Butterfly Stitching

by Shermin Kruse

  “Mr. Zarami, children smile sometimes. It’s nothing to fret about.”

  Reza jumped on a peach, making a squishy sound and staining the stone ground with its yucky guts. Sahar loved peaches and could not believe that her peach-hating brother was just wasting a peach like that. Mr. Zarami’s reaction was far more severe.

  “Dear Samira Khanum, your lack of organization is truly astounding,” he cried. Sahar saw beads of sweat collecting on his forehead.

  “Sahar, didn’t I tell you to help your brother?”

  “But I’m not the one who—”

  “How’s standing there and staring going to help pick up the fruit?”

  “Why are you snapping at me when he’s the one who’s being bad!”

  “Sahar, you’re the older sister. Now don’t argue and do as I say.” Maman turned her attention to Mr. Zarami. “Children these days! They just run after whatever bit of joy and color they can.”

  Sahar thought maybe Mr. Glossies would nod and walk away at this perfectly reasonable explanation.

  He did not.

  Instead, he ranted: Rusted open gates are unsafe. We’re coming out of a revolution. For democracy. The purest of intentions birthing the bloodiest of deaths. Mix one part uncertain post-revolutionary time, two parts escalating war with Iraq. Recipe of war and death. Seven families in this building. Thirteen children in all. Must protect the children. Gates must be closed immediately upon entry onto the courtyard so we don’t die like our martyred brothers. We’re dying. Your peaches are everywhere. Chaos. Everywhere.

  As Mr. Glossies went on, the curve on her maman’s lips faded and Sahar saw them droop down to the mole on her left cheek. Some falls were not easily regained. Sahar looked up at the sky. It was smoggy, like it was holding Mr. Glossies’ tears. Sahar knew why he was so restless.

  She looked at his left hand. The ring, always a little too loose on his finger, was still there. His wife dead in the ground but the ring still there. Sahar tried to picture her face, but could not. The whole time she was alive, Sahar never saw her face. It always covered with the niqab with only a slit for the eyes. No bare lips or cheeks. No smile or frown. She would bake cookies for Sahar and the twins, but chastise Maman for not covering up more. “Seduction’s in the face,” she would say. Sahar liked her cookies. They had almonds, pistachios and rosewater in them. Mrs. Glossies did not have children of her own to bake cookies for. Until one day, after years of trying, Mr. and Mrs. Glossies sang the miraculous news to everyone everywhere they went. She was seven months along, buying a bassinet for the baby, when the missile hit the store. Mr. Glossies was at work. He was left. Alone.

  Wife-and-child-losing mania followed.

  Sahar watched the ring move back and forth on his finger as he waved his arms about. What if it fell off? She thought he would just die if that happened. When he finally paused his rant to take a breath, Maman used her motherly voice, “I’m sorry Mr. Zarami. You relax now. I promise to take greater care.”

  Maman had this way of controlling the moods of adults, sometimes just by adjusting the look in her eyes or the tone of her voice. Maybe it was because she was unusually taller than everyone else, even many of the men. Or perhaps it was the way she seemed to know so much about every topic that the adults talked about, like politics, history, art and literature. She could even speak four languages. Or maybe it was that she painted; how she was one of the few artists who still exhibited despite the revolution and the war. Or maybe none of that had anything to do with it, and it was, as Baba said, the way her defined lips stare out at the world through her porcelain skin. Whatever it was, people stopped and listened when Maman talked. And Mr. Glossies did too.

  He lowered his eyes to the ground, avoiding Maman’s delicate concern.

  “Good day now.” His voice was a quaky whisper and he appeared shorter to Sahar, who had always thought him to be one of the tallest men she knew.

  “Good day.” Maman turned around and walked briskly to the gates, Raumbod and two grocery bags still in her right arm, bouncing up and down and side-to-side. Mr. Glossies watched, made sure the gates were closed, and scaled the stairs in slow surrender. Sahar pulled Reza over to the peaches, stretched the bottom of his shirt outward, and placed the non-squished peaches, one by one, into the makeshift pouch. “Go on up,” she said to him. “Maman is right behind us. She’ll open the door.” She picked up the melons and climbed to the third floor with him.

  There were four apartments on the third floor which, like every other floor, was shaped like an H. The horizontal part of the H was the hallway that connected the two units on the west side with the two units on the east side. All of the kitchens faced into the courtyard beneath. They were not inside their apartment more than thirty seconds before Maman ripped off her headscarf and freed her dark curls drizzled with a few grays.

  “Poor man,” Maman said.

  “He’s such a creepy old man!” Sahar said.

  “Sahar, you should always be kind to Mr. Zarami and treat him with respect. He’s a good man.”

  “But Maman jan,” Sahar was down the hall already, “why should I show respect to Mr. Glos—er . . . I mean Mr. Zarami, when he yells at me for no good reason?”

  Maman walked to the kitchen and opened the window. “Salam Shamsi Khanum!” She yelled out the window to Mrs. Shamsi’s kitchen across the H.

  “Salam koshgel!” Mrs. Shamsi’s faint voice complimented.

  Her maman turned back to her. ”Maybe he’s got no good reason to yell, my sweet. But he has reason to cry.”

  As her maman spoke, Sahar remembered a violin concert she had seen on video. There was a lone violin being played on the golden-trimmed stage of a vast concert hall with the best acoustics. Sometimes tender, sometimes viciously intense, just like her maman. Sahar bounced down the hallway and into the kitchen to find Maman surrounded by musical notes.

  The twins had already placed themselves on the black-and-white tiled floor and were lost in a clapping game. They did not see the musical notes, or maybe they did but did not know what they were because their violin teacher had not started them on music theory. Sahar knew because Maman taught her about music’s language on her keyboard twice a week.

  “Have you ever watched his yellow eyes as he yells? Have you noticed how they well up with tears?” Maman said in a song-like tone.

  Sahar examined the notes dancing around her maman. The beautiful black treble clef with its curvy body. The masculine base clef’s dots (a crescendo right at its peak). She told the notes in the kitchen to dance for her.

  “Well? Have you seen the dark pockets underneath his eyes?” Maman asked.

  “Yes!” Sahar jumped back into reality. “I thought I was imagining them, but if you see them too, then the black pockets must really be there. Did someone push his eyes in too far?”

  Three sharp signatures, rest for an eighth of a note, then harmonize.

  “Those are sockets of sorrow, my dear. His pain was too much to be contained merely by his apartment, so some of it had to move in beneath his eyes. He screams and yells about the gates because he doesn’t want you and the rest of us to get hurt the way his family did.”

  Sahar listened to the music and imagined Mr. Glossies’ pain as saffron-yellow-colored goo. She was certain, in fact, that the inside of his apartment must be filled with the goo. Sticky, slushy, irritating, saffron-yellow goo making itself comfortable, dripping off Mr. Glossies’ couch, oozing down his walls, running down his hallway and forcing itself beneath Mr. Glossies’ eyes. All the beautiful, elegant notes started to run into each other and merge into something thick and awkward. Her maman was right. Poor man.

  “Those who’ve lost a great deal lose themselves. We should have compassion for Mr. Zarami, but we shouldn’t let ourselves get caught up in his hysteria. Do you understand?”

  Yet another thing that Sahar did not want to admit she did not understand.

  “But, Maman, how does he even know the front gate’s open every t
ime? I mean, does he just stand by his window all day and watch for the gate?”

  Her maman flashed her sneaky smile, leaned close and whispered, “You know, I think that he can smell an open gate!”

  Sahar would not have believed it were it not for all those extra-long nose hairs she had noticed poking out of Mr. Glossies’ nostrils. They must give him superior smelling skills.

  3

  Nothing, not even bombs shattering Tehran around her, exempted Sahar from taking her studies seriously. School cancellations had become so commonplace that the government instituted televised learning programs for children. Her first order of business every day was to sit through the hour of mathematics, half hour of science and half hour of reading-related programming for third and fourth grades. But that was not the end of it. Her vigilante of a maman put no faith in the programming and took it upon herself to direct teachings during school closings.

  That afternoon, Maman supervised Sahar’s math drills while the twins read their storybooks. The small family room where the homemade scholastic activities were conducted was barely furnished. The slashes in the old couch against the back wall were nicely hidden by the beautiful tapestry that her great-aunt had woven the previous summer. Gold and silver threads bejeweled the tapestry and complemented the patterns of the inherited Persian rug that added flavor to the beige carpeting. Across from the couch on the other side of the room was a small television with a cracked dial that controlled two channels. The television sat on an old side table that Maman had bought second-hand. A small window towered next to the television. Sahar, who looked at every room as though it was designed just for her, often redecorated the room in her mind’s eye. She always decided that the current design was the best, although she would have preferred a bigger windowsill where a bird might sometimes sit and sing.

  Despite scarce furnishings the room was not plain. Dozens of portraits, brought to life by her maman’s bold brush strokes, watched from nearly every inch of the walls. Sahar loved looking at them, these paintings that came from the insides of her maman. There were many paintings of Sahar and her brothers, but one in particular was her favorite to command. The three of them sat on the sands of the Caspian Sea, wreaths of jasmine in their hair. Maman had taught her how to make them with a needle and thread. This one was painted live, so there were sparkles of real sand mixed with the paint. Sahar stepped up to the painting and tasted the salty air. They were there last year, staying in the villa in Amoo Hassan’s apple farm. Sahar jumped into the painting, tasted the salty air, and walked through the beach to the apple farm. She picked three apples, one for each of them. Sticks for their arms and legs. A piece of ashy wood from last night’s fire to paint the faces. There were no blaring alerts or thudding missiles and the air tasted salty. Back on the beach, the three of them now had three apple-men. Reza’s was the funniest because he was sticking out his tongue.

  She stepped out of that painting and turned to Riri, maman’s childhood Persian kitty. This piece was oval, while all of the others were squares or rectangles. Riri sat in the middle in all of his glorious pink and gray. Sahar winked at him, and he purred back at her. Sahar reached out her hand and Riri rubbed his soft head against her palm. Then he jumped out of the painting, landing softly between Sahar’s legs, tickling her skin with his soft fur, then bouncing on the sofa and cozying on the armrest.

  “You have to go back into your painting Riri,” she said. “Or they’ll catch you.”

  “Meow!” Riri replied, cozying into a ball of fur and showing no interest in moving.

  “I’m worried about you Riri. You know they kill all the pets now.”

  “Meow?”

  “It’s the Morality Police. They’ll put a long needle inside of you if they find you. They say you’re haram because you’re unclean.”

  “Meow!”

  “Come on, pretty baby. You can have your dreams and be cozy inside your frame where it’s safe.” She picked him up, gave him a kiss on the forehead, and put him back inside the painting.

  Riri was in the middle of two black and whites. One was an abstract of Sahar’s deceased granny with broken mirrors and tiles in the paint. Sahar worried that this painting scared Riri quite a bit. The other, a portrait of Baba’s younger face. A face without any of the lines it had now, and a sturdier smile. She thought Baba with the younger face was happy sitting next to Riri on the wall and maybe helped Riri be less scared. Even now he reached his hand out of his canvas to pet the kitty and sing a lullaby to help him sleep. Sahar listened to it too, since it was her favorite lullaby. My baby, I’ll help you sleep till the wind of morn blows. My baby, your baba is on a journey and I’m afraid. Like the petal fears the breeze. My baby, la la, you’re the world to me, la la.

  But Sahar’s favorite paintings were of people she had never met. Like the one of the sad young lady in a green dress that had hung on one wall or another ever since Sahar was born. Her maman insisted the young lady was just a stranger who caught her eye during a stroll one sunny afternoon but Sahar knew that could not be true. The lady had eyes too intense for a stranger and she stood beside a beautiful garden with a fountain in the center that was nothing like any of Tehran’s gardens or parks.

  Besides the lady in green, another piece mystified Sahar: an old woman with a torn dress and frozen eyes. There was something bewitching about her that frightened Sahar. Maman claimed the torn woman was the wife of a tea-shop owner in the small village where Maman was raised. But there was more to the haunting shadows in this painting. She was much more familiar, and meant more to Maman, than just another villager. Sahar tried to focus on her multiplication tables while the window cast the mid-afternoon’s glare onto the television screen and leaked noises of the neighbor’s soccer-playing children.

  “Boys, don’t think I don’t see you.” Maman turned to the twins who were getting antsy. “How can you be reading when your eyes are focused on the window?”

  The twins were in unison. “Sorry, Maman.”

  “Finish your books and then you can go in the yard and play with the other kids. I promise. And Sahar, I’m not hearing your drills!”

  “I’m doing them!”

  “I want to hear them out loud. It’s very important that you memorize the entire table.”

  “Basheh, Maman jan.”

  “Out loud now so I can hear. Now, twelve times four is . . .”

  “Maman, when Baba comes home, can we go for a hike?” Baba always talked about the Alborz Mountains. They stretched throughout northern Iran, from the borders of Armenia in the northwest to the southern end of the Caspian Sea. Baba loved the way the city was nestled in its southern slopes, making the peaks visible from almost any place in Tehran. He often dragged Sahar and her brothers out of bed on holiday mornings to hike the trails.

  “No, my darling, it’s too late in the day now to go for a hike and nothing will get you out of doing your work. So let’s go on. Twelve times four is . . .”

  “Twelve times four is forty eight,” Sahar reluctantly answered. “Twelve times five is sixty.” And so it went, until Maman pounced.

  “Wrong! Twelve times seven is eighty four. Children, I know you don’t want to study. I know you’re afraid of missile attacks. I know you think your homework is pointless. But it isn’t. Your education is the most important thing in the world. It’s all that matters to your baba and me. Because . . . well, because . . . I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you.”

  As good a time as any to tell us what? They’re giving me up for adoption because I’m not nice enough to my brothers. They’re giving up the twins because they wrote on the walls of their bedroom last week. Maybe Baba’s sick—maybe he’s dying.

  I need to learn so I can become a doctor and fix Baba.

  Yes. Baba will die unless I learn to fix him.

  So tricky, that head.

  “Kids, gather around.”

  And so here’s the answer, Sahar thought.

  “I have to tell you some very
exciting news!” Maman smiled. Sahar could always tell when a smile was fake. The eyes did not wrinkle. She had learned this a long time ago: Eyes wrinkling equalled an authentic smile, and Maman’s eyes were not wrinkling.

  “We got our Green Cards!”

  Sahar and her brothers looked at each other, then back to their maman. Green cards?

  “Permanent residency cards—we got permission to leave the country and go to America!”

  “America?” Reza asked.

  “Yes! We’re leaving in about a month.”

  “One month?” Sahar asked.

  “We’re leaving Iran! We’re going to Chicago—that’s a city in America—where there are no bombs or missiles! You’ll never have to wear the hejab again! Isn’t that exciting news?”

  “But isn’t America dead? Didn’t our chanting kill it?” Reza said.

  “Don’t be stupid, Reza.” Sahar tried to convince herself that she knew what was going on. “America doesn’t die just because we chant it. And plus we didn’t even mean it when we were chanting so of course it wasn’t going to die.”

  “Yes, Sahar’s right,” Maman said. “America didn’t die. It’s still very much alive. And there are no missiles there. And you can wear whatever you want on the streets.”

  “Even tank tops like this one?” Reza pulled at his shirt.

  “Even tank tops. And shorts, too! And Sahar and I don’t have to wear the veil if we don’t want to.”

  Sahar was not sure what to feel. She hated the hejab, but this world, this Iran, was all she knew. Her family, her friends, her home, even the vicious flying cockroaches, were all she had ever seen. What does leaving even mean? It was not as though they were moving to a different city or a different province. No. They were moving to a storybook-make-believe-fairy-tale place.

  What if “the West” was the hell that Noorbani Khanum said it was? Or what if it did not really exist at all? Given her confusing world of truths and lies, Sahar was not sure what existed and what did not. Did people play soccer there? Who would Sahar play with? Would her cousins come with her? Probably not. So who would come to their house for parties? How about Narges? Would she have to stay in Iran? Sahar could not leave her behind. Narges would cry. Sahar would cry. That part was not as important because they were used to crying. She could not bring Narges with her either. Her maman needed her to stay, since her brother died and her baba had to go to Evin prison two months ago after Narges fell out of character and accidentally told a teacher about a party at their house. That was very stupid. Everyone knows if a teacher asks you how your parents’ party went you were supposed to say you do not have parties. Maybe after Narges’ baba gets out of Evin he could stay with Narges’ maman and Narges could come to America with Sahar?