Act of Infamy
Salar Abdoh
Every morning begins with a five-minute meditation, followed by the dawn prayer which I think of as an extension of my five minutes of silence. Cage’s 4’33” therefore seemed like an inadequate imposition on someone who already lives silence. But I decided to abide the artist and the possible hubris contained therein. The awareness of two competing silences however put me in a cloud and the meditation turned sour. Rather than peace, I lived war and recalled – with eyes closed and ensconced in half-lotus – spring of 2017 when our Iraqi People’s Mobilization forces, the Hashd al-Shaabi, came upon another ghost village in northern Iraq where various contingents were replenishing their supplies before moving on in the evolving fight against the enemy, ISIS. As a writer and the sole Iranian with a group of Iraqis made up entirely of Shia men from the central and southern provinces, I was humored and allowed, for instance, to disperse more freely the food we carried in abundance to the haphazard platoons we came upon. My Arab comrades pointed to a squad of resting Iranian volunteers across the road and suggested I take some provisions over to them. I did. This was a war where cellphones were ubiquitous, and I noticed that the youngest of the squad members was rifling, as was common, through some photographs. One of the last photos was also his phone’s screen image, a profile shot of the Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, arguably the most successful special operations commander thus far of the 21st century and therefore a thorn in the heart of the American military and, I would add, a lasting object of their wrath and envy. The young fighter saw me looking with interest and said, “He is the one, Haj Qassem, the true living martyr.” I knew what he meant, and when the Americans did finally assassinate Haj Qassem two and a half years later with a drone strike, I was not surprised, yet in my heart I wished some evil upon the universe for this act of infamy. I wish now that I hadn’t made this wish. But there had been fog in my mind after the assassination and my silences had been exploded. The arrival of the plague not long afterward oddly calmed me. Silence had returned. It did not need 4’33”.
Salar Abdoh is an Iranian novelist and essayist. He is the author of the novels The Poet Game (2000), Opium (2004), Tehran At Twilight (2014), and the editor and translator of the anthology Tehran Noir (2014). He also teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the City College of New York. His forthcoming novel is Out of Mesopotamia (September 2020).