The Last Days of Café Leila: A Novel

by Donia Bijan

  When the bell rang to start the day in the neighborhood kindergarten, Noor stopped across the street to watch a few latecomers kiss their mothers and skedaddle inside. It’s the same everywhere, she thought, they’re small and they live with you and you’re in love with them and they move away and a slightly bigger version of them moves in. Then you fall in love again, only to watch that little person leave, and yet a slightly taller, more agile version, who still fits in the toddler bed, but just barely, arrives and there you go again, head over heels. Another birthday will come and this one, too, will go, pigtails and all, and so on, until your heart could burst. You see them turn two, then three and four and you miss that tiny newborn who smelled like milk, the one-year-old who teeter-tottered, and how sweet was that two-year-old who would not let go of your hand, and do you remember running alongside her bicycle at five? Where did she go? Noor had never given Lily’s clothes away, had kept every pajama and party dress neatly folded in storage boxes labeled zero through thirteen. It wasn’t at all like she had an only child—there were fifteen so far. Lily, her first and last of one, enough to make her heart break.

  When she got home she headed upstairs, but Lily’s door was closed. She knocked. Silence. Lily was not downstairs or in the yard, and no one had seen her. Beads of sweat trickled down Noor’s back. It was unlikely that Lily would go outside—she despised the scarves and layers of cover. Zod was in the salon, awake with his eyes closed, when Noor rushed in.

  “I can’t find her,” she cried.

  “Who?” Zod answered as if in a dream.

  “Lily. She’s gone!” Her voice caught and she tried to breathe.

  “Excuse me?”

  For a brief moment Zod wasn’t sure who Noor was or what she was talking about—he was becoming worryingly forgetful—then he caught himself and nodded.

  “Have you checked the Vieux Hotel?” Karim shared a room with his Uncle Soli in the old hotel, or as Zod preferred to call it, Le Vieux Hotel.

  Years ago, during the war, the hotel had been badly damaged after an air raid. By then it was already cheerless, just a shadow of its previous elegance. The rooms were rarely occupied and the few guests were fortunately evacuated. But after the destruction, Zod no longer had the desire to reopen it. Instead, it was rebuilt simply, without its pretty balconies, antique rugs, and pink tiles, to serve as housing for the staff and occasional guests. What used to be the lobby now served as a common room with a television set and couches. It was there that Noor found Lily and Karim, sitting cross-legged on the beige linoleum with a kitten pouncing on the tennis ball between them.

  Noor was so relieved that she burst into tears and ran to Lily, who held the terrified kitten like a shield.

  “God, Mom! You scared her. What’s wrong with you?” The others turned away. Soli, eyes ablaze beneath the thick knot of his eyebrows, yanked on Karim’s arm and dragged him back to work, leaving the mother and daughter to contend with one another.

  “I’m sorry,” said Noor. “I panicked when I couldn’t find you.”

  Lily’s response was furious. “You drag me here to your crappy country and I’m basically in prison and all my friends have already forgotten about me and there’s nothing but crazy old people here and finally one person here wants to be my friend, a person you guys treat like a child slave by the way, and you barge in here like the police and ruin everything!” she screamed.

  “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry,” whispered Noor.

  “You’re always sorry,” hissed Lily. “Why don’t you try leaving people alone so you don’t have to be so sorry all the time?” She stormed out, pushing past Naneh Goli who hovered outside, and ran to her room.

  It had been a long time since Zod had heard a door slam in his house. Noor appeared in the sitting room moments later and, without a word, sat next to Zod on the couch and covered her eyes with her hands.

  “Why are you sitting there?” he asked Noor. “What is the matter with you?”

  The second time she was asked that in less than fifteen minutes.

  “Why aren’t you there now? Upstairs? Are you her mother or are you playing a part in a play?” His voice was shaking. “Is this child your house pet?” he shouted, losing patience with her.

  Noor winced. How it hurt, his rough tone. Whatever harm she may have done, she had come to him to repair it. Was he dismissing her? She searched the floor for what to say. If only she could speak, but she was choking on her own tears.

  “I cannot, I cannot,” she cried fitfully. How to reach the dark landing of the stairs? Her legs stiffened at the thought.

  “Parinoor,” he said evenly, his eyes reproachful. “Is it because you lost your mother at a time when a girl needs her mother most that you don’t know how to talk to your daughter?”

  She began fiddling with the tassels on the upholstery. The tears falling freely now down her face. Zod softened, leaned close, and reached out to touch her cheek.

  “Baba, I’m sorry about this afternoon . . . I was so afraid. Everything is all right now.”

  He watched her wearily. Her answers were unsatisfactory.

  “Baba, I can run the café with Naneh Goli and Soli’s help. We will live here. Lily will go to school and she’ll get used to things.” The words tumbled now, one after another.

  He inhaled and exhaled a light whistle. “You think I’m worried about Café Leila?”

  “We-ell . . . yes,” Noor fidgeted. “It’s meant so much to you.”

  “Long ago, before the revolution, before the war, when the café was open and we built the hotel from the ground up, and my mother and father were alive, when you were a little girl and your brother, a bigger boy, long ago, when there were no hard feelings between people, and families came to hear your mother sing, this was our place, a miniature, sovereign world we built to contain us. Even when everything changed outside, we kept working. There was always so much to do. We had our own family and our big family of customers. I never had to leave because the world came to me. But these days we’re like your old dollhouse, still standing, but just a curiosity. What’s more, the families are gone. See? Everything interesting and exciting has already happened. I haven’t wasted the time I’ve been here and I’ve fulfilled my promise to my father but you, you—” he faltered, seeing his daughter’s brow furrowed with confusion.

  “Do you remember when you let Sonbol out of the birdhouse and Bolbol followed? That is nature, Noor,” he sighed, flapping his hand. “It was a lonely business after your mother died. The habit of hard work kept me here. Habit, not nature.”

  He threw her a brief glance and took a sip from the water glass on his nightstand. “I dream of my wife. I like to think that if there is a place we cross over to, that Pari will be the first person to greet me and I’ve kept her waiting long enough, don’t you think?”

  Noor didn’t answer. She didn’t feel like reminiscing, she wanted to understand. At last he was giving her permission to ask her unanswered questions.

  “Baba, do you know that I still have no idea how my mother died? I mean, what happened to her? You kept it hidden from us. One day she disappeared and no one could tell me where or why or when she’d be back. We were just supposed to carry on like we had amnesia.”

  “My only choice was to exclude you and Mehrdad from the events of her death.” Zod stared ahead, jaws clenched. “I thought it was hopeless to speak of it, to explain it to you, to put that fear in your thoughts. Perhaps you can be too careful with children, but I think I may have been more afraid than I realized. Afraid of damaging you, of exposing you to unspeakable violence.” A white handkerchief shook wildly in his grip like a flag of surrender.

  “You see, Noor, once they put someone in prison, it is like that person isn’t known as a human being who is alive, who has relatives, a mother, or a husband, or children. Nothing. No one.” Zod looked at her as if he wasn’t sure she’d heard.

  “I’ve been saying things I should have told you years ago. I always thought there w
as no comfort to be found from knowing what they did to your mother. I’m sorry, Noor. Forgive me.” He heaved a sigh and sank back on the sofa.

  Noor took a deep breath. What is this? she thought. She had not expected to talk about Pari, but it felt like an opportunity and she needed to say this now that her presence, her return, had prompted him to speak to her not as a child, but as a grown woman.

  “For years, Baba, when I’d come home from school, I’d know even before coming inside whether Maman was home or not because I could smell her and it never changed, her perfume. Then she was gone, yet her aroma was still there. I could still smell Maman. I couldn’t understand it then, but I do now. I wasn’t imagining it, Baba. She left her scent to stay alive in me.”

  “Of course, precious, the world of children is above and outside the confines of adult minds. It was beyond my ability to explain the wretchedness of it, but you found a way to keep Pari alive in you, which makes the circumstances of her death inconsequential.”

  Zod wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and before Noor could protest, he went on. “Pari used to say that I talk in my sleep, mostly nonsense, but sometimes it made her uneasy when I thrashed about and she would gently shake my shoulder to wake me up. Probably I still talk, but I’m a widower and sleep alone. My dreams are more vivid now, places and things and people are restored with startling clarity like in a museum.

  “You’ve seen the postcard of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi’s studio on my dresser. Pari sent it from a tour in Italy when she visited the museum in Bologna. The photograph has faded but I’ve kept it all these years because I was so intrigued that the interior of a man’s workspace had remained untouched for fifty years, save for the velvet rope that kept voyeurs at a respectable distance. Was there a scent of the man’s work? Of canvas and paint, turpentine and tobacco? I have looked again and again at the careful placement of his jacket draped on the back of a chair, his hat on the seat, his cigarettes and matchboxes, the cot where he slept and the pocket watch that hangs from a nail above it, and I worry that he may not have wished to be exposed this way. I enjoy his deliberate paintings, too, but not as much as this diorama of ghostly objects and their relationship to the painter. I suspect his thin shadow lurks somewhere between those carafes and pitchers that he collected and drew.

  “I have been dreaming that I’m outside the yellow brick building, looking into Café Leila. Pari sits in the garden sewing the hem of a dress for you, as you lay in a bassinet at her feet while Mehrdad digs in the dirt with a stick. She looks up but doesn’t see me standing at the gate. ‘But they told me you died,’ I cry. I try to tell her that I miss her so much, every single day, everywhere, all the time. I yell louder, ‘I love you so much, Pari,’ and I’m so happy because I realize I’ve died before her and that’s why she can’t hear me. Two crows watch from a branch above her, one dangles a large worm in his beak, but when I look again I see it’s not a worm. It’s my finger. Then I wake up and look at my hand and my wretched finger and everything is still here: my pipe, a clock, my slippers, her shapely bottles of perfume, her dresses, her comb, but when I reach for Pari, the sheets are cool and I’m alone with all our things.”

  Zod was crying now, as was Noor, but he was sobbing like she had never seen before. He opened his palms in a pleading gesture.

  Noor took his hands in hers. “Don’t cry, Baba joon (dear). Don’t cry,” she soothed.

  “Noore cheshmam, you cannot stay here. Do you know why? Because staying here makes you a child.”

  He stopped to gaze at her. “I’m one foot closer to Pari, but I won’t go while you girls are here. I want to die with dignity and every day that you stay, you prolong my suffering. You brought Lily into danger and discomfort for what, to watch me die? Everybody else has left because this is no place to live, Noor. People who’ve gone to seek their fortunes, even those who failed, chose freedom over roots—flight over captivity. You are a part of everything I have made here, but everything your mother and I have taught you is portable. Take it all with you, the hard work, the will, the appetite! I’ve lost mine, but oh, to be hungry again, Noor!” He put a hand on the hollow of his stomach.

  It felt urgent, the force with which he pleaded. “You must leave this place, Noor. Take Naneh Goli with you if you like—she will probably outlive you. Go back to nursing or open a ponchik shop in San Francisco, if that’s what you want, but take this child home!”

  There, he said it, but it left him exhausted, so that his thin neck became a burden on his skinny frame and he cocked his head for some kind of affirmation that Noor had understood. They listened quietly to Soli’s footsteps on the gravel path taking the trash bags out. Noor gently lifted Zod onto the bed, straightened his sheet and blanket, and smoothed his silver hair away from his face in a soft caress that put him to sleep. She knew her father wasn’t through with her—she carried his caution, the image of the woman he wanted her to be, his way of looking at the world, inside her, and though he had named her Noor to illuminate the narrow path, he couldn’t help her find her way because she needed new names for the places she would go.

  HAVING SETTLED HER FATHER and drawn the shade, Noor came into the kitchen and found Karim. He had been punished with the task of peeling an enormous bag of onions, which he did soundlessly under Naneh Goli’s supervision. He lifted his head when Noor walked in and quickly looked back down. The kitten lay asleep in a box at his feet, nestled in an old pillowcase.

  Noor took a bib apron off a hook on the wall and asked Naneh’s permission to talk to Karim. Naneh Goli obliged, getting up and giving Noor her seat. Noor picked up Goli’s knife and continued the work of peeling the onions beside Karim.

  “Karim jan,” she said, “you are my daughter’s only friend in Iran.”

  Noor watched the boy, saw his skin deepen a shade, but he said nothing.

  “I want you to keep her company, teach her some Persian and she can teach you English. Would you like that, Karim? Can you be Lily’s friend?”

  Karim looked up warily. Just an hour ago his uncle Soli had warned him that if he were to go anywhere near Lily again, he would castrate him, and now here was Noor asking if he would keep Lily company.

  “Bu-bu-but, my uncle—” he stammered.

  Noor cut him off, “I’ll talk to your uncle, don’t worry. Can you come closer, please?” She reached over and wiped away Karim’s onion tears with a handkerchief from her apron pocket. Then she gently lifted Sheer and put the kitten into the boy’s hands.

  “There now,” she said. “You three need one another.” Karim understood.

  NOOR PACED BACK AND forth across the wooden floors. It wasn’t that long ago that she had carried Lily in her arms when her baby cried. After the warm milk, after a lullaby and bundling her in the blanket with the satin edge, together they had walked up and down the hallway. What solace in the rocking, how easy then to soothe her baby. Go on, she said to herself now, speak to her. GO. And she said it as she went up the stairs, step by step, into her daughter’s room.

  Lily raised her head from the pillow and looked at her, annoyed. Noor sat at the foot of the bed. Lily turned to the wall, so Noor spoke to her back.

  “I panicked when I couldn’t find you because I’m so scared, Lily. Scared of losing you. Scared of losing my father. We’ve stayed this long so I could take care of him, but I can’t make him better. And what’s worse, I end up being the one he has to comfort. I feel like a stranger in this house—my childhood home! I thought if I came back to the place where I used to dream, I would remember what it was like when everything seemed possible, that I could pull myself back together. Instead I’ve walked in on exhaustion. There is less of my father every day and he sleeps through whatever time he has left. Without him, I have no home and there is no Café Leila. Do you understand, Lily?”

  As if from a voyage, Noor had brought in so much that it spilled out of her. At last, Lily sat up and gave her mother a long look.

  “But why’d you have to bring m
e?” she asked.

  “Because you are my daughter,” Noor replied. She wanted to reach over and touch Lily’s sleeve. She looked older in the bright light. “Leaving you behind would have been like leaving part of myself behind.”

  “But I’m not part of you! I’m me. I have my own life. And I just don’t understand: if this place mattered so much, why did you always make me lie to everyone about where you’re from? Why didn’t you ever teach me any of the language? I miss Daddy, Mom. My life, my friends are not here.”

  “But you could have friends here,” Noor began.

  “How? How could I have friends? I don’t even speak the language! And what about you? What happened to all your friends? I mean, like your high school friends? Didn’t you stay in touch with them?”

  “Well,” Noor paused, “Uncle Mehrdad and I left without much notice. I hardly had time to say good-bye to anyone. Everybody was looking for a way out then. It was a crazy time.” She was flustered knowing how inadequate her explanation was.

  “Like you just vanished? Didn’t you try writing to them? Find out what happened to them?” Lily was genuinely baffled that her mother couldn’t look up an old friend now, try to reunite. If her life was falling apart, didn’t it make sense to turn to people who would presumably understand her better than anyone, because they had known one another for so long?

  How could Noor explain to her daughter that she was too broken, unrecognizable now to girlfriends long out of touch, who were once inseparable—their names stored in muted memory: Farnaz, Roya, Soheila, effervescent with gossip, jokes, heartaches, gripes, and disappointments, nothing ever left unsaid between them. Could Lily go to school here and make such fast friends? Could Noor persuade her to try? It wasn’t impossible, but perhaps she expected too much from one afternoon.