Tehran Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction by Salar Abdoh

  PART I: THE CRIME PAGES

  The Fat, Fat Story of the Fat City

  DANIAL HAGHIGHI

  Mowlavi

  Fear Is the Best Keeper of Secrets

  VALI KHALILI

  Rey

  A Woman's Geography Is Sacred

  LILY FARHADPOUR

  University of Tehran

  PART II: WHEN A WAR'S NOT OVER

  The Shelf Life of Revenge

  SIMA SAEEDI

  Karim-Khan, Villa

  The Corpse Fixer

  MAJED NEISI

  Shahrak-e-Gharb

  Lariyan's Day in the Sun

  AIDA MORADI AHANI

  Qeytarieh

  The Whitest Set of Teeth in Tehran

  SALAR ABDOH

  Karim-Khan, Kuche Aban

  PART III: PROPER BURIAL

  The Restlessness of a Serial Killer at the Finish Line

  JAVAD AFHAMI

  Shush

  My Own Marble Jesus

  MAHSA MOHEBALI

  Dibaji

  In the Flophouse

  FARHAAD HEIDARI GOORAN

  Gomrok

  A Stoning Before Breakfast

  AZARDOKHT BAHRAMI

  Salehabad

  PART IV: THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG

  Bridge of Simon

  YOURIK KARIM-MASIHI

  Narmak

  Not Every Bullet is Meant for a King

  HOSSEIN ABKENAR

  Shapur

  The Groom's Return

  MAHAK TAHERI

  Behesht e Zahra Cemetery

  The Gravedigger's Kaddish

  GINA B. NAHAI

  Tehrangeles

  Persian Glossary

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from Tehran at Twilight by Salar Abdoh

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  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

  THE SEISMIC CITY

  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 particular
ly 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

  THE CRIME PAGES

  THE FAT, FAT STORY OF THE FAT CITY

  BY DANIAL HAGHIGHI

  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 to worry about in Tehran. Now imagine this guy—he is over six-six. He has a hammer face, a shaved head, and tattoos running up and down his arms. From the Janat-Abad end of the city to Nezam-Abad, he’s fucked every woman who crossed his path. Another thing: it was two years since he ran away from the army. He’d beaten the crap out of his sergeant and had simply taken off. And nowadays he was in love with some married woman who sent him pictures of her tits over the phone. That’s Naser the Tiger for you in a nutshell. The big gangster. And how old do you think this guy was? All of twenty. A junior giant who had been my brother Abbas’s friend since back in middle school. And I, eight years older than them, was working as Tiger’s chauffeur, his boy.

  Tehran was almost empty that day. Everybody had driven outside the city to celebrate and throw away their bad luck on the thirteenth day of the New Year. None of the usual traffic. I was on the clock with Naser. He paid ten an hour, plus extra for gas and booze and women. In other words, he was treating me more than right. Now we were waiting to get word about a new shipment when Fat Rambod called and asked if he could come along. Bad idea. I should have known better than to allow that lazy fuck in our mix. You see, if I’ve learned one thing living in this fat town, it’s that you can’t ever be a nice guy. You can’t let other people get too close. You have to be dirty and not let on.

  Take this same Naser the Tiger as an example. There’s not a part of his body that doesn’t have a knife mark on it. Do you think nice guys have that many knife marks on them? Of course not. You have to be a son of a bitch like Naser to get ahead in this world, hence the knife marks. And now he was sitting there telling us about a tattoo on his left arm. A house. “Yeah,” he sighed like he was nostalgic for something, “I want to sell this stuff for a while and then buy me a nice house up there in Damavand and get a rose garden going. Know why? Because my baby, Mrs. Fataneh, told me roses mean love.”

  Now this Fataneh was the same married woman who sent him her titty pictures. So Fat Rambod sa
id, “Right, Mrs. Fataneh sure has a delicate soul if she likes those roses.”

  Naser nodded appreciatively. “Yeah, that fucking beautiful bitch, that’s why I love her. She has a delicate soul.”

  I sat there saying nothing. Truth be told, I wanted to beat the living shit out of Rambod. Until two years ago he was living out in the boonies around Azadi. Then his grandma died, left him a nice piece of cash, and the fat bastard moved uptown next to the pretty people.

  The text message we’d been waiting for finally came: Good news. The New Year’s shipment is in.

  Naser the Tiger immediately called the number back and got an okay on the quantity we wanted, so we drove out to the Navab District. The place was an old family home with its basement turned into some kind of teahouse. Smoke everywhere. People sat behind their qalyans smoking and watching TV. There was a soccer game on, and guys were betting hard on some European-league match while phones rang off the hook.

  We walked to the back of the teahouse to meet up with some blond faggot kid who’d also been a classmate of my brother and Naser the Tiger in middle school.

  Naser said, “I’ve come to get the receipt for the New Year’s shipment.”

  The kid wrote up a receipt while Naser laid ten New Year’s gold coins on the table.

  The kid took the coins and started up the stairs, then gestured for us to follow him. Upstairs, an old man sat by himself waiting. He examined the gold and glanced up at us. “All good. Have a nice year, boys.”

  Now we drove to Bani Hashem. This time the place sold bathroom knickknacks. Another kid sat behind the desk here. Why not admit it? I wanted to rip the heart out of every one of these queers. I felt like I was miles behind in the game of life, while these little bitches with their slicked-back hair and attitudes were having all the fun and getting all the profits.

  Naser said, “Brother, here’s my receipt. Give me the New Year’s shipment. I need to get a move on, the holidays are almost over.”

  The kid met Naser’s eyes. “We’re all in the same boat, brother. If you can’t sell, you won’t come to us next time.” Then he turned to me. “Isn’t that right?”