“I will explain in a moment,” Mrs. Irani said, but before she could explain, Daniel rose from his seat like a lawyer objecting to the judge and declared with mock outrage for all to hear, “Iran is on this paper!” Then, looking directly at me, he held the paper up by the tips of his fingers as if it were a thing that had rotted in the sun. “Burn it!” he shouted to me. “Burn the paper!”
There was tittering and twittering in the class. Tab turned and looked at me with eager eyes.
“Burn the paper!” Daniel said.
“Burn it!” someone else said.
“Bomb it!” Daniel said.
“What?!” Mrs. Irani said. “I will not have this in my class!” But in the noisy confusion she thought only that her students were angry about having been given a homework assignment.
My classmates’ faces floated around me, fleshy and white, distorted with laughter, like gargoyles on the side of a building. A school of gargoyles, a city, a country.
“I will explain the assignment in a moment!” Mrs. Irani shouted. But there was no one anywhere who could hear her voice.
22.
MY MOTHER CONTINUED TO LISTEN to National Public Radio at breakfast, but I ceased watching her expression. I assumed, as a matter of course, that the news would do me no good. On my walk to school, I would pass the American flags and the yellow ribbons and the bumper stickers of Mickey Mouse giving Iran the middle finger. I no longer paused at the vending machine to look at the day’s headlines, as today’s headlines could not be distinguished from yesterday’s headlines. Once inside the walls of school, I did my best to stay as still as possible, to look at no one, to engage no one, praying that my quietude would encourage quietude in others. I had gone beyond expecting ever to be included again by Daniel or Tab or anyone else and instead sat in the back of the classroom, resigned to my fate, my gaze fixed at the center of my desk, hoping I would not be called on, hoping that current events would not be discussed, hoping that we would not have a substitute teacher that day who would mispronounce my name, bringing full focus once again to the fact that there was an Iranian in our midst. In the evening, I would still sit with my mother and watch Walter Cronkite, but I no longer asked, “Good or bad?” “And that’s the way it is,” he would say, “Wednesday, January sixteenth, 1980.” Now amended to include the coda, “The seventy-third day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran.”
One morning, going first as I always did to my locker to put away my lunch and to retrieve my books, I heard Daniel’s familiar voice behind me, close to my ear, saying “I bet he won’t fight.”
I was kneeling on the carpeted floor and I had the impulse to stand and turn, but then Tab’s voice joined in: “No, he won’t fight.”
“They’re too scared to fight.”
“They’re all cowards.”
“They’re yellow.”
“They’ve got yellow streaks running down their backs.”
“Look at that yellow streak running down his back.”
It was a bizarre, antiquated taunt. Something from another era. I continued to rummage through my locker as if I could not find the thing I needed. The fact that I was on my hands and knees while they stood above me added to the tableau of submission. I had knelt of my own accord, but it felt like I had been forced. To stand would imply a willingness to confront them, and that was not something I wanted to do. So I stayed on my knees, and let them carry on until the bell rang for our class to begin.
Daniel continued to remain handsome in my eyes. In fact, he became more handsome, while I, in turn, became more ugly. This was the unhappy side effect of having first perceived him as my flawless opposite. I grew skinnier, frailer, as he grew more strapping. My features became loud and prominent while his became refined and elegant. I was sure that he would be a movie star when he grew up. It was as if my face was cannibalizing the flesh from my body, absorbing it into itself, so that my nose and eyes and eyebrows intensified with each day, growing darker, larger, hairier. It was a hideous face, I was sure, loudly calling attention to itself. Now I avoided the mirror at all costs.
And one afternoon in the lunchroom, as I ate quietly among boys who did not know my name or where I came from, I was approached by a white student, a scholar from another class, whom I knew only vaguely. His name was Alan, and he was short and intelligent and Jewish, and he had an impressive vocabulary, having once astonished me by using the word literally in a sentence. “The teacher literally stood up and …”
“Hey, Saïd,” Alan said. “Come with me, I want to show you something funny.”
I was surprised to be invited, and I stuffed my uneaten lunch into my brown paper bag and followed Alan toward the edge of the lunchroom where I could see a dozen boys standing in a circle. I wondered suddenly where he was taking me and why I had agreed to follow so unquestioningly. But I had conceived of these questions too late and could not now turn back. When we were just a few yards from the circle it opened dramatically, like a claw, and in the center stood Daniel. His shoulders and chest looked broader than they had before, his hands and forearms thicker, a boy in a man’s body. I could feel the energy of the boys in the circle, many of whom I knew only tangentially Daniel looked at me and I looked away. Where were the teachers? The din of the lunchroom swelled. I watched as Alan, who had invited me there, now crossed into the open claw and took his place beside Daniel, the two facing out at me. The thought of raising my arms to fight panicked me. I will allow myself to be beaten, I thought. That is what I will do. It will be easier that way, faster. I will fall. My lunch will spill. My pants will tear. Then it will be over. I’m yellow.
“If you were a girl,” Alan asked Daniel, turning to him and projecting his voice like an actor onstage, “which boy in our class would you think was the best looking?”
And Daniel said, like he was also an actor responding to his cue: “It’d be me, of course.”
To which Alan replied, “I can see why!”
The heat in my chest rushed into my face as the boys erupted in laughter. The circle closed. I stayed on the periphery, pulled in by its orbit, listening to the high, friendly chatter. I waited for it to reopen, but the role I had been cast in was no longer needed.
And that night I told my mother.
“They’re bothering me at school, Ma.”
It was a shameful thing to admit.
My mother was in the living room, sitting on her bed, and she leaned forward, her eyebrows creased with concern.
“Who’s bothering you?”
“Boys,” I said generally. “Boys.”
“What boys?”
“Boys in school.”
“In your class?” Her voice rose. Her fingers intertwined.
“I guess so.”
“Why are they bothering you, Saïd?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you do something?”
“I think they’re bothering me because I’m Iranian, Ma.”
And at the word Iranian, my mother’s eyebrows unknit themselves and a void spread across her face. We looked at each other for a while. Was there something more I was supposed to say? And then my mother nodded, a short nod, as if to say “You are excused.” I went into the bedroom and waited for her to come and let me know what she was going to do next. When I was in second grade a teacher had referred to the class as “a pack of wild Indians,” and my mother had written a letter of complaint that I was made to hand-deliver. But when she called me now it was because supper was ready, and at supper the subject was not raised. Nor was it raised the next day.
And so in lieu of any assistance I took to carrying a little piece of metal that I had found on the floor of occupational/vocational training. It was about the size of a paper clip, with a sharp, jagged end, and I was determined, if ever there was cause, to poke my assailant in the eye. I knew I would never actually be brave enough to do this, but the thoug
ht of doing it empowered me. When I sat at my desk, when I walked the halls between classes, when I ate my lunch, I would finger the piece of metal in my pocket, and I would feel soothed by its presence.
23.
MEANWHILE, IN IRAN, MAHMOUD SAYRAFIEZADEH and his recently renamed Revolutionary Workers Party—so as to distinguish themselves from the faction calling itself the Militant Wing of the Socialist Workers Party—were diligently preparing for the first presidential election in the history of the nation. One hundred twenty-four candidates registered for this historic event that would finally, irrevocably, bring an end to twenty-five centuries of monarchy. The dream that Saïd Salmasi had fought and died for had finally come to pass, and my father, having lived his life under the shadow of such sacrifice, respectfully accepted his party’s nomination.
Born in Tabriz in the year 1313 A.H.
Author of the book Nationality and Revolution in Iran
Twenty-five years of struggle against the Shah while in exile
Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh for President
The cover of an accompanying manifesto showed Jimmy Carter’s head either resting on or emerging from a giant pile of skulls. And escaping into Carter’s gaping, yawning mouth was a diminutive version of the Shah clutching a suitcase in each hand, presumably stuffed with seventy billion dollars in cash.
“The presidential elections are being held,” the campaign platform read,
while U.S. imperialism is prolonging its economic blockade, hoping that aggressive military action and political attacks will help to regain its all-out hegemony over this country. In pursuance of the diabolical plan, U.S. imperialists have mobilized all of their international allies and agents, including the United Nations and domestic capitalists. They long for the return of the Pahlavi reign, militarism, autocracy, and the consolidation of capitalists’ ascendancy in order that they will suppress the workers’ and peasants’ campaign for liberty and deliverance from poverty …
Against this unhappy end, my father proposed a half dozen solutions, the first and foremost of which was support for the “anti-imperialist campaign” being waged by the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam, who continued to hold fifty-three Americans hostage.
I learned about my father’s candidacy by way of another envelope that arrived for me just a week after my eleventh birthday. “Here you are,” my mother said again. Inside, I found a leaflet written entirely in Persian, with densely packed text on both sides, much of it black, some of it red. Next to the text was a small, closely cropped photo of my father’s clean-shaven face, with that same inviting, confident smile. There was no note included, no explanation, no translation, and except for the fact that someone had written For Saïd at the very top of the leaflet, there was nothing to indicate that it was actually for me. It was a leaflet, after all, printed and distributed for the multitudes. Still, it felt like an acknowledgment of sorts for my birthday—if not a gift, then a sound reason for there not being a gift.
I sat for a few minutes at the edge of my bed with the wincing understanding that the news of my father’s candidacy was spectacular and that any other boy would be proud of it. So instead of putting the leaflet in my sock drawer, I thumbtacked it next to a picture of John Travolta on the bulletin board above my desk for all to admire. Here I was, in possession of a powerful secret that would astonish the world if it were ever to find out. It was so enticing and irresistible a secret, in fact, that when Mr. Petrisko announced to the class that we were each to bring in something to present for current events, I hesitated not at all and chose the leaflet. Not until I was sitting in the back of the classroom, watching the students stand and deliver, did I understand how absolutely compromised I had made myself. In front of me on my desk sat the leaflet, and in front of the leaflet sat Daniel and Tab and an entire room of likeminded boys and girls. I watched with growing apprehension as each student took center stage and proceeded to teach us about what was going on with things like the state of the steel industry in Pittsburgh. My relief each time Iran was not mentioned was counterbalanced by the knowledge that I was the one who was going to be doing the mentioning. I thought for a moment of crumpling up the leaflet and claiming I had misunderstood the assignment, but that seemed beyond forgivable.
Finally it was my turn to present. There was no getting around it. I stood and walked to the front of the class, my knees barely bending, and took the spotlight. I held the leaflet gingerly in front of me, with my other hand deep in my pocket fingering the small piece of metal. I looked out into the rows of faces that ran from disinterested to murderous, judiciously avoiding Daniel’s and Tab’s.
“This is a leaflet for someone who is running for president of Iran.” I said. Then I waited. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for someone to ask me who the man in the leaflet was.
This is a leaflet for someone who is running for president of Iran.
Who is the man in the leaflet, Saïd?
To freely offer that he was my father felt like cheating. So I waited. And the class waited. And Mr. Petrisko waited. And I realized, standing there in a sea of silence, that I had nothing whatsoever else to say about the leaflet in my hand. It began and ended with my father. My gaze dropped from the faces in front to my shoes below, the gray canvas Nikes. Then I studied the carpeting. It was such soft carpeting, and I wondered what it would be like to take a nap on it.
Soon I heard Mr. Petrisko’s voice waking me, asking, “Can you tell the class something about the language the leaflet’s written in, Saïd?”
I looked at him. I blanched. I did not know anything about the language the leaflet was written in. The language was beside the point.
“Can you tell the class something about the history of Iran, Saïd?”
I saw that I was trapped in a student-teacher exchange from which there was no exit. I stood in front of the class, undressed, tilting to one side, examining the leaflet as if I was just about to say something interesting, fully aware that I had failed the assignment. Under the bright lights of the classroom, the quality of the leaflet appeared to me as shoddy and amateurish, a thing you might find at a community center. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? The single hole I had made with the thumbtack looked at me.
“Okay, Saïd, thank you,” Mr. Petrisko said, mercifully giving me permission to take my seat. Which I did at once. Returning again to the piece of steel in my pocket, while I watched the next student rise and begin to effortlessly expound on the debate over nuclear power. “This is a photograph of Three Mile Island …”
When class was over I stayed behind, hovering around Mr. Petrisko’s desk until he was done shuffling his papers.
“I just wanted to tell you,” I said, once we were alone, “that the man in the leaflet is Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh.”
He looked at me without effect.
“He’s my father,” I said.
I said it with understatement, with false humility, so that Mr. Petrisko would have room for his response.
Why didn’t you say something, Saïd? That changes everything.
“Is that so?” he said, with an understatement that equaled mine.
“Yes,” I said.
Then neither of us said anything, because there was nothing else to say, and soon Mr. Petrisko returned to the mound of papers on his desk.
24.
MY FATHER LOST, ANYWAY. MORE than fourteen million people went to the polls in Iran, and eleven million of them cast their ballot for Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. Ahmad Madani took about two million, Hassan Habib five hundred thousand, and the remaining sixty or so candidates—another sixty had already dropped out by the time of the election—divided up what was left. The fight for a socialist Iran had been stalled.
A week or so after I presented the leaflet, I was sitting in English class taking a test on verbs and nouns when the door opened and a classmate I had once been friendly with entered the room. Everyone automatically looked up to see who could be so late for class, and when we did we saw Charlie,
with his faded jeans and his dirty-blond hair and a black T-shirt with a grotesque caricature of Khomeini’s face—all eyebrows and nose—in the center of a bull’s-eye. Above the bull’s-eye, in giant white letters, were two simple words: Iran Sucks.
There was a clean space of silence as fifty eyes in the room absorbed the meaning of what was emblazoned on the boy’s chest, absorbed that a boy could indeed be so bold as to wear it to class, and when it was all fully processed every mouth in the room opened up and laughed. It had the timbre of a shriek, high-pitched and prolonged. Add to it that the fifty eyes had now turned away from the bull’s-eye and on to me, keenly seeking my reaction. I sat in my chair, thinking I support the struggle of the Iranian workers and peasants against U.S. imperialism.…
The class was taught by a tall pretty blonde who I had a crush on, and she waited until the sound had all but died away before suggesting, respectfully, that the boy go and put a jacket on. “That’s not an appropriate shirt to wear to school, Charlie,” she said with a boys-will-be-boys tone that infuriated me. Charlie dutifully departed, but when he returned wearing a plain brown jacket, it elicited its own squeals of delight. Beneath it, we all knew, resided a terribly tantalizing thing. The thrill was now in what was unspoken. And throughout the rest of the day, whenever a teacher stepped out of the classroom or turned to the chalkboard, Charlie would stand and unzip his jacket, exposing his chest defiantly, delighting the classroom. “Tell me what is so funny!” Mrs. Irani exclaimed, which made everyone laugh even more.
I resolved finally to do what my mother could not do, and I asked Mr. Petrisko to move me into another class. He didn’t ask me why and I didn’t tell him why, but I knew he knew. Since there was only one “scholars” class on my floor, there was nowhere to put me except into the class known as “regular.” I agreed to it immediately, and the following Monday, not a day too soon, I took my seat in a room filled with black boys and girls, where I instantly reverted back to a white child.
When Skateboards Will Be Free Page 16