by Donia Bijan
By eight o’clock Nezam the barber arrived. Yanik, denied a palace hotel, nevertheless found ways to offer the services of one. The lobby barber was the epitome of luxury, and to reassure his guests, he had installed the chair in a discreet corner facing a gilded mirror and initially sat in it himself to attract customers. By and by, Nezam, a taciturn Turk, became a fixture and guests tipped back to relax into a wet shave, as he took his time to sweep his blade while demanding more hot towels from Aladdin, stroking a cheek where he had just run the blade to admire his work, and deftly singeing wayward ear and nose hairs with a lit match—an alarming sight to Noor and Mehrdad, who snuck in to fill their pockets with sugar-coated almonds from silver candy dishes on the front desk before rushing to school.
Noor remembered the night her father brought a man home from the hospital. Shoja Yazdan was one of his good customers, a widower recovering from an operation that had left him blind in his right eye. Noor saw him leaning against her father with an arm around Zod’s shoulder, the man’s gait unsteady as they walked up the steps to the hotel. Her grandfather followed behind with a small suitcase and they marched the sick man along the polished marble floors to a room on the second floor. There were pink geraniums in the window box and after three weeks in a grim hospital room, the sight of them with his good eye cheered him up. They brought him a dinner tray and he sat up in bed to share supper with Zod, who slept that night on a fold-out cot next to the man, should his friend need anything.
“What a man I married,” Pari said. “Cook, husband, father, now doctor!”
There was a strain in her voice that Noor had never heard before. Her parents were always short on time with each other, what with running a hotel and a café, Pari’s concerts, and caring for Noor and Mehrdad, but Zod and Pari’s love throbbed from one heart to the other without pause. She loved him for the care he took of his friends and family, and even strangers, but that night Noor thought she envied Mr. Yazdan, “Hotel, restaurant, sanatorium!”
However, Pari truly loved the hotel. She returned from one of her trips abroad with an antique Victorian birdhouse for Zod, with the idea of keeping it in the lobby. Handcrafted and painted canary yellow with a light blue trim, it sat across from the front desk. Inside, two white-eared bulbuls serenaded guests and these songbirds, too, added to the hotel’s charm.
Noor would bring her friends after school to see what she called her dollhouse—with its ample size, tiny windows, and arched doorways, it resembled just that—and Pari encouraged her to name the birds and talk to them. Peeking inside, Noor longed to furnish the cage with miniature chairs and teacups, to tuck Sonbol and Bolbol into wee beds and sit them down at their desks to do their arithmetic. It seemed this diorama was lacking, and so it was that she pried open the door one day to make some improvements when Sonbol flew past her and out the window. If Pari had not intervened, Yanik would have spanked Noor, and he stormed out murmuring Russian expletives. Nonetheless, just three days later Zod found Bolbol lying still and cold on the floor of the birdhouse.
“Missing his partner,” he explained to a tearful Pari, but they told the children that Bolbol flew away to find his wife. Aladdin was most relieved, for the chirping had always made him feel anxious and tardy, wake up wake up wake up, you’re late you’re late you’re late! Nina was pleased, too—caged birds made her sad. What’s more, she thought, who needs birds in the house when they have Pari?
Years later, those guests who had leaned out their windows to hear Pari sing would sometimes confuse the old days with the new, would sometimes mutter about the Shah and Queen Farah, or the Danish Bakery near Vanak Square, as if they still existed, as if they could order a birthday cake and pick it up tomorrow, but if you mentioned Hotel Leila, their eyes would glisten, the tears earnest, and with a wistful sigh cry, “Ah, but that was the golden age.”
Twelve
What Pari first noticed about Tehran after she had been away for a few weeks was the smell. She caught it almost as soon as she walked off the plane: an odor of diesel and wet asphalt that sharpened her nostalgia. If you were in it day after day, you didn’t notice it so much, but Pari noticed it—this smell of home and its familiar settling on her clothes.
Zod usually met her at the gate with a bouquet, offsetting the scent of engines with lilies and aftershave, although he wouldn’t be there tonight. Arriving a day earlier than expected, Pari was planning to take a taxi to Café Leila. She felt a happiness in her chest imagining Zod’s surprise, his urgent steps towards her nearly a run he kept in check anytime they had been apart. She could taste the sweet homecoming. In London, a bad flu had led to two cancelled concerts and she longed to be nursed by her husband. She also craved Naneh Goli’s hot chicken soup.
Wisps of hair escaped from her headscarf but Pari didn’t mind the scarf too much, it kept her hair clean. Still, she wasn’t used to this version of her country, the watchful eyes of bearded guards, the black-clad women and multiple checkpoints. It was two years after the revolution and yet the changes still unsettled her. On previous trips the contents of her bags were dumped on the floor and poked through, her copies of Elle magazine and tubes of lipstick confiscated, her body searched roughly by dour female guards.
Bitterly cold, her breath rose in the night air as she tugged on the belt of her wool coat. Anxious now to be home, she pushed a luggage cart to the curb and climbed into the first orange taxi. They started out into the black night and the driver glanced through his rearview mirror at Pari, who leaned her feverish forehead against the frosted window. He pushed a button on his cassette player and a mournful sermon rose from the speakers to press against her, a monotone the driver was compelled to interrupt with a frequent hollering of “Allahu Akbar!” Before long, the rippling tones of Arabic grew louder, filling her ears with a liquid that pounded against her eardrums and though the heater blasted hot air into the cab, she shivered and held her throbbing head in both hands. He mistook her convulsion for rapture and turned the volume up, at which Pari yelled, “Shut up! Oh please, shut him up!” She was just so tired.
PARI WAS A HAPPY traveler and took great pleasure in packing. She would lay out each item on the bed—shoes, stockings, handbag, jewelry — to consider its visual effect and comfort level before assembling complete outfits. Then she would fold them into her case, finally allowing Zod to carry her bag downstairs to where Naneh Goli and the children waited for their good-bye kisses, each holding a bucket of water to throw at the departing car—a send-off to assure smooth travels. She especially enjoyed packing for the return home. Every souvenir she selected for her family was first fondled, then wrapped in leaves of tissue paper, and then unwrapped once more for a final approval. These weren’t trivial little gifts borne from guilt—there simply was no other way for her to convey how much she missed them, how she wished they were there. These were pieces of a place carried home so as to see their delight in opening boxes with exotic patterns and lettering and a promise of something meant entirely for them. To return empty-handed was unthinkable, a statement that in her time away, they had ceased to exist. During this trip, she had braved a freezing rain to do her shopping and caught a terrible cold.
On the morning of her departure, Pari woke early to have a pot of strong black tea. As she pulled on the clothing laid out for the journey, she indulged in one last look at her soghatis (a traveler’s gifts) before fastening the lock on the tan leather suitcase that would lay in the trunk of the taxi. For Noor, a pair of white mittens from Selfridges to brighten the obligatory drab school uniform. For Mehrdad, the risky purchase of a Talking Heads album. Western pop music was forbidden under the new regime, and she had carefully slipped the record into a Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 15 sleeve. Also for her children, Mars bars and Cadbury Flakes. She bought a barrette with rhinestones for Naneh Goli, who coveted shiny things like a crow. For her mother she had purchased six white Marks and Spencer wool camisoles—her mother was always cold—and McVitie’s Digestive biscuits. There was a sky blue umbrel
la for Nina, along with some Yardley English Lavender soap. And finally, for Zod, a double-decker bus made of chocolate with marzipan headlamps and a blue silk tie from Bond Street (even though ties, too, were a symbol of Western dress and discouraged under the new order). She had strung it through the belt loops of her dress to make a pretty sash.
THE TIRES SHRIEKED WHEN the taxi swerved to the curb, jerking Pari and her suitcase roughly. The driver tossed his cigarette out the window and got out to yank the door open, grabbing Pari’s hair to throw her onto the street, hurling her to the concrete, and when she raised a hand to steady herself, he kicked her in the stomach. She dropped to the cold stone.
It was hard to tell who was screaming louder, and within minutes a column of bodies gathered, pushing for a look at her but not to stop him, because with two words—“whore” and “infidel”—he had already sanctioned their support. Their voices rose in a dark hum, closing in on her. They encouraged him to break every bone in her body, to rip out her hair, and one by one they peeled off their shoes and flung them—all but one woman who interfered, kneeling to shield Pari, but they dragged her away by her feet. Sister. That’s what they called her. “Back off, sister.”
Pari’s teeth spilled out to bob in the blood gushing from her mouth, an arm was twisted awkwardly, where bone had torn through flesh. Someone was slapping her head with a shoe, and she lay stretched out with her face smashed to the pavement, hair matted with blood, eyes looking at nothing at all, her legs splayed immodestly, like a corpse hemorrhaging on the sidewalk, powdered with fresh snow while dozens of wet black tracks circled her making an awful noise.
Before the first stone was cast, revolutionary guards patrolling the streets arrived to shove Pari into the back of their van and drive to the station where she was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and accused of enmity against God.
She lay unconscious through the proceedings and was eventually seen by a prison doctor who stitched her multiple wounds and cast her broken arm. Her bags were “lost” so she remained nameless through that night and the next, waking up in a cold cell, stiff and aching. Two times twenty-four is forty-eight, but how long had she been here, how many hours since she left London? Some sort of struggle had taken place but there was a blot of black ink in her memory beyond which she could not remember what had happened and did not know why she lay on this narrow cot under this coarse blanket in a dingy cell. Hurt everywhere.
UNTIL THAT NIGHT, PARI and Zod had lived sequestered from mass politics. She had had no interest whatsoever in revolution nor a longing for an alternative order. Of course they were attuned to the injustices, the corruption, the surveillance of the secret service, but Yanik and Nina’s escape from brutal Bolshevik oppression made them wary of any change that would disrupt the hum of everyday life. It wasn’t so much passivity as it was a lack of ideological fervor. On the other hand, the goal to overthrow the Shah glued their customers together and Zod found himself on the periphery of a movement that unfolded as much in his dining room as in classrooms, homes, and the bazaar.
In the early days of the revolution, secular men and women, communists, socialists, intellectuals, and political dissidents had marched side by side with the religious zealots. They poured into Café Leila, hoarse from shouting slogans, to slurp soup and speak openly for the first time in their lives before linking arms to go back out into the streets. The rapidity with which that fraternity crumbled and their purpose degenerated into fear and violence was breathtaking—had they really imagined that they would have a say in the future of their nation? Ah, but revolutions have a way of disappointing us and with each slain body, each dreadful disappearance, mistrust bloomed into profound betrayal.
Under the guise of tearing down tyranny, the new order ushered in a totalitarian theocracy, stripping people of hope, forcing them back into their foxholes or into exile, if they managed to escape execution. The fury of the Islamic regime did not blow over—it only gathered steam and effaced all those writers and thinkers who had never thought about life after the fall. They had assumed with glimmering hope that when a tyranny collapses, whatever comes next must be better. What began as grassroots rallies became government-staged theater—a dark sea of angry men and women shouting well-rehearsed slogans, then offered a hot meal for their performance.
Café Leila remained open through the turmoil, even on the darkest days, even when revolutionary guards stormed in for impromptu inspections. Zod, nervous and acquiescent, offered them lunch. When an ayatollah and his entourage showed up, Zod lit the coals. The dumbwaiter had proven useful after all—what Naneh Goli had once labeled the “honeymoon extension,” camouflaged by wallpaper, became a liqueur cabinet, and later a hiding place for an eclectic library of books by revered poets and writers forbidden under Islamic rule, such as Forough Farrokhzad and Sadeq Hedayat, as well as Zola, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, among dozens of French and Russian novels in translation (other than a few songs, the three brothers had never learned to speak Russian, so fierce was Yanik’s determination to assimilate). There were also several leather-bound editions of novels by Balzac and Flaubert inscribed to Zod by his old friend Gerard Simon, who continued correspondence until his letters began to arrive opened and read, to ensure that he and Zod were not planning a coup. Hidden among the books were other incriminating evidence of debauchery—playing cards, records, cassettes, and old issues of Towfigh (a political satire magazine), all suspended in a time capsule between two floors.
After the guards had filled their stomachs with kebabs, gnawed on raw onions, and scraped the filth from under their nails with the forks, they upended the café. Marauding the kitchen, the bedrooms, they dumped out the contents of endless drawers on the floor, and when they found nothing incriminating, they ripped the upholstery with dull knives and found Elena’s recipes, written in Cyrillic, which to these ignorant men looked like spy material.
A terrified Zod stood openmouthed (Nina had told only Pari of their existence), until Pari emerged, trembling under a black chador she kept for these intrusions, to explain that these were just instructions to make dumplings and salad Olivier (a chicken and potato salad bound with eggs and excessive mayonnaise), not manuals for overthrowing the regime.
“My husband is an ashpaz (cook). He stirs abgoosht (a hearty beef and chickpea soup), not trouble.”
What she couldn’t explain was why they were sewn into seat cushions, so the men, gloating over their discovery, yelled obscenities, shredded the recipes, threatened arrest, slammed Zod against the wall, and having sufficiently intimidated them, left as suddenly as they had come.
In the wake of this violence, husband and wife collapsed against each other and fell to the floor in a heap. Naneh Goli, returning home lugging shopping bags and clutching twelve-year-old Noor’s hand, wailed at the sight of them amid the rubble. She knew only that she loved these two like her own children, that this home was as sacred to her as any place of worship, and that it was up to her to put things back together. And though the intrusion made her blood boil, she took solace in the tasks of sweeping, scrubbing, and mending. Chores became lifeboats in the storm that lapped at the edges of their lives and threatened to drown them.
Nina had retreated to an oblivion that saved her from witnessing the slow and deliberate destruction of her adopted country. Yanik, too, was spared, having died of an aneurysm at seventy-one, leaving Nina so bereft that Pari wondered if she had willed dementia just to bear her sorrow. What use for memory when it fills you with remorse: I should have loved him more, I should not have let Davoud get in that car, why didn’t I take better care of him? Better to fold it all away and outsmart loss.
Nevertheless, she still woke up every morning and went down to the kitchen where every day for the last fifty years her first task had been to peel two dozen hard-boiled eggs for the salad Olivier they served at lunch. Knowing the urgent impulse within her to follow a need to be somewhere, to complete a task, Zod would leave a few eggs on the kitchen table next to h
is mother’s chair before going to bed each night. He would wake to find her sitting still with an egg clutched in her hand and a knowing grin that he presumed meant, Aren’t you clever?
After the siege, Zod leafed through the torn recipes. The script, as cryptic to him as to his assailants, seemed embroidered on the thin sheets of yellowed paper. He did not doubt that something precious lay beneath this hard alphabet and wondered if archaeologists felt similarly when they came upon a shard of pottery and were compelled to dig for the remainder. He scooped all the scraps into a shoebox, carried the box and a cup of tea to his mother’s room, and emptied the contents on her bed. A twinkle returned to Nina’s eyes, the look she sometimes got when the boys had been mischievous.
“Davoud, look what you’ve done to Elena’s recipes,” she scolded him (for she now interchanged her sons’ names randomly, just as she had when they were small and she had yelled “Morad!” for Zod and “Zod!” for Davoud, like all parents do). “Wait till your father finds out.”
“Yes, Maman, it’s horrible of me,” Zod agreed. “Can you please help me glue these back together?”
Who can explain how a mind, so untethered that she could not remember the loss of a spouse or a son, could recall the arcane alphabet of her birthplace? Out of a field of no-memory came sheets of ancient instructions. Peeping in through the bedroom door, Zod saw her figure bent over the task like a child assembling a puzzle—a tranquil face with the tip of her tongue sticking out. Often they would find her dozing behind stooped shoulders, but Nina always went back to her intricate work while Naneh Goli stood by to hand her strips of tape. The eternal tracing and patching took weeks: walnut and caraway strudel, apricots in syrup, chicken necks with turnips and prunes, ponchik (fried dough balls filled with custard), rice porridge, vatrushki (savory tarts), beef pelmeni, kulich, each one translated by a family friend in exchange for meals. His mother had salvaged these formulas from the hands of Bolshevik barbarians, learned what she could from them, and stowed them away until fate brought another round of fanatics to their door.