Us & Them: A Novel

By Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

The international bestselling author shares “a glitteringly poignant novel” of an Iranian family navigating war, migration, and generational divides (Ruth Padel, author of Where the Serpent Lives).

Ever since the Iranian Revolution, Lili and Goli have argued about where their mother, Bibijan, should live. They also disagree about her finances, which remain blocked as long as she insists on waiting for her missing son to return from the Iran–Iraq war. When they begin sending Bibijan back and forth between Paris and Los Angeles, they begin to wonder where the money is coming from. But in order to remember the truth, Bibijan must finally relinquishes the past.

Mirrored in fragmented lives, Us&Them is a story of generational tensions that explores Iranian life away from home in all its aspects—the ludicrous and the tragic, the venal and the generous. It also highlights how “we” can become “them” at any moment, for our true exile is alienation from others. Acclaimed author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani offers a poignant satire about migration, one of the vital issues of our times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781503602199

Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI is an Iranian writer with a multicultural background. An award-winning author of Us & Them, a novel about the Iranian diaspora, The Woman Who Read Too Much and The Saddlebag, an international bestseller, she now lives and works in France.

Book preview

Also by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

The Woman Who Read Too Much

The Saddlebag

Paper

CHAPTERS

1. Us

2. Apocalypse

3. Transit

4. Immigration

5. Waiting

6. Lying

7. Tea

8. Anecdotes

9. Assimilation

10. Green

11. The Association

12. Art

13. Neighbours

14. Endangered

15. Losing the Plot

16. Shopping Bags

17. Conference

18. Garden

19. Revolution

20. Laundry

21. In-Laws

22. Walls

23. Weddings

24. Divorce

25. Real Estate

26. Carpets

27. Economy

28. Hairdresser

29. Phone Call

30. All in the Family

31. Imitation

32. Fenugreek

33. Honesty

34. Them

US

WE HAD BEEN EXPECTING THE BOOK to come out for quite some time. Such an obvious subject, just waiting to be exploited. Such a plum of a theme. We knew it would boost our confidence, and our confidence certainly needed boosting, after everything we had been through. It was a personal story, of course, but we believed it captured the zeitgeist of the age. There are millions of us, after all, covering the entire gamut of humankind: men and women, young and old, radicals and conservatives, pro-this, anti-that, and everything in between. And we are literally everywhere too, scattered over the planet, in Europe and in Australia, in Canada and the US. Why, we have even taken up residence in China, Latin America, and certain parts of Africa, as well as the United Arab Emirates, although some of these countries hardly count, of course, when it comes to the publishing industry. Interesting, that: how small the world is when it comes to the publishing industry. But wherever it did come out, and in whatever language, we were sure the book would have a wide readership.

Our story would become a best seller, a blockbuster; it would take the world by storm. It would move from long to short lists, from talk shows to lecture tours, and the author, whoever he or she was, would become a household name however difficult it might be to pronounce. We did speculate about that for a while; we did worry a bit about the author, we have to admit. It was bound to be a woman, we concluded, whether she wrote well or not; Iranian women do tend to receive all the media attention these days. And that did rather bother us, to be honest; that did rather goad our pride. There has been an unreasonable amount of attention given to female artists, scientists, actors, astronauts, lawyers, and suicides over the last several decades. But you can’t have it all your own way after a revolution, can you? Besides, female or not, the author would have to deploy the first-person plural in such a book, and that would draw a veil over the matter. The first-person plural is mandatory in such situations. We use this point of view in Persian to show our modesty, to demonstrate our humility. At times, it has to be admitted, we also use it to evade responsibility. But that is another issue. The point is that the effacement of self is as vital to Persian syntax as it is to our identity. Our speech patterns will be recognized immediately as Iranian by the erasure of personality. And doesn’t recognition matter more than gender in the last analysis? It was time we received that, no question. We had been waiting for some kind of recognition, some kind of serious attention—other than what we regularly received whenever we passed through immigration—for a long time.

The main question was: what form would the book take? Fiction? Factual analysis? Some of us hoped for cutting-edge commentary, a sociopolitical survey about The Original Aryan: Then and Now. Others thought a literary masterpiece would be more chic, a dazzling debut novel called The Exiles of Malibu or something, a story that captured the long damp winter of our deracination. Most of us just wanted a simple heartfelt tale with a name like Scheherazade in the Suburbs, perhaps, a sob story about impossible love or family dysfunction, stirring immediate empathy in the first ten pages and providing a comforting, sentimental end. We would even have been satisfied with a self-help manual, ten easy-to-read chapters and a difficult subtitle like Generational Repercussions of Post-Diasporadic Syndrome. Anything really, so long as it was about us, the final word about us.

We were excited about it. We anticipated its appearance from day to day. But nothing happened. We waited, for weeks, then months. But still nothing. Elections were rigged, reformists placed under house arrest, youth scraped off the pavements and denied education, university curricula erased from hard drives and forced underground, and no book appeared. Nothing. We scoured the reviews; we rummaged the archives. But our story had not been written. Not even historically, let alone currently. Not even briefly, in The Economist. Not even in French. We, the Iranians in the first-personal plural, were simply not in print.

It was devastating. There was plenty of evidence of first-person singular Iranians on the bookshop shelves, but we were not the focus of attention. Subjective stories abounded in the chain stores, but these were not about us, the real we. They were about individuals we could barely identify with, a country that no longer existed, a past of aesthetic sensibility belonging to the academic few, or a place for the very rich, the very religious, the very feminist, or the anti-feminist, the anti-religious, the anti-rich, even. There were biographies of those associated with the Peacock Throne. Or conspiracy theories about the fall of Mossadegh. Or the true confessions of those who still remembered Hitler and our oil in WWII. Or the fictional memoirs of pivotal figures of the Constitutional Revolution. But none of these stories was actually about the hydra-headed, contradictory, paradoxical us, the multiple, first-person plural us in Toronto and Sydney, in Bogotá and Beijing, speaking Persian all over the world.

We began to doubt ourselves. Were we a figment of our own imaginations? Was our multiplicity a false construct and mere illusion? Had we been deceiving ourselves, misplacing our expectations? But surely not! There was concrete evidence that our story was universal, the impact of our exile international. Had we not had a visible influence on the property market worldwide, especially in London and Toronto, especially in relation to renovating bathrooms and improving the plumbing in showers? Perhaps we were just not sexy enough to sell ourselves, not sensational enough to capture media attention. But the very idea was preposterous! Weren’t our women some of the most beautiful in the world, our politicians the most quotable? As for commercial clout, our entrepreneurship was renowned, our skill in the bazaar second to none; our carpets and kebabs have become cultural icons everywhere we go. And we have more PhDs per capita now, in the fields of medicine, law, and engineering, than any other immigrant community, except perhaps the Chinese; more nuclear scientists and computer experts among our sons than is probably good for us or for them; more daughters playing football and handball, becoming bus drivers and documentary filmmakers. We have invented our own unique brand by achieving every stereotype in the book! How could we lose confidence in our story?

We realized that if we did not take the matter in hand our very existence would be at risk. We would lose trust in ourselves and not just in our story. There was only one alternative, we concluded, only one choice left, in the circumstances. We had tried all the other options: we had depended on others, waited for others, expected others to take on the responsibility for the book to come out. We had accused everyone—monarchs and mullahs, foreigners and heretics, even women writers—for its failure to appear, and there was no one left to blame. So we could not waste another moment: one sole solution remained.

If we wanted the world to know about us, we had to do something about it ourselves. We had to reassemble our scattered lives, re-member our limbs and organs, reunite our separate identities, and author our own stories.

It would be a grand reunion!

APOCALYPSE

WHEN WE HEARD THAT SHE WAS COMING OVER for the family reunion in March, we were dismayed, as well as surprised, we can tell you. We had no wish to bump into that young woman again, not now, not after all these years. Besides, she wasn’t young anymore, was she? We hadn’t been in touch since she had left the country, over two decades ago, and certainly didn’t want to revive our friendship. She had broken off relations and had stopped corresponding when she went to Paris.

That family had always been dysfunctional. It wasn’t only the Revolution that had screwed them up. She was going to stay with that brassy sister of hers in Westwood, apparently, the blond bimbo with her flaky husband and two brats, whom we try to avoid as much as possible. We saw them at a wedding recently; it gave us quite a turn, because the boy is the spitting image of their dead brother, except for size. Half the age of our friend, but twice as fat. They said the old lady was coming from Iran to celebrate the Persian New Year with her daughters. That took us aback. We heard that she’d lost her marbles after what happened to her son. Just imagine an old Persian biddy who’d lost her marbles sprouting Naw Ruz lentils in Westwood. Great symbol for a fresh start. Fine kind of reunion it would be. Father dead, mother deranged, brother disappeared, and a couple of sisters barely speaking to each other—one so desperate to be American that she’d dipped her brains in bleach and the other who had turned lesbian or something to prove how French she was.

It had been a relief to us that the younger one never came back to the US. Once our articles began to appear, and we received the award for the book, we went out of our way to avoid meeting her friends and relations. Not that she had ever had that many friends in Los Angeles, it is true, but the General had held some sway in Tehrangeles during the last years of his life, and the older sister still lived here, still gadded about Bloomingdales on those impossible heels. Thankfully, she had no connections with the academic community and so we mercifully lost touch, broke off from mutual acquaintances, avoided meeting. Especially after the memoir came out. It would have been too embarrassing. The most hyperbolic and extravagant display of taarof—that acrobatic assault of verbal courtesy so characteristic of Iranian discourse—could not have saved us from awkwardness had we met. We’d been their kid brother’s closest buddy, after all; we’d been his best friend in Tehran. So we certainly didn’t want to see the sisters again. Sure, we’d been close in the past. We’d spent hours at their house after school, playing games under the willow in the garden. But it had been because of our friendship with their kid brother. Whatever the gossip might be, we certainly had no sort of special relationship with those girls, not at all.

In fact, the first time we met the younger one after leaving Iran, we hardly recognized her. We were still living on the East Coast at the time, and had come down to the nation’s capital to attend a Congressional hearing, in an expert capacity you understand. Very confidential. It was not long after the hostage crisis and we were on the up and up, confidentially speaking. And there she was, standing at the metro entrance, covered in khaki from head to foot and handing out leaflets to the uncaring. We didn’t give her a second glance at the time.

It’s all written in the books, she was saying: the apocalypse is foreordained.

Another nutter, we thought, brushing past. There were plenty of them around those days, lobbying for attention during the bitter war between Iran and Iraq. But this one was familiar, unfortunately. She recognized us too, that was the worst of it, and she spoke to us in Persian. An Iranian can always recognize an Iranian in a crowd. Something to do with the mouth, the movement of the lips. The nose.

The last days have come, she gleamed at us; retribution is at hand.

We are not religious, we lied. Meeting someone you know from before, completely crazy at a metro entrance, is unnerving. Since when had that young rebel taken to the veil? She had been inclined towards Marxism when we’d known her. That business with her brother must have turned her head, marching off to martyrdom in the middle of the war. He had disappeared in the Kurdish mountains when their father was dying in Beverly Hills, but we heard that the mother was still expecting him to return, like the Messiah. It looked like the sister was nuts too. Poor kid.

Catastrophe is inevitable, chaos is unavoidable, she was telling the people behind us. And how’re you doing, by the way? she called, as we turned away.

But we didn’t answer. We weren’t interested in her catastrophes. The apocalypse had already occurred as far as we were concerned; we’d gone through enough chaos to last us a lifetime, thank you very much. Our education had been aborted in Iran, partially completed in Britain, summarized in Canada, and now needed to be concluded without further interruption, at graduate school in the US. But we had to earn enough money to pay back our astronomical loans at the end of it all. That was our doomsday scenario. So we pressed on towards the escalators. The ground was littered with her pamphlets, dropped by people as indifferent as ourselves.

What a comedown, we thought. Her family used to be rich, unlike ours; she’d had connections and was given the best education money could buy. Unlike us. What had turned her into a fundamentalist? Must be some kind of weakness in the blood: first the brother, now her. It had been a terrible blow to hear of his fate; he had been a favourite friend at school, one of our closest chums. We had confided hopes, shared dreams, exchanged poetry with one another. But we abandoned him when the war began; we escaped conscription and fled from Iran when he was drafted into the army. We felt a little guilty about that. We felt guilty about shrugging his sister off too. There were violet shadows under her eyes that brought back painful memories.

It seemed unlikely that we’d ever meet again after the metro encounter, but a few weeks later, we found her waiting on the platform itself, pressing more handouts on people. Fervent. Evangelical. Obviously fallen in with the wrong crowd, we thought. Several organizations had sprouted up since the Revolution, so-called governments in exile, opposition movements of one kind or another, the Judean People’s Front and all that, rounding up recruits among the desperate. There are so many ways a minority can exploit the masses. That’s what the Congressional hearing had been about, actually: exploiting fear constructively. It had been a great boost to our career, to become an advisor on how to handle the rising Assyrian hordes. But now we were the desperate ones, because there she was again, sidling up to us again, taking advantage of the late suburban train to ask us how we were doing. Again.

As well as can be expected, we shrugged awkwardly. Still breathing. Hanging in there. It’s not the end yet! we said attempting humour. How about yourself?

When you are oppressed by your government and robbed by your compatriots, she began, surely it is a sign of the end? The brutalities in broad daylight, the acts of intimidation on a daily basis prove it. A new time is at hand, she said, earnestly.

Is that so, we laughed. Sounds more like the same old times to us, we told her, trying to dodge past as the train doors hissed open. We found her intimidating, quite frankly, disconcerting with that pale face and the ugly khaki headscarf. We dropped her leaflets onto the rails as we slipped into the carriage.

But she followed us. To our dismay, we saw that she had stepped into the train too, just before the doors closed. She was pressing her flyers on other passengers, passing leaflets up and down the aisles, and holding up fuzzy pictures of naked bodies between the stations. That was the worst of it. How could a good-looking young woman like that, and from a decent family too, with connections in the army and the court, be waving photos of naked bodies under the noses of total strangers! She was not alone either; there was a team of them. When a couple of cops came in at the next stop and started rounding up her colleagues, we looked away, relieved and mortified, ashamed and guilt-ridden to see her being hustled off the train.

You don’t have to be religious to be responsible, she screamed as she was dragged along the platform, her headscarf slipping. It was frankly shocking.

The next time our paths crossed, we were on the other side of the country. We had been invited to give a paper, run a seminar, organize a colloquium on the West Coast, and we bumped into her by accident, on campus, at the end of the summer term. She was serving in one of the canteens, dishing out lasagne to the students, though what her older sister must have thought of that, we could not imagine. They were the two extremes: the older one in her Westwood mansion, getting her legs waxed and her nails done every week; the younger one working in a cafeteria, pushing pulp food and propaganda on students. The General must be rolling in his grave, we thought. People said she hadn’t even attended his funeral.

She came and sat at our table. Her kid brother’s best friend, after all, before we gave him the slip. We had sworn eternal fealty to each other before he offered to fight for the Lord, so we could hardly give his sister the brush-off again, could we? Not in these circumstances. The students were drifting off, the pace of work was slackening at the canteen, long time no see and all that. Besides, her headscarf was no longer khaki coloured, but blue now and made of silk. Her sister’s influence? She was still insisting on Armageddon, though, still harping on the apocalypse.

If Western governments cannot stop the violation of human rights in our country, she said, if foreign powers are paralyzed by their anxiety for votes, their fear of body bags, then there is no alternative but for us to act in our own best interests.

Her cheeks were flushed. Was she wearing a little makeup for a change? There was something different about her face. Rather attractive. But still fanatic.

We have to topple the regime, she glittered. Take advantage of the least crack, the smallest fissure to destroy the system. Chaos is inevitable, violence unavoidable.

We are not interested in politics, we lied, scraping at our plates. She sounded like some kind of latter-day Bolshevik. A pity. She was quite pretty really.

What you’re saying, she rounded, is that you don’t mind if chaos and violence reign in your country so long as you are out of it.

We did not say any such thing, we retorted. We just don’t think that we can do anything from here, that’s all. Change depends on the Iranians inside the country.

Iranians are cowards wherever they are, she countered. Change can only occur if you retaliate, if you resist. And to hell with the consequences.

We were appalled. We don’t believe that ends justify means, we replied, loftily, and excused ourselves before she could say any more.

But as we shuffled off to dump our cold lasagne in the bin, we could sense her watching us, could feel her mocking gaze penetrating our shoulder blades. Our ends had certainly justified our own means when we abandoned her brother to his fate all those years ago; we hadn’t given a damn for the consequences when we dared him to march to his death in the mountains. Had our cynicism provoked his idealism? Had our words incited the folly of his subsequent actions? Did that mean we were in some way responsible for his imprisonment, his likely death? And were we now supposed to make up for it? There is something distinctly unpleasant about being called a coward especially when you are trying to make a name for yourself in academia.

It had been a mistake to tell her that we had an office on campus, a carrel in the library. She would not leave us alone after that. We were afraid our colleagues in the department would notice. People eyed her each time she came by, gauging our relationship. We really did not want our friends to see us hanging around with a woman in hijab. There was enough paranoia in the air as a result of the hostage crisis without adding to it, and we could be thought terrorists simply by association. It was one thing to be an expert and another to be suspected of being a fifth columnist. One time we actually risked rudeness and did not answer the door when she came knocking; another time we asked to be excused, claiming pressing commitments.

But she returned a few evenings later, just as we were about to go home. She had used words and arguments at first; now she bombarded us with the photographs. There they were, the horrors she had been flaunting in the metro: mutilated babies, gassed children, women howling in the dust over the bodies of young soldiers, tortured prisoners, disfigured girls, bones exhumed from mass graves all tumbling out of the folder under her arm. That did it. We could not shut the door in her face. But since we were about to leave the library, we could not ignore her now, either.

We offered gallantly to walk her home. It was late, after all; the light was fading and that campus is always rather seedy after dark. We could hardly give a young woman the cold shoulder at this hour, especially the sister of our best friend from school. Besides, she wasn’t wearing a headscarf that evening. In fact, her hair had henna glints under the street lamps and there was an aura of perfume about her. We decided to flirt with her, experimentally, if only to avoid being evangelized.

Mother still in Iran? Yes. And brother? No. We glanced at her profile in the pause, remembering the lovely boy. Women had never been our cup of tea before.

But you can’t ignore those left behind, she said, swinging round to look at us full in the face. She really was beautiful, with that gleaming hair, those blazing black eyes. You can’t turn your back on them, she whispered. Their degradation is your degradation, their distress your distress. If their human rights are being trampled on, then you’re complicit if you do not protest against it.

There was a quiver in her voice, an unsteadiness that was unnerving. Her passion was frightfully sincere. No, we had not thought of it that way. Yes, perhaps we were complicit. We were trying to find a way to calm her down.

But she had not finished with us. If you are that complicit, then you must be awfully callous, she rounded, trembling, and if you are so callous, then you deserve the racism that’s being levelled against you in this country.

We were shocked. We could not back away now, either, we said, and at that moment we saw—sweet heaven!—tears shining in her eyes. We had not realized till that moment that this girl might actually be suffering.

It was an apocalyptic moment, alright. Although we disliked being called callous to our faces almost more than being considered cowards behind our backs, we had to admit, under the street lamp, that human rights did deserve attention. We agreed this might be a cause worth supporting. By the time we reached the bus stop, we were offering to do our bit for our country. When she gave us the leaflets, we accepted them. When she asked for our signatures, we complied. In fact, as the bus rolled up, we even told her that we’d write an article to support her cause. But we drew a line at headscarves. We would have liked to breathe the heady perfume of her tumbling locks forever, and taken her in our arms.

We bent closer to her. If universal mayhem and worldwide conflagration are at hand, a headscarf won’t give you much protection, will it? we quipped, and then we quickly kissed her on the cheek, before turning away and swinging aboard the bus.

This is not about protection; it’s about solidarity, she yelled after us.

It had only been a little peck on the cheek, but her voice was loud. Everyone on the bus stared at us as we lurched to our seats, feeling awkward and embarrassed. Women are so complicated. When we overtook her on the road, she never turned, never waved. So much for solidarity in suffering, we thought angrily; we were humiliated, discomfited by her dwindling figure; we were haunted by her perfume, the odour of our own armpits. We wondered if she had said all that stuff about degradation because she felt guilty too, about her brother.