Five rials in the tackle

Of the milder pathologies enjoyed by my family, perhaps the mildest is the compulsion to save. Magpies among the hominids, we assemble our nests from odds and ends, the things that we find, that arrive before us; the things that fascinate us, the things that we cannot give up. The more charming word for this phenomenon is preservation, but to call what we do preservation would imply that there is some sort of strategy or business model that would valorize the ensemble. There is not. We are collectors, and we have no time for a plan. A less dignified word for this practice might be hoarding, but we are not hoarders. We are instinctive antiquarians, faithful to the intention of the antique, unbound from convention and design. Disciples of the leftovers, acolytes of the refuse, we see the otherwise inconspicuous value in what has been left behind, the value in the forgotten. However one chooses to describe this condition, this way of relating to the world, the point is that we save the things that otherwise might have been overlooked, the things that might have been mislaid; things that, in being mislaid, are condemned to evanescence, to be lost, to be denied the privilege of purpose and of meaning.. It is a melancholy habit, to be sure, the saving of things; a way of dwelling with the pasts we cannot quite bring ourselves to part with, a way of reckoning with the anxiety that attends our inevitable lurch into the future. This is why sometimes these things loom larger than we had expected. This is why sometimes, just as the night descends, the things we save, the things that have been saved, afford us unlikely avenues for reflection, for discovery. When the dusk has exhausted itself and the clouds have not yet consumed the stars, sometimes the things we save allow us, perhaps, to think of new ways we might save ourselves. My grandmother was an inveterate saver. She kept a shadow box on her wall in which she preserved artifacts of her children, her parents, her grandparents. It held homemade Christmas cards scrawled in impish crayon; rosaries brought from the old world to the new, brought from Rome and Amsterdam and Bremen, places she had never been and would never go, plastic beads once sanctified by the blessings offered by long dead popes. My grandfather brought one of these from Rome. He was on leave from the war, and like a good Catholic he went to Italy and he bought a rosary outside of San Pietro. It would come to rest in the box. It was made out of mother of pearl, which is like pearl, but not. Mother of pearl is a lie. We will get to this. There were also books of matches decorated, made over as unassuming gifts from her younger children; there was a small vial of dirt from the farm on which my grandmother raised her family, the farm my great-grandfather had carved into the ground which a previous generation had stolen from the Sauks. In the shadow box, she kept the things that were especially precious to her, the things with which she wished to be buried. I very desperately wanted to keep the rosaries from Bohemia, but it was made clear to me, at some point, that these were not things that would be passed on. They were destined to return to the earth, to be preserved in the decision to let them be lost. I preserve the compulsions of my grandmother in my own erratic collection of sacred beads: misbahah from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria; rosaries from Damascus and Qana, from the house where Saint Paul was baptized and the site upon which Jesus turned water into wine; the unblessed beads from my first communion; the three strings of polyethylene baubles that are dedicated to my three orixas. These I too keep in a box. This box is one I bought in Cairo. It is handmade. It holds the objects I cannot surrender, the photos of dead friends and the mass cards from their funerals, the dried corn that spilled from the train the car crashed into when those three kids were killed. The wildflower seeds I was supposed to plant, that were meant to be a living memorial to the one that was gone who died far far far too young. In looking over her things, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that my grandmother had a striking preoccupation with money. She kept years and years of checkbook registers, she kept the canceled checks that my grandfather had written to the state, quarterly installments in payment of sales taxes he owed in 1969. In yet another box, she squirreled away the diaries in which her mother, my great-grandmother, kept the record of the hours she had worked and for whom, how much the families for whom she kept house had paid her, or how much they owed. It should be said: I am insanely proud that my Grandma Waalk was a maid. That she gave life to we spoiled children of better times is close to astonishing. But let us move on. The somewhat crude actuarial figures of my great-grandmother now find their contemporary expression through my mother and my sister, both of whom work as financial analysts and financial planners, their genius in the design of estates, the equations that allow for the accumulation, preservation, and transfer of wealth, of that which will be bequeathed, and how it will be distributed. When my great-grandmother died, she had $3.36 to her name, dimes and pennies and quarters stowed away in her small coin purse, which she kept inside a slightly larger coin purse, both with the characteristic coin purse clasp. I know this because my grandmother kept these things, the purses and the money, and she left behind a note. She itemized the contents of these purses; she wanted to make sure the accounts were balanced, that we knew how much was there, that her mother’s bequest had not been recklessly mismanaged. It was still there for us, she wanted us to know. It was always there if we needed it. In addition to her preoccupation with accountancy, my grandmother collected what she considered the more exotic forms of specie. There are countless silver dollars and memorial half-dollar coins in her tackle, the coins that were struck with images of Kennedy and Eisenhower and the moon shot; there are sheaves of two-dollar bills, the Toms that bear the image of Mr. Jefferson, that are now apparently totems among Second Amendment extremists and pro-gun enthusiasts. Folded within these more familiar currencies are currencies from abroad, mostly bills that returned to Iowa with my grandfather after his term of service in the Korean War, when he was stationed in Germany and the Netherlands. Among these, there are three bills that are particularly conspicuous. There is a note issued by the Central Bank of China, dated 1930. There is a five franc note issued by the State Bank of Morocco, dating from roughly the same period. And, perhaps most peculiar, there is a five rial note, issued by the central bank of Iran. The writing on the note is composed in Perso-Arabic script, and it is emblazoned with an image of the young Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who looks like kind of a snack. While there are numbers on the bill there is no obvious date, yet based on the portrait of Pahlavi, it is likely that it was printed around 1944, just three years after Pahlavi's ascension to the throne. On the left side of the bill, handwritten in pencil, in cursive Roman characters, is a brief legend. It reads: “5 rials,” “value–15 cts,” “Abadan”. This is in my grandfather's handwriting. I had never seen this bill before. Almost all the artifacts my mother had preserved of my grandmother were things that my grandmother had shown me while she was still alive, including her collection of foreign coins, all of which came with a backstory, usually about the men in my family who had been drafted into the service and sent abroad. To the best of my knowledge, however, none of the men in my family had served in North Africa or the Middle East. Until my sister went on study abroad, no one in the family had been to China. I was certainly the first person in my family, on either side, to attempt to make a life abroad that did not also involve the military. And while I've been to Morocco, I don't have any stories to tell about it. As far as I know, no one in the family had any stories that came from these places, or in which these places were mentioned. Among those generations who went to war, returning GIs were neither inclined nor encouraged to talk about their experiences. If not for 'MASH' it is likely the Korean War would have been forgotten altogether. Nonetheless, certain details would of course slip through the miasmatics of trauma. We had certain pieces of the puzzle. This, however, was just strange. That someone in my family–that people who were alive in my lifetime–could have made it to Morocco and China and Iran, and that there would not be some faint shimmering of anecdote that survived them, something that had passed through the layers of battle fatigue and the amnesias of war, seemed unlikely, if not impossible. Where did this money come from? How did it get into the hands of my grandparents? The most likely explanation is that it found its way to them entirely by chance, that someone my grandfather knew, some comrade in arms in Germany, happened to pass it along to him, an uncommon memento of their service together. My grandfather never much talked about the war, and when he did it usually concerned his time on base in Germany, or the brief period he was reassigned to the Netherlands in the wake of the North Sea Flood of January 1953. There were few stories except those about Jonesy, his good friend who might well have been the only black person my grandfather ever knew or for whom he had a good word. Collectively, our family knows little of John Thomas Grady’s term of service, but we know that he never once mentioned any place more exotic than Bavaria. We know that he was drafted and sent abroad in 1951; he was discharged and returned to Iowa sometime in September 1953, about six weeks after the Armistice that ended the Korean War. My grandparents were married that October, late in the month. Before Halloween. Before the Day of the Dead. As it concerns this piece of Iranian currency, how my grandfather came to possess it, and why it ends up here, shuffled between inconsequential relics of all too common financial hardships–the artistry involved in managing a burgeoning household when income is next to nothing–these dates are enormously important. Not perhaps with respect to the masterful housewifery of my grandmother, but for what her archival chicanery suggests about the unavoidably disordered remnants of our shared pasts, of the unconscious as the voracious collector of things that disturb our best efforts at fashioning order, about the consequences of those things we cannot acknowledge, much less confront. And It says many things about the next seventy years of global politics. Probably many things it does not mean to say. What falls between July 27 and September 1953? A lot of stuff, to be sure, but if you’re Iranian, or if you know anything about the history of Iran or the history of the modern Middle East, what is most relevant is probably this: From August 15 to August 19, 1953, the United States and Britain, through the offices of the CIA and MI-6, helped to orchestrate a coup by which Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, was deposed. As Prime Minister, Mosaddegh had nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which had been largely under British control since at least the end of the first World War, and he had threatened a take-over of US munitions manufactories in the south, in the port cities of the Persian Gulf, where the US had built an aircraft assemblies in the years after WWII, in the brief period before the Cold War when the US was still selling weapons to the Soviets. By January 1953, as my grandfather was deployed to Holland, ostensibly to help shore up the dikes after the flooding of the North Sea, Eisenhower and Churchill had decided that nationalization of Iranian energy production was such a grave threat to US and British interests in the Middle East that the Iranian government needed to be overthrown. And so, Operation Ajax, or Operation Boot, was put into motion. Mossadegh was ousted, eventually tried and convicted of something that was probably made up, and placed under house arrest in Ahmadabad until his death in 1967. In the aftermath of the coup, General Fazlollah Zehedi was installed as head of the government, and the Shah assumed ever greater authority over affairs of state. Under the Shah, after 1953, the policies that concerned the nationalization of Iran’s energy sector were reversed. British Petroleum stepped in as the primary actor in Iran’s energy sector, with other US and European corporations taking the remainder. To ensure the security of the Shah’s rule and the expropriative designs of Britain and the US, in 1957, the new government formed the SAVAK, the CIA-trained Iranian secret police force that would go on to violently suppress all dissent until it was dissolved during the revolution of 1979. Despite decades of human rights violations, the violent suppression of democratic movements for republican government, and the wildly imperious overreach of monarchical authority, British and American governments would continue to support the Shah, so long as the Shah pursued policies that were conducive to the maintenance of Anglo-American dominance over the Iranian energy industry, until the revolution of 1979, until the return of Khomeini, until the embassies and the hostages. But this is what comes later. In 1953, in the months my grandfather cannot be accounted for, the city Abadan was at the center of this conflict. And somehow he had money that he knew to be from there. In Arabic, 'abadan' means 'never'. As in, 'we speak of it never'. What are the things we never speak of? Is Abadan our never-neverland? Was my grandpa in the CIA? Who knows, and what does it matter? The coup happened, Iran was scarred. That is what is important. The evidence of my grandfather's involvement is circumstantial, but compelling nonetheless. He never talked about these things. I have to wonder: Are there reasons why he couldn't? It seems impossible that he was an agent; but then, I was casually recruited, too, once upon a time, so why not? Recruitment, as far as I know, as far as my experience would suggest, is generally, and largely, a casual matter. Do agents ever know what they are doing, what ends they serve? Some do, of course. But did the men on my rooftop in Beirut know why they were surveying Sharia Adel al-Solh with a telescope at nighttime in June 2022? Did they know that Edward Said's sister lived just down the street? Had they seen the CIA file on Vanessa and her time with Arafat, or that she and I and Doyle once drank together at Gruen at Gefinor before heading down to Abou Elie? I'm pretty sure Ketaʿ El Amn El Watani has a file on me; at least, they knew that I was supposed to be traveling with my ex when they stopped him for questioning in Doha when he was flying to the United States to apply for political asylum, which is something we had only told to US diplomatic personnel in Beirut. We who live in Karakas guard our secrets too well for them to find out what we know, and those things we don't. But to the matter of the family, my family, to those of us in Iowa: What does this silence mean? What did my grandfather do? And what does it do when his silence about what he did gets passed on to subsequent generations? What does it do to the rest of us?