ARASH SHIRAZI
ALBORZ MOUNTAINS, FEBRUARY 1984
I enlist because I have to enlist. The few ways out—chronic illness, being the eldest son of a widowed parent, being rich—aren’t available to me. I know men who have tried to convince doctors they have bad backs, bad knees, bad hearts. Sometimes it works, even. The men stay at home with their families and neighbors are not even particularly cruel to them. Most people understand not wanting to die for a country you no longer recognize. Somehow the idiot zealots ended up with all the guns, tanks. Five years after a revolution led by students and idealists, pacifists with hyacinths in their breast pockets. How did this happen? Zealots. Guns, tanks. And now, war.
When I die they’ll put my picture in the mosque. Arash Shirazi, shaved head, shaved face. Hairless in a way that makes my skull louder, the angles of my jaw. Not a handsome face, exactly, but ugly in a way that works. Rows of our pictures striping the mosque wall. The martyred. How to make out which bald dead martyr belonged to you. Belongs to you. A scar on a cheek, a mole over an eye.
While I’m getting my vaccinations before training, a young woman in the waiting room seethes at another man even younger than me; he looks like he hasn’t even begun shaving.
“You wanted this,” she says. “You could have told them about Beeta. You could have gotten out of this and now you have what you deserve.”
The man stares at his hands, his long soft fingers. I imagine maybe he’s a brilliant pianist, a prodigy. Maybe Beeta is his teacher, his piano trainer, who he is disappointing by enlisting. There is a station on the AM radio that plays classical music every Thursday and Sunday morning and I try to listen to it when I can, often just lying in bed the whole time with my eyes closed and the songs circling around me like planets. I like the loud guys best, Rachmaninoff and Mahler and Vivaldi. But I imagine this man, this boy really, this soft boy, playing Debussy, he looks like he’d love Chopin but especially Debussy, I imagine him swimming through an underwater cathedral, stained glass and tiny fish, with just his fingers, just his soft hands making sunken cathedral sounds. That’s what he should be doing. I can’t do anything, I have no great talent or even minor ones, I belong here. But not him, this boy, not his cathedral hands.
As the woman—his wife? his sister?—berates him, the shadow of a flinch in his hands. A rage flashing, then expiring like smoke off a match. Maybe Beeta is their daughter, sick with some congenital disease. Maybe they’re cousins. Maybe Beeta is his mother, already dead, and he is the one taking care of their younger siblings.
I imagine what might make a boy choose to go to war. Ideology, personal belief, sure. Iraq invaded us. They thought they’d kick down the door and the whole house would collapse, something like that. We were weak after the revolution. They wanted Khuzestan’s oil and Saddam wanted us to kiss his hand. To bow, yes. Of course we didn’t believe the Ayatollah’s nonsense. But we hated the idea of foreign meddling more than we hated him. So we went along. This man sitting in front of me, this boy being berated by his wife or sister, he doesn’t have the set jaw, the conviction of an ideologue. His hands are too pretty to belong to a nationalist. Maybe his father pressured him. Maybe his imam.
For my part, I don’t feel much one way or another about my service. For me, it is inescapable, a thing like sickness or death. Why kick and flail when the whirlpool is already sucking you in? I’ve seen the faces of the war dead in the mosque and in the markets. Our ugly-beautiful martyrs staring ahead into the place only they can see. I wonder what they imagined that place being, before they arrived there. I wonder if they were disappointed, or if there was no place to arrive to at all.
My mother shaved my head ahead of my vaccinations. She thought the buzz of the clippers concealed her almost silent sobs, and I let her believe it did. I am poor, unmarried. I didn’t finish high school, just screwed around in the countryside for a few years working where I could, chasing girls. This means I am expendable, a “zero soldier.” Zero education, zero special skills, zero responsibilities outside of my country. There is an expression: “If a zero soldier has to use a grenade to escape with their life, they shouldn’t waste the grenade.”
“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.
I leave home on a bus with a couple dozen other shaved vaccinated young men for a makeshift training camp at the base of the Alborz mountains. My mother gives me a picture of the family from years ago, me a brooding self-serious teen, mustache just starting to come in. My little sister Roya smiling the way she only does in pictures, with her top and bottom teeth all showing. My mother and father standing gravely behind us like stone lions. After the picture was taken my sister and my parents got into a fight. A neighbor had been arrested, some surreptitious meeting of Tudeh Party socialists my parents believed Roya knew about. There was shouting all night, silence for a week.
At the camp all the soldiers are sent to three areas according to their level of education—college graduates, who had begun their training in the summers between semesters, sent to one area for officer training. High school graduates sent to another for their high infantry training. And those with less than a high school education like me—despite our doting mothers and overachieving sisters—we are the zero soldiers. We stay in the area of Alborz where we were all first dropped.
It is cold. I have never been to the mountains before. It’s a little hard to believe they’re real, they look so much like pictures of themselves. Kind of waxy, even almost flat against the sky. The dirt is hard and the camp itself looks like it was thrown up in a day: all the walls are plastic sheet and tent pole. It’s the sort of place we could take down and evacuate in a few minutes. Which I suppose is the point.
A man in fatigues with a thick mustache and sunglasses arranges all us zero soldiers according to height and gives numbers based on where we fall along the line. I’m tall, so my number is 11 out of 208. That becomes my name. 11. یازده. Yahz-dah. Something monolithic about that. Clean.
Once, when I was still just a boy, my sister Roya and I walked to a frozen pond near our apartment. I was maybe nine so she must have been seven. We were alone together there at the pond save the massive blocks of ice bobbing almost imperceptibly on the water, like cars hovering a centimeter off the road. We would go there sometimes and chase each other around or throw rocks at water flowers. Rarely would we see anyone else.
My sister was afraid of nothing, but even as we circled the pond I could see her trying to stifle her shivering from me. At the time I assumed all little sisters were this way, eager to prove to their older brothers their toughness, and I resented her for it, wanted to deny her the approval she too desperately sought. She would never be what I was, a boy, a burgeoning man, with all the manlinesses, the tolerance for pain that implied. It was better she learned this from me than from the world.
Our pond was in the center of a kind of valley, a few spoonfuls of soup at the bottom of a big bowl. The hills leading into it were speckled with shrubs and winter wheat, all frozen over. At the top of the hill, we broke off stalky reeds and used them to smash other reeds. We hurled rocks down into the floating ice, Roya pouting a little when hers didn’t travel as far as mine, trying again and again. There at the top of the hill, the land plateaued into a frozen field, all hard dirt punctuated by the occasional dead brush, a desiccated stalk of something once green. From up there the pond looked like a purple eye, glazed over. Our blind mamabazorg had eyes like that, cataracts thick as bottle glass.
“Hold my hand,” Roya said, staring down at the pond. Glad to take her request as an admission of fear, I grabbed it with glee. Her gloves were black and soft, cotton maybe, and mine were bright purple and plastic, still very much a child’s gloves. I remember that, remember my surprise when she continued, “Let’s race down the hill toward the water. First person to stop running and let go is a coward!”
There was, of course, only one choice for me. To say no would forfeit my position as oldest and bravest. Even if I mustered some protest about her safety, we would both rightly hear it as fear. I snorted a bit and some birds took off nearby at the sound of our conversation, perhaps to ensure my sister and I would be left truly alone. I squeezed her hand, and we took off down the hill.
One of the older men here, number 137, maybe a few years older than me, tells us over a meal of watery obgoosht about an old family friend who served two different compulsory two-year military services. The neighbor, a man named Alireza, had had a brother who died two years before he was born. Alireza’s parents, in order to advance him in school more quickly, had Alireza adopt the name of his dead brother. This was before all the associated paperwork became more standardized, and so Alireza seamlessly became his dead older brother, completed all his education under his dead brother’s name. When he finished, of course, he had to serve his brother’s two-year conscription, which he did, dutifully and without complaint.
But then, after returning home for just a month or two, his parents got a note saying it was Alireza’s time to serve. The government, which had kept no record of the baby named Alireza’s education or his hospitalizations, had remembered, to the day, eighteen years later, when it was his time to serve in the military. Naturally.
Alireza’s choice then: admit years of his parents’ deceit and subject them (and himself) to the consequences of lying to the state, or serve another two years. 137 said that for Alireza, it wasn’t even a choice. He reenlisted using his own real name for the first time in years (even his parents had addressed him by the name of his dead brother). Less than a month into his second service, Alireza was killed in a training accident. Alireza, martyred. At least with his own name.
While 137 tells this story, the other men laugh.
“No way that really happened,” one says. “Somebody would have figured out their trick years before conscription.”
“He should have just told the truth,” says another man.
“And now the grief of two dead sons belongs to his parents too,” says the first man.
It is a funny story, I think, funny the way crows are funny birds, more knowing than they let on. The story pretends to be about names but it’s actually a story about time, how time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever. Into dirt. There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everyone at once.
So, Roya and I were holding hands at the top of the hill, me in sneakers and cotton pants, my casual dress another assertion of my disregard for the cold. My sister was bundled up in a thick plastic hooded coat and puffy denim pants, the bagginess of it all coming to points at her head, hands, feet, making her look like a starfish. We held hands and I counted out loud—three, two, one, now!—and we were off running down the grass toward the frozen pond, instantly unstoppable, or so it felt, like two drops of water beading down the side of a cool glass.
Nothing could stop us from our descending, our legs were running the sort of running that wasn’t even running anymore just desperately trying to keep up with the rushing world, the speed of the ground moving under us and only our clumsy skinny legs, idiot technologies, to keep us from crumbling in a heap, and my sister laughing, I was terrified and shouted like it but Roya was laughing while the pond kept getting bigger and bigger, I was trying to figure out how to get the world to slow down, slow down enough to let my legs catch up to its racing, but my sister the starfish less than a meter tall was laughing, gobbling like a turkey, holding my hand and still running straight ahead, her legs not even a blur anymore but a straight single shape, like the rims of cars in car commercials that stay still even as the car curves down the road, and finally the pond was everything in front of us and somehow I slid, I can’t remember exactly how it started but I think I jammed my sneaker into the frozen dirt, locking my legs, kicking up ice, and I slid that way and the earth stopped moving maybe too suddenly, I felt my brain slosh against my skull, that fast, maybe the earth even moved backwards a bit as if to correct itself, and in my sliding I let go of Roya’s hand, the world stilling around me I could finally see how fast she was moving, all rush and wild, I remember I shouted Roya no! as she lifted her hand, the hand that had held mine, into the air like a boxer, like a boxer’s trophy, or more than a trophy, like a little piece of the sun that she had finally been able to stretch out and grab, that hot and full of power, all the warmth she needed as she laughed triumphantly straight into the icy water.
I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be. Compared to even the dullest dog humans can smell nothing. But compare us with—what?—a monkey who can say “apple” with her hands?—and we are the gods of language, everything else just chirping and burping. And how fitting, too, that our superpower as a species, the source of our divinity, stems from such a broken invention.
It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.
Lying there on my butt, I just watched her disappear. My sister ran into the water completely, ran in so quickly she couldn’t anticipate how immediately the water dropped, manmade ponds are like that sometimes, they just scoop straight down. How instantly she was swallowed.
For a moment I lay searching for her, but she vanished almost the second she hit the water, the only sign left of her the giant arcs bobbing the ice chunks out from where she went in, like sound waves searching for an ear. And then, before I could even process what had happened, before I could make a decision to be brave or a coward, before I could arrive at that inflection point that would no doubt shape my idea of myself for the rest of my life, a crashing of water, Roya’s ridiculous soggy face popping above the break, heaving, her starfish arms splashing to hold position there, heaving and, I swear to God, laughing, laughing like a maniac between heaves.
“You coward!” she shouted, coughing up water as she paddled her way back to the shore. Massive floating blocks of ice pulled apart as she moved. “You dog!”
I am not a man who comes easily to tears. I’ve known such men, men who weep like girls, men in my own platoon who sobbed after lights went out each night, or Rostam, our dimwit neighbor who almost daily wandered out of his house to mumble and cry and laugh, sometimes all at the same time, until one of his exasperated nieces would emerge to bring him back home. There is something pathetic about such men, of course, an unforgivable softness, but I’ve secretly always envied them a bit too. The clarity of a physical emotional response. Something to do with the sadness, terror. A way to give it away.
All around Iran everything was changing. Streets named after flowers and birds being renamed after clerics, martyrs. Posters advertising watches, cars, movies, ripped down and replaced with the glowering face of the Ayatollah. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I knew it meant intensely. The adults talking to each other in hushed whispers when they thought we were sleeping. Sometimes I heard my mother crying, my father scolding her to stop. But I thought it lucky, the clarity of tears. Instead of the loose riot of confusion and dread webbed up in my chest, in my head, probably wearing lesions into my gut and brain.
I remember in school Agha Pahla holding up a stone suspended in the air by a string, telling us how the stone was full of potential energy—potential energy, the names we give things!—and how when the stone is dropped all that potential energy gets converted into motion, into kinetic energy, action, something like that. And that transformation, potential energy into motion, is what makes stones powerful, terrible, how they can crush people. Sometimes I feel like that, like I’m walking around all stuffed up with potential energy, a stone hanging in the air with no knife sharp enough to cut the rope.
I do wonder sometimes what it would feel like to cry, to beat my chest and wail like an old woman at a funeral, no potential anything being stored for later, all motion, all energy. I think about that and feel stuffed up even in my imagining, like a nose you can’t breathe out of, my brain can’t even move me into that place, can’t even pretend it to be true. One thing happens, then the next. For a long, long time.
Needless to say, when Roya’s head popped up from the water, when she began laughing and splashing and calling me names as she paddled back toward shore, I didn’t cry. Even then. I think about this now, if I had cried, would it have been out of happiness at my sister’s safety or relief for my own? It’s hard for me to remember today exactly what I was feeling then, only that when she emerged I got up without thinking and ran to the edge of the water.
She was laughing and calling me a chicken and I shouted, “What the hell are you doing! Get out! Get out!” I was fully possessed by fear, uncertainty bowing to action.
“I’m coming, my dove,” she laughed. “I’m coming!”
When she paddled to the edge of the water and reached out her hand to mine, I wanted to smack it away, to say you ran in there yourself, you get yourself out. Or maybe I wanted to make her feel as afraid as I had, as I still was. Something about her laughing, her smile, the way she was acting so invincible filled me with fury, or maybe not fury exactly because there was a baffle to it, dumb fury, a rage so deep you couldn’t help but be a little impressed.
I did grab her hand, I pulled her out of the water, her splashing probably more than she needed to, to get me wet as well, to implicate me even more in the soggy mess she’d made. I pulled and she climbed out and lay down on the bentgrass, the mud-dirt, gasping, soaking wet, laughing, panting like an idiot fish, idiot girl.
In training camp we wake up every morning at 4:30, have a half hour to prepare ourselves for the day. We make wuzu, morning ablutions, then fajr prayer together as a group. We call each other brother. Excuse me, brother; brother, pass me the towel. My parents weren’t especially religious growing up and the only times we ever prayed together as a family was when an aunt or our grandparents from Qom were staying with us. Fajr was always my favorite of those prayers because it was so short, only two rakats. The whole experience of the prayer fit tidily into the span of a single dream, a fifteen-minute sleepwalk into surrender, obedience, God, whatever. Smart, I thought, for God to demand prayer from his servants while their minds were still gummy with dream, while the partition between our world and his was thinnest.
This is, of course, all ruined by the army, which calls for physical training between fajr and breakfast, meaning no return to sleep, meaning no mind gummy with dream, meaning once you are up you are up. Fajr takes on a totally different meaning here, the final moments of relative stillness, the last quiet of the day, a time before the omnipresent gaze of our superior officers turns each of us twitchy and strange. There are no mirrors in our shared bathroom, something about preventing ego, idolatry, though the real result is a squad full of sloppy uniforms, missing buttons, and crooked lapels. When I make wuzu and wash my face with the water, I sometimes imagine it to be a kind of solvent, eating away my skin, the muscle beneath it, and the bone beneath that, the water stripping not just the dream from my head but my head itself, until by the end I’m just scrubbing whatever vanity isn’t, whatever to be is, whatever’s beneath my body and all its equipment for keeping me here, that’s what I imagine myself washing. I get the sense my is is filthier than other people’s. Heavier with all that dirt.
When Roya was lying there heaving on her mud, that pond mud, I wanted to strangle her. Not to hurt her exactly, but to make her feel afraid, afraid the way I felt afraid, or afraid the way I felt I should have felt afraid, the way I felt blocked from feeling. Maybe I just wanted to take away the feeling of invincibility. A girl cannot go through life acting like nobody can hurt her. This world? No. But even that frames my rage—the rage that felt like a hot white pin shot through my eye—as something purposeful or noble, but it wasn’t that. There was just something in her okayness that disgusted me, that made me dizzy with anger.
“What were you doing, you goat?” I hissed. “What are we going to do now?”
She was dripping wet, dripping water that might soon freeze into ice against her coat and against her body.
“Why are you so—” she said, before I cut her off:
“Poison of the snake!” I shouted, something I meant like “shut up!” and “bullshit!” both but meaner than either.
I realized that to get Roya home I was going to have to sneak her into our house without our mother noticing. Luckily our father was away at work; he fixed power lines, whenever power went out anywhere in Tehran they called his company, all hours of the day and night even on weekends, and that week he had been working long hours in the heart of the city, near the Masjid-e Ark.
I walked Roya back to our house, her pride giving way to shivers, deep shivering, she was trying to hide it but before long she couldn’t, I could hear it even without looking at her, her teeth vibrating, and I did give her my coat eventually, even though I wanted her to suffer, even though I wanted her to feel ashamed and contrite I gave her my jacket. When we got to the house I ran to my mother who was slicing cucumber in the kitchen and started talking with her, telling her about this and that, I don’t even remember what, and I think she was so excited I was talking to her, me who was usually such a quiet boy, that she thought nothing of it, and Roya was able to come in a few seconds after me and sneak up to the shower, the shower where she stayed for what must have been twenty minutes. And I don’t remember what my mother and I talked about, what she ended up cooking, just that while we talked about nothing, even as she was asking me about my friends or my school or just generally relishing having her only boy present and chatty, I could hear Roya in the shower upstairs, I could hear her stomping around warming up, giggling, laughing, singing.