The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,13

her bathing suit and wearing her hair in a lacquered wave. As the years passed, the bathing suit was shrouded by a cover-up and the hair disappeared behind a scarf, and then his mother disappeared altogether, dead of cancer before she was fifty years old. He had been just eleven when she died; he could remember her smell, and her gentle touch, but she survived for him mainly in these albums. In addition to pasting in his father’s photographs, she liked to add pictures she had clipped from glossy magazines, of Iranian writers and movie stars. There were shots of the handsome Fardin and the lovely Azar Shiva, the stars of the romantic film Sultan of My Heart. They were ghosts of a lost world.

The album fell open to a photograph he had never examined closely before. It showed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on a visit to Shiraz in the early 1970s. His mother had written a caption with all the details. He studied the picture. Jackie was dressed in white slacks low on the hip and a royal blue shirt, so slim and elegant. The camera had caught her in motion, pushing her long black hair away from her beautiful face as she looked to her left toward something that had caught her eye. She was walking down a grand array of stone steps, leaving the covered portico of some sort of monument. There were bodyguards on either side of her, dressed in black suits and skinny black ties. He looked at her more closely: so much wondrous hair, uncovered, and the pants so finely cut you could see the shape of her hips and thighs. Could this now be the same country to which the Queen of the World, Jackie Kennedy, had once paid a visit? If she were to come back now, would they cover her in a sack like a dead animal? Yes, of course they would. Jackie was an offense against their idea of Islam.

His father must have taken the picture. But what was he doing in Shiraz when Jackie Kennedy visited? Perhaps he had been asked to give lecture on Persian literature. Or maybe he had just been a tourist.

The shah was a pimp, his father had told him once, when he was a boy. His father had hated the shah, and the Pahlavi regime in turn had hated him. The young man had to remind himself of that now. His father had been an intellectual and a freethinker, and probably in his youth, a communist, too. No one had ever talked about that, but it must have been so.

Whatever it was that his father had believed, he had suffered for it. He had been arrested twice, the second time just after his son was born—just before the revolution. The shah’s men must have thought he was still dangerous—this broken-down professor living in a dream world of memories of his dead wife and Kodak pictures. That was how stupid the Savak had been, that they imagined this harmless man was a threat.

When the revolution had come, his father had rejoiced: you could see that in his face in the pictures taken at the great demonstration at the Shahyar monument that marked the beginning of the end. The look in his father’s eyes was one of revenge. The son had never asked him what the shah’s men had done to him in prison, but he could imagine. When he was a boy, after the revolution, the simple basiji treated him like a hero’s son, a martyr’s son. By then, his father had seen the truth, and though he never said it out loud, he had come to despise the revolution.

They are liars, his father had said. They have made a refuse dump and called it a green park. He told his son to go away, to study in Germany and never come back. But the son hadn’t listened. He liked the power that knowledge brought him. He liked knowing secrets. He thought he could be smarter than his father, and make a hiding place for himself where the jahiliya, the ignorant ones, couldn’t find him. But after several years in the white offices of Jamaran, he knew this was impossible.

He closed the album. He wasn’t hungry, but he thought he should eat. He went to the kitchen and found some rice and chicken the maid had left. This was his life, living inside the exoskeletons of other people. He was warming the chicken in his new