by Donia Bijan
They said that Davoud had died instantly, that he didn’t feel any pain, but Zod didn’t believe it. He couldn’t imagine that being hurled through a windshield and splattered on the pavement with limbs torn from your body could be quick or painless, and what he couldn’t bear most was that his brother suffered, that he lay there alone, his blood staining the asphalt, while Zod sat in Luxembourg Garden sketching a wretched fountain. It was beyond him to understand how grief can fill you so with the feeling of your own flaws and frailty.
Nine
When the waiters took a break after lunch to smoke and huddle under the eaves, Yanik said, “This is not the time to tell jokes.” One by one they put their cigarettes out against the wall, sending sparks into the air, and slumped away. The birds wouldn’t shut up. It was so strange to see them there, in the trees, unmoved by grief. Where is that slingshot so I can crack their beaks? thought Zod, squinting into the bright light coming through the branches. And his mother. His mother. Not a sound when he placed his ear against her door, and when he looked in, not a light shone in the room, only Nina’s face shimmered like a white moon against the black drapes.
Naneh Goli knocked and knocked on Zod’s bedroom door. Eventually she burst in, pulling him downstairs to the kitchen where a cheery light pushed through the back door. Together they toasted the flour to bake tray after tray of halvah, taking turns stirring rosewater and saffron syrup with the flour, rocking the dense pudding, anger, sorrow, anger, sorrow, rippling the surface with the back of a spoon.
It was a house full of people, but quiet save for the clocks Yanik wound every morning, wandering forlorn through its rooms until he reached the kitchen. There, in the darkness before dawn, a single yellow light shone. Naneh Goli shuffled from sink to stove. She made breakfast. She made lunch. She stripped the beds. She made the beds. Then, one day, Naneh Goli ran water in the tub and carried Nina into the bathroom. She peeled off the nightgown and washed away the gray film of grief from her skin, leaving a thick ring of soap scum behind. Scrubbed clean and dabbed with rosewater, Nina sat at her mirror and let Goli’s gentle hands comb her hair and tie it back with a blue ribbon—her first color in months.
At the table, everyone sat without saying a word until Naneh Goli brought them a clear, salty chicken soup with tiny dumplings. Earlier, she had poached kilos of bird wings and necks with leeks and carrots, saved the broth and spilled the wings and tidbits on a tray to cool. Zod had sat with her at the kitchen table to pull the warm meat off the bones, which her slick fingers quickly folded into dumplings.
Nina broke the silence, very softly at first, complimenting the broth that slowly warmed her vocal chords. Then Yanik, undone by gratitude for the sight of her, for the sound of her, sang in Russian, his voice high and cracking like an adolescent boy. Zod and Morad shared a glance and followed, hoarse at first, then urgent, before the moment vanished.
Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we would do
Those were the days, my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way
That very evening they went to Pari’s house. She was playing the piano in her parents’ sitting room when they knocked. Zod didn’t know the music, didn’t know the girl, but felt the full blow of the decision his parents had spelled out for him—to ask for Pari’s hand. What do you think? What did he think? It was a gratuitous touch, asking for his opinion when the prologue and the epilogue of the engagement were already written. Until now the proposal had seemed abstract, but planted on this girl’s doorstep, staring up at the lit window where he could see her silhouette, he staggered under the weight of it, wishing for a drink from the magic fountain.
Nina reached out a hand to squeeze his arm and they moved together through the courtyard, up the steps, into a parlor with a thick Persian carpet and ornate chairs, where Pari, in a black skirt fanned out on the piano bench, sat with her hands perched on the keys. She turned to look over her shoulder, greeting them with a shy “Salaam.” There were dimples in her cheeks. His heart, unaccustomed to such a jolt, pounded in his chest.
Long ago, Yanik had told him that once he’d seen Nina’s mother, he had asked for Nina’s hand. “Before you marry a girl,” he’d advised, “look first at her mother.” Mrs. Parsa came in carrying a bowl of green melon and set it down to greet her guests. Zod couldn’t bring himself to look at her, instead staring at the brightly framed oil paintings on the wall.
Outside, traffic hummed, dependable street noises calling to Zod who considered running downstairs to hail a taxi. Desperately, he turned towards the door, but then Mrs. Parsa was holding his hand, her palm still cool from the chilled melon bowl, and his eyes swept across her pretty face and saw an expression of sympathy he had never seen before. Her eyes filled with tears she blinked away. He lowered himself to a chair and watched his father take Pari’s face in both hands and kiss her forehead. Davoud’s death had opened something inside them, and except for Zod, who thought he would pass out, they all moved towards each other with tender familiarity, putting their faith in one another to get them through life without a son.
And then what happened, what really erased the last trace of formalities, was that Pari played the piano for them and sang in her sweet voice. It felt like an offering, a folk song about spring coming late and waiting for the first bloom. When it was over, she stood up to smooth her skirt and for an instant Zod expected her to bow, but Pari lifted her chin to look Zod in the eye. Did he even know how to speak? Let the grown-ups do the talking. Just let him stand in the heat of that gaze. Architecture be damned! He tried hard not to be jealous of all the things she had ever looked at before, of people, of flowers and trees and piano keys and sheets of music. Pari’s eyes were mirrors reflecting his future and there he caught a glimpse of a life beside her.
Eager to begin that life, he urged his parents to forgo the elaborate wedding they had initially planned for Davoud. It would be perverse to insert him so obviously into his lost brother’s place. He insisted on meeting privately with Pari to explain his devotion to her as entirely new and under no obligation. It was unheard of, a boy and a girl meeting unsupervised. “You’ll be married soon enough,” Nina said, but Zod prevailed.
Fierce now, with newfound courage, he invited Pari to hike the footpaths of Darband with him. Her father had agreed, as long as Pari’s brother could follow a few yards behind. Wearing a peacoat over slim navy trousers, she was fetching with her seesaw gait and her slick black ponytail in a barrette like a schoolgirl. Zod longed to take her small hand but kept a chaste distance, his arm ablaze with each incidental brush. There was nothing between them but air, nothing keeping him from reaching for her, nothing, that is, but Davoud’s eyes. He felt his brother everywhere, sure that the lanky figure following them was Davoud, not Pari’s little brother, and with aching hope he wanted it to be true, wished for Davoud to pummel him, to pellet his skull with the pebbles from the trail.
Out of breath with love he could hardly bear, he finally said, “Pari, I am not my brother. I will never replace him. I come to you as a man carrying my heart in my face, and a blank notebook to write our story.” He exhaled, having spoken the most words he’d ever uttered to a woman, and she turned to hide a smile. From her coat pocket she pulled a small paper bag and reached inside for a fistful of sunflower seeds and her eyes flicked from Zod to the birds darting on the gravel between their feet and held the bag out to him. They fed the birds and walked without a word as if they had always walked this way. In one hand Zod held his fearful, restrained, and predictable self, and in the other, seeds—the latter, light as gold dust.
THEIR PARENTS CONSENTED TO a quiet wedding in July, jus
t six months after Davoud’s death, aware now that these two regarded each passing day as a lifetime spent apart. Energized by grief, Yanik finished a second floor apartment, Nina sewed curtains, pillow shams, and a satin quilt embroidered with butterflies, and with every stitch, every beam, every coat of paint, they worked to seal the crack in their hearts, trusting again in the brightness of another child’s future.
It left them breathless, the care with which they crafted this nest, going so far as installing a dumbwaiter so the newlyweds could take their meals upstairs if they wished. Naneh Goli’s face filled with glee when she imagined breakfast rising to wake them from their dreams, how she would fill that black hole with pink roses and jasmine, bowls of purple figs and peach jam, loaves of warm bread, jugs of milk, crocks of sweet butter, goblets of pomegranate juice, and song. Yes, she would sing and let her voice rise, too.
Zod and Pari honeymooned on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where their toes, wiggling in the cold sand, were exposed to each other for the first time. Pari’s were like miniature ivory dolls with iridescent faces. Still bashful, she buried them, but the tide rushed to unveil them again and again. Even a kiss, full on the lips, wasn’t as intimate as this introduction to her skin. Words still caught in their throats, so Zod and Pari were happy to let the waves chaperone the silence between them, always close at hand. Their shyness coming and going, they took their time telling each other everything about their pasts, but even that seemed unnecessary because Zod felt like Pari already knew him, and he her. Soon he would feel like her voice was his home.
So began their habit each morning of walking down to the sea, where Zod would spread his jacket close to the hem of the water and they would sit and eat their breakfast of bread and cheese and Pari would peel them an orange. Even this tidy nesting of the rinds inside one another in her palm told Zod of the orderly home they would make together. With their life in her hands, Zod felt he would never again feel afraid.
By the third day Zod and Pari had shed their clothing and went in the water, stroking sideways so they could look at each other. Pari was the stronger swimmer, her delicate arms gliding through the water effortlessly. Zod flailed and kicked hard to keep up with her and had no breath for talking.
“Behzod!” she shouted. “Behzod, you mustn’t slap the water! Sweep and stroke. See?”
“Shoma are a wonderful swimmer,” Zod gasped and spluttered.
They still addressed each other as shoma, the plural of the second person like the French vous (as if the singular was too slight), but not in the stiff manner reserved for teachers and elders, and not as Zod’s mother would do when she was cross, but with a kindness between a man and woman in splendid love. Even afterwards when they went to their room and Zod tasted salt on Pari’s breasts, even when he was inside her, even when they lay bare, facing each other under the whirring ceiling fan, he said “Parvaneh, shoma have the most beautiful face I’ve ever known.” She blushed like an apricot. Zod thought he could just eat her.
BACK AT CAFÉ LEILA on a hot August afternoon, an upright piano stood under a blanket in the courtyard, its bench still out on the street. Yanik was instructing the two burly porters leaning against his recent purchase to carry it to the parlor, or salon, as he preferred to call it. Zod and Pari would be home soon and Nina wanted everything in its place before their arrival. She was happy, and her happiness spread through the rest of the household. The piano was very much a part of this cheer, a prelude to the new life that was to unfold. She slipped her hands under the coarse blanket to feel the lacquered wood, lifting the wing to tap the keys, though she didn’t play. The temperature was ninety-eight degrees and the men’s shirts were soaked with sweat, but Nina brought them glasses of iced cherry sherbets and that got them moving again.
Earlier they had been to the Saturday market with a trolley to do their weekly shopping, but with greater purpose this time. In preparation for a feast to welcome the newlyweds, crates of melons, eggplants, tomatoes, basil, apricots, and figs were stacked in the shade. Naneh Goli sat at a table set outside the kitchen, stringing green beans to cook with minced beef in a bright tomato sauce for lubia polo—a favorite dish of Zod’s boyhood. Forty game hens already lay in their saffron yogurt marinade, and tomorrow they would roast them over an open fire to serve with mounds of jeweled rice.
All morning Yanik shaped lamb koofteh (meatballs) mixed with allspice and thyme, browning them in small batches and infringing on Nina’s burners, which she needed to simmer mulberry preserves for parfait.
“My God!” he exclaimed in an effort to discourage Nina from making jam. “These berries are far too tart to soil the pan.”
Not an inch of stove space remained, the multitude of dishes filling the house with steam and forcing Naneh Goli to pull a table outside to do her work. A heady perfume hung in the air just outside the kitchen and through the open front gate Naneh Goli could see passersby pause for a moment to inhale the colliding scents. Some stopped to talk, some swerved around the piano and wandered in to ask, “What in heavens is cooking?”
That night, exhausted from preparations and the lingering heat, they lined up their mattresses on the roof and slept soundly under mosquito nets. Yanik rose before dawn to wash the sidewalk with a hose. He would’ve washed the entire city if there had been time, but the garden tables needed to be set and garlands of roses to be strung and coals to be lit and dolmas to be wrapped, and piles of cress and scallions to be chopped for kuku.
Already Nina was lighting the samovar and Naneh Goli was scurrying to the baker.
“Do you want the tables set like we did for the banquet last summer?” Yanik asked Nina.
“No, Niki,” she chirruped, “I have prettier tablecloths and embroidered napkins. This will be better.”
They had discussed the celebration for days, walking through the garden, imagining and reimagining the festivities, feverish from anticipation.
Only Morad remained on the periphery of this spell, disgusted with his parents for muting the memory of his brother so conveniently. Bad-tempered and vicious, his threats to contaminate the meal fell on deaf ears.
They had never been close, Zod and Morad. To Morad, the middle brother Zod was an obstacle between him and Davoud, always getting in the way, stumbling and crouching in terror like a girl. The closest, most sacred friendship of his life was gone, his face cut out of a marriage portrait and replaced by a witless ass. It was an unforgivable betrayal. Gnashing his teeth with rage, Morad paced the streets with clenched fists and spat at the thought of Zod with Pari, scraping his chair away from the dinner table when talk inevitably turned to the homecoming. He could not understand how battered his parents were, that the preparations lightened their grief, and that all this work was done in the name of their firstborn.
Counting the hours to his departure for America, where he would soon be going to university, he looked forward to putting an immense distance between himself and a family he’d already forsworn. At nineteen, Morad wrote himself out of the family equation and no amount of coaxing would bring him back to them, so Yanik and Nina lost two sons in one year. It was a sinister beginning for any marriage but love holds promise, and those who stayed found themselves huddled under its umbrella grasping one another against the overwhelming tide of sorrow.
IT HAD BEEN A dream, walking into the garden that night. Snowy tables covered with damask shimmered beneath dozens of gas lanterns suspended from branches, pink rosebuds floated in the fountain, barberries, pistachios, and slivered orange peel glistened on pyramids of saffron rice.
Yanik, in a white tuxedo, led the waiters like an admiral and they followed his orders, polishing and buffing silver and glass. Even the gold buttons on their lapels sparkled when they stood shoulder to shoulder to escort guests through a maze of candlelit paths and as they circulated trays of liqueurs. Nina had finally untied her apron to wear green chiffon and seemed to float a few inches above the ground. Even Naneh Goli unpacked her wedding gold to wear for the occasion.
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Pari, already seated with her parents, searched the crowd for Zod and saw him walking away to the far corner of the yard to where his younger brother lurked. She couldn’t see and would never know what happened as the men receded into the dark. Morad, in funereal black, accepted Zod’s outstretched hand and held it in a vice-like grip, fixing him with a stern gaze.
“You don’t deserve any of this, you hypocrite.”
No one but Zod heard his index finger snap like a wishbone in Morad’s hefty hand. A teetering back, a grimace, before he thanked Morad, for he knew he had not sufficiently loved, nor grieved his lost brother—so quickly he’d been wrapped in his parents’ care and shepherded to Pari, that a broken digit was a paper cut.
“Break my arm, brother,” he begged.
How often in their youth had he seen Morad grab a kid in a headlock and threaten to crack his neck, spoon an eyeball from its socket, or arch his fingers back until the kid wailed his apologies for a misdemeanor. Instead of feeling reassured by his brother’s brute strength, he had wet his pants more than once just bearing witness, knowing it was practice for when it would be his turn to fall prey to his brother’s torture. Morad smelled Zod’s fear, never missing an opportunity to push him into a muddy ditch or trip him up when they were alone, then stepping back to wipe the foam of pleasure from the corners of his mouth.
Now, with his ample torso hovering over Zod’s wiry frame, he sneered “Hah! Your arm? You mean your chicken wing, you shit? I’d break every bone in your body, one by one, if my mother wasn’t enjoying herself so much.” Then he let go, like flicking a cigarette butt, and stalked away, leaving Zod stricken and yet relieved, for underneath the anguish was peace and something like a laugh racked him when he sniffed a hint of Morad’s aftershave on his clammy palm—that his brother had remembered cologne for the reckoning, that they would never again be as intimate as they had just been.