One
Issa saw that that word—burn—had lately turned into a refrain for his friend, always hovering on the tip of his tongue, starting with a fire Nasser had fought down in the Zamzam district in south Tehran. Nasser knew the family of the burned woman, knew the piece of shit who drove her to pour gasoline on herself on the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year, the start of spring, when folks head to the parks to celebrate and throw bad luck into the wind.
He’d gone over to Beirut to search for love and had come back empty-handed, as usual. Nasser was there to pick him up from the airport. He broke the news that they’d have all day to rest before they had to head down to the Zamzam district to fight for the “honor” of a woman Issa had never known existed until now. It was bullshit, this chivalry. They were going to act out a scene of street theater only to flaunt themselves and not save any woman’s honor. This was the second time in four months that Nasser had asked him for backup in some skirmish like that.
Nasser didn’t really need the backup, yet he insisted on it. Maybe because the world of men could be pretty barren until men found each other. Which was rare. Mostly it was a relentless loneliness that one made up for with bravado in places like Jomhuri Avenue, where Issa had found himself selling expensive, Korean-made washing machines and refrigerators alongside Nasser for the last year. He had been kicked out of his university job because someone in the Selection Department had complained about his godlessness. That was what they called it—godlessness. He wasn’t sure where exactly the complaint had come from, and at that point, he didn’t care. There was always a complaint, always someone out to get you because they could. It didn’t matter where you lived or what wind of grievance blew your way. Still, Issa knew a couple of foreign languages, so a Good Samaritan at the university who felt sorry about the injustice from the Selection Committee had said they were looking for someone who could speak with embassy folk shopping along Jomhuri Avenue. The Russians, Italians, Turks, British, French, and Germans all had their embassies down around Jomhuri, and their people needed fridges and washing machines, didn’t they? Turned out none of them came to buy a damn thing at all, but there he had met Nasser, who was moonlighting during his forty-eight-hour off-shifts from his job as a fireman.
Then he’d backed Nasser in a fight.
Or rather, he’d executed an instance of precise violence in the other man’s place. Precise because Issa knew how to do it. He’d been trained in the art long ago and could still be quite good at it. And because violence was the glue that held their inadequate lives together. It wasn’t a way of life; it was life itself. And if Issa had at one time tried to escape that life, it was only because he’d been led to believe there were other options for men like them.
There weren’t.
That first time, a customer was slapping his own little boy on the back of the neck repeatedly while negotiating the price of a vacuum cleaner. Nasser had followed the man outside, and Issa followed Nasser onto Jomhuri Avenue, amid the thick crowds hustling cell phones and electronic paraphernalia underneath the Hafez Overpass.
Nasser catches up to the man, who looks like he is about to smack the boy again.
“What’s going on? Has the kid broken your phone? Did he shit on your couch?”
The man—big, flabby, his face oxlike—is disoriented for a second and asks if he left something in the store.
“You did, you whore’s son. You left a bad taste, is what you left in the store. What has the boy done that you keep hurting him like that?”
Issa stands there watching, near two policemen who know Nasser well enough to realize this is not yet their business, and, for the time being, they shouldn’t butt in. The southwest corner of Jomhuri and Hafez is surely one of the most crowded thoroughfares in all of the Middle East. But where they stand, next to one of the fat pillars of the overpass, there’s space enough for anything. Issa watches the little boy—eight or nine at most. Already at that age he looks like life has beaten him down. If he knows how to smile, Issa doesn’t see it. This boy is soft. He lacks the rough unruliness boys his age possess. He is not ever going to get in fistfights and make his old man proud. Which is why the father treats the kid as he does. The man wants to unsoften the boy. And suddenly Issa wants Nasser to really hurt this man. Just plain flatten him. In fact, all the bitterness of the past several years funnels into this moment, and he recalls, for the umpteenth time, his flight from New York City back to Iran, a country he had not seen for over a decade—his crime a few street-bought antianxiety pills that turned up during a random search at a train station, which in turn became a ridiculous charge of drug possession by a noncitizen.
Then a one-way ticket east. To here. To this corner of Jomhuri and Hafez.
“Son.” Nasser addresses the little boy gently. “Is this man your father?”
The boy nods.
“Let go of his hand and go stand to the side for a minute, by those nice policemen.”
The man finally gets it. Amazingly, he actually lets go of the boy’s hand. But then he says, “I’m going to go right back into your store and get you fired.”
“You can try. Nothing will come of it. I’m their best salesman. They don’t fire good salesmen. And where do you think you are, Germany? This is Tehran, you idiot.”
The man now looks in Issa’s direction as if wanting confirmation of all this, and Issa gives it. “He’s not going to get fired for ruining your face. He might go to jail for two days or two weeks, but he’ll have his job when he comes back out. And he’ll find you again.”
“What do you guys want from me?”
“Not to hit the boy.”
Before the man has a chance to say that it is not anyone’s business, Nasser adds, “Everything is my business. Your kid especially.”
Issa watches, listens. The father is the embodiment of all the things that are wrong with all of them. The man’s greasy hair no doubt smelling of onions and the sulfurous reek of yesterday’s kebab. The entire thing happens in less than five minutes. The policemen who have had enough amusement and must return to their clogged traffic finally intervene. They’re not going to let Nasser beat this guy. Nasser’s hands are far too heavy and relentless; everyone on Jomhuri Avenue knows this. It will be ugly. They agree that, instead, Issa must accompany the two-bit tyrant to one of the back alleys off Hafez, below the new monster mall that only sells cell phones. What is planned there is anybody’s guess. A chat perhaps. Or an exchange of money that Issa will then give to the cops for their time and trouble and, supposedly, looking out for the boy. But Ali the lockpick is there, like always. So is the one-eyed war vet who runs a discount grill from the back of his blue truck for the neighborhood drug addicts. And, of course, the addicts themselves, crazy-eyed, subdued, and hollow-cheeked.
This is where I shipped myself back to?
And then he applies what he knows best, a bone-crushing front kick to the man’s knee. It is the definition of precision, this kick, which he first learned from his old man thirty years earlier when he was a nine-year-old boy watching his father run a Shotokan karate academy below their two-bedroom apartment in the working-class district of Monirieh. But there’s nothing heroic in what Issa has done, and he knows it. The blow is mostly an expression of frustration. Still, it feels good when the man buckles and Issa tells one of the junkies to come up and give the fool a slap on the back of the head. “How does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change, gaav, you dumb cow?”
Later he tells Nasser, “We didn’t do that boy any favors. You realize this, don’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“That no-good bastard will take it out on the kid.”
Nasser considers this. “How bad did you hurt him?”
“I think I broke his leg. Maybe.”
“You know how to fight?”
“My father ran a karate school in Monirieh. I grew up around that stuff.”
“It actually works? Karate, I mean.”
“It did today.”
Nasser sighs. “I wish we’d taken his address. You really think he’ll hurt the boy?”
“He’ll think twice about humiliating the kid in public from now on. That’s something.”
“Really? That’s enough?”
“It’s never enough.”
His violence had been juvenile, he knew. But you simply had to believe sometimes—believe you could be doing a lot worse than the bad you’d already harvested. That was what he’d done when they’d told him he could hire a lawyer and beat the flimsy charge against him so he could remain in America. It had taken all of two seconds to decide he didn’t want a lawyer and he didn’t want to stay. Why all the fuss? He had been working the night shift in a hotel for the last eight years. Everyone he worked with was an immigrant like him. Chinese, African, Eastern European, Latin—all of them hustling for the next two-dollar tip on a four-hundred-dollar-a-night room. Maybe there was a transcendent story of emigration and success somewhere on the horizon, but Issa hadn’t found it yet and wanted no part of it now. His rent was too high—that was what mattered. His overpriced rat-trap hole-in-the-wall walk-up in the Bronx.
No. Sometimes there simply was no story of triumphing elsewhere in the world. Home was where one belonged, even if home was shit. And a decade had been more than enough for the flower of disillusion to turn into a forest.
Besides, work the graveyard shift for six months and even the air you take in begins to feel different; work it for eight years and you turn into a sleepwalker prone to seeking a cornucopia of deadening medicines. It was those meds that had gotten him thrown out of America, and he was not ungrateful for it. He’d gone back to the furnished, fully paid-for apartment that he’d shared with his dead father and dead brother in Monirieh and begun from zero, again. Besides selling washing machines, he slowly made up for the loss of the university job by teaching English courses and the conversational Spanish he’d picked up through years of working in hotels alongside Central Americans. Nowadays he taught in one of the better private language institutes in the city. The pay wasn’t bad and his apartment was, after all, his own. He wasn’t lacking. He didn’t have love—true—but he was working on it.
• • •
He rolled the window down. It was four in the morning and the desert air between the airport and the city smelled like desperation. He thought of all the men and women, himself included, who had tried their luck at being elsewhere in the world, all of them taking this same road to the airport and eventually being turned back from one country or another, penniless and broken—statuses denied, work permits not renewed, lives gone from nothing to nowhere.
The monumental Imam Khomeini shrine, just past the tollbooths at the threshold of the city, had a crushing presence at that hour. He was scared of the place and drawn to it at the same time. It had nothing to do with the larger-than-life fellow who was buried there and after whom the adjacent airport was named; rather, it was the sense that you could build sacredness out of nothing—one day there would be mud and dust in a place in the middle of nowhere, and a few years later pilgrims from the four corners of the earth would be flocking to those fresh minarets and domes, weeping as if this were a place as old as the stories of Hagar and Abraham.
He could not quite fathom any of this except to maybe pay some homage. Not quite a believer, and not quite enjoying the luxuries of disbelief either.
Nasser said, “I still don’t understand what’s in Beirut for you.”
“The possibility of love.”
“You are a donkey.”
He wasn’t going to argue the point. Nasser would not understand if he tried to explain that the love he sought was tied up in something as baroque as literary translation. The firehouse captain would simply call Issa a donkey again. How to explain to a guy like Nasser that you could actually give up years of martial arts practice for literature’s sake. It was futile. Issa’s grandfather had been a Shia cleric who had walked all the way from down south in the Lorestan province to Tehran. He had written books of Islamic Sharia law in Arabic that Issa still kept in Monirieh but had not been able to read until just a few years ago. His generation no longer had command of the Holy Book—it was like having a limb cut off, part of one’s self gone. So during all those years of the graveyard shift at the hotel when there were crawling hours of free time, he’d sat down to steep himself in the language of the Koran, in America of all places. Not because he had faith, but in fact because he did not have it. The immigrant life mostly took from you, just milked you dry. But if you learned the ways of another place, you might take a little back. America had not been ungenerous that way, even if it had eventually kicked him out. He had even started to take graduate courses toward another useless college degree while sleepwalking the daylight hours far from the hotel.
In Arabic he recited, “The beloveds are those whom we do not gaze upon.”
Nasser cursed under his breath. “You go to Beirut for four days and you can’t speak Persian anymore? What is it you mumbled?”
Issa told him.
“You really are a donkey.”
“Brother Nasser, those words were translated by a woman whom I wish to love.”
“When did you meet her?”
“I haven’t. Not yet.”
Nasser shook his head, exasperated. “Look, we have a fight tonight. Correction: I have a fight. You are there for backup, in case those fatherless whores decide to jump me. Here.” He reached across the dashboard, brought out a small pouch, and told Issa to open it. “Take that box cutter in there. If they decide to go with weapons, they’ll use daggers. They always do in Zamzam, those rotten lowlifes. But we’re not going to use daggers. All right? Just box cutters.”
“Nasser, you want me to watch your back in a place like Zamzam against people with daggers with only a box cutter? Have you lost your mind?”
“No, it’s you who has lost his mind. This so-called beloved of yours is in Beirut?”
“I think so.”
“So you don’t even know where she is? She probably lied.”
Yes, it appeared that she had. And who she was, Issa still had no idea. He’d been catching her periodic translations from Arabic into Persian in one of the literary journals. But when he contacted the magazine, no one seemed to know who this translator was. There was only an email address. He had written and she replied immediately. Her name was Maysa. From Beirut. So, just as Nasser said, like a fool he’d gone there to try to find her. But the address she’d given in the Dahieh district in south Beirut didn’t exist. ...
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