Excerpt from Man of My Time by Dalia Sofer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Later, even as he accepted a top position at the Ministry of Culture and the scaffolding of his existence shifted, his aloneness remained unbroken. His days and nights, filled now with meetings and dinners, remained a hall of mirrors he never wished to fully enter. When he came home in the evenings he glided from the chandeliered world of ministers and artists to his hushed room, removing only his shoes and socks. At his desk, in his suit, tie, and slippers, he worked on his magnum opus, a compendium of Iranian art—preconquest, postconquest, premodern, modern, postmodern—and whatever else there had ever been or would ever be. At dinnertime, from the head of the table, he would interrogate the family on Sasanian glass, Samarkand pottery, Tahmasp miniatures, coffeehouse paintings. My mother disregarded him. My brother, Omid, and I tried to both appease and even conquer him. But as the right answer earned us no praise, the wrong answer earned us no reprimand.

* * *

SIDEWALK DEMONSTRATORS were slowing down traffic. Syrians. Some obscure Chinese sect. Liberal Americans singing their swan song for democracy. And most perplexing of all, Orthodox Jews calling for the destruction of the Holy Land. "What's their grievance?" I asked the Minister. "They're waiting for the Messiah to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem," he said with his knowing smile, indicating acceptance of the world as the carnival that it was. I would have prolonged the discussion but sensed his stiffness as he resumed texting with his old friend, the former American secretary of state. How we all missed the man, the Minister more than anyone. "A minyan of decent Americans appeared in our lifetime," I joked, "and they came and went like Halley's Comet." The Minister nodded but didn't laugh. "How does a man like you know about minyans?" he asked. "A man like me has been through many lifetimes," I said, taking no offense. He resumed typing, with the fretful gaze of a teenager trying to resurrect a first love.

* * *

MY DAUGHTER, GOLNAZ, had that same look the last time I had seen her. Three years had passed since that accursed night, when she went to live with her mother, Noushin. And I didn't even try to stop her. Letting my daughter go was an act of pure benevolence. I didn't know I was capable of behaving this way.

With Noushin, who left me five years before my daughter did, I had been far more strident. In the farewell letter she left on the breakfast table, Noushin wrote that life with me was like going deaf in increments, until you realize one day that the morning's birdcalls sound like children crying from a distance. "Your simile is tortured," I said, holding the letter and following her to the bedroom, where I saw her tossing shirts and skirts and shoes into a valise. "I mean, the morning's birdcalls sound like crying children? That's ridiculous…" When she pulled the pale blue dress with the moonstone buttons from the hanger—the one she had worn to Golnaz's second birthday party, when together we had baked a Pink Panther cake and believed ourselves happy— I felt our future snap inside my chest. "You can't just renounce your husband like that," I told her as she put on her black velvet combat boots and shut the green suitcase, the same one she had brought on our first and only family trip—a visit to Isfahan.

A memory of the three of us eating ice cream under the columns of Chehel Sotoun stung my heart with the loss that lay ahead of me, the way my reflection in the old Safavid palace pool had done, that summer afternoon. I ran to the front door and blocked it with my large frame. "You're no husband," she said, her black eyes hard as ice picks. "You're just a warden with a wedding ring." She pushed me aside and I let her. As I heard her scrambling down the stairs—she hadn't even waited for the elevator—I regained my senses and yelled, "Go back to whichever hell you came from, but understand that you just saw your daughter for the last time." From the stairs came a strange, aborted scream. She knew the law was on my side.

* * *

WHEN NOUSHIN LEFT, Golnaz was nine years old, on the edge of eviction from childhood. I vowed to give her a good life. I cooked dinner for her, took her shopping or to the movies, and dropped her off at school in the morning. I even sang to her from time to time. I had often been told that I had a soulful voice, and more than once I gave her my best impersonation of Dariush, which she found hilarious. There was a time when I would sing my Dariush renditions to seduce women, but that was a lifetime before. Going from seduction to hilarity didn't bother me—it was just the nature of time, passing. Often, after we would wash and put away the dishes, we would sit together at the kitchen table as she would finish her homework, and I, staring at her heart-shaped face, would be seized by the thought of losing her. When she wished me good night I would kiss the top of her head, reminding myself, each time as though it were the first, of the possibility for goodness on this earth. She smelled of powder and honey, vanilla and salt. It was her scent and it had been Noushin's scent. On nights when I couldn't sleep I would tiptoe into her room and stand over her bed, sniffing her head like a bandit before returning to the cold crispness of my own laundered sheets. I was addicted to laundry in those days and asked the housekeeper to leave the dirty wash to me. But instead of using the washing machine, I would fill the tub and soak the clothes and sheets in lye, scrubbing and beating the soiled cloth like some ancient washerwoman by the riverside, rubbing out memories with suds and ash.

* * *

SIRENS BLARED AS Forty-Second Street finally opened up, and we crossed, sedan after sedan, back to our hotels. From the tinted, bulletproof windows of the jet-black Mercedes I watched pedestrians struggling to make their way through their occupied city. Serves them right, I thought. Let them squirm for a couple of days like the rest of the world. In truth my favorite part of the entire trip was being in this mighty car. I called it our machin-e-zanbour assal—the honeybee car, because it reminded me of a toy I played with as a boy. Back in the day, my brother and I had a collection of toy cars. Among them was a sleek, black Chrysler Imperial, modeled after the car in the Green Hornet TV series, with a majestic bee on its roof, green-tinted windows, a radiator grille that would open to reveal a red missile, and a boot that, once unlocked, would allow a radar scanner to fly upward. In the back seat was a figurine of the Green Hornet aiming a gun, and behind the wheel sat Kato, his assistant. It was a prodigious car, loved equally by my brother and me, but for different reasons. I was obsessed with the flapping grille and the missile underneath, while Omid adored the hornet set against the black sheen of the chassis. "The bee leads to the honeycomb," Omid would say as he'd maneuver the car within the arabesques of the century-old silk Kashani carpet of our bedroom, a hand-me-down from one of our rich maternal relatives. Poor Omid. He believed in improvement. Maybe he couldn't help it, with a name like that. Omid. It means hope.

* * *

THE MINISTER AND I arrived at our hotel. The concierge—a young man in a smart navy suit, doubtless a graduate of a Swiss hospitality school—alerted us that about a dozen people had left us a handful of miniature flags engraved with messages. As the Minister questioned him about these visitors I noticed the young concierge's cuff links emblazoned with a Warhol-style image of Mao—a wink of irony in his otherwise stern outfit.

Excerpted from Man of My Time by Dalia Sofer. Copyright © 2020 by Dalia Sofer. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.