Call Me Zebra(8)

After leaving Van, my father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini, and I spent years moving across the surface of the earth in search of a place to think. We were like the slugs that come out after a hard rain: ugly, weather-beaten, dispossessed, the refuse of the world. So it goes. No matter how many times you try to replant an uprooted tree, it seems always to fail to take to the soil. The exile never outruns history. Such are the consequences of being born unlucky in an inhospitable world. There is a line by Baudelaire that sums it up rather well: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas. I encountered that same line, written in the words of Paul Auster, after we’d settled in the wretched New World: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place I am not. It seemed just as prophetic then.

By the time we did reach that so-called New World, many years had passed since my mother’s death, since our harrowing fugue from Iran—an egress that had chilled our bones and left our hands permanently cold. From that point on, I had maintained the temperature of a corpse. Under the specter of grief, we moved through Turkey, and after a series of digressions designed to renew or falsify this or that paper, we arrived in Barcelona, our destination, the City of Bombs. There, my father hoped to meet other Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists. But events never unfold the way one imagines they will. Barcelona, cautious, worn down by the years of oppression it was subjected to by the childish whims of General Franco—that wide-eyed despot—ultimately disappointed him, and soon we were on the road again.

At times, during our long journey, we seemed to make progress in leaps and bounds. We would move across huge chunks of this uneven universe at the speed of light, then, suddenly, breathless and exhausted, we’d be unable to proceed and would move backward again. The path we had taken would fold over itself, looping backward as if it were leading us toward some information we had been too impatient to discover the first time. We would scurry back in a panic only to discover that there was nothing there. This sense that we had forgotten something—the haunting aftereffect of an indigestible loss—had turned both of us into entirely unintelligible beings. I don’t know how long we stayed in each place. I drifted in and out of the light. I was often lost to myself, and even when I wasn’t, I had no idea how it was that we had come to be wherever it was we were. I still don’t know. All I know is that when we finally arrived in Barcelona I was two years older than when we had first left Iran. Three years later, we were in New York City—hopeless, disoriented, famished.

More than a decade had gone by somehow. Now twenty-two, I still burn with rage, grief, and confusion at the arduous path of my past. I stood with my back to the Cloisters and looked out over the river. The Cuxa, the Bonnefont, the Saint-Guilhem, and the Trie were behind me, all having been clinically sliced from medieval French abbeys and rearranged here into an artificial whole. The Hudson was below me: green, serpentine, slithering lazily by. I sat down on a bench to take in the commanding view. The fog climbed up the sides of Fort Tryon Park. Suspended over the water, caught in the gauzy winter light, the George Washington Bridge looked like a giant mosquito net. It was a dreary, damp day.

My father was in our Inwood apartment, lying supine on his mattress, approaching death. Soon I would have to bury him, just as I had buried my mother. I would have to lower his body into the ground. I would have no one left to love. Sitting on that bench, watching the fog rise over the river, I thought to myself, years have passed since we left Iran. I sat there and yearned for the most banal things: figs, pomegranate trees, hydrangeas, date palms, birds of paradise. Then I thought, enough: There is no point in pining over a country with a thousand heads, a country that is always changing, that had become unrecognizable to us.

I got off the bench and walked up to the railing that runs along the perimeter of the park. I leaned over the edge. I could hear the river down below—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. The moving water made the same sound the sentences written by my ingenious forebears made as they swirled around the infinite abyss of my mind. I could no longer see out; the fog was covering everything. Instead, I looked inside myself. I saw acres of consciousness decimated by the lacunae of exile. I felt indignant, downtrodden, lost.

I considered leaping into the river. I didn’t want to survive my father’s death. Then I thought: No. I am truculent, combative, as good as any other human at kicking around the dust piled up on this miserable earth. And if I were to kill myself off, why should I do it here? I looked around. I said, “Never.” If I’m going to die, I thought, let it be among estranged brethren. As forlorn as I was, I would never leap off the edge of this New World, this land of thieves, with my back to a conglomeration of fake cloisters that have been dismantled from real French abbeys and reassembled here. As if the Old World were a mausoleum. What a laughable lack of perspective.

I marched back out of the park with new resolve. It was time to check in on my father. He hardly ever left our apartment, a fourth-floor, rat-infested, rent-controlled studio we had partitioned into two rooms with an old bookshelf. Like many other exiles, we had traveled across the world, dying and resurrecting along the way. But now, I reminded myself, as if to prepare, my father was approaching physical death—the least final but most tangible of all deaths.

I opened the door to find him talking to himself. He had grown gaunt, grim, fragile. His cheeks sagged. His hands were blue and freckled. Our vagabond life had taken a toll on him. I saw him lurching across our studio with an ashen face, leaning against this or that, mumbling from beneath his mustache into the cold air: “Exile is death’s muse.” I watched his curtained lips form the word exile. But I heard forced separation, expulsion, the refuse of the world. I couldn’t stand to see his diminished figure.