Rooftops of Tehran (10 page)

“I thought it was beautiful. She’s a lucky girl to have you. You know that, don’t you?”

I want to melt. I want to scream. I want Ahmed to hear this.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I hope she’s not jealous that you’re helping me today.”

“She’s not the jealous type.”

“No? All girls are jealous, don’t you know that?”

I want to ask if she is jealous, but that might be rude.

“Well, how does she describe you?” she asks with a curious look on her face.

“I don’t know. We haven’t had that kind of talk yet.”

“No? You haven’t told her you love her yet?”

“I think she knows,” I say hesitantly.

“But you haven’t told her?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Have you consulted Hafiz yet?” she asks. “Taken a
fahll
?”

I shake my head no.

“Well, you should and you’d better tell her soon. A girl wants to know she’s loved, you know. Now, what did you say her name was?” she asks abruptly, hoping to trick me into revealing my secret.

I smile. “I can’t tell you yet.”

“You can’t tell me because . . . ?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

Zari keeps smiling. I’m shaking, and I think she knows it because she slowly slides away from me and we continue watching Ahmed miming different characters. A few minutes later, Zari goes to the kitchen and comes back with a plate full of different kinds of sandwiches. “I knew you wouldn’t get a chance to eat, so I set these aside for you,” she says.

The knowledge that she was thinking of me spirals around in my head like a song.

“I hope you like cold sandwiches,” she continues.

How could I not when they were made by her?

After the kids leave, Ahmed, Zari, Faheemeh, and I sit around a small dining table completely exhausted. I stare at a bowl of ice cream that has been in front of me for at least twenty minutes. The girls look at the mess created by the kids and can’t believe that we still have to clean up.

“My back is killing me,” Ahmed says. “You know, my parents are going away for a few days. Why don’t you come over and we’ll have a party for the four of us to celebrate surviving these kids? We’ll play slow songs and dance all night long.”

My heart sinks as I think of Zari in my arms. I look at her and she smiles and drops her gaze.

“Are we going to have any kids?” Ahmed asks Faheemeh.

Faheemeh shows him four fingers and winks. Ahmed grabs his head.

“You two would make beautiful babies,” Zari says, looking lovingly at the two of them.

Ahmed points to me and says, “He and his honey would make beautiful kids, too.”

“Oh, yes. Beautiful, beautiful kids,” Faheemeh agrees.

“He should’ve invited her to the party,” Zari says. She waits for Ahmed and Faheemeh to respond, but they don’t say anything. Then she turns to me. “This would’ve been a perfect opportunity for you to tell her how you feel.”

Ahmed immediately snaps into his scholarly pose and says, “Well, I don’t know about that. You see, he believes he has to get to know her before telling her that he loves her.”

I know where Ahmed is heading, and I want to reach across the table and strangle him.

“What do you mean?” Zari asks.

“You see,” Ahmed lectures, “most people in Iran fall in love without knowing much about each other. In the U.S. and Europe people date for a long time and get to know each other before falling in love.” He points to me and continues, “He has a very intelligent theory about this. He told me all about it a few nights ago on the roof.” Facing me he says, “Tell them.”

I kick him as hard as I can under the table.

Zari and Faheemeh look at me, waiting for me to talk. I cough, mumble, and eat a spoonful of my melted ice cream to buy a little time. Finally I say, “Yes, in Europe and the United States people do spend a lot more time getting to know each other before declaring their love,” and then I don’t have anything else to say. After an awkward pause, I add, “In the West, relationships between men and women are readily accepted. In countries like ours, we’re more concerned about God’s will and destiny. Anthropologists should study the correlation between the advancement of technology and the forms of relationships between couples in these different kinds of societies.”

I feel like a complete ass as I look at Ahmed’s grinning face.
Why do I let him do this to me?

Zari thinks for a while and says, “Interesting.”

Ahmed puffs out his chest again and I kick him so hard that he stiffens up, trying his best not to groan in pain.

Zari looks at me and says, “When will you tell me who she is?”

“Probably not until the anthropologists publish their findings,” Ahmed says, as he throws me a wink.

 

 

We start cleaning the house. In the living room I see a picture of Doctor and Zari on the shelf. Doctor is smiling and has his arm around her shoulders. She has her patented crooked smile on, and her head is resting on Doctor’s left arm.

“That’s a horrible picture of me, but my mom likes it,” she says, walking up behind me. “I keep hiding it away, but she finds it and puts it back on the shelf. One day I’m going to burn that picture.”

“Why? It’s a nice picture.”

“Doctor looks nice, but not me,” she says, avoiding my gaze.

I look down at the picture, and whisper, “I don’t know about that. You have that smile.”

“What smile?”

“Your crooked smile—your trademark,” I whisper.

“My trademark,” she says, as if it were a statement and not a question.

“Yeah, no one else smiles like that. I like it.”

“You do?” she asks, head still down.

“Yeah. I also like the way you have your head tilted to one side.”

“Yeah?”

“I like your eyes, too. They’re smiling, like they do most of the time.”

“They don’t always?”

“They always smile when you’re happy.”

She looks up at me. “Are they smiling now?”

“Yes, they are.”

We look at each other for a while. We’re standing so close I can feel her breath on my face. My knees feel weak. In one split second, everything I’ve learned about her flashes in my head. Her favorite color is blue. She says that blue is associated with vastness; the skies are blue, the oceans are blue. I wonder why she always omits the fact that her eyes are blue, too. She is a storyteller. She and Keivan lie on a red blanket under the cherry tree in the yard every day after lunch. Zari always lies down on her side with her face toward the roof. I can tell she watches me by the way she follows my movements. I hear Keivan begging, “One more story, please, just one more.” I wish she would whisper tales of our future into my ears, and then I, too, would beg for just one more. She wakes up early every morning and walks to the bakery at the end of the alley to buy hot fresh
lavash
for breakfast. I watch her all the way there and back from my position on the roof. She knows that I’m watching her because she looks up often.

Intoxicated with my knowledge of her ways, I feel her breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling just a few centimeters from my own. I am in love with her beyond the point of going back. I could bring our lips together with the smallest gesture, and we’ve both begun to lean in when Keivan walks into the room.

“Where’s my blue shirt?” he asks.

Zari and I stand there motionless, staring into each other’s eyes for a few more seconds.

“The one Doctor sent for my birthday,” he clarifies.

Zari slowly turns her head and looks at Keivan. Then she turns toward me. “Doctor sent him a beautiful shirt,” she whispers. “You should see it, very thoughtful of him.” Then she walks toward the closet. “He’s a very thoughtful man,” she says, sounding choked up. “A very good man.”

 

When I get home, my father wants me to watch
Casablanca
with him. He says that this is one of the greatest classics of all time. I want to tell him that I know because I’m a movie encyclopedia, according to Ahmed, but I don’t. As we watch the movie, I listen carefully to the dialogue between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Maybe I can learn how lovers talk. I think of what I said about the anthropologists and forms and patterns of relationships, and I want to die of embarrassment. Will Zari, Doctor, and I end up like the three main characters in
Casablanca
? I can see Doctor as the revolutionary who fought the Nazis, and I am the lonely bar owner who thinks he has the woman until the other man comes back. Would I have the strength to let her go as Bogart does? Would I find a getaway plane for Doctor to escape with my love from the Nazis? Would I sacrifice myself for the sake of their happiness?

After watching
Casablanca
, I go to the roof. I look toward Zari’s room. Her lights are off. Suddenly, I notice a piece of paper on the wall between our houses with a little rock resting on it to prevent it from being blown away by the wind.

I pick up the paper. Zari has drawn a picture of me. I’m standing in the alley, in the rain, leaning against a tree. I’m looking to my right at a girl who is walking away toward a river in the background. Actually, she’s floating away—a faceless angel. She has a white rose, like the one I gave Zari, in her long hair. A mountain is visible in the distance, its summit covered with snow. Zari has captured it all, pure, majestic, calm, and flowing. An inscription at the bottom of the page reads, “When you tell me who she is, I will complete your angel’s face.”

I’m standing on the roof, watching the swaying figure of a woman as she comes up the steps to join me. I can’t make out her features, but the flowing walk and the full-blown, snowy rose in her hair intrigues me, and reminds me of Zari. Is it her? I hope so. The wind is both gentle and strong, rolling over my skin and carrying the rose’s simple scent across the distance. I try to wait, but my legs betray me and I find myself running toward her, arms spread wide to gather her in. I see her arms reach out, I think I grab her, but she slips and falls off the edge. My voice trapped in my throat, I sit up in my sweat-drenched bed, gasping and choking, while my mother’s mantra about people falling off roofs echoes in my ears.

I am alone in the room, a dull shaft of light falling from the small square window in the door. I squeeze my cold fingers then shake them, hard, as if I can fling the night terror from me like so much dark water. The sounds of the other patients who aren’t sleeping drift up and down the hallway outside my room, and I find them strangely comforting. The lids of my eyes get heavy, but I don’t dare fall back to sleep. Instead, I strip the soaked sheets from my bed and lie on the bare mattress, counting each of the nurse’s steps along the corridor as they make their endless rounds.

A series of questions assaults my mind again:
Why am I here? Why can’t I remember certain things, including recent events? Sometimes I don’t recognize my parents when they enter the room. Why? Why can’t I be free of the nightmares that have plagued my nights and days?

It is excruciatingly painful for my sedated mind to actively search for answers. So I exercise my only option: ignoring them and letting the fog of unconsciousness roll in to obscure my surroundings. The mental haze is like a tent that I crawl into to remain safe from what seems baffling and threatening to me. And that is how I get through the night.

The next time I see Apple Face I tell her that I need something to stop the dreams. She asks me to describe them and I tell her that I can’t remember most of them.

She assures me that my condition is normal and probably temporary.

Soraya, the Masked Angel, is visiting Zari. Faheemeh and her parents have gone to the Caspian Sea for the last few days of the summer, and Ahmed and I are bored to death. Without Faheemeh, it wouldn’t be acceptable for us to go to Zari’s house.

Iraj tries to show us his new inventions every chance he gets, but we don’t pay any attention to him. In fact, most of the time we can’t even tell what he’s trying to make; his inventions seem like stupid gadgets that have no practical function.

My mother has discovered that powdered sorb prevents liver diseases. She has bought a brand-new pestle that she uses to crush the brownish plant. She intends to place the powdered substance on a board in the sun to dry for a few days before storing it in a small glass jar she has purchased specifically for that purpose. Ahmed and I wonder how she’s going to make us eat it.

“She’ll pour it in our tea,” Ahmed says. “I’m not drinking tea at your house anymore.”

“I’m not either,” I say, and we both laugh.

From the roof of my house we see Soraya and Zari in her yard, sitting by the
hose
under the cherry tree. Soraya is always wearing her burqa, even when she’s in Zari’s yard. I guess she knows we can see her from the roof. She has mesmerized everyone in the alley. Iraj’s mother, her biggest fan, tells everyone that Soraya is the most beautiful creature on earth.