ROYA AND ARASH SHIRAZI

TEHRAN, 1973

Several nights the past month Roya had woken up covered in urine. She was ten years old, too old to still be wetting the bed. Her older brother Arash, nearly twelve, shoulders already getting broad, would pinch his nose at her over breakfast, even after she’d washed and changed out of her wet clothes, saying, “Oof, Roya, you smell like a dead cow.”

“Dirt on your head,” she’d hiss back.

Roya had stopped drinking water with dinner, gulping down her spoonfuls of dry rice and potato kotlets and only pretending to take sips from the water glass her mother set before her, then dumping it into the sink after dinner. She’d use the bathroom right before bed, staying on the toilet long after she’d finished to ensure she’d expelled every last drop. Her tongue would be so dry it’d scrape hard against the roof of her mouth. Still, she would wake up soaked, reeking.

Her parents largely ignored the issue. Her father, Kamran, would silently shave, brush his boots, and leave for work on the Tehran power grid without saying goodbye. Her mother, Parvin, would ball the sheets and clothes into the basket to take to the laundromat, eyeing Roya with frustration and pity.

When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul. In school Roya could smell the dank must even though she’d soaped it away and changed into fresh clothes. The scent wasn’t so much on her as it was of her, compositional. It clung inside her nose like a kind of rot. She was certain everyone else could smell it.

Later in her life Roya would fantasize about getting a nose job. She was at times obsessed, devastated by her own nose’s sweeping bigness. A lover, a British academic, once described her as “Hellenic.” She may as well have said “beaky.” As Roya aged and grew more and more into her face, she tried to see it as a kind of Persepolian nobleness. A crown worn on the face. This only half worked.

In school, Aghaye Ghorbani would ask her class to solve for x and they would. He told them to list favorite words and phrases and classmates said “mahtab,” “firuz,” “duset daram.” He was trying to make a point about how the most beautiful words ended in vowel sounds, but his students’ examples weren’t supporting his thesis. Roya studied the faces of her classmates, trying to figure out which ones could smell her stink. Every glance, every furrowed brow, seemed to Roya to be directly at, because of, her.

“Roya?”

She hadn’t been paying attention.

“Sorry. What was the question?”

A few classmates snickered.

“Your favorite word, khanoom?”

She panicked.

“Bini?” she offered, saying the Persian word for nose.

The class laughed openly at this, but Aghaye Ghorbani nodded.

“Good! The nose itself is not beautiful, but listen to the word. Bi-niii,” he said, drawing out the final syllable. “These sounds are undeniably beautiful.”

Two girls in the front of the room looked back at Roya, then at each other, and laughed. Roya slid down into her chair, her embarrassment like a stone on her chest, sinking her into the earth.

That night she picked at her food as her family talked around her. Her brother and father spoke about a football match in which a favorite player had been ejected on a dubious red card. Her mother talked about using baking soda to cut the tartness of the pomegranate molasses she’d used in the fessenjan they were eating.

“You can use less sugar that way, Roya jaan” she said to her daughter, who nodded as if taking notes in a future cookbook. Her mother loved her dearly, and loved sharing domestic tricks with her, as if giving Roya a leg up in a future exactly like her own, full of baking soda and pomegranate molasses. Roya, only ten, already knew she wouldn’t have a future like her mother’s. She didn’t know what kind of future she wanted for herself, but when she tried to imagine it, there were no dining tables, no kitchens either. Mostly there was open space, freedom and passion, heat obscuring everything like a candle flame smocking its wick.

That night before bed she sat on the toilet so long her father knocked on the door to make sure she was okay. Roya hadn’t drunk water save a few sips at breakfast and her throat felt raw, brittle. When she curled into bed, she prayed to God that she would wake up dry, that he would spare her parents the disappointment of another wet morning.

“Can you please control yourself tonight?” Arash asked from his side of their shared bedroom. “It stinks enough in here already.”

Roya said nothing in response, knowing any rebuke would only encourage more cruelty. And she knew he was right, too. They wanted the same thing.

That night, as Roya and Arash slept restlessly in their bedroom, their parents whispered in the next room about the things parents whisper about: Kamran had received notice that his power company would be shut down. He had heard about a textile distributor who was hiring electrical workers in Qom, two hours away from their home in Tehran. Parvin didn’t want him to take it, didn’t want him to live away from their family. But they both understood there were few alternatives, the economy growing worse and worse for folks like them. They knew people who had already turned to unspeakable crimes—against others and against themselves—to make ends meet. Parvin had a cousin to whom she was forbidden to speak because of how she’d been paying her rent. Each week, it seemed, there was another story.

Outside, it was atypically chilly for Tehran. Foxes slinked around the dark hunting for partridges. Parks of ironwood and eelgrass sucked potassium from city soil. Roya was dreaming of flowers, great yellow and red flowers growing from everywhere, out the walls of buildings and from the eyes of goats. When she woke, it was to a hiss, like a balloon deflating. She felt a pressure around her, a folding into space. She didn’t move but opened her eyes a little in the dark. Standing over her in her bed was Arash. Her brother’s pants were unzipped; he was urinating directly onto her.