by Dina Nayeri
How young they were, this troubled couple . . . but, yes, the boy ought to pay. Bahman was prepared to pay, as any man should. He had made mistakes, been selfish and hedonistic and afraid, and now, slowly waking up to these things, dreaming of newness and rigor, of study and frugality and discipline (a small taste of Niloo’s ways), he felt that paying Sanaz was a necessary and just step.
“No, Your Honor,” said the boy. “I only want the official court record to show the truth that I’m only going along. To hell with the money. I’ll pay it when it comes to me, Allah willing.”
Oh, but Bahman too had said “when it comes to me” to poor Pari . . . and he had never come through in any meaningful way. How is Pari? he wondered.
The court secretary muttered at the young husband’s cursing. “Khanom,” the judge said, turning to the young wife. “Your husband seems to be suffering here . . . look, he’s barely making sense. Why don’t you go with him? See if you can’t live with him for a few months. Maybe he can make you happy if you try.”
At that, Bahman chuckled into his fist. He wished he could call his daughter to share the joke. Since she had left Iran as a child, he had seen Niloo four times, in four short visits throughout her adolescence and adulthood. Somewhere in there, in the years between Niloo the eight-year-old Isfahani girl and Niloo the thirty-year-old American or European or whatever she now was, they had come close to sharing two or three jokes about love and sex. Though it was uncomfortable to interact with her as a foreign adult, she had his sense of humor. She would laugh at this, he was certain. Niloo had studied at Yale, a name he didn’t know until she said it one day when she was eighteen, swearing that it was as good as that other one, the one Iranians recognize for mass-producing famous doctors and senators and things. Bahman believed her, even before he looked up “Yale” on the Internet in the grimy offices of his friend the agricultural supply salesman. After that he made sure to say around town, “I sent one daughter to Yale. I’ll send the other.”
During the American election, he had called Niloo in the middle of the night. “Niloo joon,” he said, “I’ve had a prophetic dream about the man you should choose for your president. It’s a riddle: Obama is better pronounced oo-ba-ma. And in Farsi this means he is with us. John McCain is pronounced joon-mikkane, which, as you know, means he works hard. But who cares if someone works hard if he is not with you? This is what I’m thinking.” He knew he sounded stoned. She probably smelled the hashish and opium through the telephone, or sensed it by whatever magic instinct was granted to families of hedonists. She gave a small laugh and said that, yes, she would vote for the one who is with us. “We’re having an election soon too,” he said weakly. “Mousavi. That’s our man here.” She said, yes, she knew that too.
On hanging up, he had been embarrassed. His daughter thought him a clown, not a wordsmith or a poet, but an aging addict.
Niloo had married a weighty European man—not weighty in physique, as the man was very tall and thin; but weighty, as they say, in all other matters. From what Bahman could tell, Niloo had grown into a serious woman. Ever since her mother took her out of Iran, she worked or studied constantly, never taking time to feast or to delight or to lose herself, though she had been a happy child with a wild, musical laugh, a dangerous sweet tooth, dancing feet, and lots of clever schemes. Now she toiled and toiled, trying to prove something. Maybe his weighty son-in-law with the unpronounceable name needed an unsmiling wife for his friends, a wife who could quote Shakespeare and Molière alongside the great Rumi.
He had met the boy once in Istanbul, years after the wedding, which had been a secret affair with no photos. He hoped the boy made Niloo happy. The idea calmed his heart since he had spent decades shrinking under the darkest worries: What if I sent my children to America only to see them suffer? But the boy loved Niloo from the depths of his belly, a love that bent and broke him as Bahman too was bent and broken. A love he had thought Sanaz felt for him. But you can’t make someone love you, as they say, and shouldn’t try, unless you’re twenty and have a muscular heart, a heart itching to be broken in. Sometimes, in calmer years, failing isn’t such a curse.
The young wife was shouting now, her voice shaking, fists balled like six-year-old Niloo caught up in the first pangs of conviction, ready to battle away the hours and the days. “No, that is not possible,” she said to the cleric. She grabbed her husband’s arm, whispering, urging him to remember their private talks. “We agreed. He can call it what he wants. It’s all decided. We’ve sat up all night with uncles and both fathers and everyone. We’re here and we’ve agreed.”
“Yes, khanom,” said the judge. “But nothing is agreed until the court too has agreed. The man here doesn’t seem to want it. What’s the trouble in the marriage?”
The girl hesitated, battling with herself. Clearly, there was something shameful she didn’t want to make public. “He’s never there,” she shouted, her hands flailing over the judge’s papers as she pushed against his desk to steady herself. “He’s an addict. We don’t get along. We can’t have children. What does the reason matter? We’ve agreed. And he has agreed to pay.”
“I’m not an addict,” shot the husband. “What are you talking about? No, Your Honor, I don’t drink anything. I don’t smoke anything. I eat nothing but bread and cheese and dry herbs. She has taken everything from me, so she can have this too. But I want the court to have the correct story because I will not leave this world with lies on my lips. I swear to Hassan and Hossein and every imam—”
The wretched husband was raising his voice, losing control of himself. “Yes, yes, calm down,” said the judge. “Who’s talking about leaving this world, agha?”
“I’m done with this life, and I swear, I just want to leave my house in order.”
At this, a fury of voices broke out inside the chambers. It seemed at least three relatives were standing behind the door, obscured till now. The girl moaned and flung herself into an older woman’s arms. “He will kill me with this drama.”
Bahman turned to his attorney and said, “Could you not have gotten the time correct at least?” This spectacle was making him nervous for his own turn, the tales he too was preparing to weave. “Can we pay someone?”
“Agha, it’s not an exact thing,” said the attorney, massaging his knees. “Do you do your root canals at the very hour you say? And, anyhow, there’s tea just there.”
“That boy is an addict,” said Bahman. “Ranting about killing himself. Making foolish requests about who petitioned whom for what.” Statistically almost every other working-class twentysomething man in Iran was an addict—and just listening to his accent, it was clear he had never stepped into university.
“What boy?” said the attorney, downing the cold remnants in his cup.
“My friend, wake up,” said Bahman, tapping the lawyer’s chin with his counting beads as you would a child. “Listen to what is going on there!”
“I’ll get us some chai,” said the attorney, and got up to refill his own cup and to fetch one for Bahman. He let out exhausted grumbles as he hauled himself up.
By the time the relatives in the chambers calmed the man and his wife, the judge seemed to have lost his patience. He ordered that they live together for a month and not come back a day before the end of the sentence. “I can’t! Please, agha,” the woman begged the judge, her hands trembling on his desk so he could see. “You don’t know how it is. Please, for the love of the prophet.”
The judge shook his head. “You don’t have to share his bedroom. Go on now.”
But the woman wouldn’t leave. Before the words had traveled past the judge’s gray lips, she had thrown herself onto his desk, causing such commotion that the judge sprang up and the court secretary rushed to remove her. Her mother (or aunt or whoever) took her by the waist and was trying to calm her when the girl looked tearfully up and began to whisper prayers.
Bahman too was o
n his feet. Without his permission his weary shoes had taken him to the threshold of the chambers and his hand was on the edge of the door. His lawyer called him back as he peered in. This wretched girl was Niloo’s age. Look at the desperation in her eyes—a trapped bird. Had Niloo ever, in her young life, felt caged by circumstance? Had he, with his fatherly hopes for her and her brother, sent them off to a foreign land to struggle and pray to deaf gods? Did she belong to a place, to a people? Was she satisfied down to the soft of her bones?
The judge decided that the young wife would spend two days in jail, so that she might learn to behave herself in a courtroom. Bahman wanted to burst in, for once in his life to thunder at the senselessness of the world. This judge was his age, his peer. Have some patience, brother, he wanted to say; she’s a weak thing and she’s at your mercy. But something about those words seemed presumptuous and offensive to the girl, and who wants to draw such attention to themselves? He would send the family some money, if he could find their name. Maybe this unhappy wife could run away in the night. Maybe she had a lover she hoped to marry, the reason for her desperation. Of course. Bahman hoped the girl had a lover who would protect her—why else would one fling one’s body onto the desk of some old mullah?
He returned to his seat, smiling at the thought. He patted his lawyer’s hand, accepted the cup of tea and sugar cube that were offered, and said, “Please get me that young woman’s name and address,” and when the boy opened his mouth, Bahman clutched his beads and said, “No, friend. Enough objections from you.”
ME AND BABA AND ARDESTOON
I’ve seen my father four times in the last twenty-two years. I left him and Isfahan in 1987, under a scratchy blanket in the back of a brown Jeep when I was eight and Baba was thirty-three. Now I’m thirty. At the start of each brief visit, in Oklahoma or London or Madrid or Istanbul, the man who greets me is different from the last, and so much older. It’s an icy palm to the breast, a jolt of the universe that I knew to expect after the second and third times. He will have changed, I remind myself as I scan airport terminals and approach restaurant tables with a lone man waiting. But the trips are short, and later I always change him back, overriding the signs of aging, the cane, the white hair, the extra skin that hides the flash of mischief in his eyes. My Baba will always be thirty-three—a hard thirty-three, like Jesus or the number of green prayer beads that he counts with both hands despite his devotion to hedonism and his own personal divinity.
Sometimes, when drunk, Baba says things like, “I am God! What is God besides science and poetry?” Then he recites twenty minutes of perfect Hafez.
When I was three, I’d fling my arms up and shout, “I’m God too!” and he’d lift me up to the sky, my baby-fine russet hair falling on his face, indistinguishable from his own. Every evening, I waited for him on our front stoop and when I spotted him walking down the road I ran over and said hello to his hidden pastries first. “Hello, zoolbia! Hello, baghlava!” I said to his bulging jacket. “Sour cherries? Ice cream? Are you in there?” He pretended to be offended. “What about your Baba?” he’d say.
Baba used to ask me to walk on his back. My toes digging into his flesh, I felt his muscles shift and loosen, like tectonic plates. He was the ground. Now those plates have drifted far away and the ground has vanished. I can’t shake this image of him. Baba, ageless at thirty-three, forever reveling and devoted to himself, my toy spatula dripping chocolate ice cream on his soft, massive back as he hummed. Baba and I used to read The Little Prince together and eat sour plums. I had two editions of that book because Maman wanted me to learn English, but Baba and I read from the Farsi one—he would never ruin a good story with lessons, or taint any pleasure with added practicality. Sometimes, when the Islamic Republic didn’t intercept cartoon hour (a single hour of children’s programming for the entire week), we watched the animated version. Every Tuesday we watched the girl in the rose bloom while he salted cucumbers for me and checked my teeth. Strangely, for a dentist, his pockets were always full of candy. On our last visit, a year ago in Istanbul, I noticed two of his back teeth missing and I cried for most of the afternoon.
As a kid, I got the majority of Baba’s attention, even though my younger brother, Kian, was a clone of him: chubby with a huge personality and scornful charm that made people crave his affection. Gradually, he grew into a brooding, solemn child, which made him even cuter. At two he started memorizing the songs of the Iranian Revolution. “A caged bird,” he crooned, all doleful and lispy and chunky-fisted, “is heartsick of walls.”
“Shit, Pari joon,” Baba said to Maman, “are you making him a revolutionary?”
“I sing him songs about geese and rabbits.” She was twenty-eight and vigilant.
“Then how did he learn this garbage?”
“I don’t know . . . how did Niloo learn all those dirty songs?” she said, knowing very well that I learned them on trips to Baba’s village. “Let’s worry about the one growing up with zero impulse control, not the one with a heart for the people.” I’m sure Baba scoffed in defense of me then, or maybe just in protest of impulse control.
It seemed that Kian had learned to turn on the radio by himself and had developed strong feelings for the droning, melodic propaganda music sanctioned by the mullahs. Baba just shook his head and looked the other way. A few months later, Kian got the mumps on top of all his fat and officially became the most desirable child on the block, since in Iran juvenile attractiveness is measured by sheer volume of flesh. So, he got his attention from other places, and was fine without Baba’s.
Like many young men in Iran, Baba went from the highs and stupors of being in love to the highs and stupors of opium. He became an addict and would sneak away at night. Sometimes he lost his temper in awful ways. These instances were rare and, I later learned, correlated with opium rages from which I was mostly shielded—but I saw things, a blurry Maman out by the swimming pool, the whip of a garden hose, a shriek. Afterward, he would try to atone by picking baskets of fruit for her from faraway gardens, or buying her beautiful clothes, or writing poetry that he hid around the house. He raised angry hands at his brothers too. Not often, though. It’s hard to imagine it, those same fleshy, nimble hands that could make the worst toothache go away with a flick of the wrist and a press of the gauze; those same brothers he employed as technicians in his dental office just because they needed employing, though neither had any training beyond farming.
Baba, a giant with his thick red mustache and full laugh, green counting beads in one hand, his other hand full of pistachios or sour cherries, was a fixture you could see coming from far down the street. He was always chomping on something. He smoked and drank and ate sumptuously and memorized entire books of old poetry. His body was huge, and covered in red hair from head to toe.
Every Friday he piled his family into the car and we were dragged to Ardestoon village as if by hidden magnets in Baba’s shoes. As we approached the village, everyone’s accents slowly changed. Chubby Kian kept on chanting revolution songs and love songs and songs of martyrdom and death (“The air of the cage is the death of the soul!”). Our voices lost their city refinement and we began to talk with lilts and drawls and idioms, tongues smacking, voices rising.
Ardestoon, my father’s childhood home, is an ancient village of unpaved roads dotted with crushed mulberries, handcrafted outdoor rugs swept with brooms, rows of pickle jars the size of children lining every house. It has two rivers, two gardens, an orchard connected to a natural pool with ducks, a mosque, a medium-sized mountain, and a famous two-story aqueduct, an eight-hundred-year-old structure that the people of the village don’t even realize they should be proud of, because they are too busy living uncomplicated lives that Baba calls “overflowing and poetic.” “Life in Ardestoon,” he says, “is a shank of lamb so bursting with marrow, you can suck until your cheeks are full and there’s still more to pry with a pinky or to shake out fist over fist. Niloo joon, never be th
e one who looks around worrying if her face is greasy.”
When I was two, my front teeth broke in an accident and Baba performed the surgery himself. His brothers chased me around the dental chair, Uncle Hossein forcing me into it. Behind his back, Baba held a giant needle that haunted my nightmares for months. After that, the only way I’d let Baba touch me was if I was lost in the games or the books we shared. And each time, after a few minutes, I would remember to guard myself again. I trembled when Baba tried to stroke my cheek or kiss my face or hold my hand. I thought, If I stick my hand inside his big, muscular one, he will have me trapped. I won’t be strong enough to pull away. And then what if he takes more of my teeth? Or my fingers or toes?
And yet, I was becoming like him. It was Maman’s greatest fear for me. Sometimes she says, in stunned whispers, “Those are your Baba’s excuses. Oh, Niloo, that’s your Baba’s frenzy. Watch yourself, you have that blood.”
Uncle Ali, Baba’s youngest brother, was thirteen when I was born and used to watch over me when my parents disappeared on trips, Maman to do volunteer medical work in poor communities, Baba to smoke huge quantities of opium with his friends, read poetry, and find bliss and torment together.
Uncle Ali and I had a good time, though. One day, he told me how to entice my playschool love, Ali Mansoori, who was a year older and therefore untouchable. “Next time, little khanom, don’t follow him all around the kindergarten tempting him to tell you to go away. Next time, walk past him and flip your pretty hair and say, ‘Excuse me, boy. I’m trying to pass.’” Uncle Ali always called me little miss or Miss Niloo. He put me on the seat of his motorcycle and started doing a very convincing Tehrani street girl impression, sauntering past with hips swaying, eyes batting. I drank up the attention, howling at his antics. “Another thing,” he said. “Do you always call this kid by his full name? What’s this ‘AliMansoori, AliMansoori’ business? No, Niloo khanom. Better to get his name wrong altogether. Next time call him Javad or Kamal or something, a dehati worker name, so he knows he’s below you.”