by Dina Nayeri
• • •
Niloo scrambles to make the new apartment livable, buying more blankets and pillows and some chairs. She sweeps up all the debris in the living room and transfers it to garbage bags. She mops the last of the bathroom dust. She sprays every corner with insecticide, lays down cheap rugs, wipes the blinds. She buys eight more lamps and a vase of tulips. By the morning of Maman’s arrival at Schiphol Airport, Niloo hasn’t summoned the courage to tell her.
Hours later, standing in the foyer with her mother, staring over her mother’s shoulder at her broken kitchen, strewn in pieces all over a vast unfinished floor, Niloo sees the futility of her dusting and lamp buying. The place is a wreck, not a suitable home for a daughter you’ve dragged by the teeth from a war-torn country, suffered to educate despite her willfulness and likelihood of becoming a hedonist, then sent off to the best universities, and waited nervously to see settled and married. Maman runs a hand through her thick, shoulder-length chestnut hair, a style that suits her. “I need coffee before I can hear this,” she says, her voice shaking.
At the café at the end of the street, over hazelnut espressos dolloped with foam, she tells her mother the story of the past few months, the peace she’s found at Zakhmeh, losing her worries in storytelling nights, and about Mam’mad.
“Oh, Niloo joon,” says her mother, stroking her hair. They sit next to each other at a picnic-style table in the center of the café. Maman has not let go of Niloo’s hand for almost an hour. “Listen to me, baby joon, Iran breaks my heart too, but leaving your home isn’t the answer.” Then she adds, miserable, “And we love Gay.”
Maman doesn’t say much for the next six or seven hours. At home, she takes a nap on Niloo’s bed, then gets up, washes her face, picks up her purse, and goes out. She returns an hour later with cleaning supplies, bath mats, shower curtains, and groceries. She has at least eight plastic bags hanging in two rows off her absurdly strong arms. For hours, she scrubs and scours and dusts and soaks. She tinkers with the temporary oven the construction workers have been using to make cheese broodjes and she bakes cream puffs and baghlava and Dutch apple tarts. She lets slip that she learned to make the tarts in preparation for her trip (which Niloo realizes is not spontaneous, but has likely been planned for some time). Without a word to Niloo, she takes a plate of sweets to the neighbor, introduces herself, and borrows a vacuum—unlike Mam’mad, Maman knows how to approach the neighbors here like a confident American: she offers sweets not to beg for welcome but with entitlement: I need your vacuum. She reaches into the pores of the space, peeling off layers of dirt that Niloo’s hands haven’t even touched.
By the time Maman is finished, three days later, the construction portion of the apartment is sectioned off from the living space. She walks to a fabric shop across town and buys huge pieces of cheap pastel fabric, the gauzy kind that obscures shapes and colors but allows the light to pass through. She nails the fabric into the walls of the unfinished kitchen and the living room, cutting the pieces so they hang a foot from the floor, creating a breezy cotton hallway that leads from the front door, through the livable part of the hall, to the bedroom and bathroom.
Niloo shares her bed with Maman, who is happy to sleep next to her. She prays a lot. Soon, Maman begins a massive cooking project, and Niloo has no choice but to interrupt her domestic meltdown.
“So why exactly are you here?” she asks. “You said Baba was coming too.”
Wrong lead. Maman looks up from the sauce she is bringing to a slow boil, and says, “Is your father’s expatriation and exile not going fast enough for you?” Maman waves a dishrag in Niloo’s direction. “You know what your problem is? You’re just like your Baba. You think only of your own satisfaction. Your entire moral philosophy is based on what is most convenient and desirable to Niloo. Well, tell me, what kind of morality is that?”
“Who said anything about morality?” Niloo says. The comparison to Baba stings. Hasn’t she done enough to stamp out every primitive desire to the point of bleakness? Hasn’t she killed the wild Ardestooni girl and avoided drugs and lovers and all the weaknesses to which Baba has succumbed? Hasn’t she devoted her life to study and hard work? “This is just life. A turn in the road.”
Her mother paces the room, manhandling lamps and wiping surfaces she has only just cleaned. “What about that poor, sweet boy you leave alone while you turn road?” says Maman in English, then changes back. “You say you’re not happy, but you’ve been socializing with refugees, watching disturbing things, listening to the words of desperate people. Niloo, they want so much from you. Don’t you remember the misery of those years? You’ve worked for decades to escape their fate. And now what are you doing? Your life was like a silk dress that blinded a dozen seamstresses, and you’re putting a match to it.” Niloo drops onto her haunches on the floor, which her mother has covered with cheap pillows from the street market.
That night Maman discovers a late-night Iranian grocery store and kabob shop in the Jordaan district and takes a tram there. Niloo knows the owner; he comes often to storytelling nights. She doesn’t accompany Maman for fear of having to introduce them. On her way to bed, as she pulls the blinds, Niloo spots a familiar shape lingering outside—Siavash, trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell. She slips on her house shoes and goes downstairs. By the time she opens the front door and calls his name, he’s unlocking his bike. “Just checking on you,” he says, turning the Green Movement ribbons and stack of hairbands he keeps around his wrist.
Over his shoulder, she sees her mother approaching, a burlap sack of basmati rice cradled in her arms. When Maman spots them, her gait changes. Though laden (as ever) with bags, she shuffles over faster, as if trying to swim to a drowning child.
When she reaches them, she just stands there, staring dumbfounded at Siavash, who tries to help with her burlap sack. “Are you Niloo’s mother?” he asks. “You look so much alike.” But Maman’s lips gather so tightly you might think she is trying to swallow her own teeth. “My mother brings burlap sacks of rice everywhere too,” he says, laughing a little. “Persian mothers are the best.”
The more Siavash tries to charm Maman, the more suspicious she seems, unable even to release a rote greeting—it’s as if she has appointed herself Gui’s advocate against every other male in Niloo’s orbit. Niloo wonders if her mother will ever accept another partner for her. Finally, as Niloo leads her away, Maman finds her sharp tongue. She turns and says in Farsi, “We all need a rest. Please don’t come back here for a while.”
Siavash winces, raises a hand in Niloo’s direction, and turns to his bike.
The next day, Maman calls the embassy in The Hague and begins the process of inquiring after Baba. Apparently, a temporary visa has been issued, the paperwork completed, and Baba should be on his way. Has he not contacted them, the woman on the phone asks; where are the family listed on the application? She seems to be inserting new notes into the application, and Maman grows alarmed. For the rest of the afternoon, she frets about whether the call might have hurt Baba. While Niloo is out, she fills the apartment with the smell of eggplant purée, salad olivieh, and chicken with plums.
When she comes home, Niloo falls into bed beside a sleeping Maman, whose hair smells like fried onion and turmeric. Waking a little, Maman rolls over and murmurs, “Your Baba called.” Maybe she’s dreaming; her eyes are closed and she mutters about Baba’s visa and Niloo’s new address. She is clutching her mobile. Niloo kisses her mother’s oniony hair and tries to fall asleep too.
All night long, the pinging of text messages from Karim and Siavash rouse her—they are talking about Mam’mad; neither can sleep. They type in Finglish. Siavash is drunk. He can’t keep the guilt at bay. He battled so often with Mam’mad; why didn’t he just let him win one? How did he not see the old man losing all his courage, growing hopeless? He changed so quickly. Karim is consoling, his texts abbreviated because of two broken buttons on his de
relict phone. It was a sacrifice, he says. Maybe it was for us, for the Green Movement, for the younger generation. Maybe the old have passion too, instead of just expectations and sorrow. Niloo replies that it was a useless, empty loss and some Dutch bureaucrat should be fired and jailed. She’s angry for missing every sign, for being blindsided—when people at the squat spoke of suicide, she recalls, most often they were whispering about Karim.
The next morning, she wakes to a muffled conversation drifting up from beneath her window. Staring down into the street, she considers the strong possibility that she is hallucinating. Siavash is there, looking bedraggled, like he might have spent the night walking the canals, or waiting out on that sidewalk, or smoking in a coffee shop. And, beside him, as if plucked out of an absurd daydream, or from the pages of an old storybook, or a fit of the imagination, stands Baba, holding a single bag, wearing a short-sleeved button-up shirt and a strange floppy hat like an English tourist. He grips Siavash’s shoulder with a massive hand, greeting him in Farsi, as he reaches for the doorbell.
VILLAGE BUILDING
OCTOBER 2009
Amsterdam, Netherlands
It seemed clear that Bahman had underestimated the difficulty of village construction and management. The trouble is that the best people, the vital ones, often chafe against the part they’re assigned and the whole thing crumbles down. How many times had Bahman tried to erect a community like his forefathers had done? Bahman’s famous ancestor had built a thriving village as if it was nothing. He had watched it flourish and his descendants had scattered around the world, taking the legend of Ardestoon with them. How? Once when he was a boy, Bahman’s father told him that you only need a handful of people to make a village that bustles and endures: a farmer with strong sons and respect for the earth, an honest butcher, a savvy merchant with a truck and a storefront, a doctor from the city, a poet to teach the children, a grandmother with a delicious hand, a gossip, a beauty, and a rogue. “Why a gossip and a rogue?” Bahman had asked. His Baba had said, “Without stories the village has no life.” He added, a moment later, “The rogue usually has a manghal too. Look at Homayoun’s boy. At every gathering, people wait for him.”
Now, outside his daughter’s home, in this European hamlet she had chosen, a young man who might have once been handsome greeted him; and though Bahman was a stranger to this village, he had no doubt that here facing him, lingering outside his daughter’s door, stood its rogue. The boy was war-scarred, a detail that lumbered in Bahman’s heart—what crimes his country had committed against its young. Though Bahman wasn’t certain he was entitled to or capable of fatherly instinct, something stirred. For this lost boy, yes, but more for Niloo, who, in trying to steady him, might become his tattered sails. He clasped the young man’s shoulder, his gaze falling on a clumsy knife mark on his neck, and asked questions.
“So she’s made some Persian friends,” Bahman said. He made a point of surveying the boy’s ragged jeans, his muddy shoes, his three scarves intertwined, the oldest covered in pills as if each time one of them wore out, he simply added another strand to the braid. “Are you a student?”
“I’m an activist, a journalist, sometimes a student.” He spoke and moved in a limp-wristed, needlessly open manner that young men adopt when their charms have always fallen on congenial soil.
“Where are your people from?” said Bahman. “That accent isn’t Tehrani.”
The stranger laughed, showing a row of milky teeth so excellently maintained, so harmoniously arranged, that Bahman had an urge to take his chin between two fingers and examine them. “I’m American,” said the boy. “The accent is a mash-up. My parents are from Tehran, though. They sound like you.”
“I’m Isfahani,” said Bahman drily. His arms and neck were growing heavy from the long train ride, the taxis bouncing over cobblestone, and the maddeningly circular maps of this horseshoe city. “As is my daughter,” he added. He never thanked people when they claimed his accent was Tehrani, first, because it wasn’t; and, second, because they considered the remark a compliment.
After a moment’s pause, Bahman said, “You remind me of someone.” Though Bahman was a stranger, the boy seemed pleased to occupy space in his thoughts, unable to fathom an unfavorable comparison. Bahman pretended to strain for details. He scratched a rough spot below his ear and looked up at a row of windows draped in light bluish fabric, maybe Niloo’s. He said, “A poet, a wanderer who fell in love with a woman I knew . . .” He paused; which version would he offer to her daughter’s rogue, this man-child waiting on her sidewalk with a miserable smirk, his knot of oily hair and bloodshot eyes confirming a night spent walking. Even before Bahman had decided, the words gathered themselves into a bundle and slipped out on their own. “This man was very different from you, of course, in his education and upbringing, but he had the same remarkable teeth. He made his living as a roving office clerk.” He counted with fingers running down an imaginary list, as if trying to recall it from a letter, “and, let’s see, occasional setar player, extra security at underground parties, driver, maybe a witness for hire. One day, he left his daughter, a poor child of reckless romance, sitting by the gate of a mosque with her birth certificate and a note pinned to her jacket. He disappeared into the ether like a character in a bad American film.”
The boy shifted on his muddy sneakers. He pulled on one of the three scarves draped across his shoulders and smiled kindly at Bahman, as if he pitied his senility.
Bahman continued, his voice singsong, unconcerned. He enjoyed playing the storyteller. The storyteller is simple, innocent. He doesn’t lecture or accuse. He doesn’t trouble himself with morality or justice, and he doesn’t weigh down the story with notions of the way things ought to go. He is devoted only to the creation of the most enticing tale, and so is granted leeway to hide every one of these unpalatable things in the nooks and folds of the narrative. “None of us blamed him, of course,” he continued, lobbing the sort of pointed Iranian caginess against which it takes decades to inoculate. “It’s so easy to fall in love with these women without family. Their sadness is intoxicating, and, what are you supposed to do? Deny them happiness when they’re alone in the world? You tell yourself, the universe gives us beautiful solitary women so they can wrench open our calloused flesh, to sting, cauterize, then be discarded like matchsticks.” He paused to observe the boy; half his lower lip was tucked into his mouth and his thick eyebrows were gathering. He seemed lost for a reply. This gave Bahman great pleasure and he decided to end his suffering. He clasped his thin, knobby shoulder again, giving a friendly squeeze as he rang Niloo’s doorbell. “I’m rambling. I mean to say that you children are lucky . . . raised abroad where life is simpler, with friends from home.”
“Very true, Agha Doctor,” said the boy, aping a Persian familiarity he must have observed among his parents and their friends. “I hope Niloo is coping all right.”
“Yes,” said Bahman, bristling at this half-known thing, this unwelcome change in Niloo’s circumstance whose very mention felt engorged and violent. He patted the boy on the back again, offering a fatherly smile, and when the buzzer sounded, he pushed open the door and entered, leaving him to punt stones on the sidewalk.
From a transom on the second-story landing, he watched the young man as he walked away. What quality caused Bahman to suspect him? He had trusted Gui within minutes. Perhaps because Gui was willing to appear clumsy, trying out his handful of Farsi words humbly and with great relish. But men like this young Iranian, the charming, political sort, have a habit of bargaining with their love. They don’t suffer, though they like to wear the cloak of suffering everywhere they go. The truth shows itself in the teeth. Fatimeh’s is the mouth of one brutalized by the decades. But men like this mend quickly and move on, refining their art, absorbing empathy and kindness like a clever child absorbs a new language.
Could his daughter be entangled with this man, as Fatimeh had been with that other? Poor
Niloo. What frightening, unfamiliar sorrows a sensible woman, a scientist and a scholar, must have endured to fall into such resounding silliness.
At her door, he hesitated. Climbing three stories had been enough to drain him, but another sort of discomfort presented itself. A flogging sadness struck Bahman as he rang the inner bell. He had gathered morsels of the story from Pari—loyal, faithful Guillaume abandoned for a time. Marriage is hard, he had told himself, challenges abound. Why should his daughter be an exception? Each day spent trudging shared ground, new strife settles over memories of old strife like layers of fine dust on a wedding carpet, obscuring its brilliance. But that doesn’t mean you throw away this delicate handwoven thing; because didn’t skilled hands labor over it, and fingers crack and bleed? Wasn’t it obtained at great expense?
The door swung open, his daughter in pajamas and a sweatshirt to her knees, her hair in two chaotic ponytails like when she was four. His own mother had taught her to tie her hair this way, on a trip to Ardestoon when she sprang out of bed, yanked out the elastic at her crown, and wailed that she couldn’t sleep on her back.
“Babajoon,” she said, and held out her arms. “I can’t believe you’re here.” Since she left him, Bahman had seen his daughter four times, and each time, though she had grown taller, or fuller, or more somber-eyed, she greeted him with the breathy excitement of that vanished eight-year-old. Suddenly he was aware of his age, of the pain and fatigue souring in his muscles. The last time he saw Niloo, she was being driven away again, as she had been decades before, leaving him in a hotel café in Istanbul. The staff had been kind. Two men in hotel vests sat with him, smoking and talking about children. It had been a slow day for the crew, half the rooms empty, and the manager (whom he had known back then only as a fastidious homosexual with wit and a skillfully stitched jacket) had brought a plate of baghlava for them to share. It felt very much like a gathering of friends at a teahouse below Isfahan’s Thirty-Three Arches, and the manager had become Bahman’s good friend.