The Stationery Shop(50)
I wish I’d fought harder for you. I wish I could have shown you that it is not her fault. I wish I had shared with you some of her past and what made her this way. But I was too ashamed. And so hurt.
The day Jahangir told me you’d left, I felt like someone had torn off my skin. I can’t even imagine California. But how amazing is that, Roya Joon, to think that you are there in the land of Cary Grant and Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway and President Eisenhower. I’m running out of Americans to mention. I won’t mention the CIA. I’ll be good. Though it still boils my blood to think they had a hand in our coup. I want to be happy for you there in America, and I am. But what the government of your new home did to us . . . One day it will be proven. One day the world will know that the government over there overthrew our government over here. For what? The lives lost, the suffering caused—was it worth it?
I will never understand the turn of events for us in 1953. For you and me, I mean—let alone the whole damn country. If I live to be one hundred, I won’t truly absorb it.
We are, I think, a lost cause in this country.
What did our generation learn that summer? That even if we did all the right things to bring about political change, in one day, one afternoon, foreign powers and corrupt Iranians could destroy it all.
I have relived the order of events of the 28th of Mordad (or August 19 in your Western calendar) over and over. Even now, I want to see you in that square, to feel you next to me, to hold you. We would have gone to the Office of Marriage and Divorce. I had planned it all down to the minute when we would arrive at the office. The clerk I’d arranged it with said he’d be ready with the paperwork.
Jahangir must have told you I work at the petroleum company now. Just another cog in the wheels of capitalism. We don’t always match up to our own expectations of who we wanted to be when we were younger, that’s for sure. Mr. Fakhri, God bless his soul, used to call me “the boy who would change the world.” I think of the idealistic young boy I used to be and I am not embarrassed so much as bereft.
I wish I could clean life of the sadness in all its crevices. I want to accept that you made the choices you made for a reason. You will be a lady scientist after all. I hope you are healthy and happy. I truly do.
And Roya Joon, believe it or not, I will become a father this winter. I thought Mother would be delighted at the news, but she has been surprisingly quiet and in retreat.
When the baby is, God willing, born, it will have been four and a half years since I waited for you at the square.
Chapter Nineteen
1957
* * *
Cooking Lessons
Roya never did learn to eat like an American.
In Tehran she had been raised, in its city streets she spent her childhood, in its schools she was educated, and right there on one of its main squares her heart broke. She pushed away the time when she was in love with Bahman.
But American food was surprisingly harder to adjust to than she’d expected: chicken was rubbery, meat occasionally pink, potatoes mashed into a puree. In the boardinghouse, they were polite about the meals Mrs. Kishpaugh prepared; how could they protest? They couldn’t be rude and ungrateful. But Roya missed Persian food every day.
A few months after their first encounter at the coffee shop, Roya and Walter went on a double date with Zari and Jack. Jack refused to eat in a “pretentious joint,” as he put it, so they ate at a diner that served burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Roya carefully cut her hamburger with a knife and fork while Jack sat back and smoked, shaking his head at her and saying, “Oh boy.”
Roya gasped at the pink liquid running out of the middle of her burger.
“And what did you eat back in Iran? Lamb burgers?” Jack sucked his cigarette.
“Silly Jack!” Zari giggled.
The jukebox played Rosemary Clooney. The diner was overlit and the puffy plastic booth made Roya feel like she was sitting on a sticky balloon.
“Actually, you are not wrong.” Forming English sentences still made her head hurt at times, but she had improved. “We have the ground lamb kebabs. They are not in the bread like this, though.” She held up the soggy hamburger bun. “Our kebabs are longer. Thinner. Like tube.”
“Are they, now.” Jack blew smoke out of the side of his mouth and smirked.
“I think the ancient culture of Persia is renowned for a fine and fragrant cuisine,” Walter said.
“Yeah, buddy? Name one other thing from that fine and fragrant cuisine.”
“Well. I do believe . . .”
“They got kebabs!” Jack leaned back into the booth. “That’s what they got.”
Zari and Roya exchanged a look. Oh dear no. No, no. Roya wished her English was better so she could quickly regale him with a list of what she wanted to eat right now: chicken marinated in lime with saffron nestled into basmati rice sprinkled with slivers of almonds and barberries (the dish that the guests in another life had loved at her engagement party). Pomegranate and walnut khoresh. Fried eggplants with tomatoes, small sour grapes, and meat served with rice. Thick aush soup with noodles and greens and beans. Her mother’s ghormeh sabzi stew. Grape leaf dolmehs stuffed with ground beef and herbs, wrapped by hand and simmered with cardamom.
Roya squeezed the bread bun in her hand. It disintegrated into clumps. “You will come to our boardinghouse. We ask permission from Mrs. Kishpaugh, our landlady. We cook for you.”