Call Me Zebra(43)

“My past?” Ludo asked tersely. He had taken offense.

“All I know is that you’re a Bembo,” I said, lifting an oyster off the plate and offering it to him. It worked. He took the ridged shell and delicately sucked the brackish muscle into his mouth.

Every once in a while, the cooks, who were wearing black uniforms that made them look like undertakers, wiped their brows with a piece of oil-soaked cloth. Then they fussed with the pans, turned up the flames, removed sardines from the oven, boiled crabs, threw calamari into the fire.

A vague memory of my mother, Bibi Khanoum, resurfaced. I felt weary again and noxious. I saw her standing in the kitchen of the Oasis of Books wearing a blue apron. There was a dead sturgeon at her feet. She kneeled on the floor and sliced into the fish in order to retrieve the eggs. Blood curdled around the drain; I watched it get absorbed into the pipes and gutters. My nose stung with the sharp smell. I tried to look at my mother’s face, but her head was bent over the sturgeon and I couldn’t see it. I felt a nudge. It was Ludo. He had a follow-up question.

“What do you mean, intercepted?” he asked.

I sniffed the liquor, and the herbal notes helped to resettle my stomach. Then I explained to him that instead of the universe absorbing my father upon his death I had absorbed him through metempsychosis. In other words, I beat the universe to it. Then I added: “I’ve recently discovered that I’ve also absorbed traces of my mother through my father, who had absorbed her previously.”

Ludo leaned back in his chair. He looked like a frustrated accountant who keeps adding the same numbers and getting different results.





“What brought on this realization?” he inquired.

I told him that after my mother’s untimely death, while living in Barcelona, my father had entered a period of heightened literary awareness. That, in addition to pursuing his usual work as a translator, he began to practice the Art of Transcription. My thoughts swam around the murky waters of my mind like fish in an aquarium. “Under the specter of grief,” I explained to Ludo, “my father, a very innovative man—a man with a fantastic mustache, I should add—devoted himself to the manual reproduction of texts, like a monk in a monastery.” I went on to tell him that recalling this apparently insignificant fact, which until now I had erased from memory, allowed me to connect the dots. I said, “I’ve entered a period of supreme literary activity since absorbing my father; so it’s only logical to conclude that my father’s heightened literary awareness in the years after my mother’s death is indicative of the fact that he had absorbed her. And thus it only follows that I’ve now absorbed traces of her through him.”

Ludo’s pupils had dilated. I leaned in. He smelled like orange blossoms, eucalyptus, figs sliced open and soaked in honey; the scents of my youth came back to me with a dizzying pull. I landed a kiss on his cheek. His worries melted away in an instant.

I slipped him a small piece of paper on which I had written a message expressly for him. I told him, “This formula, extracted from reading Blanchot, allowed my ancestors to survive their disastrous fate for generations. Literature holds the key to transcendence, to metaphysically surviving one’s death. Here it is.” I pushed the note along the counter. He leaned over to look.



Life + Death = Totality





Totality = Unreality of the Whole





The corners of his mouth curled up as he tucked the note in his pocket. He looked enchanted, and I wondered if a new space had opened in him, a dark room to which he could retreat to acknowledge his own wretchedness.

“You should come to Girona,” he said. “I live with some great people. You would like it there. You can see the Pyrenees from our apartment. In the evenings, the flanks of the mountains look purple. I’ve never seen anything like it. And then there’s Bernadette, Agatha, Fernando. Well, Bernadette will be leaving soon. At least I hope she will. She’s a nervous type, chaste, pulls the blinds down at sunset and slips into these fluffy pink pajamas, and then she seals herself in her room and prays to the pope or the Virgin Mary. If she leaves her room and I’m there, she walks along the walls like a crab. I’m surprised she doesn’t try to grab the wall to save herself from falling. You’ve got to see it with your own eyes!” He laughed, though his laugh wasn’t malicious. It was full of bewilderment at the mysteries of life.

We sat there and got progressively drunker. I told him that, as a child, I once tied myself to a tree and pretended I was a cow. I exclaimed, “The most insipid hours of my life!”

“What made you want to do that?” he asked.

I thought of The Hung Mallard. I heard my father echo the voice of my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini: We will remain as succulent as that duck. I shared this with Ludo. The Hung Mallard, I told him, was a symbolic portrait of our collective family destiny. I told him that by tying myself to a tree I had tapped into deep reservoirs of grief that allowed me to understand from an early age what it means to live in a state of captivity, the reason I am now able to exert my will to power from within the Pyramid of Exile.

Ludo smiled kindly. I saw his reflection on the glass counter. His eyes looked darker and his hair had a red sheen. He had an attentive look on his face. He was listening. I wondered if our ancestors in the poetic dimension had oiled the gears of our conversation. Then he leaned in and planted a soft kiss on my neck.