"After the Election" by Mehdi M. Kashani
When I rushed to inform Peter that the presidential election had been stolen, I caught him in the middle of fixing our leaky toilet. The spectacle—he was wearing only his underwear, as if bracing for an explosion, his YouTube-educated hands submerged deep in the tank—was worthy of a candid photo, but my priorities were elsewhere.
“He did it. Ahmadinejad cheated,” I squealed.
“They finished counting forty million votes already?”
It was my husband’s way of showing he did indeed listen to my spiels about Iran. Over the past few weeks I’d told him more than once about the number of eligible voters and the many predictions regarding election turnout.
“No,” I said, “but he’s ahead by a wide margin.”
“Maybe things will change if they count more?” There was no conviction in his voice.
“Yeah, sure.”
I said that a lot. Whenever I found a comment of his way outside reality, when even another lecture of mine wouldn’t right it: the derisive yeah, sure. It was rude, I knew. Peter had married a girl, not her country. He wasn’t even interested in the politics of his own birthplace; he didn’t have to be fluent in mine. My awareness of all this usually brought about my contrition later.
I scurried back to the living room, where my laptop’s hot bottom burned my bare thighs. I’d been away for less than two minutes, yet I refreshed my open tabs with the ferocity of a carnivore. Nothing had transpired in the meantime but more speculations, more frustrations. Only the flushing and gurgling of the toilet water broke our uneasy silence.
I wasn’t the only one feeling betrayed. In the months leading up to the election, Iran’s economy had been in turmoil; so had our frail social freedoms. When the moderate Mousavi nominated himself, a buzz erupted among the disillusioned, those of us who yearned for change. But it wasn’t enough. Millions of eligible voters were still too jaded to vote. Some of us Iranians in diaspora took it upon ourselves to convince our compatriots to participate. I stayed awake at odd hours laboriously making long-distance calls and encouraging random people to vote with polite, practiced lines. I had answers handy for any counterargument:
What happened the last time I voted? Nothing.
I understand your frustration, sir. But reform is a gradual process.
None of these candidates is able to make a meaningful change.
Ma’am, you have a valid concern. But this is a choice between bad and worse.
So went my frenzied attempts at drumming up a handful of votes. When Peter asked who I was talking to, I always said a friend from Iran. Had he known the truth, he’d have thought I was crazy. He wouldn’t exactly have been wrong.
Now all was lost. With sixty-three percent of votes—a landslide—Ahmadinejad was deemed the winner. This wasn’t a matter of a few thousand displaced votes. He was ahead by twelve million. I felt aggrieved, incredulous, and powerless. I felt as if I’d lost a dear one in a distant land—and indeed I had: I had lost hope.
For twenty-four hours I was stuck to the sofa, plunged into a vegetative state. I treated my laptop like a paramour, carrying it even to the toilet. Peter hovered around me, trying to feed me protein, to cheer me up with pistachio ice cream. Occasionally, he’d ask, “Are all Iranians this obsessed right now?”
A fair question for which I had no easy answer. There were Iranians who conveniently introduced themselves as Canadian or American, whose favorite city in the world was Vegas, who couldn’t remember when they’d last had Fesenjān. Yet I knew many too who, like me, were pulled in against their wishes by the gravity of Iranian politics, whose lives orbited around the wellness of our country. I was one of these: a proud Iranian who’d told herself, her husband, and his family that Ahmadinejad was only a glitch in the system. Now the glitch had chosen to stay.
“Let’s go out,” Peter suggested, fed up with my misery.
“Only if we go to a Wi-Fi place with my laptop.” CNN was replaying Christiane Amanpour’s coverage from Tehran, a five-minute 101 recap for foreigners that hardly did justice to the depth and breadth of the proceedings. What I was reading in the Iranian outlets was juicier and more eventful, if not always the absolute truth. “I can’t be disconnected.”
Peter leaned towards me and gently placed his index finger on the top of the laptop. “All the more reason to go. Rana, honey, you need a break.” He knew better than to actually close it.
I slid out from under my computer, abandoning it on the sofa. “Don’t close it yet.”
I turned up the volume on the TV and dashed to the bedroom. It was a sweltering Saturday in mid-June. I shed my oversized tee shirt and began to hunt for something light to wear. He was peering at me, leaning on the doorway with a curious if not lustful look, the wavering kind that could lead to sex if I decided to follow it. He was my husband, entitled to that gaze, but suddenly I felt violated. Shouts and chants from the Amanpour report filled the apartment. I stretched an arm across my chest. “Need anything?”
With only seven months until the 2010 Winter Games, Granville Street had recently seen quite a few improvements. The pedestrian walkway had been widened, older trees cut down, new benches installed, and light poles erected. Today it was hosting a fair.
Food carts and kiosks lined both sides. Pedestrians, mostly young parents, crowded the middle, forming short queues here and there. The sun shone glaringly. I peered at people dressed in colorful summery outfits. I knew I wouldn’t bump into any of my friends. They’d be huddled together at one of their usual cafés, tweeting and retweeting news, sharing clips on Facebook, and contributing their own spin. They would soothe each other with hollow promises, which were better than no promises at all. I yearned to join them, to be with those who were on the same page as I was about what had been lost. But it wouldn’t have been fair to Peter to leave him alone on a Saturday after a busy week at school. And I couldn’t have taken him with me, as he wouldn’t be welcome, not this time. His inflected pronunciation of Iranian politicians’ names, which once incited laughter, was no longer cute. Amid such a tragedy, no one would bother to switch to English for his benefit—and for what? To educate Peter on convoluted Iranian political structures?
Peter had been talking for a while. We were holding hands, though I wasn’t sure since when. I heard his last sentence, with its questioning intonation. “What do you think of sunglasses as a gift?”
I touched the temple of my own sunglasses, a reflex. “A gift for whom?”
Peter was already veering towards Sunglass Hut, still clutching my hand. “Jenna’s birthday, remember?”
I’d totally forgotten about his mother’s birthday the following weekend. Peter had adorable parents: a genial pediatrician and a retired high school teacher who lived in a squeaky wooden house in Squamish, an hour’s drive from Vancouver, decorated in shades of red and brown. A lovely place, fit for meditation, far from the city’s frantic energy. Its peacefulness, which had often been a selling point for me, now became a kind of poison. How would I survive a full day in that void when my stomach was already turning at the thought of what could have happened in Iran since we left home an hour ago?
We snuck into the store, an air-conditioned refuge from the surrounding din. Inside I acted the dutiful wife and doting daughter-in-law, patiently trying on a range of sunglasses, gazing at my reflection in the mirror, weighing in on each option, listening to the salesman’s words of wisdom, disqualifying this and shortlisting that, until we settled for a star-studded Burberry set.
All the while it felt as if I were counting down to some unknown disaster. I needed my friends, and this need was only heightened by the prospect of our upcoming weekend, when I’d be banished from the news. I waited for Peter to pay, and then said, “Do you mind if I leave you here and join my friends?”
In the beginning I had nothing against dating non-Iranians. It was simply something none of my friends were doing. I mingled with international students during extra-curricular activities at university. We hiked; we drank; we danced; but when it came to friendship, I couldn’t count any of them in my intimate circle. So when Peter came into my life I didn’t take him very seriously. I’d just staggered out of an unhealthy relationship with an Iranian man who thought his mom was the best woman in the world, and demanded I be her replica, physically and intellectually. This Freudian fuckup was my third and hardest romantic flop since I’d moved to Canada, and I was bent on taking a break from men. Peter was patient. He let me pass through my grieving phase at my own pace. He limited his advances to tame coffee meet-ups and casual invitations to hiking events.
I was drawn to Peter’s uncomplicated nature. His expressions of his feelings seemed actually to match what he felt. That his horizon was so clear he could comfortably see himself in five years (I’ll have scaled Kilimanjaro) or ten (I’ll have a tenured position) amazed me. For once I was going out with someone who hadn’t been brought up amid waves of uncertainty and war, who didn’t have any identity issues or mother complexes. The sense of discovery was mutual. In Peter’s first romantic card to me he wrote, To this impulsive, mysterious girl from a land faraway. I needed a strong anchor in my life; who better than a man with a CPR certificate and an emergency kit at home?
What’s more, Peter graciously accepted my need to maintain my old social life. We divided our time: he pursued his penchant for hiking while I spent quality time with my Iranian friends. After three years of married life, we were proud of the equilibrium we’d reached by compartmentalizing our time—proud, that is, until the heated debates of the presidential election and, then, its aftermath, exposed a rift. The elephant in the room had begun trumpeting.
On Saturday, by the time we were ready to shove our bags into the trunk of our Honda Civic and set out toward the Sea-to-Sky Highway, Khamenei had spoken. In unequivocal terms, siding with the winners, the Supreme Leader asserted that the opposition would be responsible for any unrest. Our hopes of nullifying the election were now no more than wishful thinking. Already the internet was flooded with signs of the escalation of conflict, the onset of a fully-fledged civil war. Plainclothes police mounted on motorcycles, swaying their clubs and scattering rallies. People running. Screaming. Shouting. Blood. Bruises. Torture. Death. The situation was intensifying so rapidly I couldn’t leave my laptop at home. Peter didn’t protest.
It was a balmy spring day in Vancouver. Some cars carried boats in tow; others were packed with camping gear or picnic props. Peter blasted country music—his favorite for Squamish trips. On our left the Pacific glittered. Verdant hills rolled by on the right. Seagulls flew above. Four bottles of champagne, to be uncorked at Jenna’s birthday, jangled in the back.
“Beautiful day,” Peter chirped.
His comment was intended to pull me out of my thoughts, to help me appreciate the moment. What he didn’t understand was that the more heavenly our experience, the starker its contrast with my mind’s occupations, the wider the chasm would yawn between us, the more alienated I’d be. It was like the story of Moses, in which the water of the Egyptians was turned into blood. A curse had crippled me. Shown blue ocean, I saw crimson gore.
Still, I said, “It is indeed.”
Peter’s eyes were on the traffic in the serpentine road. Construction was underway to make it wider for the Winter Games. “Jenna will be upset if we’re late.”
I made an attempt to play along. “We’ll be there before one. Your mom knows about the construction.”
“By the way.” He placed his hand on my leg. “I explained to them that you’re on a deadline and will need to work while we’re there.”
“What deadline?” I asked, though I knew what this was about.
He squeezed, possibly expecting me to take his hand in mine. “I wanted you to be comfortable checking the news.”
It was a kind initiative, but all I could read in it was a pitying favor. So your country’s on fire, I wanted to say: that’s not a strong enough case for sneaking off from a family gathering? But a conference deadline is? When I responded neither with words nor with gesture, he turned to me. Only then did I give him a taut smile.
He looked ahead, as if to pose a question to the black Audi ahead of us. “Why did you marry me?”
“What?”
“You seem so….” He paused, unable to find the word. I couldn’t imagine him saying a sentence without first constructing the whole sequence in his mind. “You seem so distant,” he decided at last, “so preoccupied with Iran.”
“You always knew I was. That’s a requirement for the mysterious girl from a land faraway.”
His chin twitched. “You were never like this, Rana.”
“I wasn’t like how I am because Iran wasn’t going through what it’s going through now.”
He slid his sun visor down. “Look, I don’t want to start a debate while you’re dealing with the news.” Suddenly he seemed excited by what he was about to say. “But that’s my point. I keep putting off this conversation because you’ve been dealing with something, but what you’re dealing with doesn’t directly affect us.”
“You didn’t put it off. You just said it.”
“Do you think you’re overcompensating for the fact that you married to a non-Iranian? Does your marriage to me make you feel you owe something extra to your country?”
“Peter,” The quavering in my voice didn’t make him pivot toward me. I didn’t continue. I couldn’t. He was rationalizing my emotions. He understood my pain, but could not feel it. He knew a totalitarian regime was bad, but had never experienced one. We spent the rest of our trip listening to Johnny Cash.
Jenna opened the door and her husband came to receive the bottles. My sister-in-law Paula waved at us from the far end of the dining table with a glass of red wine. I’d learned from Jenna, in a rare display of intimacy, that Paula had recently been fired from her hospitality gig due to her dependency on alcohol, which had been exacerbated by a dramatic abortion. Now Jenna introduced us to a rather aged lady with brown skin, “Our new neighbor Gabriela.”
Halfway through lunch, no one had inquired about Iran. Peter and his dad were engaged in a discussion about B&B opportunities during the Winter Games. Jenna debriefed us about the number of guests expected for the evening. An interregnum ensued, during which the clanking of cutlery filled the room. At last Peter’s dad turned to me, adopting a serious face. “We’re all very sorry for what’s happening in Iran. I hope your family is all right.”
“They’re okay,” I said, “for now, at least. My brother keeps going back to the streets. My mom did it once. That big rally on Monday.” I half expected to hear, What rally?
Instead, Peter’s dad said, “Perhaps they should keep a low profile for a while. It’s a horror, from what I see on TV.”
I twisted my face into a smile. It wasn’t the time or the place to spell out the many internal contradictions he’d set off with such a harmless comment. The truth was that I both admired my brother’s courage and was dead worried about him. Only days before, my cousin, who’d recently graduated from high school, asked me if she should join the riots. I was torn. How could I encourage her to risk her life from the comfort of mine? And what of all those reluctant voters I’d persuaded to vote? Where were they now? At the front lines, shielding themselves from blows? Hunkering down at home, feeling betrayed? If anything happened to them, wouldn’t I be to blame?
Paula refilled her glass. “You’re lucky you’re here.”
She was the one gulping down her drink, but it was my insides that burned at her remark. To avoid Paula, I cast my eyes on Gabriela, the neutral guest. The corners of her mouth curled into the suggestion of a smile. I hoped it meant, I know what you’re going through.
“In a sense, it’s worse to be here.” Peter was reciting, word for word, what I had lamented before. “You feel guilty for not being there with your friends and family. It’s like they’re fighting for your cause—alone.” I rewarded him with an appreciative glance before spearing my lasagna.
“Every civilization goes through its ebbs and flows. We had drama in this continent too,” Gabriela said, that phantom smile still haunting her face. She squinted at me. “It just so happens that we live in a time of conflict in your region.”
“God, it’s a crazy region,” Paula said in a low growl—though not low enough. I heard her, along with the disdain in her tone.
It was one thing for me to call my country crazy. It was another when an outsider did. “Lucky you,” I snapped, “living in your civilized world, after a convenient attempt at total extermination of this continent’s Indigenous peoples!”
Once I had uttered these words, there was no way to take them back. In fact, I felt an unexpected pleasure in my tiny rebellion. But that sense of momentary relief was soon replaced by nausea. Videos rushed by before my mind’s eye, choppy footage caught by shaky cameras that, replayed in my memory, had, upon repetition, taken on monstrous dimensions: uniformed guards encircling an unfortunate protester, beating him with kicks and clubs; protesters dragging away his wounded body before the guards returned; buses and garbage cans on fire, in an effort to neutralize tear gas.
I heard the sound of a fork on a plate. My words hung in the air. A lump rose in my throat. I didn’t have the heart to look up. I mumbled sorry, so quietly it could easily have been missed if their attention hadn’t been on me. I pushed back my chair and darted to the bathroom, unsure if the lump would come out as tears or as vomit.
When I re-emerged, Paula had gone upstairs for a nap. Everyone else seemed busy with trivialities. Peter’s dad, slumped across the sofa, leafed through his beloved Economist. Jenna was working on a dessert recipe with Gabriela. Peter kept disappearing into the cellar and climbing back up hugging bottles of wine. They each gave me a polite nod. They didn’t know what to do with me, or how to behave without offending me. I was a convoluted toy with no instruction manual.
When Peter announced he was going to pick up the cake, I took my laptop out onto the porch. I sat on a corner at the very edge, slipped off my sandals, and let my feet dangle in the air. There was a lot to catch up on in the news, but no turning point. Only more casualties, more disappearances, more chanting, and less hope. I was scrolling up and down, worried I’d missed something, when I felt a presence beside me.
“May I sit?” Gabriela asked.
I shifted as if to make room. Gabriela slid down beside me with a nimbleness that belied her age. Then she pulled up her blouse, revealing a black top underneath. I cast a sidelong glance, simple curiosity at seeing a stranger undress. It took me a moment to realize she was tapping her finger near a crease of unusually folded skin on her upper arm. “See this?”
I nodded.
“I was lucky. The bullet could have easily pierced my heart.”
I closed my laptop and laid it down next to me. “How did it happen?”
“Pinochet’s coup. 1973. I was in Santiago. We had a rally to help keep Allende in power. I was shot, like many others.”
I knew a bit about this, though only because I’d read a book on Neruda.
“Oh, sorry.” Hearing my own voice I realized that my sympathy was as hollow as that which I kept receiving.
“I had a toddler at home. When I was taken to the hospital, he was all I could think of. Then my father arranged for me and my son to be smuggled out of Chile, to Argentina and then to Mexico. He was sort of an aristocrat. He never liked Allende. Naturally, I didn’t like my father.”
Peter pulled into the driveway and scrambled out of the car holding a cardboard box. He looked a bit surprised to see his wife with the new neighbor. “Making new friends, huh?” He carried the cake inside.
“You were saying,” I said.
“In Mexico we staged rallies against Pinochet and his crimes. We enlarged blurry pictures, evidence smuggled out of his dungeons. We did whatever we could in the safety of foreign countries. In the end, it didn’t make much difference. Well, maybe it made us feel good, relevant.” She put her blouse back on. “At first, I was like you. My body lived in the Northern Hemisphere, but my soul kept wandering south. I felt bad. I even harbored some mild resentment towards my son who, I figured, was the reason I left.” She took a deep breath. Either her face was grim or that was just how she looked, wincing in the sun. “Then I realized I shouldn’t blame my father or my son. It was I. I wasn’t made for that fight. I told myself, Either leave everything and march to the battleground, or”—she turned to me—“shut up and accept it.”
“Are you suggesting I should shut up and accept it?” I knew I couldn’t bring myself to accept. Accepting would be a betrayal, an excuse for choosing convenience over responsibility.
“I’m suggesting you should get to know yourself better.”
Gabriela seemed to be the sole person, perhaps in this whole town, who could remotely identify with my pain, so I chose not to challenge her. “Thank you,” I said. I rose to my feet and dusted off my backside. I had no idea what time it was, or when Jenna’s guests were supposed to start trickling in. I stepped off the porch. As soon as my feet touched the ground, the screen door screeched open.
“What are you up to?” It was Peter, his voice tinted an anxious hue.
His timing gave me the feeling I’d been watched from inside. “Going for a stroll,” I blurted.
“Mind if I join?” Peter asked.
I glanced at Gabriela, as if to seek her approval, but she’d disappeared into the shadow of the porch roof.
As if the town on the mountainside weren’t quiet enough, Peter’s parents’ house was located in the corner of a cul-de-sac. That the trail behind the house that led up the mountainside was deserted accentuated our awkward silence even more. I knew the purpose of this short hike was not simple physical activity. Sooner or later, someone had to speak.
Finally he said what he must’ve been rehearsing for a while. “Nietzsche snapped at the sight of a horse being beaten. You’re entitled to some grief.”
“I’m sorry about what happened,” I said.
“I’m sorry too,” he said. “I’m sorry if you’re not understood… by us.”
I had many ways to answer. I could cry, or kiss him, or clasp his hand. I could presume he’d cut me some slack, as if I were sick. “It’s nobody’s fault,” I said at last.
“You know,” Peter laughed, affected. “When you rushed to the bathroom and started to, you know,” he gyrated his hand in front of his mouth, a euphemism for vomiting. “Mom was like, Is she pregnant?”
We’d only ever alluded to having kids. This anecdote could be taken as another allusion, as an invitation, or just a joke unto itself. But my mind was cluttered, a stage crowded with treacherous characters and set with a backdrop for opposing forces. How could his family take from someone’s pained retching the promise of new life? True alchemists they were.
“Your mom likes babies, doesn’t she?”
“Who doesn’t?” Peter’s puzzled face got me going.
“I’m sure you’ve got a certificate for parenting already, in your file cabinet, right next to your CPR. But can you teach a kid how to flee tear gas? How to hold her body when she’s being beaten by the cops? Or will she not need those skills, since she’ll grow up here in Heaven?”
Hearing Peter’s voice behind me I realized I was ahead by five or six steps. “Let’s go back,” he said. “We’ll discuss it later.”
I stopped and turned. Peter was standing still, with stooped shoulders and an expectant look. I was aware of his hurt feelings. I remembered the way his chin twitched on the road when he questioned our marriage. I knew I had proved his doubts later at lunch, knew I was stubbornly drifting away. I knew it all, but I didn’t have the emotional capacity to process it. Guilt simmered within me.
“You go back if you want.” I was aiming for a neutral tone, but it came out ambivalent, the if leaving room for possibilities. I turned back and began trudging forward.
Peter shouted, “Rana! Don’t go alone. You don’t know the trail.”
I refused to look back or slow down. I honed my ears for the snap of twigs, the crushing of dried leaves, for his broken panting. Only when the trail swerved and I turned my head did I realize I was alone. It was dreadful, the silence. The shadows under the leafy arch of trees above me suggested how dark it would be in a few hours. I thought of going back before it was too late. But gradually I began to savor the fear of getting lost, the idea of dying of hunger, of being killed by a beast. Did it amount to the fear people were experiencing back home? No. Was it enough? Not yet. Not while I could still find my way back. So I continued my expedition, step by step, conquering every turn. With no signs nailed on the trees, it was hard to tell whether I was on a straight path or going in circles, but it didn’t matter. When the mosquitoes began their raid I didn’t shoo them away. As protesters’ bodies are laid bare to clubs and bullets, my skin was theirs.
The first time I heard a cracking sound I couldn’t believe my ears. The second time the sound was followed by Peter’s voice calling my name. My heart raced. I sprinted through the increasingly steep trail. My legs began to ache, my breath to fail. In a lucid state of fatigue, escaping my husband in the bowels of these hills, I remembered the streets of Tehran. How the protesters gathered to chant before the plainclothes officers dispersed them. How they hid in the alleys, to regroup or be seized.
I heard Peter again. His voice was frustrated. He must have been nervous about the birthday party. If he had his way I would soon be surrounded by Paulas, Jennas, and Peters, nice people saying nice things and wishing nice wishes, who didn’t have a clue. Like my friends in the alleys of Tehran, I didn’t want to be found. I reached for a slanted pine tree with thick branches on all sides. I grabbed the first accessible branch and, leveraging a protruding knot, scaled the trunk, scraping my knee and then my elbow. I hung from another and then another until I was halfway up, and perched on a strong limb, looking down. Dizzy, thirsty, and fatigued, I leaned on the trunk, shut my eyes, and waited for Peter to seize me or save me.
Mehdi M. Kashani lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. His fiction and nonfiction can be found in Passages North, The Rumpus, Catapult, The Malahat Review, Wigleaf, The Walrus, Bellevue Literary Review, Four Way Review, The Minnesota Review, Emrys Journal (for which he won 2019 Sue Lile Inman Fiction Award), The Fiddlehead among others.
