The Tooth Fairy

by Clifford Chase

  Though I had kept him in my carry-on, somehow he had magnetized my checked baggage for objects as strange and loaded as himself.

  While I was writing the book I used to joke to friends that what Winkie most wanted for Christmas was a pink tutu, and indeed the costumes in the shopping bag included a pink satin skirt, short and ruffled.

  Winkie’s wish had come true.

  The novel contains pictures of him in various tiny getups, culminating with a shot of him standing before a backdrop of the pyramids, wearing a blue embroidered tunic and red fez (which I had made out of some felt and a paper cup).

  Winkie and the mystery Iranian children—in their bright, gold-trimmed costumes—could almost have been members of the same troupe of performers, a sort of Islamic von Trapp family.

  The cover of one of the setar books shows a wooden instrument with a very long, thin neck and bulbous body—a guitar the Cat in the Hat might strum.

  I discovered a surprisingly large selection of setar music on iTunes. The tracks I chose sounded vaguely Greek, vaguely Middle Eastern, and at times jangly to my unschooled ears.

  My inability to place or enjoy this musical tradition made the tunes seem that much more distant and sad.

  The Persian setar is not to be confused with the Indian sitar, says Wikipedia, while an Iranian site describes classical Persian music as “grave and mournful,” adding, “The basic character of the Persian is, like his music, melancholy.”

  *

  A few days later I got up the courage to telephone U.S. Customs, realizing I could make my inquiry sound less crazy by calling from my office at the magazine.

  Press Officer Jane Rappaport naturally doubted Customs had been responsible for the mix-up but asked me to put my information in an e-mail, including a description of the items I had found.

  She called me back the next day. “All I wanted to mention,” she said, “is that—let me get my notes—okay.” I was heartened that she cared enough both to take notes and to refer to them. She spoke in a raspy Long Island accent that I found disarmingly genuine. She said there were six “leftover” bags from my flight, and if mine was one of them (though she was careful not to confirm this), it would have been inspected by U.S. Customs before it was delivered to me. “We search all luggage that comes in late. There are various threat levels, but you asked if this is because of London”—the bombings that had taken place there two months earlier. “No. We’ve always had the condition of leftover baggage.”

  As for the inserted items, she continued, “That could have happened overseas. We have no idea. It wouldn’t necessarily have happened here … Who knows at what point that piece of luggage was searched, how many clearances it goes through.”

  Uncertainties seemed to be multiplying.

  “You asked also—” she began. “It would be the airline who would help you determine whose stuff that is. We could not identify that for you.”

  I inquired if my bag might have been searched right alongside other leftover bags that night, causing the mix-up. “Probably not,” she said, “because they log in every bag they look at. And if it’s cleared, it probably wouldn’t be six bags looked at, at the same time.”

  I didn’t find this particularly convincing, but I liked Jane Rappaport herself: she had the appealing oddness of a character actor in a television crime show. Since my e-mail had mentioned the reason for my trip to Europe, I said now, “You know, my novel is about terrorism and childhood, so this is just a really weird coincidence.” “Yes!” she exclaimed, and she began singing something, a weird non-tune. It took me a moment to realize it was the theme to The Twilight Zone.

  2

  SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER, the woman at Sunny View had called me at the office. She said my mother had experienced some kind of “event,” probably a stroke, and was “unresponsive.” I hung up and stared at the white Formica of my desk for a while, before making the necessary calls—the airline; my sisters; John. I got on a plane the next morning. The pilot spoke cheerfully of unusually powerful headwinds, warning us that the flight would take seven or eight hours instead of six. I was in a dazed state of urgency that resembled the heightened concentration demanded by a tragic film. Since I had rushed to California several times for health emergencies during the previous two and a half years, part of me must have thought I was on my way to save her. I could almost feel the wind pushing my body back. The fuselage was my tunnel, softly lit, lined with blue pleather seats, accompanied by the rustling of passengers and the occasional outburst of a toddler. The last time I had seen my mother was at Christmas, two months before. It was not a satisfying visit. She was in nursing care recovering from another fall. My father had died in October, and her main reaction seemed to be renewed anger toward him. If he had let her buy a new recliner a few years ago, then the one in the apartment would not be broken now and we would not have to try to find her a new one when she was too sick to go to a furniture store to make the selection. Complaints of this nature, coming as they did less than three months after my father’s death, were almost unbearable to me. I spent as little time with her as possible on that visit, busying myself with the practical details of her care, which were innumerable, and taking long walks in the hills surrounding the retirement home. I regretted this, of course, two months later as the airplane struggled westward. I argued with regretting it—I couldn’t have known it would be our last visit, this was just how it had worked out, I had done many nice things for her … After three or four hours the pilot came on to say the headwinds were even worse than expected and we would have to stop to refuel in Denver. We lumbered down through the stormy air and slowly landed. We bowled along the pavement to wherever they needed to hook up the hose. I didn’t have a window seat and could see only a small space of cold-looking gray. The outsize nature of my frustration prevented me from swearing aloud. I shut my eyes and tried to weep but couldn’t. After an unbearably long wait we taxied, waited some more, shuddered up the runway to fly some more against the freakish wind. My brain continued trudging. Is there any point in recalling this? The flight took ten hours in all. In San Jose there was a line of thirty or forty at Hertz, and I waited nearly an hour to reach the counter. I must have read a magazine. By now I was almost reluctant to end the journey. I feared seeing my mother in that state, or seeing her die, or simply facing the fact of her dying. By the time I actually climbed into the rental car, I had become as methodical as my father, a trait that used to drive my mother crazy. I must have still been angry with her, since I’m still angry with her now, as I write this. I went to the hotel to change and to wash my face, reasoning I needed refreshment after pushing through freezing wind for ten hours. I put on a clean shirt. When at last I reached the hospital, late in the afternoon, the nurse said quietly that my mother had died ten minutes earlier.

  3

  THE SHOE STORE’S phone number is legible on the shopping bag, but I doubted the owners would actually speak English (the shoes are described as “hand maid”) and I didn’t know anyone who spoke Farsi.

  I wasn’t even sure if Americans were allowed to call Iran.

  John knew a woman who happened to fly one-way the same week as the 9/11 attacks; since then, this woman—a Jewish grandmother in her sixties—had been interrogated and searched every time she flew.

  I thought, What if calls to Iran …? and such questions deterred me from pursuing my investigation further, for the time being.

  Christmas arrived, and I entered a particularly difficult period of grief.

  I dreamed I was staying in a castle. I went to a stone balcony, seeking solitude to cry over my mom. Down in the Hudson River I saw a triangular barge full of bloodhounds, from which a man emerged riding an ATV, which he drove up the riverbank. Was a puppy in his briefcase?

  I mention this to demonstrate the utterly baffling nature of my bereavement, a process that seemed to be happening somewhere beyond my purview—if indeed it was a process, moving toward any sort of change or resolution.

&
nbsp; As if arriving at the hospital “in time” would have made any difference.

  Mainly that winter I was consumed or overwhelmed by the details of daily life, such as my duties at the magazine, which happened to be particularly odious just then.

  You could say my own sense of loss felt foreign to me.

  Nothing much John could do, besides hug me.

  “Oh, Kid,” he’d say, rubbing my back.

  I wrote things in my journal like, “Silence of grief, effort of such, silent effort, indescribable—‘hole,’ etc.”

  I passed in and out of this state all winter.

  *

  According to www.setar.info, “Setar, in Persian, means ‘three strings,’ but a fourth one was added by Moshtaq Ali Shah, a famous setar player of the 18th century. This ‘sympathetic’ string is not played but its echo highlights the predominant note …”

  In me, the mystery items from Iran had found a sympathetic string.

  One day in March I realized I could probably locate a Farsi speaker easily on Craigslist; in ten seconds I had found two.

  Next I looked on my phone card’s website and saw a very reasonable rate for Iran: clearly people called there all the time.

  This sudden can-do spirit was possibly a sign of improving mental health.

  I e-mailed the Farsi speaker with a recent degree in translation from the University of Tehran.

  Farahnaz—Fari for short—called me the next day. I hadn’t realized until then that she was female. She had only a slight accent and seemed suitably amused by the idea of telephoning a shoe store in Tehran for me.

  Indeed my story sounded so much like an e-mail scam (I just need the number of your bank account, and then I can return the lute music to its rightful owner …) that I was grateful to Fari for replying at all.

  It appeared to say something about her character.

  I asked her about her own experience coming to the United States, and she told of watching with trepidation as a guard in Turkey emptied her backpack onto a table: “All my valuables were in the bag—my documents, jewelry, everything. I thought, ‘My stuff! Be careful!’ Of course I thought they were only doing it because I’m Iranian. I take everything so personally.”

  This charmed me.

  *

  Once again I relied on the auspices of the magazine to make my investigation appear legit: I arranged for Fari to meet me at my office that Friday morning.

  As I waited for her, a siren echoed up from 57th Street.

  Though I had prepared myself for a stern-looking girl in a headscarf, Fari arrived wearing a light green sweater and brown corduroys. She had shoulder-length hair and that pretty curlicue nose you see in Persian and Indian paintings.

  She had brought along her American husband, Brian, a short, studious-looking guy in a slack gray suit and round wire-frame glasses. He explained he was on his way to the placement office at NYU, where he had been a graduate student in sociology.

  I asked them to tell me about themselves. They had met the previous year on German Friendster, when Brian was in Germany doing research and Fari was there visiting relatives. They were married a few months later, in Turkey, and had just moved to Yonkers.

  “OK, I guess we should get started,” I said, and I poured the contents of the shopping bag onto the white Formica.

  Fari’s smile was somehow both sly and demure, and she seemed perpetually amused. Maybe this is common among exiles.

  When Brian picked up the red woman’s dress and asked, “Is this the sort of thing a woman in Iran would wear shopping?”, Fari smiled with pursed lips, as if this were the dumbest question in the world. “I’m just asking,” Brian said, but he didn’t seem to mind the teasing.

  He’s in love, I thought.

  “She would be wearing that to some kind of gathering,” Fari resumed. “She’s trying to look nice wearing that. It’s like the nicest thing she could come up with.” I admired this bit of fashion criticism, which confirmed that Fari would be helpful beyond mere translation.

  But Brian was the one who thought to look closely at the labels on the dress, noting the “Made in U.S.A.” A good clue that our mystery family lived somewhere in the United States, or at least had relatives here.

  I hadn’t noticed the dress size either: 14 Petite.

  Fari tapped the fake jewel on the scimitar pin. “This says a lot,” she said. “What kind of woman would wear a sword?” Chuckling, I asked what she meant. “The sword,” she replied, “is a religious thing—it belongs to one of the prophets.” Which prophet? “Ali, I think.”

  I gathered from this that Fari herself wasn’t particularly religious, and I assumed this had been a problem for her in Iran.

  Turning to the music books, she noted the same copyright date on all three, 1385 on the Persian calendar, or the current year, which was about to end (at the vernal equinox).

  We reasoned, therefore, that the music was probably purchased in Iran, just prior to the flight on which it was lost. The books were instructional, Fari added, so evidently someone the woman knew must have wanted to learn the setar—maybe one of the children?

  I tried to extrapolate from my own childhood—lute lessons, instead of flute.

  Their colorful costumes included both skirts and pants, so I had concluded one kid was a boy, but Fari informed me that they had to be two girls: the skirts would be worn over the pants. The three of us agreed the children were probably nine or ten.

  Fari believed a tailor had made the outfits, which would have been inexpensive in Iran. Brian wondered if the tailor might have been near the shoe store, and Fari thought this plausible.

  What were the costumes for? I asked. “Something religious, maybe a religious play,” Fari replied. I tried to picture this but drew a blank.

  “Green would be a religious color,” she continued, holding up the pants that were emerald with gold trim. “The Prophet is often described wearing that color.” I asked whether the children would sing or recite or what. Again she wasn’t sure, by which I inferred she had never attended such a gathering.

  “The store’s name means ‘Genius,’” she announced. She was looking closely now at the shopping bag. Was it an upscale shop? “I’ve never been to it, but no. It’s not on a street where rich people go to buy stuff. And maybe it’s not even bad to buy cheaper stuff,” she added—a possible reference to compromises such as Yonkers.

  At the bottom of the bag was a newspaper from Tehran, which Fari described as “kind of left wing but not very much. This one has been able to survive, because it isn’t too left wing. I did some translations for newspapers that were shut down because they were too left wing.”

  Later she told me she had wanted to be a TV journalist, but this had been virtually impossible for her, “because of my family.” Unclear what she meant—too liberal, not religious enough, or what.

  Brian left for his appointment at NYU, and I showed Fari my list of questions for the shoe store. Though I had worried it would be closed on a Friday evening, she assured me everything would be open in the weeks leading up to the Persian New Year.

  It took several tries to connect. At last she began speaking Farsi and chuckling as she explained the reason for her call. I could tell she had struck just the right tone to enlist their help. She gestured with her pen as she talked and jotted a note now and then. She wrote with her left hand, right to left. Soon she put her palm over the mouthpiece. “He says, ‘I don’t know any tailor around here. I don’t know how to help you.’ But he’s talking to his dad and his brother,” she explained. “Their name is Ferdoos” (pronounced fair-dose). In a moment she relayed to me the man’s suggestion that I mail the bag to the store so that he could show the lost items to his customers. I countered that it would be better if I e-mailed him photos of the items. “OK, he’s looking for someone who has an e-mail address,” Fari said. In a moment she began speaking into the phone again, murmuring what sounded like “Bai … Bai” and chuckling some more. She copied down an e-mail ad
dress, said a cordial-sounding something, and hung up.

  “They were very nice people!” she exclaimed, beaming. “I enjoyed speaking Farsi!”

  Until then I hadn’t realized that, in many ways, she must miss Iran.

  The second conversation, Fari explained, was with the brother. “He told me to send the pictures,” she said, “and he’ll print them and ask their customers.” I had already photographed the items, so I proposed doing the e-mail now. She said she would write it in “Pinglish,” or Farsi in Western script.

  “It’s interesting,” she continued, turning from my phone to my keyboard. “I was not really hoping to get anywhere. I was thinking maybe if there had been shoes in the bag … But I knew the shop would be open, because this is a time that they sell a lot of clothes.”

  I asked if people gave presents for New Year’s, like Christmas here. “Mmm, it’s not like here,” she replied. “Everybody buys clothes for themselves, and parents buy clothes for their kids, but not as a present. At the New Year they want to have nice clothes on. This year it’s at 3 a.m. They have to get up very early in the morning.” She laughed, wistfully, I thought.

  “It’s exciting to get up in the middle of the night to celebrate,” she said. Was it a party, like New Year’s Eve in the West? “No, it’s more like a family thing. At the New Year you want to be with your family.”

  She explained various other aspects of the holiday, such as its being not a Muslim custom, but a Zoroastrian one.

  She mentioned jumping over a fire, to which you give illness and take health.

  She described a table on which are placed seven items that all begin with the Persian letter s, including a coin, an apple, a particular kind of fish, a certain flower. “They each have meaning, I’m not sure what, but they have good meaning,” she said.

  The advantage of staying in your home country, I thought, was that you didn’t need to know your own traditions too thoroughly. If Fari wanted to recreate her traditions here, with Brian, she would have to ask her mother about them, in detail.