I knew he was right to an extent, except that he didn’t seem to be including himself in any of the indictments.
“I like to have fun and these guys are just way too uptight about it. This isn’t Iran, you know. This is America. I like to dance. I like to drink and be free.” Zain stood and zipped his yellow ski jacket. He never looked at Zahra. “You know, guys, I love you. Thank you for coming here for me, but you’re just pushing for too much. I’m fine. I’m happy. Leave me be.” He cupped his hand on my shoulder for balance, pretending it was to reassure me, and left, leaving us alone with the doctor.
When the interventionist said, “He needs to be ready to accept his problem,” I felt light-headed. I had worked so many weeks to set up this meeting. “You mean there isn’t anything you can do?” I pleaded.
“He needs to hit rock bottom.” The interventionist locked eyes with Maman. “Maybe even face death.”
Clearly, this doctor had no idea what he was asking of us. My parents would never knowingly risk Zain getting close to death. In Maman’s eyes, I could see her determination. Pulling her scarf tighter, she grabbed her purse and headed for the door. Now I knew we were in real trouble.
On the drive back, a ray of sunlight slid through the gray puffy clouds and shone on Zain who was in the backseat, passed out.
ENTRY INTO THE PAST
Mashhad, Iran
I could feel the sweat drip down my belly as I placed my hand on his shoulder. “What’s up with you, Hadi? Aren’t you coming inside?” I spoke in English so Maman wouldn’t understand us. She had been dreaming of this day for so long, and I didn’t want anything spoiling it. It was now possible for our whole family to visit Mashhad together and to go to Abdollah’s grave. New laws were in place, and now Baba had been able to buy his sons exit visas.
Hadi paced back and forth, his hand on his leather bag, his sunglasses covering his eyes. Each time he circled the decorated tiles of the newly-constructed expansion of Imam Reza’s Haram outer yard, he avoided the entrance where the old men were sweeping the dust and dirt into the air. He wore a summery white cotton shirt, Calvin Klein pants, and white Kenneth Cole shoes; he was smartly-dressed and ill-prepared for the dusty Haram cemetery in the basement.
“You go with Mom,” Hadi waved his hand in the air. Calling Maman “Mom” was something he never did. “I can’t take the smell,” he said, anticipating my disapproval. Although I knew it would be suffocatingly hot and crowded with perspiring and grieving family members, I couldn’t contain my reaction.
“What do you mean? We’ve been waiting all these years for this.”
“Really? You’ve been waiting to visit this miserable place for years?” Hadi snapped. Even through his designer sunglasses, I could see the rage in Hadi’s eyes as the pigeons perched above our heads, letting their droppings fall near our feet. I knew better than to talk to him when he was angry. So I left him alone, facing the alluring golden dome.
Hadi lay on the dusty ground, face up, so that he could see Abdollah looking down at him from the framed picture hanging above. A few hours after Maman and I had left the Haram, Hadi went down to the cemetery to have his moment with his older brother – alone – to tell him he had kept his promise.
Hadi placed his head on Abdollah’s tombstone and let the tears fall against the stone.
“I wish we could switch places,” he spoke as he let his hand move across the letters. Hadi took in a deep breath and closed his eyes. “I’ve never forgotten my promise to you.”
Hadi, almost unaware, began talking aloud to Abdollah. “I’ve experienced so much since the days we were together, Dadashi. I’m sorry you’re not here to see Zain – he would make you laugh, Rahimeh – she’s brave, and Iman – so tender and gentle.” Tears stung the corners of his eyes and his voice grew louder with the unleashing of choked-back tears. “God, I wish I had been older when this happened. I could have done something. Maybe I could have protected you.”
The sobbing grew, and still he spoke.
“I imagine you in court, when you were swearing that you were innocent, crying. You must have felt so helpless. Abdollah, Dadashi, I’m so sorry.” Hadi closed his eyes. “You were just a kid.” Hadi’s tears ran in a long line and bled into the letters of Abdollah’s carved name in the stone.
The old man with the broom who cleaned and guarded Abdollah’s grave whispered a prayer for the two brothers.
Hadi took a breath, turned his face sideways and spoke quietly now, speaking almost inadvertently to the ground, one hand on Abdollah’s name, the other in the center of his chest. “It’s calm here, surprisingly peaceful.”
Hours later, at closing time, the old man sat on the stairs after asking everyone else to leave. He waited with his hand under his chin, looking over at Hadi. Hadi finally got up to leave; he walked backward, never taking his eyes off the headstone, and saying again, Dadashi, in a way that connected him to his brother forever.
Zain and Iman had also visited the cemetery, and that night there wasn’t enough shish-kabab, jasmine rice, Persian stews and soups to fill the void; and Zain ate uncontrollably. Later, while the rest of us were sending prayers to Abdollah, Zain drove to the east side of Mashhad, spending the rest of the night and well into the morning at an underground party with champagne corks popping and plates of ecstasy lined up, looking like offerings of sugar cubes.
CURIOSITY
The doctor told Baba, “I won’t discharge you from this hospital, sir.” For the past ten days, he had been treating Baba for a dangerous infection, and now he told him to cancel his next trip from America to Mecca.
Adjusting his bruised and IV-injected arm, Baba pushed himself up on the bed. “Doctor. I’m grateful for all your help.” With his free hand, he pulled on his hospital gown. “But let me be clear, I will not, under any circumstances miss this trip to Mecca. I take my orders from God, not from medicine.” He pointed a wavering finger at the doctor and spoke freely in Persian with the Iranian doctor. “Look, I have pilgrims who are packed and ready to go; more than six months of preparation has gone into this; I’ve worked night and day for weeks to get them their visas. My wife and I will take these pilgrims on the Hajj. I will not disappoint them.” Baba glared at the doctor. “I’ll die before missing this pilgrimage.”
The doctor turned toward me, switching from Persian to English. “I will not discharge him. He would be leaving against medical advice. With his diabetes, this infection could turn ugly fast. It’s cellulitis now, but it can turn into sepsis or worse; it could shut his organs down. Are you willing to take that risk?”
The doctor didn’t know Baba. The choice wasn’t mine.
I had left school once to take Maman to Iran, and this time I would leave school to take Baba to Mecca. I packed a large cooler with bags of IV antibiotics and accompanied my parents, Iman, and Zain to Mecca as Baba’s traveling nurse. Zain and Iman who ran the tours with Baba, would ensure happy pilgrims, and I would try to keep Baba healthy and alive.
In our suite at the Mecca Hilton, I wrapped a blanket under my chin and snuggled on the couch. I had just unhooked Baba from the last of his IV treatments for the day. I was not a real nurse, but from the looks of it, it had been going perfectly. Baba was limping, but in the first three days of our trip, he hadn’t yet used the wheelchair I had arranged for him. When he rose two hours early each morning and headed for the Haram to reserve the best seats for his pilgrims, Maman woke, too, despite Baba’s protest. She would straighten his collar, caution him to drink plenty of water, kiss his cheek, and finally, promise that she would go back to sleep. Tonight, standing over Maman, who had fallen asleep on her prayer rug, Baba was backlit against the seventeen-foot windows facing the bright grand lights of the great mosque that lit up the sky and was the home of the Ka’ba – the cube-shaped building that all Muslims around the world face during prayer. Baba was at home here, peaceful.
I had watched as Baba laid a blanket over Maman, tucking it under her chin and lifting her feet just
enough to wedge the blanket under her toes. “You’re an angel, zan – my angel,” he whispered. He pushed back her bangs from her forehead, leaned over slowly, and kissed her.
These were the parents of my early childhood. Witnessing their patience and tenderness with one another sent me back to the memory of when I was just a little girl of four.
Later, from my bed on the hotel couch, Baba’s uneven footsteps woke me, and then I heard a clinking sound. He had rolled his wheelchair out from the corner and was heading toward the door.
“Are you kidding me?” I jumped up, throwing the blankets to the floor, and tried to grab the room keys from his hand.
“I’m taking a group to the Haram for the special midnight prayers. Just hand me a bottle of water, azizam. I’ll be fine.”
“Your leg’s still infected, Baba. You need to rest. You’ve been up for two days, this is insane.”
“I’ll be all right. Don’t worry.” Baba pushed open the door and rolled himself out.
I was used to being ignored by Baba, especially if God’s duty called. When I caught up to him near the elevator, Baba waved me back inside. “You don’t have your scarf; someone might come out.”
When he returned two hours later, Baba’s face was yellow, the pink around his eyes unusual, even for a man who hadn’t slept for a few days. “You’re so stubborn,” I whispered to him, but he was disoriented and couldn’t hear me. I gave him an extra shot, as I had been directed, and monitored him throughout the night. Within a few hours, it was clear we had to go the hospital. His leg was as swollen as a watermelon, and the flesh was just as red.
Zain and Iman wanted to come with me, but they had to stay to deal with the pilgrims. I waited with Baba in the busy, crowded emergency room as he lay, practically unresponsive, on the gurney. I rubbed his cold hands in mine and put my hejab jacket on him. Three hours later, we were still waiting to be seen.
In a silent moment, I looked at Baba who had a pattern of not taking care of his health, and anger arose inside me. But as I looked at him lying there helpless, I reminded myself of what was important to Baba. He would die for what he believed in; he would sacrifice himself and his family in the service of others. I could see that his schedule, his agenda, his needs or those of his family would always come second to that of his purpose. His need to contribute and be significant were his life’s blood. I wasn’t taking it personally anymore, and for the first time, the rage in me dissolved.
After four hours of treatment when the drugs finally arrived, Baba slowly awoke and began speaking in Arabic, a language I did not speak well. Without acknowledging me or translating, he spoke at length with the nurse and doctor as he began to pull himself up on the gurney.
I understood immediately from the tone of the conversation that Baba was letting the doctor know that he was leaving against medical advice, again. At once, another wave of anger flashed inside me, but I pushed it aside. I had nursed him across the Atlantic, injected his medication, was on all-night duty checking his IV, and had now spent seven hours in a foreign hospital watching him and advocating for his care. The new feelings of empathy gave way to the more familiar ones of being dismissed, ignored, and insignificant.
“I think I missed my prayer,” Baba said after he was discharged with several bags of antibiotics. By the time I rolled Baba out of the emergency room and put him in a cab, he was wide-awake, and I reflected on my multiple trips to Iran in the last few years, the conversations I’d had with my Khaleh and my cousins. At the bottom of it all, my curiosity and my fears of knowing more about the past still lingered. I thought of Abdollah. When would I get the courage to ask Baba, Maman?
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Baba turned his head toward me and looked at me sitting in the back of the cab. His glasses were crooked on his face.
I hesitated. There was so much that I couldn’t explain to him about what I was feeling. Over the past few years of graduate school as I studied to become a family therapist, I had become more conscious of the dynamics of my family. While working on a three-generational family genogram for a family therapy class, I began to see the patterns of secrecy, loss, trauma, and mood disorders. But it was one of my professors who pointed out the most meaningful pattern by which she identified the split between my parents: my father the aggressor, and my mother the saint. That professor had planted the seed for my questions, particularly when she suggested that Abdollah’s death had cemented this pattern by accentuating Maman’s sense of martyring herself and blaming Baba for what went wrong in her life and Baba’s projection of his emotions onto others and reliving his fatal decision everyday. As a part of my graduate requirement, I began my own therapy, but now I was making a real investment in my own mental health and becoming who I wanted to be. I had realized how secrecy had been a part of our family for generations. All of the young dead – my parents’ lost sisters and brothers – all those deaths, covered over as if too frightening to discuss.
I thought about this all in the moment Baba asked me what was wrong, but I kept quiet. I knew that once we returned to the hotel, I would lose Baba to the crowds, the pilgrims, the hotel managers, the cook and the waiters who loved to shake the hand of the Haji from America and offer their appreciation for his return through their enthusiastic Salaams.
“Begoo digeh,” he insisted I tell him what I was thinking. Baba hadn’t taken his eyes off me.
I felt the heat rise inside me, I felt my cheeks throb, and then, finally, I blurted out. “Baba, what happened to Abdollah?”
“Drive slower, please,” he said in Arabic to the cab driver. His eyes grew serious. Baba looked back at me. I’m sure he saw the desperation in my eyes; he didn’t blink, and he didn’t seem too surprised.
“Where do you want me to begin? At the beginning?”
“Yes, please, Daddy.” I had never called him “Daddy” before.
For the next forty minutes, as we drove through the dusty streets of Mecca, Baba kept his head twisted back toward me, only looking away once, and every few minutes in his monologue, he would stretch his neck and ask, “You follow? Got it so far?” and would continue as he saw me nodding.
Sometimes, as he told me the story of the days of the Revolution and the lawlessness, the lootings, the shootings, the violence, the sense of change, the smell of freedom that mesmerized millions, my eyes would tick, as if a movie was playing in front of me. Back then, I knew about the chaos. I had even felt the energy of it, but now, I had the context, and I had my family in the picture. Baba told me about the rape of the old woman and how he was called to act, and why he couldn’t say no.
Baba told me how he was called by Ayatollah Shahami to apprehend the thugs. I could see how proud he was of himself, a man people counted on, for taking criminals off the street and helping to usher in a new era that he believed, at the time, embodied the best of his religion.
Baba looked at me, but his thoughts were elsewhere, in the streets of Mashhad. “When I saw the first boy come out drunk with disheveled clothes, I knew he was the one, but I had to bluff and make him confess.” Baba told me about the bathroom cellar, how Ayatollah Shahami’s son refused to keep the rapist, and how they’d convinced Baba to take them to Room 314.
“Your mother was opposed to keeping the boys at the hotel. She worried about Abdollah. And about you, since you were a girl. But I reassured her, over and over that it would be okay, and that we and the community would be safer this way. At least we knew where they were, instead of loose on the streets, I told her. It was supposed to be for two weeks.”
Baba got quiet for the first time during our ride. He turned toward the road and away from me. He whispered, “I told her we would all be safe. I promised her.”
Baba’s voice trailed off and became solemn. I kept silent and waited before offering anything to appease his guilt. I knew he had been carrying this burden for many years, and that he, as much as I, needed some relief.
“Baba, you all right? Do you want to stop?” I was sure hi
s neck was hurting from turning to face me.
Baba readjusted his right leg, which rested on top of the dashboard next to the IV hanging from the clothes hanger above the door. I felt bad for bringing this up now, while he was so sick. But I couldn’t help it, and now I couldn’t stop.
“Sometimes it feels like yesterday. I can smell it. Taste it. Still.” Baba continued.
“What?” I leaned forward.
“The past.” Baba’s gaze faded again.
A few minutes passed as we both stared out the window into the space of our memories.
Then, suddenly, Baba’s voice grew louder even while the sadness was palpable.
“I gave the best speech of my life there in that courtroom. After that, everyone was certain he would be freed.”
Then Baba’s voice dropped again. “I mean, everybody.”
Baba didn’t talk about the arrest or jail, but what he did tell me deeply affected me. I never saw my father the same way again.
Baba looked back at me.
“At first, when I saw Abdollah, I thought it was a mistake. I thought I could fix it because he couldn’t be... But when I got close, I saw... I knew it was over.”
“You saw…?” I couldn’t complete my thought.
Baba suddenly turned his head and faced me again.
“Three bullets.”
Baba pounded his index finger in his chest and yelled, “three bullets...”
The Rose Hotel Page 20