Though You Slay Me

Zane wails like a toy ambulance low on battery.

I don’t turn: even so, all my attention is on the noise coming from the other side of the door. He lets out another howl, and in the silence that follows I hear the faint bang of drawers being opened and closed, then opened again. Alarms course through me. I must go to him.

“Five more minutes,” says Farzad.

At the start, it had seemed unavoidable, but that was when Zane was less fitful, back when Rafael would be here to pick him up from his crib, calm him, and keep watch over me. Doesn’t Farzad hear?

But his brush is on the easel and his lips are parted and he is pressing the rose red tip into the white, and so I know now is not the time to protest, let alone let my eyes wander from the far wall where the light is streaming in and divided by the prism mounted on the window and washing over my face and shoulder in a muted rainbow, the basis for this entire painting, awash in light.

How long does it take to paint one portrait?

Weeks, months even. I had a feeling Farzad might stretch it out into eternity.

Zane stops crying for a moment.

Wafting in through the lone window, I can hear the honking of horns and the rumble of traffic five stories down. It’s getting towards six pm, and the busy seaside street is humming with people.

Zane lets out another wail. It is short and angry and demanding. Where are you Mother?

He is ten months old and utters adamant syllables now, even during his tantrums his cries are punctuated by frustrated stabs at communication.

The other day he pointed to a print of the painting of me and Rafael that Farzad had done for our wedding day. “Dada,” he had said, a questioning look in his eyes.

Later I took it off the wall and put it in the cabinet, but the following morning it was up again, Farzad staring at it as he ate his granola and imported frozen mango.

“It is not to be touched,” is all he had said and had stared not at me, but at the me in the picture, as he chewed his fleshy yellow fruit in a strangely methodical manner.

Farzad dips another brush into the black, dabs, then holds it, hovering an inch from the easel.

From the other room, I hear another wail, louder, longer.

“I must go,” I gasp, and I stand up and run toward the door just as Farzad rises from his stool. I skirt past him as he tries to block my way.

I yank at the handle but it won’t budge. I turn back to Farzad. There is a strange look in his eyes, a warning, and he’s taken a step toward me.

But Zane’s wails are suddenly fast and chaotic and unrelenting. Something has happened.

I turn back to the door and yank the handle all the way down. With a crunching cracking sound, it suddenly comes loose, and I fling the door open fast.

Outside, Zane is on the floor surrounded by broken glass and I swoop down and scoop him up quickly, searching him for blood.

But apart from the massive quantity pumping through my heart, there is none.

I turn him around to double-check. Thank God, Thank God, Thank God.

Just then I feel, more than hear someone behind me.

Farzad is standing with his arms crossed, his feet apart, and the corners of his mouth turned down. I pull Zane closer to me. This is it. This is pure lunacy, and…and…

“He can’t stay here,” says Farzad.

My arms tighten around Zane.

“What?”

I have done my best to keep my head down, to speak no evil and see no evil, but now the words pop out of me faster than I can reign them in.

“You can’t be serious,” I say, pulling him closer.

“He must go. I can’t work like this.”

And then Farzad reaches out to adjust a vinyl record on the mahogany stand next to him, and without looking at the shards of glass scattered on the floor, he turns and disappears into the studio while Zane lets out long, rasping breaths as he clings to my shoulders, recovering from it all.

…

Two months prior.

“Of course, you can stay. How could I say no to my own flesh and blood?”

Farzad’s voice sounded cheerful, yet somehow hollow. I could catch snippets of it through the telephone as if he were straining to be heard.

I looked over at Rafael who sighed and let a smile play around the corners of his lips. Farzad had grown up in Rafael’s house after his parents had died. Perhaps now he was repaying a debt.

“Thank you,” said Rafael. “It would help a lot.”

A pit had settled in my stomach then.

Rafael was never one to grovel to get what he needed, even when the cash he was able to procure from my two pieces of gold jewelry fit neatly in the small pouch he would wear around his waist during the journey.

He continued listening as Farzad went on about his art, scratching his head as he looked at me, traces of a smile skirting his lips. Primadona Farzad.

I knew that was what he was thinking, or something along those lines.

Our apartment was dark, especially with the heavy blinds drawn. The dust one couldn’t see by fluorescent light had settled in a permanent blanket all around, giving it a barely-lived-in look. All apartments in Tehran were this way, or so I imagined. Better darkness than the bloodthirsty eye of the state.

Still, I could make out Rafael’s smile as he listened to his second cousin.

He was calm and collected, although our very lives were at stake.

“Trust in God,” Rafael was saying to Farzad. “Turn to him. He’ll give you inspiration.” Color had flushed on my face for two reasons now.

Farzad had come when we had first been engaged. He had painted me, his eyes seeming to etch themselves into the contours of my face. Never in all my life had a man looked at me that way, not even Rafael. I had never told my husband, though.

The stories Rafael told of growing up together had kept me mute: he cared for the man. And perhaps it was just the natural lust stirred up by the face and body I’d been dealt, I told myself. It was not the first time, and so the feeling had become almost natural, and the looks almost proprietary, as if they were part and parcel of my very being.

Still, Rafael seemed to have no idea at all.

He hung up and came to me, putting his hands on my shoulders so that I was forced to stand there, looking up into his eyes.

“All will be well,” he had said. “God is with us. Let us trust.”

My skin had bristled.

Two weeks prior he had said he’d heard from this God, that he’d told him we were supposed to leave Tehran.

These words were foreign to me, yet I had come to expect them from him.

I had stiffened, braced for the onslaught. I would not be converted. I had a nine-month-old and I would not surrender him to the whims of some wavering being in the clouds, especially with the way this being had treated his followers. Or at least my husband.

“It is not safe for us anymore here,” Rafael had said then after I had looked up at him with wavering, angry eyes.

My heart lurched within me and Zane let out a small cry from where he was nestled against my chest, asleep. A nightmare, perhaps.

I drew him closer.

Something inside me sank. Rafael was right.

He would die, one way or another, if we stayed. I had seen enough to know that.

And so I had nodded and gulped down the great fear I had of crossing the mountains and braving the border and then descending into the strange foreign city with those three massive buildings like flames licking up to the heavens.

But anything might be better than the stifled desperation of Tehran, and in the end, Rafael was right: it was only a matter of time until they would come and take him away, and perhaps me and Zane as well.

So, I began to prepare.

Two days later it was time to depart. I took my darkest abaya and flung it over my head, adjusting it in the mirror so I could see out of the mesh rectangle sewn around the eyes. From next to me Zane cried, terrified at what I had become.

I ripped the garment off and grabbed him up in my arms and his wails stopped.

Rafael looked at me and frowned. “Your face must be covered for the whole journey,” is all he said. “Zane will have to adjust.”

And I looked at myself again in the mirror and frowned. I knew why.

When Zane was shushed to sleep and nestled against my chest, I slipped the black garment over myself and instantly felt a fog of darkness surround me: caged in, covered, beauty smoldering within.

I had seen it in men’s eyes, even when I was a young girl not more than six, having ripped off my Abaya and run in the streets with the boys. Now, I knew well enough not to play with fate. I looked at myself in the mirror: a dark wavering mass, indistinguishable from any other. If only this were how I could appear to Farzad for the duration of our stay.

…

Present Day:

It takes only fifteen minutes to calm Zane, his shudders getting slower and shallower as my hand rubs his back, his movements like the contractions of labor in reverse.

Finally, he is asleep on my shoulder, and I put him in his crib, lifting the rail he’d managed to push down and escape from. A smart boy.

There is piano music coming from the studio. Even the low notes are light and airy and I can feel the sun’s warm rays through them.

Here, on the water’s edge, the oldest buildings stand stately, looking out on the wide boulevard and the sea beyond. They look like they’re from Paris or some other European dream spot Rafael and I had talked of going to.

Of course, it had only been a dream.

I look at the door hanging open. I can see it is broken. I swallow, swearing I will make it right. I don’t know how, though.

“Good of you to come back,” Farzad says, not turning as the door creaks.

He is bent over his easel again, painting something in the bottom corner, beneath my curled toes and the feet of the chair. He likes everything to be realistic, save the background. I have learned that much from him, and I wonder, for a brief moment, if that is not the problem with Zane.

“It is not good of me,” I say, my voice flat, my features unyielding. “It is what I must do.”

Farzad looks at me a moment as if he might throw the paintbrush like a spear, but then he seems to think better of it. I can read the thoughts going through his mind: the red on my face would take too long to clean. It would smear the makeup he’d already had me apply and would make my cheeks raw and scrubbed-looking. It would get in my hair, not to mention splotch onto the chair and the floor. It would, in general, ruin the atmosphere.

The music continues to play. Sometimes Farzad likes to work in silence, but other times he goes for piano, strictly piano.

I cross the room and sit in the chair. “If Zane goes, I go,” I say. My back is flat and straight. My voice is trembling. I had practiced this phrase while rocking my son in my arms, every one of his shudders a drumbeat for war.

I look Farzad straight in the eyes, but there is a deadness in his that I can’t quite meet. If Zane goes, I go, I repeat in my head, and I shiver. Perhaps that is what he wants.

But Farzad just looks at me, lifting his chin up and narrowing his eyes, as if assessing the light falling on my face.

Without saying a word, he turns his head to the easel and presses the brush to its surface.

“Did you hear me?” I ask.

He stops for a moment, looking at me, and I can tell by that brief flicker in his eyes, that he will not let me go.

“Please be still,” is all he says.

The invisible hand that had been squeezing my heart loosens.

…

Two weeks prior, Rafael had gone for the fifth time to the U.S. Embassy, the newspaper clippings in his folder, plus the fourteen death threats he’d been sent saved as screenshots on his phone, as well as the medical report after his stabbing. They had turned him away up until now, but he was adamant he must knock once more.

It was a lot for me to be complaining about Farzad when Rafael himself couldn’t pass a stranger without checking for a knife nestled inside a coat. It was a lot for me to complain when the gash in his leg still woke him most nights around three.

That is how I had reasoned, and that is why I had never told him.

Plus, it had only been a feeling, and Rafael, or at least the old Rafael, would have laughed it off. “He is an eccentric artist and that’s all,” he had always told me. “He’s loyal to the core. Be sure of that.”

The day when Rafael had not returned from the Embassy, I had stood at the window looking down on the wide street dotted with people. I had wanted to believe he was one of them, late, bustling along trying to beat the sunset glinting off those strange, flame-like buildings. I wanted to believe he would come bursting up the stairs, his heavy winter coat and hat pulled off and his arms flung out toward Zane, a smile widening his face: good news, or at least a beating heart.

I refused to believe that the worst had befallen him. He was smart. He was capable. He would not let himself be recognized in public, much less caught. I still want to believe that today.

“You don’t need to worry,” Farzad says. The sun has set. He has put down his paintbrush and I haven’t even noticed. My eyes had gotten lost in the endless light pouring through the window, the smudges there from when someone had run a too-wet and too-dirty rag over the glass. I will clean it tomorrow, I had thought. It will give me something to do.

“He will be back,” Farzad says again. “He’s a resilient man.”

I look up at Farzad, registering what he is telling me.

“Ah,” is all I say. My mind twists back to the present. “I know.”

And I get up off the chair and walk past Farzad, my skin prickling in that terrible familiar way it does when his eyes feast on it.

I now know he believes Rafael will not return, and I am afraid of what he may be planning.

Zane and I play all that evening in my room. It is hard to keep a one-year-old entertained for long, but easy to be entertained by one for hours, especially when he is my son. I smile. He looks so much like his father, even at this young age. The dimples are a tell-tale sign. And those dark eyes and long lashes; it was those eyes that had drawn me to Rafael at first, too.

“I believe,” I whisper, quiet enough so that Zane won’t hear.

But he turns anyway, his mouth open and his eyes wide, as if I have just tried to tell him something and it bears repeating.

“I believe,” I whisper again, a little more loudly, and I pull him into my arms, the warmth of his chest against mine a signal that the fire has not gone out and that Rafael, somewhere, somehow, is alive.

That night, I get down on both knees next to my bed and I pray. Rafael had begun going to secret meetings two months before he was attacked. When he was stabbed, his resolve only grew, even though I had begged him not to return there.

“They’ll catch you,” I had said. “They’re watching. I can tell.”

“God is protecting me,” Rafael had said, in that sure calm way that he had about him, that he had always had about him. “I must go. It’s like…oxygen.”

I had just looked at him. His eyes had grown so big and plaintive as if he were begging me to understand.

Yet I did not.

When he said things like this, I felt as if he and I were now living in different dimensions, or as if he had switched internal compasses, and the magnets that had drawn him toward me were now driving him to a distant land.

And now he was gone.

“God,” I prayed.

I had done this first the night he had not returned. First I had lain on our somber empty bed for hours, the moonlight streaming through the window onto my face, making an eery portrait and leaving me bereft, hopeless. For hours and hours.

I had never wanted to pray before then, but something had made me then. Perhaps it was being utterly out of options, or perhaps it was something else that seemed to have taken up a small piece of real estate in my heart.

In any case, I got on my knees, next to our bed, like I had seen Rafael do countless times, and I had bowed my head and folded my hands, and leaned forward so that my forehead sank into the tops of my thumbs.

It had felt good.

“God,” I had prayed. And a terrible rebellion and anger had welled up within me and I had snapped my head up.

God had made this entire thing happen, perhaps a God who didn’t even exist in the first place.

I had squeezed my eyes closed, and gotten back in that empty bed, unable to sleep.

But still, something was beckoning me back down, and so, finally, I had gotten out of the covers and again on my knees. I had folded my hands, and again let my head sink into the tops of my thumbs.

“God,” I prayed again. “Please bring him back to us. Please don’t let him die.”

All I had heard was a lonely aching emptiness.

But after that, I had fallen into a deep and heavy sleep, my first in days.

And so I had continued day after day after day.

“God,” I prayed now, kneeling on the floor next to the bed, listening to the sound of the wind making the window frames groan. “Please, bring Rafael back.”

There was again silence, like always.

But this time I felt myself being pulled, nudged, prodded, as if by some invisible force.

I was meant to do something.

The book.

It was not my own words, not my own thoughts, and yet it was inside my head. I would never read that book. I had sworn it, the way he had been brainwashed by it.

The book.

The words repeat in my head. It must be right. It must be what I am meant to do.

I get up from my kneeling position, my knees already beginning to stiffen, and I make my way to Rafael’s side of the bed.

It is still there. The book.

I lift it up and caress the cover. Suddenly, I can’t help it. It is his, and I have no idea where he is right now, nor what is happening to him.

I wince. I had tried to go outside several times. Farzad had blocked the way each time, threatening to throw me and Zane out if I did.

He had promised to get information, but he never had. He had said these types of inquiries were delicate, especially when the person was an illegal from a less-than-friendly neighboring state.

No one had helped me. No one. And now here I was with this book. A promise?

I hold it in my hands and let it fall open. The spine makes a cracking sound as the light silky pages fall together on either side of the red band.

I squint and look at a piece of underlined text.

Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.

I shudder. Is this the message that drove Rafael to this suicidal devotion? Is this the God he trusts?

Tears spring to my eyes and I shut the book fast. No. No. No. No. No. No.

I shake my head and fling the book from me.

My mind is made up.

Tomorrow I will go out of this house. Tomorrow I will take Zane and I will go out and we will find him and we will bring him back and God will have nothing at all to do with it.

Still, for hours, I lay awake.

I know what I could do to feel better, to allow myself to drift to sleep, but I will not go back to the floor. I will not go down on my knees to a God who demands blood like that.

There is a reason I had never been pious before. And now it seems this new God is just as bad as Allah.

And because I cannot sleep, I focus all of my thoughts and energy on where I will go the next day, on how I will find him.

Finally, I drift off into a sea of blackness in which I find myself running away from the light, toward the sound of a man whimpering as if he’s been beaten down to his last breaths.

The next thing I know, the sun is opening on my face, and I hear Zane begin to stir.

My eyes snap open and I sit up.

I must go. Before Farzad wakes up. I must go. I will suffer his wrath later, but not now.

I stuff some provisions in my bag, plus the rest of our money, lift Zane out of his crib, rock him back and forth in my arms for a minute, until I am sure he won't squeal, and then hurry to the kitchen where I grab a slab of cheese and a loaf of bread. I fill an old plastic bottle with water and push it in my now-heaping bag. Then I wrap Zane around my chest with a long cloth, tie the ends, then cover myself entirely with an Abaya.

As I slip out the door, Zane utters a cry, and I can feel the cold wind rushing into the apartment.

The latch clicks, and then we are gone.