Call Me Zebra(80)

He looked as though I had slapped him across the face. I went on to tell him that where I come from there is an inner and an outer form, and that the rules governing my internal state don’t have to correspond with those dictating the terms of my behavior in the world. “Do you understand?” I screamed. “Farsi is relegated to the latter so as far as you are concerned,” I warned, “I have no idea what you are saying!”

Agatha retreated from the living room. She gently squeezed my arm on the way out and cast me a pleading look, as if to say I swear he made me; it was all him.

“Give me that book,” I demanded, once we were alone. I looked at the title, and yelled: “What does the unknown have to do with Iran? The unknown is not a nation no matter how like a chameleon that nation is, no matter how many times it shifts its shape!”

Ludo got off the floor. He was disenchanted. His mouth was downturned; his eyes and eyebrows drooped.

“Any updates on Taüt?” I asked, forcing my mouth to form the words.

“No,” he said. “We’ve been home all weekend, but he didn’t show up.” He sounded remorseful. “You know,” he said, shaking his golden halo. “You make no room. No room for being understood.”

A terrible silence spread its wings between us.

I watched him trail out of the room. I sniffed him on the way out. He smelled like blood oranges, mint, eucalyptus, sand, rotten watermelon rinds, salt, and mist. He smelled like the Caspian Sea, like the Oasis of Books. I stood there simultaneously defiant and disoriented, aware and repulsed by the fact that the codes those who are less burdened with history live by would forever be illegible to me.

I looked out the window. The clouds were swollen. They were loaded with rain. I stood there for a long time, alone, holding the book of Persian phrases and idioms. I could hear Ludo and Agatha putting the dishes away in the kitchen. I heard Fernando come home. To sink, I thought to myself, to slide down the craggy walls of despair would be the easiest thing to do, to indulge in my misfortune, to stop kicking against the current of injustice and the rising tides of evil. Just then, the clouds burst open and released massive globular drops. The windows fogged. I heard Agatha say sweetly, “It’s a monsoon!” I sniffed the air. It, too, smelled like the Caspian of my lost childhood.

Shards of memories floated through the misty room. I saw my mother standing in the corner burying her face in her hands. Then I saw her standing in our kitchen on the Caspian. The village fisherman was on his knees on the terra-cotta floor. He was cleaning a sturgeon he had caught, and she was sweeping the blood into the drain. She looked spent, famished, sapped. I saw myself running through the topiaries looking for our three dogs only to find them lying dead under a date palm. They had been poisoned. I touched each one. Their bodies were still warm. I ran back to my mother, knees soiled from crouching next to our dogs, hands bloody from wiping their nostrils.

“Who would do such a terrible thing?” I asked.

“Ask your father,” she said sorrowfully, and his figure appeared in the room.

“Life is full of loss,” he said. “It’s the war. It’s always the war. The war has become a state of mind. Our brethren have turned on us. We should consider this a warning for what awaits us if we do not leave.”

After that, he walked me to the oval library and resumed my lessons. He asked, “Child, what does an Autodidact, Anarchist, and Atheist always have to do?”

“Compartmentalize,” I recited. “And carry on. It’s the valiant thing to do!”

There was a burst of thunder. I looked through the window. The image resolved itself. The memories diffused like smoke in the air. I heard a crowd run through the streets laughing hysterically as they went. I stood there in the living room in Girona staring into the distance for a long time. Petita came scurrying in. She sniffed the air. I reached down and patted her on the head; her eyes grew sleepy and full of mist. What now? I thought, looking at her with a troubled mind. I thought of the insurmountable loss, the irreparable wounds that had led me to retrace my footsteps halfway across the globe. And to what end?

I retreated to my room and reached for my notebook in the dark. My sick hand always knew how to find it. I turned on the table lamp. I cracked open the book in the exact same way I had been for decades, years, to soothe myself. Goethe’s lines swam up from the page: There are two souls within my breast, one clings to the earth in search of rough passion, while the other violently shakes off the dust and flies toward the kingdom of its sublime ancestors.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I said.

It was Agatha. She was standing there with our downstairs neighbor, the baker, and her daughter.

“We’re putting in our weekly order for bread,” she gently said.

I put in my order. I looked at the child. She floated down the hallway, moping, crestfallen. “Through love, life is reborn,” I heard. Who had said that? Life, I thought, as the child returned, horrifying to begin with and now it’s duplicating itself. The girl buried her face in her mother’s skirt.



An hour later, I knocked on Ludo’s door. I was prepared to extend an olive branch. What else was there left to do?

“Come in,” he said.

I released the Petita-proof locks and let myself in. But as soon as I saw him, I thought better of it. He was distant, cold, removed. He was lying on his bed with his head propped up on a stack of velvet pillows, his body still wrapped in that silk robe, a sight to behold. He was drawing contentedly on his pipe. I could no longer see his halo. A vaporous cloud filled the room; a soft dawn mist lightly veiled his features. An amateur dressed to approach literature, I thought, as I apprehended his figure. A dandy. Papers and a few dictionaries were scattered across his mattress.