Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  So that was the second time they got married—in the pastor’s office—and they didn’t tell us about it until Ray started hanging around again. He just showed up one Sunday with the stuff to make his special Korean ribs, which had to be marinated for three days—so I knew he was planning to stick around.

  When he saw my cast, he said, “What happened?” while he grated an onion into a bowl.

  “I got jumped,” I said. I was holding the fridge open, but there wasn’t anything to eat except food that I would have to warm up in the microwave behind Ray.

  “You got jumped,” he said. He laughed maybe cause it sounded like I was in an action movie or something. He didn’t know there were three of them.

  I told him I was just trying to get my cap back and the bigger kid got on top of me and yanked till he broke my thumb. I tried to make it sound like I hadn’t used any martial arts so he’d keep teaching me.

  He just said, “Wow.”

  Over dinner three days later, they told us they were back together and that we were all moving into a house.

  That was when I learned if you can’t fight, you don’t get a vote in anything.

  * * *

  COUNTING THE MEMORIES.

  Grandma Ellie the exile.

  * * *

  Aziz and Hassan had a daughter before he died. That girl grew up to be my grandma Ellie, who plotted to kill her husband and was exiled to England. I met her there once and discovered that KittyBix and peanut butter is a good breakfast.

  My only memory of her is early in the morning in her apartment in London—she’s smiling and reaching out to take my box of KittyBix. “Khossie,” she says, “that’s cat food.” And she laughs.

  But first let me finish Aziz.

  In any story the two hardest things to be are a widow or an orphan. Those are the bad cards to draw from the deck marked “life.”

  Because those are the two moments the people you love the most die. It’s heart break. Heart shatter. Heart starve.

  It’s so much loss that it’s easier if you just died and started the game over. But you can’t. You have to wander. Part of it is losing your tribe and being homeless. Part of it is being alone in the dark.

  I won’t lie to you. The deck marked “life” is stacked full of bum cards.

  Aziz was both an orphan and a widow, and the dark nights must have seemed unbearably long. Long enough to lose every memory and become a blank-faced animal.

  But every good story has a turn and a twist.

  The deck has a joker in it.

  The turn for Aziz came two years after Hassan died.

  She met and married a man named Agha.

  He adopted her daughter.

  And he loved Aziz.

  And they all lived happily until their daughter grew up and got married and had kids of her own.

  But here’s the twist:

  That daughter was thirteen when she got married (that’s a seventh grader).

  And Agha wanted his own kids eventually, but they couldn’t have any when they tried. They went to the physician—who had a good relationship with Agha and who didn’t even remember Hassan. He told them they would need a fertility test. Aziz wanted to spare Agha the humiliation, and so she said, “It’s me. I’m barren. It’s my fault.”

  She assumed Agha would say, “No no. That’s impossible. You already had a daughter. Of course it’s me.”

  But he didn’t. He sat in the physician’s office blank-faced, red in the cheeks. He said, “I want a divorce.”

  And suddenly, Aziz was in a room with the man who took her first husband from her, and the one who took her second. The word Agha had used, setalagheh, was the kind of divorce reserved in Islam for men who have threefold anger. Men so angry they would never regret the decision, never return or remarry their old spouse.

  That was the twist, I guess.

  The twist is sometimes a knife.

  Aziz was alone again, this time for the rest of her life. When she was very old, she married again for companionship. He was the one who liked sesame candy, but never ate it because he was bedridden.

  And so by the time I met Aziz, she was the old woman who offered stale candy and whose house smelled like sadness.

  She would play love songs she used to listen to with Agha (or Hassan, I don’t know) and cry. I would run out to the little river. She would shut herself off from the world. And if you listened real hard for the sound of far-off girls laughing as they returned from the saffron harvest, you wouldn’t hear it. It was too far away.

  * * *

  ALL MY LIFE, MY GRANDMA Ellie (Aziz’s daughter, my mom’s mom) has lived in England. The legend was that her husband, my grandpa, forced her to go or else he would kill her. His name was Arman and I have zero memories of him. Not one.

  I can bring up his face in my mind, but only because my mom had a picture of him in her shoebox while we were escaping Iran. When we would look through it, there was always the one of him. Not with his kids. Not even with the new wife he had at that time—a woman whose name I don’t know.

  The photo is just Arman from the waist up.

  It’s black and white.

  His skin is a light gray. He is very thin; his lips are thin too. His nose is thin and pointy. He is bald and unsmiling. His eyebrows are thick and corded. His eyes look directly at the camera, impatient, as if he has someplace to be.

  Once, a long time ago, he killed a bunch of kittens in a burlap sack (probably threw them into a river because the family couldn’t keep them). My mom told me this story to make him seem like a responsible person who had suffered under the weight of his obligations or something. That’s the best she could do.

  I said, “He looks really mean.”

  “No,” she said, not like she disagreed, but that you shouldn’t say such things about elders. “No,” she said again, but it was obvious she didn’t have any evidence. “He worked very hard,” she said. That was all she could come up with. “And he wanted all his kids educated. That was very important,” which if you know my mom, you know is a case for him being a villain. All her life she wanted to be a farmer. His pressure made her go to med school.

  But whatever. She tried to defend him. The problem was you’d look at the picture of his pursed lips and cruel eyes and you knew the whole story.

  “He was a very important man, a governor.”

  He was only seventeen when he married Ellie (thirteen), so he had to work hard to grab power.

  Good for him, I guess.

  At one point the four kids—my mom was the second—had a cat named Sherry that my uncle Salim loved more than anything or anyone in the world. He was young then, and Sherry (who was a boy cat) would wander at night.

  One morning Sherry was at the door with another cat, this one trailed by a bunch of bleary kittens. Salim saw them and immediately adopted all of them.

  And at this point, Ellie was probably around twenty-three and Arman twenty-seven, and they already had four kids (and the one cat), so it was already a crowded situation. But then one day Sherry got sick and their dad took him to the vet. The vet told him the cat wouldn’t get better and would probably cause infections in his human kids.

  So he put all the cats in an empty sack of rice.

  “He drove them outside of town,” said my mom, “but they came back the next day.”

  She paused here. To her, the picture of Arman came with a thousand memories. She seemed to admire him. She never said a word against him—even though, trust me, he looked like he would kill the camera man if the picture took one more second to take.

  So he drove them to the creek and put them in the sack.

  “Geez,” I said, so she wouldn’t finish.

  He came back. That was the first time she ever saw her dad cry.

  “He said he shouldn’t have done that. We would be cursed forever for hurting the mazloom creatures.”

  And they were. Salim didn’t even know he had been injured, but he was never again whole. They just t
old him that all the cats ran away.

  I guess if you think regretting it makes Arman a nice man, then this story works for you. I don’t have an opinion.

  Because I don’t have a memory of my own.

  He’s just a picture my mom likes to stop and stare into.

  The difference between him and my Baba Haji is exactly one memory.

  Those are my two grandfathers.

  But the space between zero and one is all the world, and everything in it, so they aren’t exactly neighbors in my head.

  * * *

  FOR MY NEXT REPORT on Robert Frost, I will count the memories of my uncles.

  Please note, Mrs. Miller, that the “connection to the assignment” is that it involves two roads diverging—not in a yellow wood, like in Frost’s poem—but someplace else. But that’s a really good A+ connection.

  * * *

  THERE ARE SO MANY people in your life that you’ve only kept for one memory.

  Think about them.

  That person with scars you’ve never seen before.

  Or the teacher you never had who yelled at you once in the halls.

  And there are single memories you have of people you never met.

  Like the bad guy in Terminator 2.

  Or people who visit churches in the summer and give testimonies about China.

  I have three uncles on my dad’s side and two memories between them. Which means I have more memories of Jonboy the pastor’s son than all my uncles combined.

  One memory is my dad’s youngest brother, Reza, who had such red hair and so many freckles that he was probably a descendent of Genghis Khan.

  (Genghis Khan had red hair. Look it up.)

  I remember riding on the front of his motorcycle barreling down the dirt road to Ardestan. So fast we would hit bumps and fly in the air. On a straight part he let me hold the handlebars and he let go. I screamed. He laughed in my ear, a laugh I will never forget. That laugh is the heart of the memory. I knew I was safe.

  Back then Reza didn’t have any kids.

  I remember the dirt road, his laugh, the hot bike underneath me. I remember we came up to a crossroad, sand everywhere, the outline of two intersecting roads. No signs. When I see it in my mind, it is just us. Nothing else in a vast desert.

  Two roads, sand.

  I remember he said, “Khossie, you pick which way.”

  And I don’t remember anything after that.

  Not the direction we went.

  Not the trees popping up as we approached an oasis village.

  Not even a second thing Reza said.

  I just remember he let me pick and that the roads led in completely opposite directions.

  My mom would have probably scolded him for letting me hold the handlebars. But that’s not something I kept.

  If we had stayed in Iran, I think Reza would have been my number one best friend.

  * * *

  AND THE OTHER UNCLE memory is the time my dad and his brother-in-law (sister’s husband) took me pheasant hunting when I was four. His name was Askar, but you can call him Oscar in your head if you want. The forests along the edge of Ardestan are full of foxes, owls, rabbits, and pheasants. There are also leopards, which is why I begged to go with them (and also because they were doing manly things).

  I don’t remember much about Askar, except that he looked like my dad, but he was half a hand shorter, half a size smaller, half as educated, and half as friendly. Looking back, my dad was like the Pokémon Askar evolved into.

  But Askar lived in Ardestan every day, while my dad had moved to the city of Isfahan to be a doctor. So Askar had all the latest village gossip, and helped Baba Haji pen the goats and carry the pomegranate bushels.

  Even though my dad grew up in those woods, Askar knew the best part of the woods to find pheasants.

  I don’t remember how the trip began, only that my mom objected.

  “Akh, Masoud, he’s four.”

  “Let him come. This is good for him.”

  “Madame Doktor,” Askar would say, using the two most respectful words he could possibly use to honor my mother. “I will take care of them.”

  “We won’t even leave the car,” said my dad.

  The next part of the memory jumps directly into my dad’s gold Chevrolet.

  I am seated in the back, and my mom is leaning all the way in through the window, squeezing my neck. “Be careful, my sweet mazloom boy,” she says.

  “Akh. Sima, he’s not going to war.”

  She sucks her teeth, because even saying such a thing—heaven forbid. She kisses my face fifty-seven times, until I shout. Then she gives me a cardamom pound cake with slivered almonds on top. It’s the size of a brick, wrapped in foil.

  The memory jumps again to the Chevrolet grumbling down a dirt road, lined on both sides with beeches and mulberry trees. A mulberry wood is the kind of place the animals have names and jobs and go on storybook adventures.

  My dad parked in the middle of the road. We were miles into my grandfather’s land, and no one else would drive up from either direction. We watched the hedgerow and waited for pheasants to show their speckled tails.

  They started talking—I have no idea what about. Grownies will talk sometimes in boring words about boring ideas to groom each other like apes, to let each other know they’re pals.

  * * *

  Something about that early morning, the way the sun made everything bright and golden. It looked like a kid had colored the world—unafraid to use every pencil in the box. I watched and listened as closely as I could.

  You could hear the hedgehogs scrabbling into their nests. My dad reached back sometimes and I gave him a chunk of the dense cake. When they saw a family of pheasants, my uncle propped a rifle out of the window of the Chevrolet and shot. The bang wasn’t very loud. The trees ruffled. The other pheasants flew off. One dropped. For a while, the woods quivered. We stayed in the car until the air was still again, and the pheasants came back. Then my dad took a turn.

  I asked, “Will there be leopards?”

  “Maybe,” said my dad. “Keep looking.”

  I squinted at every dappled leaf in the mulberry wood, hoping to see leopard eyes looking back. Imagine how unlikely it is for two creatures of any kind to see each other—through the shadows of the woods—eyes connecting, attention ready. For a moment like that all the universe would have to conspire to move all its pieces and line them up just so.

  I think a person gets seen, really looked at, looked into, seen the way a leopard would see into you, maybe ten times in their entire life.

  And even then, who knows what a leopard would be thinking.

  After three or four pheasants had fallen into the hedges, I said, “Can I try?”

  I had spotted all the ones he shot before, so I was already involved. My dad sucked his teeth. He could hear my mother, probably.

  “Let him,” said my uncle.

  My dad nodded. Back then, I wanted to be exactly like my dad.

  I gave him the cake to hold, because we still needed a snack chief. My uncle Askar turned around and adjusted the rifle so that it rested on the shoulder of his seat, and still pointed out of his front window.

  He held the barrel and the stock.

  “Okay, put your finger here, but don’t pull.”

  I focused my vision to the end of the barrel.

  In the woods, I could hear the rustling of wings. Sometimes the pheasants would perch on the lower branches of the trees.

  “Look through here,” said my uncle.

  I scanned the trees. A speckled lump sat in the crook of a tree. I pulled the trigger and fell back in my seat. It was the loudest noise I’d ever heard.

  The lump dropped from the branch.

  My dad and uncle cheered.

  “My champion!” said my dad. “One shot!”

  “You earned our dinner,” said my uncle.

  I know what it must sound like to you, but I was super proud. “What a son you’ve got,” said my uncl
e, and my dad agreed.

  Hunting isn’t a sin if it’s useful.

  If you’re feeding people—which is what good men do.

  We got out of the car to collect our trophies. From the window it was just a video game on TV. Everything looked different when we got outside.

  The hedgerow was thorny, and I was too small to push past it, so I ran along the gully on the side of the road and watched my uncle march into the wood. Somehow he had memorized the location of every drop. Mine was the farthest, which meant I had made the hardest shot.

  “Come on, come on,” I said.

  When he came to the last one, I heard him stop short.

  “Oh no,” he said. “Masoud, over here.”

  “Is it a good one?” I said.

  My dad picked through the patches and stopped beside my uncle. They were both looking at the ground. My dad sighed.

  “Let’s leave this one,” he said.

  I ran into the ditch and through the thorny hedge to where they stood.

  At their feet was a baby owl with my bullet in it.

  * * *

  Its other eye was still open.

  We looked at each other. Can you imagine how unlikely it is for any two creatures to cross each other in a universe as big as this one? There is no telling what it was thinking, but it looked at me as though to say, there is no eating a baby owl, that’s not useful like hunting a pheasant.

  On the ride home I cried in the back of the car, but quietly so the men wouldn’t hear me. That’s the end of that memory.

  It’s the only one I have of Askar—how disappointed he was, frowning at the dead bird.

  Anyway, I told you all this because killing owls is no different than killing kittens. In case you thought I was putting myself above anybody. I’m not above anybody.

  That was the second innocent thing I killed, if you count the bull.

  And that was before I even turned five.

  * * *

  OKLAHOMA IS THE ONLY state in the Union where it is legal to own an anti-tank sniper rifle. It shoots bullets the size of milk cartons and if you hit a deer with it, all you leave is red mist.