A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (30 page)

Lately Khanom Omidi has developed a strange affection for
The Karate Kid
. She stumbled upon it when visiting Saba, who was reviewing her latest purchases from the Tehrani in her childhood bedroom. Khanom Omidi doesn’t understand the dialogue, but manages to follow along from one sparring match or training montage to the next, stopping the tape to ask questions or offer opinions. “That Johnny
folani
is no good. He is wicked already at such a young age, and I think his snake-worshipping dojo has jinns.”

Saba’s favorite summer movie is
Dead Poets Society.
On a night when Abbas has gone to bed early and she is alone with Khanom Omidi, she lets the old woman prepare a pipe to soothe her nerves. They talk about love and death and Farnaz, watch the movie together, and sip tea. This season Mahtab will begin her fourth year at Harvard. She will have made friends with prep-school boys like the ones on screen. Look at them in their crested jackets and elegant ties, so confident, so poised. Entirely different from Iranian men shouting in their
pasdar
uniforms, or sitting in corners of the house in morose opium trances, or dancing like fools at illegal parties. Once at a latenight party without the mullahs or cousin Kasem, Saba saw Reza and his brother get up and dance with the full force of their hips and arms, hands twisting this way and that. That’s the difference between men from here and there, she thought. Other than the occasional tuxedoed waltz, American movie men don’t dance. Iranian men dance to impress. Maybe Western manners have eradicated their natural wildness. Iranians have
pasdar
s for that.

Halfway through the movie, the pipe begins to lull her to sleep. She drifts off on Khanom Omidi’s lap, thoughts of her sister and dancing melding together in her memory.

Mahtab used to dance. As a child, she loved flailing raucously, being the sudden center of an attention vacuum. This is the one Persian thing she will likely retain. After all the hours spent twirling in pairs in dresses and tuxedos, Mahtab will crave center stage. In her stupor, Saba can see it, a scene good enough for a movie. Mahtab will cast aside her escort, and suddenly, out of nowhere, there will be
setar
music and Iranian lyrics. Maybe the “Sultan of Hearts” will play right in the middle of Harvard Square. A miracle!

One heart tells me to go, to go.
Another tells me to stay, to stay.
Except Mahtab has no such qualms about staying or going. She is already in the place she wants to be. She will dance alone in her elegant dress and no one will dare enter her spotlight. The beauty of being Mahtab is that you need no partner at all.

Come, Khanom Omidi, come and listen to a story about my sister. This year has been a dark, endless one for me, and I want to glimpse into her world tonight. This one is about the defeat of another Immigrant Worry:
importance
—the one that my mother fretted over for as long as I knew her, even though she was no exile. My cousins in America are afflicted by something similar—nightmares of secondclass invisibility, mediocrity, and anonymous death. Legacy-losing, taxi-driving, dry-cleaning worries. All those engineers and doctors cleaning floors and selling cigarettes in corner shops. Mahtab too loses sleep over it, because she knows that she has been lucky, that she owes something monumental to the world. She wants to do good things. But this too will pass, in 22.5 minutes. She will cast it off as she always has. This is the story of how Mahtab stops worrying about living an important enough life.

In the summer before her final year, Mahtab finds a full-time job: a position as a junior reporter for
The New York Times
that she will begin this June and continue after graduation. She will work for
khanom
reporter, Judith Miller, checking her facts and correcting her frequent spelling mistakes. She will ride in a big white news van and go hunting for stories and quotes. She will become an official a storyteller—only she isn’t allowed to lie, not even backhandedly by choosing which details to tell. You see, these Americans have figured out our true-bending tricks. And that destroys all the fun. Lucky for us we have Iranian journalists who understand how to weave a good tale.

“Ai, Saba! Enough with the double-talk. Stop complaining and tell the story.”
Fine. In the days before she leaves for her summer in New York, Mahtab carries a dull but constant ache for Cameron, whom she runs into often at the student gymnasium. She struggles daily with the decision to use or abandon his credit card. She changes her mind each time she runs into him or his waifish lover on campus. You see, realizing you are a secondary character in someone else’s movie, it hurts to the bone. Sometimes Cameron looks sad to see her. Sometimes he tries to say hello. Neither of them ever brings up the card and it becomes an awkward, unmentionable topic between them— the fact that she is linked to his family like some bizarre estranged relative. On angry days, Mahtab tries to torture him from afar. She carries a bag with bundles of towels hanging out, all white except for the thin layer of blue-and-violetcheckered silk peeking out from among the thick cotton. The scarf is faded, that guilty piece of silk she wore to the Aryanpurs’ now relegated to wiping Mahtab’s sweat. She makes sure it is in plain sight in order to make a statement of her power: I am above it, and above
you
.
“Hah! It’s just what Khanom Basir tries to say with her fancy old scarf.”
One day Cameron tries to say hello in the exercise room, and she finds herself unable to form words. She only walks past, rubbing her neck with the blue cloth.
He shouts after her, “Wiping your sweat with an Hermès scarf, Khanom Shahzadeh?”
She turns. “Don’t talk Farsi to me,” she snaps, because the language of her family and of their romance is sacred to her. “You’re no longer my friend.” I have wanted to say those words to Abbas so many times. He and I used to be friends in our own way. Each time he tries to talk to me now, I want to say:
You are no longer my friend.
But I do not have Mahtab’s courage or her options. She can take his money and be free, as long as she keeps his secret, whereas I must keep the secret and continue to be imprisoned with him.
But Mahtab is kind, and as soon as the words are out, she regrets them, because what if she’s hurt him? She searches his face. Is he unhappy too? She wishes she could reach inside him and wipe away this new, unfamiliar Cameron who pretends he can never love her. She wishes the old Cameron would come back.
How strange, she thinks, that he should have such a fear, such an intense feeling of dread surrounding his secret. Is it really so dangerous for him in Iran? Could he really be hanged? Mahtab can’t fathom such things. For a future journalist, her mind is too pure, her eyes too unsullied. Is it really so important for Cameron to go back and try for change? How can anyone feel so strongly about an intangible thing? Just a blurry shadow of a concept that may never become truth. She envies him for having such a passion. She listens to the hum of the exercise equipment all around, feeling like the only dysfunctional cog in the engine of some great, success-powered machine. Cameron is making his way onward. He wants to go without her, to become one of the powerful men who rule us all, a changer of fates, and she is only falling further and further behind.
She decides that the only way to overcome Cameron’s hold on her is to become bigger, better, more successful than he is. This was, after all, her mother’s greatest teaching: You must live an important life. Tomorrow she will move to the big city to start her internship at
The New York Times
and take her place in the white news van. She will make the men and women in business suits—those crows in a line— marvel at her talent.
In New York she lives a movie life. She attends dances like the one in
Dead Poets Society
, where couples spin in circles over wooden floors. She plays golf in green shorts. She hides a tape recorder in the pocket of these shorts so that she can catch dirty businessmen admitting to things they should not have done.
“So, Agha Businessman,” she will croon, “tell me what you did then.” She will bat her Middle Eastern eyelashes and the fool will fall to his knees and admit to this embezzlement or that filthy
bazi
and she will print it all on the front page of
The New York Times
under the byline “Mahtab Hafezi, Harvard Class of 1992.”
“Are American businessmen really so stupid, Saba jan?”
Hush now, Khanom Omidi! I’m telling a story here. Stories are full of these wonderful alignings of coincidences that lead to smart men confessing their every sin. They are full of quick victories. Do you remember the part in
Karate Kid
where Daniel kicks horrible Johnny
folani
in the face, even though his leg is broken? When I watch that scene, I imagine Farnaz at her hanging, looking into the crowd like she has a plan, kicking the mullah in the face with her girlish sneakers and saving herself from the crane to a wave of hurrahs from an audience of onlookers who suddenly worship her.
Mahtab’s life is filled with such unlikely triumphs.
She rises quickly in the ranks of the interns. She becomes a newspaper star.
She lives in a small apartment in New York that she shares with another girl. Each night when she turns her key, drops her pretty purse of real leather onto her couch, and plops down in front of the television, she knows that today she has done something important. Still, she wants more. This summer she must do something monumental, change the world like Cameron plans to do, and have her voice heard across oceans.
A few weeks later she exposes a series of sophisticated crimes in the government, some of them leading to people so high up that even I must refrain from mentioning them here. Please don’t ask for details. I only know that they are big, big news. And with each accomplishment, Mahtab comes closer to finding her true self, her natural self.
One night, as she sits on her couch in her miniskirt, with the windows wide open and her music blaring, drinking a beer openly so the neighbors can see, the answer arrives among a pile of junk mail and bills. It is a tattered envelope from Iran, covered with a hundred stamps and postmarks, smelling of rice and addressed in a careful hand—a nervous one that hasn’t finished school, reads no English, and seems to have traced the address over a printed copy. It is from a Miss Ponneh Alborz, Cheshmeh, Iran
.
Is it true? Her childhood friend Ponneh has written to her? What tales can this longlost friend have to tell? Will her letter be full of stories about Reza and his crazy mother, about her sister’s health? What a lucky thing to have a letter from Cheshmeh.
She rips open the top of the crinkled white envelope and lets the contents spill out.
Suddenly all joy is gone as her table is flooded with photos, letters, a videotape, and some audio recordings. The photos are gruesome. They show a beautiful girl dragged from a van, then hanged by the neck from a crane. It is difficult even to touch the photo paper. A scrawled note reads: “My friend Farnaz: framed for activism and for preferring women.”
Ah, but Khanom Omidi, do not despair. For Mahtab these pictures are an opportunity. She is savvy enough to know exactly what to do with them. Because, after all, our girl works at
The New York Times
now. She is our bare-legged champion, and she is armed with a videotape that I shot with my own hand.
She spends the next week watching the video, rewinding and watching it again. It is impossible not to lean closer to the television, to try to peer into the face of the beautiful Farnaz and touch her cheek before it is hooded. Did such a thing really take place? I ask myself that sometimes in the middle of the night when I view that grainy film to torture myself into feeling alive. Despite the shaking hand, the static, and the black chador covering the lens every few seconds, the image is undeniable. It happened. I was there.
Mahtab wipes her tears with a checkered scarf that no longer holds so much meaning in comparison. When she thinks of Cameron now, she no longer hates him. Not after witnessing the tragedy on the grainy tape. She understands now about the intangible things that must be done by people just like him. He is a good man, a man with all the virility in the world despite what his father might think, because he is willing to go back to this place that wants to kill him for his tastes; to risk
this
fate in order to live a life that is important. She thinks back to a time when she was the top half of a starfish and decides that it is better to cherish it, the beautiful memory, than to hate him for not desiring her.
Oh, but he
did
want you, Mahtab. There is more than one way to long for someone. And look at Cameron now, making use of his life. He is off repaying the universe for his good fortune. Mahtab will do the same.
She will live a courageous life, like Daniel LaRusso of
The Karate Kid
or Professor Keating of
Dead Poets Society
—both so brave in the face of a formidable evil. As she prepares her report based on all the evidence Ponneh has sent to her—Dr. Zohreh’s testimonial, the pictures, and the video—she considers the Aryanpur credit card. It will not give her freedom from her desires, she realizes now. Secret unearned wealth never does. Deep down she knows that she will have such freedom only by living the kind of life Maman wanted, a significant life, a life noticed by the world.
And there you have it. Mahtab spends one summer in New York and conquers an Immigrant Worry that some people live with forever, because it takes an exceptional person to overcome it—the one about making a mark in a strange land. In two weeks’ time, the front page of
The New York Times
will shout a bitter-tasting truth to the world:
The Revolution Is
N
OT
Over!
by Mahtab Hafezi, Harvard Class of 1992
Oh, Mahtab joon. You have done so well. So very well indeed. You have made me and our parents proud. Can you imagine what Maman would say if she were to see your name stamped thickly in finger-staining black ink and distributed across oceans?
To celebrate, Mahtab and her friends go dancing in a real New York City nightclub with flashing lights and flowing cocktails. They dance alone, no escorts. They jump up and down in short skirts and bejeweled tops, as in the best music videos, and Mahtab is the cause of their joy, the very center of it. She is finished with the poor Aryan for now. She doesn’t need a partner. The room is full of men and women together, but it is unlike the clubs she used to walk past at Harvard, with boys appraising scantily clad women at the door— a white scarf transforming into a turban and frightening her away. Here she is in charge, and there are no
pasdar
s lurking in dark alleys.
When I imagine her there, I think of the scene in
Dead Poets Society
where the boys dance secretly at night in a way very different from their polite suit-and-tie functions. Their dancing is tribal, much like the men from Cheshmeh. They dance to release, to impress, to express ecstasy, madness, and a too-wild-for-daylight kind of glee. Mahtab is a wild thing now, a free creature. She can do as she wants, mullahs and
pasdar
s be damned.
She sends safe wishes to Cameron, her homeward-bound friend. Maybe one day she will love an American man instead. American men may not dance, but they are experts at understanding women like Mahtab. And it seems they pride themselves in not having their own needs. Do you think this is true of all of them, or just the movie men? Iranian men are brimming with their own raw, seething hopes. They call out to us to care for them, to save them—without so much as a name in the byline. I wish sometimes to have one of them say to me, “You, Saba Hafezi, impress me.” They never would, not the least of them. We women have become too strong in that unshakable, garlicfisted way, and we frighten them. But if one of them were to write a love song for me, it wouldn’t be full of oldworld dramas. It wouldn’t be about dying or forever things. It would simply say this: “Saba joon, you’ve done so well.”
Soon I will find enough courage to break free from this place, and maybe I will be brave enough to hide that videotape in my luggage. I asked the Tehrani to smuggle it out of Iran, to send it to someone important, a journalist or a professor, maybe one at Harvard. But he said it was too risky and refused. It is a frightening thing, to abandon a home.
One heart tells me to go.
Another tells me to stay.
But I will try. That much I promise . . . because you, dear sister, impress me.