Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  “The pasha—generous and merciful—”

  At this point Jared S. interrupts. “Wait. Who’s the cousin?”

  “I’m confused,” says Jennifer L.

  “Can you make him do his reports on horses or normal stuff?” says Doug P.

  “No,” says Mrs. Miller. “I would hope that everyone does the research assignment and writes a report on their actual family, Douglas.”

  Doug P. made up a bunch of stuff about horses in case you didn’t figure it out.

  Anyway, Jared says, “Is the cousin the same guy as before who wanted the poison?”

  “No, that’s Maryam’s husband,” says Jessica, who is the best listener.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “None of these people are important. The only person to remember is Jamshid. The rest are just people for the story. The only part I know for sure is Jamshid.”

  “Then get to the point,” says Jared.

  The point was that the pasha’s daughter suffered a supernatural illness. Magistrates (like the pompous one in the bazaar who did not purchase a rug after all that) were sent to every city to find doctors to help her. And the cousin—doesn’t matter whose cousin—had the letter of invitation for the doctor of Isfahan, which he had promised to deliver in exchange for a meager fee.

  When my father tells it, he skips all of this guessing, because he’s the greatest storyteller of the family, and he has a nose for when the strange turns of history begin to sound too much like myths.

  He only speaks what we know for certain.

  He says, “Your great-great-great-grandfather earned all this land. He was a doctor, the best in Isfahan. At that time a pasha in India had a daughter who was sick—probably with a mild schizophreniform disorder, but back then, they had no diagnosis for these things. So he prescribed a sedative. She calmed down and eventually grew out of it.”

  That’s it.

  To me, this was tightfisted.

  What about the court of the pasha?

  Was the daughter beautiful?

  I will tell you, reader, that I imagine her like Kelly J., who looks nothing like a pasha’s daughter, but very much like a Disney princess.

  How long would it take the doctor to caravan to India, and what did he do in the heat of the day, as the camels lay on the ground resting?

  I would imagine he walked into the palace and looked up to see the daughter watching from a terrace above him in the grand hall. At that exact moment he fell forever in love with her.

  But she was wracked with convulsion and delusion and horrific visions.

  In her bedroom, he would submit the full weight of his knowledge to healing her condition, knowing all the while that his success would only separate them forever.

  And she too might have loved the Persian doctor. Cursed though she was with illness—she might have come to prefer it for his company.

  The tragedy of love would unfold as the doctor could never sit by and watch the princess in such pain. He would heal her and together they would suffer the duller ache of longing. I would imagine him trudging behind a long caravan back to Isfahan, broken.

  But my father would make no concessions to mythmaking, when the truth was available.

  “The pasha gave him his weight in gold,” my father would say, “and once again in jewels. And your great-great-great-grandfather returned home. He bought all the land around Ardestan.”

  That was all we knew. He returned with enough treasure to buy thousands of acres. Enfolded in them were mountains, and a river, and enough villages to make him a local government unto himself.

  “If only he had been fat,” joked my father, “we’d be twice rich. But your father’s fathers were all cursed with heroic fitness.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “It’s true,” he says. “You don’t think it’s true?”

  When we have this conversation I am in the kitchen in Oklahoma, where they make fun of kids with hairy arms and bubble butts. I imagine my father, a portly bear who I have never seen move faster than a brisk walk.

  “Well, it’s true. You descend from kings. Good-looking ones.”

  Suddenly, I realize he’s saying that because my mom told him about school. About Brandon Goff pointing at how my shirt doesn’t go straight down my back, and shouting to everyone that I have a bubble butt.

  This happened in the halls, and Kelly J. wasn’t around, but still.

  I didn’t say anything to my dad because I’m not even sure how he knew. I guess my sister saw me stretching out my shirts on the back of a chair and told my mom, and they figured it out. I didn’t say anything to my dad. It’s not like he could do anything but talk on the phone anyway.

  We don’t live in the heroic age. Our separation isn’t any great poetic struggle. It’s just pain. It’s just ripping bodies apart.

  Anyway, that’s how come we had all that land.

  * * *

  IN OKLAHOMA WE ARE the opposite of kings.

  Everything we own is inside a hard gray suitcase. It is mostly coats and papers. There is one squished shoebox full of photos that my mom guards, and cries over when she thinks we’re asleep.

  We left all the toys, and the books, and my candy bars. It has been years since we left Iran—but I wonder about the candy bars.

  One of my last memories of Iran is my dad coming home with a case of Orich candy bars a few weeks before we had to escape. When people here ask me what kind of candy I like, I say, “Orich!”

  And we go through the exact same script every time.

  They frown. So I explain. “They’re chocolate-covered coconut.”

  “Oh, like Mounds bars. We have those here.”

  Everyone is always insisting they have things here, but they do not have Orich, or my father. That is two things.

  They have everything else here.

  The grocery stores scared us at first. They have chips that are all the same shape and stack on top of each other in a tube. But they don’t have Orich bars. I say, “Like a Mounds bar, but they taste different.”

  “Oh?” say the grownies, as if they don’t believe me. “How?”

  I don’t know how to explain. I barely remember the taste of Orich. I only know I ate a Mounds bar and it wasn’t my favorite most amazing thing in my mouth … so it must be different.

  I usually say, “I also like Kit Kat.”

  They smile, because I finally answered something normal.

  I don’t say that in Iran, Kit Kats aren’t broken into bars; they’re one flat square.

  Whenever my dad brought home a case of candy bars, we ran to the door. I was just a five-year-old kid. My sister was eight. Our dad had such a habit of bringing home cases of chocolate that my mom had made me a place to store them. She took a clown doll and sewed giant baggy pants around it that ruffled out with dozens of little pockets. Back then she sewed us all kinds of toys. She even made a step stool the shape of a big red bus—stuffed with cushions so I could reach my bed.

  Anyway, we’d run up to my dad. “Baba!”

  He was a dentist who worked above a candy shop. They used to joke that it was the perfect arrangement.

  We opened our mouths so that Baba could look.

  * * *

  I remember the taste of his thumb better than Orich.

  He would look in my mouth, push on my molars to make them perfectly straight. I used to think my Baba could change the shape of teeth as easily as the great hero Rostam could move mountains.

  After he checked our teeth, I would hug his right side, because he kept cigarettes in his left breast pocket.

  This is a memory that has no sound, but probably it should have my Baba’s laugh, which was such a rich and resonant chortle that it fills rooms of my memory that he was not even in.

  He was still thin at that time, with a bushy red mustache. I only remember him eating kebab and ice cream.

  He presented the last case of Orich—probably thirty or forty bars.

  * * *

  From here, th
e memory splits into three dessert-oriented stories.

  The first is the myth of the Baker and Tamar.

  The second is the legend of my sister’s cleverness.

  The third is the history of a clown’s underpants.

  * * *

  YOU SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING.

  In school they have dances that other kids go to. There are about six reasons I don’t go. One, they’re at night and you need a ride. Two, I don’t know what they are like. Three, I don’t dance. Four, Brandon Goff goes. Five, his friends still call me bubble butt and it’s become a “thing.” Six, no one ever asked me.

  But last week, I was standing in the courtyard after lunch and Jennifer S. walked up to me. She had to walk all the way over from where people are, so it took forever. She was trying not to laugh. I checked my armpits for sweat and stuff like that. I tried to straighten my hair down. I dropped the acorns I was holding, cause it’s weird to count acorns.

  When she arrived she said, “Hey, are you going to the dance?”

  I said, “Hi Jennifer.”

  She said, “Are you going to the dance?”

  I said, “No.”

  She turned around and walked back.

  You should know, reader, that Jennifer S. is a finigonzon, for sure. But I have a crushed heart for someone else. I won’t tell you about her yet, because sometimes love has to be kept secret. If other people find out, they attack it.

  I thought maybe Jennifer S. was asking me to the dance. But then I saw her walk back to her group and they all laughed, and her friend gave her back her purse. So maybe it was a dare. I don’t know.

  * * *

  THE MYTH OF THE BAKER and Tamar, and its relation to my dad and candy bars and the love of his life.

  In my hometown of Isfahan, there is another town—a hidden town completely surrounded but separate—called New Jolfa.

  In 1606 the shah Abbas created the city of Jolfa and gave it to the Armenians, who were running from the Ottoman emperor because they were Christians. In Jolfa, they were allowed to be Christian and to build churches. But if they ever spoke to the people of Isfahan about their faith, the shah would cut off their heads.

  And so you can imagine, Jolfa kept to itself.

  As the centuries passed, the little city prospered. By the time I was born in 1982, they were kings of pastry. And the undisputed king of kings—the shah-in-shah—of these bakeries was Akh Tamar. The people of Isfahan ventured to the center of the strange neighborhood to stand in line, before the famed bakery of Akh Tamar, just for six of his cream puffs.

  They said he was the padeshah of pâte à choux, the ruler supreme of rosewater and cream. He was an old man by the time I ate one of his pastries. I was just a little kid. He might have even been dead like McDonald’s. I don’t know.

  I remember eating a cream puff in our kitchen in Isfahan and counting the guests to see if I could have another. A man, I don’t remember if it was my uncle, I don’t even remember his face, said, “That Abbas is king.”

  I think the baker’s name was also Abbas.

  The man started to tell the story that Baker Abbas was once a poor son of New Jolfa with a heart overfilled with kindness.

  “Very handsome, very handsome,” agreed the women listening. The man in my memory goes on. “And though the Armenians had no king at this time, they had Tamar, who was so beautiful she shined

  as she walked through the bazaar.

  There is no notion as important as love.

  Abbas saw Tamar one day and fell into an ocean of it. And she, when she saw him—a delivery boy for a greengrocer at the time—she fell into a kind of heartsickness that can only be described as an equal mixture of love and grief.

  She was a governor’s daughter, of course.

  And the rich never forget the social order. Tamar at this moment knew she was hopelessly in love with Abbas, and also that her love was hopeless.

  It is no magic to guess what happens next.

  They meet and speak electric words to each other.

  ‘Hi.’ ‘Hello.’

  They flit around each other when she orders from the greengrocer daily. They steal kisses in the shadows of her father’s vaulted staircase.

  She weeps in his arms and tells him they can never marry.

  Her mother sees them from her window. She promises her daughter to some fancy boy who once visited Paris.

  Abbas pours himself into his pastry craft.

  He races time. He races the courtship of Tamar to what’s-his-name.

  He sculpts chickpea cookies with a steady hand. They are each individually perfect. None crumble. He takes a stall in the rear alcove of the bazaar and sells them. He makes saffron rice pudding, stirring patiently, pulling the pot from the fire with a troubadour’s timing. It is a perfect sunrise yellow.

  He layers his baklava generously with walnuts and cardamom. His almond cakes are subtle and the cherry puree on top is joyous, bold, even a little wanton.

  Soon no one remembers Abbas the greengrocer’s errand boy, only Abbas the master baker of all Isfahan.

  His first large order is from a governor who wants a thousand cream puffs for the wedding of his daughter—Tamar.

  Abbas dies here.

  His heart crumbles into chickpea flour.

  Late in the evening the merchants of the bazaar hear him weeping in the rear alcove, as they shutter their stalls.

  Here is something I would like to tell you—stories get better as they get more true.

  The sad truth of this story is that Abbas was truly and completely ruined.

  His tears—they said—were the warm water baths that steamed up his oven. His trembling hands whipped pastry cream as light as a shroud.

  When the guests at Tamar’s wedding ate the cream puffs, they could taste the truest thing in all the world at that moment—the baker’s pain.

  They didn’t understand this, of course. To them, they were simply the most delicious pastries they had ever eaten. They toasted the merry couple.

  When Tamar tasted one, it was a love letter. She ran to her room and sobbed into a pillow.

  This is how the greatest bakery in New Jolfa came to be called Akh Tamar. The sound of a punch to the rib—Akh!—Oh!—Oh! Tamar! The sound of the old master baker weeping in the back kitchen.”

  In my memory of this story’s telling—in our kitchen in Isfahan—the man finished his tale and popped another cream puff into his mouth. I can almost squint and see him. Yes, I think he’s my uncle Ahmad, who fancied himself a storyteller.

  Memories are always partly untrue.

  It could have been his brother Reza.

  * * *

  A PATCHWORK STORY is the shame of a refugee.

  * * *

  IN OKLAHOMA I GO to the library sometimes. My mom drops me off on Saturday mornings before she goes to work. It is a small one-story building with gray carpets.

  It does not have a Persian section. The first thing I read are comics about Calvin and Hobbes. He is a boy who seems to hate the world as it is and love the world that ought to be. The tiger is his sane mind, which goes to sleep too much, so that he never knows what to believe. And never knows which world he is in. I like him because he speaks better than a kid.

  When you are spending the whole day at the library, it is important to do stuff in chunks. First, read all the new comics. Then, look at the new magazines with sports on them and write down the phrases that are cool, like “the whole kit and kaboodle,” which means “everything,” and “put on a clinic,” which means “taught.” When the Chicago Bulls put on a clinic and took home the whole kit and kaboodle, it means they won.

  In the afternoon, the old people are gone so the next thing to do is find the section that has poems that tell stories. It’s easy to learn languages when the sounds rhyme. There’s one poem about a kid named Roland who is walking from one country to another, and he’s scared. When he looks down at the wet field, he thinks the grass looks like ugly hair sticking up from a bloody
head. He says, “Thin dry blades pricked the mud which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.”

  And then he sees a stiff blind horse and thinks it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen. But he doesn’t know what to do to help him. He can’t just leave it there in the bloody field. But he doesn’t have a way to help either and he wants to keep going. Suddenly he starts to talk himself into caring less about it. Little by little, to make sure his heart doesn’t break, he makes himself immune to the pain of the horse with its “shut eyes underneath the rusty mane.” Then he says, “He must be wicked to deserve such pain.”

  Just like that. It’s the horse’s fault. I don’t believe that, reader. I think Roland is a dumb kid who just wants to forget he ever saw the horse.

  My mom usually gives me an egg sandwich to eat, but people hate the smell of egg sandwiches so I eat it in the bathroom.

  * * *

  The librarian at the Edmond Library is a woman named Helen Brown, and she is the kindest person I have ever met, and would never leave a horse in a field or blame it for anything.

  Mrs. Brown gave me my library card. I am allowed to check out thirty-five books and can visit the library every two weeks. That is seventy books a month. In one year, I will read 840 books. I don’t care what they are about, only that they contain English.

  Mrs. Miller says this is the only way to learn.

  One time, I found a book on Persians in the myth section.

  It said:

  Akhtamar—The largest of four islands in Lake Van (Turkey). According to folk legend, an Armenian princess lived on the island. Every night she held a lamp so that the boy she loved could swim from the mainland to meet her. One night her father caught her and smashed the lamp. The boy was lost in the lake and drowned. Locals claim to hear his dying words, “Akh, Tamar!” to this day.

  * * *

  THE LEGEND OF MY sister’s cleverness is a family story that people mention anytime they want to call me mazloom.