“Don’t be afraid,” Darya whispered as a few women shoved them and cut ahead in line. “Just stay calm. They can’t do anything to us. All of our papers are in order.”
How fearfully they’d left Iran, inching their way toward the passport officials, praying that nothing would go wrong. Now, here they were again, trying to reenter the country with that same sense of powerlessness and the knowledge that their fate depended on the whim of a bureaucrat. Mina prayed for the passport check man to be in a good mood. The barrage of horrifying images from the news had prepared her for half-beasts behind the airport counters, waiting with handcuffs and ropes to shackle returning exiles so they could transfer them to isolated torture cells simply for having the wrong stamp in their passport or for having a strand of hair sliding down their forehead. Mina tied her headscarf as tightly as possible for the umpteenth time. She knew it looked awkward, but she was unschooled now in the fine nuances that those who never left had surely mastered. She no longer knew how to walk with the correct mixture of modesty and confidence to show a Revolutionary Guard that she was not in the wrong.
She cleared her throat and rehearsed in her mind the short answers Darya had told her to give the bearded bureaucrat. Mina shook off the image of torture photos passed around by Amnesty International on the Columbia campus last month.
Darya nudged Mina. It was her turn at the window.
Behind the counter sat a girl, young and petite. Mina searched behind the girl for the airport bureaucrat. The girl tapped the counter and slid her skinny hand across. In her nervousness, Mina placed her own hand against the girl’s, giving it, in effect, a mini high five. Realizing what she’d just done, Mina withdrew her hand, melting in embarrassment.
“Passport, please.” The girl’s voice was matter-of-fact, louder and more confident than Mina would’ve expected. Her whole demeanor was calm and composed, as though she were accustomed to dazed former exiles behaving strangely in front of her window.
Mina slid her passport across the counter. Darya had renewed Mina’s Iranian passport especially for this trip; her exit permit was clearly printed. Mina knew because she’d checked it five dozen times. You are not going back there until you are sure you can leave. Curiosity has its limits, Baba had said as he nursed his biggest migraine yet since her decision to make this trip.
The girl flipped through Mina’s passport. “When did you leave?”
“Fifteen years ago. With my parents and two brothers, we went to America, to New York. It was winter actually . . .” Darya had told her to keep her answers brief and to the point. But she couldn’t stop rambling.
“Do you also have an American passport?” The girl interrupted Mina’s monologue.
Mina stopped in midsentence. “Baleh. Yes.” As soon as she said this, Mina felt she shouldn’t have. Dual citizenship was not recognized by Iran.
“Can I see it?”
With shaking hands, Mina fumbled through her handbag and plopped the telltale navy blue American passport on the counter. What had she done? Would she get into trouble now? Her university’s chapter of Amnesty International wouldn’t even know to post her photo during their next campus demonstration for political prisoners. Did the girl have any idea that this passport was the result of years of hard work, endless visits to the Immigration and Naturalization Service office, loops of forms filled out at her parents’ dining room table, and years of waiting? It was only with this passport that they weren’t harassed at airports and no longer needed special visas to visit other countries. Did the girl know what she cupped in her hands?
Mina sweated under her headscarf. Her poor mother. From her peripheral vision, Mina saw Darya rock back and forth impatiently on her heels as she waited behind the yellow line a few feet away. Was she imagining it, or was Darya’s forehead vein throbbing at diesel speed? Of course it would be.
The girl stroked the passport cover with her tiny thumb. Then she slid it back across the counter to Mina.
“Thank you,” she said.
Mina stood across from the girl, dizzy.
“Go on. Next!” the girl called out to the queue.
Quickly, Mina shoved both passports back into her handbag and almost tripped as she stumbled away from the airport counter. She power walked toward a staircase a few feet over and leaned against the rail to catch her breath. The bottom of a heavy fabric poster depicting a scowling leader caught on her headscarf and almost yanked it off. Mina tried to remain nonchalant under the watchful eyes of the guards.
She looked in the direction of the girl’s counter and saw that it was now Darya’s turn. Mina’s heart pounded as she absorbed the reality of how much power that girl had over them. Darya said something, laughed, then made a face as if imitating a crazy person. Mina couldn’t see the girl’s face from where she stood, but she guessed that Darya had expertly switched into that quick intimate manner she had with other Iranians, joking and acting as if she and the girl were the best of friends.
WHEN DARYA WAS CLEARED, THEY went to the baggage claim and then to the arrival gate. There Mina saw a group of people holding yellow and white flowers, some red carnations, a bouquet of pink roses. They drank from Styrofoam cups. A stainless steel thermos was being passed around. It was four in the morning and there they were, craning their heads, searching the faces of the arriving passengers. Then a few of their hands rose up in the air, waving.
“Darya Joon!”
“Mina?”
“Een Mina-e? Is this Mina?”
When Darya and Mina approached the group, they were engulfed in hugs. Mina was kissed, her cheeks pinched, her body squeezed in excited delight.
“Mashallah! Mashallah!”
“Would you look at her? That’s our little Mina!
“Darya Joon! Mina Joon! May I die for you!” In her jet-lagged daze, Mina recognized Aunt Nikki’s voice. It came out of the mouth of a woman whose headscarf was slipping, showing gray hair beneath. A woman whose face was lined, whose slender figure was now round and wide. Darya squeezed her sister tight.
A team of small children tumbled around exuberantly. Darya held her hand to her heart and exclaimed. “And you must be Arianna!” she said. “And you are Mehdi, right? Look at your cousins, Mina! Look at them!”
Mina looked at the row of small round faces, some of them missing teeth, a few of them shy, all of them strangers. These were the cousins she’d never seen. “How big you’ve gotten!” Darya said as she hugged each of them. And Mina thought, But we never saw them when they were smaller.
Fingers touched Mina’s face, she was embraced by Uncle Jafar. Small black dots danced in front of her eyes. Maybe it had to do with the plane ride, the exhaustion, but her vision was blurred. Aunt Firoozeh was near her, her hair clearly dyed light brown, her gray roots showing from the front of the headscarf, her cheeks sagging below her chin now. She wept into a handkerchief.
A tall woman wearing a white headscarf smiled at Mina.
“Leila Joon! Leila-ye Aziz!” Darya hugged Leila.
Mina suddenly remembered Mr. Johnson standing across from Leila at her tenth birthday party, nibbling the tips of his glasses, his arm pushing against the wall near her shoulder. Mamani’s wish to get Leila out of Iran.
Leila pushed forward two fair-skinned, hazel-eyed children, a boy and a girl around eight and five. “See?” she said as she bent near them. “It’s Mina Joon. Here all the way from America!” Mina hadn’t heard Leila’s voice in fifteen years. Where was Mr. Johnson?
Then she saw her grandfather. He stood at the front of the crowd. How had she missed him? He wore his khaki suit, his pants were crisply ironed, his white shirt starched. He held a pink rose. He held Darya for a very long time, then turned to Mina.
“You’ve come home. Omadi peesheh ma. You’ve come to us.”
It was the same voice that used to tease Mamani as they bantered in the kitchen, the one that c
alled out Mamani’s name in the middle of the night, in his sleep, unabashedly romantic, on the nights Mina had slept over at their place. He looked at her now with rheumy eyes. She walked over and kissed both his cheeks. Agha Jan took Mina’s face in both his hands. She could see the hazel eyes so much like her own mother’s.
“We have missed you,” her grandfather’s voice from long ago said. Only she heard it now, in the present. He was in front of her. “We have missed you so very much. Did you know that?” A few of the adults in the group stayed silent as they watched Agha Jan put one arm around Darya and one around Mina. Aunt Firoozeh started it. With the wet hanky in one hand, she started to clap, and the rest of the group—Leila and her two children, Aunt Nikki and Uncle Jafar, the small collection of young cousins, and all the rest who had come there to greet them—broke out into applause even if a few of them had to clap against their thigh, due to their other hand being occupied, resolutely and expertly, with that perfect cup of tea.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Red Lamps
Laboo! Laboo!”
A voice came from outside the window. Mina sat up in bed, not remembering where she was. Mamani’s handmade quilt was over her, a black-and-white photo of her parents’ wedding rested on the bureau, burgundy silk cushions were scattered across the bed and on the floor. Slowly, reality set in. She was in Mamani and Agha Jan’s house. The voice from outside continued—it was both familiar and strange. Mina went to the window and saw a hunched man in a gray shirt and dark pants pushing a cart down the street. The beet seller. With his cart filled with hot cooked beets: Laboo! Laboo! Could it be the same bent-shouldered beet seller from years before?
“Pasho, wake up.” Darya walked in wearing a lemon blouse and white skirt, her hair freshly washed and blow-dried. “Come and have tea.”
Breakfast was hot fresh barbari bread, feta cheese, homemade sour-cherry jam. (For a minute Mina wondered if it was Mamani’s jam, but of course it couldn’t be. Aunt Nikki must have made it at the end of summer, and saved it in jars for Agha Jan.) Steaming black tea. Agha Jan was listening to the radio. The announcer had that booming, melodramatic voice that had been a hallmark of Persian radio for as long as Mina could remember. It was easy to believe that the announcer was the same broadcaster from her childhood. And Mina wanted it to be the same person. But most of the media figures had been replaced, sometimes imprisoned, occasionally executed, at the time of the revolution. So it probably wasn’t the same guy.
The clock in Agha Jan’s kitchen was the same, the red-and-white chairs were the same. The wooden box the pigeons ate from outside the window still bore the traces of the flowers and fish shapes that Mina had painted years ago, in that other life. The cushions and the tables and the plastic roses in the vase were the same. But Mamani was missing. It seemed as if someone had set up all the props on a stage, but the lead actress had forgotten to show up. Darya whizzed around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, bringing out saucers and bowls and spoons for breakfast. Agha Jan spooned jam on his bread and chewed, listening to the news. The pigeons pecked at the bread in their box, and Mina sipped on her tea, which in this kitchen, in this home, at this time, tasted remarkably as though Mamani had brewed it.
“Leila called,” Darya said. “She’s coming tonight, to our welcoming party.”
When Mina had left, she’d been ten years old and Leila had been nineteen. And now, she was twenty-five and Leila was thirty-four, married with two children, working as an engineer.
“I can’t believe she married Mr. Johnson,” Mina said.
“It’s been a good match,” Agha Jan said.
Mina remembered Mamani whispering into the phone, “I’ve found someone for Leila. If all goes well, she can leave Iran before she’s twenty. She can study in England . . .”
“But they stayed in Iran,” Mina said.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Agha Jan said.
“Come on,” Darya said to Mina. “Let’s go for a walk. Go put on your roopoosh.”
MINA WALKED BEHIND HER GRANDFATHER and Darya, who were huddled close together and chatting quietly, catching up on family gossip and changes in the neighborhood. Darya held on to the tweed of her father’s jacket elbow, at once protective and dependent, helping him climb the curb, yet also hanging on to him. Mina wondered if Darya had dreamed of this walk. Even though the sun was weak, Mina began to see shadowy black spots floating in front of her eyes again. Was this still part of the jet lag? She wanted to swat at the spots like flies.
They walked past stores Mina had forgotten about. The dry cleaner’s and the noonvayi bread shop. Still there. At the corner of the main street, Mina saw the greengrocer’s shop. The one she always passed on her way to her grandparents’ house. They had good pomegranates, but not as good as the ones at the store Mamani had gone to on the day she was killed. Mina followed Agha Jan and Darya into the shop.
The store was a small square room. In Mina’s memory this place had been huge. There was dust everywhere. An unshaven man with red plastic slippers on his feet stood in one corner, smoking a cigarette. Bruised oranges and withered apples were stacked in carts around him. Carrots and lettuce lay in bins. Agha Jan bent over a cartful of cucumbers.
“Agha, let me help you,” the grocer said.
“I can select my own cucumbers, may your hands not ache,” Agha Jan said.
“As you wish,” the grocer answered. Mina sensed that her grandfather and the grocer had had this conversation many times, had argued over cucumbers and carrots, maybe celery too. Agha Jan straightened himself, as if fighting for a sense of dignity, then handed the grocer his purchase.
“Two kilos.” The grocer weighed the cucumbers on a scale.
“Check again,” Agha Jan said.
“My mistake. One and a half. But I am not worthy of your payment.”
Mina couldn’t believe they were tarof-ing over payment. The grocer mumbled something about being a humble servant and about farangi guests. Farangi. Foreigners. Mina looked behind her for European tourists. But there were only her grandfather, tall as the Persepolis pillars, and Darya, standing by her father as any respectful Iranian daughter would. Mina looked down at her mud-caked, thick-soled, made-for-adventure hiking boots. It was she. The farangi. The foreigner.
Agha Jan added oranges to the scale, and the grocer summed up the total with a stubby pencil on a tiny pad of paper, then counted the toman bills Agha Jan gave him.
“May your eyes be brightened at the arrival of your guests.” He dropped Agha Jan’s cucumbers and oranges into crinkly plastic bags and twirled the tops. He handed the bags to Agha Jan. Then he turned to Darya and bowed. “It’s nice to see you again, Darya Khanom.”
“And it’s nice to see you again, Hussein Agha,” Darya said.
Hussein Agha pulled out a chocolate egg from near the scale and gave it to Mina. “For you.”
“Oh no, I can’t,” Mina started.
“It’s yours. You must excuse my conditions. I am embarrassed. My shop needs repair. My fruit is not worthy. But if you break that chocolate egg in half, there is a little toy inside.”
“Thank you,” Mina said.
The sun was blindingly bright when they stepped out from the dark interior of the shop.
“He was just a kid when we left,” Darya said. “He hung around and helped his dad with the store. Mamani used to give him extra change.”
Mina turned around. Hussein Agha stood in the door frame of his shop, smoking next to his boxes of onions. When he saw her, he put his hand on his chest and bowed his head.
BACK ON THE STREET, MINA NOTICED that the cars were exactly the same. Even though it was 1996, most of the cars were still from the seventies, before the revolution.
“We’re the pariah of the world now,” Agha Jan said with a nervous laugh. “Other countries can’t do business with us. These leaders have taken our country, hijacked it
, and held us at the throat for years.”
Three large metal stands with red lamps flanked the middle of the sidewalk. They seemed out of place. Mina looked up ahead and saw that there were at least two dozen lamps on this block alone.
“What are those?” Mina asked.
“For the soldiers that died,” Agha Jan said. “In the war. You remember, don’t you? The war with Iraq.”
“Of course. I know. I was here.”
“The war lasted eight years. You were here for one year.” Agha Jan stopped walking. “Why does your government over there hate us so much?”
Mina froze in the middle of the street.
“Tell me, are we even humans to them? Do they know we also mourn every life lost?”
The sun blinded Mina, the black spots multiplied in front of her eyes. The American hiking boots suddenly felt as if they were filled with lead. Every one of Agha Jan’s remarks pierced like a needle jabbing at her chest. The grandfather she had left was calm and wise. Not bitter. Mina wasn’t responsible for America’s actions, just as she wasn’t responsible for Iran’s. But always, the questions came. No matter which country she was in. People wanted an explanation.
Together Tea Page 16
