I regard the slope of the roof above me, the sky growing quite dark, and I decide to telephone a najar as well, a carpenter, to give a price for the building of a widow’s walk. I can then refer to this bungalow as Waterview Property, and in the meanwhile, my wife and I may sit together in the early evenings so high on the house and hill, to look out at the sea, and the sky.
THE NAJAR IS a polite young man, not quite thirty years, and he has given to me a price of eleven hundred dollars for the construction of a widow’s walk. We will not be able to enter this from inside the home but must walk outdoors to new stairs in front of the kitchen window in order to reach the roof. There is no other affordable way to construct it, the najar assures me, so I accept this compromise, but I will not inform Nadereh of her window.
This morning, Monday, while my son rides his skateboard down the hill of Bisgrove Street to explore the town of Corona in the sunshine, I spend time here in my new room organizing it as an office, and I have no time to waste. As soon as I rid my desk of all unnecessary papers and boxes I begin immediately to write an advertisement for the sale of this house. I study the language used in other realty advertisements of the town’s newspaper, and I use the same for my own, yet I do not feel I am qualified to name a price. So many of the homes advertised sound no larger or more well-maintained than this bungalow, and they are in “quiet residential areas” as well, but the prices for these homes are well over one hundred seventy thousand dollars. My fingers begin to shake; I am once again in amazement at the low price I paid for the home and I imagine if I could sell for even one-fifty I would more than triple my investment. Outside my door and down the hallway, Nadi works in the living-room area. From time to time I am able to hear her voice as she speaks to herself. It is a habit she has always possessed and I am pleased to hear it for it only comes when she is deeply involved with a project or task of some kind.
Early this morning she rose from her bed with the rest of us, her son and I. She for us prepared toast and tea, and when she poured for me I thanked her and she said: “Haheshmeekonam, Behrani,” which is the proper response, though I have never cared for her using my family name when addressing me. When we were younger she called me Massoud-joon or, often, Mass. But for many years now—since the revolution I am quite certain—my Nadi has called me Behrani. One evening in our large apartment in Paris, on the Right Bank of that dirty but beautiful river the Seine, Nadi had a long telephone conversation with one of her sisters in Tehran. After hanging up she began immediately crying. I gave her a few moments of solitude, then I went to comfort my wife but she pushed me away and yelled very loud in Farsi she should have never married me, a kaseef soldier! None of her family were forced to leave the country; theirnames were not upon a death list,just herbecause she married meand the filthy kaseef air force and it is all your fault, Behrani! Our country is ruined because of you,you and your SAVAK friends!
It was then I hit my wife very hard across the face with my open hand and she fell to the floor and lay there crying, “Man meekham bemiram.” I want to die, she wept. I want to die.
Of course I would not have let her stay upon the carpet in that fashion if our son was in the home, but Esmail was playing in the streets with his young French friends, so I allowed Nadereh to lie upon her face and weep. Because she was quite wrong of my involvement with the secret police, SAVAK. I had very little to do with any of their affairs. And of course she before never complained of all our privileges; she never complained of the maids and soldiers she used for the upkeep of our home; she never complained of the skiing trips in the mountains to the north, or of our bungalow there overlooking the Caspian in Chahloose; she never complained of the fine gowns she was able to wear at the parties of generals and judges and lawyers and famous actors and singers; she never complained when on a Sunday afternoon I would order Bahman to drive our family to the finest movie house in Tehran and of course there would be a long queue of people waiting, but I was dressed in my uniform so we never waited, we never even paid; we were ushered up to the balcony reserved for the Very Important People, away from the crowd. And yes, I often saw fear behind the smiles of these theater managers as they bowed and led us personally to our seats, and yes, no one waiting upon the sidewalk outdoors dared make a complaint I may hear; but there was no blood on my fingers. I purchased fighter jets. I was not with SAVAK.
But there were moments in my career I had spent time with these men. In the final years, every Thursday evening, five or six of we senior officers would meet at General Pourat’s home for vodka and mastvakhiar. And how I have wished for that sort of company today. At the high-rise of pooldar Persians in Berkeley I attempted to organize some of the men together for an occasional evening, but these young doctors and engineers have spent so many of their years being educated in the west they do not even know the proper way to drink with each other like men; they do not know that the oldest and most experienced in the room is the saghi, that he, and only he, holds the vodka bottle and he will fill, or not fill, those cups around him. Each Thursday evening at Pourat’s, he, of course, was the saghi. In his large home a soldier would escort us to the den where we gentlemen would remove our shoes at the doorway, and we would sit in a circle on the dark red carpet from Tabriz. In winter, there was a fire burning in the tall stone fireplace behind us. Two or three musicians and a singer would stand in the far corner softly playing songs more than a thousand years old and still only a third as old as our country. Hanging on the east wall was a long woven tapestry of Hazrat Abbas and his holy companions charging down the sand hill of Karbala, racing to the thousands of enemy soldiers who would yield them to martyrdom.
And in front of each of us was placed a small earthen cup, relics from Pourat’s family in Isfahan. A box of long Havana cigars lay closed, for we never smoked until our host did first, nor did we dip our two fingers into the chaser, as Americans might call it, the bowl of mastvakhiar—that wonderful sour yogurt mixed with bits of cucumber—that moment would not come until after our first drink of cold Russian vodka, which Pourat would pour as soon as he entered in a smoking jacket, silk pants, and fine Parisian socks. He was a handsome man, khosh teep, and bald with wide shoulders and a flat belly. Of course we would stand, but Pourat would wave us back to the floor and he would make a joke about one of us, something he may have heard that week at Mehrabad, and we always laughed at Pourat’s jokes, not out of respect, but because he was truly an amusing man. Sometimes he would tease one of the younger or more ambitious men by passing his cup over while pouring the very first drink, something a saghi rarely did, for the main purpose of a saghi is to keep a man from drinking more than he is able. The young senior officer with the empty cup might lower his head out of shame, his face a reddened study in concentration as he attempted to remember how he may have insulted the general. But then Pourat would laugh quite loudly, as would the rest of us, and he would pour the vodka for the relieved and smiling young man, then fill all our cups.
When we toasted our health, each man, including Pourat, attempted to tap his cup beneath those of the others, which is a true sign of respect in Persia. “Man nokaretam,” we say, meaning: I am your servant. And of course each man wants to honor another more than himself, if it is truly deserved, so he will not allow his cup to stay higher when they touch; he will instantly lower his cup to the bottom of the other man’s as if to say, “No, I am yourservant.” But the other will sometimes insist by lowering his again and more than once I have seen grown men lower their cups in this fashion, each after the other all the way to the floor, then stand to fistfight over who respects whom the most. But at Pourat’s this would never occur. We prided ourselves on being not simply high officers, but Persian gentlemen as well.