Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (9781101601990)

by Nayeri, Dina

  “I’m taking you out of that school,” he said. “It’s a waste, all the Arabic lessons; better to focus on making you fluent in English. I’ll take you to say good-bye tomorrow.”

  Good-byes are such luxuries. Some people pine for them for entire lifetimes.

  Chapter Ten

  AUTUMN 1990

  Saba bleeds more often than once a month now. She has back pain, sometimes a small aching in her stomach. It is a punishment, she tells herself. After the two women left, Saba bled for two days. She didn’t tell anyone because, after all, there was a secret to keep. Besides, didn’t Khanom Omidi once tell her that women bleed their first time? Her cycles were erratic after that. Each month they lasted twice as long as before, and she often found dark red patches on her underwear and bedsheets in between cycles. She didn’t tell anyone. Maybe the bleeding was God’s judgment for failing to guard herself in this frightening new Iran and for believing she had so much figured out. When she and Mahtab were children, their mother used to say that God always punishes the proud because “pride can ruin you, and Saba jan, your brain is your greatest vanity.”

  “Isn’t that Mahtab’s vanity too?” Saba would ask.

  Her mother would shake her raven head with its five gray hairs and whisper that Mahtab’s vanity was worse because she didn’t stop at trusting her own mind but believed herself capable of manipulating the world. “But you focus on the plank in your own eye,” she would advise Saba, referring to some Bible verse. “And I’ll deal with your sister.”

  Now, when preoccupied with the practicality of her own choices, Saba remembers that there is always someone savvier, always someone with a better plan. And what can a girl do when she has been outwitted? Her only weapon against Abbas is his loneliness, which she takes cruel pleasure in amplifying—denying him entry into her room, accepting social invitations without him, making dinners for one. What can he do to stop her? Her inheritance is protected by an airtight contract. And he knows that if he was to harm her physically in a way that she could show to the world, she certainly would.

  Day after day he silently begs for understanding. He tiptoes around the house, looking for her here and there, leaving her small presents of fresh unskinned almonds and peaches. Sometimes he wastes an entire bag of apricots, cracking open the pits one by one because he knows she likes the juicy nut at the core. But his sins are too unforgivable for Saba. Let him die of loneliness. Let his last nights be empty and cold and let him wither, knowing he will never again be comforted by the touch of another human.

  She retreats into lonely corners of her home, gobbles up Western media like a starving beast. The Tehrani, her constant friend though they barely speak, brings her his most popular items—the things he trades from house to house with the highest turnover—everything from Michael Jackson videos to Indian films to exercise tapes, but Saba only craves more American movies. After Love Story opened her eyes to the magic of Harvard, she promised the Tehrani twice his usual price if he would bring her more movies and television shows set there. His first attempt was a disaster. A hodgepodge of garbage set in Hartford, a few episodes of Cheers, and a movie called The Paper Chase that wasn’t actually filmed there. Though there is a fascinating moment at the end when the main character, a law student, makes a paper airplane out of his report card and tosses it into the ocean. What a thing! He doesn’t even look at it. There are many papers—marriage contracts and Iranian passports and letters to Evin Prison—that she wishes she could release into the sea, where Mahtab could catch them and sort through them for her.

  Now she is watching the Tehrani’s latest acquisition, an independent college film that she likes despite its poor quality. It depicts the right sort of place for her sister. She memorizes the names of the streets and buildings in the film. She watches the way women speak, the way men move, the shocking way one of them spies on his beautiful friend as she undresses. What a bizarre and wonderful world.

  Soon Khanom Omidi comes in and sits beside her. She rests her head on the old woman’s lap. As she rocks and hums and strokes Saba’s hair, her folksy tunes mingle with the sophisticated English words emanating from the television, creating what Saba imagines is the music of her sister’s immigrant world. To her own disgust, she begins to cry again. Lately the weeping has become impossible to control like a tic.

  “What’s the matter? Oh no, Saba jan,” Khanom Omidi coos, “don’t be sad, child. You can be happy if you try.”

  On the screen, students wear jeans and sweatshirts in a lecture hall. They go to a party in their pajamas. They linger around dining tables with red wine and thesis pages.

  Saba doesn’t respond. She sobs into her surrogate mother’s ample skirt and wishes for her sister. Khanom Omidi seems to have a vague idea that something has happened to Saba. She hums her song, takes Saba’s face in both hands, and tilts it toward her. “I know you’ve been hurt,” she says, her tone full of quiet gravity. “But marriage is an uncut watermelon. You can’t see inside before you decide.”

  Saba lets out a snort. “That saying is for naïve girls. It doesn’t cover everything.”

  “Maybe not,” Khanom Omidi says, and goes back to her rocking and humming. “Saba jan, just tell me what happened.” After a long silence, she whispers, almost to herself, “The good thing about old people is that they die. Soon we all die.”

  Saba hugs Khanom Omidi’s waist with both arms. She can see that the old woman feels guilty about encouraging the marriage. “You can never die. I won’t let you.”

  Khanom Omidi makes a clucking sound with her tongue and pinches Saba’s chin. Saba thinks about dying, and blood, and how, according to her mother’s theories on destiny and DNA, everything would have been the same even if she had moved to America. All fate is written in the blood. So what is Mahtab, her perfect blood match, doing now? Lately Saba has been practicing her English word lists again, in case her mother wants to hear them one day. “I miss Khanom Mansoori,” she muses. “She used to ask for stories of Mahtab in America.”

  “That sounds like her.” Khanom Omidi brushes some hairs out of Saba’s face. “You can tell me one if you want.”

  “Maybe I’m too old now to play games like that,” Saba says.

  “Never too old. When a person is too old for stories, he might as well be buried. Storytelling is how we get back the people who are far away from us.” Khanom Omidi hoists herself up from the small carpet she likes best and brings Saba a small glass of clear liquid from the pantry. “Drink this,” she says. “We won’t tell anyone.”

  Saba situates her head in the space between Khanom Omidi’s thick arm and her soft, comforting lap, and looks up. She can see the old woman’s crossed eyes and feels an even deeper affection for her. “Okay, Khanom Omidi,” she says. “I’ll tell you the story of my marriage . . . but in my own way. Since it’s a secret, you’ll have to settle for Mahtab’s version. She’s my twin and her fate always follows mine in some way. I think you especially will like this one because it’s about maast-mali and something else you know better than anyone . . . getting and keeping Yogurt Money from cruel men.”

  Every story must have a resolution and, as on a television series, every resolution must fit a theme—Immigrant Worries are the signposts of Mahtab’s life. This story is about money. You can imagine it, can’t you? You don’t have to travel to faraway places to know that immigrants worry about money because their own wealth is lost in another land. This story is also about a dilemma. Should she take it, she wonders, this money that belongs to a rich Persian man with a bruised ego and a fear for his reputation?

  In her third year of college, Mahtab begins to wonder what she should do with her life. She wants to be a journalist, a storyteller for a big respected magazine—it is what we both wanted as children. So she travels to Boston and New York for interviews, wearing black pantsuits with multicolored shirts and playful sheaths peeking out from under st
ern woolen collars. She gets French manicures, highlights her hair, and waits for someone to offer her a place in the world. In the lobbies of publishing giants, she sits across from similarly dressed twentysomething men and women all in black. Crows in a line.

  Since James, she hasn’t had time for men or relationships. She spends her nights reading her books and selling tickets at a local theater for extra money.

  It’s lunchtime. Mahtab and Clara, of the broken-high-heel day, eat salads on the lawn outside Harvard’s famous Widener Library—wait, is there a lawn outside Widener Library? Yes, I’m certain there is. Mahtab lies on the grass, her hands behind her head. She adjusts her sunglasses on her nose and picks at her food. She doesn’t notice the dark, smiling boy with the inquisitive expression standing over her. He’s young, no older than Mahtab, possibly in his last year, poorly shaven, tall, and dressed in expensive jeans. “Are you Iranian?” he asks. “I have good radar, but I wasn’t sure about you.”

  “It’s because I had my nose done,” Mahtab says in a matter-of-fact, almost bored way. His beauty doesn’t faze her in the least. She is accustomed to exquisite men.

  “That’s usually the first sign,” he says. His adolescent smile makes her laugh.

  His name is Cameron. He pronounces it the Western way, not like the Persian Kamran. Cameron Aryanpur. Aryan Poor. She likes his name.

  “So, May.” Cameron says her name with skepticism, like a placeholder, like a We’ll see. “Do you have time to go out with a poor Aryan?”

  “How poor?” she says, and accepts before he can answer.

  Cameron is the first Persian man Mahtab has ever dated, or even considered dating. In many ways, their lives have paralleled, though Cameron’s family left Iran long before the revolution, ensuring the safety of their fortune in European currencies and American real estate. As the school year rolls along, Mahtab finds herself always near him. They spend evenings in his dorm room, watching movies, talking in Farsi, reheating classic dishes that his mother has brought from Westchester. Tomato and eggplant with lamb. Fenugreek, parsley, and coriander with lamb. Split peas and potatoes with lamb.

  They talk about food, music, books—all they have retained of their culture. They flirt in English and Farsi, a miraculous middle language that is oddly sensual. They leave notes for each other on their dorm-room message boards in English using Farsi letters, like a grade school secret code. Since no one else can read the notes, they write the most scandalous things. You see, Khanom Omidi, they can do this in plain daylight and no one will stop them. To her delight, Mahtab finds that she is much tawdrier than she ever imagined. She takes hours composing these cheap messages to him. Cameron too seems enraptured by their shared blood, and she wonders if they are acting in some ethnic play. Their private theater continues for a long time. It consumes her like a good movie.

  They sit together in lecture halls, wearing jeans and sweatshirts. They go to a party in their pajamas. They linger around dining tables with red wine and thesis pages.

  Sometimes he tries lines on her, calling her his favorite Persian dish or his Shomali Shahzadeh, and she rolls her almond eyes, thinking he is training to navigate his way around all Persian women. She’s never met someone so confident in his own charm, yet so obviously learning. He exudes youth, like Abbas exudes death. But the poor Aryan isn’t only a princeling of sorts, a fellow child of Baba Harvard, he is also a poet, afflicted with the same immigrant puzzles that perplex Mahtab. She tells him she hates her theater job and that she wants to be a journalist. He tells her that he wants to go back to Iran, to become involved in some sort of resistance, to pursue a new regime. He is enamored with the idea of an underground movement—and all things underground: movies, music, books—of rediscovering “our homeland.” He uses Farsi words deliberately in his English: roosari, not “scarf”; khiar-shoor, not “pickles.”

  “He’s like you, Saba jan,” says Khanom Omidi, “mixing English into your talk.”

  Like every American child of foreign parents, Cameron likes to analyze and categorize his people until the riddles feel solved. It makes Mahtab feel a sad empathy.

  You may not know this, Khanom Omidi, but like us, American Persians can feel the loss of old Iran, of beautiful Iran, the Iran that was full of romance. Maybe America is empty for them, so they make Iran into a heaven that no longer exists. Like Agha Thomas Wolfe says in a book I just bought from the Tehrani: You can’t go home again. Home is never the same. Mahtab and Cameron know this. Even I, who have never left, know this. I see my home changing. Every month I read the ghostly misery of those so-lucky immigrants in letters from distant cousins. They are a wandering people, and they gravitate to each other like lost mongrels who know each other’s smell.

  “Show some respect to the ancestors,” Cameron says one day when Mahtab sacrifices rice for fear of an unforgiving dress. “You can’t just decide to change a thousand-year-old dish. There should be rules for being a real Persian, wherever you live.” He smiles at Mahtab with gleaming white teeth set off by shiny black bohemian hair that clashes with his chic clothes and pretty stubble manicured in a distinctly un-Islamic way.

  “Reza has stubble like that. Is that what this Cameron looks like? Like Reza?”

  Oh no, no, even Reza doesn’t have magazine teeth like these. You get them in America, along with your fancy degree. There are some bridges we can never cross all the way from this village, Khanom Omidi. But Mahtab can. She too has white teeth all in a row, arranged for her by dentists when she was twelve or thirteen. She has that perfect postsurgery nose too. They are such a pair—chosen by nature, like twins.

  Her wealthy Iranian is very different from my old decrepit one.

  Cameron’s comment leads to an analysis of every dish, every custom and ritual. Is this a hard rule? Is that truly Persian or just Arabic? Don’t they do this differently in the South? In one night they create a set of commandments scribbled out on the back of an old history exam. They try to write it in Farsi, but neither remembers how to spell the big words and they end up stumbling through at a fourth-grade level before switching to English. They laugh easily at themselves, and neither is particularly embarrassed.

  Do you want to hear it, Khanom Omidi? My friend the Tehrani confirmed this for me, and let me tell you, American Iranians have a bizarre sense of what makes them Persian. It makes me wonder if my information about Americans is as cartoonish, because in their quest to find an old, forgotten Iran, they have turned us into soft-bellied muses in garden-side sketches and warriors carved in the ruins of Persepolis. We are no more than smoky figures wafting out of poetry books. The Tehrani tells me that the ones who have been away the longest worship the dirtiest shalizar worker like homesick disciples. Cameron and Mahtab too lose hours scribbling their so-called rules:

  To achieve Persian authenticity, you order pickled garlic with dinner. In a Western restaurant, where no garlic sits stewing in brine for ten years, you order yogurt and raw onions, or raw radishes, mint, and basil to eat with your food. You consider an appetizer the product of Western foolishness, because what pansy appetite needs to be coaxed awake? You eat with a spoon, never a fork and knife, because what horrible cook leaves meat so tough that it would require anything but a spoon? You add a raw egg yolk and butter to your rice, skipping this step only for a rich sauce. You never stop at two or three cups of tea, and you eat something made with honey for dessert. You lie back afterward on a mound of pillows—you are inevitably sitting on a hand-crafted rug on the floor—smoke too much, drink more tea.

  You never whisper when a scream will do; never reveal truth when a lie will do.

  Oh, the miracle of being born below the Caspian. You may be endowed with a shrieking, matricidal, six-horse jinn of a temper. You may be granted the most unfortunate crow’s beak of a nose. And, unless you’re a dehati with no roots, or a half-breed, you almost certainly have a history of poetic lunacy in the family. B
ut it’s all worth the ability to metabolize a small deer overnight.

  “Oh, Saba jan, that is so true! Even worse than that, if you ask me.”

  They laugh loudly and spill their drinks as Cameron, in his politician’s voice, proclaims their work finished, and Mahtab cheers and decides to be in love. What a strange world. My Mahtab, so many scoops of a teaspoon away, still manages to fall in love with a Persian man. Should I warn her? If I only knew how to reach her.

  In this blissful time before he is tested, Cameron seems beautiful to her.

  Before Abbas became a monster, he too seemed fragile and gentle, and I loved him in a different way. He was a sort of father to me, when my own was unavailable. But Mahtab doesn’t need a father now. She has Baba Harvard. And so, before his transformation into Abbas, Cameron is his own unique self, his natural self, a wandering, displaced male Mahtab. An exile and a perfect fit.

  She doesn’t know that her ideal Iranian other self—though he stands just there, brushing his teeth while she watches him in the bathroom mirror—doesn’t exist.

  She wants to touch him, to hold him, to throw away her reservations and crawl into his clothes with him. Why does he not want that too? Sometimes when he’s asleep on his back with all his limbs spread out, she lies on top of him in the exact same formation, so that every centimeter of her is touching him, from the tips of her toes on his ankles to the top of her head just below his chin, with every finger perfectly aligned to his. She listens to his slow heartbeat and wishes they could freeze in this pose, like two halves of a starfish.