Foreword: No Place for the Timid Soul
I
pledge allegiance to no flag, no nation, no religion. Henceforth my allegiance
is to humanity.
Those
are the final words of the last tea-stained page of Father's handwritten
memoirs. They complete our story, which until now was a hodgepodge of mosaic
pieces, without pattern or meaning. They tell much about Father, and therefore
much about me. They tell of his strife-filled life, of the years spent in
prison and mourning the decline of his beloved homeland, Iran.
And
they tell of his feelings, conveyed in deeds and in words. The years of
solitary confinement changed him. And as he changed, I changed. We traveled a
circle in opposite directions, yet we ended at the same place. We encountered
numerous obstacles along the way, forcing us onto treacherous detours that
reminded us we are father and son.
Missing
from Father's memoirs is an account of his seminal detour, one that he
grudgingly related in his later years. It must have been too painful for him to
commit to paper, except for the single page with a heading and an unfinished
sentence:
Tabriz; July 13, 1964:
Through the sheets of rain I
glimpsed the evil...
My Novels
| After devoting thirty years to surgery, all of it at universities, I needed a rest and a change. Practicing medicine was gratifying, but it deprived me of life experiences outside hospitals and clinics and operating rooms. Write, my children said, because you’re a great story maker-upper. So I made up stories and published them. Most are medical fiction, in the thriller or mystery or suspense genre with emphasis on surgeons whose characters are shaped by their profession. | |||
|
|
 | ||
|
Wings Press recently published my latest novel, entitled The Phoenix Incursion, a WWII mystery/suspense set in western England. Here's the Prologue: Facts: On May 2, 1945, as the Allies stormed into Berlin, one of Hitler’s top henchmen made a daring escape out of the Chancellery bunker. Although a lesser bureaucrat during the earlier period of World War II, the henchman’s influence escalated toward the end, when he was the titular second-in-command of the Nazi regime. Despised by Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring, he was the archetypal behind-the-scenes powerbroker. And they could do nothing to thwart his ascendancy. More than anything, he gained power by controlling the Adolf Hitler Endowment, an enormous cache of money gathered through ‘voluntary’ contributions. No one knows how much of that money he transferred to his personal account before his disappearance. After his escape from the bunker, some believed that a Red Army tank killed him as he and Hitler’s physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger, fled from the bunker. But his body was not found, and a world-wide manhunt for him proved fruitless. Without any conclusive evidence, in April 1973 a West German court officially proclaimed his death. Rumors: After World War II, countless sightings of the henchman were reported: some in Argentina, some in Paraguay, some in Italy. And a few sightings in western England. What was this man, a genius at weaving plots and counterplots, doing on British soil?
I. J. Sarfeh, M.D. | |||
No Place for the Timid Soul
Excerpt from No Place for the Timid Soul: My seventh novel almost ready for publication.
Strolling in the garden, Shireen by his side, Rostam thought about his homeland, about his home. The Iran-Iraq War had been raging since September 1980, the continuation of an age-old rivalry that had kindled on and off since the glory days of Mesopotamia and the Persian Empire. With Iran chaotic in the aftermath of the Revolution, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had seen his opportunity to acquire new territory and oil reserves. Iran’s theocratic rulers in a sense welcomed his incursion as an opportunity to re-ignite the fading embers of the Revolution. And they succeeded. Everything came to be viewed in terms of good versus evil: God versus Satan, Moslem versus infidel, Iran versus Iraq, East versus West. Iran had become a country of black and white and no gray—and no other colors, period.
For three years, the war fronts had moved back and forth, no side with clear gains, both sides with massive casualties. Rostam was certain that had he been in command of the army, Iraq would no longer be Iraq.
As if reading his mind, Shireen laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Perhaps if that incident at Tehran University had not occurred, you could go back.”
“It occurred, and we cannot turn back the clock.”
“But if you volunteered to lead the army against Iraq, would they—?”
“I have already thought of it. I called my lawyer in Tehran with the same proposal. After investigating the matter, he informed me that the mullahs will put me on trial regardless.”
Rostam and the lawyer had talked at length over the crackling and buzzing telephone line. He discovered that his home in Tehran had been seized soon after he left Iran. Fortunately, a month before leaving, he had shipped most of the home’s valuable items to America. Now occupying the house was an akhoun, preacher, the father of nine children; nine deplorable children who shattered windows and pissed from the balconies and left food everywhere for rats to infest the place.
Rostam loved that home, the way Ali kept it spotless, the way Shireen adorned it with the perfect blend of arabesque and western décor. Scattered throughout the home were hung oil paintings displaying scenes from both worlds: from desert sands to snowcapped mountains; from candle-lit villages to neon-lit cities; from rice paddies to apple orchards; from herds of goats to herds of horses. And from the mud-and-straw huts of paupers to the palaces of kings.
He especially loved the terrace overlooking their garden. It was his haven away from the stresses of command, where in the evenings he would sit with Shireen, sip brandy, and listen to orioles warbling in the apple trees. He even didn’t mind Ali’s wooden hut, which was varnished to look like a vacation cabin, planters full of colorful flowers lining the outside walls.
Rostam recalled the garden parties, important people discussing important issues, walking arm in arm along the winding cement path, stopping to pick grapes from the vines that covered the trellis, standing before the reflecting pool and gazing at the graceful goldfish.
But now all that beauty and serenity must have vanished, replaced by wilted roses, untrimmed hedges, browned grass, decomposed goldfish floating among the scum in the reflecting pool, its blue water green with algae.
He wondered about the Seth Thomas grandfather clock in the foyer. A magnificent antique, the clock was too big, too delicate to ship safely via Iran’s chaotic shipping industry around the onset of the Revolution. So he had left it behind, hoping that it would still be there, still undamaged when he returned. But his home was no longer his, and the clock was probably ruined, its glass shattered, its heart broken, lifeless, timeless.
His former neighbors had deserted the neighborhood, which now belonged to the cleric squatters. Garbage was everywhere, stray dogs and cats everywhere, animal waste everywhere. Kasram Street had become a slum, a street where the homeless roamed, slept, and left their waste in the gutters. A street where the mullahs preached to them every day, telling them that the nation must be freed of infidels, telling them to scour the city and report sinful behavior, for which they would receive a few rials to buy rice and nan.
