In the early stages of my father’s illness, I prayed a lot. I prayed when he started holding my hand to steady himself. I prayed when he started using a walker. I prayed when he became wheelchair bound. I prayed when his speech started to slur, when I heard him weeping behind the closed bedroom door. Finally, when he lost the ability to speak, I stopped praying and turned to threats, instead . . . I told G.d that if He took my father, I’d kill myself, too. And then came the morning when my father died.
Three days previously, my father’s breathing had become more strained. I knew that ALS often ended like this, that the person suffocates. But I wouldn’t admit to myself it was happening. I stayed home and sat at the dining table, listening to my father struggling to breathe, and I busied myself with a research paper I was writing for school. I woke up in the middle of that night, before the morning of his death and I walked to his room to check on him. He labored to breathe in his sleep. I went back to bed, fell asleep and dreamed about him. I hadn’t dreamed about my father in three years, but he was there, in my dreams on that last night, and I had my arms around his neck, and I cried and cried, and a fantastic light shone all around him, and he laughed.
I asked him, through my tears, “What am I going to do now?”
And he said, “You are going to live your life.”
That morning, around 7:30 a.m., as I drove to the community college that I was attending, a cool breeze came in through my open car window and I took a sip from the Styrofoam cup of tea I had purchased from a gas station and, suddenly, I experienced a jarring memory, a strong familiarity of that exact moment with tea, morning sunlight through windshield, cool breeze with the smell of the ocean on it. I had already lived this moment, it was both memory and the present, at once. But this wasn’t my own memory that I was reexperiencing. It was my father’s memory. This is how he must have felt each morning when he left for work, when he could still work. He sipped his tea and felt the pleasure of the morning air on his face as he drove, knowing that his wife and his daughter slept in their warm beds at home.
I knew, in that moment, that my father was living, feeling this experience through me. And I knew, after that moment, that he was no longer alive.
I drove back home blindly, weeping, screaming, pleading for him to wait for me. It was the first of May, and wild narcissus grew near the coastal hills. Those were his favorite flowers. I wept and screamed and told him to wait, because I hadn’t brought him narcissus this spring, I hadn’t brought him a bunch of narcissus to put beside his bed, so that he could smell them, so that he could see their delicate, paper-white beauty. “Wait,” I screamed and drove blindly down the winding canyons that led home. “Wait and I will bring you all the damned flowers from all these damned hills.” I parked the car in the driveway, ran to the door and pounded until my mother opened it.
I asked, “Where is my father?”
And she said, “He is gone.”
I turned and walked back to the car, because G.d and I had a deal, if he took my father from me, I’d commit suicide. And this was it, the time had come. I was going get into that car, drive the way I had come, and drive right off a cliff.
My mother followed behind me and asked, “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
“Please . . . Don’t leave me.”
I don’t know why I turned back, but I did. I turned to tell her where I intended to go, and I saw her. I mean, I saw her. I saw her pain, and her beauty in that pain. I saw that she was the manifestation of love and light, entrapped in a human body. My heart broke open, and the world flooded in and drowned me. And now, here I was, frozen on the edge of a cliff in Iran, with death right before me, and I remembered my mother asking, “Where are you going?”
There was a prayer she sang beside my father’s open grave. She had sat down beside the earth that his brothers and friends would shovel on his coffin, on the very edge of that abyss, and she sang a prayer. It was the sunlight and it was the wind and it was earth. It was all of the beauty and all of the sorrow of the living. With my feet turned to rocks and the nothingness so near, the echo of that song my mother had sung years before somehow managed to travel through time and space to find me where I stood now, turned to stone from fear and fatigue, and that prayer sent an electrifying jolt right from the crown of my head to the soles of my tired, begrudging feet. I started walking, and I started singing loudly enough for my mother to hear me, and she must have heard me while sitting on the edge of her husband’s grave, and she must have sung her prayer loud enough for it to reach me both then and now, in this time when I needed strength to see past the fear, past the face of death, so that I could walk forth.
Pouya strolled quietly behind me, looking off into the distance, giving me the space I needed to reckon with whatever I needed to reckon with, until we finally turned around a bend and saw Behrooz sitting with the rest of the group, listening. Below us stretched a visible valley. And in that distant valley, the thin ribbon of a river.
We finally came to a slope we could walk down, made up of loose rocks. Those rocks came alive with motion each time we moved so that with every step, we slid forward several feet. At any moment, our descent could have triggered a rock slide that would have crushed and buried us. We walked slowly, slid, held our breaths. We were hit by rocks that came hurtling at us, left us bruised, scraped, bleeding.
During the walk down that treacherous mountain, Javid kept saying, over and over, “You have no idea how many miracles have befallen you each minute that passes. No idea what a miracle it is to be alive.” He said this with a tone of humor and perhaps irony, but he was right. Each step that didn’t bury us was a miracle. And there came, finally, the most miraculous moment, when we found ourselves at the foot of that mountain, a few yards from the banks of that river we had seen from the top of the cliff. That thin ribbon of water in the far, green valley now rushed before us. Behrooz walked slowly to the bank, then sat. He had delivered us. Safely. He boiled some water for us to drink before we started to walk again, following the river toward the encampment of Amoorok, where a large shepherd family stayed during the summer months.
After an hour’s walk, we saw their tents. There must have been thousands of sheep there, surrounding a group of men engaged in a very serious conversation. They were all relatives and they were discussing who would take their flocks where in search of grass. When they saw our group, dust-covered, visibly haggard, cut and bleeding, they stopped immediately and approached us. Behrooz told them the ordeal, and a couple of the men hurried to bring us a large, tin pail of fresh yogurt. The head of the tribe told us to go to his tent and ask his wife for bread.
We were complete strangers to them. They lived in these mountains because it was their home. They searched for green pastures as a matter of survival. We risked our lives for sport. We lived in nice city apartments, with running hot water and electricity and fridges full of food. They thought of winters and wolves and droughts. We came out of the mountains, hungry and lost, and they welcomed us into their fold, despite our strangeness.
Outside the flap of the largest tent, we asked if we could enter. A woman’s voice welcomed us in. Only the girls of our group walked into her home. The men waited outside, respectfully. The mistress of the house was a beautiful young woman, her black hair held back by a colorful headscarf, her skin freckled, her cheeks rosy, her body lean and strong. She was probably the same age we were, but already had a toddler at her skirt and a baby at her breast. She stood in the middle of that large, round tent, where there was a makeshift stove over an open flame. Above it, in the ceiling of the tent, was an opening that allowed in light and let out smoke. The floors of that home were of earth, but earth watered and tamped down, so that there was no dust. A warm, soft light filtered in, and all around the canvas walls were wool cushions and bedding in rich colors rolled up to serve as couches.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
And I burst into tears. I wept, uncont
rollably, silently, and looked at her. She went to where she kept the bread she baked each day, wrapped in cloth to keep it fresh, and she unwrapped it and handed that bread to me. And I wept some more. She turned to one of the girls in our group and asked, “Why is your friend crying so much?”
And that girl replied, “She is from America.”
I suppose that was the reason. In a way. Because I had never felt welcome. Because the doors of all those homes in that suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles always remained shut. And here I stood in a dirt-floored tent, hungry and tired and lost and scared, and she had welcomed me in, then shared with me her family’s daily bread.
The last leg to the village of Deleer was a three-hour hike that followed the river. We arrived right before the sun set. That village, in my memory, is beautiful beyond words. Remote, without any developed roads leading to it, tucked in the green northern mountains and hidden by lush forests. At the eastern entrance from the river stood an old walnut tree. She was a giant, and the villagers, for lack of a better word, revered her. Not in a pagan, ritualistic sense. She was just old and beautiful and, for generations, had provided the villagers with her fruit and her shade. She had presided over ancestors the villagers only knew from the tombstones in the cemetery, and would outlive them to see the great-grandchildren they themselves would never meet. The walnut tree was like a village elder. An ancient old woman who stood witness to the passage of time, and who cared for those who came to her. Anyone who entered the village from the east walked beneath her shade first.
The houses were made of earth and stone, the roofs thatched. Roses grew profusely, climbed the walls, around the windows, over the thresholds. The doors and the wood frames of the windows were painted in bold reds and blues, yellows, greens. Roosters of the same bold colors patrolled the narrow paths between the homes, and those paths wound up and down, past doors that were always open, and in those doorways stood women with rosy cheeks, or old and bent, or young and shy, or plump with motherhood, all inviting us in as we walked past them. They greeted us, told us what they had cooking on their hearths, and said, “Come in, share a meal with us.”
Beside their doorways stood aluminum canisters that once held lard or coffee, now filled with soil and growing a profusion of cosmos and geraniums. Old men sat in the shade of trees, sipping tea and chatting with one another. Able-bodied men and women returned from the fields. I wept there, too, as I walked through that village at dusk. I walked and wept and the children followed me and asked where I had come from, and why I cried. I turned to Behrooz and asked, “Why can’t we live like this? Why can’t it be so simple and so pure?”
Behrooz looked at me and laughed. Then he ruffled my hair and said, “After one day, you would waste away from boredom. This is not a life for you.”
I wanted it to be a life for me. I wanted to be a fisherman’s wife. I wanted to have goats, live in a village, write poetry, and birth babies in my earthen home with its thatched roof and primitive wooden furniture. I wanted to cook stews in a cauldron on a wood-fueled stove. I wanted to make fresh butter and wash my clothes in a river against rocks. Why couldn’t this be my life, in place of those suburbs back in Los Angeles, those identical houses with their manicured lawns, their washing machines, their two-car garages, treadmills, TVs, microwaves?
I was twenty-four, I had the power of choice but the heart of a child. It was a purely magnificent age. Everything was possible. I could choose any story I wanted my life to be, and in that evening, walking through the narrow paths of that village, I wanted to be simple and pure. I wanted to tear up the map I had been given in America, forgo the ease, the security, the stability of all that and live, instead, in the wilderness of those mountains of Northern Iran, and grow old in those mountains, and return to those mountains.
I imagine it, now, from time to time. I imagine myself there, despite all that has come to pass. After the falling of the towers, the burning of the cities, the explosions of madmen, the slaughtering of children, after the wasting away of the earth, after all this, televised and broadcast, headline after headline after headline, I imagine what that boredom might have been like, in that little lost village, beneath the protective shade of that ancient walnut tree.
Behrooz hired the only two cars in the whole village to take us back to Tehran. We drove over the narrow, bumpy, dirt road out of the mountains and to the main highway that led back to the city. When we reached the highway, our driver slipped in a cassette tape, the kind of drum and bass you might have heard in any nightclub in Europe in those days. He turned the music up, then drove like he wanted death. He raced the other hired car, swerved in and out of the opposite lane toward oncoming traffic, barely making it back into our lane, barely skirting the edge of a cliff that offered no barricades to keep us from flying right off. We screamed at him to slow down. We pleaded. We threatened not to pay. But he drove on, without heed. And Javid, who sat in the front seat of our car, his hands stretched out to the dashboard, kept yelling, and laughing, “You have no idea how many miracles have just passed this moment. You have no idea what a miracle it is to be alive.”
WHEN WE RETURNED to Tehran, I was in love. I can’t write an exhaustive list of what I was in love with, because I was in love with everything. I was in love with the taxi drivers. The surly ones. The quiet ones. The inquisitive. The ones who recited poetry. The ones who talked about their dreams. I was in love with the Kurdish men who stood on the side of the road tall and proud, with their thick mustaches and their baggy pants and the colorful scarves wound about their waists, who waited all day for someone to hire them. I was in love with the little boys who followed shoppers at the bazaar with their wheelbarrows, insisting. I was in love with the recording of the azaan broadcasted over the city from the tops of minarets at dawn, at midday, at dusk. The smell of hot piroshkis from the bakery, the colorful display of seasonal fruit, the hanging carcass of a goat, the dazed chicks that sold for pennies each, dyed hot pink and neon green and who lived for less than a day. I was in love with the merchants who napped in the late afternoons on the piled bags of wheat they sold, in the corner of their shops. I was in love with the beggars. In love with the street musicians. The prostitutes. With the policemen in their ill-fitting uniforms. With the butchers in their bloodstained white aprons. I was in love with the beautiful young women. In love with the young men. The old men. The tired mothers. The street sweepers who swept with brooms made of bramble. I was in love with the mullahs who walked in the shade of the elm trees that lined the streets and avenues, their cloaks billowing out behind them like sails. In love with the fruit dealers who sang about their produce, how ripe it was, how sweet it was, how cheap. I walked the streets in love. Delirious with love. Broken-hearted with love. Shining with love. Crazy with love. The sight of a mechanic’s hands eternally covered in grease, or the purple hands of the man who sold roasted beets from a cart, or the blackened fingers of the young children who shelled raw walnuts and sold them on the corners moved me to tears. Iran. I was in love with Iran. All of her. Her sorrow, her suffering, her beauty, her strength. Her magic. Her spirit. She was mine, I was hers, this was love.
This madness, of course, drew a bit of attention in the streets. People noticed. But it inspired a kindness in strangers toward me, the way a community accepts a village idiot. And I wasn’t afraid to be the fool. I was given to bouts of joy, of ecstatic gratuity to the world as it manifested. There, in the streets of Tehran, I walked enraptured, spellbound. The world was gifted to me. Gluttonous, I wanted all of it. I became engorged, every one of those taxi drivers my confidant, every fruit vendor my friend, every beggar my guilt, every old woman my mother, every argument my folly, every act of kindness, everything, mine. I felt like I was awakening, again, for the second time in my life from a deep sleep, and I stretched myself wide to encompass the whole of it. I felt the unfurling of my ego in every direction, through the winding passageways, down the wide avenues, over the tall garden walls, into the tight and n
arrow streets, into homes, alleys and high-rises, schools and offices and banks and stores. I had thousands of eyes, and thousands of mouths, and arms and legs and hearts and hopes. I was all of the immense humanity before me. I walked the streets with impunity, holding a bag of persimmons or apples, and handing them out to every beggar who crossed my path, to groups of day laborers and construction workers. Even the police gave me license as they watched this loudness of character, this fearlessness, this openness, and they let me be.
It was a happy time. Those days.
So my cousins and I decided to host a party, to share the happiness, the miracle of being alive. Behrooz had just moved the family from their old apartment in the quiet and secluded outskirts of Tehran into his new building in the heart of the city. The old apartment still stood vacant. Pouya and I searched the bazaars far and wide for black lights and hired a DJ with the right music. We soundproofed the home with egg cartons and blankets on the windows to muffle the bass so policemen passing in the streets below wouldn’t hear us, and invited a whole bunch of people and gave them a password, and told them to dress outlandishly. I put on my white thrift-store hippie dress and wove myself a garland of daisies for my hair and fashioned some wings out of silk and wire, and the night of the party came, and the guests arrived and that’s when Reza walked in through the door.
Reza, the One.
There were no formal introductions between Reza and me. I had my back turned when he walked in with his girl, his brother, and his gang of friends. But I felt him enter the room. Let me get this right. Forget form. For a moment. Forget the idea of two separate people in a room crowded with other people, a certain distance between them. Reduce everything down to the atomic, to the burning core surrounded by the dance of particles smaller than even that. There, the strict boundaries of the body dissipate, elements merge with one another, breath with the particles of air, feet with the seeming solidity of the ground, and in between all those dancing atoms, nothing exists but empty space. And energy. And heat. And attraction. In the minutia of that universe, some frequency, some taut vibration of strings pulled between Reza and me, and he looked over, past the crowd of bodies to where I stood, looking at him. Then, he looked away. And his girl, who had been his girl since they were children playing on the same street, felt that connection as a palpable threat and withdrew to another room, upset. In that same moment, Amir appeared out of nowhere and asked me to dance, and even when dancing with my eyes closed, in between so many bodies sweating and moving, amidst a concoction of dizzying pheromones, to the bewildering thump of the music, I still knew Reza’s precise location in space, like the needle of a compass drawn north.
Home Is a Stranger Page 9