Love and Death in Iran
Love is a cycle of contractions, rich with lance-split heart, flushed with boom and bust. My blind love had required of me a description of light and darkness. But then I felt the impulse to commit a crime, a crime of heart.
The phone call came at around 1 PM when I was teaching - a graduate course on global diplomacy at Tehran University as a visiting professor. Mrs. Javadi the department secretary hesitantly knocked on the door to alert me about a "very urgent call" for me. Some of my students seemed delighted by the interruption, perhaps finding me boring or too Westernized, i.e., the hermenutics of suspicion. I told them to review a book chapter and that I would be right back, never fathoming it was the last time I saw them, rushed to my office and picked up the phone the moment it rang. A male voice in a thick serious tone first asked for my name and then inquired if I knew Hannah Hoffman? I said I did and asked why? He told me he was a deputy chief police officer in Isfahan and they had arrested Hannah, who had left me three days before for a photo shoot in Isfahan, for attempted murder.
"Attempted murder?! Are you serious?! Murdering who?"
His answer was even more shocking, "An elderly lady here. Did you know that your friend carried a hand gun with her?" Of course, I didn't and couldn't believe my ears. I asked if I could talk to her and he firmly said no. The only option was to hurry to Isfahan a half day away. After hanging up the phone, I dialed the secretary and asked her to cancel my afternoon classes. Then I took a taxi to the bus station and boarded the first one for Isfahan, with my head jammed with so many questions begging for an answer.
During the bus ride on that hot autumn day, I had to put up with a constant baby crying behind me, wishing at one point to just grab and throw it out the window, and, worse, a repulsive onion-breath worker sitting right next to me and lamenting the drought in Isfahan devastating its riverbed and its harvests, pretending to be listening while my mind revisited all that I knew about Hannah, i.e., she was a perfectly enchanting woman in every respect, an award-winning photo journalist visiting Iran on a German magazine's assignment and we had met three weeks earlier at a mutual friend's house party, hitting it off instantly, partly because of our shared experiences in international travel, particularly in East Africa, where I was involved once in some UN peace efforts, and speaking German, French, and English with each other. She had shown me photos of her tiny house (in the community village Margarethenhohe) in Essen, with a little garden behind, and a lawn as big as a pocket-handkerchief in front. We had spent time touring the Niavaran Palace and the rug museum, among other places, and then I took her for a few days excursion to the Kish island in Persian Gulf, pretending to be married so that we could share the same hotel room, putting on a couple of fake rings to convey a married couple's impression, and laughing about it. "What happens if we get caught?" She asked. “I've heard about the Evin Prison.” I casually answered, "Nothing, probably stoned to death for adultery -- just kidding don't worry." We spent romantic evenings, making love passionately and rapidly falling for each other, to the point that I confessed my love for her that last evening strolling by the beach side and enjoying a bonfire before the clouds piled up in the sky moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals, running back to the hotel and taking shelter under a massive tree kissing each other like mad lovers; I loved kissing her full lips, told her once "your lips silently promise to keep me happy" to which she quickly reacted, "and what about when my lips are not silent?"
"They speak in coded words: We always keep our promise," I laughingly responded. "Oh, you're a flesh reader Professor," she teased.
The bus made a half-way stop at a roadside traditional restaurant and I treated myself with some rice and kebab yet with a head somewhere else, tapping into my memory bank, now recalling that she had an ugly scar on her right thigh from an accident a long time ago, but didn't want to talk about it. We watched a couple of episodes of popular TV show, Game of Thrones, on her laptop and she educated me all there was to know about the cast of characters, particularly the anti-hero, Cresei, her rogue sexuality, viciousness and constantly scheming. I played my favorite Persian song, the melancholic yet inspirational Gole Yakh (the ice flower) by Koorsh Yaghmai, for her and she instantly loved it and asked me to play it again and again and translate every word of it. Through a waiter we managed our hands on an old bottle of red wine and finished it at the beach, drinking from the bottle only when there was no one around while listening to Cold Play on her cell, basking in the glory of being transgressors of local restrictions. There is always something liberating about being a rebel. A la Les Bacchantes (Roman God of wine and intoxication), she sounded after finishing the last sip, then stood and showed me how she can turn into a derviche tourneur (whirling dervish), forcing me to join her, inevitably attracting some attention until a life guard showed up and warned us to leave before we got into real trouble. She found the island, a western oasis built primarily for Iran's budding bourgeoisie with its fancy malls and plush hotels, "extraordinarily interesting" and her only lament was losing her summer hat to blowing wind on a pleasure boat; on the boat, we met a group of young musicians who had fled Tehran over their underground music and were in hiding at the island; partly because of their subversive lyrics and partly due to their embrace of Buddhism -- they referred to the boat in Buddhist term, kari no yadori (temporary dwelling). "Buddha is cool, doesn't guilt trip you over your sins," one of them explained to Hannah, who had been to Tibet monasteries and certainly knew more about that eastern religion than me and most if not all of those young souls; one of them, his first name Amir, was a talented singer whose uncle was the captain, a grubby old man mildly reminding me of Zorba the Greek, who worked them hard as the crew and, yet when we were sufficiently out in the sea, softened up and let those kids play live music for us, much to the chagrin of some conservative tourists who disapproved of their "decadent" behavior, but not Hannah who simply couldn't take enough picture of them, wondering aloud if those kids had any bright future in the country? I gave them a nice tip at the end, appreciative of the odds they faced in Iran's restrictive post-revolutionary system at odds with its modern civil society. On the way back at the airport, I purchased a small silk rug and a miniature painting for Hannah, and she was hesitant to accept them but I finally convinced her. On the plane, she told me for the first time that she was seriously thinking of taking up my suggestion of a much longer stay. Hannah had a minor degree in philosophy, from the prestigious Heidelberg University, and bragged about her honor thesis on the subject of David Hume's aesthetics and modern photography. To my delight, she was quite well-read, carried a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in her purse, and was also a movie buff like me, rather amazed by my knowledge of new wave German cinema, although we disagreed on the merits of Werner Fassbinder's films, not to mention my personal friendship with the great German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, who was once my professor at Boston College and who had also made a visit to Iran several years ago with some help from me. Walter Benjamin was Hannah's favorite author and I impressed her by my deep knowledge of Benjamin and the rest of the Frankfurt School (of social theory), above all Horkheimer and Adorno.
"I never thought I'd be discussing the Frankfurt School, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Erich Fromm in Tehran, or the subtle connections between photography and aesthetic philosophy; I 'm not a typical narrow-minded German woman you know," she chuckled once and then wondered if the return of religion in Iran met the definition of "negative dialectic?" I limited my response by citing Hegel: What Enlightenment declares to be an error is the same thing as Enlightenment itself. “Who knows? The signal of a new history may come from Iran, but the revolution is still young and it's too early to tell.” She thought I was sounding “too Hegelian.” She tested me, "Why don't philosophers make good lovers?" I didn't know the answer and she laughingly said "it's because their real orgasm comes from the mind not their bodies." In response I posed the question, "why do women make better kissers than men?" She wondered why and I said, "they have softer lips, of course, but harder tongues." She disagreed on the last part and we kissed tongue to tongue to prove who is right. It was a draw. We also covered a lot of ground talking about each other's background and she asked me what I thought about the United States, where I had spent most of my adulthood. "It's a rich country but poor intellectually, reeking of intellectual poverty. There is almost no genuine intellectual around, just a few dying breed with no replacement, which in turn makes it dreadfully boring and uninteresting. Besides, America is founded on a grand property theft, from the natives, not to mention centuries of slavery and segregation.." She thought that was a sign of my "petulance" and asked if Iran was any better? I was curious over the German word for petulance and she answered, "Greiztheit, although I prefer the French, irritabilite. But I still love your toxic negativity." I said I simply didn't know if Iran was any better or worse, had been in the country only a precious few months and hadn't seen much being bogged down with teaching a full load, nor had I paid much attention to Iranian intellectuals, since I just wanted to get away from the "boring US where you have a million colleges and universities and just a trickle original thinkers." Hannah had visited the US a couple of times, was very fond of New York and San Francisco and disagreed with my negative assessment, prompting me to ask if she preferred US to Europe and of course she didn't, but nevertheless she was keenly interested in the SoHo subculture and the "community of artists in lower Manhattan." What did I know about artists, always saw them as strange creatures roaming around for a perfect place to jump to their death. Laughing in response, she called me a Kantian launisch (man of humors). Didn't Kant find that as the indispensable condition for "perfect man?" I asked.
"Wow, you've read the Critique of Judgement? Je suis vraiment impressionné." She then asked me who was my favorite poet and I simply said, "Hafez, who else?" Hannah was not familiar with Iran's greatest poet and asked me to recite a line from him; I did. "Go sweep out the chambers of your heart/None dies whose heart by love is ever living." To my delightful surprise, she knew another Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, rather well and immediately recited the line that fit a nihilist streak in her.,
“Tis but a day we sojourn here below,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe,
Then, leaving our life's riddles all unsolved,
And burdened with regrets, we have to go.”
She then asked me, "Did you get on well with your father?" I told her that my dad was extremely old-fashioned and, being the only child, was intent on infusing all his values into my head "with little success" until the day he died several years ago. But I always wore the watch that he gave me for my college graduation; we somehow didn't get to talk much about our respective mothers; Hannah's mom was a retired social worker who had remarried and lived far away from her; my mother, a school teacher for years, had passed away less than a year after my dad's passage, perhaps hoping to reunite with him.
Those lengthy chit chats, zigzagging randomly from the philosophical to mundane, to purely banal, simply added to the magical sparks of our moments together, We had made some tentative plans to go to a resort in Caspian Sea after her return from Isfahan, and in her voice message of the day before, she had expressed her great desire to take photos of Iran's green mountains around the Caspian, ending with "Ich Vermisse Dich. Ich kann nicht aufhoren an dich zu denken." (I miss you. I can't stop thinking of you); I had texted her back, "Du bist wirklich etwas Besonderes.Du bist an sonnenschein." (You're really something special, a sunshine). Her response text was "Ich verbringer wirklich gerne Zeit mit dir. Du bist immer so nett." (I really appreciate the time with you, always so nice). Hence, I had not noticed anything out of the ordinary about her, except an occasional vacant stare indicating some anxious thoughts, which I innocently attributed to her presence in a strict Muslim country, if not a tinge of her Camusian character, and, consequently, I was fully convinced that whatever the charges against her were entirely bogus and she would be returning to Tehran with me in a day or so. I was badly mistaken.
Following the address given to me by that police officer, within minutes of arriving in Isfahan around 10 pm I was talking to a plainclothes head detective at a police station; his name was Naseri and by all indications he was equally surprised by Hannah's strange behavior.
"Please tell me. What has she done?"
"Your friend went to a lady's home and tried to kill her but luckily the gun malfunctioned and didn't fire the bullet. She then ran out and was apprehended." I was speechless and my jaw dropped. Detective Naseri asked me how well I knew Hannah and I answered, "We know each other for only a couple of weeks. I am totally shocked. I don't understand. She told me she's coming here to take some pictures, that's all." then I ventured a word about my academic credential, to dispel any suspicion of foul play on my part. "I'm well aware of your background, Professor," Nasseri replied. "She's my responsibility now, at least for a while. So, tell me, how did the two of you meet?"
"We met at a friend's house party and Miss Hoffman was there because she knew my friend's fiancé, Zhila, from Germany. Zhila was full of praise about her as a well-known artist who had won a few awards for her photos taken from around the world, especially the conflict zones. Her works have been in some museum exhibitions. I've seen them through her personal website."
After reflecting on my answer for a moment, Nasseri handed me a paper to fill with all the facts about Hannah known to me "from A to Z" adding "it's pure routine. There are some sheep who can turn into wolves instantly." I gave him a cold reply and then after narrating everything down, minus any mention of the Kish trip, for all the obvious reasons, handed it to him; he confined himself to a quick "fine" after glancing at it. I then asked if I could talk to her and Naseri said she was on her way from a women's detention center and would take a little while. I then exited his office and paced back and forth in the hallway deep in anxious thoughts, asking myself if Hannah was a spy or even an assassin and, if so, should I curse myself for being duped so easily like yet another (over) sentimental Middle Easterner with an inherent knack for self-destruction? Is it because of our inflated egos? Why is the damn light of love always blinking in the right direction? I tried to distract myself by the sight of a half dozen young men, including a boy who could not have been older than thirteen, smoking and chatting with each other about who had started a fight, i.e., a case of friendship gone sour. An hour or so later, they brought her in and we talked in a room in the presence of Naseri and two other police officers. "Tell her we're not here to harm her; we just want to talk," Nasseri said as she was entering. Hannah gave me a sad smile and looked every bit as distraught as me, as if she had suddenly aged three years in the space of three days. I wished I could hug her and hold her hands, but couldn't.
“Are you alright?” I asked her.
“I'm okay,” she said softly, tucking her hair under her head scarf. "I'm feeling a bit tired, that's all." I tried a psychological affect by replying, "Same here, Nicht so good. it's been a long day," and then, pointing at the red spots on her arms, asked, "What's that?"
"It's an allergic reaction." But then suddenly her face changed. It softened a bit, obviously relieved to see me there.
"They say you tried to kill a woman, is that true? I beg you to believe that, if you're innocent of this monstrous accusation, you can do yourself nothing but good by speaking openly and without fear." She rolled down her beautiful green eyes and whispered "Yes, it's true" and then sighed deeply and moved her shoulders uneasily as if her clothes prickled them.
"But why?! I can't believe it."
"Ask her how she got the gun?" Naseri ordered me in Farsi and I obeyed.
"I smuggled it in through my luggage, wrapped it inside my perfume box," she answered. "I knew it was a risk, but had to take it."
"But why? Please tell me."
"Because of my dad," she replied in a voice so muffled that I had to strain my ears to hear her.
"Your dad? I thought he's dead."
"Yes he is," Hannah said and then with a sad face looked into my eyes and added, "she killed him -- through her deceit."
At that moment, my mind raced back to one of our late night conversations that included a brief description of her late father as a kind family man who died of cancer in Belgium, no mention of him visiting or staying in Iran, obviously a big omission on her part. "When I was a child, he took me to Keith Jarret's concert in Berlin. He loved American Jazz," her words rang in my head, as did her rather spontaneous uttering one night, "Deception cheats, robs, and damages others." We had then talked about legitimate anger and I had reminded her of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics: To be angry with the right person, to the right degree, is not easy. Obviously, she had no difficulty with this particular case.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you, I couldn't."
"Did you use me then to get a family revenge?" I almost asked her but decided to postpone it until I had a full grasp of her motive, knowing that it would throw her into a fever. She asked for a glass of water and after drinking it had a deep sigh and, still looking exhausted, furnished the truth.
"My dad was a contractor and worked for a German-Iranian company building a hotel here right before the revolution. During that time, he started an affair with a lady who worked as a secretary of sorts for them, not knowing she was married. When the revolution happened and my dad was preparing to leave the country, suddenly that lady accused my dad of rape and he was arrested and kept in jail for 4 years, The new government after the revolution upheld his conviction sadly and my dad spent time at a prison here in Isfahan, sending us letters with his pencil drawings of the prison and the street life from his cell window. He was good at it. I've put up a few of them on my Facebook, you should look them up. Anyway, he found out that woman was playing him all along with her husband for a ransom and my dad's family finally came up with a big figure that convinced her to drop her complain and then he came back and went straight to a Belgian hospital for his colon cancer -- he was disgusted with the German government's inaction and didn't want to step foot there anymore -- but it was too late and he died shortly thereafter. In his death bed, I pledged to him to get revenge, and that's the real reason I came to Iran, I am sorry." She then sneezed a couple of times and brought her explanation to a close with a rather firm voice, "Tranen sind nich die einzige waffe einer Frau" (tears are not a woman's only weapon).
I was completely floored by what I had just heard from Hannah's mouth and my immediate reaction was if she had any real feelings for me or it was all fake? After all, just ten days earlier, I had assisted her with extending her visa.
"No, don't say that Ali. At first, that was the case, but after our Kish trip, I really started to fall in love with you, which is why I didn't shoot her." She said with an unmistakable frank voice.
"But they say the gun didn't fire, is that a lie?"
She frowned a little. "Yes. It is. I swear I was so close to pulling the trigger and then the only thing that prevented me was you, your face in my head begging me not to do it for our sake." She then started crying and held her head in her hands lowered to her chest. I was dumbfounded for a second but then brought myself to pat her on the back and to tell her, "I'm glad you didn't. It's okay. Everything will be alright," and then added with a touch of humor, "Du hast dir jetzt eine Umarmung verdient.Wir müssen die Reise zur hellen Mitternacht antreten. " (right now you need a hug. We must take the journey to the bright midnight); the last line was from one of her favorite songs by the American band, the Doors; it brought a trickle of smile on her face, stopped crying. "Don't worry. You didn't kill anyone, no one is hurt, that's easy to prove," I comforted her.
Of course this wasn't an easy matter, Hannah had gotten herself into a terrible little pickle, and, as expected, that evil woman had immediately pressed charges against Hannah for attempted murder. They took Hannah back to the detention center after she wrote and signed a statement, and I promised her to do all I can. The next day through one of my colleagues at the university I contacted a criminal attorney in Isfahan and he soon informed me that the only way out for Hannah was to pay off that lady a huge sum of money. I asked him to negotiate her down and a couple of days later, the lawyer brought the good news that she was flexible and would drop the complaint for ten thousand dollars, which I immediately procured to him the next day; sadly, he was the only one who could visit her in prison. Still, Hannah was not entirely out of the woods yet and the illegal possession of a hand gun and smuggling it into the country were even more serious charges that could potentially land her in jail for several years. As I had feared, detective Nasseri soon found out about the Kish trip -- by checking the photos on Hannah's camera -- and summoned me to his office and yelled at me, threatening to put me in jail for lying to the police. Luckily, he didn't and limited himself to scolding me, without taking any further action, perhaps because of my status and connections and or out of pure pity, not to mention his use of Hannah's photos of those runaway musicians to alert the local authorities about them and take credit -- "so sad," I reacted in my head, wondering if those young souls were now blaming us for their predicament?
Nasseri profusely refused any monetary gift and broke into an angry torrent of moralizing speech, "I'm not like the rest of the world my friend, just don't do it again or I'll book you for trying to bribe a police officer, are we clear?"
"My apology; quite clear."
Irrespective of Nasseri's refusal, I still ended up bribing a prison warden to keep Hannah from being transferred to Tehran, where she would likely end up as a "potential foreign terrorist" in a solitary regardless of the truth of the matter, in which case it would be doubly difficult to get her out soon. The news of Hannah's arrest had reached the media and I evaded a couple of reporters' query calls. I certainly didn't want any adverse publicity and asked another professor at my department to take over my classes for a few days, using the excuse of a personal illness. I also called Zhila and her fiancé and told them everything, hoping that they could assist somehow, but as much as they worried for Hannah they said their hands were tied and couldn't do anything; I was a bit disappointed at their inaction and attributed it to their wariness of any potential backlashes, given Zhila's repeated "be careful, this is Iran, not Paris or New York." Obviously they had no clue about how far Hannah and I had gone in that short space of time and I chose not to get into the details; Hannah too was disappointed when she called one evening, a rare courtesy call she was granted, and learned about Zhila's inaction. I asked her about the conditions in that place and she described it as "barely tolerable, but surprisingly the food is not that bad, a lot of rice and potato cutlet." She also said that she had volunteered to help in the kitchen, had made some friends, including a 16 year old on death row for killing her abusive old husband, asking me if there was anything we could do for her? I said I wish I could but that it was better to focus on her case only; a few days later, I found out that girl had been denied clemency and had been executed, for sure a heartbreak for Hannah. In the course of that telephone conversation, Hannah dropped the bombshell that she was "converting for a change. Prophet Mohammad says, love death so you may live happily and achieve salvation." Understandably, the news of her (temporary) conversion to Shiite Islam surprised me a little bit, although I could see how the creed's unique knack for tragedy hit home with her. Hannah had been raised a Catholic and her favorite Bible quote was one of Paul's Letters: "Not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immortality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy." I told her that mine was "the flood bursts from my eyes," the flood of love! Was she changing religion or simply adding one, I couldn't tell, nor could I rule out the possibility that she was feigning a conversion to Islam for self-protection in a hostile environment or simply donning a new spiritual outfit and throwing the old one away rather whimsically like an unfashionable and outdated robe. "Faith and hypocrisy go hand in hand," I had read somewhere, but clearly this was not the right moment to repeat it! Whatever her real motive, she was clearly savoring the new experience, but for how long? She then recited Goethe's Faust, "The timid maiden mind's deflecting, so that, their guardianship neglecting, they think of their own defense." She muttered something in German about the prison actually being good for her, but refused to repeat it when I asked her to speak louder. Our conversation then turned to her dream of being in Niamey, Niger, again, revisiting the UN refugee camps at the Libyan border after Gadhafi’s downfall, and the beheaded bodies she had encountered in the desert right outside the fenced camps. "I never told you before, but I have some pictures of those gruesome scenes, didn't know that they would come to haunt me in my dreams." I told her to dispose of them at the first opportunity and expected her to agree, but she jolted me with her response after a brief pause. "You know why I haven't, and you're the first one to know this. I kind of like those photos, even enjoyed them, as the quintessential evidence of human barbarism, isn't that terrible?."
She paused and then whispered in the phone, "I was sexually assaulted there by the UN soldiers you know. That's how I got that scar, from a bayonet when I was trying to flee." Pretending that I didn't hear the last part, which was quite disturbing and instantly reinforced my image of her as traumatized and even tragic, I immediately shifted the conversation to my classes, a couple of which I had managed to conduct on the (choppy) internet. She asked me for the nth time to go back to Tehran and to my students, but I assured her that there was no need and I had everything under control -- that turned out to be entirely self-delusional. Absent a self-discipline, and real commitment to my teaching duty, now slipping dangerously close to borderline indifference, I should have known that there would be backlashes at the university and soon I would receive a pink slip from the department chair, Professor Hesabi.
"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.
I was now hostage to Hannah's love, at her beckoning, robotic lover, proxy or slave to her command from the distance: to kill and kill without pity, price of our reunion, obviously a huge condition, but nonetheless one that I had no quarrel with philosophically speaking, as time went by and I descended deeper into the vortex of darkness. "In your inner paradise find a priest to wed you to yourself and wish you eternal happiness," a voice echoes in my head. I am vaguely aware of death lurking outside the window, counting my days ahead, like a patient highway patrol bored with inaction. Vaguely, I stare in the mirror at the stranger staring at me. You were once a familiar face and we shall have friendly chat again, whenever you feel lonely and depressed. Oh my love Hannah, where are you? How much longer should I burn in this hopeless love affair? How long? Where are you my love, my Aspandarmaz? And the hands, what value have these now that they have dipped into the baptism of killing? Oh the miracle of useless hands, as inconsolable as the hands of Babylonian slaves; waitress, a glass of red wine please, make it chateau mouton please; oh, not allowed, what a pity, well maybe next time. Enough of this foolishness. I need a comedy with flutes, sweet or discordant. When did the "I" submerge in the darkness? I need to retrieve it with fire, warmth, memory, in a word, a whole new 'body schema," to borrow from Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. But, the question is how does one perceive a dead body, beautiful or grotesque? Speaking of grotesque, I needed to find out about Hannah's rape by the UN soldiers, most likely from black Africa, how many were there and the whole sensation and terror of it. Would she ever tell me the truth? Probably not. Imagine her bloodied clothes and the ruthlessness of those beastly men! They probably left her in the desert next to those decapitated bodies after they were done, hoping she wouldn't make it; they only scarred her for life.
And then the knock on my door, someone calling my name repeatedly; for a second, I mistook it for daily muezzin's call for prayer from the nearby mosque. Opening the door, I was surprised to see it was none other than detective Nasseri and one of his subordinates, a tall thirty something guy with a thick mustache; clearly, my disheveled appearance jolted them both
"Hello detective. What a surprise, why don't you come in."
"You are a hard man to find professor," Nasseri said as they entered my small dinky hotel room smelling of hashish; I opened the window for a bit of fresh air, even though it was quite cold outside, shivering instantly.
"Well, I'm not teaching anymore."
"I know. News travels fast in this country. Apparently you're not doing a lot of things you used to do," he said as he was situating himself on a chair, took out a cigarette and lighted it. "This is quite a downgrade since the last time I saw you at Pardis Hotel."
"I suppose, but it's less hectic."
"You didn't leave a forwarding address, so we had to check all the hotels throughout Isfahan," his assistant sounded standing by the door. I closed the window and sat on the bed facing them, feeling like a zombie.
"What can I do for you detective -- now that you found me?"
"I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. Where were you three nights ago?"
"Three nights ago? I'm not sure. I think I was right here, haven't left this place for days. Why?"
"Are you sure? Because the front desk says you were out most of the night. Where did you go?"
"You mean three days ago? I honestly don't remember, except maybe I got out for a quick bite. Why?"
Detective Nasseri and his assistant gave a meaningful look to each other before Nasseri put out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table and asked, "Did you go and visit Mrs. Rasooli by any chance, -- you know the old lady that your German friend tried to kill?"
"No, why would I? Has something happened?"
"I'm afraid the answer is affirmative. She was found dead, choked to death by someone."
"Wow. That is shocking. Do you know who did it?"
"That's what we're here to find out."
"What do you mean by that?!" I retorted. "Do you think I had something to do with that? But that's absurd. The idea is laughable."
"Well, absurd or not, we need to get to the truth. After all, we have witnesses who have seen you in that neighborhood a couple of days earlier,"
I shook my head and raised a chorus of protest, "No, no. Are you trying to pin that lady's murder on me now? I told you I have never seen that -- what did you say her name is, was?"
"Mrs. Rasooli. You know very well, who I am talking about, you paid her off through that attorney to let go of the complaint against Mrs., Hoffman, remember?"
"It's Miss Hoffman. Of course. Now I remember. Sorry detective, I'm a bit sick and have been under the weather."
"That's okay. So my next question is what were you doing in her neighborhood? Were you looking for her or was it a pure coincidence? We're told you were standing on a look out not too far away from her house, was that a coincidence?"
I paused for a moment before answering emphatically, "I don't know what you're talking about and what witness came up with that cockamamie story. Coincidence or not, I' ve had nothing to do with Mrs. Rasooli, honestly." Nasseri stared in my eyes and tried to dig deep in my soul by asking, "Are you a devout Muslim?"
"Of course, why do you ask?"
"Because a devout Muslim doesn't lie.”
"I take great exception to such accusation sir. I don't lie."
"Really? Never? Or was it me who forgot to put down the whole escapade in Kish?" Both men then laughed at the obvious contradiction on my part. "Let me ask you directly. Did you kill Mrs. Rasooli?"
I was shocked by his audacity to pose such a loaded, and thoroughly offensive, question to me. I shook my head negatively and then asked them to leave. "You can ask me a hundred times and my answer will always be the same. I was here three nights ago and never saw Mrs. Rasooli. By the way, how did you say she was killed?"
"Someone chocked her to death."
"So someone did a service to humanity, but I promise you I had nothing to do with it. Why would I?"
"Beats me," Nasseri replied. "If you wanted to protect the honor of that woman, maybe you should have taken her as your wife first."
"That's my business," I said firmly, yet he was unrelenting and meaningfully said, "I bet she'll never see you again."
"I repeat. That's my business." That shut him up but only for a second. He asked if I minded them looking around and I said "be my guest" and then watched them search the room. "What's this for?" Nasseri asked, pointing at the hammer he found in the closet. "I don't know, never seen it before. You should ask downstairs." To my sigh of relief, Nasseri put it back and continued searching until his cell phone went off and he gave a full report about me and my condition to the person on the phone, obviously a higher up. "Yeah we checked him thoroughly, No, nothing so far, but don't worry, we'll get to the bottom of it soon." He then got ready to leave and ordered me to stay put. "We want you to stick around, you understand? No going back to Tehran unless you want me to book you for suspicion of murder. Trust me this is better than our joints, isn't it?" He asked rhetorically from his assistant who shook his head immediately with a terse smile etched on his lips. I yawned and threw my hands in the air, for a show of submission. "Well, I wasn't planning to go anywhere, for a while, detective. Strange how the last time you were encouraging me to leave to Tehran. I happen to like Isfahan."
"That was then, it is now an entirely different situation you find yourself in. Besides, I consider myself quite fortunate to have you here, an erudite author of books on world affairs. I looked up one of your books the other day, definitely above my grade. So, tell me, what do you like about Isfahan?"
"I like its clouds, hover above differently."
"I see. You're a changed man Professor, haven't seen anyone change so much so fast. Okay let's go. I'll be seeing you soon. Next time we meet I want straight answers on your whereabouts the night of the murder. Don't think we're not watching you." Then just as he was exiting the door, Nasseri paused for a second before turning around and saying, "Incidentally, you might want to know that your friend's friend Zhila had played a part by locating Mrs. Rasooli. She claims she didn't know the real reason that German lady was looking for her and thought it is something innocent." Repeating the word innocent with a twist of irony, he then laughed and his assistant laughed too and then they left without a goodbye, leaving the door a jar open so I could hear them talking about my "creeping toward suicide" and "I'd be surprised if tomorrow he hasn't hung himself yet." Bemused, I stood and closed the door and returned to the bed, collapsed on it, now telling myself, "So that explains it why Zhila was hesitant to help. She must have been scared bottomless." She and her fiancé Babak, who was a junior faculty in sociology, had visited me a week ago and had treated me to delicious kebab and roasted tomato and onions, as well as Babak's old guitar, to entertain me for an evening, to lift the gloom from my heart, but to no avail; they too had not heard from Hannah and Zhila was rather worried about her. Babak's sudden playing Gole Yakh aggravated my mood however, distinctly reminding me of Hannah and her facial expressions when listening to that beautiful song, and that made me feel worse, without bothering to explain why. No matter how hard they both tried to convince me to return to Tehran, I didn't budge and Zhila had tears in her eyes when they left, but I am now wondering if they have now gotten the wind of that old extortionist's death and harbor any doubt about the identity of the true culprit? Who am I? I don’t recognize myself anymore. My God, did I do it? Did I kill that witch? How come I don't remember? Did I hallucinate everything? I know I plotted it in my head a hundred times, and I ventured in that neighborhood more than once, but how come I have no recollection of anything? And what about that lie about being a devout Muslim. Am I kidding myself? But I need to do something to revive myself through faith. Yes, I must. Maybe I should go to that little mosque around the corner and join the mass prayer, who knows what will happen. Can I be true to my religion when I have nearly stopped believing in God, or even killed him like Nietzsche did?" Why can't I be like Hannah, finding faith as a rescuer from her sea of trouble? Or was it just a passing flirtation with an exotic religion? Is it not worth giving it a shot? What is there to lose, but the shackles of a meaningless existence? With that question, which I found to be both tantalizing and disturbing at the same time, I fell sleep again; a short while later, like someone hit by a brick jolting me, I half raised my body and, looking at the dark sky outside, asked myself an intriguing question. "Did Hannah hire someone to do it? She must have. Who else but ME? No, I don't think so, that's absurd, isn’t it? If I did such a thing, I would remember, wouldn't I?" After a few minutes of vacant stare at the ceiling, I picked up a pen and paper and spontaneously wrote "Out of breath. In my dream, a wise old man reads my palm and then warns me of apocalypse, sufficient turbulence to wake me up dizzy with sweat and fear. God, where is your saving grace? I then notice the clock on my table: 3:45. Is life worth living, and saving? Countless ideas circle my head, like so many wolves smelling blood. I fall sleep again, only to dream I'm a headless scarecrow in the field waving the vultures away, but only for a moment, and each time they grow bolder, hungrier for my flesh rotting under the sun, until finally I close my eyes and bid farewell to the world, feeling the pinch of vultures' bites, until nothing but bones remain and I'm handed a pen again to write my own obituary, with nice self-fulfilling words like 'courage under fire' and loving husband and father, a true patriot. But, wait the ink is out and I now dip it in my own blood, to venture a word of caution: approach death with blinking light, it might issue you a hefty ticket." Finishing writing, I closed my eyes again and went into a peaceful sleep. In the middle of night, however, Nasseri returned in a dream in vengeance. He was interrogating me in his office, with the cuffs pressing against my wrists.
"State your name for the record please."
"My name? But you know my name detective."
"I am asking you again. What is your name?"
"My name is Rodion Romanovich Raskolinkov."
"I will call you rascal, a criminal rascal for short."
"Whatever pleases you detective."
"Your true confession, Professor, or should I say ex-professor?"
"I'm a firm believer in both love and death."
"Splendid. I knew I would finally get the truth out of you. You've gone from a respected academic to a social parasite in a hurry mister. Have you looked at yourself lately?"
"I'm afraid not. Is it that bad?"
"Worse than you think."
"Then it must be pretty bad."
“Book him for murder.”
“I protest. I didn't murder anyone.”
“And what do you call yourself, your former self you butchered, Professor. Book him for life.”
It was late morning when I woke up again, rays of a hot sun pierced through the curtain and burned my face; first thing murmuring under my lips was, "love's the real butcher."
I then immediately emailed that sentence to Hannah, out of a pure intuition that it will somehow trigger a response from her. It did, a case of lovers' telepathy for sure, for to my delightful surprise, she responded an hour or so later, her sole response ever: Die Liebe ist ein Roman des Herzens, dessen Begräbnis nur den Liebenden gehört (Love is a novel of the heart whose burial belongs only to lovers). Her farewell message was all too clear. Spontaneously I signed off on our love story by sending her a short poem, titled After You:
After you, I lost my strength, my cheerfulness and even my pride.
And I forgot the name of my friends.
After you, I lost my life's fragrance, my will to live, the competitiveness and the drive.
But after you I learned the genius of tears and the healing cries.
It was now useless to avoid a confession, I had to liberate myself from the burden of guilt and self-second-guessing, from the indiscrete charm of self-imposed misery, so I finally made it out of the bed and put on some shoes and a jacket to head to the police station and surprise the heck out of Nasseri by admitting that yes, I killed Mrs. Rasooli but not because of Hannah but rather due to my own annoyance with myself -- murder to set my own identity straight, even though I was quite clear that in the end it would prove no more than a panacea for my interminable identity crisis, requiring a steady anchor.
But, it wasn't to be, Half-way to the destination, I heard on the taxi's radio this breaking news -- police had finally cracked the mystery of Mrs. Rasooli's murder by tracing the finger prints to a sociology professor in Tehran, first name Babak. "Both he and his accomplice, his fiancé, are under suspicion that they killed the old lady purely for money they desperately needed to purchase their small unit in Tehran Pars. The money had been wired to them from outside the country."
Right then I was distracted by the sight of a torrential rain landing hard on the windshield, causing the driver and the other passengers to celebrate. Within several minutes, the Zayandehrood River was flowing again, to the delight of every Isfahan and others from out of town, like me, who had made the city my home for a while, not fully knowing why?
"Listen Mister. I changed my mind. Can you take me to the bus station instead?"
"Sure, but it will cost you twice as much."
"Well, in that case just drop me off at the police station."
I had to save Babak's and Zhila's dream house plans, and besides I was spending too much time without food, and Hannah had told me their prison food wasn't that bad after all.
Love's a blip in heart moving often without a chart.
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