The Septembers of Shiraz (19 page)

R
achel bursts through the door, flushed and out of breath. “It's Mameh! Her water broke. The twins are on their way.”

Zalman taps the counter with his firm, freckled hands. “
A shtik naches—A
great joy!
”
Turning to Parviz he says, “Close the shop for me, will you, son? I probably won't be back tonight.”

“Yes, of course. Good luck to you!” He watches the Mendelsons hurry out of the shop into the scattered light of the afternoon, now nearing its end. Since that day in Central Park, he has been alone with Rachel only once. Returning home from a late class, he had seen her outside, struggling to dump large trash bags into garbage cans. He offered to help and she let him. “You guys need your own landfill,” he joked. She didn't laugh. She explained, apologetically, that her parents were entertaining three emissary couples and their families. Snow had just begun falling, the night clean and still. It oc
curred to him that with a house full of guests, her absence would go unnoticed. “Let's go for a walk,” he said. She looked around, swirling his proposition in her head, and before she could come up with the excuse of not having her coat, he took off his and draped it on her shoulders.

They walked in the hush of fresh snow. The silence calmed him. Occasionally she would glance at her watch and look back with a worried look, but she kept on walking forward. Guilt was brewing in him but he suppressed it; he had not felt this good in a very long time. She stopped at the house with wind chimes, hesitating. “Come,” he insisted, holding out his hand. To his amazement, she reached out and took it. Her hand inside his filled him with longing. He had never thought that a mere hand could stir so much.

The street, deserted, was growing white. The neighborhood had vanished in the fog. Street lamps lit up the way, and as he looked at her face in the hazy golden light, he leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips, stiff and reprimanding, softened.

Afterward she hastened back and nearly slipped. He tried to break her fall but she pushed him away gently, holding on to a wet lamppost instead. His apologies, he knew, would come later. But for now, the kiss, like the snow, was still fresh, and he let it linger. He walked behind her slowly, restoring her solitude and watching the white space grow between them. He decided that despite her distress, he would remain happy, at least for one night. There would be plenty of time later for shovels and salt.

Since that night, now nearly three weeks ago, she has refused to speak to him, except to let him know that she had
not gotten into trouble: the next morning she had told her parents that she had gone to bed early, and they had believed her. He stands by the shop window, looks out into the dusk. The twins will no doubt arrive in the night, when insomniacs will be talking themselves to sleep and the sick will be numbing their pain with drugs, waiting for those first, pale hours of daylight that will reassure them that they have made it to a new day. Parviz himself had been born hours after midnight, on a moonless winter night as his mother often liked to remind him. And so he wonders if the Mendelson twins, born like him in the night, will be prone to fits of sorrow.

He returns to his stool and steams the remaining hours away. A heavyset woman walks in as he is about to close up. “Where's Zalman?” she says sharply, as though she were offended to find Parviz there instead of the owner.

“His wife is giving birth.”

“Ah, the twins!” she says, her face lighting up.

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“I'd like to buy a hat for my grandson Herzel. He is going to Los Angeles as an emissary. He is about your age, you know. Already married and off to Los Angeles!”

“That's wonderful.”

“Yes, we are all so proud of him. Well, let me get you his measurements.” She opens her purse and pulls out crinkled papers, two orange medication bottles, and some used tissues. “What a mess,” she apologizes. She picks up one of the papers. “Here.”

Parviz retreats to the back, where rows of black hats stare at him with the dark, purposeful eyes of their future
owners. Not finding the exact size of the grandson—this accomplished boy of eighteen who has already found himself a wife and is on his way to save the Jews of Los Angeles—he goes down to the basement, where he knows Zalman keeps all the unusual sizes. The hat he wants is resting on a wooden chest, which Parviz had never noticed before. The chest is weathered, chipped around the edges, a broken brass lock dangling from its side. Curious, he opens it, and finds a heap of letters inside, with the careful, scripted handwriting of a different time. He shuts the chest and takes the hat.

“Here,” he says, proud of his excavation.

She pays for the hat and reshuffles her life back into her purse. “Goodnight!” she says. “Mazel tov to Rivka and Zalman. God willing, everything will go well.”

By the time she leaves the sun has set. Lights are coming on in living rooms, where families are gathering, fitting their day inside a single dinner hour before retreating for the evening, so much left unsaid. He thinks of Rivka Mendelson forcing her twins out into the night, offering her husband two more reasons to be happy. Tonight, he knows, the lights in the Mendelson household will be off, and their usual chaos, which Parviz would overhear from his basement apartment, will be absent. They are all in a hospital somewhere, pacing outside the delivery room, calling family, praying.

He returns to the shop basement and walks straight to the wooden trunk. The yellow-edged letters are scattered inside in no particular order. He opens a few envelopes and finds greeting cards, for this or that holiday. From others he pulls photographs of Hassids in their black suits and hats. In
one envelope he finds a letter and a single photograph of a young woman in a long floral-print dress. On the back are the words
To Zalman, love, Nadia. Marrakech, July 1960
. He flips the photograph and stares at the girl, seated on a chair in a garden, her legs crossed, playing what seems to be an oud. She is not beautiful, exactly—her face is too round and her neck too sturdy—but she has humor in her blue-gray eyes.

He unfolds the letter enclosed with the photograph:

So Zalman had once loved but had let go, his father's suffering condemning him to a geographical prison.
You belong in Crown Heights.
Parviz wonders how long it had taken Mr. Mendelson to forget about Nadia. Maybe, to this day, Zalman slips down to the basement once in a while to look at the fading photograph. Tonight, when holding his new infants, will he forget Nadia, or, on the contrary, will he recognize in them something of her—the blue-gray of the eyes, so common in newborns? The prospect of not forgetting fills Parviz with dread.

Feeling uneasy, as though he had interrupted a grave, he shrouds the letter in its envelope. Guilt overwhelms him, and he wonders if he has already become for Rachel what Nadia has been for Zalman—a sad transgression. He hears footsteps upstairs so he shoves the envelope back in the trunk. “Mr. Mendelson?” he yells. “Is that you?”

The steps grow louder but there is no response. “Hello?”

Mr. Broukhim walks down the stairs. “Are you all right, Parviz? I was walking home and saw that the lights were on but no one was manning the shop. I got worried.”

“Oh, I forgot to lock the front door,” Parviz says. “Yes, I'm fine. Zalman is at the hospital. His wife is giving birth.”

“You mean giving birth
again.
” Mr. Broukhim smiles. “What are you doing here so late?”

Parviz shuffles some hats on a shelf. “Just cleaning up a little…”

“Did you have dinner? Come eat with me.”

He has grown so accustomed to eating alone that the idea of sharing a meal intimidates him. “Thank you, but I better go home. I…”

“You what? Come eat with me. I'm alone, like you.”

They lock up. Two snowstorms have hit the city since the kiss, leaving behind their gray, slushy remains along the sidewalks. Mr. Broukhim's studio apartment is on the second floor of a brownstone, a few blocks down. His dog greets them enthusiastically when they arrive, his wide mouth stretched ear to ear, as though he were smiling.

“That's a friendly dog,” Parviz says.

“Yes. He's wonderful. He is a Samoyed. I call him Samad-agha. If only people could be this sweet—Well, sit down. I'll start cooking.”

The apartment is clean, with spare furnishings—a sofa, a coffee table, a twin bed, a shelf with a couple of books, a small rug with a Persian motif, clearly machine-made. On the windowsill is a single framed photograph of a dark-haired girl with mischievous eyes.

“That's my daughter, Marjan,” Mr. Broukhim calls out from the kitchenette. “She's studying at Princeton. She loves it. She wants to be a doctor, a cardiologist, like me. Well, I should say, like I once
was
.” He takes an open box of pasta from the counter and spills the contents into a pot of boiling water. “I hope you like spaghetti, which I make with my special
sauce—tomato
à la vodka.” He smiles, picking up a bottle of Smirnoff and pouring a good cup into another pot. “There won't be any
ghorme sabsi
here.”

“It's better than
my
special sauce—ketchup,” Parviz says. He plays with the dog, the smell of warm butter and tomato sauce filling him with an unexpected joy.

“Bon appetit!” Mr. Broukhim says, placing the cooked
pasta on the table. He uncorks a bottle of wine and pours two glasses. “I can do without a lot of things,” he says. “But I need my wine. This is a fine Bordeaux. Enjoy!”

Sitting across from Mr. Broukhim, Parviz realizes how lonely he has been all this time. How wonderful, he thinks, to sit at a table with someone and share a meal. The dog sniffs his way to their feet, wagging his curled tail, happy. Its creamy-white coat has shed throughout the apartment in round tufts, like snowballs.

“Is the food all right?” Mr. Broukhim asks. “I know it's not La Grenouille. But I try. You know, I've had a rough time. I came to this country thinking I had already lost everything I could possibly lose—my home, my profession, my life. But that was just the beginning. Little did I know what I had coming. The day my wife told me she wanted a divorce I actually laughed. I thought she was joking.” He pours himself a second glass of wine. “It's the same for you, I imagine. You came here, having left everything behind. Then you hear your father is in prison. You don't mind that I know, right? Rachel told me.”

News of misfortune travels. Parviz has come to accept this as an unavoidable part of life, like cockroaches, clogged drains, landfills. Hadn't he heard from Zalman about Mr. Broukhim's ruinous divorce? “I don't mind,” he says. “I try to keep going also. But there are days when I wonder how much I have left in me. I am tired.”

“At your age, you are tired? You have so many years ahead of you!”

“That's the thing, Mr. Broukhim. Fatigue has nothing
to do with age.” As he says this, exhaustion washes over him. His head feels heavy, weighing on his tense shoulders. He wonders if the wine is getting to him. His stomach churns, suddenly, as the incident with Rachel reappears in his mind. He recalls the look she had after the kiss—first of exaltation, then of shame. He realizes that his anxiety is caused not only by the embarrassment he caused her, but also by the belief, however irrational, that having tainted her sanctity, he has also spoiled his prayer for his father's safe return. She had, after all, been his liaison to God.

Mr. Broukhim wipes his mouth then turns on the stereo, slipping in a cassette of a classical Persian ensemble. “The singer in this group was my cousin,” he says. “They killed him last year.” He dims the light, sits back on the sofa, and smokes hashish, his eyes moist.

In his moonlit corner by the window, Parviz listens to the reed flute and sitar accompanying the deep, precise voice of Mr. Broukhim's cousin singing ghazals. From time to time he looks at Marjan's photograph and envies her lightness, her apparent lack of gravity. How could someone his age love her new life here? Does she not miss her house, her street, her friends? Sitting here, in the melancholy smallness of the studio, the executed singer's voice filling the room, Parviz remembers, suddenly, how in the summertime his whole family would bring mattresses onto the terrace and sleep under scores of stars, a vast, black night surrounding them. Or how, during holidays at the beach house, he and the neighboring teenagers would sit by the sea around a campfire, grilling kebab and singing until dawn. How could
these things be replaced—forgotten? When the music ends he feels a gnawing pain magnifying in his head, so he gets up and says good-bye.

 

H
OURS LATER, DEEP
in sleep, dreaming that he is stranded on a boat with Zalman somewhere in Vladivostok, he hears the shrill ring of the telephone, a sound that has become unfamiliar to him. Speaking into the receiver, only half conscious, he hears a faint voice—his father's.
Parviz-jan, can you hear me?
the voice repeats.

“Baba-jan, is that you? Yes, I can hear you!”

“I just returned from my trip. I wanted to let you know that.”

“Yes? Was it a difficult trip?”