Darius the Great Is Not Okay(55)

I bit my lip and grabbed the fence. The sun had been shining on it all day, and the links were hot beneath my fingers. I clambered up after Sohrab, convinced the fence was going to peel off the building like the lid of a soup can just before I reached the top. But it held, and Sohrab offered a black-smudged hand to pull me up onto the roof. My own hands were crisscrossed with perfect black mesh marks too, and they smelled like old coins.

I rubbed my palms together but only managed to smear the dirt around even worse.

Sohrab laughed and threw his arm over my shoulder, which no doubt left a black handprint on my shirt.

“Look.” He nodded straight ahead.

“Wow.”

I did not know how I had missed the two turquoise points sticking up above the pale flat rooftops spread before us. They looked like the jeweled spires of some Elven palace from a prior age of this world, made of mithril and sapphire and magic and will.

I blinked. It seemed like a mirage—too beautiful to be real—but it was still there when I looked again.

“What is it?”

“The Masjid-e-Jameh. It’s a very famous mosque. Hundreds of years old.”

“Wow. It’s huge.”

“Those are just the . . .” He thought for a second. “Minarets. Yes?”

I nodded. Sohrab’s English vocabulary was immense.

“And below there are two domes. Huge domes. And the garden and the mosque.”

“Wow.”

My own vocabulary had become somewhat less immense in the face of the majestic mosque.

The Masjid-e-Jameh towered above the other buildings in Yazd. Everything around it was short and tan, and even the domes were only a few stories high.

From up here, it felt like looking out over a fantasy world, a world wrought by Dwarvish cunning and Elven magic.

“What are those things?” I pointed to the spires sticking up from some of the roofs between us and the Masjid-e-Jameh.

“We call them baad gir. Wind catcher.”

“Oh.”

“It’s ancient Persian air-conditioning.”

“Cool.”

Sohrab left his arm resting on my shoulder as he pointed out the other buildings nearby: newer, smaller mosques, and bazaars, and farther away, looming over Yazd, the mountains we were going to visit soon. I could smell his deodorant—something medicinal, like cough syrup mixed with pine needles—and then I couldn’t remember if I had put on my own deodorant after showering.

I leaned down to surreptitiously sniff my armpit. It did not smell like “mountain breeze”—whatever that is supposed to smell like—but it didn’t smell like cooked onions, either, which is what I usually smelled like when I forgot my deodorant and began producing biotoxins.

We sat on the ledge of the roof for a long time, swinging our legs and surveying the khaki kingdom laid out before us. Clouds blew by, and the breeze tossed my hair and kept it from turning into a Level Eight Fire Hazard.

Across the street from us, a pair of women walked down the sidewalk. One was older, with a blue headscarf so faded it was practically gray. It reminded me of the old rag Dad used to polish his dress shoes.

The younger woman wore a shiny red headscarf, and a stylish jacket that came down to her hips. Mom said those were called manteaux, which was yet another word Farsi may or may not have borrowed from the French.

I did not understand the Iranian obsession with French loan words.

The minarets of the Jameh Mosque sparkled in the sunlight as I used my tongue to dig a piece of lettuce out from between my teeth.

I could still taste the sweet and minty sekanjabin.

My grandfather made it.

“Hey Sohrab?”

“Yes?”

“What did you mean yesterday? After Babou . . . when you said that wasn’t how he really is?”

“He was not himself. Because of the tumor.”

“But you’ve known him a long time. Right?”

Sohrab nodded. “He and Mamou helped. So much. When my dad went to prison.”

“What was he like? Before?”

Sohrab let his arm fall from my shoulder and folded his hands in his lap. He chewed on his lip for a moment.

“I remember one time. Three, four years ago. Mamou and Babou came to our house for ghormeh sabzi. My mom loves to make it.”

Ghormeh sabzi is a stew made with tons of herbs and greens. I always found it suspicious, because it had red kidney beans in it that looked like tiny eyes, corpse lights lit in the swamp of the green stew to draw weary Hobbitses to their graves.

“Babou had just got his new phone. He needed me to help him with it. Babou is not very good with technology.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I help with their computer too. So they can Skype with your mom.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Of course. I love your grandparents.”

Sohrab bopped me on my shoulder. “Anyway. He was trying to put his background photo to a picture of you. From school.”

“Me?”

“Yes. He was so proud. He always talks about his grandchildren in America. Always.”

It didn’t make sense.

Ardeshir Bahrami, proud of me?

He didn’t even know me.

Sohrab was more of a grandson to him than I would ever be.

“He talked so much about you. When you came here, I thought I already knew you. I knew we would be friends.”