The Last Days of Café Leila: A Novel

by Donia Bijan

  Noor put fresh sheets on her bed and clean towels in the bathroom and surprised her aunt by staying at Nelson’s house during their visit, inviting them to dinner as if she were married—shocking information that Farah kept to herself. Quickly enamored with Nelson, Farah was glad for the blood, not ice water, that ran through his veins, yet she privately hoped Noor wouldn’t marry him. Chagrin over the course of her own marriage made her wish they would stay lovers. Nassim, too, came for a weekend visit with her fiancé, Charlie. Absence healed old wounds and the two friends had reconciled after a temporary freeze. They huddled on the couch while Nelson cooked mussels and Charlie mixed margaritas. Men and women alike fell under the spell of Nelson’s lisp—everyone except for Liam, who regarded the doctor with cautious optimism.

  That summer, in Napa for her thirtieth birthday, after tasting too much champagne under a hot sun, Noor fell off a rented bike and Nelson carried her back to their B&B on his shoulders like King Kong. She sat on the edge of the bathtub and as he kneeled before her to clean and bandage her scraped knees, Nelson looked into her flushed face and said, “Noor, would ju like to be my wife?” In retrospect it sounded condescending, like asking a clerk “How would you like to be assistant manager someday?” but befuddled as Noor was, she wanted then to wrap her shanks around him and never let go.

  It would be hard to say which of them, Noor or Nelson, was the poorer judge of character; probably Noor, but for reasons of age, and significant advantage in the realm of romance, Nelson, who seemed to have become quite unexpectedly domesticated in the light of Noor’s radiance, should have remained a boyfriend and nothing more.

  Noor eventually came to learn that we see what we want to see. She used to ask Nelson, “When did you fall in love with me?” Sometimes he would say it was when he saw her that morning in the hospital with Mr. Nejad, or the first time they kissed, or sometimes he would say it was in the mangy yard of his garden apartment when he saw her planting bulbs. In due course Noor would learn that the moment had been specific only for her and gradual for him. Jerry would’ve said, “Loosen up! When doesn’t matter, he loved you and the applause was wild in the background.”

  What a wedding they had. Noor kept the bride-and-groom cake decoration made of sugar that topped the cake in a box on her dresser. Aboard a boat out on the bay with a live band and a seven-tiered sacripantina from Stella’s, Zod held her hands aloft like when she was small and danced with her under the stars. Mr. Nejad came (thankfully, so Zod had someone to talk to). Nelson’s parents, Anna and Teodor, and his little sister, Clara, flew in from Barcelona. Mehrdad and Chrissy, Nassim and Charlie, Aunt Farah, Uncle Morad, and Marjan, gorgeous in a glittery sleeveless dress. Sue Sullivan was there, of course, and her entire family—three kids and her husband, even taller than her. And sweet Liam, always elegant, kept an eye on Zod and witnessed two brothers who had not seen each other in three decades exchange perfunctory greetings and retreat—“Without even a handshake,” he recounted.

  Loving Nelson meant that Noor would never be lonely again. He made her feel good. She would swear she was even in love with the sound of the telephone when he rang. She put aside all doubt and forgave his flirtations, to keep the idea of him safe. When Lily arrived, it was for her and the little backyard and the skinny pomegranate saplings already twice her height, for the swing set, and the sunlit breakfast nook. We see what we want to see.

  PART FOUR

  Nineteen

  The fourth of July in Tehran came and went without a spark. At home it was the highlight of summer. Families opened their backyards for neighborhood barbeques or headed to the beach. Car after car, packed with coolers, blankets, and boogie boards, snaked across the Golden Gate Bridge towards Marin County, where the celebration would climax with fireworks after dark. Lily had not outgrown the festivities, nor the food or the games. Nelson would place cones in the sand and invite a group of children to play soccer. Lily loved being on his team, chasing the ball and watching her dad huffing and puffing to keep up with the kids. She felt bitter now, a little past two o’clock on this July afternoon, nearly two months since their arrival in Iran. Being so far away, she realized anew how colorless her life was without her father and friends, but did anyone at home feel her absence?

  The day stretched out before her and Lily stood at the bathroom mirror, brushing her hair and braiding it, then taking it out and doing it again. Again and again, she twisted the plait, over and under, reversing the loop from time to time. She glanced at her watch and counted back the hours, wondering what her friends might be doing right then, composing in her mind a happy tableau of classmates huddled at a Starbucks—a futile preoccupation with their whereabouts that only strengthened her melancholy.

  Time passed indifferently here, each day hotter than the last, with no breeze and too much sunlight coming into her room. School would be starting in a few weeks and Lily wondered how much longer her mother intended on staying. Had Noor lied to her? Had she planned all along to stay through the summer? It was no use asking. Noor would launch into another tale of duty and devotion that Lily couldn’t bear.

  The thought struck Lily then that her friends had forgotten her. Emma and Zoe, her best friends since kindergarten, busy with their own summer lives and family vacations, didn’t answer her emails anymore, and if she couldn’t text, she didn’t exist. And then there was Jeremy Ross. He wouldn’t care if she returned because he had never noticed her anyway. On the last day of school, she slipped a note to him, thinking there was nothing to lose now that she was leaving.

  Jeremy, I don’t think I can ever tell you this in person. I love you. L

  On ruled binder paper she wrote it, crumpled it up, and started over. Just before sixth period, she ran to his locker and pushed it through the slot. She would never know what he had done with it. Most likely, she thought, he showed it to his friends and everyone had a good laugh. But now it didn’t even matter.

  Lily would not admit it, but a part of her was beginning to appreciate the freedom that came with captivity. Freedom from peers. After two months of isolation, not worrying about what to wear or what anyone thought of her, not having a public profile or being surrounded by people who had known you all your life and were full of expectation, she was discovering what it was like to have an independent thought. Freedom even from family, because she remained unconvinced of her relation to this tribe. It would take more than a faded photograph of a grandmother she had never met to bring her into their company.

  Lily tried to imagine her mother standing at this wobbly sink, collecting her wayward curls into a rubber band, wearing the school uniform that still hung in the closet. She squinted into the mirror, wondering if Noor would have known what to do with a boy who didn’t notice her. Would she try a touch of rouge or glance in the mirror and think, Why bother?

  Her bedroom was bright due to a window facing the garden and the wallpaper, though faded, was a trellis of sweet peas on a sky blue background. On the dresser, in a jewelry box made of inlaid wood, were tucked Noor’s first gold chain, a charm bracelet, and a green velvet pouch with all her baby teeth. That was a creepy discovery. Lily had peered into the ornate dollhouse that once housed birds, amused by the cardboard people in matchbox beds lined with calico sheets. She had inspected the contents of the drawers and the bookshelf, which held a Barbie doll still in its original box and worn copies of Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden—books her grandmother Pari had brought home from her trips to England.

  Lily rummaged through the closet and held her mother’s old clothes up to her own body—drab uniforms with pleated skirts and an interesting turquoise dress that was too long, with a lovely scoop neck. Still, she couldn’t quite conjure an image of teenage Noor, who had slept in this same room, with the same pipes rattling, waking up to the same yard birds, and doing her homework in the clamor of the busy café.

  But in fact both her mother and uncle grew up here and opened their textbooks every afternoon on a table in the dining room, facin
g the nook where their grandfather greeted his customers. They ate Nina’s jam on sweet rolls, listened to the echo of their mother’s voice running up and down the scales and the pleasant ting of the cash register, which swayed the large brass balance used for weighing candied nuts and Turkish delight.

  The cluster of men who sat at the same table day after day offered them coins and chewing gum, while elegant women draped their coats on the backs of chairs and filled the room with perfume as they leaned forward for a kiss when Noor served iced coffee, leaving lipstick marks on her cheeks. There was work for everyone here. Even the children swept, refilled teapots, ran to the store for more eggs, and pitted crates of cherries. Age did not exempt them from doing what needed to be done, and they were no less cherished. Maybe if Mehrdad and Noor had not been sent away, they would be here now, polishing the glass shelves behind the bar. It wouldn’t be glamorous or even interesting work, but they would be grounded, not strangers in their own home.

  It was hard to picture her mother living in Iran. Throughout her childhood, Noor had tried to impress Lily with stories about Iran, about its rich culture and history, its poetry, music, and food, even the cats. Her father would tease Noor and say things like “It’s too bad they can’t play soccer,” and her mother would get angry and defend the players like they were her sons. Yet as certain as Noor was about Iran’s glorious past, she was evermore ambivalent about her country’s future.

  What Lily never understood was Noor’s parallel pride and dismissal of her origin. If Iran was so great, why did her mother warn her every day not to tell her friends that she was half Iranian? She was always so afraid of being found out. During heritage week in third grade, Lily took churros to school and everyone said, “Are you Mexican?” Lily answered that she was half Spanish. So they asked, “What’s your other half?” and she told them Italian. Then they demanded she bring spaghetti next time.

  Nelson said that Noor was paranoid, and after September 11 it got worse. Lily was only a year old on 9/11, so kids her age were all used to the cycle of bad news. It just didn’t make sense to Lily how her mother would brag about her country one minute and then lie about it to strangers the next. Nelson would roll his eyes and remind Noor that September 11 had nothing to do with Iran, but her response was “You don’t get it. These people lump everyone from the Middle East together.”

  A colleague once asked her what it was like watching the television series Homeland when “some of those characters look like they could be your relatives.”

  “You mean Claire Danes?” Noor replied, laughing it off, seething inside. There were many days she related to the neurotic Carrie Mathison.

  So for Lily, Iran was a colorful fairy tale full of kings and princesses at night and quickly forgotten by daylight.

  A sound drew Lily to the window, where a bulky air conditioner was installed, whirring noisily day and night. Even with the dial on high, the heat was unbearable at midday. A pebble hit the windowpane again and Lily opened the shutter to peer outside. Karim stood below in a white T-shirt, his arms tanned brown, holding something against his chest. When he raised a hand to wave, she saw what it was. With a finger on his lips to be quiet, he motioned for her to come down.

  No one saw Lily go outside. Naneh Goli and Zod were napping and Noor had gone to the fabric store. Soli and the waiters were in the café. She met Karim in the garden.

  Since her arrival in June, she had spoken to him only once, when she went to the kitchen looking for ice and found him scrubbing the stove. His face had broken into the widest grin and once Lily gestured to the freezer, he’d scrambled from stove to sink to wash the grime that reached his elbows and then filled a tumbler with ice, holding it out with both hands and turning bright red when she said “merci.” Then she asked how to say ice and he could hardly breathe to speak, but every day since then there would be a short knock on her door, and when she opened it there was a small tray with a bowl of ice. Every day.

  And now here he was, with that generous grin that stretched from one floppy ear to the other. She took the kitten from him and held it against her neck. It squirmed and tickled and made her laugh. Karim stood watching her. He’d never heard her laugh and really it sounded exactly like the gurgling stream within earshot of the house where he grew up, an arrangement of water and pebbles that had accompanied his youth.

  Together, Karim and Lily sat in the shade on the gravel path and played with the kitten and an old tennis ball for over an hour, during which a saucer of milk and two cold Cokes were pilfered from the kitchen.

  The cat was snowy white, so Karim asked Lily how to say milk by pointing to the saucer. He repeated after her, “Mil-kuh,” making her laugh. Then, preferring the word in Persian, they settled on naming her “Sheer.” And it made no difference at all that Karim imagined staying here next to Lily and Sheer forever, while Lily believed that she had finally found an ally who would help her escape. In the stillness of a late summer afternoon, it made no difference at all.

  Twenty

  Tehran was like the blank page in a coloring book, gray but for the two landmarks Noor discovered. One was the fabric store where her mother and grandmother used to bring her to choose fabric for a new dress in the weeks before the Persian New Year. It was hard to believe it was still there, smaller than she remembered, but stacked from floor to ceiling with bolts of silk, satin, velvet, in every hue. The saleswomen had fawned over her mother, but Noor did not expect to be recognized. And she wasn’t, but they sensed her foreignness and treated her kindly, draping cloth over her shoulders and letting her see it in natural light on the sidewalk, where she was struck with a fantasy of running through the streets and unraveling reams of color behind her.

  Noor had lied to Zod and Naneh Goli about taking a taxi. She knew they worried that she would get lost, but she couldn’t stand another ride in one of Tehran’s bumper cars, with the cabbie’s manic swerves and abrupt stops to pick up multiple passengers. Afraid at first to walk alone, she soon realized that no one cared about a frumpy forty-nine-year-old woman as long as she covered her head and appeared busy. Walking the two miles became routine and returning with swatches or a few yards of violet and blue made her happy, thinking that she would eventually gather her courage to ask Naneh Goli for a tutorial on Pari’s sewing machine.

  In a search for color, the flower shop on Amir Parviz Street became Noor’s second destination. It was where Zod used to buy flowers for Pari on his way to fetch her from the airport, and Noor had often tagged along. Now she came here once, sometimes twice a week. Ever since she moved Zod’s bed to the salon where the light was more cheerful, she filled the room with flowers. Mr. Azizi, the owner, kept his shop cool and was always kind, offering Noor tea and almond brittle. His family had a nursery outside the city where his brothers tended the greenhouses, and he drove into town at dawn every morning to open the shop. Noor imagined him behind the wheel of a truck carrying a bed of flowers to a city where every effort was made to defeat plant life. Mr. Azizi made exquisite arrangements, taking his time cutting the wet stems, selecting ferns and ribbons to embellish the bouquets.

  Noor enjoyed walking out into the hazy, concrete city, carrying an enormous cellophane bundle wrapped with a huge bow. Every single head turned to look at this glorious spray of color and scent. Noor felt the mood around her lightening, softening the set jaws of the men and women who shouldered past her. Inevitably, drivers rolled down their windows to shout, “But you, miss, you are a flower yourself!” or “Oh, a flower carrying a flower!” or some such corny compliments. It was good to see the verve of her people, to learn that it still existed, and she was still a part of it.

  Noor wished she could convince Lily to come on these excursions with her; they were Noor’s only distraction from the feeling of gloom and helplessness that had pervaded the house since she learned the seriousness of her father’s illness. But little had changed between them since their arrival—Lily, reticent and friendless, stayed in her room and Noor made futi
le attempts at reaching her. She would emerge only for meals or an occasional cup of tea, sullen and ill-tempered, responding to Noor’s queries with an equal measure of self-pity and contempt that unnerved Noor, ending their conversation with a resigned sigh.

  One morning Noor found herself walking behind a group of young girls in jeans, gray knee-length coats, and elaborate headscarves. She was curious about these girls her daughter’s age. Where were they going? What did teenagers do in Tehran?

  They led her to an unmarked building with a mysterious entrance covered by a black tarp. The girls slipped behind the tarp and through two or more curtains before coming to a door that led to a front office. Noor caught the strong scent of chlorine and realized it was a swimming pool. Ladies’ hours were nine to noon every Monday and Wednesday morning and the attendant (in shorts) let her peek inside in exchange for her cellphone, lest she take any photos. Noor was elated to see women shed their cloaks and emerge from the locker room in bright bathing suits, running with madcap joy to the pool with its blue perpendicular lines and nothing to get in their way. The atmosphere was relaxed, with women lounging, chatting, and splashing—unburdened for a few hours before they had to cover and compose themselves once again. There was even a small café with soft drinks and sandwiches, and beautiful turquoise tiled showers where they bathed, naked.

  Rushing home to tell Lily, feeling certain that in this heat, she would not resist, Noor rehearsed her pitch: You should see these girls, Lily! They’re your age. We’ll invite them to lunch! There’s even a nice café! This seemed like a promising premise to ease Lily’s resistance, for Noor had little time left to wait it out. In a few weeks Lily was registered to start school in Tehran but Noor didn’t have the courage to tell her.