A Door between Us Read online

  Azar powered the phone down. Then she turned it over and slid off the back cover to remove the battery like Ibrahim had taught her to do.

  “It’s a nice phone,” Azar remarked as she set the disassembled phone on the coffee table. “The shops were already open this morning?”

  Ms. Tabibian’s olive skin tone deepened in a way that caught Azar’s attention. She watched closely as her secretary mumbled, “Well, actually, a . . . friend got it for me.”

  A friend? In the four years Ms. Tabibian had been working for her, Azar couldn’t recall her ever mentioning friends or even family other than her daughter Leila and, more recently, Mr. Sadegh. From Ms. Tabibian’s discomfort, it seemed to Azar that this ‘friend’ might be a romantic interest. Ms. Tabibian was, after all, an attractive woman with those light-green eyes that were so prized in Iran. Azar made a mental note to investigate further to make sure her employee wasn’t involved in anything untoward. She had to be particularly sensitive about the moral rectitude of her office and employees given the controversial nature of her work.

  For now, however, Azar needed to focus on Ali.

  “Okay,” Azar said, “tell me what you learned.”

  Ms. Tabibian brightened at the change of subject. “Yes, I have an address for where they took Mr. Ali. And the name of the station commander is Mr. Heydari. Here, I wrote it down for you.”

  Ms. Tabibian set a scrap of paper on the coffee table between them.

  “Oh! That is very helpful!” Azar exclaimed as she picked up and examined the paper. The address scrawled across it was in an upscale neighborhood not too far away, which meant Ali hadn’t been processed into Evin. With luck, and possibly a small bribe, they could get him within the hour!

  Azar smiled at her secretary as she congratulated herself for thinking to arrange yesterday’s reunion. It’d been several weeks since Ms. Tabibian had come across Mehri Hojjati on a list of names Azar was inviting to a party in honor of her brother’s upcoming wedding. Recognizing the name, Ms. Tabibian had come to her with the shocking suggestion that the woman, Sarah’s Aunt Mehri, might be the woman who had destroyed Ms. Tabibian’s marriage and stolen her son more than two decades earlier.

  Azar had heard Ms. Tabibian’s story before. The loss of her son was part of what drove her secretary to help Azar serve clients facing similar custody and other divorce battles. But it was an unwelcome twist to hear Ms. Tabibian name Ali’s future in-laws as the family responsible for her loss. Ms. Tabibian begged Azar to investigate her claim and, if proven correct, put her in touch with Sadegh.

  The request had made Azar extremely uncomfortable. She didn’t like the idea of meddling in the affairs of a family she was about to be linked to. And what if the Hojjatis had good reason to have dissociated from Ms. Tabibian? Azar had come to depend on and even like the woman. She didn’t want to learn anything that might make it difficult to continue working with her.

  Azar had reluctantly agreed to help Ms. Tabibian. But it wasn’t until the relationship with the Hojjati’s had frayed to the point that Azar concluded that Sarah’s family might have had something to do with Ali’s detention, that she’d taken any action. The previous evening, Azar had driven Ms. Tabibian to Mehri Hojjati’s home, where they saw and followed Sadegh to Sa’adat Abad. Azar’s desperate hope had been that Ms. Tabibian’s sudden appearance and plea for Ali might help jar loose some useful information from her newly found son. But at the very least, she didn’t mind causing some disturbance and embarrassment for a family that had hurt her own. It was hard to believe that this long shot born of anger, desperation, and a need to make good on a promise to her secretary had actually worked.

  “Did Mr. Sadegh say why they took Ali?” Azar asked.

  Ms. Tabibian’s eyes dropped, and she shook her head. “No, he didn’t say.”

  Her secretary’s discomfort made Azar wonder about Mr. Sadegh’s reaction to his biological mother’s reappearance. She’d clearly managed to get some important information out of him. But perhaps he hadn’t been as welcoming as Ms. Tabibian had hoped.

  “I’m sorry,” Azar apologized. “I’m in such a rush to get information about Ali that I forgot to ask how things went yesterday. Was Mr. Sadegh surprised to meet you? Did he realize we’d been following him? Did you spend much time together after I left?”

  Ms. Tabibian looked at Azar and shrugged her shoulders. “Alhamdulillah, praise God, I suppose it went as well as one could expect. But, you know, for so many years I’d hoped and dreamed about the day I would get my son back. And seeing him, I realized, well, I’m never really going to get him back. I’m a stranger to him. Worse than a stranger . . . That woman has influenced his mind about me the same way she did to his father.”

  “What exactly happened with Mrs. Hojjati?” Azar asked. Now that things had gone so badly with Ali’s marriage, Azar didn’t mind inviting some gossip about the family he’d almost married into.

  Ms. Tabibian shrugged again and shook her head as if not sure where to start. Then she went still and looked steadily at Azar. Her eyes were the color of drying grass with yellow and brown blades mixed with the green. They stood out even more due to the heavy wrinkles and dark half-moons under her eyes. Ms. Tabibian was at least ten years older than Azar.

  “Your husband, Mr. Ibrahim . . . your parents chose him for you?” Ms. Tabibian asked.

  What a question! Yes, in fact, Azar’s parents had chosen Ibrahim for her over her strenuous objections. She’d been only fourteen. A baby. And all she knew of Ibrahim, her seventeen-year-old second cousin, was that he’d made a practice of terrorizing Azar and her closest girl cousins when they were children. In one particularly memorable incident, he’d trapped the girls, then eight years old, behind the big willow tree in his family’s garden by threatening to shoot them with his BB gun if they tried to escape. When, after what felt like hours of tears and pleading, Azar decided to make a break for it, the threatened shots never came, but in her panic she’d tripped and twisted her ankle. Ibrahim ran to check on her and Azar kicked him in his face, hard.

  When her mother had told her it was all arranged and Ibrahim would be her husband, Azar responded that she would die before marrying that boy. “Azar!” her mother had scolded, “Don’t joke about such things. I’m your mother. I know you better than you know yourself, and I’m telling you this is a good match. You’re a smart and ambitious girl. We didn’t even have to ask permission for you to continue your studies, because Ibrahim himself said he expects his wife to go to university. University! This type of boy among families like ours isn’t easy to find. If Ibrahim gave you a hard time when you were kids, it was only because he liked you even at that age. Just you wait a few months, and you’ll see how right I was.”

  It had taken years.

  In the end, of course, it had all worked out. Ibrahim was a good man, and Azar had actually gained more freedoms as a wife than she’d had as a daughter. Still, the first case that drew her into divorce court was that of another fourteen-year-old bride that hadn’t been so lucky. The girl’s petition for a divorce was denied, and so far as Azar knew, she was still living with a man who refused to let her leave the house by herself.

  Anyway, this was none of her secretary’s business, and Azar expressed her disapproval of the inappropriate question with a sharp “Excuse me?”

  It seemed, however, that Ms. Tabibian’s question was rhetorical, as she had continued without waiting for an answer.

  “An eighteen-year-old girl needs parents to help her make that most important decision,” Ms. Tabibian said, her voice tight. “But me . . . I was all alone. And when a kindly older gentleman wanted to marry me and take care of me, I agreed to be his second wife. How could I know that his first wife objected? How could I know she would never forgive me and would seek to deprive me of the only real family I had ever known. How could I know that she would take my son . . . my little Sadegh!”
r />   Ms. Tabibian clenched her jaw. She was clearly struggling to keep her composure. Azar hoped she would be successful but pushed a box of tissues toward her just in case. Ms. Tabibian took a deep breath and went on. “She put it into my husband’s head that I was unfaithful. When he divorced me, he told the judge he didn’t want—” Ms. Tabibian paused and looked up at the ceiling to, Azar guessed, prevent pooling tears from overflowing. “—his son to be raised by someone like me.” Ms. Tabibian finally abandoned her valiant efforts to keep from crying. Her face seemed to fold in on itself as her clenched eyes pulled her forehead down while her chin pulled up toward her downturned mouth. Ms. Tabibian began to sob. She pulled several tissues and pressed them to her face.

  Her secretary’s tears made Azar uncomfortable, and she regretted having opened the door to them with her question about Sarah’s aunt. Azar was a good lawyer who battled the courts successfully more often than one might expect given the stacked deck Iranian women were facing when it came to divorce law. But she’d never enjoyed the part of her job that entailed comforting or even just dealing with the emotions involved. It was always heartbreaking when a young mother lost custody of her children. Ms. Tabibian, going up against a powerful man like Mr. Hojjati wouldn’t have had much of a chance.

  Aloud, Azar tried to be comforting. “There, there, azizam, don’t cry. Crying never solved anything. Besides, now at last you’re reunited with your son, and that’s good, right?”

  Ms. Tabibian nodded and took several deep breaths.

  “Well, I suppose I should go see this Mr. Heydari as soon as possible, right?” Azar said, hinting that it was time for the woman to go.

  “Right,” Ms. Tabibian said. She picked up her disassembled phone, put the pieces in her purse and leaned forward onto her good leg to stand.

  “Thank you again for your help with this,” Azar said as she walked her secretary to the door. “And thank you for running things at the office today. I almost forgot to mention,” Azar turned to office business. “Ms. Jalili’s court date is Wednesday. Her only chance is to prove her husband is infertile, so check to see if he still hasn’t gotten the test. We have to file an official complaint by tomorrow. Also, I need you to call Ms. Raisdana to tell her we need another man willing to testify that her ex-husband beats their daughter. If we can convince the judge that the ex isn’t fit to make decisions for her, he might be prevented from marrying the girl off to his cousin. I’ll be back in the office tomorrow. Everything else can wait until then. If you have any questions, talk to one of the associates, and if they can’t help, call me.”

  Ms. Tabibian nodded as she walked to the door. Azar knew her capable secretary would probably have known to take care of these things even without her reminders. Ms. Tabibian, like Azar, was zealous about using every possible loophole and ruling to give their clients the best possible shot at having a say in their futures. In the office at least, Ms. Tabibian had never let her down.

  Ms. Tabibian paused at the door. She turned slowly to Azar.

  “Just one thing,” Ms. Tabibian said. “You should take Mr. Ibrahim with you. These sorts of places, it’s better to have a man. Mr. Ibrahim is here with you, right?”

  “No, he’s not. He’s—” Azar stopped herself. There was something about the pointed way Ms. Tabibian was looking at her that reminded Azar it was best not to share anything about Ibrahim having gone into hiding. “He’s not here. But, well, it’s good advice. I’ll be sure to take my father.”

  “It would be better to take your husband,” Ms. Tabibian repeated. Then she bowed slightly and hobbled out the door.

  * * *

  “Ya’allah, ya’allah.” Azar’s father warned of male entry from behind his cracked bedroom door.

  “Come in, pedaram, my father,” Azar called in response as she hung up her chador. “It’s okay, she just left.”

  Her father entered the living room yawning. He wore a baggy white T-shirt tucked into striped cotton pajamas, the drawstring tied snugly above his waist.

  “Good morning, pedar,” Azar said and she greeted her father with a warm kiss on his grizzled cheek. “Can I get you some tea? I have good news.”

  “I’ll get my own tea,” her father said and moved toward the kitchen. Azar followed him and took a seat at the wobbly table that, she noticed, had been cleared of all dirty dishes but still held the bread and other breakfast items that her mother must have left out for her and her father.

  “Guess what,” Azar said as she heaped butter and jam on bread. “I just got the address for where they’re holding Ali. Have your breakfast and then we should go as soon as possible.”

  “I don’t need breakfast,” her father said as he opened kitchen cabinets, “just my morning tea. Where are the teacups?”

  “Did you look in the dishwasher?” Azar set her bread down and popped up to retrieve a teacup and saucer from the machine. “Here you go.”

  “Thank you, my dear.” Her father lifted the steaming teapot off the samovar and poured its hot, dark contents into the teacup, filling it about a third full and spilling more than a few drops in the process. He placed the teapot back on its perch and opened the samovar’s spigot so the boiling water pouring into his cup lightened his tea to the right color. His teacup full, he turned the spigot again but didn’t manage to close it all the way, so small drips and drops continued to escape the vessel’s spout.

  “So,” he said as he sat and set the teacup and saucer on the softly rocking table, “your secretary gave you an address for where they’re holding Ali?”

  Azar, still standing, had quickly tightened the spigot, wiped drops of tea off the counter, and was now cleaning up the small puddle that had formed on the floor under the samovar’s spout. Azar often resented her father’s proud insistence on serving himself. It usually caused a great deal more work—which he was entirely oblivious to and unappreciative of—than if he’d simply allow himself to be served. Azar knew it was a small thing to care about in a country where a woman’s life was valued at half a man’s, but she found it increasingly difficult to resist the impulse to point out to her father the many unacknowledged ways he was propped up by the women in his life to look stronger, wiser, and more self-sufficient than he really was. Azar wondered whether Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s charismatic firebrand of a wife, played the same role for her husband as well.

  “Yes,” Azar answered as she tossed the wet paper towels in the garbage and washed her hands before joining her father at the table. “She even gave me the name of the station commander.”

  Her father lifted the teacup from its saucer to his thin lips and blew, forming cooling ripples in the steaming liquid. Azar noticed that the saucer was dangerously close to the edge of the table, where the slightest bump would result in a crash landing. She nudged it inward as her father asked, incredulous, “She managed to get all this information within minutes of reuniting with her long-lost son? Didn’t they have other things to talk about? And why would he give that information out so easily? Did she tell Sadegh that she worked for you?” He took a sip of his tea and set the cup in the saucer, pulling it back toward himself and the edge of the table before fixing a critical gaze on Azar.

  It was a good question, and Azar felt a little stupid for not having thought to ask her secretary the same thing. Particularly since Mr. Sadegh, by Ms. Tabibian’s own account, hadn’t been especially happy to see her.

  “Well . . . I don’t know exactly how she did it,” Azar said. “But she’s a loyal employee, and she’s smarter than you might think for someone without any education. Maybe she tricked the information out of him somehow. Or maybe Mr. Sadegh was already feeling guilty about putting poor Ali away.”

  “Akh!” Her father waved his hands in the air, jostling the table as he did so. “Whatever their failings and whatever our disagreements, I refuse to believe that boy or anyone else in that family arranged Ali’s arrest.”

>   Azar closed her eyes. She suspected her father was implying that Ali’s arrest had something to do with Ibrahim and Azar’s political activities. He’d warned strongly against their involvement in Mousavi’s campaign and had been apoplectic about Ibrahim’s role in encouraging mass resignations at Sharif University, where he worked as a professor of economics. Since Ali’s arrest, he kept muttering about how no one had listened to his warnings that political activities like that always led to misfortune.

  Azar didn’t disagree with her father about the risks. It was just that she and Ibrahim felt compelled to join in putting their shoulders to the wheel of history and offering what small efforts they could toward moving the country in a better direction now that there was a real opportunity to do so. And despite the tumult of the last few weeks, Azar was still certain that the Green Wave would ultimately prevail.

  Ali, however, shared their father’s philosophy and had steered clear of the conflict that had embroiled the nation. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to go after Ali for political reasons.

  It was much more likely, in Azar’s opinion, that her brother’s misfortunes stemmed from his unlucky entanglement with the Hojjatis. The family’s behavior since Ali’s arrest had been shocking. Sarah’s mother hadn’t even let Azar or her mother talk to Sarah directly to hear the story of Ali’s arrest firsthand and ask questions about what had happened. Sarah was much too upset and delicate to talk, Mahdiyeh-khanoom had insisted when they’d called. And when Azar and her mother had decided to simply drop by in hopes of seeing the girl and convincing her to help them look for Ali, Mahdiyeh-khanoom told them Sarah was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. Sleeping! While her husband was being held God knows where.

  At the very least, it was obvious that Sarah’s family was trying to use Ali’s arrest as an excuse to end the marriage. But Azar thought it was possible that the family had arranged Ali’s arrest to begin with and had angrily hinted at her suspicions to Sarah’s mother. Wasn’t Sarah’s Aunt Mehri exactly the sort of vengeful woman who would do such a thing, especially after the humiliation of her fall at the wedding and the experience of being so openly defied? Didn’t her son work for the Basij? Hadn’t Azar seen Sadegh outside the wedding venue with his Basiji friends? And didn’t his provision of information about Ali to Ms. Tabibian prove that he knew something about it to begin with?