A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (42 page)

ears have passed. Today the world outside learns to live with all that is new and unnavigated, and Saba rushes to her apartment in California, pops a roll of film into a heavy camera, and packs a suitcase. A few days ago a group of Arab men struck her new country. The twin towers of New York have been attacked twice in the years she has lived here. Every American statesman, bureaucrat, journalist, and right-wing pundit is calling for stricter immigration policies. But Saba has a green card now, is almost an American citi zen. It has been three years since she graduated with a degree in journalism from a college where she was four years older than her classmates. She works for a newspaper. She is a reporter—the real kind, a storyteller without a license to lie, but with the freedom to tell the entire truth.

On this September morning Saba prepares for a road trip to New York—the place where her plane first landed, and where she began her own immigrant life. She scans the streets on the television, the cameras venturing south where more and more of the roads are soiled by smog and debris. The streets look eerie during those first days. A quietness seems to have fallen over this indestructible American city. When she sees a newspaper cover photo of a jubilant Palestinian woman, a
dehati
, hands in the air, mouth open in rejoicing, Saba feels sick at her own connection with her.

Finding plane tickets has been impossible, so she grabs her laptop and her camera, puts on a pair of travel jeans, and prepares for a long drive to New York. When she walks the streets, with her hidden Persianness, no one blames her. She isn’t accused of anything—just another American participating in the shock. But she wants to stop the passersby and tell them that she is innocent.
I’m a Christian, a well-read woman. I will be an American citizen very soon.
She wants to say these things in a loud, confident voice, in her overeducated accent with its fake British undertones, to some anonymous assailant.

She has Immigrant Worries now.
Despite the peace of all the years gone by, sometimes in crowded rooms she scans the faces for her mother’s. Once a year she indulges in a letter to former Evin prisoners.
When she returns to California, her camera filled with photos and her notebook with stories, Dr. Zohreh calls. Ever since her move, Saba has slowly acquiesced to Dr. Zohreh’s requests to help her secret group. The two have talked often—when Saba first arrived and later when she felt alone and needed a mother to listen to her fears. “Is everything okay? I’ve been trying to get through for days.”
“It’s bad,” says Saba. “I can’t stop thinking how hard it will be now for you or Baba to visit. Or for me to go back.” She misses her father the most. She calls him often.
“I’m sorry,” says Dr. Zohreh. “Maybe this is a sign to look forward.”
“Yes,” she agrees, though she thinks of Reza too much on lonely days. Sometimes she goes for drinks with her friends, in dirty bars with shots of tequila for three dollars or three-dollars-twenty for the better kind, and she imagines that Reza will walk in any minute. That he will have changed. Maybe he will be something like Mahtab’s Cameron, an amalgam now, a third something, as she is. They will be free to kiss or touch because people do that here, but they won’t, because of the time and the distance, maybe a little because of their friendship and the ghosts of past
pasdar
s always watching. For the sake of the rest of the party, she will pretend he is a cousin—as lovers sometimes do in Tehran streets—smile coyly and say, “How is Uncle So-and-So?” He will like this game and fire back with something irreverent like “Still full of cancer” or “Still in love with his housecleaner.” The others will leave them alone to discuss their shared roots, while whispering open-minded American things, pretending to understand. “Look at that,” they will say, heads shaking knowingly. “That’s blood.” The two will leave the bar together. Maybe it will take a block, maybe three, before he takes her hand and kisses her palm, his beard tickling her skin. Maybe they will dance in the street to no music, like men and women in movies. Then America will recede for a while, and Iran and Reza and her family, all the smoky smells and
setar
sounds and watery-green details of home will come rushing back and she will be herself again—not a fancy American reporter who knows thousands of English words and arranges them in elegant passages for her readers but a Gilaki girl dancing in a street to the music of her village lover’s easy humming.
But Reza would wither here, and each day Saba lets him go. She is an expert at it. She makes a pot of tea for her neighbor—a Spanish artist who spends her days painting badly and applying for grants— and imagines a closing for Mahtab’s story.

Another year passes and Mahtab feels a pain in her heart, an immortal longing—she doesn’t belong here. You know this. I know it too. But I’ve kept her alive for so many years, and now she has begun to feel the artificiality of it. It’s time I let her go. This is not where Mahtab wishes to be. Not Iran. Not America.

When we were children, she once asked Maman, “Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be immortal? To die and still live forever?”

“Everyone wonders,” said Maman. I remember her speech almost word for word. “Some people think that children will make them immortal. Others say it is a lifetime’s work, or that it comes from what others remember of them. Some people, like the Mansooris, are just tired and want to join their friends. But we know that it’s all about making a mark. Not just a lifetime of work, but
important
work.”

Mahtab is tired now, stretched thin from her time in limbo, and she has already lived an extraordinary life. All that’s left now is to sleep.

Goodbye, Mahtab jan. Rest in peace and know that you are a better woman than I.
I may never be able to shed the skin of the immigrant, put away the dreams of an old Iran that no longer exists, and start belonging somewhere. But my sister can.
Who knows if one day I will make a true legacy for myself. But I once promised myself this: In exile I will be a different kind of person—not the Saba of two failed marriages, not the damaged Saba, the one who ushered two old men to the grave. I will no longer be the other half of my dead sister. So I have written her story and the jinns have run away from me just as easily as they arrived. I have banished these immigrant fears through my sister’s bite-sized television epiphanies so that I could wander the streets as if they were my own. And in the end, I will put Mahtab back in the water, many thousands of scoops of a teaspoon away—where she belongs.
Now I walk to the market in my new city and I . . . wait . . . who was it that just passed? That woman with short gray hair, the one wearing a blue manteau. Who was she? Would she have held on to that same old overcoat for all these years?
I must stop telling myself stories, but it is too much in my nature.

am an Iranian exile. This story is my dream of Iran, created from a distance just as Saba invents a dreamed-up America for her sister. Saba longs to visit the America on television as I long to visit an Iran that has now disappeared. This book is my own Mahtab dream.

Cheshmeh, a fictional village in Shomal (northern Iran), is an amalgam of several villages that were part of my childhood memories of my home country. Some details I have taken from one village, some I have blended from several towns and provinces, and some I have imagined. As is the norm in fiction, when a detail did not suit the story, I made the story my priority, sometimes ignoring confusing or irrelevant facts or customs. Specific organizations named in the novel, such as Sheerzan and Gospel Radio Iran, are fictional. Postrevolutionary Iran is a place of contrasts. In my research I discovered that so much of what we Westerners characterize as modern Iran varies from day to day, and from city to city, and family to family. Even in a small region like Gilan, people live vastly different lives. I have tried to be true to the spirit of the region and the time, though there are details I have chosen to ignore (e.g., the many varieties of
hijab
/ chador and the rarity of a
korsi
so far north—though I have seen it set up to show children). Some aspects of Saba’s story are unique—a prominent Christian family living mostly unbothered in a village; a well-read Iranian girl who is fluent in English yet chooses to delay college. (Iranian girls tend to be studious and ambitious. The most gifted, if they have the means, often find their way to foreign universities.) These are the uncommon nuances of Saba’s life. I am indebted to the people named below who helped me research this book from the United States, France, and Holland.

I would like to thank those who read my novel, those who gave hours of their time to be interviewed or help me locate books, videos, photos, and other documents (particularly those who sent their personal albums or located volumes available only in Iran). Due to the dangers to those who travel to Iran, I had to leave out some surnames. A big thanks to my primary readers: Anna Heldring, Chris Saxe, Eric Asp, Tori Egherman, Andrea Marshall Webb, Jonathan Webb, Pierre Dufour, Clara Matthieu Gotch (who read this twice!), Julia Fierro, Catherine Gillespie (for therapy and one hell of a twenty-page critique letter), Natalie Dupuis, and Caroline Upcher. For special research help, thanks to: Azadeh Ghaemi, Sussan Moinfar, Donna Esrail (wow, a reader sent by God!), Mahasti Vafa, Maryam Khorrami, Maryam S., Nicky and her aunt in Iran, and my own aunt Sepi Peckover and her family, and of course my mother and father, who shared their memories. To all the people who passed through the Mezrab critique groups and the Amsterdam novelists’ group over the years and left their mark on my novel in so many ways. Friends, you have been a lifeline. I regret that I’ve almost certainly forgotten some acknowledgments, and some of you didn’t even tell me your last name as we tore into one another’s work over many bottles of bad wine (and
jenever
in canal boats), but I will at least thank those who gave me key ideas: Amal Chatterjee, Nina Siegal, Ute Klehe, Barbara Austin, and David Lee.
Proost!

To Christian Bromberger, renowned Gilan scholar from France whose willingness to help was a beautiful surprise, and to my unlikely Iranian educators: Cyrus (for talk of home, reading, inspiring, and “Persian men dance to impress”), Arturo (for finding the old songs, the poems), Kian (“Love you, miss you,
zoolbia!
”), Sahand (for Mezrab, where I learned much about our crazy people), and Pooyan (a wealth of knowledge and hope. Thanks for including me in your Iran-loving world).

Thanks to my first Dutch editor, Pieter Swinkels, who offered much perspective, and to Sam Chang and all the wonderful people at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who will be properly and individually thanked in my next novel. Thanks most of all to my amazing agent, Kathleen Anderson, her team at Anderson Literary, and her partner agents around the world; my brilliant, tireless editor, Sarah McGrath, who made the book so much better with her vision and talent, as well as Sarah Stein and everyone at Riverhead Books. Finally, thanks to Philip Viergutz, for cheerfully eating cereal for so many dinners, making three a.m. tea, and encouraging some truly spectacular whims, starting with “To hell with these business school loans, I want to write novels.”