Call Me Zebra(9)

It was time to drag him out of the house. Perhaps an outing would revive his spirits. The next morning, I took him to Brighton Beach, where the waters are as dark and oily as the Caspian. The fog had lifted, but there was a bitter chill. It was the middle of winter. The beach was deserted. Lead-colored waves were scraping the metallic underbelly of the sky. Scattered across the shore, between briny patches of sea foam, were piles of seaweed and dead fish rotting in the wind and sand. Those fish activated my father’s trauma. Dead animals often brought on his rage. He staggered over and weakly pointed his cane at those limbless vertebrates, then wailed that the sea had heaved out all those scaly, gilled creatures in the same way we had been forced to flee our bludgeoned country and that now we all had been left to die on the fringes of the New World. As I watched his fury unfold, I realized more clearly than ever that we could have been living anywhere: in a hut in Cambodia, a houseboat docked in the canals of Amsterdam, a tent made of coconut hair in India, a prison at the bottom of a snow-capped mountain in Tibet. Our address would always be the same: the Nation of Exiles, neither here nor there. With him gone, I would be alone in that boundless nation, aimless and adrift. I felt an intense dread approach from far off. Then I pushed away the thought and all the feelings it had the power to exhume. I refocused on my mustached father.

In honor of the Hosseini family tradition, I had brought a stack of books with me to the beach. When my father was done airing his frustrations, I helped him down to the sand. He could no longer read. His eyes were too weak. He suffered from advanced macular degeneration. So he sat there, hunched over, mouth downturned, cheeks puffy, sulking while I read out loud to him. I took turns cracking each book open to a random page as if it were an oracle. There were certain sentences that delivered an electric pulse and momentarily brought him back to life. It worked like a charm. There was no denying it: There are units of language that have a mysterious aura about them, a metaphysical force. Encouraged, I got to my feet and walked in circles around my father like an old peripatetic Greek. Better yet, like an old Sufi mystic, the way I had walked in that oval library as a child.

My father slapped his knee with enthusiasm. The pink tip of his tongue protruded through his lips; it grazed the ends of his mustache. He was content. The man had persevered for my sake through that nauseating no-man’s-land, through the toxic fumes of war. The least I could do now was continue reading despite the brutal winter chill and the fact that my feet kept sinking into the sand, causing my knees to buckle. So I opened the books one after the other and recited ominous sentences in a prophetic tone.

In a clipped voice, I repeated the following: Things are going to be spoiled by those who are already rotting. Dalí. One of my favorites. A man with a tongue as sharp as a rigger brush who wasn’t afraid to use it. I could tell my father was happy because he dug the end of his cane into the sand like a child, making little holes. His eyes moved inquisitively from side to side, and beneath them, his mustache looked as if it were about to levitate. I felt useful, invigorated, blithe. When I was sure I had committed the lines to memory, I sat back down. We shared the view of the Atlantic under that gunmetal sky a moment longer. Then we got on the subway and rode back to Inwood.

You could say I am the AAA’s most militant member. I have a tattoo of our family seal on my left forearm: three As enclosed in a circle. In deep black ink, our family motto appears beneath the seal: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths. Upon my father’s passing, I will be the only Hosseini left, the last in a long lineage. My inheritance of their intellectual prowess will be complete. I don’t take the charge lightly. I have always been schooled by my father just as he was schooled by his. But, truth be told, the tutorials with my father had ended long ago. I could no longer study with him because he was nearly blind and, as a result, extremely impatient. He struggled to access his mind. I watched, bewildered by his helplessness. It was like watching a toothless dog gnaw on a bone, resolute despite his inadequate resources. For a time, fearful of betraying our family’s long tradition, I remained mentorless. Guruless. I worked on my mind alone. I prepared for the desolation that lay ahead. Once my father was gone, I would be leading a life with no railing to lean on. A life with no foothold. But we had not come all this way just to surrender to this unscrupulous New World. No. I had no other recourse but to continue fortifying my mind—which he had worked so hard to arm with languages and literature—by stuffing it with even more texts.

Over the years, I had received an endless stream of mail from this or that recruiting university offering me a variety of scholarships. I have no idea how the universities got my name or address, perhaps through the tortured process of acquiring our residency papers. No matter. I rejected all their offers. I was certain that this mail was just another way for the New World to shed its white guilt while simultaneously exploiting Iran’s ousted intelligentsia. This is perfectly in keeping with American foreign policy, in my humble opinion, which seems to subscribe to the following mission: Interfere with and profit from far-flung governments at the peril of their citizens, and once those poor, unfortunate souls have been dispatched to the Four Corners of the World, in exile and on their knees, offer a scattering of them asylum and a compensatory education. But the buck stops here! I, an ill-fated member of this infested universe, a Hosseini descendent, would never give in to such effacement. I would never eradicate my difference.

Nevertheless, I didn’t want to remain mentorless forever. So I made an exception to my boycott of American institutes of so-called higher learning: José Emilio Morales, reluctant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at New York University; Chilean exile (kicked in the rear by that madman Pinochet); fervent Communist (though he has learned to keep his politics to himself—he has mouths to feed in Chile); and ex-confidant of the deceased poet Pablo Neruda.