Call Me Zebra(13)

The apartment was scattered with objects—most of them rusty, damaged—that we had either carried with us across that no-man’s-land, that miasma of death, or accumulated during our subsequent exodus through the Mediterranean in search of intellectual freedom. A vain search that turned up nothing, because no matter where you go, knot-brained idiots outnumber honest and straightforward men.

I stood near the dining-room table, dustpan in hand. I examined the objects of our lives: a rust-stained samovar, a hand-woven rug that looked like it had been bludgeoned, an old suitcase shaped like a chest, The Hung Mallard (our most prized possession), and a book of poems by Hāfez, which was lying on the floor near my father’s La-Z-Boy. He was sitting in that armchair now, slumped over, nervously tugging on his mustache. He had staggered over to it with his cane, grunting along the way, while I swept up the shattered glass.

My father often consulted Hāfez’s poems. In what turned out to be the final weeks of his life, these poetic consultations confirmed for him a fact he had firmly come to believe and that seemed to have revised his thinking up to that point: Our future had been sealed off, we had been permanently barred from it, and we would never have access, not now, not ever, to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; we, to put it shortly and sweetly, belonged to the cast of the living dead and there was no point in our continuing on.

“No point! You hear me?” He spattered so loudly that his voice carried across the room. He was breaking down inside. He had given up his sword.

I walked into the kitchen, stunned. I removed the lid from the garbage and got rid of the shattered glass. My father, annoyed at my lack of response, got up and lurched across the rug to the window that looked out onto the street. I came back out of the kitchen and watched as he struggled to open the window. He kept pointing at the glass, at the people on the street below. He was repulsed by their dress, their manners, their way of being in the world. He banged his cane against the sill. The framework came loose. He stuck his cane out, pointed it at a passerby, and announced: “I spit on my life!”

Then he wheeled his head around, slipped his cane out of the crack in the window, and pointed it directly at me. He said: “You should know: The final hour is always approaching.” His hands were shaking. His cane was bouncing up and down. I noticed his mustache was wet. The tips were so long that they were getting caught in his mouth. I took this as evidence of a bad mood gone sour.

That night, before my father went to bed, he reached into his pocket and retrieved an image of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s face, a cutout from an old rial banknote. When I was a child, he had made me a mobile out of those cutouts; he would twirl the mobile around and I would see the king’s shadowy face redoubled on the ceiling and the walls. I remembered him telling me: “Look, the Ruler of the Aryans ate the ground!” Or, with a chorus of defiant laughter, applauding his own sarcasm: “If we who have mingled with the Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and Greeks for hundreds of years are Aryans, then the Spanish are pure-blooded Iberians!”

Now, as if the King of Kings were still alive, my father looked at me from across the room and let out: “Ha! The man thinks his sweat is as white as milk!” He was holding the king’s face up to the light. His mind had unreeled.

He seemed to be working his way backward across his life, which was ending in the most unfortunate place: exile’s cold claw. As I observed him, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. This pain, I believe, derived from the sudden and unexpected loosening of the screws that kept the lid on my past tightly shut. I was faced with the prospect of having to open that lid in order to fit my father in the same container I had relegated not only my mother to but also the senseless phenomena that had accumulated during the course of my ill-fated life. I was sure those forgotten fragments of memory, sharpened into spears on the jagged cliffs of time, would inevitably slip out and stab me in the gut. I had no doubt that upon my father’s death I would enter a labyrinth of grief so complex that I may never find the exit.



That fateful day finally arrived. In April, while the cherry trees were blossoming and the sky was a cloudless blue, my father died. His heart stopped.

I came home from my weekly meeting with Morales and found my father sitting in his La-Z-Boy, dead, his cane resting across his lap, his mouth open, his tongue sunk back, his mustache flat and lifeless. I felt as though my heart had been put through the shredder. I heaved and wailed, but I couldn’t shed any tears. I had gone dry, like that no-man’s-land we had traversed. My eyes stung and my gut burned. I bit my lips until they bled. I gnawed on my fingers. I attacked myself the way animals do when they are in distress. Sometime later, somnambulant, comatose, I walked over to my father and caressed his face. I closed his eyes. Then I went into the kitchen and poured some tea. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was a small radio balanced on the windowsill that led out to the fire escape. I had never turned it on, but I did then. There is a first time for everything, after all. I leaned against the sink and listened to the voice coming through. It said, “The long siege.” We were right in the middle of the reckless chaos of the Bush years.

I retreated from the kitchen and again looked at my dead father. There was a white hue to his skin. I couldn’t stand to see him that way. I looked around. There was a notebook I hadn’t noticed before on the dinner table. My father had left me a present, a leather-bound notebook with a note on it that said: “Ill-fated child, last of the Hosseinis! Add to history’s pile of ruins the uselessness of our suffering.”