Tehran at Twilight PDF
Preview Tehran at Twilight
SALAR ABDOH TEHRAN AT TWILIGHT %n • I % fCV ’•'** * *1 *• A remarkable meditation on violence, and on all the ways one bears witness to pain. Abdoh depicts a pulsating portrait of Tehran ... A smart, eloquent novel." —Dalia Sofer, author of The Septembers of Shiraz The year is 2008. Reza Malek’s life is modest but manageable—he lives A* in a small apartment in Harlem, teaches “creative reportage” at a local university, and is relieved to be far from the blood and turmoil of Iraq and Afghanistan where he worked as a reporter, interpreter, and sometime lover for a superstar journalist who has long since moved on to more remarkable men. After a terse phone call from his best friend in Iran, Sina Vafa, Reza reluc- tantly returns to Tehran. Once there, he finds far more than he bargained for: the city is on the edge of revolution; his friend Sina is embroiled with Shia militants; his missing mother, who was alleged to have run off with a lover before the revolution, is alive and well— while his own life is in danger. Against a backdrop of corrupt clerics, shady fixers, political repression, and the ever-present threat of violence, Abdoh offers a telling glimpse into contemporary Tehran, and spins a compelling morality tale of identity and exile, the bonds of friendship, and the limits of loyalty. TEHRAN AT TWILIGHT Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/tehranattwilightOOOOabdo TEHRAN AT TWILIGHT by SALAR ABDOH This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Published by Akashic Books ©2014 Salar Abdoh ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-292-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938793 All rights reserved First printing Akashic Books Twitter: @AkashicBooks Facebook: AkashicBooks E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.akashicbooks.com Thanks to David Unger for everything. This novel is dedicated to the memory of Hannan Dekel (b. Ostrow Mazowiecka, 1927; d. Haifa, 1993), a Tehran Child. MALEK H e’d spent the weekend at a think tank near Du¬ pont Circle in DC with an array of retired Ameri¬ can military types and political science professors in and out of government service. Now, on the 1:05 a.m. train back to New York City, Reza Malek, who had once seen an angry crowd pull a man out of a Baghdad liquor shop and set him on fire, sat in a nearly empty car nurs¬ ing a poorly hidden bourbon minibottle out of his lap¬ top case, his hands slightly shaking and his mind edgy with the recollection of someone’s blown-up face. The rattle of his cell phone brought a bit of relief. “I need you here for something.” It was Sina Vafa, calling from Tehran. “Just a minute ago I was thinking of that time in Mo¬ sul. Four years ago. Remember?” “Three years, actually. The guy went up in the air twenty yards in front of us. When he came back down, his nose was in one place and the rest of him was, well, elsewhere.” Sina Vafa always put on a hard-boiled front, like these things didn’t bother him. And maybe they didn’t. But they did Malek. In fact, everything bothered Malek. He was no warrior, like Sina pretended to be. Malek was a bookworm who had found himself in the wrong war at the right time. This had made something of an 8 *f Salar Abdoh academic career for him afterward. In a way the war had, strangely enough, saved his life. But he’d also seen things he’d sooner forget. Like the image of that burn¬ ing man outside the liquor store over there in the Dora Quarter. Or that almost perfectly intact nose in Mosul, Iraq. One minute their handsome, young Kurdish guide, so full of life, so full of enthusiasm, was walking twenty steps ahead of them talking about his wedding plans, and the next minute he had stepped on something and his face was gone, like a mask peeled right off. How was a guy supposed to negotiate something like that with himself? He wanted to ask Sina this. But the line had gone silent and the distant connection was cut off. So Malek’s mind wandered while waiting for Sina’s redial—to Mosul, to Baghdad, to Tehran, and to, of course, his best friend, Sina. Sina’s hardening, his fast track to becoming such a dedicated, sworn enemy of the Americans, was something Malek had tried to put out of his mind. As if Sina’s soul was just another burned corpse on the side of the road where a planted bomb had gone off. But now Sina was calling him again. What did he want? Why call him? Every day Malek would wake up and read the latest body counts of young American soldiers in the news. The war was still on and each time Malek saw the reports and read the names of the dead, he sweated the way a man with a bad conscience might. He was living here in the States, but the coun¬ try wasn’t quite his. He was paying taxes and carried that prized blue American passport, and for two years now he’d had this plum teaching job in New York. It was an average college and he wasn’t even teaching in
The list of books you might like
