Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  * * *

  OF MY GRANDPARENTS, my grandma Ellie was the least likely to kill any animals. She always had a princess quality about her, which is to say, people talked about her like she was spoiled.

  I don’t know what it would be like to be thirteen and married. I guess one thing it makes you is scared all the time that everyone will hurt you. Even as she got older, people said she acted like a kid—thought only about her own problems—and wasn’t very mother-like.

  I don’t have any stories about her early life.

  Nobody ever described the wedding. A little girl in a room full of grown men, wondering which one is her husband. My mom just sighs and says, “It was a different time,” and he was a young man, but nobody’s convinced, not even her.

  What else is there to say, though?

  It happened. Welcome to earth.

  Arman—the pinched grandfather I told you about from the picture—her husband, was a bad husband, who was known as “the Governor,” and governed mostly a bunch of affairs with other women.

  Ellie took more damage than an Oklahoma trailer park in a tornado and people still blamed her for retreating into the bomb shelter of her own mind.

  Those are the only facts I know. Child bride. Horrible husband. I could live a thousand years and they’d still be the only parts I know for sure.

  The bones of the history are that they had four kids, grew apart, and divorced.

  The rest of the story I only ever heard through the cracks of doors, as my aunts whispered it to each other over tea—years later in places like Toronto, London, and Edmond, after they had survived it all and could safely compare their experiences.

  Every side of an explosion looks different.

  If you’re looking at a bull collapsing to the ground and I’m beside you looking at it, we’re seeing two bulls die, two rivers of blood, two everything. That’s why there is an infinite labyrinth of stories, even in just one family.

  The story I heard was that Arman became a governor of a town near Tabriz. A little town where he was a big man.

  They lived in a house with an open porch where my mom studied and where her younger brother would use a piece of broken gutter to reach the apples on the trees in the next yard and twist them from the branches so they would roll down into his bag.

  My grandfather was the kind of man who had goons, bigger guys in suits that don’t fit, with sweat stains up their backs. He was good-looking back then, I assume, because the only thing I ever heard about him was that women liked him. Maybe in a different version of our story, he would be the one to give me advice about how to impress Kelly J. In that version he is my grandfather the sophisticated charmer who wore silk jackets and taught me how to wink like a cool guy. One thing about being a refugee is that you lose those little lessons, and you have to teach everything to yourself.

  Ellie was only twenty-something and had four kids to worry about, so she didn’t even know that husbands don’t take showers in their offices in the middle of the day. Or that governors don’t have to work late nights.

  Basically he was going out and winking at other women (and they would wink back) and no one told Ellie because he was powerful.

  Ellie had a lot of sadness in her life. Sadness of the kind that makes perfectly normal people into poets. After dinners, the family would sit in the open terrace with bowls of dried apricots, and pistachios, sugar candies, and a big samovar of black tea.

  Arman would be off somewhere, Ellie would write poems about the night air under the oil lanterns, and the children would sit beside the cherry tree. Her oldest daughter, Soraya, was nearly in college. Sima, my mom, was in high school. Both were straight-A students. The brother, Salim, would be in town with other boys making a kite out of butcher paper, glue, and hand-carved branches. And Sanaz, the youngest, the last daughter, at eleven years old, was the baby.

  Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble.

  Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away.

  I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do.

  And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.

  Later in her life, Ellie would go crazy. She believed mysterious people were trying to kill her with alien sound wave machines, so she would sleep in a tool shed to hide herself.

  But for now she was brave.

  I always imagine the man she met was a librarian of the village—with a library so old it had a signature in one book from Esther in the Bible, who would go on to become a queen. But no one ever said his name or his job; it’s just what I like.

  The village where he lived is a real place where the houses are carved into stones that bulge out of the ground, as if a volcano had bubbled up the earth and hardened into giant pillars.

  Maybe he lived in a different village.

  Doesn’t matter.

  I’ll describe the cool one.

  Imagine colorful wooden doors in odd shapes and windows at wonky angles embedded into the rock. Sometimes the top of one house has a rickety bridge to the balcony of another. It’s a stair-step bunch of cave homes stacked around each other. And curving along the windowsills is a little river, like a stone gutter, winding around the entire village. Sometimes it goes into the house, where you could wash your hands in the constant flow of cold mountain water. Sometimes it makes a tiny waterfall cascading next to a dirt staircase leading down to a new terrace of houses.

  I imagine if you were a kid with a friend, you could make a paper boat and write a secret message on it. Then you could go to your window and set the boat in the water and watch it flow away, in the channel, past all the other homes and you could shout, “Hey, Ali! Look out!” And your friend (his name would be Ali) would run to his window just in time to retrieve the boat. And he’d get your message (“Ali is a dog’s son. Wanna play ball?”)

  In the lumpy village of doors and windows carved out of rocks, there would be one tall pillar, like a lighthouse, with a door so narrow you could only pass through sideways, and green window shutters with irregular slats all around it. Inside would be a spiral staircase around a stone column. As you went up, carved into the column itself, would be shelves, where books were stacked by the dynasty in which they were made.

  You would go backward in time, so the first floor would have the current century. That shelf would have the tea glass and the tray with paper clips and rubber bands, because literature has not been the focus of this dynasty. But you would climb up and reach the Pahlavi, then the first big shelf of American dynasty writers like Stan Lee. Then Britain (J.R.R. Tolkien), then France (Alexandre Dumas).

  As you climbed the stairs around and around, the outer windows would shine colored light through their stained glass. Then finally, on the shelves for the Seljuk Turks in the thirteenth century, you’d find the poet Rumi, who said, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,” and Attar, who wrote The Conference of the Birds.

  The next shelves would have Ferdowsi of the Abbasid Empire—the father of the language in which I dream. If it wasn’t for him, my dad says, we wouldn’t even have Farsi. “Look at Egypt, look at Syria,” he says. “They don’t speak Egyptian anymore. They don’t speak Syrian.”

  After the Muslim conquest in the years around 750 AD, they all switched to Arabic. “But not us,” my father says to me over the phone. “Because we had the Shahnameh”—Ferdowsi’s epic poem—“we had that and could hear the beauty of the Persian language. He told all the history of the Persian people, back until it blended into legends, and then myths. All of it. It’s there.”

  Above the Shahnameh, near the top of the tower library, would be the shelves for Ibn Sina—the father of modern medicine. He was the guy who wrote the properties o
f things, like how aloe soothes skin, and ginseng gives you focus. It was like alchemy back then, but later people realized it was the first book of medicine.

  This is why it was so easy for my mom and dad to become doctors like Avicenna, because your blood is a very complicated river of information inside every part of your body. And it carries things you would never believe from generation to generation.

  And the last shelf, in the cramped peak of the tower, where the stairs end and a tiny window looks out onto the village and hill country beyond, are a few pages from the lost books of Persepolis, the city of kings. This was the city that was burned by Alexander the Great during the Achaemenid dynasty three hundred years before Christ.

  Back then it was the richest city in the world. Now if you visit, it’s a pile of stones that only museum people care about. On the stones, there’s still writing that says stuff like, “I am Xerxes, king of kings, ruler of all that you see before you,” as if you should be impressed, because back then you would have seen a shiny kingdom, but now you see a colossal wreck on a dirt burger.

  The library was destroyed and so Persian literature doesn’t go back much further than that.

  They say Alexander the Great saw what his soldiers had done to the city and regretted it. But that’s like breaking someone’s bones and then saying you’re sorry.

  Anyway, in the library tower of the wibbly-wobbly village dug into the rocks, there might have been a librarian.

  He’s the guy I made up to fall in love with Ellie.

  I guess he could have been from a city and sold motorbikes or something.

  But Ellie was a poet. And she never chose her husband, and never even grew up to decide what kind of stuff she liked as an adult, or dated anybody with the same interests.

  So I just imagine Kaveh the all-alone librarian of Kandovan, who was as tall and thin as his tower, and moved like a cat, and sat in the light from the window at the top of the stairs to read and remember the kings.

  * * *

  STAY WITH ME ON this one.

  In Oklahoma they call fruit leather “Fruit Roll-Ups.”

  Which isn’t fruit and doesn’t feel like leather.

  The flavors are sour blue or cough syrup.

  And the shapes are Ninja Turtles.

  My mom won’t buy us any because she says it’s nothing but sugar mixed with chemicals to make it neon colors, and it’ll give you cancer.

  I think it’s just because we can’t afford it.

  In Iran the number one snack is fruit leather made by humans.

  I had some at school once and Jared S. said, “Why is it so brown?”

  Because dried fruit is brown.

  “Not pineapple.”

  “If you just dry it without chemicals it turns brown.”

  “Not mangos.”

  “Yeah mangos.”

  “Not apricots.”

  I’m honestly impressed with how many fruits Jared S. can name, since he eats all of his in gummy form.

  In any Persian market, you can get cherry leather, or black currant. But people make their own, and villages have special combinations like apple pomegranate, or plum lime, which is like sour blue but not blue (and not give you cancer). Tamarind is the best flavor. It is very sour, and very brown.

  Jared S. says it looks like “the crap they use for catfish bait.” But I am not friends with Jared S.

  * * *

  IN MY MIND, KAVEH the librarian would sit in his library with a book in his lap and a stack of fruit leather next to him like sheafs of paper. It wouldn’t spill on anything, and he could keep it shelved in between the covers of a book that had no pages after an imam had torn them out for offending Allah.

  On every shelf, he had one. A book with fruit leather pages.

  I imagine Ellie entered on a Tuesday right after school started and people went to work. It’s not gross to say she was pretty, because I’m Scheherazade and not her grandson right now.

  And everyone agreed she was very pretty. And cautiously curious. And educating herself one book at a time. At that moment, Kaveh was reading a line in a poem:

  The seed of a pepper—black

  The mole on the lip of a lover—black

  Both burn at the touch

  But the first is one thing

  And the other, another.

  He looked up from his book, saw her at the bottom of the stairs, and said, “Oh,” as if he suddenly understood.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  “I’m looking for a book,” she said.

  “How can I help you,” he said.

  “I’m looking for a book,” she said.

  “Yes. Sorry. What book?” he said.

  “Poetry,” she said.

  “Hafez? Nizami?”

  “Not poems. How to write poetry.”

  “You write?” he said.

  “I try,” she said.

  “Here’s one,” he said.

  “How much,” she said.

  “One poem,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I was only joking,” he said, “This is a library.”

  “I thought it was a store,” she said.

  “Yes. I figured. You don’t owe me anything. Please take it.”

  She took it and walked out. He said, I love you, I love you, I love you, in his head.

  * * *

  THE NEXT WEEK—MAYBE—she returned with a poem written on a cream-colored sheet of paper. It was not about him. It was about books. But it talked about books as if they were couples, lined up beside each other as if they were standing for wedding photos—and the only trouble was that a book is shelved with a lover on either side. And how would anyone know the right pairs?

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “I think it’s tragic,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but it’s also true.”

  In Muslim Iran, it would be a scandal for a man to spend any time alone with a woman, even in a library, but Ellie was a governor’s wife and not always obedient.

  She would knock on the crooked door in the mornings. They would sit in the alcoves of each floor reading to each other and eating sheets from the book of fruit leather. They consumed the pages and were consumed by ideas.

  Sour pomegranate. Sweet descriptions of kissing.

  Sweet mulberry. Sour passages of death.

  Sometimes, she would put her head on his shoulder—after a poem about birds or something—and cry inconsolable tears.

  Ellie had four children, a husband, parents, cousins, and friends, but felt very alone at this time—and grown out of season.

  And sometimes you fall in love that way, when you’re drowning in a world of pain.

  It’s not a happy love.

  It’s just whoever manages not to hurt you all the time. You think they must be the best the world has to offer. The little window of time you aren’t in pain can seem like happiness.

  But I think Ellie and the librarian in the tower of stone were in real love. Somehow, in all the world, with all the people in it, in all their wonky shapes, they were shaped to fit each other. And they found each other—born in the same country, how lucky—and both loved poetry and fruit snacks—and like poetry they felt their hearts expand infinitely in all directions when they were together, so that it was possible to forget all the pain in their lives and the world, or at least to endure it as long as they could be together.

  Maybe that was it.

  * * *

  I MADE ALL THAT UP.

  The only part anyone told me was that Ellie found a lover. They decided to kill her husband, and run away together.

  * * *

  I AM EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT that I wrote a poem for Kelly J. for Valentine’s Day—not embarrassed that I wrote it, but embarrassed that I gave it to someone so mean.

  It said, if she wanted, we could read together.

  I would feed her tamarind fruit leather.

  And to me, she was a seed of black pepper.

&nb
sp; Kelly J. is the kind of person who would give private letters to her friends to laugh at during our hour in the library—which doesn’t have any books about any Persian stories anyway.

  There is a book on animals. It has a page on Persian cats.

  And there are definitely no books full of fruit leather. That is too much to ask of anyplace in the real world.

  When I tell people my stories, about the hero Rostam or the size of pomegranates from the orchards on my Baba Haji’s land, the villages in stone pillars, Orich candy bars, or anything that happened to me, they never believe me. There is no evidence in their library.

  They think I’m one of the poor kids trying to say I used to be rich.

  But I was.

  I know it’s crazy that the kid in Oklahoma on welfare who barely spoke English at first used to be a prince. I know.

  But I did. I had a Nintendo and uncles and tons of store-bought snacks. A house that smelled like flowers all the time, with birds in the walls and a pool.

  I wasn’t always poor.

  Other kids don’t know that.

  They think I’m lying.

  And if you tell somebody they’re lying all the time, they start to believe you a little.

  They start to question their own memories.

  Cause they’re so different than everything happening around them. They think, maybe I was always smelly. Maybe I never had anything like a dad.

  Maybe I’m going crazy, like Ellie after her exile, making up stories to feel better about myself. Maybe it would be too painful to live otherwise.

  But I don’t think so. I close my eyes and squeeze tight my grip on the memory of my Baba Haji, smiling, reaching to squeeze my face in his bloody hands. If you could see it like I do, how proud he was that I was his—you’d feel so good that a grandpa like that loved you—maybe you’d never cry again.

  * * *

  THE VERSION THEY TELL me goes: