Call Me Zebra(5)

At first, the dirt path under our feet seemed to trot along with us—kind and concerned for our safety. But our fate took a turn for the worse. Somewhere between Khalkhal and Mount Sahand, in a long stretch of no-man’s-land littered with Iraqi missiles, a poisonous black cloud billowing over the southwestern horizon, my mother, Bibi Khanoum, died. She had walked into an abandoned home in the middle of a razed village to see if the deserters had left behind any food. Just at that moment, likely when she was hovering over the kitchen table, the house collapsed. She was crushed under the weight of its stones.

I stood before that collapsed house in a state of shock. I could hear my father’s voice rising and falling in the distance. He whimpered and yowled. I could hear him choking on his tears. I didn’t know where we were. I covered my ears. I couldn’t stand listening to him sob in that manner, like a wounded animal left to die in the dry gales of the desert. But I could still hear his sobs rising into that godless gray dome that keeps us pinned to this meager earth. The world seemed nebulous, unnavigable. I felt as though someone had taken a rolling pin to my heart, razing it and extinguishing its warmth. I felt a gaping hole bloom in my gut. Then those crucial four words of the first Hosseini Commandment, which my father had whispered to me upon my birth, trumpeted through my void: Love nothing except literature.

I put one foot in front of the other and walked toward my father. He was curled up near a rock. My hand hurt as I nudged him. I told him we had to unbury my mother. I told him we couldn’t just leave her there to rot. When he finally looked at me, I saw that his eyes had turned into two murky puddles and that the skin of his face had drooped. To me, his features seemed to have melted; his nose was indecipherable from his cheeks, his forehead had merged with his chin. The only thing I could see clearly was his thick black mustache.

It took us a full day and night of hard labor to retrieve Bibi Khanoum’s body from the wreckage. My father kneeled against her and pulled her into his arms. He rocked her and wept silently. I stood behind him and watched. Her face was flat and gray. It was covered in dust. It could have been anyone’s. Once I had seen it, I couldn’t unsee it. Her face had introduced a distortion in my visual field. The world, all of its parts, which, when summed up, still refused to make a whole, seemed unstable at the edges.

Hours later, breathless and confused, we buried my mother beneath a lone date palm. Our fingers were numb from clawing at the earth. We stood over her grave and cried, then we waved our good-byes the way we had waved at the stones of our village, at the jasmine bushes lining the streets, at the magnolia and citrus trees, and at the rows of eucalyptus growing wild near the sea.

As we rode away from her makeshift grave, my father brought his hand to his mustache, which was as long and limp as Nietzsche’s, pulled on the tips that were stained yellow from all the tea he drank, and nervously said: “It could have been worse. At least she was buried in her homeland. There is nothing worse than dying a stranger.”

At the ripe age of five, I thought to myself: Worse than strangers are estranged brethren. As we moved farther away from my mother, I felt that void—deep, dark, craggy—widen. But I said nothing. Because sometimes, as Shakespeare famously wrote, the rest is silence.



We continued our journey. In order not to arouse suspicion, my father designed a senseless path, full of digressions, one long detour after another. This vagabonding through the dead of night, through dark and silent fields, across terrain that was being drenched with poison gas and blood and death, turned us numb and sluggish. At times, my father seemed to have forgotten who he was or where we were. In those moments, he would look at the sky with a wide, dry mouth, and it would seem to me that even his mustache was barely hanging on to his crusty upper lip.

Every morning, the grainy light of dawn came down on our heads like a guillotine. We didn’t have time to mourn. We tried to push away any emotion that arose: panic, shame, fear, despair, astonishment. We didn’t know how else to carry on, how else to move through our remaining days. Sometimes, in an effort to lift our spirits, my father would speak. He would say, his voice breaking, that the lesser men on this earth are the most powerful and that we, the illfated, must draw from scant reservoirs, plumb the depths of our singed minds and hearts, just to find the courage to survive in this world that acts against us with such violence. Worse than violence, he would say, is the indifference of those who watch the destruction of others and remain unmoved by it. With what little conviction he could muster, he would remind me that it was our job to resist the tyranny of hate and its behavior of choice: the elimination of others.

The next time my father and I came across a leveled village, we sifted through the rubble and dug out from the debris six blackboards that had been used in the village school; we tied each pair together with a piece of old string and mournfully slipped the boards over our heads and saddled our ass with a pair. We wore them like shields. But while we continued on, our ass, in still another tragedy, died of exhaustion. By the end, the poor animal barely had the energy to keep his ears pointing at the godless heavens. My father, unusually lighthearted, stood over the animal’s body and saluted him. “Good-bye, dear Rocinante!” he said, as if our ass had been Don Quixote’s infamously weak horse. He knew how much I loved the trials and tribulations of that Knight of the Sad Countenance.

And so my father and I went through the lowlands and highlands of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province on foot, dragging our suitcase of meager possessions along with us. We walked by night and hid by day. We were caught in the approaching winter. Our teeth chattered; our bones ached. It wouldn’t be long before glistening sheets of snow would settle across the rugged landscapes that lay ahead. We ate potatoes, beets, turnips; anything my father managed to procure every now and then. We were reduced to desperation by our aimless path, which seemed to fold over itself a million times before delivering us to the border. Our bodies had metamorphosed. We were skeletal, ragged, dirty, stupid from the rough blows of our journey toward nothingness. In the rare occasions when we saw villagers moving across the landscape, ambling into the light and crossing out of it again, they pretended not to see us. It was as if we didn’t exist.