“Would you like some peanut butter and crackers?” she said. “I was just walking to the office myself.”
I shook my head no. Ali Shekari would have been proud.
“I’ve eaten,” I said, which is true because I have eaten in the past. But I walked out anyway. It was almost time for recess. And I started to get nervous that even though I wasn’t lying, she thought I was.
“I can find the book later,” I said.
Mrs. Miller said, “Will he be able to read it? Does your dad speak English?”
I was already walking out, but I wasn’t far enough out to pretend I couldn’t hear, so I said, “Uh-huh!” like my dad could speak English.
And I ran down the hall.
That was the lie.
I’m telling you now.
But Mrs. Miller would find out soon enough, because he was coming to class. So I don’t know why I did that. I mean, he speaks a little. Maybe enough to trick everybody. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in five years.
Anyway, that was really bad.
I’m afraid she thinks we’re all liars now.
* * *
THE LAST DAY I ever saw Ali Shekari was also the first day I attended school in two years.
It was only sort of a school.
Since we’d left home, my mom had been so worried that we’d fall behind—or worse, stop caring about our education—that she sent letters, talked to churches, and looked around until finally she found an American couple who were teaching their kids American things. They had a girl my sister’s age and a boy my age, so their books were the ones we needed.
That first morning, my mom walked us down the hill after what happened with Ali Shekari, which I’ll explain in a second. I was crying the whole way and not admiring nature. We snuck past the café, where the old men hadn’t arrived yet, to a stationery store where my mom bought six big pink erasers and two pencils. She had packed her dinner from the night before, so our bag was full. We waited for a bus.
The bus took us to Rome, to a train station where they said gangs of gypsy men roamed at night. Another bus took us another hour to the other side of the city. Nobody spoke on the bus. I was still acting like a baby and my sister was still mad that I had been mean to Ali Shekari so we rode in silence.
Do you remember his pockmarks? The splatters of white that looked like they had eaten away the skin on his left side? Maybe you don’t, I dunno. But that morning, I asked him. We were playing soccer in the courtyard while I waited for my mom and sister to come down. Everybody was already at the places they would be for the rest of the day. All of Hotel Barba was in a constant state of waiting for papers to come in. No one went out. No one lived any kind of life. They just waited and hoped some country would take them. There was nothing else to do.
As I waited, I saw Ali Shekari, who was trying to fix a bicycle he had found in the landfill behind Hotel Barba, under the mountains of trash.
“Ali Shekari, wanna play?”
I had a soccer ball I was going to take to meet the American family since they had a boy my age.
Ali Shekari jumped right up and played with me. He had his sleeves rolled up. The marks had eaten gashes out of his forearms.
As he kept the ball away and I chased it, a couple times he put his hand on my head as a joke. I hit it away. We were laughing, I promise. But once, I grabbed his side, cause he was shielding me from the ball—and he winced.
Ali Shekari was as tall as a man, so I stopped, because nothing that light should have hurt him. I wasn’t as strong back then as I am now.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine.”
But he sat on a cinder block.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He laughed.
Ali Shekari was Kurdish. He was a Kurd. Did I tell you that already? I think I did. Did I tell you about the Kurds? Am I falling apart?
The Kurds are nomads—like the Roma, who everybody calls gypsies. They, the Kurds, live in the hill country between Iran and Iraq. They go back and forth because they’ve been living there since way before those borders existed and they have no paperwork because they don’t belong to anybody. They’re like refugees for every generation all the time.
In the myths that Ali Shekari told me, they are the tragic result of a demon king who wanted to eat brains. It went like this:
I said, “What happened?” and pointed to his pocks. “Do they hurt?”
I could see him wondering if he could get away with waving it off. But finally he decided to admit it, “Yeah.”
It was Saddam Hussein, the king of Iraq, who had done it. Do you remember the part where I said Iran and Iraq had been at war when I was a kid and when Saddam’s planes bombed our city, I was just a baby? I think I did. It was the legend of Khosrou, the fat sleepy baby who once slept through the building next door getting bombed to pieces. I told you that, I’m sure. My mom ran into my room and I was still sound asleep. I could sleep through bombs and tornadoes and everything.
Anyway, that guy, Saddam, practiced his bombing skills on the Kurds. His war planes would swoop into the highlands and spot a tribe of Kurds with their sheep and they must have thought it was funny to drop bombs on them. Who protected the shepherds? Nobody.
They dropped the bombs just to see how far the Kurds would scatter. And you might think the Iraqi pilots were ashamed, but they weren’t. By the time Ali Shekari was thirteen, the war planes were practicing dropping chemicals instead of regular bombs.
* * *
As we sat in the courtyard of Hotel Barba, Ali Shekari, who was twice a refugee, said, “Agent Orange,” which I didn’t know back then was a chemical bomb that drops on shepherds and eats their skin. But I nodded and didn’t ask more.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Those bleep bleeps.”
That was all the story I got from Ali Shekari. I know in the 1,001 Nights, there are stories within stories, but this is real stuff. Anybody who has watched a ball fall from the sky and burst into a cloud of acid that washed over him and everyone he ever loved is not somebody who tells the story to entertain people. He nodded over at a lady from Moscow who had run away from her husband and who never came down to the courtyard, but watched from a window three stories up. He nodded at her and said, “She’s a finigonzon,” cause I’d told him about my language.
And when I turned to look at her, he snatched the soccer ball from my hands and started to play again. That was when it went wrong. I think he was trying to impress her.
But now you know why Ali Shekari was scarred on over half of his body. And if you want the story in the story, I’ll tell you the one Ali Shekari told me about the origin of the Kurds later.
For now we can get back to the accident, which wasn’t such a big thing, except that it was the last thing.
And whenever you look back and realize something was the last of something—like the last moment you ever saw your grandfather’s house or the smell of the street you lived on or Orich bars or whatever—it can be an ordinary thing, but it also becomes the only thing you have, the clearest memory, and it gains all this extra meaning. To me, the accident was just that Ali Shekari was extra excited keeping the ball from me and kicked it just a little too hard. It flew into the spokes of his broken bike and burst. It wasn’t a real soccer ball. It was one of those cheap plastic ones that can deflate like balloons. But it was the only ball I had.
There was the pause right after it happened. My mom and sister had come out, finally. The babushkas stopped talking. The finigonzon at the window, the old men playing backgammon, it seemed like they all watched me.
Ali Shekari said, “Akh. I’m sorry. I’ll get you a new one.”
Maybe it was because we were going to meet the American family and this was the toy I had to share or something. Maybe it was just the feeling that none of us could ever have any unbroken thing. All I remember is that I never felt so poor as I did then. And I cried. I shouldn’t have. But that was the whole accident. A ba
ll. It wasn’t like he broke my thumb or anything. I didn’t even know back then that men you looked up to could do so much more damage.
I made Ali Shekari feel like scum. He was so embarrassed he said, “I’m sorry,” to my mom. He was probably even worried that he could be kicked out. I kept crying. And when he put his hand on my shoulder, I wrenched away, probably because I was embarrassed by that point too. But I should have forgiven him. I should never have treated him like he wasn’t my friend.
My mom told him it was okay and took us to town, where we caught that bus. Everyone in that courtyard must have glared at Ali Shekari for hurting a little kid—but reader, please, he did nothing wrong. That was the last time I saw Ali Shekari. People came and went at the Hotel Barba without good-byes. The papers would come in and you’d run out. He probably got his papers to Australia. When we got back that day for dinner, the Zuppa Guy called me over and handed me a baseball cap. It was Ali Shekari’s hat. He had left it for me. And my mom got me another ball eventually. I never got to say I’m sorry, Ali Shekari. I wish I was still your friend.
* * *
“THE ORIGIN OF THE KURDS,” said Ali Shekari one afternoon, to me, as we sat eating peaches the way friends do, beside a tree, with all of Italy blooming down the hill, “is this. This is how Ferdowsi tells it.
“First there was Zahhak, the villain king who brought an end to Jamshid’s honorable reign, and who later chased Fereydun into the care of the rainbow cow. A rainbow cow, you must understand, is not a silly cow with big painted stripes. It is a splendid cow, like a peacock, with every hair a different shimmering color.”
He had to tell me that, because I had interrupted him with giggling. He went on, “Zahhak was such a vile punk murderer that Eblis the devil took notice and came to his court disguised as a cook. He made Zahhak lamb stewed in wine, veal with saffron and garlic, and kebab—all of it was so delicious that Zahhak said, ‘Tell me, strange cook, what gift I can give you and you will have it.’ This is always a dangerous moment in a story, because the king is not a djinn, and a wish that is an insult can quickly become a curse. Another way to put it is—don’t ask for anything that’ll make the king mad.
“The cook was the devil, though. So he said, ‘O King, all I want is to kiss your shoulders.’
“And the king said, ‘Okay.’
“Don’t think that just because this was hundreds of years ago that this was totally normal. It’s still kind of weird to ask to kiss his shoulders when you could have asked for a mansion and a rainbow cow or something.
“When Eblis walked up and kissed the king on his shoulders, two things happened: The devil disappeared into a sudden burst of smoke, and the king grew two snakes from his shoulders.
“This is how Saddam became the serpent king. When he cut them off, they grew back. When he slept, they whispered wildness in his ears. And when they were hungry, the king would sacrifice two young servants so that the serpents could eat their brains.”
He was neither a god who spoke nor a god who listened.
Like most kings, he was a god who only ever devoured.
“It went like this for some amount of time—enough for the weeping and mourning of the people to drown out the birdsongs and even the chorus of the east winds. Every day the king’s serpents ate brains, until two heroes arrived, also disguised as cooks. They stood in the castle kitchen drawing up a plan. They couldn’t just use sheep brains. The snakes knew the taste of human brain.
“Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.
“So the cooks had to settle for something half-good.
“Every day, when two unlucky people were dragged from the nearby towns into the kitchens, the cooks thanked the soldiers and offered them tasty treats in the other room. Quickly, they would take one sheep and mix equal parts human and sheep brains into the two bowls for the snakes. Then they would help the other person escape through the cellars of the castle, with some hard bread, a wheel of dried fig, some dried beef. They would tell them to go, run off into the hill country and hide.
“Every day, they saved one.
“Every month, they saved thirty.
“When they had two hundred people hidden away in the hills, the cooks gave them some animals and showed them where they could live in the desert. And in Ferdowsi it says, ‘The Kurds—who never settle in towns—are descended from these men.’”
I ate my peach.
“See,” said Ali Shekari. “The Kurds are half a people.”
He must have been trying to tell me something with that story. Maybe it was that somewhere, if you go back enough in history, everybody comes from ancestors who wandered around looking for refuge. Everybody was poor at some point.
I dunno.
Maybe it wasn’t about me.
Maybe Ali Shekari looked at his own scars in the mirror and thought that he was half of a half. That a patchwork life was all he was ever going to get.
Maybe he was counting his own memories, holding on to them with trembling fingers. Or maybe he was thinking about the cooks, who were heroes, sure, but still had to kill and serve one person every day to the serpent king in order to save the other. Maybe half-good is as good as it gets in this life. And maybe that’s why my mom was so interested in the next one.
I don’t know.
Like I said, I never saw him again after we got back from the school.
* * *
MRS. MILLER SAYS I HAVE “lost the plot,” and am now just making lists of things that happened to fill space. But I replied that she is beholden to a Western mode of storytelling that I do not accept and that the 1,001 Nights are basically Scheherazade stalling for time, so I don’t see the difference.
She laughed when I said this.
It was one of those genuine laughs you get and for a second you see the person they are when they’re not a teacher. Like the same laugh she might have at a movie or something. She said, “That was a wonderful use of ‘beholden.’”
And I said, “Thank you.”
Have you noticed my English is super good now?
The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.
All the good stuff is in between and around the things that happen. It’s what you imagine I might be like when I’m not telling you a story, but we’re sitting together in silence. Would my hands be fumbling with themselves in my lap? Would I be nervous? Would I love it if you asked about Final Fantasy? And would I say yes if you invited me to your house?
Look how much you know about me.
I bet if I told you that my dad came to Oklahoma with just one surprise for me, a friend from my past, back from the dead, you’d probably even know what it was even before I told you.
* * *
THE LEGEND OF MY MOTHER is that she does not stop. And if you don’t stop, you’re unstoppable.
I know I told you that already, but you didn’t understand it the first time. I know you thought you did. But you didn’t. Trust me, reader.
I love you with all my heart, but you just don’t know.
For instance I bet if I asked you, “What is the toughest stuff on Earth?” you’d say, “Diamonds.” But you’d be wrong. You should have said, “Your mom.”
And if I said, “What is toughness anyway? Is it being an unbreakable rock?”
You’d say, “Yes,” because you’d still be thinking of it wrong.
And I’d say, “But isn’t it harder to break water?”
And you’d say, “Well, yes. You can’t break water.”
I would try not t
o smirk here, because Mrs. Miller says that’s why I don’t have many friends. And you’d say, “But at the molecular level, everything is eventually breakable—even an atom.”
And you’d be right, because being breakable has nothing to do with toughness. Everything breaks. Everything is whirling around in a big bunch of motion and energy crashing into each other at the size of atoms and icebergs, and will crumble eventually.
But then you’d say, “So what makes you think your mom is so tough?”
And I would say this part slowly, cause I’ve said it before. I’d probably even whisper, “Cause she’s unstoppable.”
Every rock smashes into everything else and breaks. That doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the rock keeps going the same direction it was going when it smashed. Do you see what I mean?
What keeps going?
What do you know that keeps going?
Never distracted? Never bored? Never deterred?
Beat up and threatened, sure.
Humiliated and ignored, often.
But never never stopped.
That’s right. You get it now.
My mom.
* * *
HERE IS SOMETHING THAT only makes sense now that you know what you know.
In a refugee camp, it’s the waiting that will kill you.
The whole point of a refugee camp is that there are actual people trying to kill you.
But really, it’s the slow numbing death of hopelessness that does it. You have to imagine a room that’s just a cement cube—nothing beautiful in it. If you’re not careful, this is also what becomes of the parlor of your mind.
The room is your room in Hotel Barba. It has a bed. No lamp. One light in the ceiling. There is a bathroom with a shower, toilet, sink. Nothing else. No glass. No mirror. White walls. No art.
Everything Sad Is Untrue Page 23
