Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

3.  They were the ones expected to do the paving.

  * * *

  THE TRUE STORY OF AZIZ is more interesting than a magic fish anyway, and took place beside a real river called the Aras. When she was a little girl, she lived in a big house surrounded by saffron fields. Do you know about saffron? Should I explain it? Okay, I’ll explain. It’s a spice that comes from pulling tiny threads from the middle of a flower. It’s delicate and impossible to harvest with machines—you have to pinch them out of the flower by hand. In fact, I bet it’s even more valuable than gold.

  Aziz’s dad was a khan for owning all the fields. They say he rode his horse in top hat and tails—he was a gentleman farmer.

  And they say he was kind to his workers. When the girls returned from the fields to the big house, everyone at the house could hear their laughter, because saffron has an aroma that makes people happy. Sometimes a warm rain would soak the fields and the flowers would give off their deep red color—rivers of red, like the yolk of sunset burst over everything. The workers’ hands would be stained yellow; so would the ankles of the khan’s white horse.

  Aziz was the little princess of the khan’s grand floral sea. She read her books in the open courtyard sitting on the inlay tiles of the fountain, one foot dangling on each side, with an eye always on the horizon.

  When her father’s hat peeked over the hill, and the laughter of the harvesters was a far-off chime, Aziz would run into the house to tell everyone, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

  Aziz ran back across the orchard to the bonfire. The old cook got his kiss on the cheek from the princess, waited for her to leave, and began barking orders. The whole house prepared for the feast. Even Aziz. Her job was to fill two bowls with fresh yogurt from the sacks hanging in the basement larder, where the floor was packed dirt, and where the old cook kept his pickling jars.

  Soon the dinner carpet was full with trays of kebab, grilled onions and tomatoes, platters of fresh chives, green and purple basil, cilantro, radishes, and dill. The mountains of steaming basmati rice were capped with drizzles of saffron butter. A stew of chickpea, lamb, crispy shallots, and fried mint was the khan’s favorite.

  Aziz always sat beside him and made sure his plate never wanted for anything. He did not talk much, but held his wife’s hand as much as possible. You can already feel it, can’t you, in all this happiness, that some horrible darkness perched outside the houses watching Aziz.

  And those nights in the saffron fields would be the best she ever got.

  * * *

  LISTEN TO ME FOR a second.

  The life of Aziz is a tragic one.

  It was a real life. She was a happy mazloom girl in this part, but I only knew her as an old woman—bent in two, with a face like dry soap, shut off from the world, shuffling around her little sod house by the ravine in her coverings like a black ghost.

  She would look at me—I remember because she would smile and the lines in her face twisted into unfamiliar shapes—almost like a grimace, almost like she was looking at me from the bottom of a well.

  She offered sesame candy from a dish beside the lamp that also had buttons in it. I remember because it was the first time in my life I refused candy.

  Those are the only two memories I have of Aziz: the little river of flowers and sewage, and a sad old grin giving me stale candy. I’m telling you this because it’s important to count the memories. The rest is other people’s memories. Stories they told me some thousands of nights ago.

  Now that we are here in Oklahoma, I will never see Aziz again, because she is too old to travel and I can never go back.

  Sometimes on the bus to school, I think of her and hope she has a gentle death. I hope she has more memories that I do, and I hope she forgives me for the ones I have of her. In my head, I tell her I will always think of her as the princess of a kingdom of laughing flowers.

  But the truth is that we are both exiles and will never go home again.

  * * *

  THE DAY AZIZ BECAME an exile is also the day she lost her father, the great khan, forever.

  The legend goes that the khan had to take a long trip. His fields stretched from northern Iran into Azerbaijan, which, at the time, was a part of the Russian Empire. For centuries, Russian and Persian dynasties fought over it—but at this time, it was peaceful and the khan rode back and forth without trouble.

  In the stories the calamity is sudden. Somewhere else in the world, a mad king sent out his army.

  Not an important king.

  Aziz wouldn’t even know his name. But the stars and the moon and every heavenly thing aligned to make the worst of all outcomes. And so the far-off kingdoms of Europe and Russia tumbled into the second Great War.

  The drums of war had not yet silenced the laughter of the harvesters, but Aziz felt the first pinch of heartache when her father didn’t return on the appointed day.

  They say he was in Azerbaijan when the war began, and the borders were closed. I imagine it like an iron fence shutting behind him and scaring his horse. No one knows what happened after that. His fields on that side of the Aras River were taken by faceless enemies. And the khan was never heard from again.

  It’s easy to imagine it from our side of history. To see the khan’s horse rear up at an encroaching darkness that pounces on him like a pack of wolves.

  To imagine him immediately drowned.

  To see his top hat floating away in a red river.

  But Aziz and her mother didn’t have the comfort of certainty. To her, the darkness across the river was a cloud of endless unknowing.

  At any moment, she might see her baba emerge with tales of adventure and a pocket full of sesame candy.

  Until the very last day, Aziz stared in the direction of the northern fields and wished for the khan’s return.

  But that was months after he disappeared, and by then her uncles had already done their evil.

  * * *

  FOR MY CLASS PROJECT, I would like to present the 1,001 Nights, which will unconfuse you about some very important things.

  First, you have to know about Shahryar, who was a Persian king—not in true history, but in myth history.

  He had a wife we will not name, because it would be embarrassing to her family. In the story everyone except Scheherazade is a shame for their family, but the queen is especially shameful because she’s an oath breaker.

  The king finds his wife in the garden copulating—that means sexing, but I use the official word because Mrs. Miller would freak out if I said “sex” in class and Tanner would make kissy noises and Kelly J. would say, “Gross!” either because of Tanner being slurpy or because she thinks I’m gross and “sex” reminded her to remind me.

  So anyway, the king finds her cheating on him and goes crazy.

  He has everyone killed, which is why we’ll just call him “the king” from now on. In the story he mends his broken heart by turning it to stone.

  Every night after that, the king marries a young woman and kills her in the morning. The night he marries Scheherazade, we are not told what number wife she is.

  This is how the thousand nights begin, with Scheherazade entertaining the king with a story. Before she can finish each one, we are told “the morning overtook Scheherazade, who lapsed into silence,” leaving the king burning to hear the rest.

  And so each morning he spares her life in order to hear the end of the story. And each night Scheherazade weaves the tales together so that they always end on a cliffhanger. The brilliant part is that the king always thinks it’s his idea for them to keep going. And at important parts, she stops and lets the king fill in the story so he feels good.

  For a thousand and one nights she does this, but really, it’s forever, because we don’t have all thousand and one stories recorded. Nobody wants them to end. They’re all the stories people tell after dinner, over glasses of tea. Like with the phrase “Once upon a time,” a storyteller will say, “And so the following night, Scheherazade began her tale once again.”<
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  There are endless variations from teller to teller. The Tale of the Three Brothers and the Djinn might be a comedy if you hear it in the market in Isfahan, or it might be a hero’s journey around a bonfire in Ardestan. Every possible version exists somewhere. In the mind of Scheherazade there are a thousand times a thousand times a thousand tales.

  She tells them forever without stopping.

  Even this is one of them.

  But lunchtime has overtaken me and I cannot finish my report on what I did this summer.

  * * *

  WHAT DOES THIS HAVE to do with Aziz as she awaited her father, you might ask.

  How does this unconfuse anything?

  The answer is that now you know two true things.

  One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.

  And two, the story of Aziz could have gone a million different ways.

  * * *

  IN A DIFFERENT TALE, the khan has an odyssey in the Azerbaijani hill country.

  He dances with every member of a village of lepers, and heals them with nothing more than a kind touch.

  He steals a key ring from the horn of a sleeping djinn and throws it to a mermaid imprisoned on a salt stone at the center of a pink lake.

  He sits for tea in the den of a demon who believes in God and together they write the saddest of poems, a poem so immeasurably sad that it quenches the flames of the demon’s seat in hell.

  And he returns in time to tell it.

  The khan returns in the final moment to save his daughter from her uncles.

  But this is not what happened.

  After just a few weeks, the khan was considered dead, and the mansion in the saffron fields fell into decay.

  The world’s war found Aziz and her mother and the old cook and the harvesters—and put its calloused hand over their mouths.

  The fields went fallow.

  Hunger came on them like a bandit.

  Her mother sat all day with an untouched glass of tea and watched it cool. Aziz began to feel that her mother had also left her, and would only return with the khan.

  Aziz spent those famine days at the front window of the house, in a state of half-reading. Carriages drove past the open courtyard, taking people to the cities to find work. One woman stuck her hand out of a carriage and let a man cut the bracelet from her wrist in exchange for a loaf of bread.

  The day her uncles came, Aziz witnessed the old cook carrying a pot of barley stew from the bonfire on the other side of the orchard to the main house, when a gang of people attacked him, spilling the pot onto the dirt. They pushed the cook aside. And then they fell to all fours and plunged their faces into the stew and the mud.

  * * *

  IMAGINE YOU’RE EVIL.

  Not misunderstood.

  Not sad.

  But evil.

  Imagine you’ve got a heart that spends all day wanting more.

  Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity.

  Imagine you’re like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers.

  Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.

  Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey.

  Imagine you’re evil and you don’t do any of those things, but you’re like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what’s going on and you say nothing’s going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English.

  Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you’re disgusted, because you don’t like meanness. But you don’t do anything or tell anyone.

  Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.

  Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them.

  Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone.

  All the kindness you could have given.

  All the excuses you gave instead.

  Imagine that for a minute.

  Imagine what it means.

  * * *

  WELL, ANYWAY, DON’T GET too upset.

  You can always find somebody worse-acting than you and say, at least I’m not as bad as that guy.

  And you can feel good and go to the mall and go back to being evil.

  * * *

  HER EVIL UNCLES APPEARED on a cold early morning, right after Aziz walked into the courtyard and found her mother dead.

  Aziz was only ten. She stood over her mother and thought, How will I tell this news to Father when he comes back? That was how out-of-touch she was, probably. She knew he was dead, but also, in a different story, he was temporarily dead. She wanted to live in that other story.

  In a different tale her mother would have died of heartache for her missing husband (in this one, disease).

  That was the story that actually happened. Aziz lost her dad, then lost her mom, then the uncles arrived as if they had heard the news of their sister already. As if they knew Aziz had become the orphan heir of all the khan’s estate.

  She had no one but the old cook, and the steward family who kept the orchards, and the harvesters who lived in the village. But they couldn’t defend her against her own kin.

  The uncles—I don’t know what they looked like or how many. Let’s make two. Both younger brothers to Aziz’s mother, both squat and shaggy.

  No wait, one is pinched and thin.

  Together they look like a bird and an onion.

  One is the kind of villain who wants more for himself.

  The other is the kind who wants less for others.

  The one who looked and moved like a bird was the first to walk into the house and inspect everything, as if he’d just walked into a bazaar. The uncle who looked and smelled like an onion stood by the door, sweating.

  So the story goes that the uncles had whispered with a clerk in the village and given him gold. In exchange, they took the deed to all the khan’s fields.

  And what about their orphan niece?

  They would keep her, of course.

  She would care for the house.

  There is no more description of this time in Aziz’s life, because no one ever talked about it.

  The harvesters refused to call the uncles “khans.” Under the watch of Mr. Bird and Mr. Onion, they marched into springtime fields so full of purple flowers they looked like carpets in the house of God. But Aziz never heard the harvesters laugh again.

  As she washed and mended, she only ever heard them say, “Don’t worry, Aziz joon. Soon you will come of age and claim the khan’s inheritance.”

  No one knows if Aziz felt better when she heard that sort of thing. Because Aziz would never say. But it would have been better if she put her head down and helped the cook prepare the private meals for her uncles. It would have been better if Aziz never dared hope anything in those long five years.

  Because the version where she grows and takes her father’s house back—that’s not how the story goes.

  * * *

  PEOPLE GET MARRIED FOR all kinds of reasons.

  I said that once in Mrs. Miller’s class and Julie Jenkins said, “Like love.”

  And I said, “Or money. Or protection. Or just to talk to somebody,” which is what I thought at the time, because my mom married Ray. It seemed to me she just wanted someone who spoke Farsi like we did, and he was the only one we met when we got here. Mrs. Miller didn’t know that, so she said, “Thank you, David. Let’s stay on task.”

  She called me David for the first few weeks, even though we told people to call me Daniel. They’re both the same to me, so I didn’t correct her. “Ma and Pa love each other,” adds Julie. And we go on reading Charlotte’s Web.

  We lived in an apartment before Ray. Brentwood Apartments. It was a nice pla
ce. I once saw a kid explode his tongue with a car battery, so I guess it was the kind of place where they value education.

  His name was Tanner and he was trying to kill the cockroaches in a drain ditch behind the apartments. He had the two prongs of jumper cables with the other end attached to the car battery. And he’d put them on the cockroaches.

  I was only there because Ray was shouting at my mom and they’d sent us outside. I played in the cement drainage area because Tanner told me someone had killed a kid in the woods last year. So I stayed away from there.

  “Come check this out,” said Tanner.

  I didn’t move.

  He jabbed the prongs into the ditch, under an open grate, and laughed. “I think you could kill a turtle with this.”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  That made Tanner look up, because I was telling him what to do. He could have probably killed me if he wanted. “What’d you say?”

  I would have run home, but Ray hit my mom a lot back then, and it was worse if we were around. I said, “Nothing. I thought … is there a turtle in there?”

  “No, idiot.”

  He stuck the prongs in again. They made a zap sound.

  “It could fry up a bird, easy,” he said.

  When I had a dad, in Iran, we had a house and it was so beautiful. I dream about it sometimes. There’s a smell I smell in those dreams. It could be a fake memory, because one of the pictures we still have—a baby picture—was me in the backyard standing in front of a wall of white jasmine flowers and red roses. I’m smelling one in the picture—my sister says, like a sissy. Like a sensitive boy, my mom would say.

  I dream about that sunny jasmine smell.

  And we had a pool.

  And between my room and my sister’s, the wall was one giant sheet of glass. Between us was a room with trees in it—inside the house—for doves to perch on. The ceiling of that room was glass too. Light shined down all day on the potted trees and the birds sang to each other. You could see it all from both rooms. I would watch my sister through the glass room playing. She wouldn’t let me go around to play with her. But the memory is that flower smell, the glare of the glass, squinting to see my sister on her side with her dolls, and the birds in between sitting safe in their orchard. When I was a kid I thought everybody had a glass bird room in their houses. I only ever remember birds being nice to me. I thought, Why would Tanner want to kill them?