by Donia Bijan
Zod convinced himself that these notebook pages held a key to his ancestry, and he meant to decode the mysteries of his grandmother’s kitchen. For she was a marvelously gifted and disciplined but oppressive and authoritarian cook, whose kitchen mirrored the dictatorship his parents had fled.
AFTER HER ARREST, PARI was blindfolded and taken to a pit where she was asked many questions. Every day the same questions were repeated over and over again, but Pari had no right answers for these faceless men. For two months she was lashed, raped, and threatened with execution. They did not contact her family. By day she was forced to make false confessions about her ties to Western powers and involvement with dissident groups and when she told them what they wanted to hear, the beatings subsided and she was left in solitary confinement with pen and paper to write bogus confessions and letters to her family explaining her absence and atoning for her sins.
Time becomes vague in isolation. Without the shifting light of day into night, without sun, with no moon or stars, a person vanishes. Stay alive. Stay alive. Pari knew she had to stay alive for Zod, for Mehrdad and Noor, and to do so she had to obey and abide by a schedule, to make everything she did matter, to listen for sounds. It helped that meals were served at a set time to mark the hour. Every morning she hobbled the length of her cell one hundred times, an exercise she repeated in the evening. She thanked the female guard who brought her breakfast of watered-down tea with bread to dunk and practiced effusive expressions of gratitude. After breakfast she asked permission to wash and she scrubbed her bra and underwear in a plastic washtub. It was important to put on clean underwear every day and to keep her remaining teeth clean. During the thirty minutes of hava khori, when they were shepherded outdoors, she recited silent lyrics to arias and folk songs, the Beatles and ABBA, Googoosh and Hayedeh, going through genres in an obsessive chronological order.
The guards grew fond of her and brought her milk like she was a stray cat, or extra helpings of yogurt, knowing most of her teeth had been knocked out, but she ate very little and asked instead for more soap, a comb, and paper to write letters.
For three months Zod did not know where she was. Insane with worry, he spent day after day at police stations and hospitals begging for information but, other than confirming her return from England, they had no record of a Parvaneh Yadegar. Then one night, when he was warming rice and chicken for Mehrdad and Noor, he heard Naneh Goli yelp and shoo the children upstairs. A familiar voice came from the salon and he ran towards it with a mad, joyful flutter in his chest. Pari was on television admitting to being a liaison between political dissidents and Western contacts. Extremely thin and pale, her black hair streaked with gray, she sat with a dull look in her eyes, which frequently slid away from the camera, lisping through a list of alleged crimes. She was one of many who had been coerced into these taped confessions that the government staged as a warning to would-be activists.
Blinded with tears of rage and relief, Zod didn’t know how he drove to Evin Prison that night. He leaped into the darkness and howled, howled like a wounded dog, hurled himself against its concrete walls, but he wasn’t a lone wolf. The guards were used to mothers and fathers, husbands and wives scratching their fingernails raw at the gates. At dawn they found Zod on his knees with his forehead to the pavement, thought he was praying and took pity. He was given a number and allowed to make a phone call.
“Did you get my letters?” Pari cried upon hearing his voice, raspy from hollering all night.
“No, what letters, janam (my life)?” he croaked, “For three months I haven’t had any idea where you were.”
“Those bastards,” she screamed. “Those filthy bastards!” shrieking louder and louder. Then, both were crying so hard they couldn’t speak and the phone was yanked away. Her confinement may have ended after the confession if only she had kept her mouth shut.
Noor never wore her new white mittens and Mehrdad never heard a song from Remain in Light. Naneh Goli tore out her hair and Mrs. Parsa shivered through that winter and the next until she died of pneumonia. Nina couldn’t remember what an umbrella was for. And Zod, he would’ve noosed himself with that tie. The taxi driver, now a local hero, was invited to kick the chair from under Pari’s feet at her hanging.
Thirteen
How to live after this? Zod spent most of his time wondering why Pari didn’t call to tell him she was arriving a day earlier. How was it that she had changed her flight? What words were exchanged in the taxi? He wished he could claw his way back to the early hours of that February morning before his wife had left London. Or even before, to when the idea to surprise her family first crossed Pari’s mind, and he’d scratch it away. Days, weeks, years later, when he opened their closet to take a shirt off a hanger and saw her small pumps on the shoe tree, or walked past the gazebo where she had sung or the piano his father had bought for their wedding—always silent now—he still wondered what it was that had changed her mind.
Mehrdad had stopped speaking altogether, but fifteen-year-old Noor kept asking about her mother. Zod would tell her about the time Pari decided to teach him how to swim. How they couldn’t stop laughing and he swallowed half the water in the sea. How Pari liked to eat oranges sprinkled with salt. How carefully she gathered grains of rice on her fork. How she loved white carnations. Zod told it all like a folktale, like Noor was six years old. But Noor still tugged at his sleeve impatiently, insisting that he tell her why her mother vanished.
“Did you try to find her?”
“Yes.”
“Is she really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see her dead with your own eyes?”
“No.”
“Then how can you be sure?”
For months Zod went to Evin every day and stood outside, crazed, begging, flailing, afraid of going home to face his children. The guards threatened to lock him up but he went back and he went back until one day they took him inside and showed him her picture, and the worst thing was that she looked so afraid. They told him she died instantly, painlessly, her small neck snapped, they told him she’d hanged herself. But Zod knew his Pari would never do that, his Pari wouldn’t leave them, she would try to stay alive. He also knew it wasn’t painless. He would always know how much she had suffered. Parijoon, Parisa, Parinaz, Pariroo, Parishan, where was I when they did this to you?
Zod looked for exhaustion in the kitchen. Nina sat at one end in a chair that was too big for her, so he eased a cushion behind her back while she went on with the impeccable organization of buttons. Their roles had reversed—now she was the one who sat in a corner while he chopped ingredients and filled enormous tubs with cubed vegetables and marinated meats to keep himself from going insane. Suddenly Nina would look up misty-eyed and Zod knew she had drifted back in time, sinking into the first, or fifth, or third decade of her life, burying Davoud again, buttons forgotten in the cake tin, weeping and muttering softly —“Whywhywhy?” —probing through the remains of her memory.
Zod would make a second cup of tea and sit across from her to feed her small bites of cake until an awareness leapt into those blue eyes and she called his name in a happy shout, holding out her arms to fold him inside.
THE CAFÉ WAS CLOSED for weeks, with a black shroud draped over the door, the gate locked, but people kept coming. They left rows and rows of wreaths and letters and crates of oranges and pears and toys for the children, as if they were still toddlers. Naneh Goli instructed Hedi to bring everything inside, then wash the sidewalk and sweep the dead flowers away. What fresh flowers remained, she put in half a dozen galvanized buckets and pinned moist white carnations on the waiters’ lapels. Then she opened the door just a fraction and started frying onions for pomegranate soup—bitter, sweet, sour, this is how it would be. Thereafter, Café Leila stayed open. Zod couldn’t call it living—but at least it was an existence.
Noise. Laughter. Blue sky. These things are what surprised Zod every time he borrowed Hedi’s bicycle to fetch Noor from school.
Not that she needed to be picked up, she had been walking home from school with her friends for two years now, but Zod waited outside the schoolyard to follow them home to safety. Rumors were rampant of random arrests and lashings by chastity squads targeting women for improper observance of the hejab, such as loose headscarves, makeup, nail polish, and sandals. Terrifying stories circulated of irrational rage on the streets, of vigilantes attacking young women for alleged provocative behavior.
Anything can happen, Zod thought, so I best be there to collect her. He was never empty-handed—stopping to buy cream puffs or fruit—and Noor would act peeved at first and complain that he was being overprotective, but brightened once the snacks were dispensed. As a concession, he pedaled a good distance behind to let the girls giggle freely as they walked. He looked at the girls’ heavy black cloaks, a red thermos or the tip of a white sneaker, the only color in their habit, and wished he could run and get them each a bouquet of pink and yellow tulips. Who would want to be a child in this country? It was too hard. Funereal.
Home at last, her curly hair loose, Noor’s youthful preoccupations were a happy distraction for everyone. She stayed close to her grandmother, coaxing and caressing Nina when she grew agitated. The old woman would hold a tight fist to her chest and whimper, “Remind me again of your name, dear?” When sunlight poured in, she wheeled Nina into a square of light to French braid her snowy hair and the years fell away, giving this grandmother the unexpected look of a young girl with flowers tucked behind her ears. Together they spooned jam straight from the jar into their mouths, hiding from Naneh Goli’s disapproving glare.
Mehrdad lost his puppy fat and grew tall, seventeen years old, broad-shouldered and good-looking, with chestnut hair and eyes that changed from hazel to emerald green when he wore light-colored shirts. He mostly ignored Noor, simply lost interest, and when he did acknowledge her it was to mock her jungle hair or new wire-rimmed eyeglasses, calling her koor (blind) if she bumped into him in the hallway, or bisavad (illiterate) if she went to him for help with homework. The worst offense was her inadvertent humming of Pari’s songs—he threatened to yank her tongue right out of her mouth. He swerved from hostility to tears without warning, his face clouding over each time he carried his grief outside the walls and into the streets, trying hard to compose himself, so that from a distance he would not seem anguished but for the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he struggled to swallow a sob at the mere sight of a mangy alley cat. He withdrew from his friends and people got used to his crossing to the other side of the street to avoid greeting them.
No one could understand the care with which he preserved a handkerchief, a small white square with his initials M.Y. embroidered in the corner. This scrap of cotton kept alive the memory of a birthday long ago when he woke up and heard Pari humming a tune while the smell of cardamom, warm and sweet, wafted upstairs to his bedroom. He had felt so happy and looked forward to breakfast. He got up and washed his face, combed his hair, put on a clean shirt and trousers, then went downstairs in house slippers. There was a vase of pink and white carnations on the breakfast table and a brown paper package wrapped with a red satin ribbon at his place. His family sat waiting for him. Pari buttered a slice of bread, slathered it with sour cherry jam, and put it on his plate. They wished him happy birthday and he circled the table to kiss each of them on both cheeks, then sat down to open Pari’s handmade gift of six white cotton handkerchiefs with a light blue border, monogrammed and starched. Just a year ago he was playing war with swords and slingshots and now he was carrying a handkerchief. Few knew of his dreams or longings, but on that morning long ago, Pari was aware of the man behind the boy. “You never know when it might be useful,” she said. He didn’t know then how often he would need it to wipe his eyes.
By the time he turned eighteen, Mehrdad was ill at ease among his peers and resented the indignity of accepting pocket money from Zod. Mandatory military service loomed and the upside was the pain from physical exertion, the garrison training, the hours of misery, the marching, endless marching under the hot sun. The army will make my hands rough and brown, he thought. The army will make me a man. Up and down he paced, impatiently scowling at his reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Do something with yourself, you pansy! All you do is drink tea and wander aimlessly around here getting kissed and petted and washed by your nanny and your senile grandmother who cries over you and thinks you’re her dead son.
With the ongoing war between Iran and Iraq, Zod would die before letting Mehrdad fulfill his military service, but he was also aware of the rage stirring just beneath his son’s hard exterior—a desperate warning—and he was quietly making arrangements to send both his children abroad, deciding without telling them. Just because he had always been here didn’t mean they had to stay. No longer would they face the mother-shaped hole of Pari’s absence.
Like thousands of other disenchanted citizens, Zod resorted to bribery, pleading for visas, asking favors of faithful customers with connections, growing a bushy beard, peppering his speech with Muslim piety to acquire passports, soliciting Morad in Los Angeles to help with college enrollment in America.
At first Morad tried to discourage him with absurd warnings: In America they will lose their manners, and so on. Zod, returning briefly to the elements of childhood, listened earnestly, just as he had when Morad had fabricated stories of the glutton lurking in the cellar eating pickled penis, or broken glass traveling through the blood stream to puncture your heart, or cockroaches swimming in Coca-Cola bottles.
Oblivious to Morad’s vexed tone, he persisted. “Manners be damned! Don’t do this for me, brother. My children are traumatized. Do this for your niece and nephew.” Only then was he able to breathe.
He broke the news first to Mehrdad in a solemn man-to-man voice and watched him grow red with anger. Zod was too familiar with this misguided fury. Though nobody had told Mehrdad of the exact circumstances, he silently blamed his mother’s senseless death on Zod for appearing blind to injustice. If he left, who would avenge her? It made him wild to think about it. He formed fists with his hands and cracked his finger joints, for he had no other means to express the torment of watching his father run the café, greet people, conduct business as usual, and make plans to evacuate him.
“I won’t run away!” he shouted. But it could not be undone.
“One day this life will be quite distant and you will have no use for it, son.”
Zod knew that his children thought he was a coward. He remembered the day the police came and told him he was no longer allowed to serve meals in the garden and music was prohibited under Islamic rule. Pari had started to question which page of the Koran forbade people from eating outside when Zod quickly bowed his head and promised to shut the patio and silence the musicians, then offered the police refreshments. Afterwards the couple argued loudly and he knew the children could hear. Until that day they had never heard Zod raise his voice, and now he had made their mother cry.
“I can’t stand it,” Pari said, “I can’t stand it, it’s unbearable, how you’re afraid of them.”
“Pari, dear, now be sensible, there are some things one simply cannot do, things that are not worth haggling over with idiots. It’s useless.”
“You bowed to them. You offered them tea. You are the idiot.”
Pari stared out the window into the garden. Were these brutes offended by the sensuality of the garden itself, the spicy-sweet scent of its daphne shrubs, its lush flowers and strings of colored lanterns? She went to her bedroom and shut the door. Zod buttoned up his coat and went out. Not a word was spoken. Not a sound was made. That night the whole family went to bed hungry.
After that day, Zod and Pari’s peaceful marriage was muted, as if they had to find a new way to talk, waiting their turn to speak in low, careful tones, the clink of their teacups filling the silence as if they had forgotten how to laugh or joke or sing like they used to. The light, crisp sound of Pari’s high heels, once beautiful with the pr
omise of her arrival, now signaled her leaving. One, two, three, four, the children counted her steps going away.
Then, a week before Noor’s thirteenth birthday, she was doing homework when her mother came through the door carrying a bundle wrapped in brown paper, neatly tied with white string. She sat on Noor’s bed and unwrapped the paper, revealing a bolt of smooth, turquoise fabric.
“I’m going to make you a lovely birthday dress,” she said. “You’ve always been so fond of blue.”
Zod came in and sat beside her. For a split second, from behind Noor’s desk, it felt like her parents were the children, they were so little and lonely and she wished she could protect them. Her father’s stone face melted, open and anxious again. “Your tea’s getting cold,” he said, and they went to the garden where he’d set the table with sandwiches and currant cake. Pari sat back in her chair, talking animatedly and fanning herself with a magazine, and the flush in her cheeks told Noor that warmth was restored, that they really could plan a birthday party. Quarrels and silences were new to their house — infrequent arguments had always ended in sudden forgiveness. They had never before been fretful of their mother’s outbursts, and many nights after that argument, Noor lay in her narrow bed interpreting noises, listening for the cadence of her parents’ voices drifting through the crack in her door, waiting for her mother’s merry laughter and her father banging pots and pans—announcing the return of peace by cooking something delicious.
