by Nayeri, Dina
Up above, a crow calls out from its perch on a phone line.
It is autumn again. The ground is covered with trampled wild berries, pieces of orange rinds, and crushed cans. Cool breezes carry plastic bags into treetops. Wet and dry, red and yellow leaves drift over the streets. The air smells like rain, like a fistful of wet morning grass held up to the nose. Saba feels trapped here, with the blissful poor, in a world made up of the scattered parts of many different eras. A group of older women passes by her. Over their long-skirted, brightly mismatched village dresses, they have draped the austere black of city women. They are probably headed to catch a bus to Rasht or to a holy shrine, where they will be black crows pecking and preening in a line. She takes the time to notice the parts of them most unlike her mother, with her elegant clothes, her illegal books and her defiant red nails. The village women flap their fabric wings and cluster together. One of them has double-wrapped her chador tightly around her chest and tied it in front—rural practicality, very unfashionable. Saba looks at their sizable hooked noses and the way another one clutches the loose cloth with her teeth so her hands can be free to hold bags. Her lips disappear behind mouthfuls of black and suddenly she has a bird beak. Is Saba more like Bahareh Hafezi or this woman?
She nods hello and continues on. Minutes later, she turns toward a small dirt road at the edge of the town center and lingers. She shouldn’t be here alone. Her father doesn’t like it when Saba makes herself a target, as he puts it. But this is where the Tehrani promised to meet her, so this is where she will wait. He appears after fifteen minutes, an oily, opium-addicted twenty-year-old with uneven stubble, yellow teeth, and a premature bald spot in the middle of his too-long hair. He waves a black plastic bag in her face.
“A thousand tomans,” he says. No greeting, as usual. Saba doesn’t even know the Tehrani’s first name. Just that he’s someone’s cousin’s cousin, and that he comes from Tehran carrying illegal treasures for sale. Most video men are cleaner, more careful with their dress. But Saba prefers this one because he knows his material. No bumbling analysis of movies he hasn’t seen, no worthless advice. (“Yes, India Jones,” one of the video men recommended once, “a very nice Hindi romance.”) The Tehrani is a connoisseur.
She reaches into her pocket and hands him some bills. He chuckles.
“Each,” he says. “I brought good things. All arrived this month.” He glances around the corner. “The price covers the trip and the special order. I do it only for you.”
“It’s still expensive. Let me look first,” she says, and when he hesitates, she adds, “What, you think I’ll run off with it?” He smirks and hands over the bag. Saba peers inside. She tries not to gasp for fear that the price will jump—because inside the bag there are six magazines, half of them fashion issues, none of them more than a year old, two videotapes, and five audiocassettes. At the bottom of the bag she digs up a tattered novel with no cover. “Oh my God,” she whispers.
The Tehrani smiles. His shoulders tense as Saba looks behind her and throws an arm around his sweaty neck. “Okay, okay,” he says, “I told you I’d get it, didn’t I?”
She picks up the book again. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. Saba has never read a novel in the same year it was published. Let alone one that could get her killed.
“That book is more . . . as we agreed,” says the Tehrani, but Saba doesn’t care, though this is one volume she will have to read and burn. She turns one of the tapes over in her hand. “It’s just what you asked for,” the Tehrani says proudly. “My man in America taped the Top Forty off the radio, plus the usual: Beatles, Marley, Dylan, Redding, U2, even Michael Jackson, the devil’s mouthpiece himself. The videos are TV shows from this year. Clear sound this time, hardly any white lines or shaking. Trust me, you’ll like.”
Saba thrusts a wad of bills into the Tehrani’s hand. He counts them and says, “I have a surprise from America for my best customer.” He pulls out a yellow bottle—a treasure that Saba has hunted for daily since the revolution, along with many other foreign things she used to love. “Neutrogena, all yours,” he says. “Go make your friends jealous.”
Saba opens it and breathes in. “You’re the only good soul left in Tehran.”
He coughs and says, “How about a kiss, then?” tapping his cheek. Saba raises an eyebrow, wishes him a safe trip, and moves quickly to her own end of the village.
A few paces outside the house, she hears voices pouring from the open windows of their large sitting room. First the high-pitched whines of the khanoms, strained and out of breath, followed by the low drones of village men, meandering slowly, struggling to do so wisely. None of them her father’s voice.
Someone lets out a low-pitched belly laugh. Someone else says, “I swear I’m not exaggerating. May God strike me dead right now . . .”
Saba enters through a back door that leads into the hallway next to her bedroom. She tosses her basket onto the bed, tucking the bag of Western contraband under her mattress. She stares into the mirror. Tufts of reddish orange have escaped the head scarf loosely draped in an urban style over her shoulder. Last month she let a seventy-year-old woman with a secret salon in her living room color her hair—a costly mistake.
Someone calls from the living room, “Saba. Saba, come and join us, child.”
She grabs a cloth and wipes her face clean of makeup while straining to make out the individual voices. Is Reza among them? What about Ponneh? She tries to decipher the conversation to see if her friends are already establishing the alibi the three of them will use in an hour or two to escape—but the buzz of voices doesn’t include theirs. She pulls her scarf behind her neck: if she can’t let her hair fall free, she favors the traditional Gilaki way of wrapping the fabric around her neck and tying it in back, taking care to show off a finger of center-parted hair. Before she leaves, she eyes her pile of English textbooks, the only Western books she can keep in plain sight without fear of fines, arrest, or at least a long fatherly scolding. At the top of the pile, a science book is open, revealing a photograph of a flower in a delicious shade of orange. The caption says: “California Panther Lily.”
Vibrant, Saba thinks, repeating the list of English v-words she memorized today. She says the words to herself over and over as she checks the room one last time. Verdant. If her mother was here, Saba would use verdant in a sentence. If Mahtab really did go to America, how many good English words would she know by now? Probably all of them—more than a person can learn from smuggled novels and magazines, or from browsing a tattered children’s dictionary, or even from the best Iranian tutors. But Saba is eighteen now and she knows the world of adults. She doesn’t talk about Mahtab in this way because girls who are supposed to be dead can’t learn English. Still, the mystery of her mother’s departure keeps Mahtab alive—one day Saba will know the whole truth.
In the hall, she almost collides with her father, who likes to walk and think about four different things at once. He isn’t a large man, but he has solid, imposing features that remind Saba of a wrestler. There are dark lines above his cheeks and his jowls are speckled with gray. His watery eyes, sad even when he’s smiling, give him an air of kindness. He doesn’t talk much, likes to keep his thoughts and explanations short. But he is firm in his opinions, one of which is that he’d rather be safe than express them. He likes fine things, which is why, he often tells her, he married a woman with a master’s degree and had daughters who studied English for fun before they could ride a bike.
“Saba jan, come and help. Mullah Ali brought some people . . .” His gray mustache bounces, sweeping his slack cheeks as he chews. Saba smells honey. “I saw the tapes,” he adds. “A collection that size will bring trouble. What if your cousin Kasem sees it?”
“Is he coming? He’s not going in my room!” She shudders. “I hate him . . . always looking at me that way. Worshipping Mullah Ali.” She sticks out her tongue in disgust.
/>
Her father warns her with a glance. “He’s my sister’s son. Be kind. And show some respect to Mullah Ali. He’s a decent man, a helpful man. I don’t want trouble.”
Saba begins to storm off, mumbling, “All mullahs are pigs, even decent ones.”
“Watch your tongue,” he whispers. Then he softens. “Yes, I know . . . but please, Saba, you used to be sensible. Drop this May Ziade act.” His attempt to placate her falls apart at the mention of the obscure Arab feminist whose last name happens to mean “too much” in Persian. Her father loves to use this otherwise random woman in his lectures. “The name says it all!” he exclaims. “Whatever your views, learn restraint.” Often he adds, as if to entice her to behave, “You know, keeping silent, not expressing opinions, is a talent of the finest people in the Western world. It shows a mastery of self.”
May is a good name, Saba thinks, and crosses her arms, maybe to invite his anger.
“What?” Her father sighs. “Tell me. What is it that you’re so desperate to say?”
She snaps, “It’s not fair that you talk to me like I’m some delinquent. When have I ever caused problems?” This is a kind of truth—she has become an expert at fulfilling her illegal desires without attracting trouble.
Her father glances back toward the living area. He is still whispering, but his tone is as loud as ever. “When? I’ll tell you when. Every other day I have to cover for you to someone. Oh no, Khanom Alborz, that wasn’t my daughter barefoot with red toenails in the street. No, no, she didn’t mean anything by that remark, Mullah Khan. No, Khanom Basir, that wasn’t my daughter making inappropriate advances toward your son. What are you thinking, Saba? This isn’t Tehran. Everyone knows everyone!”
The last remark stings. She has tried hard to keep her feelings for Reza a secret. She has pulled away each time he has touched her hand, looked away, face burning, from his knowing smiles. Even in the pantry, when his bare foot creeps too close to hers, she has tried not to give in, to exercise restraint. “I didn’t do anything . . .”
But her father is only getting started. He paces, picking at the paint on the wall as if he can’t control his hands. “What’s the matter? Help me understand! Are you unhappy? You have the best tutors and more foreign books than anyone, and all these women to take care of you. Why do you want to jeopardize your future?” He pulls a lock of red hair from the front of her head scarf and flips it aside. Saba wishes he would just see how careful she is, how sensible, maybe even shrewd. And doesn’t he take risks for his many dangerous habits? “You won’t even get rid of that music! I don’t know . . . I wish—”
A bewildered look passes over her father’s withered face.
“You wish what?” Saba whispers. That I was Mahtab? That she was the one left behind? When the twins were born, they were often told, Saba had a cord wrapped around her neck. Mahtab waited patiently, pink and beautiful, never shedding a tear while her twin was blue and near death from impatience. Once at a party Saba heard a distant aunt wonder if this impatience as a baby had caused damage to her brain. After all, wasn’t Mahtab the smarter one? The twin better suited for America. When her sister was around, Saba used to giggle at this sort of talk, because Mahtab was the other half of her and it didn’t matter which half was considered good and which wicked.
Her father shakes his head. “It’s time to find you a husband.”
“That’s not what you were about to say,” she goads. Her father is a progressive man. This isn’t about marriage. “You wish I were Mahtab.” It would be grotesque to cry in front of her father, so she tries to seem more adult, hard-hearted and above girlish blubber.
Her father’s eyes widen. “What . . . ?” He seems agitated and confused. “Yes, I do wish for her sometimes,” he says. “Can you blame me? If I had done things differently—”
He looks away. What is he thinking? Is that guilt making his jowls shiver? Regret? Though she has never asked, Saba imagines that her father has nightmares, that he doesn’t tell her where her mother went because he was there and couldn’t change any of it. How daunting to be the one in charge of a caravan when so many pieces are breaking apart one after another. At what point do you simply let go of the reins and give yourself up to falling? Who do you call to rescue you?
She touches her lips with two wandering fingers. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—” Saba shrugs. Agha Hafezi sighs loudly. “I meant that life would be simpler if I could have been a better father, so you could both be here . . . but everyone knows that twins are the same. You and Mahtab, God keep her, are just the same to me.”
Everyone knows that twins are the same. This is her parents’ philosophy. All fate is determined by the laws of blood and DNA, and two genetically identical girls will always live the same life, they will always provide the same comfort to their parents—whether they are at home or in a faraway place.
“Baba,” she says, and clears her throat, “please tell me where Maman went.”
Her father rubs the corners of his eyes, a ploy to avoid her gaze. Finally he looks at her with a weak smile. “When you were small, Khanom Basir told me everything about you.” He laughs, and Saba wonders what this has to do with her mother. “She told me you made up a letter from Mahtab to entertain your friends. She called it stress.”
What is he trying to accomplish? She wonders if her father has been at the hookah. He touches her shoulder with a massive hand. “I like your way of dealing with impossible things,” he says, “the way you make a perfect world for yourself and say to everyone that’s that. . . . Makes life simple . . . So, for the sake of killing the bad memories, let’s just say your mother’s in America . . . just until I’m sure of a few things myself.”
A part of her wants to press on, to insist again that she saw her mother and sister get on that plane, and that he can stop running away from the murkier, more enigmatic possibilities. She wants to force her father to finally tell her. What happened? Why can’t I speak to her on the phone? But her father looks like a lost child, and he too is without a mother, or wife, or sister. She remembers the days after the separation when he spent sixteen hours a day on the phone in his office. No meals, no visitors, just call after call to agencies and bureaucrats and mullahs—even some whispered conversations with her mother’s friends and members of the underground Christian community, people whom Saba recognized as her father’s real friends, though they never came over for dinners like the mullahs so often do. They whispered to her father that all would be well, that he should keep faith and pray to Jesus to banish his doubts. Did he keep faith? Maybe . . . but he also kept a suitcase under his desk—a toothbrush, a flask of water, pajamas—in case his God failed him and he was arrested without warning. Saba prays to Jesus sometimes. Though she is unsure, it is enough that her mother believed—that it would make her proud. She decides that her father has been through enough for now. He is trying so hard to keep a smile. Better to be kind, to conspire with him. Though he is only humoring her, she will be generous and play along. “Okay,” she offers, “that’s what we’ll tell them.”
“No,” he says, his expression suddenly cautious. “These are all private things.” With that the moment is lost, as is Saba’s chance to be good to her father—a stupid thing to try, she thinks.
Saba moves quietly to the back of the sitting room, the one decorated in Persian style with old rugs, rush mats, and pillows around a floor cloth, a sofreh, in place of a table and chairs. This is the only room, in which her father entertains villagers. The Western dining room, with the Nain rugs and carved chairs, remains mostly unused, except when Saba’s tutors visit from Rasht. She likes to study there because it has a big window and photos of her mother and Mahtab. In summers when they were small and the carpets were being aired and checked for mold, she and Mahtab used to lie facedown on the tile floor of the Western room in their underwear to cool their bellies. Now in the casual sittin
g room, she places herself just behind the Three Khanom Witches and Ponneh’s mother, Khanom Alborz, who is often a reluctant addition to the party. Saba remembers her father’s words. Do they all know about Reza? Are they mocking her? Her head spins.
Vertigo, she thinks it’s called in English.
For the sake of the clerics, the women are draped halfheartedly in house chadors—white ones with big purple blossoms, or polka-dot ones with rows of pink roses and curlicues—from the cloth bundle kept stocked for guests near the door, next to the pile of everyone’s shoes. For Saba’s father, this practice shows off his piety to the mullahs; but around Tehran where black coverings are the norm, it is a welcoming gesture to offer a guest a bright house chador. Please change your chador, they say, get comfortable, stay awhile. It is an invitation to slough off crowish exteriors, to display one’s natural colors, to engage in the chirping talk of Persian mothers, which is the same in every region.
Why? How? What?
Chera? Chetor? Chee?
Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.
Saba knows that it is a popular joke now to call Iranian women crows because of the black chadors worn in cities or solemn places, but in his early hashish moments, when he is most reflective, her father scolds her for it. He says Persian women are more like the terns of the Caspian that hover and glide over the foggy sea, not like crows at all. Don’t be fooled, he says. They are terns in crows’ clothing. You see, the Caspian tern started out here, but exists now all over the world, in every continent. It is a fierce water bird, with a deep red bill, a sharp, blood-red mouth. And while the body of the tern is white, its head is covered in black. It watches with coal-black eyes and attacks without pause, bloodying anyone who disturbs its nest. “Just like your mother,” he says, breathing out the comforting smoke. “The tern has a wild and angry spirit living inside.”