“The letters—”
The sound of clicking heels interrupted him. It was Claire; she walked in with a plastic bean-shaped tray filled with prescription bottles. “Mr. Batman, it’s time for your meds!” As she came closer, her face went red. Bahman was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, I’m interrupting. I can come back in a few—”
Roya got up. “I should go anyway. I really should go. My husband is waiting.”
“Stay,” Bahman said. “You don’t have to go.”
“I’ll come right back,” Claire said.
“No, Roya, you. Please. You stay. We have a lot to discuss.”
“My husband is waiting.”
“I’m beginning to see,” he whispered.
“Would you like lunch?” Claire asked her gently.
Roya stood there in her gray heavy-soled shoes. Seeing Bahman like this, with his mind half-gone, his memories jumbled up, his Parkinson’s and dementia, broke her heart. She wanted the boy she used to know, the boy who would save the world. To think that she still loved him! She was suddenly exhausted.
“The snow,” she finally said. “It’s coming down so fast. We have a long drive ahead of us. I can’t afford to wait. We don’t want the conditions to get dangerous.”
They had switched to English in front of Claire. That’s what you did in front of Americans. It was strange to hear him speak it. She wanted to hug him good-bye, hug him hello, hug him for forgetting, hug him for remembering a little, just hug him again.
“Who tricked us, Roya? Someone did. I said Baharestan Square. Who was it that changed our letters?”
Claire looked at Roya and then at Bahman, the plastic tray in her hand almost tipping over.
“What about your sister? She never liked me. Was it Jahangir? Did you know, Roya Joon, that he later told me he was in love?” He looked at his hands. “With me.” Then he looked up again. “Who did this to us? Shahla would never have had a hand in this. She couldn’t have. Could she? Was it Mr. Fakhri? Not my mother, surely.”
Roya’s heart raced as the past came flooding back, as the people who had figured so prominently in their lives that summer swam in front of her eyes, as she listened to the man she’d loved who had lost so much, including his mind.
“Good-bye, Bahman.”
“Come back. When you can. There is so much history you do not know.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
2013
Back Storage Room
Bahman’s letter came in the mail, addressed to Roya’s home. Was it so easy to find the address of Mr. and Mrs. Walter and Roya Archer, nothing more than a neat searchable item on the Web? Roya opened the envelope with a strange feeling of déjà vu: that old familiar thrill coursing through her even as she sat in her kitchen—at seventy-seven!—waiting for Walter to come home from the grocery store.
Dearest Roya Joon,
After our engagement party, I wanted to make it all up to you. The fact that my mother tried to sabotage our joyful celebration saddened me to no end. All I wanted was a normal mother, someone kind, someone who didn’t dominate my life with her strategies and calculations and endless plans to manufacture the life she wanted for me. She wanted me to climb up in that fake, bourgeois world that she coveted. Her rage episodes left my father and me bereft. They barreled through like a force of nature, like a hurricane out of control, and once whatever semblance of peace we had in the home had been destroyed, we were left exhausted and brittle. My mother was sick. She needed help. But we did not know how to help her.
For days after our engagement party, she was restless, agitated. My father recommended that she sit and do her calligraphy. He had taught her in the hopes of having it calm her—so she had an outlet, a pastime, a way to focus her nervous energies on something positive. And she was surprisingly fond of it. But she could never be as good as those who had studied the art from a very young age.
Calligraphy was the skill of the best students of that generation. Those in the top-notch schools had been trained by masters in how to control their hand, produce their strokes, hold their pens.
And, of course, I would later find out the damage this skill could cause. The chasm that it created in our lives. When you came here to the Duxton Center a few days ago, it forced me to acknowledge what I think I had feared all along. My mother changed our letters. Rather, she had them altered, ensuring that you would go to one square and I to another. No one could have wanted that but my mother, Roya Joon. She was the one who felt her world would collapse if her son didn’t go through with the wedding she’d planned for him. And how did my mother get her hands on our letters? Oh, Roya. The answer to that question involves the history you do not know. So here, as I sit in this assisted-living center in the twilight of life, let me tell you what happened that summer.
On the Friday that fell two weeks after our engagement party, Mother could not sit still. She got up, paced the room. She complained of burning, of the heat keeping her up all night, of voices in her head. She demanded cool cucumber peels for her eyes. I peeled the cucumbers, what could I do, I pressed them against her eyelids. I fanned her with the bamboo kebab fan the way she liked. I fussed over her even as I seethed, hoping she’d just calm down, just relax, rein in her demons.
Nothing worked. She scratched the cucumber peels off and hurled them on the floor. She told me I had no idea the pain I was putting her through, how all she’d wanted was for her one son to have a life that was successful and filled with the right people in the best circles and that meant marrying Shahla. She went on about how she’d picked out Shahla for me, spoken to her parents, planned it all. Did I know what I was throwing away, what I was actually doing? She herself had been the daughter of a melon seller, and it was marriage to an engineer who was decent and good and most importantly from the upper class that saved her. Did I have any idea, she went on, what it meant to stagnate in life, to have no standing, to push and strive for a better life but to be stuck because of who your grandparents were, because your father was not educated, because of the class in which you’d been born? I was furious. She had busted out of the class into which she’d been born, and now, instead of letting me marry for love, she insisted that I just keep going as if I were an athlete grabbing her baton. I would not be allowed to stop running, would not be able to turn around, as if my marriage to someone I loved would somehow negate the “progress” she had made in fighting her fate.
I picked up the wilted cucumber peels from the floor. They were warm from contact with her skin, soft and limp. Touching them disgusted me. I argued for us. I told her how clever you were, your excellent grades, how hard you worked at school. I even emphasized your father’s steady job as a government clerk. And as I sit here in twilight writing this letter, it pains me to think I even uttered those words. As if I had any duty to convince her. As if our love alone shouldn’t have been enough. I am stunned by my own weakness.
My father got a fresh bottle of ink, pushed the calligraphy pen closer to her, begged her to write out a few lines of a favorite poem. Anything to have her concentrate on something other than her rage.
“If Bahman marries that girl, I’ll lose him, I know. Roya won’t be like Shahla. She won’t let me stay close to him. As if losing the others wasn’t enough.”
My father shrank when she said this, put his head in his hands and stayed still.
She stormed off. We heard her open and close drawers in the kitchen. Then we heard her bedroom door slam. Like always.
We sat in our usual uncomfortable silence, my father and I, waiting for her anger to dissipate, for the ugly storm to pass. I closed my eyes and recited Rumi in my head to distract myself. Eventually I smelled something sweet and cloying. I opened my eyes. The air smelled like rotted roses. My mother had come back into the living room fully dressed and made-up. She had put on too much perfume. Layers of thick rouge covered her cheeks. She held her handbag tightly. She stormed out the front door before my father could say a word, before I could beg her not
to go.
Sometimes when she left the house, it felt like a suffocating layer of soot had suddenly lifted. But this time the discomfort remained. I couldn’t move. For I don’t know how long, I waited to get the energy back in my legs, to get up and go out after her. My father said nothing. He looked undone. Of course we had to go after her. Who knew what trouble she’d get into when she was in these moods? I worried for her sanity, for her safety, even for the looks on the faces of people in the street as she strode by. For the spectacle she could make of herself.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll bring her home.”
I went out the gate. I had no idea where to turn first. I cursed myself for sitting on the couch longer than I should have, for not running after her immediately. I didn’t know where she’d gone, which street she’d taken. Because it was the Friday holy day, most people were at home resting or at the mosque praying, and there were few passersby. And what would I ask of them anyway: Have you seen a woman smeared with rouge walking by in a rage?
All I wanted was to be with you. I wanted to see you, hold you, feel you next to me. I was tempted to walk to your house. But I had to find my mother. Once at the greengrocer’s, she had bitten the tops off several eggplants because she said the greengrocer had treated her like a lowly peasant dahati. “You treat me like an animal, I’ll act like one for you, how’s that?” And I had melted in shame. Another time, she cornered the beet seller and his young daughter as they pushed their wagon down the street. He should never take his eye off his daughter, she told him, because she could easily become a whore, a slut, a piece of trash, pregnant before her time. When she was overtaken by these manic forces, my mother’s cruel streak whipped out of her like a snake, unexpected and unable to be contained.
I couldn’t find her. The shops were closed for the holiday and few people were around. Once or twice, I saw a woman from behind, but of course, it wasn’t her. I searched and searched, going in circles and feeling more lost.
Worn out, my nerves jangled, I went to the one place that could calm me down. I knew Mr. Fakhri sometimes used Fridays to catch up on his inventory and to organize things in the back storage room of his shop. In my high school days, I’d even helped him unpack boxes of books on Fridays, proud to be his assistant of sorts.
The clear sound of the bell when I opened the door to the Stationery Shop was a relief. The door was unlocked, so Mr. Fakhri must be there then, working. I remembered how my mother had spoken to him at our engagement party. She’d been rude and forward, blaming him for helping our romance. I suppose I wanted to apologize on her behalf just as much as I wanted Mr. Fakhri’s calm, soothing presence.
When I walked into the shop, muffled voices rose as if in argument. I looked around but I couldn’t see anyone in the store. The familiar scent of dusty books and pamphlets was laced with something else. Withered roses. My mother’s perfume.
I moved to the door leading to the back storage room. The voices grew louder. The floor felt suddenly uneven. The clock in the shop hiccuped as if it were broken. I hated the smell of that perfume; I wanted so badly to be wrong. But by now I recognized my mother’s voice from behind the door.
“Tell me you love me,” I heard her say.
“Don’t do this, Badri.” I had never heard Mr. Fakhri sound so vulnerable. In that moment, I knew what he’d sounded like when he was a boy. Why did he call my mother by her first name? What was she doing here?
“Remember the sword my father used to slash the melons?” she said. “I was expert at it. I can use this right now and end all the pain you’ve caused. You were and always will be a useless, spineless coward who murders his child.”
“Badri, please,” Mr. Fakhri said.
It was then that I opened the door. My mother was standing on a small stepladder. Her arms were by her sides. In her right hand she held a large butcher’s knife. My body went cold. I wanted to believe that the knife was simply hanging there by her thigh. It could not be attached to her hand. Where would she have gotten this knife—was it from our kitchen? Was it the one my father used to cleave chunks of meat, was it the one he kept at the back of the kitchen drawer? In its large sickle-shaped reflection, I saw Mr. Fakhri’s spectacles.
In a swift move, she lifted the knife. Then she pierced her own throat.
I’m not sure how I made it across that room. I bulldozed through what must have been piles of books and boxes of magazines and pamphlets. I got to my mother and jumped. I grabbed the knife she held. When I landed, I held it so tightly that I thought my hand would break.
“Bahman?” The color drained from my mother’s face.
A metallic, tinny taste filled my mouth. I thought I might be sick. All I could do was to wrap my arms around my mother’s knees as she stood on the stepladder. I still held the knife.
Gently, she stroked my head. When I looked up, drops of blood had bubbled up on her neck.
I let go of the knife and it landed on the floor with a sharp clang.
I pulled her down from the stepladder. She was in a daze. Her tearstained face was red and blotchy. She put a hand on the wound in her throat and extended her arm, looking at the blood on her fingers. “Look what you made me do,” she said. “Ali, it’s all because of you.”
Mr. Fakhri rocked back and forth and murmured a prayer. Then, with his perfectly polished shoe, he kicked my mother’s knife out of his way. He walked closer to her. From his pocket, he took out a square handkerchief. He leaned in and held it as if to press it against her throat.
She recoiled and hissed, “Don’t.”
The small beads of blood from her wound expanded in diameter, in what seemed a strangely symmetrical line.
“First you, then me, right?” She smiled sadly at me. She wouldn’t look at Mr. Fakhri. “You get your neck gashed in a demonstration, and I have to deal with the lies and betrayal of this traitor. Good thing we both know a good doctor. Do you think Jahangir’s father will give us a family discount?”
I felt sick. The books I had knocked over in my rush to get to her were scattered on the floor. The knife lay next to a pile of political magazines. Her attempt at levity was for my benefit; I could see how afraid she was of my own fear. Why on God’s earth was she this way? Why did she torment us, scare us, threaten us?
Then she wept freely, lost in an emotion so deep that the sounds she made were almost soft. I had seen her cry loudly, violently many times. I had never seen her cry like this. “It is too late,” she said. “It is absolutely too late. It’s too late for my child.”
I thought she meant me. I thought she meant my upcoming marriage, of which she disapproved. I thought she meant, in her own warped way, that it was too late for me to have the life she’d planned.
“You made me kill my baby. By myself.” She turned to Mr. Fakhri. “Because you are a coward.”
My breath caught in my throat. I was planted to the floor.
“Badri, I beg of you,” Mr. Fakhri said. “Don’t do this now.”
“After I killed it, my body was wrecked.” She looked at her stomach as if she were talking to some force she had pleaded with before. “My body was so broken it killed all the others. All of them.” She looked up at me. “Do you know how many children I buried? I should have told you before.”
“Badri, stop,” Mr. Fakhri whispered.
“They come out of you and you think they’re whole. You think you will be able to love them, raise them, cherish them. But then you see. Well, they come out of you not how they should. Too soon, or they just come out . . . silent, warm, and dead.”
I was burning with disbelief. I had never known my mother had lost children before. Neither she nor my father had told me. I was seventeen and only now finding out.
“You thought you could do whatever you wanted to me, Ali. Behind the mosque. In that square. You got away with everything. You had the money, the privilege. I had nothing.” She wept into her hands. “I was a child!”
“I am so sorry,” he said softly. “I a
m so, so sorry.”
Dust motes moved in the shaft of sunlight that came through the one small window in that storage room. What filled the space wasn’t the smell of books or my mother’s perfume or my own sour odor as I stood soaked in sweat. It was something different: something I couldn’t quite define, that would forever cloak that day and all the days that followed. It was, I think, the scent of grief.
Mr. Fakhri walked over to her. She folded into him. In his arms, my mother wept. She spoke of babies lost and babies dead, and I learned from her disjointed, somber narrative that I was not the first child my mother had borne. I was not her second nor her third nor her fourth. I was the fifth child my mother gave birth to, the only one who lived, the one, I now slowly came to realize, into whom she poured the hopes and dreams she’d had for all of the others. And it was with a chilling shiver in that storage room that I realized that my mother’s first baby—the one she’d aborted before it was due to be born, perhaps with her own hands—had been fathered by our soothing, calm stationer, Mr. Fakhri.
I stood among the fallen books, among the words of artists who’d spent happy, circuitous hours writing, honing their words for years. Mr. Fakhri bent over my mother like an animal wounded and lacerated himself.
I wanted to leave and not come back to that shop, to escape from the whole city, to run away and hide somewhere.
I rushed out. On the pavement I heaved forward and vomited and hid my tears as best I could from passersby.
When he saw my mother’s laceration, my father sped us to Jahangir’s. We couldn’t go to a hospital in Tehran. There was so much shame back then in all of it, Roya Joon. In her sickness. In her attempt to take her own life. In even the idea of suicide.
Jahangir was home when we took my mother in to see his father. He hugged me and assured us that our secret was safe with him. Jahangir’s father promised not to say a word about what she’d tried to do.
Thank goodness, she hadn’t had a chance to puncture her skin deep enough. I had grabbed the knife in time. In the end, a gauze bandage and ichthyol ointment was all that was needed. “But one more second here and there, one little slip . . .” Jahangir’s father shook his head.
The Stationery Shop of Tehran Page 23