Caspian rain, p.19
Caspian Rain, page 19
I said all this in as few words as I could, tried to make it look as normal as possible. He listened and asked questions, nodded and listened some more. At the end of the hour, he told me I had permission to leave, but that he would see me again, that he and I had lots more to talk about.
“We’re going to be good friends,” he said.
Bahar waits till we have left the office. Then she says, “I heard everything.”
For a minute, I feel as if I’m turning into ice.
“That can’t be,” I protest.
She turns her lips up and shrugs. “Everyone else did, too.”
I feel my chest burning up, my hands tightening into fists. I want to assault her right then, or to obliterate myself.
“You’re lying,” I scream.
She shakes her head again.
“Everyone in the waiting room heard you.”
I’m stunned. I mutter, “He said no one would know.”
“Right,” she smirks. “And you believed him.”
I see the faces of the women in the waiting room, how they looked at me when I came out.
“You’re lying,” I say. “He was a doctor. He promised me.”
“You told him all about your father and me,” she offers proof. She’s seething, stabbed in the back by the daughter she has always known would be her “worst enemy” and who has proven herself worthy of the title.
“But you took me there.” I start crying. “You told me he could help.”
She stops, bends down, and brings her face an inch away from mine.
“You spoke too loudly,” she says. “You can’t hear yourself, but everyone else did because you’re so loud.”
THE NEXT DAY, Mr. Arbab summons Omid to the house on Jordan Avenue. It’s Friday, and the cook has made lamb kebab with saffron rice and broiled tomatoes. After lunch, they sit on the terrace to drink tea. Mr. Arbab has a smoker’s cough and a slight tremor in his right hand, but he’s otherwise strong, more deliberate and forceful than most men his age. Normally, he talks with the tone and emphasis of one who is accustomed to being obeyed, but on this day he appears mild and reflective, more empathetic than judgmental.
“There was a man in the ghetto, way back when I was a boy, before the Jews were allowed to move out,” he says, and the very words shock Omid because he has never heard his father talk about his own boyhood, or admit that he had lived in the ghetto in South Tehran. It’s this way with most Jews who have moved up in the past fifty years—they’re so ashamed of their ghetto past that they deny they ever lived there, or that their parents lived there, or that they even knew where the ghetto was. If you press them about their beginnings, they might admit to Cyrus Street, but that’s as far as most are willing to go.
“He used to clean out the septic tank in our house. He came every morning with a basket strapped to his back. He emptied our tank with his bare hands, went from house to house till the basket was full, then dumped the contents in some field outside of town. People avoided him because he was so dirty and smelled so bad; he was practically najis—untouchable—the way Jews were to Muslims.”
He takes a sip of his tea. He knows Omid is wondering why he’s being told about this man, what this story has to do with the real reason he has been called to the house.
“The thing is, he had been born into this work. Some jobs—the best and the worst ones—were inherited by each generation in a family. This man was doomed to do this work because no one would give him another job, or buy anything he might have to sell to make a living. That’s how it was in the ghetto: whatever you did, good or bad, belonged to your children. Your good name opened doors”—he pauses for a second—“and your mistakes ruined your progeny.”
He stops and drinks his tea again without looking at Omid.
“When Reza Shah opened the ghettos, the Jews were ecstatic. Anyone who could afford to left immediately. The septic tank man, on the other hand, refused to leave. This astonished us. We thought he’d be the first to run away, shed his burden, and live where people didn’t know him. We knew he despised his work, and yet he wouldn’t change his name or deny what his family had done for generations.”
Finally, Mr. Arbab looks at his son.
“So I asked him. He said, ‘I may be impure, but I’m the guardian of my father’s name, and I will carry it with honor.”
Mr. Arbab looks over the yard, at the white mulberry tree with the enormous leaves, how its branches have spread so perfectly over the nearby fountain, allowing patches of sunlight over the water while keeping the rest in shade.
“If this is about her,” Omid says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mr. Arbab throws a furious glance at his son. They have always been strangers, but their relationship has become more strained since the day he told Omid he may not divorce his wife. Since then, Omid rarely comes to visit, and he avoids his father out of the office. They speak when they have to—about work—then quickly part. Mr. Arbab has the upper hand—he controls the money—and Omid hates him for this. He has denied Omid happiness with Niyaz, all for the sake of protecting the family’s good name, and he doesn’t care what this does to his son at all, doesn’t mind losing Omid’s affection, because he knows what is wrong and right and where to draw the line. There are things we allow ourselves, and boundaries we don’t cross.
“It’s not about her,” Mr. Arbab says. One of the women in the psychologist’s waiting room was a friend of a friend of the Arbabs. She’s told people what she heard, and they, in turn, have told the Arbabs. Omid’s father has tolerated much in his lifetime, but he cannot stomach having his name sullied by a ten-year-old and dragged through the mud by his son’s family. Still, that’s not the reason he has called Omid.
“Listen to me once and for all,” he tells Omid, his right hand shaking as it raises a cigarette to his lips. “I’ve done some things in my life I’m not proud of, and I’ve forgiven you much as well, but I’ve never compromised where our honor was on the line.”
He puts the cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray and, for the first time in Omid’s life, allows something other than disapproval to seep into his voice.
“I don’t know how you got yourself into this trap,” he says, the words pulsating with something resembling affection, “but you have a daughter who is practically deaf, and a wife who’ll be no one if you leave her. To turn your back on them as you have, to go around with that woman pretending all is well”—he pauses to catch his breath—“that’s something I don’t want to be remembered for.”
THERE ARE THINGS we allow ourselves and boundaries we don’t cross. There are transgressions for which one will not be forgiven, crimes that indict not only the perpetrator but also those related to him by blood.
You can be unfaithful to your wife, but you can’t divorce her. You can take away her dreams, but you can’t stop providing for her. You can despise, but not disobey, your father, dislike, but not dishonor, him. You can pretend your child is not ill, but you can’t abandon her.
For every sin, a virtue; every cruelty, a measure of mercy.
NIYAZ IS IN AMERICA when she receives his letter.
“Forgive me,” Omid has written, “but I must uphold my duty before God.”
He writes about a child who needs his attention—Niyaz remembers having heard about her in the past; she’s going blind, or deaf, or something equally tragic, Niyaz recalls—and that he feels he must devote himself to her, look after her and her mother until they find a cure.
It’s this kind of interdependence that Niyaz dislikes about Iranians—they’re always with their families, traveling in packs like a bunch of penguins. They do everything by committee, make every decision by consensus. Even after they’re grown men and women, they don’t become separate people. They live each other’s lives as if it were one great tragedy they signed on to at birth. They get married but don’t leave their parents’ care until the parents are too old and the children take charge of them.
Niyaz has no sympathy for Omid or his child, can’t see what he could do for the girl if he stayed with her mother. It bothers Niyaz that he hasn’t talked to her about this in person, that he waited for her to go to America and then wrote a letter, but she knows this is because he’d never be able to do this face-to-face. At any rate, the letter doesn’t alarm her much. She reads it twice and throws it away. She doesn’t write back, or call Omid in Tehran, or contemplate any of the other senseless acts that jilted lovers engage in so often. She knows Omid will come back to her—sick child or not. Whatever he may think of himself and his ability to rise to certain occasions, Niyaz knows his limitations.
OMID TELLS BAHAR he wants to start over.
He looks spent—devastated—as he says this, but he confesses that he has failed Bahar and me, promises he will do whatever possible to turn himself into a real husband and father.
Bahar cries tears of sorrow and relief—tears of that bitter joy that belongs to those who have given up too much on the road to victory.
They rent a house on the Caspian shore, in a village nestled between the sea and acres of rice fields. We pack for the trip at night because we’re going to leave early in the morning. At four-thirty, Omid comes to my room and wakes me. In the kitchen, Bahar pours tea into slender glasses and tells me to drink fast, we must leave soon to get to the seashore by sunrise.
We drive across narrow mountain roads, above valleys so deep the end is invisible, through long, narrow tunnels made of stone, beside a lush jungle where white tigers live. We stop once, to buy a bucket of blackberries from a peasant boy who has picked them only minutes earlier. He’s barefoot, his face and neck scratched, his hands bleeding from the thorns and branches he has had to clear to get to the berries. At sunrise, we come upon rice fields where the water, still as glass, shines like yellow gold. Then we reach the Caspian.
IT WAS THE SEA, I thought even then, that brought my parents together. It’s as if Bahar had always known this—that they would have to travel away from their life in order to find happiness. That’s why she told him about the Caspian that day when they spoke for the first time. She had told him about a happiness she hadn’t experienced but knew existed. It was all a matter of faith, The Opera Singer would have said, and I thought, that summer when my parents and I became a family for the first time, that he would have been right.
Omid and I swim in the sea every day on the beach outside our rented house. At midday, we retreat into a straw hut that has been erected on stilts dug into the sand. Little boys, younger than me, sell trays of steaming rice and broiled meat that their mothers have cooked. Old men with rotting boats and crooked oars bring us the fish they have just caught. They gut each fish with one slice of a knife, pour its insides on the sand, cook it over a fire they’ve made in an empty ten-gallon oil can.
Bahar emerges from the house with glasses of iced cherry nectar, quince-seed juice, cantaloupe juice. She’s wearing a cotton dress, large sunglasses—Jackie O glasses, they were called in Tehran—straw sandals.
In the afternoon, I sleep on the floor of the hut, under a sheer cotton blanket of the kind woven by local women on old-fashioned looms. My hair is matted, my skin covered with sand and salt from the sea. I close my eyes and feel I’m still being rocked by the waves.
When I wake up, the air is sticky and humid. The sun is still out, but rain is falling in perfect, shimmering drops. It’s a golden rain, each drop the color of the rice fields along the shoreline. I come out of the hut and stand in the rain. I feel my heart expand with joy, and I think it has something to do with this sea, this beach, this rain that I can hear—I realize suddenly, and to my astonishment—that I can hear so well, as clearly as I once did and as I haven’t for a long time.
Even today, I hear that rain in my dreams.
THEY RETURNED from the Caspian with new optimism. They talked about going back often, about spending more time together at home. I remember Bahar singing as she made dinner, setting the table with flowers and sugar-coated almonds in pastel colors and golden saffron rice. Even after I started fourth grade that fall, Omid came home early on Thursday afternoons to watch Peyton Place with Bahar and me. Friday mornings that spring, he drove us to the Karaj River. We hiked toward the snow-covered peaks of Alborz, ate fried eggs and yogurt in coffeehouses built along the water. My cheeks would sting from the cold mountain air and my hands would become numb from the icy water and Omid would take them into his own, hold them till they were warm, and I could see the relief in Bahar’s face, see her thinking, it must be true—that family triumphs over all, that blood pulls harder than desire.
It doesn’t.
We’re driving back from Karaj one Friday in late spring when he reaches for Bahar in the passenger seat, brushes her hair out of her eyes, and says, “I can’t go on.”
I can’t do this anymore I’ve tried but I’m dying inside I need to leave this wasn’t meant to be—you and I—you must know it too.
Stop, she screams, and her voice echoes in the car. Stop it, Yaas can hear you, have pity on her if you don’t have it for me.
Omid pleads with her. “Hear me out.”
He tells her it was all a mistake, that he never should have married without love, that life without Niyaz is nothing more than an endless, empty wait. This is not something he has chosen; it’s what he’s doing because he has no alternative.
I remember his voice trembled when he spoke. I remember that Bahar sobbed next to him all the way home. I remember thinking I had become invisible from the neck down, that I had no legs to tremble, no stomach to churn with anguish, no heart, even, to break.
PART V
AT THE END OF THAT SUMMER, Artemis, the “Persian Ringo Starr,” gets the big break he’s been waiting for all his life.
He has been working in the shoe store for nearly fifteen years, playing the drums at weddings and bar mitzvahs once every few months, usually because a musician friend has felt sorry for him, or is unable to perform, and has asked Artemis to fill in. He hardly gets paid for those performances, and barely makes any money selling shoes—which might be touching, even admirable, for an artist in his prime, struggling against the odds, but Artemis is nearly forty years old, graying at the temples and much too wide at the center for the fitted shirts and low-waisted trousers he still wears. It’s not clear if he is any good at the drums anyway, because he makes so much noise when he plays, you can hardly escape with your hearing intact. But you don’t have to be a musicologist to glean from his circumstances that Artemis is a step or two short of achieving the Beatle-like fame he aspires to—that he is, in fact, quite unlikely ever to leave the Alley of the Champions or the second floor of the yellow house where he lives alongside a love-struck Zoroastrian and a haunted Jew, above a South American maybe-spy who avoids sleep for fear of dreaming of her Nazi parents’ prey.
The only person, other than himself, who continues to believe in Ringo’s potential, and banks her own name and entire future on it, is Ruby. She started sleeping with him out of pure lust, she has confessed to Bahar, which isn’t a bad reason to sleep with anyone, especially a “boy” as handsome and impressive as Artemis, but she has, over time, fallen in love with him—so much so that she’s willing to wait as long as it takes, support him with her own meager earnings if she has to, just for the pleasure of seeing him succeed. Then the two of them will leave South Tehran together, get married or “live together”—she knows people do this in America because she reads Bahar’s Modern Ladies magazines—in one of those suites on top of the Tehran Hilton where rich Jewish and Muslim men keep their mistresses.
The fact that she’s married doesn’t once interfere with Ruby’s fantasies about Artemis. She has already abandoned Hassan in her heart if not on paper. She hasn’t told him a thing about what she is doing, and he has never confronted her. He goes about his duties with more-than-usual obsession and spends all his free time trying to revive the garden that is clearly beyond hope. He must still think there is a chance for Ruby to leave Artemis, Bahar says whenever the subject comes up; he must think he can outlast the other man.
At this, Ruby always laughs, throws her head back, and shakes her hair.
“Right!” she says. “And the Shah’s wife is going to leave him for the one-eyed street sweeper.”
She has even gone so far as to buy herself and Artemis matching pendants, two gold letter R’s—Ruby and Ringo—intertwined so that they each look like a person in profile facing the other, and she wears hers all the time, even to bed, without regard for what Hassan might think.
But for all her faith in his potential, when success does come to Artemis, Ruby will be the person most taken aback.
They have been carrying on as usual, she dropping in on him in the afternoon and staying two or three hours, going back again sometimes at night or in the early morning when she brings him freshly baked bread and handpicked peaches. One Friday night on Cyrus Street, The Opera Singer looks at my mother and says, not without a hefty dose of envy, “So your maid’s lover finally made it.”
Bahar has no idea what The Opera Singer is talking about. She can’t imagine what would constitute “making it” for a person like Artemis, she says.
He’s clearly delusional.
The Opera Singer is indignant.
“I agree. The guy’s a fat mule. But so are the people who’ve picked him for their band.”
Iran’s national television network has started to produce local programming. Among those programs is a music variety show where Iranian singers and musicians dress and dance and act like American pop singers. The show is wildly popular, and it nearly guarantees anyone who appears on it certain fame.
