by Nayeri, Dina
Up we went and there was maast,
Down we came and there was doogh,
And Mahtab’s story was doroogh (a lie).
Chapter Twenty
LATE AUTUMN 1992
Later they sit together in the shack, drinking cups of hot chocolate imported from Switzerland by one of Dr. Zohreh’s many scattered friends. Saba looks out the frosted window and tries to make out the water below. “It’s true, isn’t it? Everyone believes it. She was taken to prison from the airport and then they said she had never been there.”
Dr. Zohreh nods. “Yes, that’s usually a sign—”
Saba isn’t listening. “And then we never heard from her again.”
“Another sign,” says the doctor matter-of-factly.
Saba takes a sip and taps the window. The far-off outline of the sea in summer used to remind her of her favorite song, the one about the dock and the bay. In winter it used to be a frightful thing, a cavernous black mouth swallowing up her sister. But now the sea is nothing more than many droplets, rocks, algae, and shells.
“I thought I saw her getting on a plane with Mahtab,” she says. “I saw a woman in a blue manteau with a girl my age.”
“You were so young,” says Dr. Zohreh. “Children invent things in order to cope.”
“It’s just such a strange thing. Both of them lost. . . . No bodies, no funeral.” Those words, no bodies, sound morbid, like a betrayal. “And within days of each other.”
“It took weeks for your mother,” Dr. Zohreh corrects. “But yes, it’s a beautiful mystery. And I guess you’re right. It doesn’t help that there are no graves, no closure.”
“I wonder where she is exactly,” Saba muses. “Where in the water.”
“Do you want to talk about that day?” says Dr. Zohreh.
Saba shakes her head. She is consumed with another idea. Yes, she will go to America, but it will be different. She will build a new life for herself and stop searching for some hazy past. And while there is sorrow in knowing that she will never find her mother, that knowledge is also a burden lifted. “I have to go now,” she says.
The drive to Cheshmeh is black and slick, and she is distracted from her thoughts by the condition of the road. Pulling up to her house an hour later, she thinks of Abbas’s funeral, that feeling of power and possibility. The way she took stock of the people around her, the people in her debt, and realized that everything that had been her father’s and husband’s was now hers. On that day she was sure that her patience and suffering had redeemed her, and she was transformed. She longs for that certainty again. She wants to reach for it, grasp that rush of being powerful, no longer just a girl slapped around by the wind. She will do this, she decides, a little each day.
On the day before her departure, while Reza is in Rasht, Saba shuts herself in her room and sorts through her hidden wealth. She puts a third of it in an envelope with the deeds to her properties. Then she and Khanom Omidi sew the other two-thirds of the cash and jewels into the lining of every jacket, every pair of pants, even the suitcase itself, while her father keeps Khanom Basir busy with a suddenly dire level of household incompetence. He is trying so hard for her, Saba notices. He always has.
On her last night walking in her house, sleeping in her bed, looking out onto the garden Reza and Ponneh planted for her, Saba listens to all the music she can’t take with her. She speeds mournfully through all the books that she knows she can buy again in America. She sits up in the bed she still shares with Reza and, for the first time, realizes that this is the very bed on which she was so viciously attacked. Why did she never think to change it? To give it to one of her father’s workers and buy a new one? Maybe it was Reza, the thought of him, the idea that this bed, the knowledge of what happened here, was what held them together. A poor, damaged girl and her childhood friend with his mixed-up sense of chivalry and a weakness for broken things.
Watching Reza sleeping in a tight ball at the edge of her bed, Saba remembers all her favorite times with him. The nights in the mountain shack. Reza with the rusty old guitar in the hammam. But in the end, she decides, the very best times were shared with Ponneh when they were young—the three of them hiding in her father’s pantry, passing stolen joints, hitchhiking to Rasht to search for letters from Mahtab.
She kisses him good night—good-bye—then places all her paperwork in a folder on top of her suitcase and climbs into bed. She falls asleep with her headphones still on, her favorite music playing over and over, because she cannot bear to throw it all away.
Shortly after dawn her father knocks on the door, whispers a greeting, and says he will wait in the sitting room while she gets ready. “I will make you breakfast,” he says, holding up a bulging plastic bag that smells strongly of lavash bread and cheese. John Lennon is singing about rain in a paper cup, dying love, a changing universe, his voice faint and muffled out of her fallen headphones. Soon the frenzy of her last shower in her hammam, her last cup of tea, her last good-bye to all the objects around her overpower him and the music fades away. Around her father’s clumsily prepared breakfast sofreh, she finds him having tea with Reza and Khanom Basir. The air above them is full of tension and tarof and unspoken truths. Khanom Basir shakes her head in mourning and clutches something covered in yesterday’s stew. Saba recognizes the blue edges, the glossy paper—one of the expired plane tickets that she had sunk to the bottom of the trash as she was sorting through the remains of her old life.
“Maybe my brain is finally old, but I’m confused,” Reza’s mother huffs. “It’s a plane ticket. I should have known when I saw that book with foreign pictures.”
“Calm down, Khanom,” says Saba’s father. “She was going to tell you before she left. Now we’re all here and you know everything that’s happening.”
But Khanom Basir isn’t listening. She sinks into a cushion like a lost thing and puts her head in her hands. “You’re leaving him,” she says softly. “I knew you would.”
Reza reaches to help his mother, but she shrugs him away. Her reaction is surprising, because didn’t she want Saba out of her life? The others are silent as Khanom Basir unburdens herself. “After everything my son has gone through, you’re leaving him? I thought things were good now.” She isn’t hysterical. Only curious and sad.
“I’m taking your advice,” Saba says, and sits beside her mother-in-law on the rug and the cushions, their legs tucked beneath their haunches, while the men bring them fresh cups of tea. She takes Khanom Basir’s hand.
Khanom Basir looks up, glassy-eyed. It’s a strange look, and Saba thinks that maybe she is just afraid of being left behind. “What advice?” she asks.
“Only die for someone who at least has a fever for you,” she says.
Khanom Basir gives a resigned laugh. She nods a few times. “You kids have made such a mess. Such a mess.” She sighs and squeezes Saba’s hand. “I want some of the special tea.” The storyteller lifts herself off the floor. She seems to be convincing herself of things. “No need to make a fatwa out of family misunderstandings. My special tea from India would be nice now,” she mutters, leaving unspoken the words before you go and Saba baffled about why they went through such trouble to keep this a secret from her.
They drink the Indian tea in silence, each of them sipping and remembering, interrupting the hush of the early morning only when there is a particularly important memory to share. Khanom Basir conjures up the day seven-year-old Saba proposed to Reza. Reza, in his infinite kindness and penitence—or maybe just his inherited penchant for beautiful lies—talks about their kiss in the yard and how in that moment he was thinking of no one else—what man could? Her father mentions the day she and Mahtab stayed up all night, reading their first shipment of English storybooks, and he realized that these wide-eyed, hungry creatures were never his to keep.
When it is time to go, they reluctantly get up from the sofr
eh, and Saba puts on her manteau and scarf. Reza loiters by the gate, pretending to check on the garden. He takes her hand, touches her cheek. “Now who will sing the lyrics when I play?”
She pulls out the envelope with a third of her liquid assets and the ownership papers for Abbas’s properties. She weighs it in her hand, turns it over one more time, before holding it out to Reza. “This is for Dr. Zohreh and Ponneh. I want you to use it to help their group. And I want you to finish school.”
Reza opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything.
“I want you to hide the money, okay? I’ve rescued it for you.”
Reza begins to shake his head. “No,” he says. She can see his pride is wounded. “I didn’t marry you for this. I would marry you even if you had nothing but your stories.”
“I know,” she says, thinking that this is the best thing he has ever said to her and that she will remember it always. She closes his hand around the envelope and adds, “I’ve always had plenty . . . maybe too much. Let me share it with you. I found out that Abbas’s family still has a claim to the money. They might take away everything you have here, so just hide it, and after it all settles down, you’ll have something.” She notices him looking at the land deeds bewildered. “I haven’t had time to figure out what you should do with the property papers. Maybe nothing. But maybe you can claim it or find a way to sell some before they come for it. But Baba can’t be the one to do this. He’s going to say he knew nothing about my plan to leave.”
“Okay, but—” Reza begins.
“You can’t let Abbas’s brother get the money. You know what I went through.” Reza is looking at his feet now and nodding, and Saba can tell that he is still unsure. “A lot of people sacrificed for this money,” she says. “How much did you and Ponneh go through to protect me? She was there when Abbas died. And you . . . you’ve made me happy since we were children. Now I want you to be happy.”
Reza flips through the stacks of bills and Saba feels a strange unanchored sensation, watching him reluctantly accept her blessing. It feels good to finally give something to Reza. She has wanted to ever since the day they were eleven and he held out all his coins to her in exchange for a music tape. But in all these years and for all her money, she has never found a way.
Before they leave, Saba calls Ponneh’s neighbor and asks her friend to go to Khanom Omidi’s house—quietly, no questions. In a sleepy rush, her father drives her into the wooded area higher on the mountain. When they arrive, the door is cracked open; Saba and Agha Hafezi slip inside. Khanom Omidi is flitting in every direction, heaving Saba’s suitcase toward the door despite her extreme old age.
Ponneh appears from another room, separated from the main sitting area by a hanging canopy. “What’s happening?” she whispers. “You’re really leaving?”
“I just wanted to say good-bye. And say good-bye to Dr. Zohreh for me too, okay?”
“But why?” Ponneh is dumbfounded.
Saba reaches for her friend, hugs her, kisses her cheeks. “I love you, Ponneh jan,” she says. “You were my best friend since Mahtab.”
“What about Reza?” Ponneh’s voice is muffled by Saba’s scarf. “Is he going?”
“He loves you,” says Saba, pulling back to look at her friend. She shrugs as if to say it’s no big deal, that Ponneh shouldn’t worry. “I’m going to make my own life. And one day, when you’ve done all your activist work and things are better, you should marry him. And then you should both visit me.”
“I promise about the visiting part . . . not sure about the marrying part.” Ponneh’s face melts into a smile, as it did when they were small and she and the twins made elaborate plans to steal leftover pastries or get Reza or Kasem into trouble. “Say hello to Shahzadeh Nixon for me,” she says, and Saba can see that all is well between them.
“If you promise to be careful,” she says, “you can send me your photos anytime . . . for the newspapers. I’ll call you with my address.”
She kisses Ponneh good-bye again. It’s over, not as hard as she imagined. Another sister left behind, not so monumental a thing to do when there is a life waiting to be lived. Moments later Saba drops into Khanom Omidi’s arms and inhales her unique scent—a mix of jasmine, turmeric, coins, and dried mulberries—knowing that this friend she will likely never see again. She kisses the old woman’s soft hand, streaked with brown freckles, blue veins, and yellow saffron stains, and thinks of a song the Tehrani gave her once, calling it his favorite. Grandma’s hands used to ache sometimes and swell, a voice like a warm palm to the chest, like a winter korsi, crooned. Will Saba find another such person in New York or California or Texas?
With each good-bye Saba sheds tears, but her hands aren’t desperate to clutch her throat. There is no sense of drowning or being buried alive. Nothing is closing in around her.
Saba and her father spend the day in the bustling Tehran airport. Agha Hafezi paces by the benches in the waiting area as Saba goes through each step that leads to boarding the plane. After she has endured the agony of watching airport security paw through her suitcase—praying with every breath that they don’t search the bottom layers of clothing too carefully—they say good-bye quickly, awkwardly.
“Losing another daughter,” Agha Hafezi sighs.
“Except I can come back anytime I want,” she says, trying to sound cheerful. She wants to apologize for all that she has put him through. For all the nights she ran off to buy illegal tapes or sneaked alcohol into his pantry. Most of all she wants to tell him that she is sorry for all the times she pushed him away when he tried, in his own uncomfortable way, to create a bond. How can she say that she has seen him worrying about her; that she knows he has gone to great pains to help her finally catch her plane to America; that she has seen his shadow running ahead of her and clearing her path for twenty-two years? Before Mahtab’s death, he used to say, “My daughters, I will take you to the sea and dry you with hundred-dollar bills.” Lately she has had a recurring dream in which her father holds a towel made of American bills, arms stretched out, calling out to her. In the dream she is only a little girl, and she turns her back and runs into the sea instead. For so many years she has treated him like the dead parent and chased after her mother. Somehow she managed to miss them both.
But she can’t say these things outright because she has chosen to leave him, has chosen an independent life, the possibility of college and a legacy, over staying close by him. Maybe she will write it all in a letter. Or maybe she will live the rest of her life the way he wanted, grandly, powerfully, secure and unafraid of life’s biggest risks. It won’t be so hard. It’s the way Mahtab lived in all those immigrant stories. And wasn’t the girl in those stories really Saba, after all? Saba Hafezi as she would have been if the world wasn’t so full of rules and punishments and missed flights.
“Remember our father-daughter song?” he asks. He clears his throat, and it seems to Saba that he doesn’t know how to say good-bye.
“I’ll come back one day,” she says. “This isn’t a last good-bye for us.”
“Yes.” Her father nods morosely. Then he takes her face in his rough, sun-chafed farmer’s hands and adds, “I’ve been lucky to have you here for this long.”
Epilogue
CALIFORNIA. AUTUMN 2001
Years have passed. Today the world outside learns to live with all that is new and unnavigated, and Saba rushes to her apartment in California, pops a roll of film into a heavy camera, and packs a suitcase. A few days ago a group of Arab men struck her new country. The twin towers of New York have been attacked twice in the years she has lived here. Every American statesman, bureaucrat, journalist, and right-wing pundit is calling for stricter immigration policies. But Saba has a green card now, is almost an American citizen. It has been three years since she graduated with a degree in journalism from a college where she was four years older than her classmates. Sh
e works for a newspaper. She is a reporter—the real kind, a storyteller without a license to lie, but with the freedom to tell the entire truth.
On this September morning Saba prepares for a road trip to New York—the place where her plane first landed, and where she began her own immigrant life. She scans the streets on the television, the cameras venturing south where more and more of the roads are soiled by smog and debris. The streets look eerie during those first days. A quietness seems to have fallen over this indestructible American city. When she sees a newspaper cover photo of a jubilant Palestinian woman, a dehati, hands in the air, mouth open in rejoicing, Saba feels sick at her own connection with her.
Finding plane tickets has been impossible, so she grabs her laptop and her camera, puts on a pair of travel jeans, and prepares for a long drive to New York. When she walks the streets, with her hidden Persianness, no one blames her. She isn’t accused of anything—just another American participating in the shock. But she wants to stop the passersby and tell them that she is innocent. I’m a Christian, a well-read woman. I will be an American citizen very soon. She wants to say these things in a loud, confident voice, in her overeducated accent with its fake British undertones, to some anonymous assailant.
She has Immigrant Worries now.
Despite the peace of all the years gone by, sometimes in crowded rooms she scans the faces for her mother’s. Once a year she indulges in a letter to former Evin prisoners.
When she returns to California, her camera filled with photos and her notebook with stories, Dr. Zohreh calls. Ever since her move, Saba has slowly acquiesced to Dr. Zohreh’s requests to help her secret group. The two have talked often—when Saba first arrived and later when she felt alone and needed a mother to listen to her fears. “Is everything okay? I’ve been trying to get through for days.”