Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

They could go to the man’s office for a chat, Teacher Fei offered, knowing that this was the last thing he would want. The father hurriedly agreed to go to a nearby diner instead. He was the kind of man who was easily bullied by the world, Teacher Fei thought, realizing with satisfaction that he had not sought out the wrong person.

At the diner the girl’s father chose a table in the corner farthest from the entrance, and in the dim light he squinted at the bench, wiping off some grease before he sat down. When the waitress came, Teacher Fei asked for a bottle of rice liquor and a plate of assorted cold cuts. He was not a drinker, nor had he ever touched marinated pig liver or tongue, but he imagined that a friendship between two men should start over harsh liquor and variety meats.

Neither spoke for a moment. When their order arrived, Teacher Fei poured some liquor for the girl’s father. A good drink wipes out all pain for a man, Teacher Fei said, and then poured a glass for himself, but it soon became clear that neither of them would touch the drink or the meat, the man apparently feeling as out of place in the dingy diner as Teacher Fei did.

“What are you going to do?” Teacher Fei asked when the silence between them began to attract prying glances from the diner’s middle-aged proprietress, who sat behind the counter and studied the few occupied tables.

The man shook his head. “I don’t understand the question,” he said.

“I think you should sue your daughter,” Teacher Fei said, and immediately saw the man freeze with hostility. Perhaps someone had approached him with a similar proposition already. Or perhaps that was why the young girl had sued her father in the first place, egged on by an attorney, a manipulative man using her rage for his own gain.

Not that he could offer any legal help, Teacher Fei explained. He had been an art teacher in an elementary school before his retirement. He was in no position to do anything to hurt the girl’s father, nor did he have the power to help him in his situation. It was only that he had followed his daughter’s story in the media, and when he had seen the family picture he had known that he needed to do something for the girl’s father. “ ‘How many people in this world would understand this man’s pain?’ I asked myself when I saw your picture.”

The girl’s father flinched. “I am not the kind of man you think I am,” he said.

“What?” Teacher Fei asked, failing to understand his meaning. He was not into other men, the girl’s father said, so could Teacher Fei please stop this talk of friendship? The proprietress, who had been loitering around the nearby tables checking on the soy sauce bottles, perked up despite the man’s hushed voice.

It took Teacher Fei a moment to grasp what the man was hinting at. Nor am I who you think I am, he thought of protesting, but why should he, when he had long ago made the decision not to defend himself against this ridiculous world?

The proprietress approached the table and asked about the quality of the food and drink. When the man did not reply, Teacher Fei said that they were very fine. The woman chatted for a moment about the weather and returned to her counter. Only then did the man insist that it was time for him to go home.

“Who is waiting at home?” Teacher Fei asked, and the man, taken aback, stood up and said he really needed to leave.

“Please,” Teacher Fei said, looking up at the man. “Could you stay for just a minute?” If he sounded pathetic, he did not care. “You and I…,” he said slowly, glancing over at the entrance to the diner, where a pair of college students, a girl and a boy, were studying the menu on the wall. “We are the kind of men who would not kick our feet or flail our arms if someone came to strangle us to death. Most people would assume that we must be guilty if we don’t fight back. A few would think us crazy or stupid. A very few would perhaps consider us men with dignity. But you and I alone know that they are all wrong, don’t we?”

The man, who was about to leave some money on the table, tightened his fingers around the bills. Teacher Fei watched the college students take window seats, the boy covering the girl’s hands with his own on the table. When the man sat back down, Teacher Fei nodded gratefully. He did not want to look up, for fear that the man would see his moist eyes. “When I was twenty-four, I was accused of falling in love with a girl student,” he said. “Pedophile” had been the word used in the file at the school, the crime insinuated in the conversations taking place behind his back. The girl was ten and a half, an ordinary student, neither excelling among her classmates nor falling behind; one often encountered children like her in teaching, faces that blended into one another, names mis-recalled from time to time, but there was something in the girl’s face, a quietness that did not originate from shyness or absentmindedness, as it usually did in children of her age, that intrigued Teacher Fei. He envisioned her at different ages — fifteen, twenty, thirty — but there was little desire in that imagining other than the desire to understand a face that had moved him as no other face had. “No, don’t ask any questions, just as I won’t ask whether you indeed kept a mistress while being married to your wife. It doesn’t matter what happened between your cousin and you, or my girl student and me. You see, these accusations exist for the sake of those who feel the need to accuse. If it wasn’t your cousin, there would have been another woman to account for your not loving your wife enough, no?”

The man took a sip from his glass, spilling the liquor when he put it down. He apologized for his clumsiness.

“My mother used to say that people in this country were very good at inventing crimes, but, better still, we were good at inventing punishments to go with them,” Teacher Fei said.

When he and his cousin were young, they had vowed to marry each other, the man said; a children’s game mostly, for when the time came they had drifted apart. She was widowed when they met again, and he tried to help her find a job in the city, but she was never his mistress.

“You don’t have to explain these things to me,” Teacher Fei said. “Had I not known to trust you, I would not have looked for you.” The man could say a thousand things to defend himself, but people, his own daughter among them, would just laugh in his face and call him a liar. The crime that Teacher Fei had been accused of amounted to nothing more than a few moments of gazing, but one of the other students, a precocious eleven-year-old, had told her parents of the inappropriate attention the young teacher had paid to her classmate; later, when other girls were questioned, they seemed to be caught easily in the contagious imagining. He had just been curious, Teacher Fei said when he was approached by the principal. About what, he was pressed, but he could not explain how a face could contain so many mysteries visible only to those who knew what to look for. His reticence, more than anything, caused fury among the parents and his fellow teachers. In the end, he chose to be called the name that had been put in the file: A man’s dirty desire was all his accusers could grasp.

“One should never hope for the unseeing to see the truth,” Teacher Fei said now. “I could’ve denied all the accusations, but what difference would it have made?”

“So there was no…proof of any kind?” the man said, looking interested for the first time.

“Nothing to put me in jail for,” Teacher Fei said.

“And someone just reported you?”

“We can’t blame a young girl’s imagination, can we?” Teacher Fei said.

The man met Teacher Fei’s eyes. It was just the kind of thing his daughter would have done, the man said. “She’d have made sure you lost your job,” he added with a bitter smile, surprising Teacher Fei with his humor. “Count yourself a lucky person.”