AIAW Featured Writer: FIROOZEH KASHANI-SABET

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet - Iranian American Writer

Buildings. Everywhere you look, there are buildings. On Inqilab Avenue two solitary walls stand on the left side of the road. It's anybody's guess what this pile of rubble will turn out to be. Maybe a mosque, a business center, or a mall. Or better yet, a monument honoring the dead. The drilling sounds fade as I move beyond the construction zone. Ali Agha, the baker, spits out orange seeds on the cracked cement as he counts some change in his hand. Come to think of it, even his store is a new addition to the street.

"What time is it?" Ali Agha asks as he watches the pedestrians on the opposite corner of the sidewalk. A worker tells him the time from inside the bread shop. "It's slow again today," he says, mostly to himself. When he recognizes a customer, Ali Agha motions to his cronies to bring out the sheets of warm lavash. "Hurry up! Hurry up!" he yells, now sitting erect on the edge of his chair. As the man approaches, Ali Agha holds out the bread and says, "Fresh out of the oven. Don't you want to take some home to your wife?" The pedestrian lowers his head, quickly walking away, and Ali Agha curses at a young employee before eating the bread himself. "How am I supposed to run a business?" he complains. "What's their excuse now? The war is finally over."

As I walk past the bread shop, Ali Agha notices me, and the scene repeats itself. "I was waiting for you," he says, getting up from his chair. "Some bread, Hajji Khanum?" I don’t fault Ali Agha for his sycophantic ways. He smiles. He calls me "Hajji Khanum," even though I never made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He politely holds out the bread. The economy is hard on everybody these days.

"Six sheets," I say.

When I dispense the change, Ali Agha takes my good hand and kisses it. "God Bless you!" he exclaims, following up the blessing with a token prayer, but I quickly pull my hand away. Ali Agha apologizes and I walk away fast. So fast that I don't realize I've walked past the post office. I wipe my good hand against my Islamic robe, rubbing it hard into the cloth until I see a spot of blood. I know then that I've atoned for the sin. It’s un-Islamic to touch a man's hand. These are fine points we never learned in religion class. Fine points about nails and skin and hair and water and dirt and cotton and wood.

I pass Ali Agha's bread shop every Tuesday on the way to the downtown post office. Today, I take the long route there: through the bazaar and past Muhsin's engineering building. I haven’t been to this part of town since the last explosion. Has it already been a year? That day, I stopped by the bazaar. I wanted an appraiser to price our family antiques. They were for my daughter, Nasrin, and I thought she might someday want them for her home. I asked the merchant if he’d be willing to smuggle them out for a modest bribe, but he just rolled his eyes and sighed. I don’t know what I was thinking, since back then, leaving Iran wasn’t an imminent possibility, with the war dragging on with no end in sight. But in a state of war, denying reality comes more easily than embracing the truth.

Disappointed, I left the bazaar for the post office. A long line curved outside of the building, but compared to the gasoline queues, this one moved swiftly. As I walked in, the mosque projected the noontime prayer call, the azan, which echoed in the neighborhood, and a young woman behind me silently mouthed her prayers. Outside, military planes flew low, circling the neighborhood, and only the azan intruded upon their distant drone. When the prayer call finally ended, the young woman started speaking softly to me. "They recruited my youngest son for the war,” she said. "He's twelve. Do you have a son?"

I shook my head. Then she whispered, “I don’t believe in martyrdom.” Before I could answer, an altercation broke out between two customers standing ahead of us in line. "It's my turn," a bearded middle-aged man yelled as he elbowed a veiled woman half his size to claim a spot in front of the post-office clerk. "What do you mean?" the chadori woman challenged. "I've been waiting for twenty minutes." As she was speaking, the woman adjusted her black veil to hide loose strands of hair. Then, she turned to the person behind her to say, "Didn't you see him just walk in the door?" But no one rushed to support her cause. Maybe it was the desperation in her voice, the hypocrisy of her chador, or the weakness of her gender that made her appear guilty. Even though the woman was telling the truth, she sounded less sincere than the man.

Finally, the post-office clerk intervened to resolve the issue. "Khanum" he said to the chadori woman, "please cooperate. Let this man finish his business. You'll be next." Before the woman could voice another complaint, there was a loud thump. It was a noise I’d never heard before, as if twenty trucks had crashed into one another. From a distance the red-alert signals, which sounded like truncated ambulance sirens, began to toll. The Iraqis had struck something, but nobody seemed to know what.

Helicopters had joined the military planes to survey the streets. Inside, no one hazarded talking, except for the post-office clerks, who shouted orders to file people out of the building. "Over here," a young man yelled, and we formed a line behind him. Another loud crash shook the main lobby, and the concrete beneath our feet began to tremble. The young woman standing behind me again prayed silently as she watched a rat scuttle across the floor. Before the rat reached the western end of the lobby, the tiles trembled, and we flew out of the building.

****

That's all I remember about that Tuesday afternoon. I'm not even sure if the ground was really shaking after the third blast, or whether my knees were betraying me. I’m not sure. Everything happened quickly, maybe within five minutes.

****

An old man sits in a wheelchair outside the post-office entrance -- a spot he’s claimed since the war. I place the warm sheets of lavash in his lap and step into the building. He mumbles some incoherent words, and I turn around to acknowledge his disjointed utterances, but I know his memory will only register the incident for a few short minutes. As I wait in line, two teenage boys push ahead of me, but I don’t see any point in fighting such aggression. Moralizing won’t persuade them to jettison their habits.

Since the explosion, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands so I create mindless chores for myself. I feed the pigeons. I water my garden. Or I visit the post office. Nowadays, the post office certifies all of our letters and packages. Letters with pictures in them or letters with little substance. Perfunctory letters about the weather or the new ice cream store down the block. My daughter, Nasrin, lives in America, but she probably can't read Farsi any more, so why waste time crafting a masterpiece? Still, I prefer descriptive missives myself. Long, discursive letters about winter nights in cold gardens, but Nasrin rarely writes back. When she makes the effort, it hardly seems worth the trouble. Her last one came three months ago: "Hamid looks like Husni Mubarak. I think it's the nose." Hamid is her fiance. Then she adds, “Are you still praying, Maman?" I’ll keep her letter in my purse until the next one arrives.

When the post-office clerk eventually takes care of my business, I step outside and walk a short distance. The man in the wheelchair has rolled himself up a block, and when I approach him, he doesn’t recognize me. He reaches out for change, and I place a fifty-toman bill in his lap. At the first green light I catch a bus, and from the window I observe other reconstruction projects across the capital.

The government rebuilt this post office six months ago. A businessman who’d lost a son in the war donated large sums of money to renovate the building. For days, construction hands worked to efface any sanguinary remnant of the explosion, burying broken bones and torn clothing under the ground. Still, despite its clean walls and fragrant household plants, this building isn’t so different from the old one. Only scattered ruins in the southern corners of the city linger as icons of the war. A chipped wall, a shattered window, a cripple. Where rocks and gravel once covered the streets, new monuments stand in their places. Outside the main drive leading to the post office, school children gather regularly to water fresh flowers. On that street, Martyrdom Street, where tulips bloom perennially, only the murmurs of the dead keep their memories alive.

****

A gardener lavishly waters a fresh flower patch next to the sanctuary, despite the summer drought, but nobody seems to mind. In the courtyard a mother rocks her newborn son and hums a gentle lullaby. The baby stares into the distance, through the massive columns and their plaster moldings. When the humming stops and the preacher's voice rises, the infant shifts in his mother's arms and wails. "Maybe he's hungry," someone remarks. "Or tired," another surmises. Someone offers the woman bread and cheese.

I take a detour and visit the mausoleum. The smell of rosewater permeates the hand-woven rugs on the floor. Next to me, a woman wails and kisses the iron grids that protect the Imam’s tomb, asking for miracles. I try hard to imitate her piety but can’t. Her crying makes me nervous and I decide to leave. Outside, a security guard approaches and removes his shoes by the entrance to the tomb. Today, he's only an ornament here. He doesn’t see the young girl and teenage boy flirt while sharing a bowl of pistachios. The girl's veil slowly slides down her head, exposing thick black curls, but nobody chastens her. The price of bread went up another ten tomans; the price of gasoline another five.

I catch the next bus and go home. There’s nothing more to see here. The 22nd of Bahman, the anniversary of our revolution, has become just another meaningless national holiday, like the commemoration of Imams or the birthdays of kings. My hand has started to ache. I take some pills and wait for today to spill into tomorrow. Muhsin is gone and won’t return for hours. I won’t remember him coming home.

****

The sky is still black, but morning lies just around the corner. Outside, the trees and crickets hide from view, conspiring to delay the arrival of dawn. I open the bedroom window and listen to their movements. I don't know how Muhsin lives with his other wife -- where he sleeps, whether he leaves the window open or shut -- but I don’t speculate. This is my preferred hour of the day, when the streets are quiet and I can watch Muhsin dream. He doesn’t feel me stroke his fingers. From the bedside window, rays of light slowly penetrate the bedroom. I place my prayer rug in the middle of the room and begin the namaz. The obligatory prayers are brief, but I linger minutes longer to think. I wonder whether to confront Muhsin about the opium I found stashed away his coat pocket. But it is easier to feign ignorance.

As I put away my prayer rug, Muhsin wakes up prematurely from his sleep. His forehead is covered in sweat and he throws the blanket off his body. "It was hot," he says. "I felt like I was on fire."

"The window is open," I say.
"I don't know. I was sweating uncontrollably."
"Where were you?" I ask.
"I'm not too sure. Near the Takht-i Jamshid. Under the rubble."
"It was only a dream," I assure him.

But he remains agitated and confused. The samovar brews slowly in the kitchen. I set the breakfast plates and some lavash on the table. Muhsin joins me shortly with a cigarette in hand. He appears more at ease, no doubt relieved to put the night behind him. Since my accident, his nightmares have become more frequent, but we don’t always know what causes them. Muhsin walks over to the kitchen counter to turn up the volume on the radio. When the announcer initiates a litany of doleful Arabic prayers, he reaches for an old newspaper on the kitchen table. "Nobody cares about the news any more. All we hear these days are Arabic prayers. What's the matter with Persian? I bet they're afraid people might actually understand the nonsense they're promoting."

"They're just harmless prayers," I say. "Why make such a fuss?"

I place a cup of tea before him. Muhsin smirks at me but doesn’t respond. Instead, he fiddles with the short-wave stations until he locates BBC. Then he relaxes his forehead and continues eating his breakfast. "Much better," he comments, listening attentively to the news summaries, even though there’s nothing especially important going on in the world. When the news hour is over, Muhsin goes into the bedroom to change. He yells to me from there and presses me to finish the cleaning quickly. I pretend not to hear him and sing to myself, louder and louder, until he’s forced to repeat himself. Then he marches back into the kitchen and hovers threateningly over me. Then, he moves back slightly and starts drying the dishes.

****

What is it about the air of guilt -- the self-conscious twitches, the wandering eyes, and the cautious humor -- that invariably gives the guilty away? With Muhsin, it was the smell of his cigarettes. They no longer released the crisp aroma of fine tobacco. This was the smell of infirmity, the stench of tobacco grown on diseased lands. Maybe Iraqi shelling had damaged the yearly crop, transferring rare viruses from decaying human flesh onto idle land. Or maybe poor manufacturing had stained the tobacco leaves with unwelcome impurities. Pesticides. Fossil fuels. Chemical gas. Whenever Muhsin lit a cigarette, a grayish brown smoke stretched out sideways, like a sick cat, mutating mild coughs into wild paroxysms.

On that sunny afternoon when the post office exploded, Muhsin had planned to spend the day working at his engineering firm. This line of work had irregular hours. Sometimes during the week Muhsin would be gone all morning; other times he wouldn't even leave the house. I watched him leave the house with his cigarettes and fake leather briefcase. When the bombing threw me onto the concrete, I lay still, thinking of Muhsin. Random scenes passed before my eyes, and I could feel his presence. We were both downtown, maybe just a few streets away from each other. On a map of Tehran the distance between us measured less than the span between two fingers. I wondered whether Muhsin could hear me if I called out his name. Once or twice, I opened my mouth, but there was nothing. Tall flames spilled out of the sky, and I had difficulty focusing. I was slipping out of consciousness.

During my subsequent phase of alertness I smelled death. A young man lay beside me, heaving with prodigious effort, until he decided, quite abruptly, that life was no longer worth it. That was when I became aware of him -- of his putrefied limb and gory perspiration. Dismembered from the rest of him, the man's hand had landed next to my feet. His was a beautiful hand with long artistic fingers and unmanicured nails, a hand capable of painting masterpieces or composing epics. He saw me admire his detached appendage and smiled vaguely. Just at that second, before he decided to surrender his body, his eyes caught mine. They seemed to tell me, "Take it, if that's what you want. It belongs to you now." I’ve often wondered about him and that hand.

A rescue worker draped a white sheet over his corpse and severed parts when the young man shut his eyes. I shifted slightly as the rescuer’s shoes brushed against my side. Then, the rescuer placed two fingers on my throat and yelled to his fellow workers, "This one's alive." Two helpers crossed the street and rushed to lift my body onto a wooden stretcher. "Does it hurt?" one of them asked, as he placed me inside the ambulance. It was his question that reminded me of the sensation I’d lost in my left hand. A female attendant nurse rubbed an acrid liquid under my nose as the engine started. "Breathe," she said, gently caressing my face. When my inhalations grew regular, the woman raised my head to cover it with a veil. As she fastened the ends of the black fabric into a loose knot, she pledged, "Have faith, Sister. We'll win the war," but her assistant just bandaged my hand and sneered. What did faith have to do with war?

Someone tried calling Muhsin at the office when we reached the hospital. Nothing major, they had claimed, which was true -- just a deep wound in my left hand. As the doctor explained, though the hand was never going to move well, in fact hardly move at all, it was still there, almost in full, attached to the rest of me: "All four fingers and nails," he affirmed, as if there were nothing unusual about the number. He wrapped the gauze tightly around my hand as I watched the lifeless burden on the left side of my body.

Eventually, the nurse wheeled me into another room, away from the other victims of the explosion. She asked again if there was anyone else I wanted to call. “My husband," I repeated. Within minutes she returned to tell me that Muhsin wasn't at work or at home. I suspected nothing. I knew he’d come to me in time. I thought about my hand, about life with one functional hand instead of two. How much could that change a person's life? I could still dust, chop, caress. And my daughter, Nasrin? How would she take it? It didn't matter then. I wouldn't be seeing her for a while.

Finally, Muhsin showed up at my hospital door a day later. He entered quietly, without knocking. "Why did you go there?" he demanded in an accusatory tone, as though ordinarily going to the post office carried the same implications as marching onto a battlefield. I didn’t answer. The nurse had given me an injection, and my head grew heavy with oblivion. I don’t remember him that afternoon. He returned the next day just as the nurse was changing the dressing on my wounds. He looked away as he spoke, focusing on the door instead of my hand. Apparently, the explosion had started a massive migration out of Tehran. Muhsin rolled in a television set into my room after the nurse finished bandaging my hand. The main station aired several scenes from the explosion. I looked for glimpses of the young man lying beside me, but the reporter had moved on to another newsworthy event: a Tunisian caravan gone astray on the road to Damascus.

"You hear that?" I asked Muhsin. He looked pale. He slipped his fingers through his greasy hair. As he spoke to me, Muhsin caressed my good hand, even though public displays of affection -- even between married couples -- were against the Islamic rules of the state-run hospital. I wanted him to stop but said nothing. Then, in one ugly second, I began to yank his hand, hoping to pull it out of the socket as if it were an appendage on a doll. I yanked and yanked until Muhsin eventually shook me hard and told me to stop. Then he lit a cigarette and the smell of infirmity suffused the room. His eyes drifted away from my face and onto the white tiles beneath his feet.

"I was at work," he said quickly. "On site. It was Tuesday, remember?”
"Nasrin used to count tiles," I said.
"I came as soon as I heard.”
"She must have learned that from you."

As Muhsin reached for the pitcher to pour some water, his hands quivered and he spilled the water on the floor. The second time he tried, the glass slipped out of his hands. Never before had an incident so alienated us. Not the revolution, the drugs, or even Muhsin's short stays in prison, I guess, because none seemed as indelible as this. The knowledge of something good turned putrid bothered us, and my crippled hand displayed publicly the imperfection of our lives.

I knew then.
"Why you?" he whispered.

I felt him grope for my anger, but there was nothing. One who has lain next to death begins to hold onto life, however feebly. “It's still in my purse," I told him.

"What?"
"The letter."
"I’ll mail it tomorrow,” he offered, “and give some money to the poor.”
"Please." I pleaded. "Please take care of it."
"I will," he promised.

He never did.

****

I returned to the hospital weeks later to remove the bandages from my hand. This time, Muhsin accompanied me throughout the ordeal, valiantly, as if instructed beforehand by the doctor. He didn’t even cringe when he saw for the first time my twisted fingers and bent knuckles. I did. I wanted to rip my hand away, like a chicken bone, and dump it into a garbage bin, permanently out of sight. "Try massaging it several times a day," the doctor said. "Soon you'll regain some feeling." He began rubbing my hand in soft vertical strokes and waited for me to take over. But when he released my hand, I let it drop to my side and instead watched a stray cat from the window limp to the other side of the street. The doctor paused. "Like this," he offered again, taking my hand and exerting pressure upon it. He waited for me to imitate his motions, but without his encouragement the hand again fell to my side.

On the way out the doctor gave Muhsin a bag full of color-coded tubes. "This one numbs the pain; this one will heal the cuts with minimal scarring; this one will ...." I stopped listening to him, focusing only on the doctor's fourth finger. Would he have responded to his own pain in the same way that he reacted to the suffering of others?

****

The sun pierces through the morning clouds. Already, a long trail of outdated cars clogs the expressway. A driver to the left of us thrusts his head out the window to yell obscenities at a wayward pedestrian. Further ahead, two cars stall abruptly, choking on leaded fuel, before chugging along. The car's irregular motion and frequent jerky halts make me dizzy. As I open a window to clear my head, noxious fumes waft inside the automobile, and I feel worse. "Close the window," Muhsin says. "The air is really dirty in this part of the city."

The doctor’s office appears shortly after we turn onto Martyrdom Street. There are fresh slogans on the concrete walls of the doctor’s building since the last time we were here. Muhsin begins reading some of them out loud: "A veil protects a woman's decency and prevents moral corruption." He lets out a loud, devilish laugh, and continues: "Death to the unveiled."

"Was that ever in the Qur'an?" he asks.

I don’t reply. It’s the absence of opium that makes him moody. We enter the doctor’s office and the nurse situates us in the waiting room. Muhsin picks up an old magazine, skims it, and loudly tosses it back on the table. Then, the nurse appears and directs us to the examination room. We smile politely when the doctor enters. “Are you still using the medication?” he asks.
I nod. “But they don’t stop the pain any more,” I say.

Muhsin lights a cigarette and looks at the doctor. “Go ahead,” the doctor says to him. As he exhales, a ripple of smoke spreads out, and the smell of infirmity fills the room. Muhsin walks over to the window as the doctor gives me an injection. Muhsin asks if there’s anything else we can do for the pain -- a superfluous question he feels compelled to pose every time. There is, of course, nothing more to do, and soon we are back on the expressway.

At the first red light Muhsin reaches over and takes my good hand. He kisses it from the fingertips to the center of the palm. "This point here looks like a bird's nest," he says, referring to the corner where the life line and the love line intersect. To me, the indentation looks more like a ditch.

“Don’t go,” I say.

Muhsin releases my hand, and his eyes wander from my wound to the window. I long to stare at him, into his eyes, but he twitches as the light turns green, and his eyes follow the morning traffic down Martyrdom Street and away from my sight.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

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