Chapter 18
The following week Julian was sweating as he walked the sloping sidewalk to Mitra’s from the grocery store, cradling his paper bags and breathing in the aroma of fresh basil for the pesto sauce he planned to make. As he passed the low brick wall that surrounded Mrs. Tokuda’s flower bed, he noticed Kourosh’s BMW double-parked in front of Mitra’s house, its passenger door and trunk wide open. From the alley came Kourosh, a bulging brown shopping bag hanging from each hand. “Hey, man,” he said, smiling crookedly, sprinting to throw the bags into the trunk as if they were contraband, then coming back onto the sidewalk. “How you doin’?”
“What’s up?” Julian asked. So, he thought, the guy is finally redeeming himself, here to collect Akram and Sali. The groceries suddenly felt lighter in his arms. He and Mitra, just the two of them, were going to have a feast tonight. Life on track.
He noticed Kourosh’s mother sitting in the passenger seat, a scarf—one of those slippery French makes painted with gold chains—covering her poofy hairdo; she made no motion to wave or smile at him, but turned her eyes away. Kourosh saw Julian looking. “My mother’s not in such a good mood. I apologize.”
“No problem,” Julian said, shrugging. “I understand.” But he didn’t. “Need any help?” he asked, glancing into the alley.
“Uh, no. There isn’t much stuff, just one more bag, I think.” Kourosh edged toward the alley. Akram stepped out from the gate leading into the garden, her legs clad in thick, flesh-colored stockings, her feet in plastic slippers. She balanced a large bundle against her hip, one of Mitra’s old sheets tied neatly into a makeshift carryall; it reminded Julian of cartoons depicting a runaway child, stick and hanging bundle slung over his shoulder. Kourosh stepped forward and relieved Akram of the heavy thing. Her eyes met Julian’s. He smiled, but she’d already looked away, raised her chin, and pulled her scarf over her cheek. Julian felt a heat in his chest. Fucking ingrate. He adjusted his grocery bags to get a better grip. “Well then,” he said to Kourosh. “I’ve got to get these things inside.” But he hesitated. He didn’t want Sali to leave without saying goodbye. He decided then and there that when she came out, he’d give her a hug—damn the mum, he’d give her a nice big hug.
Kourosh closed the trunk, moved to help Akram into the back seat. Shit, it couldn’t be. They weren’t taking the girl with them? Julian bounded up the stoop and was relieved to find the front door unlocked. Sliding the bags onto the kitchen counter, he called to Mitra, who responded from her office. As he turned, he saw Sali sitting on the window seat in the family room, a book in her hands, chewing on a pencil.
Mitra was sitting behind her desk. “Kourosh is here,” Julian said. “He’s loading the car with their stuff.”
She frowned, rose slowly. “What?” Then her face revealed a sudden look of comprehension. “Shit!” she spat, coming quickly around the desk, her hip brushing against a sheaf of blueprints that knocked over a cup of mechanical pencils. She flew past him. Sali appeared next to him, her hands against her cheeks, wide-eyed, shoulders grazing her earlobes. “Stay here,” he told her.
Out on the stoop, Julian watched the confrontation unfold. Kourosh had started the car. Mitra pulled open the rear passenger door just as he was inching away. He stopped short and the engine stalled. Julian heard him curse and pull up the hand brake. An edge of Akram’s coat spilled onto the running board. Mitra beckoned to the woman to get out of the car, spitting words in quick Farsi. Kourosh’s mother twisted her fat neck and threw a sentence toward the back, and Mitra yelled at her: “Khafeh sho!” He knew that phrase: Shut up! Mitra had told him that she made up for being illiterate in Farsi by memorizing every nasty idiom she could cajole Olga into teaching her. “And it’s not just street curses,” she’d said. “In Farsi, a clever insult is as revered as love poetry.”
Julian felt a thrill watching Mitra down on the sidewalk, hands on her hips now, a string of raspy words tumbling from her mouth, her mane of wavy hair swinging with her hand motions. Kourosh got out of the car but didn’t come around. Over the roof, he spoke quietly, but Julian could hear a tremor in his voice. Clearly, he was begging Mitra to calm down. In English, Mitra said, “You stay out of this.” She went immediately back to her diatribe against Akram, who had now stepped out of the car and was looking up at Mitra in a defiant stance that was new to Julian. She’d removed her coat in the car and stood there in an inky shapeless shift and scarf. And then Kourosh’s mother was out of the car too, screaming like a banshee, stabbing the air with her hands, spittle bubbling onto her chin. Whoa, Julian thought, catfight. He held in a smile.
Mrs. Tokuda emerged from her house, followed by a gaggle of sweaty women in yoga pants, one of whom sported a baseball-size purple bruise on her arm. Mrs. Tokuda looked ready to practice some of her judo on Mitra’s behalf. Julian closed his eyes briefly, willing the woman not to interfere, knowing that if he said anything, she would throw him that look of disdain and probably jump in just because he asked her not to.
Mitra stood her ground, but Julian couldn’t help sensing that she was losing the battle. Mrs. Tokuda said, “You need me, girl?” Mitra glanced back and shook her head, put her hand up in a halt sign. Akram was yelling now, in a squeaky voice like nails against a blackboard. She bared her teeth, and Julian thought about the appointment he’d made at the dental school to have the women’s teeth looked at; Akram’s were rotting, and Sali clearly needed braces. Mitra had grown quiet. Kourosh’s mother crossed her thick arms beneath her shelf of a bosom and nodded at Akram’s spate of words. Is she looking at me? Julian suddenly thought. Why is she looking at me? And then he felt the lightweight presence behind him: Sali in the doorway, hands still covering her cheeks, staring down at her mother with tear-filled eyes. Mitra turned and saw the girl too. It was useless, but Julian tried to pick out words that he might understand. Dokhtar, he heard several times. Didn’t that mean “daughter”? Well, that didn’t help much. Kourosh slid back into the driver’s seat, not before Julian noticed an embarrassed blush on his face. His mother kept nodding and saying, “Baleh, baleh”—yes, yes—to Akram’s words. She threw dagger looks up at Sali. Mitra rested her brow in her palm, shoulders hunched, and shook her head. Defeated? He heard Sali sobbing quietly but kept himself from turning to comfort her as he would any crying child; he didn’t want to make things worse.
Finally, Mitra stood up straight, flicked her wrist dismissively at Akram, and said something Julian wouldn’t have caught even if she’d spoken in English. When this failed to halt Akram’s harangue, Mitra said, “Boro,” which he knew meant “Go,” followed by a string of tired-sounding words, and again, “Boro.” She turned her back on Akram and walked slowly toward the stoop, looking up at Sali as if he didn’t exist, her gaze filled with pity. He saw Mrs. Tokuda herding her students back into her house. “Show over, ladies.” She nodded at Julian. “I come over later. You take care of her,” she ordered, gesturing her head at Mitra. He had a mind to salute the bossy old woman.
Akram had gone silent. Kourosh gunned his engine, and she folded herself into the car, yanking in the hem of her shift before closing the door. And then they were gone.
Mitra’s arm circled Sali’s waist as they walked slowly down the hallway toward the back of the house. Julian shut the front door and followed. “What happened?” he asked. Mitra was murmuring to the girl. “Will you tell me what’s going on?” He sounded like an orphan begging for a morsel, and he felt his anger rise. “Mitra!” he shouted.
“Hold on!” she snapped back. She deposited a stunned Sali on the sofa in the family room, draped her in the chenille throw despite the heat, and came into the kitchen. Julian watched her take a glass from the cabinet and reach into the refrigerator for the carafe of cold water. Finally, he said, “Well? You told her to shut up and go; that’s about all I understood. And the word dokhtar several times.” His pronunciation, he knew, was awful; he’d put way too much emphasis on the kh sound, hawking it like spit instead of lightly eliding it into a throat whisper. “It means ‘daughter,’ right?”
She raised her eyes to his face, exhausted and sad. “Yes, it means ‘daughter.’ In the vernacular, it also means ‘girl’ and ‘virgin.’ It means all three, depending on the context.” Her gaze moved to the window behind him, sunlight speckling her brown eyes. “I never realized that before. Girl, daughter, virgin. One word for all.” Her attention came back to him as a bitter curl formed on her lips. “Interesting, huh?”
* * *
“I’m in here,” Mitra said, hearing Julian pass the living room.
“In the dark?”
“Sun went down while I was sitting here. Sorry about dinner.”
He leaned against the doorway, a glass of wine in each hand. “No worries. Making the pesto calmed me down. It’s in the fridge if you get hungry later, or we can have it tomorrow. How’s Sali?”
“A mess, though not as bad as when I first went up. She’s soaking in a warm bath now. It took me forever to convince her she didn’t have to leave. She’d packed all her stuff in a garbage bag and was sitting on the bed rocking back and forth.”
“Jeez. Where and how was she planning to go?”
Mitra shrugged.
He stepped through the dim room and placed the glasses on the coffee table. He found the lamp switch next to her. “You look like you could use some wine,” he said.
She squinted at the light and avoided his eyes. With the first sip, she felt her neck muscles begin to loosen. “I don’t know why I’m so tense. I’ve had worse shouting matches with plumbers.”
He chuckled. “Your least favorite subcontractor.” He sat in the armchair across from her.
“Akram’s words keep echoing in my ears.” He didn’t ask her to translate them, for which she was grateful, but she heard them just the same: Whore of a daughter, nothing girl, filthy, shameful, dishonored, throwaway girl, dead to me. “I keep trying to resurrect my anger, but I’m just really sad for Sali.”
“Well, I’m pissed enough for both of us. Pretty harsh punishment, walking out on your kid. I mean, it’s not like Sali can say she’s sorry and un-pregnant herself.”
“That wasn’t a punishment today, Jules. It was a banishment.”
He shook his head. “I knew it was a bad idea to keep them separate after you told the mum about the pregnancy. They should’ve begun the healing process right away.”
“The healing process?” she scoffed. “You sound like a pastor.”
“She needs her mother, and her mother’s forgiveness.”
Mitra sat forward, both pitying him and admiring him for clinging to his faith in unconditional love. “Julian, the mother will never forgive her.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy to predict. In Bosnia, many of the women who’d been raped by soldiers found a way beyond the stigma; my mother helped them.”
“You don’t know that. You didn’t go back to their villages with them. And even if that was true for some of them—that they freed themselves of shame and their families forgave them—they still had to live among people who’d been raised for generations with certain implacable ideas. I mean, look at our own society. We’re just beginning to accept the concept of date rape. You can’t tell me that the majority of people don’t still think that if a girl dresses provocatively, whatever that means, she’s asking for it.”
“I don’t care what other people think. We could have a debate about this, M, but the issue is about what’s happening in this house, with these two people we’ve taken under our wing.”
Our wing? she thought.
“The longer those two don’t talk,” he continued, “the more difficult it’s going to be for them to fix their relationship.”
Our wing? She gritted her teeth. “It’s not an option, Julian. I won’t subject Sali to that again. Even if Akram were to come to me and say she’d made a mistake, I wouldn’t trust Sali’s well-being to her.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Well then, what do you propose we do?”
“Take care of her.”
He frowned. “Keep her here?”
“Why not?” She took a gulp of wine.
He rubbed his forehead in frustration. “First of all, she’s a minor. Second, she’s going to have a baby. Third, we don’t even know her legal status. She’s probably here on a visitor’s visa that will expire at some point. Be realistic, Mitra.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think we should drive her over to Fremont tomorrow for an intervention.”
“Talk about unrealistic. They wouldn’t let us over the threshold. Akram and Kourosh’s mother made that clear.”
“They actually said that to you?”
“Are you implying that I’m lying?”
“No.” He exhaled and looked away in distaste. “I just don’t get it.”
“What is it that you don’t get, Julian? That Akram would abandon Sali or that I won’t?”
“You’re not Sali’s mother, Mitra.”
She snorted. “No, and I don’t want to be.”
He looked up and squinted. “You could’ve fooled me.”
She didn’t speak or move, though the urge to do both was strong. Not a word more, Julian. There will be no going back. Please.
“If you want to be a mother so badly,” he challenged, “go off those birth control pills.”
She winced, then felt a burning behind her eyes. It was over. Their paths had diverged. “Jules,” she said quietly. “This isn’t about my biological clock, but about yours.” He paled. She leaned forward and reached to touch his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t give you what you want.”
He pulled back. “Correction,” he said. “You won’t give me what I want.”
She held her tongue. She’d made her decision, it seemed: she wasn’t going to tell him about the lie. And yes, it was indeed a lie, not a matter of personal privacy. She’d deceived him and would have to live with the guilt and shame of that. To reveal the lie in order to make the breakup easier on her would be unforgivable. It was enough that she was breaking his heart. Whatever he said to her now, she’d earned every word.
“Jules—”
“We’ve been together a year,” he interrupted. “Tell me honestly, Mitra, do you love me?”
“Yes, I love you.” She held his gaze; it was easy when you told the truth.
He fell back against the cushion and sighed. “But not enough, apparently. You’d rather have a patchwork family than commit to one with me.”
“Families aren’t always about blood ties,” she heard herself murmur. Is that true?
“Tell me,” he said. “What happened back east that changed you?”
“Changed me? Nothing changed me.”
“Bollocks. Don’t gaslight me, Mitra.”
She sighed and stood up, walked to the window so she didn’t have to look at him. “All right. What happened is I woke up. You know those five stages of grief? I think I got stuck in the fog stage for a year.”
Julian snorted. “Not in the mood for a joke, Mitra.”
She faced him. “I don’t know how else to describe it, Jules. Maybe it’s true what they say about the One Year anniversary; it shook me up, yanked me out . . . something like that. I don’t think I changed, necessarily; I think I’m just more like myself.”
His frown was deep, eyes unfocused. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her words, or understood the implication in them. She didn’t want to spell it out for him: that she never wanted commitment with any man, that it felt to her like a trap, that she couldn’t bear the idea of growing to resent someone she loved. And for all these reasons and more, she no longer desired him.
She came back to her chair and leaned toward him. “Julian, this is not about love—how much or how little—it’s about the shape we each want our lives to take. There’s nothing wrong with what you want.”
“It’s my own fault,” he said in a bitter tone. “I never should’ve brought those two into our lives. It was naïve.”
“It wouldn’t have made my choice about us any different,” she said, her mouth dry.
Julian shook his head. “It’s our age difference, isn’t it?”
“What? No.” She raked her fingers through her hair. “If Sali had walked into my life ten years ago, I would have felt exactly as I do now.”
She closed her eyes, willing him to stop trying to make sense of something that would never make sense to him. Every cruel sentence that came out of her mouth stung like acid on her tongue. She wanted to say more. Kind words about their year-long romance and friendship, about her hopes for his future and for his continued relationship with Sali. But it was too soon for that. With time, maybe . . .
Julian stood up and walked to the living room entry. Hands in his pockets, he gestured with his chin toward the stairway. “I think she’s crying,” he said. “You should go up.”
Mitra was on her feet and moving past him. Halfway up the stairs, she realized he wasn’t following. She turned. He nodded tiredly and looked at his watch. “My shift starts in an hour.”
“Okay,” she said. “Um, maybe you could prescribe something for Sali, a sleeping pill or a tranquilizer.”
“She’s pregnant, Mitra. You’ll have to take that up with her obstetrician.” He donned his jacket. “I’ll call tomorrow to check on her.” He was already moving toward the door, his back to her. Without another word, he let himself out.
* * *
Sali was not crying, though a wad of crumpled tissues lay next to her on the bed where she sat cross-legged with Jezebel curled against her belly. The cat hadn’t spent much time upstairs since Mitra began dating Julian. Now she was getting more attention than Mitra had given her in a year. Sali stroked and cuddled her in a way that Jezebel had never allowed Mitra to do, speaking to her in a high, singsong voice, her lips only centimeters from the animal’s fur.
“She loves you,” Mitra said, startling the girl, who moved to leap up. “No, no! Stay where you are. I’ll be right back.”
Mitra went downstairs and warmed two glasses of milk, put them on a tray next to a plate of rice cookies, and returned to the room. Sali thanked her meekly, unable to look her in the eye. Jezebel sniffed, eyed the milk, inched close, then backed away when Mitra said no. Sali’s long dark hair was loose, some of the strands wet and stringy. Her eyes and nose were swollen and rosy from weeping, but she was calm and seemed comfortable. That was all Mitra wanted.
When they finished their milk and cookies, Mitra said she would leave her bedroom door open so Sali could come to her if she needed anything. As she was leaving, Sali said, “Mitra Khanoom, I want to thank you . . .” Her voice trailed off as she pulled a small worn jewelry pouch from her robe pocket and held it out for Mitra to take. “It is what I have of value,” Sali said to Mitra’s puzzled look. “They are real gold, given to me by a friend I knew when I was little.” Mitra opened the pouch and shook four gold bangles out onto her palm. She felt dizzy and had to sit back on the bed. Persian bangles from the bazaar—Ana had worn them, too; never took them off, and you always knew where she was from the sound of them tinkling against one another. “Please do not tell my mother. She does not know about them. She hated my friend and made her go away from our village.” Suddenly Sali wrapped her arms around Mitra’s waist and pressed her face to Mitra’s chest. “I am unworthy,” she whispered through tears. “God kill me.”
Mitra felt such a rush of anger that she grabbed Sali’s arms and jerked her away. “Don’t ever say that again.” Even as she saw Sali’s eyes grow wide with shame and fear, she couldn’t tamp down her fury enough to say more, to say the compassionate sentences that might buoy her self-esteem. What was the use? Such words hadn’t helped Ana.
“Dokhtar-joon,” she finally said, tucking the bangles back into the pouch and putting them into the girl’s palm. “You owe me nothing but your well-being. Do you understand?” She pulled Sali back to her and felt the nod of her head against her shoulder. “Now let’s get you to sleep. I’ll stay with you for a bit.”
* * *
Mitra woke in a way she hadn’t since adolescence: like the girl in the fairy tale with everything just right, nestled as if on a cloud of eiderdown, her mind serene as it floated between dream and reality. She slid her hand lazily toward Ana’s warmth.
Her eyes flew open. It was dark. Sali breathed evenly, her back turned. Mitra bit the inside of her cheek to stop from sobbing. Slowly, she sat up. The clock said 2:00 a.m. She wiped her cheeks and crept out of the room.
Downstairs, in the living room, the cushions still bore her indentation next to Julian’s. In the kitchen, the aroma of basil hung in the air. In the den, Julian’s gym bag was gone from the corner, and a stack of U2 CDs had disappeared from a bookshelf. Had he come back while she and Sali slept?
Up in her bedroom, she had her answer. Only remnants of Julian’s life remained: his toothbrush on the shower ledge, a cardboard 49ers coaster on the dresser, and one T-shirt in the closet, her favorite, the one that said: DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT. Everything else—toiletries, shaver, clothing, his pile of books and magazines from the bedside table, even the glass beer mug half-filled with coins—was gone.
She shivered. Pulling a mohair shawl around her shoulders, she padded to the thermostat and turned it up to seventy. The forecast said rain and Mitra hoped for it. The first rain of the season, perhaps snow in the mountains, the storm door bursting open to let in week after week of water to quench the parched hills and flood the ravines and cleanse the dust off the leaves and the stucco. All she wanted was the sound of it on the roof, trickling through the gutters, slashing in short gusts against the second-floor windows. The house was too quiet.
Yes, she missed him. She hated that she’d hurt him. She didn’t blame him for being angry; she had treated him badly. She’d been weak in her grief and she’d used him. “I suck,” she said aloud. Would she never see him again? Would they meet by chance, on the street or at a restaurant, and pretend they hadn’t noticed each other? Or exchange awkward words? She imagined him alone in his apartment and her throat swelled. She cared about him, she did. Deeply. She didn’t want him completely out of her life, but how selfish was that?
She crawled under the duvet, nestled into her pillow, and left the bedside light on. She wondered if she’d sleep at all. The silent dark was a breeding ground for a hundred disparate thoughts that wired her tight against sleep. She cringed slightly at the silence, but she was determined to make it not matter. She’d lived for years without Julian and hadn’t been lonely.
Zoya
In the time of our history after the people voted in droves to elect a reformist president and the regime lifted the death fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing something bad about the Prophet (though the people who took this fatwa seriously were mostly illiterate), a young girl of nineteen came home to find her house ransacked and her father, who was also a writer, missing. Unlike that famous Hindi, he and his colleagues did not write about the Prophet, but about politicians who thought of themselves as prophets. Of late, their stories and opinions and poetry were printed in periodicals that bloomed like hyacinths in spring. The people read as if starved.
The girl, frantic and blinded by fear and grief, fled her home and roamed the city, unmindful of the need for food or sleep or washing. From the northern hills, she walked south, along wide avenues shaded by sequoia trees and through meandering alleyways marked by graffiti: “Khomeini the Pimp!” “Faith No More!” The rush of people—lady shoppers, hawkers, artisans, schoolchildren, businessmen—paid her no mind, but as she walked farther south, the Sisters of Zaynab scrutinized her for dress code violations, gangs of poor boys stilled their soiled footballs to stare at her, addicts lolling in corners focused their watery eyes for a moment, and when the darkness came, teen prostitutes in frayed chadors followed her with their made-up eyes even as they remained alert to the morality patrols. The wretched know the wretched by sight, while the well-off blind themselves.
She wandered toward the university, where now she knew the spies and informants of the shadow theocracy lurked and blended and set traps for the Thinkers. She stood hidden on the periphery. Silently, she bade farewell to the professor who loved Kundera and COBOL, the light-eyed poet who came from Tabriz, and the sisters who swooned over Metallica in the hallways. She turned her back on the place where she had once belonged, where her poetry lived in pixels poised to fly on the wings of Code, and remembered what all the children of writers begin to sense from the moment their eyes see the light of the world: that in all of our histories—in the East and the West, in the North and the South—the Writers have been hunted and silenced by the cowards who seek power.
Near dawn, she found herself—sneakers dusty, ears buzzing with exhaustion, headscarf rank with sweat—back in the city’s familiar north at the base of a modern apartment building. Looking up, there on the fourth-floor balcony, she saw the old woman she sought, peering down at her as if a jenn had foretold her arrival. In that loving gaze, the girl felt ten years old again. And safe.