Fariba Hachtroudi - The Man Who Snapped His Fingers

This long preamble is to explain the circumstances in which I met Ala. I was desperate, but I hadn’t given up. Already for some time I had been thinking that marriage might be a way out, although I scarcely believed it would. Of all my suitors, not a single one would have been any help. The help I wanted was to be able to go on studying. When I met Ala, I immediately knew that here was my chance. I didn’t try to understand why I seemed to have so much power over him. But it was real, and completely different from the simple physical attraction which any man feels toward a desirable woman. How did I know that Ala would be the unconditional lover? It was more calculated than intuitive. From our first time alone together I knew I could get whatever I wanted from him. In addition to his physical attraction, another criterion which made him precious in my eyes was his future potential within the new regime. He was a soldier. He had been noticed at the front. He would be rising through the ranks fairly quickly. For me this was a guarantee of protection, and of the possibility that I might be able to go on with my studies under the best possible conditions. In a word, Ala and his position were the rampart I needed so badly if my projects were to succeed. There was no place in my life for the love with a capital “L” by which you set so much store. By the time I met Ala, calculating my probabilities where a predetermined life choice was concerned was more important than anything. Some people might qualify this behavior as purely cynical or opportunistic or who knows what else. Which would be wrong. As far as I am concerned, love — at least as it is understood by the great majority of individuals, and women in particular — should not have the vital importance that is granted to it. Given the choice, I would never have married and I would never have had any children. I would have dealt with my instincts by means of passing relationships. But such dreams were unthinkable, impossible, forbidden. In that country even more than anywhere else. A woman who dares to think such things leaves herself open to the worst consequences. I confess that if someone more interesting than Ala had come along, I would not have hesitated for a moment. But given the circumstances, I could not afford the luxury of letting this chance slip. One’s vocation is founded on a projection into the future. Determination alone is not enough. The environment has to be favorable. I knew that at the first opportunity I was going to have to leave the country. With or without Ala. But I would proceed by stages. Ala never suspected a thing about my most secret intentions. Either before the marriage or afterwards. There was no point giving him any reason to worry. I had no intention of cheating on him, or abandoning him, or wronging him in any way. I let him love me. And I returned his love through my presence alone.

The heroine of your novel lives in a space-time of her own. You have done a very good job explaining how she manages to disregard everything going on around her, even though you justify it in an incredibly romantic way. My distance with regard to emotional outpourings is structural. My vocation is egocentric. I may seem inconceivably cold to people like yourself or Ala, who can burn like torches for love, for a cause, for an ideal. I have always rejected any feelings of belonging to a nation, a religion, a given place, or even a family. My homeland is science. When Ala used to talk to me so enthusiastically about defending the Fatherland, or the strength that faith can give, or his concern for the underprivileged, I wanted to burst out laughing. Like at the theater. But I held myself back. Regarding his work, as long as I needed access to the Army’s observatory, I went along with it. I urged him to resign as soon as the conditions were ripe for us to leave and go abroad. The dissertation advisor for my doctorate by correspondence had assured me there was a position waiting for me. Ala knew nothing about any of this. But he suspected something. He knew me well enough to have an idea about my ambitions. Only abroad could I have a career. I think that unconsciously he was afraid of this. He thought I would slip away from him. He was right, and wrong at the same time. I had always been slipping away from him, even though I was physically by his side. And there was no reason for that to change. Physically we got along well. There was good chemistry between us. Which is what drew me to him, above all. Other than that, I did not really pay much attention to what he was doing. I wasn’t really interested. When he claimed that he had resigned, I was very happy indeed. So happy. The timing was perfect. We could leave. What could be easier for a businessman than to travel around as he pleased? I could never have imagined what actually lay behind his front of a job. I didn’t have time to look into it any closer, even though a number of details, obvious clues, should have warned me that something was up. My own space-time, the silvery poetry of the heavens, occupied me entirely at that period in my life. I was preparing my doctoral dissertation. And the fact is, I trusted him. Now I know I was wearing a blindfold. Please forgive me for using this expression, but there is nothing innocent about it. I will get back to this.

My deep passion has always been and will remain astrophysics. No one, not even my children… could replace it. In short, my need for love to exist, to survive — in both senses of the term — has never had anything to do with Ala’s. Instinct is in the DNA of all mammals. Of course I love my children. I will bring them up as best I can. But the love I feel for them is not a priority, nor is it in conflict with what constitutes the driving force of my life, the competitive spirit of research, a thirst for deciphering the fabulously complex phenomena of the universe. Orgasms in my case are above all cerebral. I will never understand women who talk about breast-feeding as the most supreme of pleasures. I hope that with these brutal confessions I will only disappoint the woman in you, and not the novelist. In your letter you confess to what transpires in your novel: your jealousy of the Colonel’s wife, or rather, of the love she inspired in him. We do not inspire love, I don’t believe that. Sometimes we elicit it when the other partner is in sync with us. Feelings are the result of a mental disposition. It is a strictly personal matter one keeps to oneself. Ala was afflicted by lovesickness. He had a visceral need to love beyond all bounds. The Commander, the Fatherland, his wife, his children, the underprivileged… He adulated them, and alternated between them, depending on the circumstances. I’m convinced he would have loved another woman with the same intensity if he and I had not met. He came upon me at the right moment. Happenstance. He needed to escape. I was his great escape. Indeed, I am convinced that love has no axiomatic reality. Which does not prevent me from telling you how much I admire your ability to love, to transcend. You surpassed yourself, you went beyond anything a human body can bear, in order to remain faithful to your concept of love. But this superhuman, or inhuman challenge — is it not a matter for one’s private life?

I am in your debt, and that is why I have been pressing the point where all this is concerned. I saved your life, and you rehabilitated me in my own eyes. I cannot find a better term to make myself clear. Now we are even. Thanks to you, I can accept my shadow side and my failings. I watched the CD several times, of

our

crimes toward you and so many other innocent people. I can say it without trembling,

our crimes,

even though, for years, I distanced myself from everything that I eventually reproached Ala with so violently. I was at odds with the situation and did not want to admit it. It was only after his departure that I had to face facts. Of the two of us, who was more to blame? The young devoted soldier caught in the tyrants’ vice, or the scientist cloistered on her Olympus, refusing to see what was there before her eyes? An Olympus that Ala destroyed with a CD. The deep reason for my rage against my husband, which you render so well in your novel, is too shameful to admit. Why did he have to wrench me from my ivory tower just before we were due to depart? It was a question of his own survival. This constant need for an inconsolable love, a betrayed utopia. If I have an experience of soul-searching, it is something that I owe to you. It did not transform me. One can never change radically. But I won’t lie to myself anymore, nor will I lie to my children. What is prodigiously human — not to say monstrously human — in Vima 455 cancels out the monstrosity, pure and simple, of the murderers at Ravine: that is a message I shall not forget. It is you I have to thank for enabling me to see what human beings can attain if they look inside themselves. I could never have imagined that a few inches of ground in the most sordid of prisons could elevate a person to the same degree as the constellations of the Milky Way. I have my work cut out for me, to meditate on my flaws and to reconsider the way in which all the world’s believers are certain of a human purpose, something I have never paid any attention to before now, or very little. Science does not recognize either right or wrong. Before meeting you through that terrifying CD, I did not recognize any kind of truth other than the relative truth of science. Now, thanks to you, I can conceive of the complexity of the mystery of beings, the way that mystics experience it. Love is its axiom, and Utopia its motor. One day a poet friend told me that true meetings are merely instants, the fleeting magic which we call happiness, just to give meaning to the word.