Darius the Great Is Not Okay(68)

The fire inside the Atashkadeh had been burning for fifteen hundred years. According to Babou, it came from sixteen different kinds of fire—including lightning, which was pretty amazing if you thought about it.

We were all in light clothes: Mom, Laleh, and Mamou with white headscarves and manteaux, and me, Dad, and Babou in our white caps.

Even Stephen Kellner, noted secular humanist, dressed up to go.

The Fire Temple wasn’t as tall as the Jameh Mosque, or even the baad gir of Dowlatabad Garden. It was only two stories high, surrounded by trees. A still, perfectly circular pool mirrored the cloudless blue sky above us.

“Wow.”

What the Atashkadeh lacked in height, it more than made up for in majesty: Five arches, held up by smooth white columns, fronted it, and a Faravahar was carved into the top. The winged man shone in unblemished stone stained blue and gold.

I wondered how it stayed so vibrant in the Yazd sun, which bleached everything else to blinding white.

When we parked the car, Mamou let me and Laleh out from behind her, but then she got back in.

“Um.”

“You go ahead,” she said. “Babou is not feeling very well.”

I looked past her at Babou, who had gone pale, despite the golden sun pouring in the car windows.

It must have been bad, if he was going to stay behind.

He had been so excited to show us the Atashkadeh.

Mom led us up the wide stone steps to the temple, and showed us where to slip our shoes and socks off.

It was silent inside, a silence so intense, it squeezed my head like a too-small hat.

Even Laleh could tell this was the kind of place to keep quiet.

A tinted glass portal separated us from the inner sanctum, where a giant bronze chalice held the ancient fire.

I thought about Babou, waiting in the car. How many times had he come here to see the dancing flames?

How many times had his grandparents stared into the same fire?

And every other Bahrami. Going back generation after generation, through revolutions and regime changes, wars and invasions and pogroms. How many of them had stood where I was standing?

And how many would there be in years to come, if Babou was right and the Age of Bahramis was coming to an end?

Standing in that temple, staring into the fire that had been burning for hundreds of years, I felt the ghosts of my family all around me. Their soft presence raised the hair on my arms and tickled at my eyelashes.

I wiped my eyes and stood there, lost in the fire.

I knew that Babou was going to be one of those ghosts soon too.

No one had to say it out loud.



* * *





Babou went straight to bed when we got home. Mamou stayed with him. I heard their soft voices through the closed door.

I found Mom in the sunroom, with one photo album on her lap and three more on the couch next to her.

“Uh. Mom?”

“Come on in.” She stacked the other albums to one side so I could sit next to her.

“You okay?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, like she had been crying. “Just looking at some old pictures.”

She had the album open to photos of her in America: her college graduation, her bridal shower, her citizenship ceremony.

“Is that Dad?”

“Yeah.”

At the bottom of the page was a photo of a young Stephen Kellner standing in front of a bright green door. Apparently, the übermensch had once been an überhippie, complete with a scruffy beard and hair that reached past his shoulders.

Imagine that:

Stephen Kellner with long hair. In a ponytail, even.

“Babou hated that hair. Your dad cut it to make him happy. He nearly had long hair in all our wedding pictures.” Mom smirked. “God, can you imagine? Your dad would never be able to live it down.”

There was a photo of Mom and (short-haired) Dad on their wedding day, with Mamou and Babou on either side of them; and one of them at a fancy restaurant overlooking the river; and Mom with a huge baby bump; and Dad lying on the couch with a little baby on his bare chest.

Dad’s arms curled so gently around Laleh, who had her little legs tucked up under her stomach, and her face nestled in the hollow of his collarbone.

“She was so tiny back then,” I said.

“That’s you, sweetie.”

“What?”

I looked closer. Mom was right.

It was hard to believe the little potato sack on Dad’s chest could be me.

It was hard to believe how content Stephen Kellner looked, cradling me in his arms, his lips resting in a kiss on my fine baby hair. (It was not very dark and curly yet.) I wished we could go back to that. To a time when we didn’t have to worry about disappointments and arguments and carefully calibrated intermix ratios.

When we could be father and son full-time, instead of forty-seven minutes a day.

We couldn’t even manage that anymore.

“This is my favorite photo of you two,” she says.

“Um.”

“He could always get you to sleep. No matter what. Even when you were teething, a few minutes on his chest and you were out like a light. You loved it when he held you.”

Mom traced potato-me with her fingers.

“Look how much he loves being a dad.”

Mom’s voice quavered.

I wrapped my arm around her and laid my head against her shoulder.