by Adib Khorram
“I thought he moved,” Navid said.
Navid’s voice was deep, like his mother’s. He’d inherited her elegant, arched lips, and Mamou’s long, dark eyelashes. I too had inherited Mamou’s eyelashes, which sometimes got me teased at school.
To be honest, though, I liked them.
I really did.
“He was going to move to Kerman,” Sohrab said. “But his father lost his job and they had to stay here.”
Ali-Reza had been a complete jerk to me—the epitome of a Soulless Minion of Orthodoxy—but I still felt bad for him.
It turned out Ali-Reza had Father Issues too.
Sohrab gave Parviz and Navid a complete play-by-play of our latest game. He made me sound way better than I really was, glossing over the passes I missed and exaggerating all the saves I pulled off.
It became a lot harder not to smile.
I felt like I was ten feet tall.
“After the game, Ali-Reza wouldn’t stop complaining. Asghar told me. Ali-Reza said, ‘They don’t even play football in America.’”
Sohrab threw his arm over my shoulder. He had showered before coming over, and still smelled soapy and fresh, like rosemary. My back warmed where his arm rested.
“But it doesn’t matter. Darioush is Persian too.”
I was a warp core on full power.
I was glowing with pride.
Navid and Parviz decided that, since I was so Persian, it was time for me to learn how to play Rook. Navid produced a pack of cards from his shirt pocket, the way a smoker would produce a pack of cigarettes, and began dealing.
Sohrab sat across from me and helped my cousins explain the game. I already knew the basics, but I’d never actually tried to play before.
“It’s okay,” Sohrab said. “Just have fun.”
I glanced over at Dad’s table. He caught my eye and smiled, like he actually approved of what I was doing.
I worried I would have to play Rook with him when we got home.
I did not think I could stomach it.
Sohrab started out our bidding. The inherent telepathy that made us such a good team at soccer/non-American football helped us with Rook too.
That was good, because I was pretty much terrible at the game.
Sohrab never got mad or impatient, though. And even Navid and Parviz were nice about it. After each round, they gave me advice on what I could have done better. It was probably the slowest game of Rook they had ever played.
It didn’t matter, though. We had fun.
When the night wound down, I escorted Sohrab and his mom out and said good night to the living room, where all the ladies sat sipping tea and talking over each other in Farsi.
Mamou pushed herself off the couch to give me a good night hug.
If Mamou made the best chelo kabob in the Alpha Quadrant, it was nothing compared to her hugs, which were easily the best in the Virgo Supercluster, of which our Milky Way Galaxy was only one small part.
When Mamou wrapped her arms around me, a whole new dimension of light and warmth opened up between them.
I sighed and hugged Mamou back.
I wished there was a way I could bundle her hugs up and take them back to Portland with me.
“Good night, maman.”
“Good night, Mamou. I love you.”
“I love you, Darioush-jan.” She held my face. “Sleep well.”
* * *
Laleh’s door was cracked open as I passed by. She was curled up in her bed, completely incapacitated by the amount of chelo kabob she had eaten.
I kind of wished Dad wasn’t playing Rook. Maybe I could have convinced him to watch an episode of Star Trek. Just the two of us.
But Dad had found his place, and I had found mine. Even if they were further apart.
Like I said, our intermix ratio had to be carefully calibrated.
I went to my room and started up the Dancing Fan. Dayi Soheil had brought Sohrab’s new cleats for me, concealed in a grocery bag, and Mamou had left the box on my bed. I opened it up: bright green Adidas, with the three gleaming white stripes on each shoe so crisp and new, they would blind Ali-Reza and Hossein next time Sohrab played against them.
They were perfect.
I wanted to run after Sohrab and give them to him right away.
I wanted to go to the field and play a game.
But then I thought about what he had said—that it was nice to share with me. And I thought maybe I should wait and give them to him later. Like a going away gift or something.
“What’s that?” Mom asked from the door.
“Dayi Soheil picked up some cleats for me to give Sohrab. As a gift. He needs new ones.”
“They’re perfect.”
“Yeah.”
Mom sat down next to me and ran her fingers through my hair. “You’re a good friend. You know that?”
“Thanks.”
“I love seeing you two together. Just like me and Mahvash when we were younger.”
“Yeah.”
I loved being Sohrab’s friend.
I loved who being Sohrab’s friend made me.
“You’re going to miss it here, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” I played with my tassel. “I think I am.”
Mom wrapped her arm around me and pulled my head down to kiss me on the temple.
“Did you have a good time tonight?”
“It was perfect,” I said.
And it was perfect. But it was bittersweet too. Because I was running out of time.
I wished I could stay in Iran.
I wished I could go to school with Sohrab, and play soccer/non-American football every day, though I supposed I would have to start calling it regular football.
I wished I could have been born in Yazd. That I could have grown up with Sohrab and Asghar and even Ali-Reza and Hossein.
The thing is, I never had a friend like Sohrab before. One who understood me without even trying. Who knew what it was like to be stuck on the outside because of one little thing that set you apart.
Maybe Sohrab’s place was empty before too.
Maybe it was.
I didn’t want to go home.
I didn’t know what I was going to do when I had to say good-bye.
THE AGE OF BAHRAMIS
“You have too much hair, Darioush.”
“Um.”
Babou had been hanging around Stephen Kellner too much.
He was trying to fit a white cap over my dark Persian curls, but it kept slipping off.
“Fariba-khanum!” He called down the hall for Mamou to bring him something, but I didn’t recognize the word.
Mamou appeared in my bedroom doorway, smiling at the cap sitting crooked on my head.
“Here, maman.” She stuck three hairpins in her mouth, bunched up my hair to stuff it under the cap, and pinned everything in place.
“Perfect.”
“Merci,” I said.
Mamou squeezed my cheeks—“You are so handsome!”—and left.
Babou took me by the shoulders and looked me up and down. I was wearing the white shirt he and Mamou had gotten me for Nowruz, and my one pair of khaki dress pants.
They were the same color as all the walls in Yazd. I wondered if I would blend into the buildings, and appear as nothing but a floating face.
Babou tugged on my collar to straighten it.
“You look very nice, Darioush-jan.”
“Uh. Thank you.”
I didn’t feel nice.
I felt like I was on an away mission, disguised to infiltrate and observe another culture without violating the Prime Directive.
I felt like an actor, playing the role of the good Zoroastrian grandson.
I felt like a tourist.
But Babou fu
ssed with my cap a little more, even though Mamou had already gotten it settled. He looked me in the eyes from time to time, like he was looking for something, and thought maybe—just maybe—I had it in me after all.
Babou hummed to himself as he smoothed out my shoulder seams and rested his hands on them.
“I am glad you are here to see this, Darioush-jan.”
Maybe I wasn’t such a tourist.
Maybe this was something Babou and I could share. Our very own Star Trek.
Maybe it was.
“Me too.”
* * *
The Atashkadeh is Yazd’s Zoroastrian Fire Temple.
It wasn’t like a mosque or church, with services every week. It was only used for special celebrations.
But it had a fire burning inside all the time.
The fire inside the Atashkadeh had been burning for fifteen hundred years. According to Babou, it came from sixteen different kinds of fire—including lightning, which was pretty amazing if you thought about it.
We were all in light clothes: Mom, Laleh, and Mamou with white headscarves and manteaux, and me, Dad, and Babou in our white caps.
Even Stephen Kellner, noted secular humanist, dressed up to go.
The Fire Temple wasn’t as tall as the Jameh Mosque, or even the baad gir of Dowlatabad Garden. It was only two stories high, surrounded by trees. A still, perfectly circular pool mirrored the cloudless blue sky above us.
“Wow.”
What the Atashkadeh lacked in height, it more than made up for in majesty: Five arches, held up by smooth white columns, fronted it, and a Faravahar was carved into the top. The winged man shone in unblemished stone stained blue and gold.
I wondered how it stayed so vibrant in the Yazd sun, which bleached everything else to blinding white.
When we parked the car, Mamou let me and Laleh out from behind her, but then she got back in.
“Um.”
“You go ahead,” she said. “Babou is not feeling very well.”
I looked past her at Babou, who had gone pale, despite the golden sun pouring in the car windows.
It must have been bad, if he was going to stay behind.
He had been so excited to show us the Atashkadeh.
Mom led us up the wide stone steps to the temple, and showed us where to slip our shoes and socks off.
It was silent inside, a silence so intense, it squeezed my head like a too-small hat.
Even Laleh could tell this was the kind of place to keep quiet.
A tinted glass portal separated us from the inner sanctum, where a giant bronze chalice held the ancient fire.
I thought about Babou, waiting in the car. How many times had he come here to see the dancing flames?
How many times had his grandparents stared into the same fire?
And every other Bahrami. Going back generation after generation, through revolutions and regime changes, wars and invasions and pogroms. How many of them had stood where I was standing?
And how many would there be in years to come, if Babou was right and the Age of Bahramis was coming to an end?
Standing in that temple, staring into the fire that had been burning for hundreds of years, I felt the ghosts of my family all around me. Their soft presence raised the hair on my arms and tickled at my eyelashes.
I wiped my eyes and stood there, lost in the fire.
I knew that Babou was going to be one of those ghosts soon too.
No one had to say it out loud.
* * *
Babou went straight to bed when we got home. Mamou stayed with him. I heard their soft voices through the closed door.
I found Mom in the sunroom, with one photo album on her lap and three more on the couch next to her.
“Uh. Mom?”
“Come on in.” She stacked the other albums to one side so I could sit next to her.
“You okay?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, like she had been crying. “Just looking at some old pictures.”
She had the album open to photos of her in America: her college graduation, her bridal shower, her citizenship ceremony.
“Is that Dad?”
“Yeah.”
At the bottom of the page was a photo of a young Stephen Kellner standing in front of a bright green door. Apparently, the Übermensch had once been an Überhippie, complete with a scruffy beard and hair that reached past his shoulders.
Imagine that:
Stephen Kellner with long hair. In a ponytail, even.
“Babou hated that hair. Your dad cut it to make him happy. He nearly had long hair in all our wedding pictures.” Mom smirked. “God, can you imagine? Your dad would never be able to live it down.”
There was a photo of Mom and (short-haired) Dad on their wedding day, with Mamou and Babou on either side of them; and one of them at a fancy restaurant overlooking the river; and Mom with a huge baby bump; and Dad lying on the couch with a little baby on his bare chest.
Dad’s arms curled so gently around Laleh, who had her little legs tucked up under her stomach, and her face nestled in the hollow of his collarbone.
“She was so tiny back then,” I said.
“That’s you, sweetie.”
“What?”
I looked closer. Mom was right.
It was hard to believe the little potato sack on Dad’s chest could be me.
It was hard to believe how content Stephen Kellner looked, cradling me in his arms, his lips resting in a kiss on my fine baby hair. (It was not very dark and curly yet.)
I wished we could go back to that. To a time when we didn’t have to worry about disappointments and arguments and carefully calibrated intermix ratios.
When we could be father and son full-time, instead of forty-seven minutes a day.
We couldn’t even manage that anymore.
“This is my favorite photo of you two,” she says.
“Um.”
“He could always get you to sleep. No matter what. Even when you were teething, a few minutes on his chest and you were out like a light. You loved it when he held you.”
Mom traced potato-me with her fingers.
“Look how much he loves being a dad.”
Mom’s voice quavered.
I wrapped my arm around her and laid my head against her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT
I wrapped Sohrab’s cleats in the ads section of one of Mamou’s Yazdi news magazines, covered with pictures of scruff-faced men in button-up shirts advertising real estate or plastic surgery or new cars.
It was our last game.
I was not okay with that.
I was not okay with saying good-bye to Sohrab.
And I kind of hated Mom and Dad for bringing me to Iran, knowing I’d have to say good-bye.
I left a few minutes early, so Sohrab could try on his cleats before we headed to the field. But when I got there, a strange vehicle was parked outside his house: a tiny grayish-brown hatchback that had been waxed to such a shine, I sneezed when I caught the sun’s reflection off the front fender.
I knocked on Sohrab’s door and then shifted the box of cleats. I wasn’t sure what to do with it: whether I should hold it out in front of me, or hide it behind my back, or tuck it under my arm.
There was no answer. I knocked again, a little louder.
Sometimes Sohrab or his mom couldn’t hear me knocking, if they were in the bathroom or on the phone or out in the backyard.
Maybe they were enjoying another Ping-Pong table full of romaine lettuce and Babou’s sekanjabin.
I gave up on the front door and picked my way around the side of the house, tiptoeing between the square stones that constituted the Rezaeis’ landscaping.
But the backyar
d was empty—no Sohrab, no lettuce. Just the Ping-Pong table folded upright and pushed against the wall of the house. It rattled on its hinges, a rigid green sail tossed in the stiff Yazdi breeze.
I rubbed the flat of my thumbnail against my bottom lip. I wished I had some tassels.
I wondered if Sohrab and his mom had gone out. If they had forgotten I was coming by.
But then, through the little window in the door, I caught sight of Sohrab’s amou Ashkan in the kitchen, pacing back and forth, in and out of my view.
I knocked on the back door.
“Hi. I mean, Alláh-u-Abhá, Agha Rezaei.”
“Alláh-u-Abhá, Agha Darioush,” he said. But there was a sadness in his voice, and he wasn’t smiling.
Sohrab’s uncle had the kind of face that looked wrong without a smile.
“It is good to see you.”
He stood back to let me in. I slipped off my Vans and set them against the door. There was no sign of Sohrab.
“Um. Is everything okay?”
The other Mr. Rezaei sighed. Not an exasperated sigh, but a sad one. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Come in.” He took my shoulder and led me into the living room.
Mrs. Rezaei sat slumped on the couch, looking like she had just strode inside from a battlefield, leaving behind a trail of corpses in true Klingon fashion. Her hair was black flames licking the air around her. Her makeup, normally so careful, was wild and smeared. Her chest heaved.
She was sobbing.
I felt terrible for thinking of her like a Klingon.
I was a complete and utter D-Bag.
Sohrab had his arms wrapped around her, like he could keep her from flying apart if he squeezed tight enough. At first I thought he was shaking with the effort, but fat, sloppy tears were pouring down his cheeks too.
I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Sohrab-jan. Mahvash. Darioush is here.”
Mahvash Rezaei moaned. It was the worst sound I had ever heard in my life. It was the sound someone makes when they’ve been stabbed in the heart.
Sohrab took his mom’s hand, gently uncurling her manicured fingers and weaving them with his own. He rested his chin on his mom’s head and held her tighter.