Call Me Zebra(6)
One morning, as we sat huddled together at the center of a cluster of trees, my father said rather conclusively of my mother: “The whole world is a mind. Her mind has been absorbed back into the mind of the universe.” I looked around. A thick mist hovered over the landscape. The whole world seemed unreal, tinged with my mother’s death and the death of the Hosseinis. I thought to myself, she is everywhere; she has contaminated everything. I took comfort in this. I dragged that vaporous air into my lungs and held my breath.
Nights passed, and we marched on. The closer we came to the border, the more dead bodies we found: dissidents who had tried to flee but who had frozen to death, Saddam’s victims. We were north of the front. His men must have been aiming with their rectal holes, killing anything with a pulse.
On a particularly morbid night, my father, who seemed for my sake to recover a little bit of his strength with each passing day, paused near a dead body lying face down on the ground, and mournfully said: “It’s a good thing we buried your mother. We didn’t leave her exposed to the merciless elements. Now, child, look around. As your great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, would say, Death is coming. Take this chance to train that Hosseini nose of yours! It is the only way to guard your life with your death.”
As I listened to him speak, I was reminded of the second Hosseini Commandment: It is our duty to remember that history’s unfinished business will recycle itself. I remembered: The only way to remain one step ahead of death is to cultivate our ability to sniff the bloodthirsty past before it approaches to settle old scores.
The next time we came across a pile of bodies, I looked at the faces of the dead. My father removed their clothes and piled them onto my small frame. Snow was drifting through the air; it had stacked on the ground, a spectral glow that would soon cover those who lay there, dead and abandoned. I smelled them. They smelled of shit and vinegar and rust. The stench of history, the miasma of death, was coming up from the southern front in waves. For days, there was blood in my head. Blood in my eyes. Blood everywhere I looked.
Weeks stretched on like an interminable road. Through the coldest stretches, my father carried me on his back as if I were a load. Time moved unnervingly slow. But it was in the midst of that decay and putrefaction, and that harrowing winter we had tried so hard to avoid, that my father resumed my lessons in literature. We reclaimed our old habits. They gave us a sense of order. We felt bolstered by the architecture of words. Every day, before we rested from our night’s hike, he instructed me to sit on a pile of rocks that jetted out of the brightly glazed snow, and said, “Life crushes us, grinds us to a halt, wears us down.”
I listened to him through the bitter chill of the ancient howling wind. I closed my eyes and inhaled his words. I swallowed them as if they were food to my stomach. I felt nurtured by literature’s web of sentences, connected through them to this strange and dark universe.
My father warned, echoing the third and final Hosseini Commandment: “Child, you must follow in the tradition of your ancestors, your forebears and your forebears’ ingenious forebears, those great martyrs of thought who retreated into literature in order to survive death, in order to outwit the cruel absurdity of the world.”
He always said child just like that; never my child or sweet daughter of mine or my doll. He didn’t believe in the possessive. According to his logic, I was a vessel, the latest to be produced in our ill-omened bloodline, designed to receive and transmit literary signals; destined to contaminate the world with our cross-generational devotion to literature. “Remember,” he would say during those dawn lessons, pacing back and forth before a pile of icy rocks, “literature reveals the lies and the hypocrisy of the world. It is the only true record. After I am gone, you will be the last remaining scribe of the future.”
After a long, thoughtful pause, he would artfully say: “Repeat after me: Memorize! Regurgitate! Transmit!” In the surrounding silence of death, I would echo those words with my eyes still closed. I prepared for my ill-omened fate.
At the end of each lesson, my father instructed me to open my eyes. He pulled out a broken piece of chalk from his pocket and transcribed several verses from memory on the front of his blackboard, which he refused to remove lest someone was shooting at close range. As a result, all the verses were lopsided. He had me recite them back to him, a difficult task. No one should have to carve words on their heart, and no one should be expected to read that writing. But I did.
There were lines from Dante Alighieri, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Baldwin, Matsuo Bashō, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Wollstonecraft, Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī (alias Hāfez), Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. My father’s head was like the library of Babel. Each day, he transcribed different verses. I stored them all away so I could feed on their marrow during the starved days of exile that lay ahead. They were a balm to my wounds; a remedy against the brutal winds that would blow through my void, causing its craggy walls to sting. The line I remember most often goes like this: Like desert camels of thirst dying while on their backs water bearing. We walked hundreds of miles with that sentence scribbled on the front of my father’s blackboard. We were those camels, only instead of water we carried literature’s bountiful load on our backs. We were united in our struggle against hunger, the frigid air that kept us raw, the excruciating pain of my mother’s sudden death.
When we arrived at one of the promontories of Mount Sahand, that comatose beast of a volcano looming over Iran’s northwestern border, my father looked east toward Tehran, south toward Baghdad, and northwest toward Van, the first destination in our long journey of exile, just over the Turkish border. It was the end of winter.