Love and Death in Iran Page #5

A modern Dostoevskyian love story set in Iran.

• Drama

								


"What a pity. You ruined it all for a Western lady. What got into you? How am I going to explain this to your students?" Hesabi yelled at me on the phone, without receiving any satisfactory reply from me. “What can I say? It is what it is. I am sorry.” Until then, Hesabi's tone had been friendly. We had exchanged a few pleasantries at a couple of chance encounters in the hall way, but certainly not enough to expect him to back me up after the students' complaints. There was a long pause on the phone before Professor Hesabi gave me the final word on my termination.

But that was a couple of weeks later. From my small hotel room in Isfahan, I worked the phone feverishly and was able to reach out to a couple of high level officials whom I knew from the UN, where I worked for a number of years on peace and conflict issues, and thankfully they were able to assist with getting Hannah out, but only on the condition that she would leave Iran immediately. I picked her up at the entrance of the women prison and took her straight to the airport. She greeted me with a strange vague smile and a somewhat inconsequent manner. A German consular officer had by then arranged all her travel details. Sitting in the back of a taxi, I held her hand and gave her a happy look. She asked if I had been eating since I looked much thinner. I laughed and said, "Well, that's one good thing to come out of this. Come on we should celebrate." Then we both kept silent for a while, with her stoic face looking out at the noisy traffic; it seemed as if the prison experience had diminished her in size, requiring a lengthy recuperation. I said to myself, "Patience Ali. Yours is not strictly a dancing role, comfort her as best as you can."

"It's a beautiful city," she commented as we were passing by a historic monument.

"Yes honey it is. We should return one day and really enjoy it," I ventured in response. "It's really a different city when it rains and the water flows in the river again." And then I tried to entice her with our planned visit to Caspian area -- the fresh mountain air, spectacular sunset scenes, babbling brooks, and peaceful towns and villages, the hospitable locals greeting you in the ethnic tongue -- "there you can retrace the steps of a 3000-year- old history of trading routes," but despite nodding to every word, clearly all she could hear were regrets.

"I wish you had helped that girl, Mina. She was only fifteen sixteen, had been forced to marry a fifty year old when she was thirteen, so sad," Hannah almost whispered without looking at me. I didn't know what to say, except that if I had dished out money for that condemned girl on death row, I wouldn't have had enough to give the warden to keep Hannah from being sent to Tehran. "I'm sorry. There is a lot of fucked up things about this country."

"I washed her body in the morgue you know. No one else was willing to do it. It was riddled with bullets -- even her sweet innocent face.' She had tears in her eyes.

"Oh wow. I can't believe you did that. You're much braver than me. I 'd never have the heart. So, it wasn't by hanging?"

"No. The husband's family wanted her shot -- multiple times. Bastards."

"Such a tragedy. I'm sorry."

Then we both kept silent for a few minutes and then she turned her head slowly toward me and said, "I'm so sorry Ali. Please forgive me. You have no idea how attached I was to my dad and what a toll it took on me and my family what that evil woman did to him. In retrospect, I wish I had pulled the trigger."
"Well, I am not darling. If you had, I would probably never see you again."

"Look Ali. For the sake of clarifying the future of our relationship, I prefer not to be contradictory. I need time to sort things out," she said as we entered the airport area. "But I still love you, will always love you. I can never thank you enough for all that you've done for me, really." I nodded in agreement and yet tried to minimize my role by saying, "don't be silly, I've done nothing," simultaneously asking myself if I was looking at the same woman I knew before the incident, for there were signs of profound transformations about her unmistakable to naked eyes. But, was it all attributable to that short duration of her incarceration? Probably not. "What happened to your watch," she asked me. She had never seen me without it. "I gave it away, it was time for a clean break with my own father," I answered and she confined herself to a meaningful "I see." The car came to a screeching halt at the busy entrance to the international flights. We then had a tearful and emotional farewell and she really appreciated the bag of pistachio she loved so much. After debating in my head, I chose not to sadden her any further by breaking the news of my university expulsion. Maybe I should have. I never saw Hannah again. She never kept her promise to keep in touch, and never replied to any of my emails after emails either, perhaps wanting to put Iran and everything Iranian behind her. Who could blame her. But the fire of her love still burns my heart, just as it did that whole day and night when I returned to the hotel a broken man and sat on a bench lost in my sea of sadness for hours -- I had an inexplicable intuition that it was over. She had an unfinished business and I had inadvertently got in her way; perhaps she expected me to finish the job for her. I would then unwittingly become her hit man, contracted by the covenant of love only, stalking that old lady and then quietly enter her abode and terminate her with prejudice, before emailing Hannah and breaking the news to her, hoping that she would reply. But then again, that would violate my ethical principle of reverence for life, in essence, I needed to stop such foolish fantasies, that filled the void.

Ich vermisse dich, her voice rings in my head.

One day I shall see you and whisper in your ear again, as I did at the Isfahan airport, you're my Aspandarmaz (Zoroastrian goddess of beauty) forever.

Sad and broken, stiffly venturing out my window, and into the void. I'm a black hole within, salvaged only by love, same love that threw me to the void, covered by ambiguity, like a sheet of dust on the windshield -- that can't be wiped clean.

Je ne paux pas arreter de penser a toi!
Loin de toi, c'est la nuit,
C'est la nuit triste et sombre,
Et mon cœur plein d'ennui
S'ensevelit dans l'ombre.

Esclave de cette fatalite miserable!

My mind keeps playing the lines from Gole Yakh:

The ice flower has sprouted in my heart. My eyes are raining in the night.

The fake ring keeps shining into my eyes, and then the flashes of a vicarious death for love's sake; if there is ambiguity in love, there is clarity in death. The question is why are we always dazzled by love's tragedy? Suddenly this question sparked a new discovery in my head: Hannah was trying to impersonate, replicate, Raskolinkov, the anti-hero of Crime and Punishment, which explained all the copious notes on the margins of the book -- I had casually browsed while sitting on the terrace of a Kish hotel enjoying the spectacular oceanic view while Hannah was taking a shower, mildly curious over the sources of her keen interest in Dostoevsky's dark writings. My eyes had stopped on the lines that she had jotted down, “his real motive for murdering the old lady was to mock the absurdity of life” and also "wanted to share God's hidden pleasure as a life-taker!" It suddenly dawned on me that the father's revenge was just a convenient cover for Hannah. Naturally, this prompted me to get my own copy of Crime and Punishment and indulge further and further in that foolish fantasy. I then looked up her dad's prison drawings on her website, all thirty or forty of them, admiring his existential art work, one showing a fruit seller and his boy, another a family of three on a motorcycle, another a car accident, a religious procession, and multiple drawings of pedestrians on the side walk or crossing the hectic street; and then a few days later, I saw Hannah's own pencil drawings from the prison, almost as good as her dad's, but without any street scene, one showing her cellmates and another a figure resembling me pointing a hammer at an old lady shrieking in fear. Her timing, her signal, couldn't be more perfect -- she must have somehow known I am now fully immersed in a Dostoevsky an narrative. What is the life of that stupid, spiteful, consumptive old woman weighed against the common good? Compassionate murder, to kill as an act of pity for the suffering or misfortune of others, a hazardous mission of love! I looked up Hannah's old photos on her Facebook. There she was, loving, beloved, full of the positivism of youth, ravishingly beautiful, immensely resilient.

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