Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  The following year, an ashen sky, grayer and heavier than a donkey’s behind, settled over Iran. As my father predicted, the revolution was promptly seized by the Islamic leaders. And even worse, Saddam Hussein, that wide-eyed despot, came sniffing around the borders of our freshly assembled Islamic republic and proudly launched a brutal and tactless war on a fatigued and divided Iran.

  A year after the war broke out, the few remaining intellectuals who hadn’t been jailed or fled the country with false papers declared my father a clairvoyant truth teller. But my father—Autodidact, Anarchist, Atheist, whose character they had previously assassinated—refused to have his moment in the sun. Instead, he and my mother, Bibi Khanoum, ran for the hills. She was pregnant with me, and my father had suffered enough loss to last him a lifetime. It was winter. The journey was cold, and damp, and dangerous. It had felt interminable to them. But they survived it and took shelter in that stone house in Nowshahr, near the Caspian Sea, which was built as a sanctuary by my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, who referred to the house as either the Censorship Recovery Center or the Oasis of Books, depending on his mood.

  I have been told by my father that halfway through their journey, in the middle of the rugged Elborz Mountains, which separate Tehran from the Caspian Sea, he stopped the car and got out. He looked over his shoulder at Mount Damavand, which hovers over our capital like the shiny white tooth of a gentle giant, and wept until the skin around his eyes was paper-thin: “That pig-headed Saddam is going to level our city!”

  And level our city he did. But even in the midst of darkness, there is always a flicker of light. Months later, in 1982, I was born in the heart of the Oasis of Books, the library, which was designed in the shape of an egg and built around a date palm that shot to the sky through an opening in the roof. My mother leaned against the trunk of the tree and pushed. I—a gray-faced, black-eyed baby—slipped out of her loins into a room lined with dusty tomes, into a country seized by war. I immediately popped a date in my mouth to sweeten the blow. My parents looked down at me, grinning with hope.

  I learned to crawl, walk, read, write, shit, and eat in that library. Even before I could read, I nurtured my brain by running my hands along the spines of all the old books and licking their soot off my fingers. After feeding on the dust of literature, I sat on the Persian rug and stared at The Hung Mallard, which was fixed to the wall. Once I was old enough to walk, I paced in concentric circles like a Sufi mystic, masticating dates and muttering the family motto to myself: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths.

  The days passed. My education unfolded in the midst of the interminable war. My father read aloud to me from Nietzsche’s oeuvre on a daily basis, usually in the mornings, and after lunch, he taught me about literature, culling paragraphs from books written by our ingenious forebears, the Great Writers of the Past: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mawlānā (alias Rumi), Omar Khayyám, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dante Alighieri, Marie-Henri Beyle (alias Stendhal), Teresa of Ávila, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Sādegh Hedāyat, Frederick Douglass, Francesco Petrarca, Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Benjamin, Sei Shōnagon. The list went on and on; it included religious thinkers, philosopher-poets, mystics, secularists, agnostics, atheists. Literature, as my father would say, is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. There are no stations, no castes, no checkpoints.

  At the end of each lesson, as bedtime neared, my father stiffly ordered: “Ill-fated child, assimilate and regurgitate!” In this way, he nurtured my mind. He taught me the long-lost skill of memorization. What is the purpose of memorization in the Hosseini tradition? It is twofold: not only does it restore the ritual function to literature—its orality—which harnesses literature’s spontaneous ability to transform the listener’s consciousness, but it also protects the archive of our troubled, ruinous humanity from being lost through the barbarism of war and the perpetual ignorance that binds our hands and feet. Count the times books have been burned in piles by the fearful and the infirm, men and women allergic to inquiry. Memorization is our only recourse against loss. We Hosseinis can reproduce the pantheon of literature instantly; we can retranscribe texts from the dark folds of our infinite minds. We are the scribes of the future.

  While my father and I spent our days united in the realm of literature, my mother, Bibi Khanoum, spent her days in the kitchen. If she ever ventured out of the house, it was to find us food: rice, oranges, fish the local tribesmen had managed to wrench out of the sea. I didn’t spend much time with her. She didn’t agree with my father’s methods. She considered them invasive and extreme for my age, but he, twenty years her senior, had the upper hand in all matters governing our family.

  I remember my mother once walked into the oval library, where she had given birth to me, with her apron tied around her waist and her face moist from the kitchen steam, to scorn my father: “Abbas, you are raising this child to be a boy! How will she survive in the world? Who will marry her?”

  My father reproached her: “These are times of war and you are worried about marriage?”

  “And who do you suppose will feed her once we are dead?” she retorted. “A mother has to worry about her child’s stomach!”

  Confrontation ensued, but I don’t remember anything after that. I have tried hard to remember my mother’s face, the tone of her voice, the feel of her touch, but the details are out of reach. She would die not long after that argument, and the void left over by her death would push my father and me over the edge. He would fill the lacunae of our lives with literature. Over time, my mind, filled to the brim with sentences, would forsake her.

  In the meantime, on the other side of the Elborz Mountains, that megalomaniac Saddam was spreading mustard gas across the frontier, shooting missiles at random targets, burying mines in the no-man’s-land separating our two nations. What did the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran do? He sat on his newly established throne looking healthier than a fresh pear and ordered human wave attacks to blow up the mines that his nemesis, that bushy eyebrowed man-child, had buried at the front. Human wave attacks! As if it were the Great War!

  Now, Rodents, let us ask: What is the purpose of a flicker of light in the midst of all that bloodshed? Easy. To illuminate the magnitude of the surrounding darkness.

  At a certain point during the long war, my father started to wander about the perimeter of the house or along the seashore, night and day, holding me up as if I were a torch. He used my head, which shone like a beacon with all the enlightened literature he had inserted into it, to measure the scope of the encroaching abyss. Iran, he decided, was no longer a place to think. Not even the Caspian was safe. We had to flee. We had to go into exile. We departed: numb, astonished, bewildered.

  Thus our vagabond life began. We left our home, stopping just beyond the door and looking back once. Pitiful, simpering, we waved our good-byes to the Oasis of Books, to the orange groves and eucalyptus trees, to the rice paddies and sandy shores. Pressed together on the rear of an ass, my father, mother, and I set out across Iran’s forbidding horizon toward the Turkish border. Of our earthly possessions, we took only our samovar, a rug, our books, and The Hung Mallard. We had packed a few provisions, the little food we had left in the house. It was the middle of summer. Other deserters had died in the rugged flanks and stony depressions of our mountains. We didn’t want to be caught in a snow blizzard. We didn’t want to die against an icy stone, frostbitten. We rode in silence for a long time, fearful and worn down. No one dared to ask: Will we ever set foot on these grounds again? Smell the jasmine bush? Stuff our mouths with the sweet meat of dates freshly fallen from the trees?

  At first, the dirt path under our feet seemed to trot along with us—kind and concerned for our safety. But our fate took a turn for the worse. Somewhere between Khalkhal and Mount Sahand, in a long stretch of no-man’s-land littered with Iraqi missiles, a poisonous black cloud billowing over the southwestern horizon, my mother, Bibi Khanoum, died. She had wa
lked into an abandoned home in the middle of a razed village to see if the deserters had left behind any food. Just at that moment, likely when she was hovering over the kitchen table, the house collapsed. She was crushed under the weight of its stones.

  I stood before that collapsed house in a state of shock. I could hear my father’s voice rising and falling in the distance. He whimpered and yowled. I could hear him choking on his tears. I didn’t know where we were. I covered my ears. I couldn’t stand listening to him sob in that manner, like a wounded animal left to die in the dry gales of the desert. But I could still hear his sobs rising into that godless gray dome that keeps us pinned to this meager earth. The world seemed nebulous, unnavigable. I felt as though someone had taken a rolling pin to my heart, razing it and extinguishing its warmth. I felt a gaping hole bloom in my gut. Then those crucial four words of the first Hosseini Commandment, which my father had whispered to me upon my birth, trumpeted through my void: Love nothing except literature.

  I put one foot in front of the other and walked toward my father. He was curled up near a rock. My hand hurt as I nudged him. I told him we had to unbury my mother. I told him we couldn’t just leave her there to rot. When he finally looked at me, I saw that his eyes had turned into two murky puddles and that the skin of his face had drooped. To me, his features seemed to have melted; his nose was indecipherable from his cheeks, his forehead had merged with his chin. The only thing I could see clearly was his thick black mustache.

  It took us a full day and night of hard labor to retrieve Bibi Khanoum’s body from the wreckage. My father kneeled against her and pulled her into his arms. He rocked her and wept silently. I stood behind him and watched. Her face was flat and gray. It was covered in dust. It could have been anyone’s. Once I had seen it, I couldn’t unsee it. Her face had introduced a distortion in my visual field. The world, all of its parts, which, when summed up, still refused to make a whole, seemed unstable at the edges.

  Hours later, breathless and confused, we buried my mother beneath a lone date palm. Our fingers were numb from clawing at the earth. We stood over her grave and cried, then we waved our good-byes the way we had waved at the stones of our village, at the jasmine bushes lining the streets, at the magnolia and citrus trees, and at the rows of eucalyptus growing wild near the sea.

  As we rode away from her makeshift grave, my father brought his hand to his mustache, which was as long and limp as Nietzsche’s, pulled on the tips that were stained yellow from all the tea he drank, and nervously said: “It could have been worse. At least she was buried in her homeland. There is nothing worse than dying a stranger.”

  At the ripe age of five, I thought to myself: Worse than strangers are estranged brethren. As we moved farther away from my mother, I felt that void—deep, dark, craggy—widen. But I said nothing. Because sometimes, as Shakespeare famously wrote, the rest is silence.

  We continued our journey. In order not to arouse suspicion, my father designed a senseless path, full of digressions, one long detour after another. This vagabonding through the dead of night, through dark and silent fields, across terrain that was being drenched with poison gas and blood and death, turned us numb and sluggish. At times, my father seemed to have forgotten who he was or where we were. In those moments, he would look at the sky with a wide, dry mouth, and it would seem to me that even his mustache was barely hanging on to his crusty upper lip.

  Every morning, the grainy light of dawn came down on our heads like a guillotine. We didn’t have time to mourn. We tried to push away any emotion that arose: panic, shame, fear, despair, astonishment. We didn’t know how else to carry on, how else to move through our remaining days. Sometimes, in an effort to lift our spirits, my father would speak. He would say, his voice breaking, that the lesser men on this earth are the most powerful and that we, the ill-fated, must draw from scant reservoirs, plumb the depths of our singed minds and hearts, just to find the courage to survive in this world that acts against us with such violence. Worse than violence, he would say, is the indifference of those who watch the destruction of others and remain unmoved by it. With what little conviction he could muster, he would remind me that it was our job to resist the tyranny of hate and its behavior of choice: the elimination of others.

  The next time my father and I came across a leveled village, we sifted through the rubble and dug out from the debris six blackboards that had been used in the village school; we tied each pair together with a piece of old string and mournfully slipped the boards over our heads and saddled our ass with a pair. We wore them like shields. But while we continued on, our ass, in still another tragedy, died of exhaustion. By the end, the poor animal barely had the energy to keep his ears pointing at the godless heavens. My father, unusually lighthearted, stood over the animal’s body and saluted him. “Good-bye, dear Rocinante!” he said, as if our ass had been Don Quixote’s infamously weak horse. He knew how much I loved the trials and tribulations of that Knight of the Sad Countenance.

  And so my father and I went through the lowlands and highlands of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province on foot, dragging our suitcase of meager possessions along with us. We walked by night and hid by day. We were caught in the approaching winter. Our teeth chattered; our bones ached. It wouldn’t be long before glistening sheets of snow would settle across the rugged landscapes that lay ahead. We ate potatoes, beets, turnips; anything my father managed to procure every now and then. We were reduced to desperation by our aimless path, which seemed to fold over itself a million times before delivering us to the border. Our bodies had metamorphosed. We were skeletal, ragged, dirty, stupid from the rough blows of our journey toward nothingness. In the rare occasions when we saw villagers moving across the landscape, ambling into the light and crossing out of it again, they pretended not to see us. It was as if we didn’t exist.

  One morning, as we sat huddled together at the center of a cluster of trees, my father said rather conclusively of my mother: “The whole world is a mind. Her mind has been absorbed back into the mind of the universe.” I looked around. A thick mist hovered over the landscape. The whole world seemed unreal, tinged with my mother’s death and the death of the Hosseinis. I thought to myself, she is everywhere; she has contaminated everything. I took comfort in this. I dragged that vaporous air into my lungs and held my breath.

  Nights passed, and we marched on. The closer we came to the border, the more dead bodies we found: dissidents who had tried to flee but who had frozen to death, Saddam’s victims. We were north of the front. His men must have been aiming with their rectal holes, killing anything with a pulse.

  On a particularly morbid night, my father, who seemed for my sake to recover a little bit of his strength with each passing day, paused near a dead body lying face down on the ground, and mournfully said: “It’s a good thing we buried your mother. We didn’t leave her exposed to the merciless elements. Now, child, look around. As your great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, would say, Death is coming. Take this chance to train that Hosseini nose of yours! It is the only way to guard your life with your death.”

  As I listened to him speak, I was reminded of the second Hosseini Commandment: It is our duty to remember that history’s unfinished business will recycle itself. I remembered: The only way to remain one step ahead of death is to cultivate our ability to sniff the bloodthirsty past before it approaches to settle old scores.

  The next time we came across a pile of bodies, I looked at the faces of the dead. My father removed their clothes and piled them onto my small frame. Snow was drifting through the air; it had stacked on the ground, a spectral glow that would soon cover those who lay there, dead and abandoned. I smelled them. They smelled of shit and vinegar and rust. The stench of history, the miasma of death, was coming up from the southern front in waves. For days, there was blood in my head. Blood in my eyes. Blood everywhere I looked.

  Weeks stretched on like an interminable road. Through the coldest stretches, my father carried me on his back
as if I were a load. Time moved unnervingly slow. But it was in the midst of that decay and putrefaction, and that harrowing winter we had tried so hard to avoid, that my father resumed my lessons in literature. We reclaimed our old habits. They gave us a sense of order. We felt bolstered by the architecture of words. Every day, before we rested from our night’s hike, he instructed me to sit on a pile of rocks that jetted out of the brightly glazed snow, and said, “Life crushes us, grinds us to a halt, wears us down.”

  I listened to him through the bitter chill of the ancient howling wind. I closed my eyes and inhaled his words. I swallowed them as if they were food to my stomach. I felt nurtured by literature’s web of sentences, connected through them to this strange and dark universe.

  My father warned, echoing the third and final Hosseini Commandment: “Child, you must follow in the tradition of your ancestors, your forebears and your forebears’ ingenious forebears, those great martyrs of thought who retreated into literature in order to survive death, in order to outwit the cruel absurdity of the world.”

  He always said child just like that; never my child or sweet daughter of mine or my doll. He didn’t believe in the possessive. According to his logic, I was a vessel, the latest to be produced in our ill-omened bloodline, designed to receive and transmit literary signals; destined to contaminate the world with our cross-generational devotion to literature. “Remember,” he would say during those dawn lessons, pacing back and forth before a pile of icy rocks, “literature reveals the lies and the hypocrisy of the world. It is the only true record. After I am gone, you will be the last remaining scribe of the future.”

  After a long, thoughtful pause, he would artfully say: “Repeat after me: Memorize! Regurgitate! Transmit!” In the surrounding silence of death, I would echo those words with my eyes still closed. I prepared for my ill-omened fate.