No one ever told me if Khosrou II was part of the plan to kill his own father. I never imagined the king looking up to see his son standing in the poppy field. They probably didn’t tell me because I’m named after him and it would be a curse to be named after a treacherous son.
All my mother ever said was that Khosrou II had his uncles killed and he was the best-looking boy in the fifth grade.
As for his love story, here are the lessons:
When Khosrou was a young man, his friend told him about an Armenian princess named Shirin—which means “sweetness” in Farsi.
Anyway, Khosrou fell in love with her, just from the descriptions from his friend, that she was a super finigonzon, with peridot eyes and one of those noses that look like a pinky finger and not a thumb.
The lesson here is that you can fall in love with a story you have in your head.
And the same happened to Shirin, who fell in love with Khosrou just by looking at a picture of him. You can imagine people a certain way and it’s like you created them. Like a whole new Kelly who doesn’t roll her eyes so much.
So the boy is all googly-eyed over the story within the story of the girl, but this isn’t a Disney movie, so he doesn’t just float over to Armenia. What happens is a warlord named Chobin shows up with an army at Khosrou’s palace.
Chobin had been a general in Khosrou’s dad’s army and had been dismissed for losing a battle. He was humiliated and there’s nobody more dangerous than a kid who feels like that.
Chobin’s rebel army probably all felt like that. Fighting with tears in their eyes and embarrassed for being babies who cry.
And that army—the mazloom army—that one always wins.
So Khosrou had to run away and Chobin became the king of the Persian Empire. When Khosrou reached Armenia, he wasn’t any better than a refugee, and Shirin was as blond as Kelly J.
The lesson here is that people have scales in their heads and they measure other people for their value and ugly refugee boys are near the bottom and pretty blond girls are at the top. This is not a happy lesson. But you either get the truth, or you get good news—you don’t often get both.
Anyway, Khosrou was actually handsome, so that helped. When they met they fell into magical love. In the story, Khosrou sees her naked while she’s bathing and Shirin says she’ll never marry him unless he gets his kingdom back, so maybe that tells you way too much about magical love.
Then Khosrou goes to Constantinople to ask the caesar for an army to go back and defeat Chobin. The caesar says, “Okay.”
“Okay okay?” says Khosrou. He was probably expecting some tarof, some backing-and-forthing, but the caesar gets right to the point.
“Okay, you can have my army, but you have to marry my daughter Maryam.”
“Which one’s Maryam?” says Khosrou.
And the caesar points to a girl picking her nose in the corner.
The lesson here is don’t ask anybody for anything you can’t pay for. Or maybe it’s that nobody cares if two lovers get together—that’s like a cake only they get to eat. But nobody likes to watch someone else eat cake.
I don’t know the lesson exactly at this point. Honestly, Mrs. Miller, not everything has a lesson. It’s a complication that Khosrou agrees to. He marches back to Persia with an army and a wife, and smacks Chobin so hard for wrecking everything that Chobin flees to Fergana, which is like saying he runs away to Mars. And even then, Khosrou’s so furious about having to beg the caesar and being homeless when he met Shirin, and being forced to marry Maryam, that he hires an assassin to sneak into Chobin’s fortress and stab him to death.
A tip-top love story so far.
But by the time Khosrou finished with Chobin, he heard a rumor that broke his heart—like maybe he was in the library during lunch and his friend came in and told him—that a finigonz named Farhad, who was some kind of sculptor with dimples and everything, had started hanging out with Shirin after school.
“Sculptors can’t be rivals to kings,” said Khosrou, so he sent Farhad into exile to a mountain called Behistun and told him he couldn’t return until he carved a staircase into the stone cliffside—all the way up the mountain.
“Rival for what?” said Maryam probably.
“Uh,” said Khosrou.
The lesson here is that if you watch the side characters in a love story, you might notice the lovers treating them like garbage, with the excuse that they’re doing it for love.
But another lesson might be that maybe you’re not the hero of every story, and maybe Farhad was Shirin’s true love, or maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it—maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.
Farhad had chosen to love Shirin and threw himself into the task of sculpting the face of the world. He carved the stone of Behistun into a staircase—one step at a time—all the while dreaming that he’d reach the peak of the mountain and by then he’d have changed the world. He could fly directly into the arms of Shirin. And all that pain would become gladness.
When Khosrou heard that Farhad was making progress—that day and night he worked at carving the rock and loving Shirin—Khosrou was filled with jealousy.
He sent a message to Farhad.
It reached Farhad on the mountain, by a bird.
Farhad held the creature in his calloused and dusty hands and pulled a roll of parchment from the tube tied around its leg. It said, “Shirin is, unhappily, dead. Do not return. Here is a list of more mountains.”
On the back was the list, but Farhad didn’t read it. He had reached the top of Behistun. The last step.
He could see—if he squinted, and if his eyes weren’t full of tears—all the way to Armenia. And he thought of all the pain he had eaten to see Shirin again. Her face.
He screamed words in the unknowable language.
And he jumped.
And he did not fly.
* * *
THE LESSON HERE IS that your happiest memories can become your saddest all of a sudden.
* * *
KHOSROU WAS SO STUPID in this story that he thought he could have Shirin, now that Farhad was dead.
He never thought about poison.
How it might infect his own life to hate his wife, and kill some innocent man to get what he wanted.
That’s a metaphor kind of idea.
His heart had festered with murder and jealousy—so little by little he boiled away all the loving parts.
But in this story, there is also real poison.
When Shirin heard that Farhad had jumped off the mountain, she must have known the reason. She must have known the truth about Khosrou.
But people get married for all kinds of reasons, so she still wanted him.
One thing that is interesting is that lots of poisons taste sweet. They’re not like acid. They’re like syrup.
This is interesting because you can imagine Maryam taking a drink of mulberry cordial one night and saying, “Mmm, shirin,” which is the word for “sweet,” and also the word for her killer.
Maryam died clawing at her own throat, trying to scrape or squeeze the shirin poison back out as it ripped her apart.
But remember, this is a love story.
And the lesson here is that people are unlikeable. They have the irritating habit of believing they are as important as you are to the story. I might be especially unlikeable to you because I’m not beautiful like Scheherazade, or funny, but I still have her job to entertain you.
And I want to be good.
I want to give you something you treasure.
I want you to like me, as if I was a person in your life.
That doesn’t make me beautiful.
But wanting to please you is important too.
That’s what you want, after all: to be pleased.
You’d be shocked how few people want what you want.
* * *
FARHAD AND MARYAM WERE conveniently dead, leavin
g Khosrou and Shirin to their love.
Except it was poison love now.
They had both murdered someone for it.
And if you thought this ended happily, then you haven’t been paying attention. These stories are epic, so by this time, Khosrou had a son with Maryam (before Shirin killed her obviously). The son was a teenager and into girls. Uh-oh, you might be thinking.
And “uh-oh” is right, because the kid kills Khosrou so he could be with Shirin (the lady who killed his mom (but he probably doesn’t know that)).
But before he could force her to marry him, Shirin went to the grave of Khosrou and drank poison.
The end.
There is a love story for you.
Really makes your tummy tingle.
The lesson here is that love is a many-parted thing.
There is the part when you see someone beautiful (naked in a bath or not naked), and you want to be near them.
There is the part when you decide not to marry anyone else (which Khosrou didn’t do).
There is the part that makes you improve yourself—makes you practice controlling your fear and jealousy. There is the part where you choose every action so that it doesn’t hurt the one you love, even indirectly. There’s a lot more to love than smooching.
People are also many-parted things.
Two Persian poets—Ferdowsi and Nizami—tell it differently. As if both of them lived with Shirin and remember her with their own flawed memories.
In one telling she’s a mazloom finigonzon who suffers. When she dies, it’s because she was too pure for this world, and too sad. That one doesn’t mention her poison stash.
In the other telling, she’s the jealous maniac who murders Maryam and decides to kill herself when the son insults her pride with a proposal.
In the version I tell, she’s a mix, like Mithridates who drank all that poison so it wouldn’t hurt him while he was exiled, and then returned and killed everyone. She’s half defending herself, half burning the world down. Sometimes I add to Shirin’s story by having her do the same thing. She was paranoid that someone would poison her like she did to Maryam, so little by little she made herself immune. And then my twist in the last scene is that she drinks a whole cup to kill herself and nothing happens.
* * *
NOW YOU KNOW HOW Persian love stories go.
It’s okay to be scared.
* * *
WHEN YOU ASK PEOPLE in Oklahoma how their great-grandparents died, they say—almost all of them say:
“Cancer.”
Or:
“Heart disease.”
Or if you get lucky:
“Kicked in the head by a horse.”
Other than the horse one, you have to nod and agree with them that cancer and heart disease are totally normal and respectable ways to eat it.
But if you say, “Poisoned by the town doctor in a blood feud,” then you get looks. Courteous looks. Like, “Isn’t he precious” looks.
And only then would you regret being agreeable when they said theirs.
Why should you believe them?
How would they know that their great-grandpa died of cancer?
It’s just a story someone told them. They weren’t there.
They just expect everyone to take their word for it.
And people do, because the story is boring. Nobody cares the second after they hear it.
It goes:
“Cancer.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. He was young too, only forty-seven.”
“Wow. Wanna get tacos for lunch?”
Don’t be fooled by the “wow.” That was an “I don’t care” wow.
People are like that.
They’re immune to the sadness of others.
* * *
KARAJ IS A MOUNTAINOUS city so far away from Behistun—where Farhad carved his love letter to Shirin—that you could fit fifteen Edmond, Oklahomas in between.
But in the shadow of every mountain, there is at least one lover who looks up and sighs and wonders if the world could be so easy as to give him love, if he just climbed to the top.
There are no mountains in Oklahoma.
This is why people like the myths of Hercules and Rostam. The clarity that if they just completed their challenges, they could get what they wanted.
But love stories are never so easy. You might climb the whole mountain and return only to find out that mountain climbers aren’t your crush’s type.
My great-grandmother, Aziz, who was fifteen, loved Hassan, who was in his twenties, and the best thing I can say about it was that their love was clear.
It was clear that Hassan did not need to cleave a mountain to win Aziz.
Hassan owned the only auto parts shop in town. It was clear that Aziz liked this about him, because she always called him a businessman, even after he met with the Karaji physician one day in the winter, and he called Hassan a cart donkey—and which eventually led to Hassan’s death.
They were in love—that much is clear.
It was sometime in the 1940s. That part isn’t very clear, because I never asked about dates.
They lived in a house. From the kitchen window, Aziz could watch each day as the snowcap marched down the mountains till winter.
She made warm lunches of beef cutlets in tomato and saffron sauce on fresh bread, and walked the muddy path to Hassan’s shop with extra crisp radishes and a thermos of hot tea in her gunny sack.
Karaj in the wintertime is a snowbound city, and cars driving on the mountain road would often crunch into potholes and drop transmission parts or hubcaps. They were probably old-timey cars too. This was the time when horses became cars, and great khans became mechanics.
If the people didn’t care about cars, they would drive straight into puddles and flood their engines, as the physician did one day, when Aziz made a dish of chicken stewed with plums. She brought the lunch to Hassan wrapped in a scarf that she imagined her father had given her. Hassan kissed Aziz quickly, so the greengrocer across the street and his wife—who spoke to their individual cats more than to each other—would not spread rumors that the young couple were indecent.
Aziz only ever weeps when she remembers this story, and never tells it, so I will make up a scene to show what my mother told me, which is that Hassan and the physician had a misunderstanding that led to a bitter feud.
A truck pulled up in front of the auto parts shop just as Hassan raised his glass of tea. The sugar cube he held between his teeth was still dry when a man slammed the passenger door of the truck and marched toward the shop. He was shaped like a cashew, pushing his belly out and his forehead back.
“How can I help you, Doktor?” said Hassan.
Or, wait. Maybe it starts even worse, like, “Hello, sir, how can I help you?”
“Doktor,” says the doctor.
“Oh. Very sorry. How can I help you, Doktor?”
Wait. No. This isn’t working.
He’s the only doctor in the neighborhood, so it would be unlikely that Hassan wouldn’t know him.
In fact, straight-to-your-face rudeness isn’t a very Persian thing. It would be more subtle. Like the doctor wouldn’t barge in. He’d look at the little carpet that Aziz had put down in the shop and he’d sneer, but he’d never say the rug was too dirty for him to step on. He’d just smile and say, “Oh, I don’t want to bother you while you dine,” and he’d use a word for “dine” that means being a little lazy in the middle of the day.
Hassan would tarof and say, “Please, share some of my wife’s tea,” but the doctor would refuse, not even with a long, drawn-out compliment. He’d just say, “Thank you, but I’m in a great hurry.”
Can you imagine something that rude?
That his hurry was somehow more important than a person offering tea. And even worse, his wife’s tea, while his wife is standing right there.
The doctor may as well have spit in Hassan’s face.
He just pushed past the part of the conversation
where they would honor each other as humans, and started making requests, as if Hassan was a servant.
“My car is stuck in the mountain pass,” said the doctor.
“Were you driving it?”
“When it got stuck?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. It sputtered and just stopped.”
“You flooded the engine.”
“How do you know?”
“Was there smoke?”
“No.”
“You flooded the engine.”
“It happened after a big puddle.”
“Yup.”
Aziz would have found something to do in the back of the shop, since it was getting heated and her presence would have made it worse.
The doctor would have let the silence hang, as if everything was obvious.
“Well?”
“Well, how can I help you?” Hassan would say, which in this context would mean, “Get the hell out of my shop.”
“I need someone to tow my car and fix it.”
This would be the moment that Aziz—peeking from between a row of spark plugs—would see her new husband stop up a volcanic rage, as if it was a bottled djinn.
“I’m not a mechanic.”
“You sell auto parts?”
“Yup.”
“So you’re like a hospital without an ambulance?”
“I’m like a grocer who doesn’t make you dinner.”
“You just sell the ingredients.”
“Yup.”
“Well, I have some advice if you’d like to improve your business.”
“Oh? Does it need an X-ray for a hangnail?”
The doctor would suck his teeth and narrow his eyes at Hassan. To say the doctor pushed for expensive tests was like calling him a thief. Worse than a thief, a liar. He turned and walked away.
And from that moment, Hassan and the doctor were sworn enemies.
The way the doctor would tell it, when he described the fight to anyone who’d listen, was that Hassan was a lazy mechanic who didn’t want to work on his lunchtime. The way Hassan would remember it, the doctor made impossible demands, treated him like a cart donkey, and insulted his wife.
Everything Sad Is Untrue Page 7
