A Nearby Country Called Love by Salar Abdoh

Author:Salar Abdoh [Abdoh, Salar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Ten

August came, and the burning season began. Every day there was news of another forest in flames. They seemed timed, synchronized. As if someone was putting the country on notice. Tempers flared. In Monirieh, the sporting goods stores remained empty. Fights broke out.

Issa walked the neighborhood, waiting for someone from the shahr-khar’s family to come and pick up where Haj Davood had left off. But no one came. Finally, one day, he saw a new sign going up in front of the man’s old real estate office. Even the bodybuilding gym was shuttered after a while. He asked around and found out the heirs had been fighting among themselves. They could agree on nothing, and so bit by bit everything that the old scrooge had worked for and swindled others out of was going up for sale. It was a fitting end to a life that had been slime, and Issa didn’t mind it one bit.

He wondered what would become of Haj Davood’s multitude of thugs. He understood the city well enough to know that when hoodlums lost a master they could run wild for a while. But on a Friday, he came face-to-face with the guy whose ribs he’d broken. The other man gave him a wide berth and crossed over to the other side of the main street to continue walking.

At the same time he was receiving unexpected, outlandish emails from overseas. His only lasting friend from his years in America, a colossus of a Senegalese man named Babacar, wrote to say he was tired of Dakar and wanted to come to the Middle East, convert to Shia Islam, and study at the seminary in Qom where he’d heard they gave stipends to African students.

Baba, Issa wrote back, Stay where you are, please. In fact, I wouldn’t mind leaving Tehran and coming to Dakar myself.

Babacar had been deported just two months before Issa, after getting caught in a fake marriage scheme to obtain residency papers. The sole doorman on those night shifts at the boutique hotel in Manhattan, he knew the Koran by heart, read the French classics out loud in the lobby as a way to relax during the wee hours of the morning before guests came down for checkout, and taught Issa the minutiae of Arabic grammar while Issa showed him the finer points of English and, at Baba’s insistence, read him Shakespeare and the British Romantics. They had been two transients on borrowed time in that lobby near the Theater District.

“Issa, English poetry is not bad. But—how do you say it?—it holds no candle to Arabic.”

“Does French?”

“Certainly not. Do not be foolish.”

“Why are we here then, Baba?”

“Well, we did not come to New York to study poetry, did we?”

“Maybe we did.”

“Maybe we did. Even so, Mr. Shakespeare talks too much.”

“Read his sonnets instead. He talks just enough in those. He doesn’t get carried away.”

“It is still not Arabic poetry.”

“Nor Persian.”

“I wish I could read Chinese. But I am late for my prayers.”

Baba would always catch up on his prayers around three a.

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