The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

43





ARSHAN SITS IN SILENCE, SWIRLING HIS WINE in his cup. The next part he has never spoken about to more than a handful of people. All of them in Iran.

“Reza and I began to argue frequently. He idolized Khomeini, saw him as the answer to every evil in his young life. He had my temper, but no angel like Maliheh to buffer it. He saw me as too secular, too intellectual, too Westernized. He also loved me fiercely, and the conflict was overpowering him. He poured all his anger into the movement. I, unfortunately, was distracted by other problems.

Maliheh and I had been trying to conceive again since Reza’s childhood. She’d had five miscarriages over the course of fifteen years, and each one locked a piece of my wife away from me. I begged her to desist from trying, but then in 1978, Maliheh became pregnant. I braced myself for the horror of another miscarriage. But another month and Maliheh was still nauseous in the mornings and rounder. I felt hope stirring in my heart. I let it color the atmosphere around me. Maybe there could be a whole new start, I thought. Khomeini spoke of equality and justice. Of returning the pride of Iran.”

The wine turns to vinegar in Arshan’s mouth. “Another three months, and I knew my first instinct had been right. The demonstrations turned violent, the rhetoric fanatical. I saw what the revolution would mean to men like me. And my family.”



Maliheh, Arshan and a teenage Reza sit around the dinner table. Arshan is yelling, Reza is fuming, and Maliheh is disgusted with them both.

Reza’s appearance sums up his crisis of allegiance. He’s wearing a shiny new green athletic jacket, but doing his best to grow a respectable Muslim beard. He scratches at the patchy hair and pointedly averts his eyes from his father.

In the center of the table is a pile of cassette tapes.

Arshan picks up a tape and waves it in the air as he yells at his son. “Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, Chiang Kai-shek—I did not raise my one and only son to be an idiot, a sheep, a mindless martyr!”

Arshan is quaking, his tie quivering as he tries to control his rage.

“How can you not see that Khomeini is no different? How can you not see if you do not open your eyes, my young son?”

Arshan moves his face inches away from Reza’s. Reza’s so upset that tears spring to his eyes, the very thing he’s trying to forestall. He jerks his head away so his father won’t see.

Maliheh leans closer to her son, the scarf over her hair falling from her furrowed forehead.

Reza jumps up and leaves the table. Arshan watches him go, then tosses the cassette back onto the pile. He kicks the leg of the table. Maliheh only shakes her head slowly in response.



On the beach in Tela, Arshan says, “Maliheh had carefully instilled our son with patriotism and faith. I countered with sordid history, science and skepticism.

The combination turned out to be a mistake. We handed our son his own private war.”

Arshan rubs his eyebrows, as if he can blot out the memories, stop what’s coming.

“By the end of summer, Maliheh and I had opposite objectives. She wanted to set up a nursery for the baby. I wanted to move to Washington with my cousin before she gave birth. She wouldn’t hear of it. Reza wouldn’t even respond to the prospect of moving. And then the calendar brought September eighth, just like any other day.” Arshan sighs raggedly.

“It was becoming impossible to maintain my classes at the university amidst the constant protests. I’d seen Reza’s friends in the parades. They moved like a herd of cows, chanting in unison. Death to the Shah. Death to America. Death to Zionists. Chanting makes it easy to forget the meaning of words, a pack of teenagers drunk on the feeling of unity, as addictive as any drug. And so the students planned another major demonstration. That morning, Reza was excited. I forbade him to go. ‘How long do you think the government will tolerate this rebellion?’ I asked him. Reza made some statement about the glory of martyrs, and I lost my temper. I told him he was a fool, more or less. I told him I had failed as a father if he intended to kill himself for an imaginary harem of virgins in heaven. I mocked him and his precious revolution. Basically I did everything I could to drive a sixteen-yearold straight into the streets—” Arshan stops again to rub his temples. Thirty years later, he can feel the same drum roll of doom he felt that morning. The same panic that comes with a glimpse of one’s powerlessness.

The people around him on the beach experience the same sense of foreboding.

Now I know how Mina’s brother will die, but I can’t stop the story any more than you can stop a memory from finding you in the dark. I look at Cornell. He is somewhere else. He’s hearing the sound of a sea of marchers. An orgy of youthful energy and powerful emotions—love, egoism, urgency, righteousness, the bliss of belonging. Now Cornell hears the thud of batons, the scurrying of scuffle, firecracker gunfire, and the kinds of screams that haunt you the rest of your life.

“They called it Black Friday,” Arshan says. “The name Americans give the biggest shopping day of the year. I went to work and sat in my empty classroom. After a while, I left. I ran into a worried neighbor. He asked if Reza had come home yet. As the words came out of my mouth explaining he was at school, I understood that my son was at the march. Still, I went home first. It didn’t seem possible that—”



Maliheh’s eyes—cold. Searching Arshan’s face with her metallic eyes. A stranger’s eyes. Where is my son? Where is he? Her inflated belly between them as she leans in close to his face. Go back. Go get Reza. Go get my son.



Arshan puts his hands over his eyes. Flashes of running, falling in with the hundreds headed for the demonstration. Coming up against of a sea of thousands. Bobbing signs with the face of Ayatollah Khomeini. Allahu Akbar. God is great. Death to the Shah. Death to America. God is Great.

“I am not the hero of my life.”

Arshan sighs. It is time. Time to remember, to confess. Time to repent.



Arshan is swimming upstream. He’s fighting to ride the wave of people taking to the main boulevard. The chanting consumes him, like plasma he has to carve through with his limbs. Above the zombielike shuffling of the crowd, Arshan thinks he hears the boots of soldiers. And helicopters. There is a knot in his stomach the size of a pomegranate.

As the marchers coalesce onto the main street, Arshan pauses at the curb, holding on to a lamp post and stepping onto a car’s bumper to get his bearings. He was right. Soldiers are advancing from the opposite direction. He has a front-row seat to see what happens when the two factions collide.

Arshan realizes he is holding his breath, which hisses from his lips at the first wave of gunfire. The front wave of people is picked off like soda cans. The rest of the thousands duck or scurry off to the sides, causing the car under Arshan’s feet to sway and shake as if in an earthquake.

Arshan tries to maintain his position. He scans the faces that are streaming past like rats fleeing the sea.

When the soldiers fire another round, the screams unite into a collective shriek and the herd stampedes.

Arshan is shoved to the ground, landing atop a teenage boy. He grabs the kid by his jaw and peers into his face, hoping. But it’s not his Reza. The boy’s hands and face are bloody and as he returns Arshan’s panicked look, he melts in Arshan’s hands, from a strapping teenager into a terrified child. Arshan takes his collar and drags him out of the street. He hides behind the car and turns his attention back to the boulevard.

More and more people are mowed down by the soldiers. Men try to shield their comrades only to fall helplessly to the ground. Boys slip in the blood of their best friends. Even as they try to run away, men are shot in the back.

At Arshan’s side, an old man clutches his clothes and sobs in disbelief.

Arshan still sees no sign of his son. He doesn’t recognize anyone, any of Reza’s friends or fellow students. Maybe he went home. Maybe his fear sent him home.

And then he sees it.

On the ground, beneath the horde of soldier’s boots. A green jacket.

A strangled sound escapes Arshan’s lips. The old man next to him seems to sense what’s about to happen.

Arshan makes to dart into the street, but the old man grabs his shirt with surprising tenacity. The soldiers continue to advance, trampling triumphantly over the dead bodies in their path.

Arshan watches, frozen, as a soldier approaches Reza’s body. He puts out his hands as he watches the soldier, not much more than a boy himself, raise his weapon.

The soldier fires into his son’s chest, sending Reza’s body flailing like a narwhale harpooned on the deck of a ship.

Arshan turns and buries his face in the old man’s breast. Now the father is the child, learning too late the dark side of fate.