The Stationery Shop

by Marjan Kamali

  So I told her I was in love with you.

  She was doing calligraphy when I told her—I’ll never forget it. It calmed her to copy the letters and the doctor had recommended it for her nerves. For a brief moment a look of tenderness crossed her face. But then she stiffened and said, “Basseh.”

  Enough, she said. Stop the nonsense.

  Our financial situation was wobbly, much as my mother liked to boast about our “villa” by the sea. I knew her boasting drove you crazy. It made me want to melt with shame when she said those things about our “wealth” in front of you. Even now, I want to disappear just thinking of some of the things she said to you. But the truth is that my father had been passed up for promotions. He stagnated at his engineering job. Even though he came from a wealthy family, his relatives’ rejection of him after he married my mother meant he could never ask them for help of any kind, especially financial. Over the years, my mother’s mental state was all the more reason to avoid his relatives, because the few times his sisters did see us, they made it clear her illness only confirmed that she had been wrong for him all along.

  Shahla’s family is rich because of the Shah and her own father’s powerful position, and my mother saw marriage to her as helpful, almost essential. They buy their dresses and pearls from Paris, my mother said. As though I cared a rat’s hair about all that. I was worried about our country. I supported Mossadegh because he promised progress and democracy and autonomy. I couldn’t stand the Shah’s cowering to foreigners, his lack of spine. I admired Mossadegh’s independent strength. But I digress. Suffice it to say that Shahla did not fit into my view of my future at all.

  You did.

  When I got your last letter, when you said that you didn’t want to spend your life with me after all, that my mother’s condition was just too much for you to bear, that you could not marry into a family with this mental instability—what could I do? I wasn’t going to force my family on you. I couldn’t change her condition, much as I would have liked to. I was so hurt, Roya Joon, by your shunning of her, of me. What could I say to that? She’s my mother, and there was no possible way she would not be in our lives. I didn’t want to stop your dreams. I had to let you go. You didn’t want to see me and I respected that.

  I wish I’d fought harder for you. I wish I could have shown you that it is not her fault. I wish I had shared with you some of her past and what made her this way. But I was too ashamed. And so hurt.

  The day Jahangir told me you’d left, I felt like someone had torn off my skin. I can’t even imagine California. But how amazing is that, Roya Joon, to think that you are there in the land of Cary Grant and Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway and President Eisenhower. I’m running out of Americans to mention. I won’t mention the CIA. I’ll be good. Though it still boils my blood to think they had a hand in our coup. I want to be happy for you there in America, and I am. But what the government of your new home did to us . . . One day it will be proven. One day the world will know that the government over there overthrew our government over here. For what? The lives lost, the suffering caused—was it worth it?

  I will never understand the turn of events for us in 1953. For you and me, I mean—let alone the whole damn country. If I live to be one hundred, I won’t truly absorb it.

  We are, I think, a lost cause in this country.

  What did our generation learn that summer? That even if we did all the right things to bring about political change, in one day, one afternoon, foreign powers and corrupt Iranians could destroy it all.

  I have relived the order of events of the 28th of Mordad (or August 19 in your Western calendar) over and over. Even now, I want to see you in that square, to feel you next to me, to hold you. We would have gone to the Office of Marriage and Divorce. I had planned it all down to the minute when we would arrive at the office. The clerk I’d arranged it with said he’d be ready with the paperwork.

  Jahangir must have told you I work at the petroleum company now. Just another cog in the wheels of capitalism. We don’t always match up to our own expectations of who we wanted to be when we were younger, that’s for sure. Mr. Fakhri, God bless his soul, used to call me “the boy who would change the world.” I think of the idealistic young boy I used to be and I am not embarrassed so much as bereft.

  I wish I could clean life of the sadness in all its crevices. I want to accept that you made the choices you made for a reason. You will be a lady scientist after all. I hope you are healthy and happy. I truly do.

  And Roya Joon, believe it or not, I will become a father this winter. I thought Mother would be delighted at the news, but she has been surprisingly quiet and in retreat.

  When the baby is, God willing, born, it will have been four and a half years since I waited for you at the square.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1957

  * * *

  Cooking Lessons

  Roya never did learn to eat like an American.

  In Tehran she had been raised, in its city streets she spent her childhood, in its schools she was educated, and right there on one of its main squares her heart broke. She pushed away the time when she was in love with Bahman.

  But American food was surprisingly harder to adjust to than she’d expected: chicken was rubbery, meat occasionally pink, potatoes mashed into a puree. In the boardinghouse, they were polite about the meals Mrs. Kishpaugh prepared; how could they protest? They couldn’t be rude and ungrateful. But Roya missed Persian food every day.

  A few months after their first encounter at the coffee shop, Roya and Walter went on a double date with Zari and Jack. Jack refused to eat in a “pretentious joint,” as he put it, so they ate at a diner that served burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Roya carefully cut her hamburger with a knife and fork while Jack sat back and smoked, shaking his head at her and saying, “Oh boy.”

  Roya gasped at the pink liquid running out of the middle of her burger.

  “And what did you eat back in Iran? Lamb burgers?” Jack sucked his cigarette.

  “Silly Jack!” Zari giggled.

  The jukebox played Rosemary Clooney. The diner was overlit and the puffy plastic booth made Roya feel like she was sitting on a sticky balloon.

  “Actually, you are not wrong.” Forming English sentences still made her head hurt at times, but she had improved. “We have the ground lamb kebabs. They are not in the bread like this, though.” She held up the soggy hamburger bun. “Our kebabs are longer. Thinner. Like tube.”

  “Are they, now.” Jack blew smoke out of the side of his mouth and smirked.

  “I think the ancient culture of Persia is renowned for a fine and fragrant cuisine,” Walter said.

  “Yeah, buddy? Name one other thing from that fine and fragrant cuisine.”

  “Well. I do believe . . .”

  “They got kebabs!” Jack leaned back into the booth. “That’s what they got.”

  Zari and Roya exchanged a look. Oh dear no. No, no. Roya wished her English was better so she could quickly regale him with a list of what she wanted to eat right now: chicken marinated in lime with saffron nestled into basmati rice sprinkled with slivers of almonds and barberries (the dish that the guests in another life had loved at her engagement party). Pomegranate and walnut khoresh. Fried eggplants with tomatoes, small sour grapes, and meat served with rice. Thick aush soup with noodles and greens and beans. Her mother’s ghormeh sabzi stew. Grape leaf dolmehs stuffed with ground beef and herbs, wrapped by hand and simmered with cardamom.

  Roya squeezed the bread bun in her hand. It disintegrated into clumps. “You will come to our boardinghouse. We ask permission from Mrs. Kishpaugh, our landlady. We cook for you.”

  “No.” Zari shook her head. “We shouldn’t cook there.”

  “We cook for you,” Roya repeated, with a glare at Zari.

  “Well, isn’t that swell? Why, I would enjoy that very much!” Walter beamed.

  “Sure you would, chump.” Jack slung his arm around Zari’s
shoulders. “But I’ll skip the cooking demonstration, if that’s all right with you. I got my fragrant Persian cuisine right here.” He tightened his hold on Zari.

  Zari’s cheeks reddened and for a minute she stiffened. Then she melted into his embrace.

  Walter concentrated on his plate and cleared his throat.

  “You come then, Walter. I cook for you,” Roya said.

  Their first lesson was on a Saturday evening. Mrs. Kishpaugh made meals for boarders on weeknights and Sundays, but on Saturdays everyone was on their own. Most of the girls were taken out on dates then anyway. And Mrs. Kishpaugh enjoyed visiting her daughter on Saturdays, coming back with long and detailed anecdotes about the antics of her grandchildren. Roya had asked for permission to use the kitchen, and Mrs. Kishpaugh had said fine as long as you clean everything, not a spot, make it as though it didn’t happen.

  Zari’s date with Jack that evening was to go see James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Roya snorted when Zari told her the movie title and said it was fitting for the both of them. She had prepared for this night carefully. Earlier in the week, she’d made a pilgrimage to a Turkish/Armenian food shop in San Francisco. Since arriving in California, Roya’s link to Iranian spices was tenuous. At the beginning of the semester, in chemistry lab, she’d met a girl named Seda Kebabjian. (The fact that Seda had the word kebab in her last name made Roya immediately warm to her.) They became friends. One day as they stood at the lab sink washing beakers, Seda had told Roya that her uncle had opened a delicatessen in the Richmond District of San Francisco where he sold spices and teas and jams from the old country. Roya’s beaker overflowed as she stood in a trance, listening.

  “Take me there,” she whispered.

  When she and Seda arrived at the small delicatessen in the city, Roya stepped inside, closed her eyes, and inhaled the familiar combination of scents. Then she opened her eyes. All at once, she wanted to devour the entire store. She wanted to sweep everything on the shelves into her skirt and run off, carrying jars of every single spice that she had missed so much. A piece of her had come home.

  She bought yellow split peas. Cardamom. Cumin. Cinnamon (the one here was far closer to what cinnamon should smell like than anything she’d found so far in America). Crushed rose petals. Rosewater. Orange blossom water. And (was she dreaming?) the shop had actual dried Persian limes and saffron threads! Roya greedily grabbed all the ingredients. Baba had been dutifully sending money to America whenever he could. Now she would eat up his well-earned tomans on her one excursion.

  Walter smelled of aftershave and soap when he arrived for the cooking demonstration on Saturday night. He wore his wool trousers, his blue blazer, and a porkpie hat. When he took off the hat, it was clear his hair had been washed and carefully combed for the occasion.

  Roya led him into the kitchen and didn’t say a word about him not taking off his shoes. It was pointless in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s boardinghouse anyway. No one took off shoes indoors in this country, which was baffling and slightly disgusting, but she’d adjusted.

  She offered Walter a seat and asked him what he’d like to drink.

  “Oh, I’ll have a Coca-Cola if it’s not too much trouble, thanks.”

  If he’d been Iranian, he would have said, Oh, no thank you, I couldn’t trouble you, I’m fine. She would have asked again, and he would have refused and said he was just fine, thanks, no need for anything. She would have served the tea that she had already brewed first thing. She would have prepared a big bowl of nuts and seeds, a platter of fruit, a tray filled with small chickpea cookies and other sweets. If he had been Iranian, she would have heaped fruit on a plate and peeled a cucumber for him and poured his tea into an estekan and offered him sugar cubes to put between his teeth as he sipped the hot tea. In the beginning she had wanted to do all these things for anyone who visited her in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s house, for classmates who came over to study, for Zari’s Jack even. But she was limited by what she could do in a house that wasn’t her own, in a kitchen where there was no samovar, in a place where people did not consider cucumbers to be fruit and did not think that fruit should be eaten in heaps before dinner. When Seda Kebabjian had come over to review their chem lab notes and Roya had apologized for not offering her more, Seda had held up her hand and said, “Stop! It’s not like that here Roya, it’s not like it is back in both our homes. You do not have to constantly offer and cajole, the guests will say yes when you ask them, and you do not have to worry so much about being the perfect hostess.”

  So Walter’s “Oh, I’ll have a Coca-Cola if it’s not too much trouble, thanks,” did not come as a shock. She had already lived here for more than a year. She knew these American ways well enough now. She knew it was not rude that he didn’t politely refuse her offerings at first. She knew that Persian tarof—that ritual of constant back-and-forth offering and refusal, often buttressed with flowery language and exaggerated flattery—was not the custom here.

  She came back with the Coca-Cola. The other boarders and Mrs. Kishpaugh were all out. She and Walter had the kitchen and the house to themselves. It was strange to be with him, alone in a large house. In Iran, such a thing would never be allowed. But this was Walter. He was so well behaved; he would never force himself on her. She told herself not to think silly thoughts. “Come, it’s time to cook, no?”

  He followed her into the kitchen. Roya had prepared all the ingredients before Walter’s arrival. She showed them to him and explained a little about the dish she was making.

  “It’s called khoresh-e-bademjan. We usually make it with beef.”

  He just nodded.

  Blood rushed to her face. “But I couldn’t get beef. So we’ll make it with chicken today.”

  “Sounds like a plan!” Walter smiled.

  She sliced an onion thinly, chopped it, then sautéed it in a large pot until the onion was just transparent. With a mortar and pestle that Mrs. Kishpaugh kept on the top shelf, she crushed precious threads of saffron till they were ground into a fine powder.

  Walter sat at the kitchen table and watched with a delighted expression. “You should see my mom on Sundays when she’s making the roast,” he said. “She likes to cook too.”

  “Yes? See now, this is the saffron. You see how it is . . . crushing?” She pressed the saffron threads against the mortar with the pestle. “See?”

  “I sure do see it crushing. That’s neat.”

  Her self-consciousness began to evaporate as she cooked. Just like in the café with him, and at their few dinners with Zari and Jack, she actually felt comfortable. It had never been her intention to spend time in America with someone so cheerful. She found too much good cheer undesirable, smacking of falseness. How did Americans keep up their good spirits day in, day out, year-round? It had to be the brand-shiny-newness of their country. It had to be all that freedom. No thousands of years’ worth of stultifying rules to observe. Just easy-peasy rolling with the flow. But she’d get used to the good cheer. She liked Walter, and his positive mood made her feel good.

  Suddenly she remembered Bahman, but with a pang she pushed him out. It would be ridiculous to feel anything that dangerous again.

  She added a few teaspoons of boiled water to the saffron and mixed. Walter couldn’t possibly care about her recipe as much as he let on, but he nodded as she did it, as though he were watching an important event. Then he got up. “Would you like me to cut the chicken?” he asked gently.

  She hadn’t expected his participation. Not once had Baba cooked. Iranian men loved to eat, but she knew very few who loved to cook. In fact, she’d known none who cooked until . . . Of course she’d been surprised at how Mr. Aslan and Bahman bustled in and out of the kitchen in their home. With Mrs. Aslan so unwell, her moods paralyzing her, they had no choice. She took a knife and rinsed it. Here was Walter, waiting to help. Here was Walter, waiting. She had better things to do than think of anyone else. She handed Walter the knife and proceeded to describe, as best she could, how the chicken needed to be
cut.

  He obeyed her instructions and made sure the sullied knife didn’t touch anything else. He washed his hands with soap when he was done. She was impressed at how diligent he was and how he worked with such care. That he genuinely worried about the size of the chicken pieces because he knew it mattered to her. A part of her couldn’t help but be moved by his thoughtfulness.

  When he finished, Roya dropped the chicken pieces into the pot of sautéed onions. The chicken sizzled. They stood next to each other, but not touching. Other than shaking his hand at the café that first day, at the “coffee shop,” she had not touched Walter. He was a perfect gentleman on all their dates.

  “We add the salt and the pepper now. And the secret ingredient,” she said. It was getting hot standing near the stove. She had to stay focused.

  “And what would that be?”

  “This . . . turmeric.” She wasn’t sure how to pronounce turmeric. Walter’s eyes twinkled, but she couldn’t tell if she’d pronounced it incorrectly or if Walter had no idea what turmeric was. She sprinkled the yellow spice liberally onto the sautéing chicken.

  “Without a doubt,” Walter said, “this dish will be unlike anything I have ever tasted.”

  “Now we add water to the chicken and onions to cover them.”

  “I have made a note of it.”

  “I don’t see you writing down.”

  “It’s all here.” He tapped his head.

  “You let the water come to boil, then you lower heat and chicken can, um . . . what do you say? Cook . . . gently.”

  “Simmer?”

  “Yes. Simmer.” It was a big word, not because it was long but because it was the kind of word that made her feel like a native speaker. What Iranian woman in this country for less than two years walked around saying “simmer”? Turmeric, simmer—she was becoming quite the professional.

  “As the chicken simmers”—Roya took care to use the correct verb tense—“we peel and slice eggplants. Then we add salt to eggplant, rinse them, dry them, and fry them. Yes?”