Tehran Noir

284 Pages·2014·1.77 MB·English

by  Salar Abdoh

To the memory of Ali Abdoh, old Tehran’s boss of bosses, and to his grandson,
Ashil.
In addition to the remarkable efforts and patience of the writers themselves,
there are several friends who should be especially acknowledged in this
anthology: Hooshyar Ansaarifar, Mitra Elyati, Maryam Haidari, Somayeh
Nasiriha, and Hassan Shahsavari. A warm thanks to each and every one of you
for your invaluable suggestions and encouragement. This book could not have
come together as it did without you.
INTRODUCTION
T S C
HE EISMIC ITY
Back in the day, so my mother tells me, on the rare occasions when my father
took her along to one of the cabarets of old Tehran, the tough guys—the lutis—
the bosses, the knife brawlers, and the traditional wrestlers, would lay out their
suits and jackets on the floor of the place for my mother to walk on. It was a
gesture of supreme respect for one of their own. And it says a lot about a Tehran
that simply doesn’t exist anymore—a Tehran of chivalry and loyalty, a place
where allegiances meant something, where friendships harked back to a classical
world of warriors from the great Persian epic, the Shahnameh (The Book of
Kings), and to the medieval Islamic notion of the ayyar brotherhood in Iran and
Mesopotamia where the bandit and the common folks’ champion were one and
the same, and where every man followed a code of honor set in stone.
Or else, all of this may simply be wishful nostalgia for something that didn’t
exist even back then. Back then means a time before the Islamic Revolution of
1979. That watershed event that sits in the mind of every Iranian as a chasm, a
sort of year one after which everything strange became law. The brutal eight
years of war with Iraq—the longest conventional war of the twentieth century—
the persistent pressures from America in its own everlasting twilight war with
Iran, the official corruption of the new ruling class, and the snowballing inflation
turned just about everyone into a “night worker.” Living an honest life was no
longer an option. Prostitution, theft, an explosion in the drug trade and addiction,
the selling off of raw materials and historic national treasures—plus endemic, in-
your-face bribery—became a way of life. Meanwhile Tehran grew and grew,
until it was one of the megacities of the world, now pushing at fifteen million
stray souls—a leviathan that can barely stand itself, a purgatory of unmoving
traffic, relentless pollution, and noise and anger and inequity, surrounded by
some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the world.
Tehran, then, is a juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty that breaks the heart.
A place where not one but two inept dynasties came to miserable ends, and
where, arguably, the third most important revolution in history (after the French
and the Russian) was started. It is also the city where Churchill, Stalin, and
Roosevelt met to divvy up the world while the flames of WWII were still
burning. And it was where one of the CIA’s first manufactured coups (with the
prodding and support of the British—who else?) against a democratically elected
government was put into motion, thus ushering in years of a dictatorship which
in turn was swept aside by the first real fury of fundamentalist Islam, a harbinger
of the world we now live in and call post–9/11.
In other words, there is something of both the absolutely spectacular and
positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are
inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every
imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and
malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran’s case is no
different—except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a
hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the
watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic. The city enforces its
own morality police, and there are regular public hangings of drug dealers and
thieves. Because of this, there is a raging sense of a split personality about the
place—the imposed propriety of the mosque rubbing against the hidden (and
more often not so hidden) rhythms of the real city. At the start of each day, and
particularly in late evenings, Tehran remains a schizophrenic beast always at
odds with itself, always trying to figure what will be the next design for it that
won’t fit, or fit horribly.
None of this is of course helped by the fact that Iran happens to be one of the
biggest drug conduits on the planet. The vast Afghan opium crop, transformed
into heroin, needs its transit routes for the European markets, while Iran itself
remains a major supplier of methamphetamines. The country and its slatternly
capital sit at the crossroads of the world—to the north is the specter of Russia,
ever daunting, to the west there is Turkey and the gates of Europe, to the south is
the Persian Gulf, the Arab lands, and the immensity that is Africa, and to the
southeast and east is India and the rest of the great Asian continent. Each of
these have had their say in Iran at some point. Each has left its indelible mark.
And you only have to traverse the country to experience the dozen languages
and as many shades of color and appearance—all of them inevitably converging
on Tehran, impregnating it and aborting it, lending it life and destroying it, and,
sometimes, praying for its redemption.
You would think that such fertile terrain would be the stuff of powerful
fiction from the past. Not so. And the reason why so little of it all has been
tapped thus far is something worth noting here: censorship. That ogre which
hounded Iranian writers before the revolution and even more so afterward.
Before 1979, there were two types of censorship, and at opposite ends of the
political spectrum. One was the predictable and narcissist censorship of the
king’s court, and the other the knee-jerk braying of the leftist/Communist
intellectuals who believed that any written work that was not in the service of the
“masses” was bourgeois and of no consequence and therefore in the royal court’s
favor. This boded particularly unwell for serious genre fiction of any sort—
which is why, for example, a minor gem like Qasem Hasheminejad’s An
Elephant in the Dark went utterly ignored.
Nevertheless, with the advent of the Islamic Republic, what had mostly been
a thorn in the side of writers and their creative lives ballooned into absurd and
unfathomable proportions. Consider this typical example of the censor’s verdict
regarding a sentence in a simple children’s manuscript: There is a conversation
between an apple and a pear. The apple tells the pear, “Come and take a bite of
my red cheeks and see how delicious I am.” The Ministry of Culture and
Guidance’s ruling on the sentence: “Too sexy. Too provocative. Must be
removed.” From this small example you can imagine what Iranian writers have
had to contend with for the past thirty-some years. Imagine having to write in an
alternate universe where there is to be no mention of sex, little genuine
interiority of character, no delving into social issues, no politics, and nothing that
could convey a society at some internal conflict with itself. In such a universe, if
a writer does not kill himself first, or instead simply gives up and becomes a cab
driver (I’ve known cases of both), he might resort to one of three modes of
writing that have, unfortunately, a fighting chance to pass the censor’s obtuse
gaze: 1) fluffy and vague symbology meant to say one thing and mean another;
2) derivative and tired magical realism that has every other character and their
mother growing wings and flying to who knows where; 3) thin, bloodless texts
of angst and self-absorption with little context or reference to the troubled world
outside.
In such an atmosphere, to even begin to attempt the noir mode—which at its
best is in complete, albeit harsh, engagement with the world—is an act of
courage, a political act. Which is why the writers drawn for this collection
happen to be those who have tasted the city and know its wounds. They depict a
Tehran at its most raw and least forgiving—Sima Saeedi and Majed Neisi in
their inimitable portrayals of life after a war or revolution; Mahsa Mohebali and
Danial Haghighi unmasking underground life in the Islamic Republic; Farhaad
Heidari Gooran, Yourik Karim-Masihi, and Lily Farhadpour showing the tough,
multicultural reality of a pullulating city bursting with prejudice; Azardokht
Bahrami and Javad Afhami revealing the lugubrious weight of religion; Mahak
Taheri and Aida Moradi Ahani exhibiting the systematic and inescapable
corruption in the chambers of power; and Vali Khalili and Hossein Abkenar
displaying the grit and harshness that is the quintessence of the capital. (Since I
translated all but two of the stories from Farsi into English, I’ve included a
glossary of Persian terms at the back of the book.)
In each story you can find more than one and often all of the themes I just
mentioned. But Tehran’s narrative would not be quite complete if we did not
cross oceans in at least one tale to land smack in the middle of Southern
California. In Los Angeles, to be exact. In the Los Angeles Valley, to be even
more exact. After the revolution, the exodus of many Iranians took them all over
the globe. But nowhere did they flock to with more verve and the sense of
finding a home away from home than a city that is often dubbed Tehrangeles.
LA, then, is where Gina B. Nahai’s story takes us—this other unwieldy Goliath
of occasional instant riches but mostly shattered dreams, the noir city par
excellence, where the two Tehrans finally converge. And it’s only right that they
should, as both cities, Tehran and Los Angeles, sit on top of major tectonic fault
lines. The clock is ticking for them. But who cares about dire predictions of
earthquakes and eventual annihilation when there is real estate money to be
made today? Who gives a damn about the day after tomorrow?
So take what you can get when you can get it. It is this sense of
impermanence about a place, expected one day to be swallowed up whole and
disappear, that drives the inhabitants of Tehran, my Tehran, to—as we say in
Persian—press hard on the gas pedal. There is always an element of the end of
the world about this city. A feeling of being once removed from the edge of the
precipice. Elsewhere I have called it the “Seismic City”—the seismic sanctuary.
All of this will end one day. Yes. And maybe sooner than later. And when it
does, by God, we will miss it.
Salar Abdoh
Tehran, Iran
July 2014
PART I
T C P
HE RIME AGES
THE FAT, FAT STORY OF THE FAT CITY
D H
BY ANIAL AGHIGHI
Mowlavi
I’d made up my mind to go to work for Naser the Tiger. I hadn’t had a real job in
three months and was getting tired of watching everyone get ahead except me.
Besides, Eid was coming, the New Year. The math of it is simple: A fella needs
some new clothes. He needs to be able to buy things and give gifts to people and
look important. I mean, all we had in this world was the butcher shop on
Mowlavi Street. A rundown little shithole I didn’t care to work in or inherit from
my father. We’d bring anything you can think of to this place: chickens, rats,
sick pigeons—we’d grind them all up together and sell it to places like Akbar
Amu’s sandwich shop.
Yeah, I was sick of it all. This jungle of a neighborhood. Look in every
corner and someone’s keeping a squirrel or a bunch of snakes or miserable dogs.
I’m serious. They trade animals here and I was sick of animals. Just the other
week someone showed up with some crazy creature that looked like a crocodile.
They called it a dragon. They said it was poisonous, so they kept it on a leash
and fed it morphine to make it stay calm. Then some old fart with money came
and bought the thing.
You can imagine then how the stink of these beasts was driving me nuts.
And in the end what should happen? I lost my own poor brother, Abbas, over
this shit. Abbas got fucked. He died right here in this stinkhouse over nothing at
all.
Still, in the beginning the money I made with Naser the Tiger was turning
out to be all right. But less than two weeks into the New Year and my new job,
everything went bad. It was actually the thirteenth day of the holidays, Sizdah
Be Dar, the day you’re supposed to throw away all your bad luck and begin
fresh. I was Naser the Tiger’s wheel man. I did the driving while Naser did the
actual dealing. His main merchandise—cocaine—meant he had less competition