not to live, not even for the cause. Today, I am against all clandestine activity. If you believe in something, you should do it as much as possible, and if it’s not possible, you shouldn’t do it in hiding. You find another way. Secrecy doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s total nonsense. Even in countries under dictatorship. I would even say especially in countries under dictatorship. The dictator is afraid of the masses, not of individuals in hiding. You have to drown the dictator in the small freedoms that the masses allow themselves. A thousand tiny bites that the masses know to deliver to their enemy, once they’ve identified the enemy. But when the masses are not with you, as was the case in Iran at the beginning of the revolution, or in Nazi Germany, it’s not even worth trying to resist. You simply have to hibernate. Let time do its work. That romantic idea of wanting to awaken the conscience through individual actions is as useless as writing “death to the wall” on the Great Wall of China. So we were busy breeding in a closed circle, feeding on our own worries, our own questions and certitudes. But the more the police pressure heightened, the more our existence became difficult and our mission impossible. The more we closed ourselves off in a parallel world, the more we distanced ourselves from the reality around us. The war swallowed its victims like a monster its daily pittance. The cities of Iran were falling one by one. Atrocious images invaded our daily lives. But we continued our debates. The death toll amounted to tens of thousands. The country was in crisis. We were still debating. We were revising our notes. We wanted to bring our socialist revolution to fruition. And when the world didn’t correspond to our theories, it wasn’t the theory that we blamed, but the world! It was the world that had a problem. And we had to find another theory as quickly as possible to explain the anomaly of reality. Quickly, find the counterattack. Quickly, get out the ideological forceps.

  Around me, everything was false. Even to me, who was used to falsehood, imposture. Me, the fraud. I was out of my depth. The apartment, the objects that furnished it, the couple that lived in it, their first names, everything was false. Everything had been set up in haste, cardboard cutouts. It was a facade to make someone believe that there was a couple there, a family, a normal life. In vain. It would have taken less than a minute for someone to realize that these things weren’t real. Even the pictures hung on the walls, meant to brighten up the apartment, were false. The sun setting behind the bare trees in the photo, the snowy summit in its frame, the couple embracing at the edge of the sea. What love? What sea? Love had been lost and the sea walled! In the official photograph of the wedding, we could tell the clothing was borrowed. The vest was too tight, the dress was too large, the smiles artificial. The rules of clandestine life stipulated that we communicate as little as possible to avoid knowing too much about each other. When it came to that rule, my hosts followed it to the point of abuse. They pushed the instructions to their paroxysm. Sleeping in separate bedrooms, they practically never spoke. They outdid each other in an attempt not to forget that they were the protagonists of a lie, that their marriage was nothing but a cover, clinging to falsehood out of fear that through lack of focus something real might happen. A gaze that lingered too long on the chest, a personal remark, a suggestive pleasantry. But, in time, reality would get the better of them. By hiding it, each instant exuded their repressed desire. Their suppressed embrace. And believe me, it was a sad sight to see.

  It was over for me. My destiny was not written in any of the books piled in Niloufar’s mother’s wooden boxes, the books saturated with the smell of rice and hope for a better world. Destroyed, like an empty-handed gambler, I had nothing left to put on the table. The silence gnawed at me from the inside. I missed the North. I was living in Tehran, but that was just one more illusion, as if I were seeing the city on a TV screen, through thick glass. In truth, I had never gotten off the bus that had brought me here. The times when I went out alone, I got lost. I couldn’t adapt to the dry air, to the dark and sterile blue of the sky, to the stench of the sewers, the packed sidewalks and the constant rush of people. I missed the rain. I missed the clouds. The verdant mountains, the river, the cascading rice fields, the salty wind, I missed all of it terribly.

  I was afraid. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I saw clearly that I was done for. Beyond the theory and the principles, it was enough to go from one end of Tehran to the other once to see that our cause was totally hopeless. Daily life had consumed the people. The war was affecting the country’s economy. Everything was rationed. They were juggling the white market and the black market, where the prices shot up a thousand percent. They spent hours lining up for food staples. Survival took precedence over reflection and thought. A collective delirium, a general rage had taken over the country. People saw Khomeini’s face in the moon. The mullahs went out with weapons over their shoulders. The Friday preachers delivered their sermons with guns in their hands. The most important matters were solved with reasoning that was summed up in a few categorical terms, spewed on a loop from the mouth of the already very old Supreme Leader. We wanted to defend the country against an enemy that we had invented ourselves. We were persisting in a revolution that was leading the country to chaos. In any case, my career was over. The path that should have led me to glory and fortune proved to be a dead end. Worse still, it turned out to be my Stations of the Cross. Yes, I was afraid. That was the reason for my insomnia. I already said it: I’ve never been courageous. Deep down, I knew that I
was no heroic resistance fighter. I wasn’t made for that destiny. Electric shock torture, cables whipped on the soles of the feet, nails ripped out, solitary confinement—no thank you. I was constantly on the alert. Footsteps on the staircase, a car stopped in front of the building, a slowing truck, voices on the sidewalk, everything scared me, they were going to arrest me. I was so afraid that I worried I would reveal my fear in my sleep, betraying it with a word, a cry, a gesture. I was living in a state of permanent alert. I was as wary of my friends as of my enemies. I imagined fleeing. But where would I go? Parand’s father had sent me a letter with a considerable sum of money and a note reminding me that I could always count on him. That money was lying at the bottom of my bag. It was enough for me to go wherever I wanted. Even outside of the country, like you. But, at that time, no one dreamed of leaving the country. The wave of exiles abroad began a few years later. So another idea came to me. I pushed it away at first, but it came back with persistence. An idea so crazy that it makes me feel ill just admitting it. But I’ll tell it to you. That’s what I came here for, right? To tell you the truth, the whole truth. I was thinking very seriously and more and more often about turning myself in. Yes, simply giving myself up. Walking into a Pasdaran army base and confessing to them who I was. If I surrendered, it was likely I would receive special treatment. I would have the right to speak, I hoped. And if I could speak, I could manage, I was convinced of it. As I had done a few years earlier with the secret police of the former regime. After a few hours, the SAVAK agents ended up believing me. I hadn’t received a single blow, not even a slap. I told you, I have the ability to be very convincing. I persuaded them that what I was doing was only subversive in appearance. I had proved that it was of more interest to them to let me go than to keep me in captivity. I could influence my peers, temper their ardor, keep them from veering into extremism. And they freed me. Better still, they had kept the matter quiet, leaving it to me to arrange how the information leaked.