Call Me Zebra(4)

I learned to crawl, walk, read, write, shit, and eat in that library. Even before I could read, I nurtured my brain by running my hands along the spines of all the old books and licking their soot off my fingers. After feeding on the dust of literature, I sat on the Persian rug and stared at The Hung Mallard, which was fixed to the wall. Once I was old enough to walk, I paced in concentric circles like a Sufi mystic, masticating dates and muttering the family motto to myself: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths.

The days passed. My education unfolded in the midst of the interminable war. My father read aloud to me from Nietzsche’s oeuvre on a daily basis, usually in the mornings, and after lunch, he taught me about literature, culling paragraphs from books written by our ingenious forebears, the Great Writers of the Past: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mawlānā (alias Rumi), Omar Khayyám, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dante Alighieri, Marie-Henri Beyle (alias Stendhal), Teresa of ávila, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Sādegh Hedāyat, Frederick Douglass, Francesco Petrarca, Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Benjamin, Sei Shōnagon. The list went on and on; it included religious thinkers, philosopher-poets, mystics, secularists, agnostics, atheists. Literature, as my father would say, is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. There are no stations, no castes, no checkpoints.

At the end of each lesson, as bedtime neared, my father stiffly ordered: “Illfated child, assimilate and regurgitate!” In this way, he nurtured my mind. He taught me the long-lost skill of memorization. What is the purpose of memorization in the Hosseini tradition? It is twofold: not only does it restore the ritual function to literature—its orality—which harnesses literature’s spontaneous ability to transform the listener’s consciousness, but it also protects the archive of our troubled, ruinous humanity from being lost through the barbarism of war and the perpetual ignorance that binds our hands and feet. Count the times books have been burned in piles by the fearful and the infirm, men and women allergic to inquiry. Memorization is our only recourse against loss. We Hosseinis can reproduce the pantheon of literature instantly; we can retranscribe texts from the dark folds of our infinite minds. We are the scribes of the future.

While my father and I spent our days united in the realm of literature, my mother, Bibi Khanoum, spent her days in the kitchen. If she ever ventured out of the house, it was to find us food: rice, oranges, fish the local tribesmen had managed to wrench out of the sea. I didn’t spend much time with her. She didn’t agree with my father’s methods. She considered them invasive and extreme for my age, but he, twenty years her senior, had the upper hand in all matters governing our family.

I remember my mother once walked into the oval library, where she had given birth to me, with her apron tied around her waist and her face moist from the kitchen steam, to scorn my father: “Abbas, you are raising this child to be a boy! How will she survive in the world? Who will marry her?”

My father reproached her: “These are times of war and you are worried about marriage?”

“And who do you suppose will feed her once we are dead?” she retorted. “A mother has to worry about her child’s stomach!”

Confrontation ensued, but I don’t remember anything after that. I have tried hard to remember my mother’s face, the tone of her voice, the feel of her touch, but the details are out of reach. She would die not long after that argument, and the void left over by her death would push my father and me over the edge. He would fill the lacunae of our lives with literature. Over time, my mind, filled to the brim with sentences, would forsake her.

In the meantime, on the other side of the Elborz Mountains, that megalomaniac Saddam was spreading mustard gas across the frontier, shooting missiles at random targets, burying mines in the no-man’s-land separating our two nations. What did the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran do? He sat on his newly established throne looking healthier than a fresh pear and ordered human wave attacks to blow up the mines that his nemesis, that bushy eyebrowed man-child, had buried at the front. Human wave attacks! As if it were the Great War!

Now, Rodents, let us ask: What is the purpose of a flicker of light in the midst of all that bloodshed? Easy. To illuminate the magnitude of the surrounding darkness.

At a certain point during the long war, my father started to wander about the perimeter of the house or along the seashore, night and day, holding me up as if I were a torch. He used my head, which shone like a beacon with all the enlightened literature he had inserted into it, to measure the scope of the encroaching abyss. Iran, he decided, was no longer a place to think. Not even the Caspian was safe. We had to flee. We had to go into exile. We departed: numb, astonished, bewildered.



Thus our vagabond life began. We left our home, stopping just beyond the door and looking back once. Pitiful, simpering, we waved our good-byes to the Oasis of Books, to the orange groves and eucalyptus trees, to the rice paddies and sandy shores. Pressed together on the rear of an ass, my father, mother, and I set out across Iran’s forbidding horizon toward the Turkish border. Of our earthly possessions, we took only our samovar, a rug, our books, and The Hung Mallard. We had packed a few provisions, the little food we had left in the house. It was the middle of summer. Other deserters had died in the rugged flanks and stony depressions of our mountains. We didn’t want to be caught in a snow blizzard. We didn’t want to die against an icy stone, frostbitten. We rode in silence for a long time, fearful and worn down. No one dared to ask: Will we ever set foot on these grounds again? Smell the jasmine bush? Stuff our mouths with the sweet meat of dates freshly fallen from the trees?