Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  * * *

  I TRIED TO EXPLAIN BEING najis to Kyle and he said, “Oh, like cooties.”

  “No,” I said. “Almost nothing like cooties.”

  “Because there isn’t a cootie shot for nuggles.”

  “And because they don’t kill you if you have cooties.”

  “Okay, that’s two things. But the rest is like cooties.”

  And he’s right. Besides those two things.

  * * *

  SIMA WAS BAPTIZED JUST a few days after the wedding of Sanaz, her youngest sister, Ellie’s youngest daughter.

  Ellie is the exile, if you remember.

  My dad wasn’t paying much attention, because he was busy tearing open luggage, removing the drugs, and buying new luggage.

  And my sister was getting her finger cut.

  And I was eating cat food.

  But if my dad had been paying attention, he would have been against the whole thing.

  In Oklahoma, on the phone, he’ll tell me, “We should never have gone.”

  “To the wedding?” I say.

  “No. It would be horrible to miss the wedding. The church.”

  “The wedding was in the church.”

  “Akh! You know what I mean.”

  I don’t, but I don’t say anything.

  He thinks it was religion that ruined everything.

  “It was like waking up and your wife is a completely different person. Jesus this. Jesus that. And suddenly she takes my children and goes across the world.”

  These are the parts of the conversation that feel like a video game. He’s jumping around the topic—religion bad, ruined his life—and throwing a billion fireballs—Why do governments tell people what they can believe? Why would she take his children?—and all the while, the giant lizard on the screen he’s trying to avoid is my one question: Why didn’t you come with us?

  * * *

  IF THERE’S ONE THING to know about my mom, it’s that she doesn’t stop.

  And if you don’t stop, you’re unstoppable.

  As soon as we got back to Iran, after the wedding, she joined a secret church with a missionary named Pastor Pike, who would one day—three years later—get his throat cut in the street like he was a mad bull.

  It was the Committee who did it.

  The Komiteh.

  The secret police of the Supreme Leader of the new government.

  In our city of Isfahan, they were the shadows on every wall. The invisible claw of the Supreme Leader. They could do anything. Their sudden raids on homes would make families disappear. They tortured people to get information about who was breaking Islamic law.

  And anyone could be helping them.

  If the old lady across the street saw a satellite dish on your roof, or a picture of the old king in your kitchen—you’d make eye contact with her on the way to your trash can, and you’d realize she had a hammer over your head. She could tell the Committee and you’d disappear.

  People suspected their own cousins and dreaded their own children. In the middle of assignments, teachers would hold up a picture of a whiskey bottle and ask if anyone recognized it. An eager six-year-old might raise her hand, and come home to find a ransacked house and Daddy gone.

  You couldn’t tell the Committee members by sight.

  You couldn’t smell the blood on their shoes.

  * * *

  To be stared at too long at the market meant you were suspected.

  And so, in turn, you suspected them.

  The Committee was the Supreme Leader’s best idea.

  It curdled society in its own fear.

  One day, they would catch my mom and kill Pastor Pike. But for now, they were lurking behind the curtains of every bathtub.

  * * *

  I WILL TELL YOU THREE stories of my mother, the unstoppable:

  1.  The time she fixed my bloody nose in the secret church

  2.  The time she got a bunch of threats

  3.  The time she got caught

  It goes like this. We got back. The birds of my aviary had all waited for me and they listened to my stories about all the different candy they had in England. The jasmine plants were still the smell of the entire city of Isfahan to me, but that’s only because I mostly played in our backyard.

  Sima, the daughter of an exile, and the granddaughter of an exile, came home already knowing her fate.

  At the time, I told you, it was illegal for Muslims to become Christian, and more illegal for Christians to preach to Muslims. So she went to Jolfa, the city within the city of Isfahan where the Armenians make cream puffs. They were excused to be Christian, because Shah Abbas said so in 1606.

  That’s where my mother met Pastor Pike. Pike was a missionary from the United States, so he had to hide in a room in our house. It was as if Sima brought home a stray cat and said, “Can we keep him?” and my dad said, “If the Committee finds out they’ll kill all of us.” And my mom said, “Then we’d go to heaven telling people about the truth and saving their souls.” And he said, “Akh!”

  And you can kinda see it from both their sides.

  My mom had the enthusiasm of somebody who just played Chrono Trigger for the first time and has to tell everybody about it.

  The members of the secret church would meet in abandoned buildings.

  It was just a small group of them, maybe thirty people. Everybody was careful about how they spoke, even to each other, because anyone could be with the Committee. They would pray together about other things, but also that the secret police wouldn’t kick the doors down at any moment and arrest all of them while they prayed.

  My sister and I would play in the parking lots outside the little doors to the basements of the abandoned buildings. It was like the Bible studies in Oklahoma. There was nothing ever for us to do.

  I was a climber and a jumper. She was a finder and an explainer. We hated waiting for grownies to talk about eternity. It seemed so obvious that everything was already eternal. That something made all of it. Something that loved and was beautiful and was cosmically and royally ticked off with what everyone was up to.

  We never walked straight into one of the buildings where we met, because it would look suspicious. So my mom would take us to the local grocer at the corner to seem like we were walking around the neighborhood doing chores. The grocers had gunny sacks of dates and almonds next to stacks of fruit leather, not Orich bars or anything like that. We got little bags of puffed rice, hemp seeds, and roasted chickpeas. If you picked each rice puff by itself and sucked the salt from it and waited till it dissolved in your mouth, then the Bible study would be almost over by the time you finished the bag. I never ate the chickpeas, because they were as hard as cherry stones.

  At this point, I should also tell you I picked my nose a lot back then.

  Not with oily, salty fingers. I would lick them before.

  My sister would say, “You are disgusting.”

  I would also lick them after.

  Anyway.

  One day, I was rolling a chickpea in between my fingers.

  They were almost done. They’d all walk out—not together—at different times without looking at us so it didn’t catch attention.

  My sister had already tried to swap her chickpeas for my fruit leather, which was a scam. Now we were walking on a narrow garden wall. She said, “You can’t tell anyone, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “If you tell anyone, they’ll kill Mom.”

  “I know,” I said again.

  I picked at an itch in my nose with my thumb. That’s when I noticed the chickpea fit right inside my nostril. It was snug and if I blew out, it made a pleasant pop sound and flew off. I stuck another one in and shot it at a yellow flower sprouting from the rock wall.

  “You won’t even get to see her. They’ll just grab her and probably Baba too, and we’ll go live with grandpa Arman.” That was my mom’s dad, the stern governor who would never have taken us.

  “Why not Baba H
aji?” My dad’s dad, the poet farmer, the love of my other grandmother’s life.

  “Because,” said my sister. “Just don’t tell anybody.”

  That’s when I knew she was lying. If anything happened, of course we’d go to Baba Haji and Maman Massey in Ardestan. She just wanted me to stay quiet.

  I tried to shoot out another chickpea, but it didn’t come out.

  I breathed in by accident.

  It went up.

  “They could run in there with guns right now.”

  I put my pinky finger up there cause it’s the smallest, but it didn’t fit behind the chickpea. It just pushed it up farther.

  I stopped walking.

  “If we see a black van, we have to run inside and tell them.”

  The chickpea was so high up my nose, it was between my eyes. I scratched at it, but all it did was turn.

  When my sister turned around, she screamed. For a second, I thought maybe there was a black van behind me. But she was looking at me. That’s when I saw my booger finger was covered in blood. Not a little blood.

  The way my mom describes it, the grown-ups were all huddled together in prayer when the door of the basement slammed open and little Khossie ran inside, weeping with a river of blood pouring from his nose.

  Everyone startled like a flock of birds on a sidewalk.

  They thought for sure the Committee men were right behind me with guns and vicious hearts and fists willing to hit a five-year-old.

  Except my mom. She ran toward me and scooped me up. I was too old to be held, but that didn’t stop her.

  “What. What. What,” she said. “What happened.”

  And I remember this part, because even though it was hurting now, and the blood was rushing out, I was so embarrassed to admit in front of everybody that I’d stuck a chickpea up my nose. She pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my other nostril and said, “Blow.”

  And then, “Blow,” again.

  On the third blow, a glob of blood and mucus and chickpea went flying out and hit the floor in front of Pastor Pike.

  Everyone laughed the way you do in a scary movie, because they were still imagining the Committee men.

  A couple people stopped coming after that.

  But no matter how many times her husband lashed Sima with a belt, she believed. You can’t make someone stop believing something. In fact, she hung a little cross necklace from the rearview mirror of her car, which was probably a reckless thing to do. But you know, in Oklahoma, after the hundredth time I rode bus 209 and got cut with something or Brandon Goff ripped my hair out, I understood it. They can’t break you. You stick your chin out, like, Go ahead, hit me if you’re going to hit me.

  My mom was like that. One day after work, she went to her car and there was a note stuck to the windshield. It said, “Madame Doktor. If we see this cross again, we’ll kill you.”

  To my dad, this is the kind of story that proves his point. That Sima was picking a fight. That she could have lived quietly and saved everyone the heartaches that would come. If she had kept her head down. If she stopped telling people. If she pretended just a few holidays a year, that nothing had changed. She could still have everything.

  Sima took the cross down that day.

  Then she got a cross so big it blocked half the windshield, and she put it up. Why should anybody live with their head down? Besides, the only way to stop believing something is to deny it yourself. To hide it. To act as if it hasn’t changed your life.

  Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?

  It’s a tough question, because most people haven’t picked anything worthwhile.

  A few weeks after that, Sima was in a market buying pomegranates, and tea, and saffron, when a black van pulled up onto the sidewalk.

  The Committee men, who looked like regular men, got out and grabbed her up. Nobody in the market said anything. The van drove away and disappeared like a bad memory. The grocer probably put back the pomegranates and the tea and the saffron, so that someone else could buy them.

  * * *

  YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW THIS, but Oklahoma is called Tornado Alley, and also the Buckle of the Bible Belt, which means it’s a great place to hide.

  You are surrounded by as many Christians in Oklahoma as Muslims in Iran. Cars practically come with the crosses attached.

  But also, Oklahoma gets more tornadoes than anywhere in the world. Except it isn’t spread out over all 365 days of a year. They happen in the summer, almost every night, sometimes three or four at a time. Huge tunnels of wind that claw the earth. Like if God was scratching His belly, just above the belt buckle, each finger would be a tornado.

  Sometimes they erase entire towns off the map. Suddenly your grandpa’s house is as gone to you as mine is to me.

  When you see a tornado rip swimming pools out of the ground, you realize something Oklahomans already know. People aren’t very big. In fact, if you stand in the wide flat expanse of an Oklahoma field you can watch a rain cloud roll in from miles and miles away, pulling a curtain of rain across the prairie toward you and your little body will collide with less than a trillionth of it. The rain won’t ever notice.

  Men who make Committees and go around stealing mothers and hurting them, they’re just red ants killing black ants in a giant universe that has tornadoes bigger than the biggest thing we have ever built.

  And that’s a nice thought.

  It’s nice to be unimportant.

  * * *

  THERE’S A SONG HERE that goes:

  Oklahoma ditches run Oklahoma red

  When Oklahoma rivers have been overfed

  With Oklahoma rain, from Oklahoma skies

  And I’ve still got Oklahoma dirt in my eyes.

  I think it means we need more than rain to clean us.

  * * *

  NOBODY EVER EVER SPEAKS about what happened to my mom when the secret police took her.

  I don’t think they realize that I have seen more than seven rated-R van Damme movies and my imagination is probably worse than what happened. I mean. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t.

  Scheherazade never had this problem, because she made everything up and she didn’t love anyone in her tales. To her, this would be the moment that a young woman—nameless, no kids—was caught up in the lair of a vile djinn. Or, if she’s lucky, a demon who believes in God. But she isn’t lucky and so we hear the clicking of the monster’s teeth, and the clacking of his boots.

  But this is my mom we’re talking about.

  I asked her once about it, while she was cooking, so I knew she couldn’t go anywhere. She said, “Akh. Why do you want to know?”

  Ray wasn’t around, so she could be herself.

  I said, “I just do.”

  Which got me nowhere, so I added, “It’s for school.”

  She didn’t believe me.

  She kept chopping a mound of herbs the size of a basketball.

  I went for plan C. “C’mon, c’mon. Please. Just tell me. I can handle it. Did they have bazookas?”

  “What’s a bazooka?”

  “A rocket launcher.”

  “Khosrou,” she said, clicking her tongue. “Of course not.”

  “Guns?”

  “The ones in the van did, but they didn’t want to be so obvious.”

  The word she used also means “rude,” like Persians are so polite that even the secret police who go around killing people don’t want to be so rude as to scare the kids in a market.

  “So they had badges? How did you know they were the Committee?”

  She finished with the herbs, scooped them in both hands and dropped them into the stock pot. All the leaves wilted and shrank until they all disappeared into the broth.

  She was looking into the pot, but had gone back to that day in Isfahan—you could tell—and was remembering whatever answer t
here was.

  “We just knew. They looked completely normal. Men in corduroy pants and knit caps like your uncle wore. I thought I recognized one of them. And in the van, the one in the front seat turned around and said, ‘I’m sorry, Madame Doktor.’”

  “You knew him?”

  “He knew me. Maybe I treated his mother or something.”

  “Then what?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I used the same trick again, where I’d say something so ridiculous she had to correct me. “Did you go to prison?”

  “No.”

  “The torture prison.”

  “Evin.”

  “Evin Prison. Did they take you?”

  “No.”

  “Is that where Dad went?”

  “Khosrou!”

  She shushed me, like she was embarrassed even though there wasn’t anybody around. And besides, he only went for a short time. At first, the government thought he was a big-time dealer since he’d bought more than any person could use for themselves in a year. But really, the giant stash was to throw a party for a whole town—which is so perfectly him. He was just being a good host.

  “Then where?” I said. “Was there a different prison?”

  “It wasn’t a prison,” she said.

  “Then what?” I say.

  Do you see how frustrating this is, by the way?

  They were all like this. My mom, my dad, even Ray. They hid stories that explained what we were even doing in Oklahoma. Maybe just from me. I don’t know. If you’re the only person everyone else is keeping from a secret, then you don’t know what you don’t know.

  “They had houses all over Isfahan,” she said.

  The houses were unmarked and sat in the rows of tense neighborhoods like uncracked knuckles. “They lived together?” I said.

  “No. No. They lived with their families. Maybe just a few houses down. They used the houses to hold people, to interrogate them …”