The air in my grandparents’ home felt rough in my throat as I headed past the open cellar door to bring some water for my grandfather and Iman and Khaleh. We were finally together again after a disorganized exit – Hadi and Zain had climbed out the bedroom window and ran when Khaleh made her pronouncement that we would not be returning home for awhile. But where was Abdollah? Still in that dark gray building? Would he know where to find us? Had something happened to him?
It all felt so terribly wrong. After seeing Maman, who had always been so calm and cheerful, collapse, my own world had collapsed too. We all sensed that something horrible had happened, but we didn’t know what. The world, so serene throughout our childhood, was now filled with menace.
The house had been quiet all day and everyone appeared changed somehow. Grandpa’s eyes were heavy, with dark circles around them. I didn’t know why we were at his house and why everyone seemed so sad.
Every corner of my grandparents’ house felt scary, but the dark staircase down to the cellar terrified me; it yawned open – dark and gaping as a tomb.
The cellar was twenty steps down into the pitch black. Gusts of cold air circulated. I knew this was the “cold room” where potatoes, rice, and other supplies were stored for the winter.
From the corner of my eyes, as I passed the open door, I sensed a sudden light coming from the bottom of the stairs. Someone was down there. I called out: “Iman?” “Khaleh?” “Zain?” But no one answered. I froze. A bright light glowed from the cellar, and all sound around me faded. Warmth traveled up my spine as I caught a glimpse of a figure – just a fleeting image of his face and his hand, waving…
I put my foot on the first step, shaking. The smile on the face got softer, then suddenly the light dimmed and I moved my eyes to meet his. I recognized him immediately. “Dadashi?” I gasped.
His smiled grew as he waved me toward him. Suddenly, I turned my back to him and decided I should run, but a few seconds later, turned to face him and kept my eyes glued to his. I tried to go down another step but my knees buckled. He gave me another gentle smile before he and the light around him disappeared. From somewhere I gathered the courage to take a few more steps.
I raised my hand up and waved him to me. “Come back. Dadashi, come back,” I said to the empty darkness. I ran down the dark steps so fast I almost stumbled. I opened the storage room doors, even searched in the adjacent bathroom.
I never saw him again.
A few weeks later, we trudged up the walk, finally home. I stared at our yard, dirty and overgrown with weeds. The chicks were gone. I wondered about the strange men in white shirts standing in the shade outside the hotel’s glass entrance and near the gate to our yard. When I pushed open our front door, the sound of burning esfand – rue seeds popping on the stove startled me.
It was not Maman who greeted us, but Khaleh instead who kissed us and quickly shook the tray of esfand seeds over our heads, saying, “This is to protect you little angels from the evil eye.” The incense made a thick trail of smoke that became like a fog turning each of us into a gray silhouette with the face of a ghost. As she waved the smoking seeds in a circle over our heads, Khaleh recited a prayer in Arabic, mixing the religious with the superstitious, just in case.
The door to Abdollah’s room opened and, as my grandmother leaned out, a cloud of esfand smoke billowed from his room. “Quiet, my dears. Your Mamani is resting.” We stared at my grandmother. Iman squeezed my index finger that he had been clutching. Zain, now six, began sucking on his thumb, something he hadn’t done since he was a baby and he hung on to Hadi’s pants. Hadi pushed into the room, Zain stumbling behind, clutching Hadi’s pants. Iman and I stopped at the doorway.
Buried deep in blankets, Maman’s eyes were fixed on a place no one else could see. She was in a trance, like the famous portrait of the martyr Imam Ali who was killed while he was prostrating in prayer, his forehead to the ground. Esfand smoke hung thick in the air above her, making it more difficult to see her.
We knew my grandmother believed that the esfand smoke could ward off the evil eye, a jinx brought on by jealousy and directed at a person or families who were successful. On the side table was an untouched cup of lentil soup and a half-full glass of rose water and sugar crystals that sparkled like yellow diamonds dissolving in the tepid water. Quiet filled the room now and the only sound was the occasional scratching of tree branches against the window.
Hadi elbowed past my aunts and ran, Zain chasing him.
A few minutes later, the silence in the house was broken by Zain’s cries through the open window. “Maman, come quick.”
Khaleh ran out instead. We couldn’t know Maman was deep in a Valium-induced sleep.
Outside Zain was biting his fingernails with one hand and holding a rickety ladder with the other. The crows took off as Hadi climbed the final step onto the roof and sat with his legs dangling over the edge. Khaleh waved her arms. “Hadi Jaan, come down. You’re going to get killed.”
“I’m staying here until Maman comes out. Don’t even try to talk me out of it. I’m going to stay here forever if I have to.”
Now the hotel personnel were milling in the yard, whispering to each other as they watched Hadi. As one of the workers stepped onto it, the flimsy wooden step splintered in half.
Khaleh turned to the crowd and waved them away. “Leave us alone. He doesn’t need an audience. He just wants his mother.”
The ladder began to shake; as she placed her right foot on the second rung, it cracked. Khaleh tucked her chador under her arm, wrapped the long end around her belly in a knot, and recited a prayer aloud. Now hold this rickety ladder tight, kids. I’m old, so if I fall, I won’t make it.” Khaleh looked up at Hadi.
Hadi put his hand up, “Stop climbing, Khaleh. Just stop!” Hadi began to back down the ladder. “I’m coming down.”
Hadi sat cross-legged in the middle of my parents’ bedroom, his back to Maman as she entered and sat next to him. In the dimness, her movements were still heavy and slow, as if she was underwater, but she leaned down and kissed his shoulder. “What are you doing Hadi Jaan?”
It was the first kiss anyone had gotten since we had returned to our home. Hadi began to wrap ropes around the broken pile of toy car parts at his feet. He had ripped the guts from all our high-end Kuwaiti toys, taping and gluing the mismatched parts together.
“Do you want some help putting the toys together?” Maman reached for a toy.
“I don’t want anything from you.”
Maman flipped on the light switch and caught her breath. For a moment, she seemed to truly waken – in horror. The walls of the room were covered in red blotches and streaks… She looked down at Hadi and saw he had painted a red moustache above his mouth, and in his hand, he held his weapon: a tube of Maman’s lipstick. Crushed Pomegranate.
“Oh, Hadi!”
Hadi turned away from Maman and faced the window. “If you don’t like it, paint over it.”
Maman’s heavy eyelids pushed to close. It was too much: the red-smeared room and son, his behavior on the roof…the other children to take care of… She stumbled over the broken toys, and drifted back to Abdollah’s room and fell onto his bed under the cloud of esfand smoke.
We all fell under the spell of this cloud – Zain tried to sleep all day, blanket up to his chin, face to the wall. Iman stared up at the ceiling, sucking on multiple lollipops at once, his toys unused at the other end of the room. And I wet my bed – every night.
When my grandmother helped Maman sit up in bed, pluck her overgrown eyebrows, and put on a clean blouse, Maman didn’t appear to recognize her. When she force-fed her broth from meat stews, Maman would vomit. For weeks, Maman took nothing but spoon-fed rose water, flavored with Valium. Without sedation, she hit herself, as was the custom in distress, banged her head against the walls, and shuddered with wracking sobs that left her unconscious. Every day, doctors and natural healers visited our house, trying to cure her of – to us a yet unnamed – sorro
w.
After a few weeks, Maman could walk with assistance. She would leave Abdollah’s room only to use the bathroom – she stayed in there a long time. One day I walked in to check on her, and found her with the metal chain from the water tank around her neck. What was she going to do? Jump? Choke herself? My mind spun. When Maman saw me, she quickly untangled the chain and walked back to her room. Maman’s sorrow was in itself almost fatal.
Would she die from her pain? Right now, it seemed so…
On the day I saw my mother with the chain around her white throat, I ran from door to door pounding and screaming in the house. Iman eventually joined in. No words, just screams. Loud, long wails. Would she have harmed herself? I couldn’t take the chance, from that day on, whenever she acted oddly and disappeared into a room, I sat in the doorway, keeping a closer watch.
For months, while Maman slumbered on in a drugged sleep, Baba was gone, negotiating to sell the hotel. We didn’t feel the sun on our skin. We lived in a false premature winter, though outside, in the world, it was spring, then summer.
In the backyard our playhouse sat empty, leaves and rainwater collecting on its roof. Our bikes slumped against the side wall; the pedals rusting in the rain. The vegetable garden grew high and wild with weeds, and deflating balls, dirty and moldy, rested near the corners of the yard. A kind of mold had also settled over our home and, perhaps, our souls. Where we once had played, there was only decay, and the garden, which had rung with our laughter, fell silent. We failed to set out seeds and rose water for the mockingbirds, and soon, they flew away.
The great stillness settled over us.
We sat in the different corners of our room, not exchanging smiles. Nearest me, Iman was untangling ropes. I kept my eye on Hadi, waiting for him to blink. My brothers and I didn’t know what had happened to Abdollah, but we knew this much: not only was our eldest brother gone to some mysterious place, but we had lost our mother, too.
Whenever Maman did venture out, she was even more disturbed. In plain view, she ripped a poster of Khomeini off a public building, shredded it with her fingernails, and stomped it into the gutter. When the komiteh confronted her, she screamed, “Kill me. I dare you to shoot me!”
After that, my grandmother and Khaleh kept her quiet and confined to house arrest with regular doses of Valium. It was best, her sister and mother agreed, that she stay inside and sleep, until she could recover…
But once fate descended upon my family, there would be no end to loss. My brother was missing, my mother lost; also – all of us, in our own way, had gone into our separate states of suspended animation until something would happen to break the spell.
When change happened, it was another blow: fate struck again. This time, Maman’s father, who had gone into the hospital for a routine surgery on his shoulder, fell suddenly ill after the operation.
The four of us were in the backseat of the car with Maman when our driver, the hotel manager Amir, slammed on the brakes.
“Bismillah! What in the name of God is this?”
Amir lowered the window. I could see, outside the window, pointed at him, the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle.
Standing by the driver’s side, the teenaged revolutionary guard demanded, “Where do you go in the middle of the night?”
“I’m driving this woman to see her ill father.”
Maman gripped the door handle and pulled her chador closer, covering more of her face.
With the nose of his gun, the guard pointed to the side of the road. “Pull over here.”
Three other young guards, all armed, each with a finger on the trigger, lined up alongside him.
Amir got out of the car, and the first guard led him away, into the darkness.
Iman began to whimper.
When the guard and manager didn’t return, Maman rolled down her window and called to the other guards. “Khasteh nabasheen – good evening and I hope you haven’t worked too hard.” Her voice was calm. “Please call my husband at the Rose Hotel. Our manager is driving us to see my father who’s very ill. I must go to him now.”
This was the longest sentence she had uttered in weeks.
“We don’t have phones in the middle of the streets, zanikeh. Bitch.” The guard tapped the tip of his gun against her car door. “Your husband can’t do anything for you. This is an Islamic state. Mifahmi? Do you get it now?”
Maman’s breathing shortened; her body began to tremble.
Then it happened – I did not even have enough time to cringe. I froze next to my brothers as Maman opened the car door and flew at the guard, her chador flaring like bat wings. She walked straight at the gun barrels and screamed: “My father is sick. He might be dying. Let us go!”
“Go back and sit in the car, zanikeh.”
“You think I’m scared of your gun? You’re hiding behind the guns you don’t even know how to use yet. If you have the guts, pull the trigger, you coward!”
Maman moved two steps closer; the guard stood, too stunned to move away. “You’re my son’s age, but my son had more honor in his little finger than you’ll ever have in your entire life. How dare you talk to me this way?” Her voice rose to a scream, “It was you that took my son. It’s you that has destroyed our lives.”
Hadi bolted out of the car, and ran toward Maman. The moment she heard his footsteps, she turned and caught him. At ten, he was tall for his age, almost as tall as the guard. Hadi shouted a “Pedarsaga – you bastards.” The three other guards and the manager came running.
“Please, please return to the car,” Hadi whispered to Maman. “Let me try…”
“Please have mercy.” The manager spoke to the first armed boy. “She’s not of sound mind. You can see that she’s not well.” He offered his hand and, in his palm, I caught a glimpse of the wadded pink…. Motioning Maman to go to the car, the manager passed a roll of money to the leader with a handshake and placed his other hand on the lead soldier’s gun. A small fortune. I had never seen so many pink bills. I knew instinctively that Baba had given them to the manager.
The men lowered their guns.
As the manager slipped back into his seat and shifted the car into gear, his voice shook. “Thank Allah, he was merciful. We got past them.”
That night, Zain sobbed for our Grandpa Rahim, who never awakened after his surgery. Maman moved back to her bedroom, and pulled Zain into bed with her. When my nightmares woke me before dawn, I ran into my parents’ room, but neither Maman, who was in Valium slumber, nor Zain, who was tucked under her arm, were awakened by my sobbing. Zain and Maman were glued to each other on one side, far from Baba.
I looked at my Baba lying at the edge of the bed, awake; his feet dangled from the edge and something in this struck me as so wrong. Baba and Maman always slept entwined, even their feet.
“I’m scared,” I told Baba.
Tapping the space between him and them, he said, “Come, azizam,” and I climbed in, pulling the sheet over me. We lay awake; and I wondered about the missing – and the dead. Baba and I looked up at the ceiling, side-by-side, in silence.
Baba
The Rose Hotel sign – the insignia of the hotel, its beautiful script and the words “No Alcohol, No Music,” the same sign that had taken three years to design and install for a business that, after ten years, had consumed Baba’s entire life – stared back at him. Now he wanted nothing more to do with this business. He had spent the past three months trying to find a buyer for the place that had been home, his other family, and his life’s dream.
The trees were bare, and the cold wind signaled the arrival of the new winter. The sounds of the trucks, motorcycles, and the honks of drivers were fading as Baba lifted his head, looking into the dark sky, his eyes filled with tears. Even now, he could hear the sounds of the shovel he used to break ground all those years ago, shortly after he met Mr. Gaffari. Baba turned when he heard footsteps behind him.
Mr. Gaffari put his hand on Baba’s shoulder. His voice was soft.
&nb
sp; “The doors of the hotel are locked. It’s time to go, Haji,” he said gently.
Mr. Gaffari reached to embrace Baba.
Baba embraced him also; both men let loose their tears.
“I’m indebted to you for all my life. I don’t know how I will manage without you,” Baba said to his dearest friend.
As Baba climbed into the driver’s seat, Mr. Gaffari said a final goodbye to Maman, who kept her head turned away from the house and the hotel. As we drove away, I looked back – just as the lights of the Rose Hotel sign blinked off and the hotel went dark.
Rahimeh
The hotel and I were five years old. We had been “born” together. When I saw the hotel go dark from within, a shiver such as I had never known, ran through me.
I think, at that moment, I knew the truth.
Our journey away from the hotel began with an uneasy feeling. All of us children were upset and overtly “acting out” – each in our own ways. Zain was sullen, biting his nails. He had to be dragged, screaming, away from his toys: “I don’t want to leave!” Hadi was working the door handle, trying to remove it. And Iman, sucking his thumb, sat in Maman’s lap.
“But we’ll come home someday,” I said, afraid to
phrase this as a question.
No one said anything.
Baba started the car and drove off, I could see Mr. Gaffari still waving to us from the hotel parking lot until his image and that of the nightingale, which perched on top of the roof, faded and vanished. I squinted and kept waving even after they were out of view.
Through the back window, I could see the glistening golden dome of the Haram reflected in the bright sunlight. After the third time I saw the dome come in and out of view, I asked, “Why do we keep circling the Haram, Baba?”
“We are saying goodbye to Imam Reza, azizam. Repeat after me.” Baba began to recite the Arabic prayer.
Goodbye? We never circled the Haram unless we were going on a trip. Maybe we were going very far this time. Maybe we were finally going to visit Abdollah, wherever he was.
The Rose Hotel Page 8
