Still staring at the ball, the boy shrugged. “You can have it. It’s not mine really.”
As I held the dirty ball, my eyes stinging, I saw myself in the boy. I felt ashamed and guilty for the accusing look I had given him. I wasn’t angry with him, but with my father for selling the house without telling Maman or us, for not saving our keepsakes, and for not securing us another home in Iran to return to one day. All my feelings flooded in. I hated Maman for being dependent on Baba, hated Abdollah for leaving, and hated Khomeini for allowing this to happen to Iran. And, I hated Iran, and everyone and everything connected to it. I was angry. Tears soaked my face.
“Take it. Really, it’s not mine either, little guy,” I said as I tossed the basketball back to the boy. “Nothing here is mine anymore… I’m sorry.”
The boy grabbed the ball, fixing his eyes on me.
I dried my eyes and winked at him. “When spring comes and the trees blossom, don’t forget to play hide-and-seek with your sisters. And make sure you give them a chance to bounce the ball around, too. All right?” I could see my sad face in the little boy’s big brown eyes. He nodded. And I walked away.
When I said my goodbye to the eight little kids that now had lined up near the door, witnesses to my return home, I put to rest the memories of my own childhood. I finally said goodbye to the little girl in me. But that didn’t mean I had given up on wanting my mother. And at last, in Iran, I had her. The moment she stepped off the plane, she became animated and alive. She commanded the attention of others as she bargained in the stores, talked to friends in the streets, coordinated our outings, and translated difficult phrases from formal Persian so I could understand them. We were mother and daughter again. And after she opened an account under her name for the first time in her life, a savings account only for her, we walked out of the bank chador-to-chador, shoulder-to-shoulder.
Almost immediately after arriving by plane in Mashhad, we hailed a cab to go see my grandmother for a long visit and then headed to the Haram of Imam Reza. After we were searched at the Haram’s entrance, Maman kissed the fifty-foot door. The reflection of light on the gold dome winked at me, and I squinted; the dome was the only part of Iran that had stayed exactly the same. The pigeons circled in the clear air. The decorative blue tiles, the gold Arabic writing engraved on the entrance doors, and the marble reflected the sunlight. I had forgotten how beautiful the Haram was and how light I felt when inside. The smell of incense in the air transported me back in time to something ancient and familiar.
As we descended the dark staircase to the lower basement, the thin layer of dust tickled my throat. When Maman pulled her black chador to cover more of her face, I knew she was beginning to cry. I moved closer to her, dreading what seemed inevitable, her uncontrollable sobbing.
The dark walls of the underground cemetery held hundreds of photos in frames. The faces of young boys, martyrs of the war – shaheeds – were all around us. The walls echoed and magnified the screams of women crying for their beloved sons and brothers, repeating their names, and beseeching God to return them to their families. The air was thick with dust and heat and human suffering. The atmosphere was dark and oppressive. I wanted to flee.
Out of nowhere, an old man suddenly appeared. He wore a white shirt with two buttons missing, dark blue pants rolled up to his knees, and heavily-worn and ripped plastic sandals. It appeared he had been working here for ages, cleaning the cement tombstones of the young men and boys who had died too young. He carried their grief on his back as he sat with the families of the dead while they prayed. His soft beard was peppered with dust. “Come, my dearest girl,” he said, gesturing me to follow him in the direction of the frame that held my brother’s photo.
Maman immediately began to thank him profusely. Hired by my parents when we left Mashhad, this man had been cleaning Abdollah’s grave for ten years now – making sure that the photo on the wall over the grave hung straight, and that the headstone was washed every day, and that flowers adorned it. And, when the ink on the tombstone faded, he dutifully reapplied it, making sure that each curve and crevice of the letters of Abdollah’s name was legible and dark.
The old man put down his broom and guided me toward the grave.
“He’s been waiting for you,” he said quietly.
As we stood staring at the headstone, Maman took my hand and began to cry softly.
“He has been waiting for us for a long time, azizam. I’m so glad you’re here with me.” She tightened her grip on my hand. As I squeezed her hand, I felt the pressure in my chest, and the heat made my cheeks flush. My head began to spin. This time, it was me who needed rose water and sugar crystals. Suddenly my pain turned into anger – I hated Abdollah for leaving, for causing us this enormous pain. I couldn’t watch Maman cry again.
After sitting cross-legged on the cement ground for some time, her chador speckled with dust, Maman looked up. As I followed her gaze to the photo on the wall, I felt fear rise up from my stomach. Although the gold frame around Abdollah’s picture was scraped, the glass was wiped clear. Abdollah’s soft eyes looked down at us.
Maman tapped the ground next to her, and I sat, pulling my scarf to cover my eyes. I didn’t want her to know how painful it was for me. The bile in my stomach registered my anger at everything: for what they did to him and at Abdollah himself – for leaving us and never coming back.
As Maman recited the traditional prayers for the dead, she reached out her hand from her chador and softly ran her five fingertips along the cement tombstone, following the grooves of the letters of his name. I followed the movement of her fingers and heard her quiet voice breathing until finally she said – “Salaam Pesaram. I’ve missed you, son.” Maman pulled a tissue from her purse, immediately wiping each of the letters and the spaces surrounding his name.
As Maman continued to prayer aloud, she looked toward me twice, her eyes checking me. She was calmer than I had seen in the ten years we had been away from Iran. Her voice cracked a few times, but she pushed through her sorrow, softly. Her eyes were fixed on the tombstone, and occasionally a tear would drop to meet the white stone.
“I never told anyone this, but after he died, he visited me whenever I prayed. When I couldn’t talk back to him, you know?” Maman checked my face. “One day he told me to accept, to let go and focus on the children. That day, I made a decision to live again.”
“What was he wearing?” I asked innocently.
Maman cocked her eye at me. “Why? What do you mean?”
Maman looked up at the photograph for a moment and then back at me.
“I saw him too, Maman, in Grandma’s cellar before we went back to the pomegranate farm. He waved goodbye and when I finally got the courage to run down the steps, he was gone. I didn’t know then that he had died.”
Maman took my hand. She, too, had seen an apparition of Abdollah in his navy blue suit. A white light had appeared around his body.
Maman paused and started to cry. “He told me he had to leave, and that he needed to be in heaven. He had a wife and children, and was now with my father. Then, he told me goodbye. He never came again.”
As I stared at his photograph, I imagined Maman holding him on the day he was born. I also imagined Baba, sixteen years later squeezing Abdollah’s cold hands.
My anger began to fade and instead something else rose inside me. I spoke to Abdollah without thinking: I’m sorry I’ve been so angry. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry I stopped talking to you a few years ago. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Brother.” I looked at his name on the tombstone and finally released years of tears. Brother. I love you. I miss you, Dadashi.
After Maman said a final prayer, she prostrated herself, placing her forehead on the tombstone. She began talking to Abdollah, telling him how proud she was of him and how terribly she had missed him. She was finally home. In that moment, I witnessed her mounting strength that I had almost forgotten.
Before catching our flight back to America,
we made a special stop. We stared up at the Rose Hotel. It seemed to stare back at us through its windows with its empty-socketed eyes. No one stayed there; no guests graced its halls. The school had shut it down years ago – its operational budget too high to handle. The hotel seemed to be in mourning, waiting, as we had been, for the past to return. Through the echoing empty halls, only ghosts walked, and the shadow of fates that once occupied Room 314.
We returned to the taxi dry-eyed, accepting that the Rose Hotel had been a dream place. That dream had died with Abdollah.
It had been forty-five days, and now the exhaust from cars and airplanes filled the air as we sat at the gate of the airport waiting for our return flight. From the taxi driver to the steel factory owner, everyone had complained about the “changed” Iran and the existence of a new reality – the extremes in living, the contradictions in society. Having visited cousins in fancy mansions with gold knobs and imported Italian marble while seeing that the majority of the Iranian people now struggled with their wages and had to live hand-to-mouth, I felt sadness for all the people, the ones who didn’t have enough and were hungry, and the ones who did and felt guilty. I was grateful to have gone back home to visit, and though it felt strange, I was also relieved to realize that it wasn’t home anymore. In many ways, going to Iran and visiting Abdollah’s grave had finally brought him back to us, and freed me.
Maman smiled at me and took my hand as we walked toward the plane, side by side. We would be returning home as different women. It was finally our turn, the women’s turn, to shine.
THE CLIFF
The trip to Iran had provided much-needed healing, especially for Maman who had experienced success as a negotiator. Her visit with the rest of her family had also reminded her of her old self, when she was more like her mother – always supportive of her husband, but quietly challenging his authority. Maman was determined to change things. After our return to America, Maman began to engage in the tour business with Baba; she became his business partner.
While Maman and I had addressed some of our past in Iran, at home in America, Zain had not. With every family that is traumatized and in chaos, it seems that there is one member who is most vulnerable – who absorbs more than others, as if giving voice to the pain for everyone. In our family, this person was Zain. And without meaning to inflict so much hurt, he hurt everyone who loved him.
One night, I heard a heavy thud come from the shower next door to my bedroom. The sound was so loud that my heart began to pound and the hair on my arms stood upright. It was dark, and the only light in the cold room was the light of the digital clock, its blue numbers showing 4:15 a.m. I gritted my teeth. I got up and walked toward the bathroom. A dim strip of light came from below the bathroom door, and as I got closer, I was met with an unfamiliar odor. Assuming Zain had come home late again, I asked, “Zain, is it you? Are you okay?”
The water was gushing on full volume, making it impossible to hear or be heard. “Zain. Open up.” I raised my voice and jiggled the doorknob. My parents and Zain’s wife and daughter were asleep across the hallway. This was no time to be taking a bath. Why was he so thoughtless? What was wrong with him?
At the sound of an even louder thud, I tugged at the doorknob. “Zain, open up! I mean it!” The water flooded beneath the door. My feet were getting wet. “Zain, the water is coming under the door. Open up.” I couldn’t hear much, but I knew Zain was in trouble.
When I threw my shoulder at the door and finally pushed the door open, I found Zain submerged in the overflowing tub, his hair floating on the surface and his eyes closed. I grabbed his head and pulled him up. When he finally took a breath, the stench of alcohol from his wet mouth filled the air. “Breathe,” I said. “Breathe!”
Even though the scorching hot water burned my feet, I stood steady and dragged his body out of the tub, and tried to make him stand against the towel rack. In a panic, I slapped his face a few times before hitting him so hard that his eyes popped open before rolling upward. I hit him again, “Wake up Zain. Wake up, damn it.”
His eyes still closed, Zain flapped his limp arms and then tried to push me away. “Don’t look at me, sister. Don’t look at me,” he said. His voice slurred.
I drained the water and struggled to wedge my hands under his armpits. “Zain, for God’s sake! You could have drowned here if you hit your head any harder.” Pulling him up, I wrapped him in a towel, and propped him against the wall. The stench of alcohol burned my eyes. His skin had pruned and peeled off around his cuticles where he chewed his nails.
“Just breathe and open your eyes. I’ll help you to bed.”
“I was right there at the edge…” His words trailed off. “I wish I would have the guts to drive off that cliff.”
I stared at him. He was drunk and incoherent, but I could hear the desperation at the edge of his voice.
Finally in bed, he blinked at me with his bloodshot eyes as if to say “thank you” and drifted off to sleep. Although now I was beginning to understand that Zain’s problem was alcohol, I also knew something else was eating away at him.
After cleaning the bathroom and drying the floor, I knew it was time to force the family to get help. Since we had been transplanted in the States, we had become lost in a new country, and to ourselves. We needed an intervention. And the whole family needed to go.
My best guess was that it was a cocktail of methamphetamine, cocaine, ecstasy, and vodka that caused Zain to snore while sprawled in the front passenger seat of Hadi’s Lotus Elite. Drool slid from the corner of his mouth. It certainly wasn’t Zamzam water from Mecca. If holy water did that, my parents wouldn’t be spooning it out to us once a month.
Sitting in the backseat for the drive to Irvine, I rechecked my seatbelt and tried to ignore Hadi’s thumb-texting while he weaved in and out of traffic at one hundred and ten miles an hour, fighting with his lawyer on the phone. His seatbelt light was still blinking. And we thought Zain was the problem?
After the bathtub incident, Zain’s drunken late-night arrivals were the subject of frequent family fights. Finally, I convinced my family to get help. Iman, my parents, and Shanna had agreed to meet at the substance abuse interventionist’s office. When we had met with the doctor earlier to prepare for this intervention, Baba needed the most help understanding what alcoholism was. True to his nature and consistent with his worldview, he believed that a conversation with God and a religious path would be more effective than any of this Western-style mumbo-jumbo talk therapy. Although he didn’t understand it, he still agreed to come.
As I dragged Zain from the passenger seat, he put his hand on my shoulder, and asked in his fog, “Why are we here, Sis? I’m really tired.”
“I told you, we are going to have a family discussion. This is not just about you,” I reassured Zain.
When we entered the office and he saw Baba, Maman and Shanna, he opened his eyes wider and he abruptly adjusted his posture. Four-year-old Zahra was in the corner of the floor wearing a headset and coloring with her markers. Zain’s eyes were glossy and red as he began pacing. “What’s going on here?” he asked, confused. Even drunk, he couldn’t be fooled.
“I need my sunglasses.” Zain said, holding a hand out toward Hadi. “Car keys, please?”
“I’ll get them for you, Bro.”
When I returned with Zain’s sunglasses, he put them on, sat down at the edge of the chair, indicating he wasn’t planning to cooperate.
As instructed by the psychologist, we had each written letters to Zain. Iman went first, expressing his concern for Zahra and his observations about the impact of Zain’s absences on everyone, but especially on his wife and our parents. Zain kept readjusting his sunglasses up and down his nose. When Shanna spoke about her drunken, abusive father, and how this was a repeat of her past, and how she wanted something very different for her daughter, Zain’s leg began to shake.
When it was Baba’s turn, he looked directly at Zain. “This doctor tells me that what you have is a diseas
e. I’m just learning these things because, as you know, no one in our family drinks.” Baba went on to talk about the damage alcohol does to the body. I was sure he was quoting sections from the pamphlet “Why Alcohol is Forbidden in Islam” that he placed at the entrance of the Rose Hotel all those years ago. “You have to quit putting this poison in your body. I cannot bear to see this happen to you.” Baba’s shoulders drooped a bit lower as he pushed his glasses back up on his nose. His tone was somber.
After we all spoke, the room fell silent. Zahra looked up, and then returned to placing stickers in her coloring book. I placed a cup of coffee in front of Zain.
Finally, Zain adjusted his glasses again and sat forward. His leg was now shaking against his chair. “Doctor, I was brought here under false pretenses, but okay, I’m listening to all of my family members. I love them. I respect what they’re saying, but I don’t have a problem.” Zain took off his sunglasses and looked the interventionist in the eye. “You see, my father is a religious man, too religious, if you ask me. And my parents lost their kid in Iran. That’s the real problem here.” He didn’t take a breath. “I don’t drink anymore than any other guy my age. I want to live my life. They want to control me. That’s just not going to work out for me or for them.” He looked spent; he had used every ounce of energy he had. Through half-open eyes, he added, slurring, “Did I mention my brother died?”
No one spoke, but I felt an exhalation of air in the room as the interventionist let the past go as quickly as it had appeared. Instead, he redirected the conversation to the impact of Zain’s drinking on the family.
While the interventionist confronted him, Zain slid his sunglasses back on and let him finish. Then he went for the jugular. “You see that guy right there.” Zain pointed toward Hadi. “His name is Todd, but his real name is Hadi.” Zain smiled. “Now I can’t even call him his real name or he flips out. He’ll even refuse to answer us if we talk to him in Persian. He’s not okay with who he is. I am. I am exactly this guy you see – the good, the bad, and the ugly.” Zain took a sip of his coffee, put his cup down, and glared at Hadi. “My family is hurt, we’re not okay, but I’m not the problem here.” His leg stopped shaking as he looked over at me this time.
The Rose Hotel Page 19