Table Of ContentSALAR ABDOH
TEHRAN
AT
TWILIGHT
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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
