Call Me Zebra(16)

The man stood there, nodding along and smiling warmly.

I said, “I intend to dive into the lacunae of exile. In other words, just like my father and my mother, I am going to become nothingness, fade into the white noise of death—only I will do so by physically retracing the ill-fated steps of our journey from Iran through the Mediterranean to the U.S.A.”

His eyes widened, but he kept nodding.

“The U.S.A.,” I said, letting out a chuckle. “The Unanimous Station of Apathy, a station where the selfish and the greedy readily set up shop with the intent of exploiting the vulnerable!”

The funeral director looked at me with that polished countenance of his.

I said, “Just so the message is clear”—at this, he looked like I had slapped him in the face with a dirty dish towel—“I intend to prolong this ridiculous habit of living just long enough to examine the landscapes we traversed during our long and brutal exodus. After that, there is no knowing what I will do.”

Once his initial surprise had passed, the funeral director did his best to normalize the situation. He stood there and continued to smile kindly while he searched the ground at his feet. But his unresponsiveness failed to soothe me; it only fueled my anger. I raised my notebook to my nose and sniffed it, then I took another sip of my water.

“Soon,” I said, swallowing, “this notebook will smell like ink, like the blood of literature, the blood that runs through all Hosseini veins.”

The man took a respectful step back. He stood there with his hands clasped, his head bent humbly. He was still staring at the gray carpet beneath his feet. I took another sip. His mouth finally opened. His tongue had started working again.

“I understand,” he said humbly. He raised his head and looked past me at a man who was walking across the room carrying an arrangement of roses, lilies, and white hyacinth.

I got up and walked over to the chest-shaped suitcase, which I had parked near the door. Naturally, my dead father was no longer in it, but the pungent odor of his corpse had been absorbed into the leather and wood. The scent of his death made me dizzy, but I carried on. I had to persist in the face of dread. It was the valiant thing to do. I pulled out a few of our favorite books: The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, The Odyssey. I walked back over to the man with the polished face and asked him if he could give the books to the undertakers to put in my father’s casket before sealing it. I wanted him to have access in death to the tattered pages from which he had so often read to me in life. I could see the man wasn’t pleased with my request, but again he nodded and said he understood.

“And who do I give the epitaph for the tombstone to?” I asked, shoving the old tomes under his arm.

“I can take care of that for you,” he said.

I handed him a piece of paper. It read: Like desert camels of thirst dying while on their backs water bearing. The man read the note. He looked up from the page, and asked: “This is what you want on his tombstone?”

“Exactly,” I said. “And make sure the engraving is poorly done. I’d like the words to be lopsided, as if they were written hastily and upside down during times of war, between bouts of carnage, detonations, and bombings.” As I spoke, the bony knobs of my knees ached the way they had hurt when we walked across that no-man’s-land with those blackboards hanging over our chests and backs to protect us from the imprudent blows of history.

The man who had been carrying the flowers was now walking back across the room. This time he was holding a blown-up photograph of one of the world’s other recently deceased, a man with glasses, a tiny nose that looked like it had been chopped off, and white hair.

After that, I don’t know what happened. At some point, hours later, I was standing out in the cemetery under a cluster of trees looking at the plot I had seen on eBay. It had since been dug up. It was a moist black hole. I was dazed, holding my notebook, watching as my father was slipped into the mud of the earth. Again, I had the feeling that someone was draining my blood. I yielded to the dizziness until I was at the point of delirium, until I felt myself double, triple, quadruple. I thought to myself, I am among the loneliest of this pitiful world; all the other Hosseinis are dead.

My void widened in order to contain my increasingly voluminous loneliness. In response, my consciousness stretched and spun. Just then, like a bolt of lightning, a magnificent thought struck my mind. It occurred to me that I would need a new name for my journey of exile, one that referred to my multiple selves. I declared inwardly: I, the last of the Hosseinis, will continue to live so that this scattered collective of selves can fill my notebook with literature; in other words, my manifesto—composed of literary fragments systematically organized into a vast matrix, with each portion reflecting a disparate self—is my only vindication, my final line of defense.

At that critical moment, the light came down through the trees in the cemetery and fell across my father’s casket so that it appeared striped. The image was charged with an electric force, and for a brief moment, my inner and outer worlds were in perfect alignment. I felt as though the fate of my future self were tied up with that image of my father’s casket wrapped in alternating bands of light and darkness. It formed a kind of chiaroscuro composed of shadowy, inky bands laced with contrasting stripes as white as paper. That’s when the word appeared in my head: zebra.

I let it sit for a moment. I watched the undertakers—three men dressed in black, all of them strangers—sow my father into the earth, thinking, as I did, that the juxtaposing stripes of light and darkness were sending a message to me, a message that consisted of that very word, zebra, which had spontaneously manifested itself much as the truth does. The truth, which is odder than one expects.