by Donia Bijan
Seven
Everyone knows the rules. Never yield the right of way. Never stay in your own lane. Never slow down at a yellow light. If you missed your exit, simply put your car in reverse. You may change the direction of a one-way street. Blow your horn angrily and with abandon.
Noor cowered in the backseat holding a thermos of strong black tea and clenched her teeth as their taxi driver slammed on the brakes and jerked the car through traffic. Lily had her earphones in and glanced curiously at the relic Zod held in his lap, a Sony Walkman. They both seemed unmoved even though an accident seemed certain.
To Lily it resembled a video game, and indeed their driver seemed to be enjoying himself, fluid through the frantic rise and fall of horns as the world expanded beyond the compound. They were on a wide boulevard, which, like many streets, had been renamed post-revolution after imams and martyrs. But like childhood friends insisting on a nickname, motorists used the old street names in cheeky contempt of the clerics, and not unlike cabbies the world over, their driver sized up his three passengers and knew what he could get away with.
Without speaking a word, Noor’s foreignness was manifold in her bewildered gaze, the awkward knot of her headscarf, her sheepish smile—years in America had taught her to smile at everyone and apologize often. The driver slipped a cassette into the stereo and Noor softened with the first chords of Cat Stevens’ “Moonshadow.” Their eyes locked in the rearview mirror and she saw the driver was about her age, late forties. She looked around the cab’s interior, at the worn trim of the seat cushions, and it occurred to her that this song was played for her—a reassurance that within the confines of this beat-up metal box, they were safe. A bootleg library of cassettes under the front seat, ranging from the Bee Gees to Madonna to sermons, assured a good tip. Nevertheless, he attempted to refuse payment when they arrived at the hospital—an ingratiating and obligatory ritual common among tradesmen. Zod pressed a bill into his palm and asked if he could return to pick them up in an hour.
Dr. Mehran, a compact man with a thick head of salt-and-pepper curls, met them in the lobby and rushed them past a waiting room choked with patients. They were soon inside a small office, simply furnished with a desk and mismatched chairs.
“Miss, you didn’t have to bring your own tea. We may not have much left in this country, but we can still provide tea for our guests.” Noor blushed and quickly shoved the thermos into her cavernous handbag. Idiot, she thought. To have forgotten the ancient rules of hospitality in her homeland was proof of how far she had traveled from the essential ingredients of her culture. This wasn’t Kaiser Hospital, with its coin-operated dispenser of dishwater coffee and fake cream in Styrofoam cups. Within minutes an orderly rapped on the door and came in with a tray, serving them each a glass of tea and leaving a plate of butter cookies and a bowl of sugar cubes on the desk.
Zod looked comfortable seated between Noor and Lily, as if they were here for a social visit. And indeed, the doctor’s eyes, though weary, shone with warmth. He and Zod had only known each other within the walls of Café Leila, but their friendship ran deep. Year after year he sat in the company of other men like himself, who had their own problems yet came to share a meal at Zod’s table. They all had burdens in their lives, but they always cheered up as though seeing one another after a long absence, when in fact it had been only days and they were just glad to get away for an hour or two to chat over a bowl of stew. In Persian, the word del refers to both the heart and the belly. Considering that Zod lived in people’s stomachs, he may not have been as beloved if he were a mechanic or an accountant.
They spent fifteen minutes chatting before Noor felt the urge to interrupt. She had so many questions and worried they were running out of their allotted time—surely this doctor had other patients to see—but Doktor was in no hurry to put his friend through any discomfort.
“Each generation has less patience than the one before,” he said, reaching for a cookie and reciting a line of poetry alluding to youth. He came from a generation of Iranians who quoted verses as if they floated in the air above them and simply needed to be plucked like apples to clarify their opinions. Noor took a polite sip of her tea while Lily bit daintily into her third cookie. Nassim’s words echoed in her ear—what was she doing at this tea party when they could’ve been at Stanford Hospital?
In the days prior to their appointment Noor had pleaded again with Dr. Mehran on the phone to tell her what he knew, and although the doctor had finally broken his promise, Zod had no intention of undergoing chemotherapy. He only agreed to come to the appointment to please his daughter. Having suffered bouts of food poisoning as a child, he dreaded relentless nausea more than the plague itself. He did not want to lie in a hospital bed with tubes in every pore. He wanted to live his life, what little was left of it, and face death in the privacy of his home.
“Don’t you think, Doktor, that my father should have the treatment?” Noor blurted out, trying to steer the conversation to Zod’s health.
“Should he?” Dr. Mehran queried, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes, shouldn’t he at least try? There must be a way to slow this down. Do you think he’ll have a better chance if we go to America? You can’t just give up!” Noor urged. Abruptly, Dr. Mehran stood up.
“Give up? Give. Up?” His voice cracked. Veins bulged from his temples, threatening to erupt, and he cleared his throat before launching into a litany of statistics and offering to show Noor the CT scans that showed the metastasized cancer. Zod and Lily drained their tea and frowned into their empty cups while Noor gazed at the cross-sectional images of her father’s organs, at the pancreas protruding below the stomach like a conch shell—gravelly with tumors. She covered her mouth to stifle a sob. Dr. Mehran turned to face her, a gentleness returned to his wide-set eyes.
“My dear, you are a nurse, so I don’t have to tell you that the best thing we can do for your father at this stage is to offer palliative care and make him comfortable so he can at least enjoy your company. If we had caught it sooner, yes, you could have taken him abroad for care. I concede that he may not have had access to the drugs here that we can’t get for our patients, due to sanctions, not knowledge.”
Sufficiently chastised, Noor looked back at Zod’s shrunken frame, his long bony fingers folded on his lap, a painful realization, no longer private, occupying the space between them. Dr. Mehran slumped in a chair, his skills exhausted, wounded in much the same way as his patient. A doctor relies on clinical intuition and he blamed himself for failing to see the symptoms earlier.
Lily, spared by the language barrier but sensing the gloom, searched Noor’s face for clues. It had been so long since Lily looked at her without cold contempt that Noor felt unnerved. If only she could run outside, if only she had never left, if only she had come back sooner. I’m always too late, she thought, feeling as if she was a migratory bird separated from her flock.
Dr. Mehran stood to embrace his friend and kissed him on the cheeks, first the left, then the right, then retreated behind his desk, bowing to Noor and Lily. They filed out into the lobby, past tired mothers and colicky babies, past sullen husbands, through messy wards crowded and noisy with mobile phone conversations augmented by the delivery of lunch trays, banter between medical personnel, visitors bearing bags of fresh fruit, and a lone security guard lighting a cigarette then flicking the match into an open trash bin. Outside the main entrance the air was dry and hot. A cluster of men stood around smoking and parted to let them through, throwing sidelong glances in Lily’s direction.
Their taxi was waiting for them at the curb and Noor caught the driver’s eye again as they climbed in, knowing that without Zod’s presence, he would feel at liberty to chat. She wished for someone to talk to, someone who didn’t know her and wouldn’t judge her. How often in movies did a troubled person pour her heart out in the backseat of a cab while they drove aimlessly through dark streets? Zod, sitting between them, leaned forward and spoke softly, instructing the cabbie to
take them uptown to Darband. Noor, about to object, was silenced by the hand placed on her lap.
“Shush, we are going to lunch. I want to take my granddaughter to the hills for some fresh air and a nice kebab before she goes back to America.” Then he sank back, offering a jaundiced palm to each of them.
What he really wanted was the plain pleasure of sitting across from them, to look into Lily’s eyes and to hold his daughter’s hand. There were so many things they ought to know and he had so little time left to tell Noor to start living up to her name, for God’s sake. Blinded by her troubles, unable to raise her head, to exert herself, clinging to the exaggerated memories of her youth. When had this girl, who defied them in childhood, who never got her way fast enough, grown timid and undemanding, so frustratingly passive in the face of humiliation? Why did she think herself so undeserving of love, merely enduring life like a pebble in her shoe and sidestepping people’s shortcomings, talking as though she had caused Nelson’s infidelity—a watchfulness grown inward, doubtful and wary of her own child even. Lily seemed a loose tendril, unattached and spiraling, with no direction from either parent. She may have looked eighteen, but there was still a small, uncertain girl underneath that vengeful silence. What lesson did Noor aim to teach by bringing her here?
In the old days, when they went to the restaurant in Darband where they celebrated special occasions, Pari would dress the children in party clothes, choose a silk tie for Zod, and come downstairs in one of her pretty gowns, the scent of Diorissimo filling the front hall, reminiscent of lily of the valley. They would pile into the Peugeot to drive the narrow roads towards the mountains that hugged Tehran.
Zod especially had loved these outings that opened a world beyond Café Leila, that offered the taste of another’s hand. He often grew weary of his own cooking—the predictableness of it—and his stomach rumbled joyously at the thought of spooning someone else’s rice into his mouth. How rare to be just the four of them, a family all his own. Even now, in spite of the writhing in his stomach, he tingled at the thought of taking his girls there.
The road curved as they climbed the mountainside, the driver not once signaling or slowing down at the sharp bends, winding upward, round and round. Noor grew queasy and cracked the window to let the wind blow into her face. A part of her was curious to see again the pretty village deep in the mountains. Darband was their special place when she was growing up—it was where the water in the streams sparkled and on weekend hikes she could cool her feet in the icy water while sitting under the shade of trees, but so far there wasn’t a tree or a bush in sight. Tall buildings towered on both sides of the narrow road, their stark gray facades rippling as they raced past and Noor searched for intervals in between where she might catch a clear view of bare ridges, but it made her dizzy. Much longer and they would have to pull over.
At last they swung round and stopped at the foothills. Zod tapped the driver’s shoulder and asked him to wait for them as Noor and Lily slid out the backseat. Noor paused to breathe in the cool air, looking up at café terraces fanning the hillside, dotted with colored lights. They set out to walk the steep trail following the scent of hot bread and the clattering of pots and pans.
Lily dropped behind, taking in the modern apartment buildings straddling the rugged hills, the train of mules bearing panniers of pomegranates and eggplants, and the noon call to prayer. So this is what it’s like outside the walls of their compound: concrete, cars, open ditches, men gaping at her, and this in-between landscape, not rural, not urban, Tehran pushing against it, arm wrestling the mountain.
They sat under a walnut tree on wooden benches draped with kilims and soon the table was covered with small dishes of yogurt, olives cured with angelica, eggplant and whey cooked to a silky paste, piles of basil, cilantro, and tarragon, and a pitcher of doogh, the tangy yogurt drink spiked with mint that a jolly waiter in a snug tailcoat poured into stem glasses, all the while exchanging pleasantries with Zod.
“You must not miss us as much as we miss you,” he teased, bowing at Zod’s request to have lunch delivered to their taxi driver waiting at the bottom of the hill. Lily watched as a waiter traversed the narrow stairs to the parking lot, holding aloft a plate of kebab with rice and a Coke.
Noor wondered how her father could stand to look at all this food, to smell it, to remember the taste of it, and not eat it. But Zod had eaten his fill of olives, orchards of them, eggplants dressed one thousand and one ways, bushels of mint and tarragon, towers of naan and barrels of doogh—he saw it all before him like a mural, layers upon layers of shapes he had sampled and savored. How much does a man need to eat in a lifetime? What he longed for was to watch Noor wrap warm bread around sheep’s milk cheese with walnuts and basil to make parcels for Lily, to feed her child by hand the way he and Pari had done. Did he really have to show her how it’s done? Perhaps, because Noor sat before him like a stone with an impenetrable gaze while his granddaughter stared at the dishes before her with mild curiosity.
Exasperated, Zod showed Lily how to assemble a tasty wrap and fed her. “She can do it herself, Baba,” Noor murmured. “No. She can’t,” he replied, irritated. “You must make it for her.” So when the oval platters piled with rice and skewers of saffron chicken arrived, he kicked Noor under the table, urging her to serve Lily first, to fold an egg yolk into the steaming rice and sprinkle it with sumac.
Zod had not been back to Darband since his sister-in-law’s brief visit last year. Here he felt like a country boy, saw it as an island that rose from the foothills all the way to its snowcapped peaks. He had hiked these trails with his brothers and later with Pari, starting out early and stopping for breakfast at one of the many teahouses tucked in among the ridges, mopping comb honey with slabs of just-baked bread and washing it down with hot black tea.
There were more houses on its slopes than he remembered and garbage strewn in the murky brown streams, a garish reminder of a city hand encroaching, but it remained earnest as a place you could still walk under a gray sky and accept a glass of tea while sitting on a cold rock. He would like to take Lily along the footpaths, to prolong their outing—that they would walk in silence didn’t matter because it had become unspokenly clear that she was glad Zod deflected her mother’s attention from her.
Having Noor with him for the past week had been a trial and a comfort; she was present but absent, attentive but distracted, circling him from dawn until sundown. If he rested his eyes for a moment, she asked if he wanted to lie down. If he went to lie down, she urged him to walk in the garden for fresh air. If he took a stroll, she followed a few paces behind. If he sped up to prove his endurance, she tugged on his sleeve to slow down. If Naneh Goli fried him an egg, she swabbed obsessively at the delicious grease with a napkin until it cooled and he didn’t want it anymore. She searched for a blender to puree dandelions and carrots to make healthy shakes and watched him politely sip the brackish contents of a riverbed, which he promptly vomited back up. If he did his crossword puzzle for too long in the bathroom, she stood vigil, compulsively knocking at the door—“Baba? Baba? Baba?”—until he replied, “A river in northern France?” She mumbled something and slouched away. What had they taught her in nursing school? he wondered.
AFTER LUNCH THE TAXI driver safely returned them home and Zod, exhausted from the outing, dozed on the couch, snoring away beneath an old quilt. Noor watched him sleep. She understood that her father wished to write his own ending. Noor had seen people suffer. She helped keep them alive. You know how it ends yet you continue as though you don’t. Her father seemed to have rebounded after their visit to Dr. Mehran, appearing happy even, as if having the cancer spelled out for his daughter relieved the burden of fighting the disease.
Noor thought about how the years had passed her by, like the ripped pages of old calendars, then this single bittersweet week that stretched with remarkable detail. The excitement of homecoming, the first day back, sleeping in her brother’s tiny room on the top floor, across from her old ro
om with the shared bath, where her daughter now sleeps, the familiar scents of a house she grew up in, Lily coming downstairs to sit quietly with Zod, and, finally, the darkest hour in the doctor’s office—Noor remembered every moment.
Naneh Goli took her hand and sat Noor down at the kitchen table, then resumed stirring the Turkish coffee in a long-handled copper pot on the stove. She placed two demitasses between them and they sipped in silence. Later Noor would carefully flip her cup over the saucer and Naneh Goli would twirl it in her calloused hands, interpreting the patterns and symbols left on the walls of the cup by the coffee grounds.
“Do you see this tree, Parinoor? See, it is late autumn and it’s lost all but one leaf—one stubborn leaf swinging from a branch, not letting the tree sleep. Look here, look at this person sitting on a rock facing the horizon. She thinks she’s alone, but there to her right, see the figure standing on the bow of a ship?”
Noor listened to her soothing voice and remembered the days she had come home from school to find five or six women, including her mother, leaning into Naneh Goli while she read their fortunes. There was always, always, a figure sitting on a dock waiting for her ship to come in, a ship carrying a prince or a sack of gold coins, or a way out. This was Naneh Goli’s way of saying, Noor, I see farther than you. Don’t stay too long to see your father weakening. Go back to your real life.
Noor had a different take on Naneh Goli’s clairvoyance. Never mind the boat, the suitor, or the gold—there were no loopholes. She would cling to her father like a leaf to a tree and stay to look after him.
PART TWO
Eight
The night Zod packed all his belongings into a single suitcase, Madame Chabloz rang the dinner bell early. She was going to see the new Truffaut with her daughter and was anxious to feed her boarders. A year and a half ago, when he arrived in Paris at age twenty-one to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts, Zod had rented this damp room—no bigger than a cupboard with a metal cot, a desk, and a chair—at a small pensione on the Rue Mouffetard. This was 1961. It was his first time away from his family and if it weren’t for the tall, narrow window overlooking the busy street, loneliness would’ve swallowed him up.
