A VERY SHORT CHILDHOOD by Dina Nayeri
One slow afternoon at the café, Darius clicked through discount travel sites until he’d bought a plane ticket. He’d fly to Heathrow and crash for three days with Beatrice, a new hookup who’d passed through Fort Greene and told him she was a Londoner only after the sun came up. “Come visit,” she’d said, the slim rays from his gable window striping her back as she stumbled into her jeans. Weeks later, with his miles about to expire, he thought of her honeysuckle perfume and the way her cheek dimpled when she chewed, and decided she meant it.
At Sunday dinner, he dropped a word or two about the plan, keeping his mouth full and his eyes on his father. His aunt Suri went quiet. (London? Aunt Pari whispered in her ear.)
Years ago, Suri, a gynecologist, had done four free sessions on Darius’s first girlfriend, who’d then dumped him because (fair enough) it’s weird dating someone whose eccentric aunt has prattled away about gluten-free bread and cock sizes while lubing up your fourth vaginal expander, to which she’s given a name and a backstory. “Meet Simon, approachable Physics grad student. Very easy, all he cares about is your pleasure . . .” Okay, fine, Suri was fun.
Darius had spent high school cringing at his weird Iranian family, his cut-rate surrogate mothers. Now and then, he reminded himself that at least his mouthy Aunt Suri, with her medical degree and private brand of cherry lube, was a better caricature for his classmates to tear into than the sexist turban-clad ball sacks always on the news. But lately Suri’s rusty sex positivity had become embarrassing. “We get it. You’re so new world,” he’d taunt. “Calm the fuck down.”
Now Aunt Suri scowled at him. “It’s non-refundable,” he said, “so don’t start.”
Baba smiled tightly at his son. “You smoking things?” he said, leaning into the long yogi breath Darius had just released. Baba’s first name, Babak, had long confused all of Darius’s friends: which one meant “dad,” and which one was his name? Such handwringing, even though “Dan” and “Dad” too, are only a letter apart. “I smell the skunk,” said Baba. (He hasn’t been smoking, Aunt Pari reassured him. Pari, a farmer, knew the smell of every natural thing.)
“Where will you stay?” Suri asked, folding her arms.
He barely glanced at her. “I just told you, with B.” Unable to resist, he added, “While I’m there maybe I’ll jump on the Piccadilly . . . drop in on the grandma you guys are hiding from me.”
“There it is,” said Suri, lips curling slightly. She glared, because wasn’t this the true reason Darius was going? Finally, to investigate his enigmatic grandmother, to find out the greatest of the Amirzadeh family secrets before his cousin Kayvan did, so that he could publish them like the scavenger they all believed he was? And what if Kayvan did find them first? If he wrote it, he wouldn’t be a scavenger at all. He’d be their archivist, their hagiographer, a hero. Darius reminded himself that his grandmother’s address was easy to find. Kayvan had never visited because he simply wasn’t that interested – Kayvan always overlooked the truly interesting in favor of the familiar, the warmed-over, and anything related to his own small life. And that, not who got there faster, would decide things in the long run. Meanwhile, Suri carried on accusing. “There’s the real reason,” Suri sneered. “Is there even a Beatrix?”
Darius didn’t give her the satisfaction of correcting Beatrice’s name. His baba’s back straightened. “No, Darius, please,” he begged. “Don’t go looking for our mother.” (She’s selfish, whispered Suri. 33 An abandoning, selfish woman, muttered Pari. She didn’t even leave after the revolution, you know. She left before, with a first-class ticket. With curled – )
“Yeah yeah . . . With curled hair and the good suitcases,” Darius chanted. “We know.”
“Curled hair! And the good suitcases!” they said, their voices tumbling over each other and overlapping, Babak, as ever, echoing his sisters.
“Maybe that’s why you’re so interested,” Pari muttered. “You share the ungrateful gene.”
That was a touch cruel for Pari, and he told her so. Pari shrugged.
“She left us,” Suri said, “alone against all the evils in Iran. Never even looked back.”
“Didn’t you have Baba Ardeshir?” Darius asked. Babak’s eyes bulged. Pari muttered a blessing for the old patriarch under her breath. Suri glared at Darius and made a crack about crossing an ocean for a mere fuck. Again, Darius didn’t correct her.
“She abandoned her children,” whispered Babak. “We weren’t even us . . . We were tiny, small, innocent . . .” he started panting, struggling for volume. Babak started drumming the table.
“Okay, Babajoon, breathe.” Darius covered his father’s hand with his. You couldn’t let gentle, undiagnosable Babak get frantic. He’d lose an entire day to worry. He’d begin picking his hair, or overpruning the garden, or he’d disappear into the attic, trying to fill the gaps in the boxes of photos, hunting a single unimportant shot that crossed his memory. Babak started arranging the cutlery, and Darius helped, moving his own teaspoon to the end of his father’s row.
“What do you even want with her?” said Suri, releasing a long, labored sigh that gave Darius the itch to goad her until she cried.
“Dunno,” he said, pretending she meant Beatrice. “I need something to prod.” Darius wrapped a morsel of lamb into his bread and dabbed it in the sauce. Suri glared. The truth was the more Baba and the aunts protested and wrung their hands, the more his imagination stirred. And anyway, if Suri could intrude so grossly into his life in the name of openness and family, then why shouldn’t he repay the favor? He shrugged and stared back.
If Darius had an earnest American family with boundaries, he’d tell them that he’d lost his way, and that he was afraid he might be wasting his pricey American education (way pricier than cousin Kayvan’s, the finance-bro turned lit-hack now writing a melodramatic turd of a book about their family). He’d tell them that he understood that one day he’d have to parent his own father, but he didn’t know how because nobody had taught him. He didn’t know how 34 mothers spent their mornings, or how normal fathers reacted to a missing teaspoon. He’d never consider Baba a burden, but Darius needed a minute to just breathe and to orient himself, to figure how just how he was meant to function in the world, before he could be somebody’s mother.
And, if they gave him the slightest room to open up, he might admit that Beatrice made him feel good, better than the others. Sure, it was one night, but they’d told each other real things and he’d woken up to her long fingers untangling his hair. She’d made him pancakes and coffee.
For three years, Darius had slept in a friend’s illegal attic rental at the edge of Fort Greene, writing overworked stories and making Turkish coffees and falafel in the café below. Now and then, Princeton classmates came through in dry-cleaned jeans, said an awkward hi and asked about his unfinished book, on their way to the F or the N for media or banking jobs. He told them the truth: it didn’t matter because nobody’s listening. Even if he became a writer, the terminus of his every dream, he’d still only be speaking into a selfish and unmovable void.
Darius needed a distraction, to rouse his curiosity out of its long sleep. “I forbid you to go,” Baba muttered, resting a hand on his shoulder. Darius touched his father’s hand.
“It’s just a weekend, Babajoon.” He tried to make his voice gentle. “It’s nothing. I’ve met a chill woman and I want to see her.”
***
Weeks later, Darius stood jet-lagged and hungry on a cold outerLondon stoop. He shuffled on her doorstep, lips to the speaker, with an overnight bag and the shit-eating grin that had gained him entry everywhere since he was a motherless schoolboy. He scanned the two columns of doorbells for her name: Mrs. Golshifteh Amirzadeh. He double-checked the photo of her address, snapped from Baba’s journal. This was the right place, this shabby post-war building, three floors of flats above a fish and chip shop in north (north north north) London. Hardly worthy of a runaway Persian princess or whatever she thought she was. He ran a finger down the columns again, stopping at 1B. The name plate read: Emmeline Amiri.
“There you are, Azizjoon,” Darius muttered the affectionate name that Baba had taught him for a hypothetical Iranian grandmother. He’d shortened Amirzadeh to Amiri before; they all had. But where did ‘Emmeline’ come from? Decades in England, he knew, but he hated it when Iranians Westernized. For a while in college, he’d insisted on being called Daryoosh, but his classmates wouldn’t let it 35 happen gracefully. The intercom crackled as he muttered in Finglish. “Azizjoon, it’s Darius. Your grandson?”
Would she remember him? His grandmother knew his face, of course, and Kayvan’s. Baba and his sisters sent formal letters, photos, graduation news.
A small, reedy voice that seemed to have gone unused all day (maybe many days) chirped through the speaker. “Oh dear – is that . . . oh, darl – ” She let go of the button mid-darling, poor old thing. Darius knew from his father and aunts that Azizjoon was senile, and not particularly maternal. Anyway, she’d be in her eighties, and you don’t go knocking on the door of your most clinically bat-shit ancestor, a stranger who ghosted her children decades ago, expecting Pari’s butter cookies or Baba’s tea with a shot of Baileys.
But he had nowhere else to go. At the terminal in JFK, he’d decided it was time to text Beatrice. Firing off a message, he noticed she’d been the last to write. Twice. He had no new messages when he landed at Heathrow, so he decided to head to his grandmother’s first – he’d do the visit, take some notes, then go to B’s. But Beatrice’s response, when it came, was surprisingly not chill, accusing him of disappearing from her DMs and treating her like a backup.
He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t a backup, that he’d been playing it cool and overshot. But he was nauseated and tired, and he kept seeing Suri’s little smirk. Maybe B would laugh, too. She’d gone from zero to seething so fucking quick, he had no time to massage things. For now, Darius needed a bed and a roof, maybe some slowcooked lamb, a doting ear to listen to him complain about stuff. Still, he tried to remember that he wasn’t here to get his head scratched. He was here to grab the old stories and go before the old lady kicked it and Baba’s childhood secrets were buried with her; they were probably fast leaking out of her head right now, and Kayvan, the story-stealer, was closing in like the striving, unoriginal try-hard sack of shit that he was. God damn it! Thinking about Kayvan always got his temperature up.
The door clicked and opened a crack. Purple-lined eyes peered at him, then the door swung wide. “Oh, my Darius,” Azizjoon sang through tears. Her accent was nearly English, like those fancy Iranian ladies who’d flown off to boarding schools in London and spent their useless lives lugging skis between Dizin and Chamonix. Azizjoon didn’t have a life like that – she will have cultivated this accent, forcing her mouth to clutch the marble, that tight English “o,” to let her r’s drop into oblivion. Her pronunciation wasn’t so much received as it was wrenched. She will have practiced before a mirror, into a cheap tape recorder, as her daughters had.
He allowed her to hug him, to pat his back, but something was off in the tightness of her grip, in her smell. This wasn’t the grip or smell of a geriatric. She had power in her arms, the scent of a fancy perfume, something Chanel-like. Could this be his grandmother? This woman looked the same age as Suri and Pari, his younger aunts. She looked sixty. His aunt Goli, her eldest child, was about to turn sixty-two.
“Come in, darling. I’ll put the kettle on.” She continued to speak as she turned and led the way upstairs. “I’ve just been out, so there’s biscuits and a pot of goo. Oh, dear, I . . . How handsome you look. Just like your Baba . . . and my Baba . . . much more my Baba.” She stopped for a breath, turned and noticed his befuddled expression. “I suppose they’ve told you things.”
He removed his shoes at the threshold. Set down his plastic rain jacket. The staircase led up to a bright room with whitewashed wooden slats covered in an old Nain rug. It smelled of cardamom and rot and muscle-relaxing cream. He summoned the charming Turkishcoffee-and-falafel Darius. “I didn’t expect to be fed. But thank you. I’m starving.”
“Oh, poor you, sit sit, this instant. I’ll fetch the goo.”
What the fuck is goo? “It’s fine, Azizjoon,” he muttered, craning toward the kitchen.
His phone buzzed. It was Beatrice. She’d already closed the door on this, but here she was again, probably day drinking. Fuck you, she said, u ghosted and now suddenly ur here? He began to type, letting the ellipses to show. Then he stopped and put the phone away. If she was going to be mean, so could he. Moments later his phone buzzed again. He peeked: ur just scamming for lodging. What a waste to love you. Not that I did. Ur just a bygone fuck.
Woah, what love? He walked to the middle of the room, where he could see Azizjoon pouring loose-leaf tea into a decanter and dumping some kind of store-bought personal pies onto a chipped floral plate. She threw out their cardboard boxes. The labels read, in huge letters, Gü.
Ick B, he wrote, because that bygone stung, but then a wave of cruelty overcame him, and he went right for the “thirsty” emoji he reserved for when he wanted to crush someone. “You know that feeling,” he used to say to Kayvan, “when you don’t want them mad, you want ’em calling a hotline?” Kayvan had called him immature and flaunted his shitty trophy marriage. But Darius didn’t want to sleep here, under a strange old lady’s roof. Besides, texts have a way of staying around forever; he deleted the emoji and wrote instead: there *was* love there. So much.
Instantly he felt awful. That’s not how he’d wanted to say it, 37 all slick and fake. He wanted to say he’d felt good with her. But he couldn’t now because she was being such a bitch.
“Here we are,” said Azizjoon putting two creamy white spheres – cheesecakes maybe – on the glass coffee table. She poured tea into Darius’s cup. “Shot of Baileys?” At the offer of Baba’s night drink, he dropped his jaw, “My baba drinks this!” to which she rolled her eyes, “Almost as if we were blood relations!” Then she winked and tossed in a classic Amirzadeh family dig: “Where’d you go to uni again?”
“Azizjoon,” he said stirring his tea with the comically tiny spoon she had provided. He was almost sure it was a salt spoon. “I’m sorry to ask, but how old . . .”
“Oof.” She sucked a drop of tea off her upper lip. “Right to the shameful calculus, huh?” She paused. “I’m seventy-four.” He kept stirring. Aunt Goli was sixty-two. “Seventy-four,” she slowed, fake British accent thickening, as if he might be deaf, which, for most Iranians, is preferable to sucking at math. “April 1941.” She sipped her tea, smoothed a thinning patch behind her ear. “Don’t strain yourself, darling. Your aunt Goli was born in 1953.”
“So, you’re not . . .” said Darius, latching on to more palatable scenarios. “I mean, Baba Ardeshir had a first wife? Or . . . Goli isn’t your natural . . .”
“Of course, she is!” her voice rose an octave. “That’s my first baby!”
“Sorry,” muttered Darius.
“So, they told you nothing. Poor you. Do you know when those children started banding together to lie about me? Early . . . I was almost proud they got it so well organized.”
“They never tell me anything. They’re afraid I’ll write it.” He paused. The mischief was draining from her eyes. “They said if I ever run into you, don’t ask questions, just keep walking.”
She chuckled and smacked his arm. Then she sighed. “Well, darling . . . it suited them. But, look at you, a writer? I happen to love embarrassing writing. We’re artists on my side.”
It surprised Darius how much he liked her. Her faded flat, the full tea tin, and the dusty shoe rack hinted that he was her first visitor in a long time. Darius had heard the stories of her personality: feisty, rebellious, desperate for attention. Childish, Suri often called her. Though no one spoke of her age, Darius now remembered that in the stories she had always behaved young.
After that silent beat, though they were sipping from their second cup, she announced, “It’s Harrod’s ’Festive Afternoon’!” He snorted and spit some onto the plate. “Oh dear.” She waited for him to cough it out, then said, “Do they want privacy from ugly Iran business?”
“No, no! They just want to give it to Kayvan,” he said. “If he wrote it, they’d be proud.”
“Yes, of course, Kayvan,” she said. She sat across him on a plush yellowing loveseat. “Goli’s boy. I thought you two were like brothers?”
“I wouldn’t trust that guy with a used paper towel,” Darius muttered.
Her gaze sharpened, as if she were studying, having forgotten the family tree, having been pushed off her branch of it. “He steals stories, then? He’s the wicked one?”
So, she was just rolling with it, with his version of things. In one gulp, she had swallowed a reality with Kayvan as the devil. He was beginning to understand how this woman had survived mid-century Iran and immigrant London and a childhood marriage and even managed to smell the theocracy coming. Now her infamous and almost instantaneous post-exile religious conversion made sense. (To Christ! Pari whispered, wide eyed. To fucking Christ, Suri echoed).
“Yes,” he said, and grinned in his disarming white-toothed way, and she reached over and touched his cheek with her cold, overmoisturized hand. He told her about the summer barbecue when Kayvan strode toward him in his khakis and asked how freelance life was panning out. Then came some self-righteous job advice, Kayvan acting like some kind of authority on graceful adulting. And Darius had told him to fuck off. Kayvan’s face had gone cold, and he said, “You know, markets are slower in summer. I’m thinking of writing about the family. Why not, right? It’s a good hobby.” But the family story had long been settled as Darius’s. What Kayvan was saying, Darius explained to Azizjoon, was that writing is easy and worth no respect, that Darius had wasted his Princeton degree, and that anything Darius could do Kayvan could do better. Kayvan wanted every good thing for himself. He was restoking the old rivalry, the one Darius had won when his university acceptance had dwarfed Kayvan’s, and Kayvan had stolen his application essay and read it at family dinner: Over the years, Baba’s habits have become a comfort to me. I watch as he washes his hands twelve times. I arrange our socks in rows of three. I only buy mine in blue. The aunts were stone silent. Darius caught Baba’s wet wounded gaze, fumbling hands folding his napkin into eighths. Then the glory ended. Baba and the aunts stopped celebrating Darius. At least Kayvan had gotten into Fordham on his merits. Darius snooped for weeks, looking for Kayvan’s essay. Finally, Kayvan just showed it to him: it was about his love of Persianfusion, grilling burgers in turmeric or some such ass-lick. “The saddest part,” he told Kayvan, “is that you’ll never see why that essay didn’t get you in somewhere good.” That wiped the smug smile off 39 Kavyan’s face. “You don’t understand, Azizjoon,” Darius said now, “he’s a hack. I get that I’m rude and mean sometimes but he’s – ”
“I believe you,” she said, “because you’re the one that was sent.”
He made a show of eating the cake. “I thought of you a lot growing up. Wondered if you bake and stuff.” He waited a beat, for her to melt and dive across the table and hug him.
“Oh, listen to you go,” she made a halfhearted grease-slathering motion that made Darius chuckle. In his pocket, his phone vibrated. After all these years of feeling like an Amirzadeh outsider, the sleazy and ambitious one, the manipulative one, here was his ancestor – whose specific genes only he carried forward – ostracized for chasing her stolen youth, for daring to want things, to say things. “I always thought, in photos, Kayvan was a bit . . . off,” she continued. “He looks like that boy in every schoolyard who bites other children. His head is far too round.” Darius grinned at her. She was so transparent and committed to his narrative, though she’d learned it minutes before. He checked his phone. B had texted: #hobosexual
Ouch. He wrote back, I don’t owe you a play by play of my whereabouts, B.
To which she texted back the middle finger emoji and: just have the balls and decency to say ur gone. Don’t keep ppl on the hook for next time ur in London.
Azizjoon eyed his phone, swallowed a small burp and said, “Tell me everything Kayvan’s done.” She started to mutter, as if losing her way, as Babak sometimes did. “I wonder if I can find Goli’s old photos . . . the ones from. . . . He had a hairline like a Syrian refugee.” Woah. Darius sat up, eyes wide, and so she straightened up. “Tell me darling, I’m listening.” How weird to see his father’s oddities, his singular quirks, reproduced here in a virtual stranger.
He carried on about Kayvan, how in ten years, maybe they’d be competing for BBC interviews and guest spots on talk shows, both telling the same story. And would the media see the difference between Kayvan and Darius? Would they understand that Darius was the serious one, the artist who loved language and would’ve been a writer even if his family didn’t have a superbly timely story? Or would they lump Kayvan’s side hustle with Darius’s lifelong calling?
“You should write it,” an MFA buddy had said to him, “this thing with your brother.”
“Cousin,” he’d corrected. And Darius tried. But then he just ended up writing a comic piece about two geriatric holocaust survivors, Herschel and Benjamin, who kept getting booked for the same memorial events. At every panel and podium, they played nice, while undermining each other’s stories, insinuating themselves the more 40 genuine survivor, the one with the more harrowing story, the better memory, the longer ordeal, until Benjamin decided his dream was to be a writer, not just the guy who survived the Nazis, and started writing current events instead. But the world just wouldn’t have it: Benjamin was his brutal story and nothing more. They didn’t want to pay for this old coot’s journalism. They wanted the Auschwitz story. And so, pretty soon poor Benjamin was back on the survivor talk circuit, sitting across the laminated floor of the White Plains UJA from his old pal Herschel, who looked at him wisely and said, “Well, now you’ve screwed yourself,” and he told that audience of old ladies that Benjamin had always been just a wannabe writer, embellishing. Oh, but the things he (Herschel) had seen. He wished he didn’t have to tell it – he was no storyteller, just an engineer, a birdwatcher – but it was his duty. He ended the story on the men decades before, their real tragedies in its detail, the hours and days cracked open to their bloody viscera, to show a grave unsentimental truth doomed to be mangled by time and other people’s gaze.
But Darius wasn’t going to become like Benjamin. He wasn’t the story. He was a Princeton-educated writer who’d happened to have come from a family of post-revolutionary Iranian immigrants with a bunch of undiagnosed mental health issues, and it was best to establish that credential right off the bat – that he was here for the long haul and could outlast Kayvan. Then Kayvan could do all the victim porn posturing and refugee dances that he wanted. His “book” would be a flash in the pan, a small embarrassment in Darius’s memoirs.
As he spoke, Azizjoon interjected with sighs and grunts and ei vais. She made clear in her performance that she loved listening to him, that, in this moment, she was his grandmother only. Once she referred to a stroke of bad luck as “hard cheese,” and drank in his delight.
By the time he was finished, Beatrice had texted twice more. Such a coward.
“What’s that there?” Azizjoon eyed his phone. “Is that a woman you’re toying with?”
Darius let her scan the last day of texts. “It’s hard to explain the situation,” he said. Would Azizjoon have had romances, lovers? When? “I guess you never had . . .”
“You mean before I got married and pregnant at twelve?” she laughed.
“What happened?” he asked. “I thought Baba Ardershir was a nice guy.”
Azizjoon started fussing with the plates and forks. “What does this girl want? You mustn’t let her lead you down a sinful path.” She 41 paused as Darius slipped the phone back into his pocket. She cleared her throat, released that reedy little laugh again, “You know, darling, I do have someone. A love . . . a man, called Julian, that I love.”
Darius sat up. “What? Are you serious? Nobody said anything – “
Had Azizjoon tried to build a life with someone new? Surely not. What happened to her after Iran? Maybe that was the real story here, the one he’d come to London to unearth.
“Oh, those kids don’t know!” she said. “They’re brainwashed, all four of them. I envy their childhood. They had every freedom.”
“They didn’t have every freedom,” said Darius. “Baba’s got major spectrum issues – ”
“Stop!” said Azizjoon. “None of that nonsense.” Her eldest, Goli, too, had this rule. The Amirzadeh blood is clean, and they didn’t need lazy millennial excuses and diagnoses and pills.
So, no bonding over Baba then.
Darius got up, brushed a few crumbs from his lap. “Sorry,” he said. “Are you going?” she sounded alarmed, regretful, almost panicked.
“I – ” he stopped. “I was just looking for the toilet.”
“Oh,” she breathed out, voice shaking as she tried for nonchalant. “It’s just there.” Then she started muttering, “Those poor children. There is no worse lie than the lie you tell yourself.”
She started clearing the dishes. She moved in a quick practiced way, hobbling only a little as she delivered a stack to the kitchen counter. By the time he returned from the toilet (which was strewn with little dried roses and draped in crochet wall hangings), she had brought out a stack of letters, the ones at the bottom darkening and frayed. Darius sat in the yellow armchair and watched her rifle through pages on the floor. He waited for her, picking at the leftover cheesecake and glancing at his own tired reflection in the glass coffee table.
Exhaustion was washing over him, and she must have sensed his interest waning. She blinked a few times, frowning as she shuffled her papers around. “Have you moved your bowels today?” Darius scoffed, so she tried to clarify. “Your bowels must be open once a day.”
“Yeah, I . . . that’s not it,” he said, getting up. Suddenly her pile of scraps repelled him, and he was dizzy after the long flight. “Can we get a real drink? I saw a pub around the corner.”
“I have – ” she stammered and pitched toward the cabinet with nervous fingers.
He touched her shoulder. “We can come back after. Let me buy you a whiskey.”
***
At the corner pub, they ordered cheap red wine, two whiskeys, and a Yorkshire pudding (just to see). He told her about New York and his plans.
“I want to write my memoirs,” Azizjoon said after half a drink. “I have the first line. Do you want to hear it?” He nodded. “I had a very short childhood.”
“That’s a beautiful first line,” he said. And he meant it. It was perfect. Briefly, with the whiskey burning his throat, burning down the skin of his heart, he wondered if this was why he was sent here – if he was sent – not to write about her, but to help her write about herself.
They talked about good stories and bad stories. He told her about Proust’s madeleines and hagiographies and lazy strokes of fate. Again, he warned her against Kayvan’s stories.
“When I was young,” she said, “all my favorites were about djinns and kind spirits.”
“Maybe you could start with what you remember, your house and your town and stuff.”
She waved away the suggestion. “I already have that,” she said, “in my papers.”
“Your papers?” he said.
“My work, my meditations,” she said shyly. After a beat, she added, “my poems.”
“You write poems?” Darius sat up, but she’d already moved on.
“The papers are for after I die . . . my poems, letters. I’ve left lots of instructions for the historians and . . .” Probably Darius was smirking because she stopped, gathered herself, her tone changing. “They’ll want to know about Iran in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s history! I have documents.”
She told him a story, about leaving Iran in 1972 (curls and the good suitcases), wandering Europe for years, moving from bedsit to hostel to church basement, then, four years later, arriving alone in north London at thirty-five years old, a teenager in mind, if not body. “I was still very young,” she said. “But I’d given birth to four kids, tried to raise them, in my way. Have you ever seen a thirty-fiveyear-old with four grown children?” He shook his head. He’d slept with childless thirty-five-year-olds, of course. But they just looked like a more experienced twenty-three, bodies indistinguishable, sometimes a cute line or two framing their mouth. Azizjoon continued, picking crumbs off her plate with the pad of her forefinger as she spoke. “It isn’t what you’d expect. You still look young. Just a different sort of young. The changes are . . . well, you’re used up, aren’t you? 43 But sort of renewable, maybe. There’s this hope that you’ll get a chance to do your childhood again . . . or, rather, just once, but late . . . you realize it’ll go by quicker, but you’re also a lot faster at grabbing the memories, so . . .”
He wanted to jot that down. He wanted to jot down so many things she said. These memories had to be preserved, lovingly, by a person whose history and identity were intertwined with hers.
She continued. When she left Iran, the children were teenagers – barely. Pari, the youngest, was eleven or twelve. Goli would’ve been nineteen and off to university. Azizjoon was tired. Of childcare, housework, watching a fourth lucky kid have the childhood she was denied.
Then she paused. “Lucky,” she whispered, as if to herself, “but I worried . . . for my young girls, with him. Suri and Pari were just the age – ” She stopped. An image returned to Darius, of Suri waving around Simon the Physics student. Azizjoon looked away.
“What happened in those four years?” he asked.
“What years?” Azizjoon looked up from her letters, eyes glassy. “Oh . . . those were just nothing years. Looking for where to go.” She described tiny spaces, rooms and apartments, where she spent much of her time tending to her body. She did calisthenics and stretches, plucking out extra hairs, dying her hair, and pinching her fat, and dreaming of a new life, which, of course, meant a new man. “I had my silly women’s lib days,” she said, chuckling. “Briefly, I had a friend who encouraged me to think of the rest of my life as mine. She got me a toolbox and plants,” she sighed, as if missing this friend. “She kept saying, why does all of life have to be a pursuit of a man? And I thought, okay this lady is bitter. I have a plan, and I can’t do it by myself, can I? I have no education, just a little money, enough for a flat. What am I going to achieve alone? So I’m going to have my European husband, and my big house, and all my scattered children and my clever, Western-educated grandchildren will return to me, and my daughters and I will put on beautiful dresses and come down to dinner in the garden, on a big table with vines coming down the sides of the house. And the grandchildren will prove everything I’ve told my husband: that we are a smart family, a talented family. Such good blood, if only we weren’t stuck in Iran. And you’d have one of those big, intellectual conversations with him, like Baba Ardeshir used to have with his university people in our living room.”
He hadn’t wished to interrupt her, but now a wave of emotion dislodged his words. After everything, these were her dreams, and in demanding them, she believed herself brazen. “You’ll have that one day, Azizjoon. I promise to come to your party and talk about everything I know.”
“God promised it,” she said, leaning over and patting his hand. “Julian is my future.” Julian again. Darius sat forward, thirsty for more. Was this a secret love? Or an unwitting crush? Darius had already drafted half the plot in his head. Azizjoon sighed, glanced toward the door, and added, “Not everyone wants it. I have enemies in the church. It’s very political.” She paused, took a deep breath and dropped her gaze, as if in prayer. “But God called me to London, to claim our life together. So, I sent thirty-two pounds to Benny Hinn, and I put it directly to Jesus.” She released a contented sigh. “It’s as good as done. I have peace about it.”
Baba had told Darius about the televangelists who prey on desperate men and grieving women, people whose true need wasn’t celestial but crushingly human, to “name and claim” their desires with money. “She’s become a fanatic, my boy. Leave it,” Baba had said.
Desperate to shake off Baba’s voice, he said, “So you met Julian in Europe somewhere?”
Azizjoon shook her head. “No, no, he was here,” she said. “He lives in London.”
In 1972, a terrified but giddy Golshifteh Amirzadeh arrived in Berlin with a suitcase full of her best dresses. She’d stashed away some money, over her nearly two decades of grudging domesticity and forced motherhood. So, when her eldest was safely in university, and the others sure to follow, she took her secret cash, the luggage she’d been given as a thirtieth birthday present, and she ran. She wasn’t looking for love or sex or fun. She wanted a new life, and a new life meant a new marriage. She didn’t even consider that a life alone could be the reward for all her suffering. If one man had wronged her, the answer was simply a better man, maybe a man from another faith. She didn’t want any more to do with Iranians or their version of marriage or womanhood. What was a marriage if the bride was never asked if she wanted it? Her mother had asked only if she wanted an excuse to wear high heels. And she’d said yes.
“I know I can’t call it rape,” Azizjoon said, almost as an aside. “But I swear it felt like that.” She looked up. “Why didn’t someone just tell me before I got married . . . what this act was? What’s the good in letting a girl discover it like that?”
“Uh,” he inched as one would toward a sparrow, careful not to spook her with his fascination. “You can call that rape, Azizjoon . . . I can’t believe your mother did that to you.”
A faraway look shadowed her face. “I betrayed my kids, too. Not as badly, but.”
“They’re really angry,” said Darius. “Suri – “
She released a low moan, pained, like a struck deer. “Ohhh, my
Suri.” She began rocking. Eyes shut, she mumbled, “Sweet Jesus take this evil picture from my mind.”
Darius wanted to comfort her, but his limbs had gone stiff. “Anybody else would’ve run.”
She kept rocking. “I kept my babies close in their young years. When Goli turned fourteen and sturdy, with big muscles, I knew, that was the safe age. But when I left, Suri, she was . . .” Darius kept nodding as a weight took shape in his chest. He thought of his aunt’s thick laughter, performing her bawdy stories. “She was wiry, just the age he liked.”
They were silent for an age. Then her chest lifted, as if by a string, “I’m sorry, I’m . . . this is my mind . . . Satan playing tricks. The Amirzadehs, we were a glorious family.”
Darius nodded. “Suri has a great life, you know. She likes to be shocking but mostly she’s chill, and happy, and I think she has boyfriends and stuff. She’s not alone.”
Azizjoon wiped her eyes, mumbling more prayers. “Who explained adult things to you?” she asked. “Was it . . .” She stopped, pressed her wet thumb against the wooden tabletop to pick up a fat crumb. “At my church there’s a girl who talks to me sometimes,” she said. “She’s very chatty and every week she knows something new. This is how you get a boyfriend. This is how you kiss. She says the cheekiest things, and I listen, not because she’s cute but because – ”
Darius smiled, “Because you want to know those things, too.”
She nodded. “Why couldn’t we let our kids just get there? No fumbling blind till you’re off a cliff. No . . . shame-shame for every curiosity, then . . . saddle up, it’s your wedding night!”
Darius let out a quiet laugh, and she smiled kindly.
“She died, my mum, just a few years ago,” said Azizjoon. “I was here. I got a call from a nurse in Iran saying that her last deathbed wish was to talk to me. So dramatic.”
“That’s very sweet,” said Darius. “That you got to, you know, say goodbye to her.”
“Oh dear, I didn’t, of course. It was just nice, after all that, to deny her that final wish. She denied my every wish from the day I was born.” Azizjoon started to chuckle. She cradled her whiskey to her ample breasts. “You should’ve heard that poor nurse gasp. It was all very dramatic and Iranian. And she explained how hard it had been to find me, and who is Emmeline Amiri and why won’t I talk to my own mother who gave me the sweet gift of life? So I said “Goodbye dear, I’ve got some Gü in the microwave,” and just hung up . . . plunk. Cheerio, Mummy’s nurse! And then I went and ate my cake with some good Harrod’s ‘Festive Afternoon’ and prayed that that 46 woman ends up in a part of hell where every morning you wake up having forgotten what the sex act is, and you learn it from a brandnew disgusting man each day, and you see a long line of them waiting before you fall asleep, and you wake up again, your memory wiped. And that’s a mercy, Darius joon, to forget.” She laughed her girlish laugh, then stopped abruptly. “Oh dear, your glass is empty. Darius joon, let me just – ”
Darius stiffened. “No, no,” he said, fingers buzzing now because how many people get this chance? To meet the ancestor who makes sense, uncorrupted by all the strangers who had a hand in one’s creation. “I can’t drink any more. Please Azizjoon, relax. Tell me about Julian.”
In Berlin, she found Christ. Or rather – because Darius was learning to read between the lines like a writer – she found a church full of kind people who welcomed her. The price of admission into their social circle, Darius now guessed, was her salvation. And Berlin was too frightening and debauched. The part of the city where she lived was traumatizing, so much flesh and desire always on display, people celebrating things that should be torched. She moved to a village in Holland where asexual locals made cheese and grew tulips and roses, and fair-skinned men seemed to age from a safe fourteen to a safe eighty overnight. “It was like God spared them the genitals, Darius joon! If I wasn’t called to London, I would’ve stayed in that Dutch village.”
Her friend, she explained, had a job in the UK and dragged Azizjoon along, promising that she’d be happier in an English country, since she spoke it well enough. “Then I met Julian in the church one Sunday and we fell in love. And I just . . . I got stuck in . . . waiting, waiting.”
She took a long sip, wiped her mouth, and said, “Let’s go home, dear,” and briefly she looked the age he’d expected her to be, the age that would have been right.
Back at the flat, she stacked their shoes, hung her jacket neatly on the only peg. She sat on the rug in front of the sofa and gestured for Darius to sit beside her. He felt revived now as he thumbed through the papers she’d left spread out on the floor. He wanted her to keep talking, and she did, pulling out letters from his father and aunts.
Then a computer pinged loudly from the bedroom and Azizjoon began hoisting herself off her haunches. “Where are you going?” asked Darius.
“I have an email,” she smiled gently. Something tightened in Darius’s chest.
“Of course,” he said, and watched her chase that single lonely ping.
“Probably Julian,” she said, her voice receding into the bedroom. “He works so hard.”
When she was gone, Darius checked his phone. He started recording a voice memo, whispering into it the best details from the pub, chastising himself for not switching it on earlier. What an astonishing legacy. And Kayvan had no right to it; that opportunistic bastard worshipped Baba Ardeshir. Kayvan would never admit that they were all the outcomes of rape, or give space to the whispers of deviance, a sickness following the family from Iran to America, creeping into the blood. Maybe both grandsons were like him, a couple of sexual menaces.
“Everything okay in there?” Darius shouted into the bedroom. She was muttering to Jesus again, when lord when, and some words about suffering and patience. “Should I put a kettle on?”
“Oh yes, darling, thank you!” she strained, her voice reedier from far away.
He headed to the kitchen. “Was it your man?” he shouted, teasing.
“Oh . . . no, I just have to send this email message . . .” she was typing with two fingers, eyes on the keys, then screen, then keys, then screen. “The great irony of technology, my darling, is that it adds so much admin to life. And people expect instant replies.”
The electric kettle was still heavy, so he pressed the button and headed to the bedroom. He glanced at the screen, then leaned over her shoulder, thinking he might offer to type it out for her. She was composing a reply to a Microsoft user message.
“Dear Microsoft,
Thank you for your kind note. I will do the update and let you
know.
Many thanks,
Emmeline Amiri”
“Oh, Grandma,” said Darius, flushed, then recoiled at the word that had slipped out of his mouth, almost on its own. Darius had never called anyone that. As she hauled herself out of the chair, suddenly she seemed so much frailer than she had at first, when he could hardly imagine that she was older than sixty. She seemed now from another era, another universe. How did she survive here, in gritty north London? At her bedroom threshold, she paused. “Please don’t call me Grandma, darling. Julian doesn’t know I have grandchildren.”
Watching her drink more tea, Darius tried to find a way back to the story. She hummed as she sorted through the letters, and Darius searched for words. Now that she was comfortable, sometimes she spoke in accented Farsi. He wanted to ask if she had friends here, if the people from the church ever visited. Did her email alert ping once a day or twice, or five? What did Julian say in his messages? Then, as Azizjoon situated herself under an afghan and blew on her tea, his gaze fell on the pile of letters at her shins. The top envelope wasn’t postmarked or stamped. Julian’s address was written neatly below his name. “Are those from . . .?”
“I keep copies,” she said. “I have every letter I ever wrote to him just in case they don’t arrive. And even if they do, one needs to remember what one last wrote.”
“For your papers,” said Darius.
“That, too,” she smiled.
“And Julian – ” He started to ask a question, but stopped, not wanting the answer. “Azizjoon, is Julian . . . is he here, right now?”
There was a tense beat, and then Azizjoon started laughing into her fist. “Oh, my stars, my wicked children did quite a number on you, didn’t they?” She paused, spread out the letters. “Darius! I’m not crazy. Julian exists. He’s at home just southeast of London with his wife and two sons. And the reason there are no letters from him is that he hasn’t written back quite yet.”
“Oh,” said Darius, slowly, feeling silly. Of course, there was a wife. Azizjoon was the other woman. This felt much truer to stories of her: selfish, reckless.
“Jesus promised him to me, and yes, in this life there are sometimes complications and obstacles. Look at Charles and Camilla! We don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run.”
“You mean, like, will his wife die in a Parisian tunnel?” said Darius, shifting in his chair.
She flushed, her chest rising and falling as if something had lunged at her. She sprang up from the floor – no more heaving sighs; indignity makes the haunches young and lithe – and gathered up her letters. “I think I’m finished telling you my secrets now,” she said.
“Oh, I’m . . . ,” said Darius, rubbing sweaty hands on his jeans, cursing himself for his big mouth. Now she’d give the whole thing to that hack Kayvan and he’ll write some bullshit about a family’s journey across the waters, and how resilient everyone was, and how the women in the family are formidable and brave, and all this vague heroic shit that doesn’t require him to imagine his tiny, freckled grandmother, even tinier than now, barely a teenager, having seen nothing of the world, nothing of men or male bodies, thinking “yay, I 49 get to wear high heels,” pinned down and penetrated by their own beloved Baba Ardeshir, a monster. Kayvan won’t write that. And he won’t ask unseemly things, like how far did his disgusting affection for his daughters go? And why was his son, Darius’s own father, so deeply fucked? And why do Pari and Suri talk as one voice, one with a medical practice and the other with her own farm, yet in the confines of the family, unable to function if you pried them apart? And Goli, the eldest, a tyrant and a narcissist, with her strange rules and demands for loyalty. Sometimes he pitied Kayvan, having to be raised by that woman. He took a breath, steadied himself. “Azizjoon, I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean that . . . I understand the situation.”
She looked at him with sad eyes, part forgiving, retreating into a known world and its rules, part curious, some long-imprisoned girl who wants to know just how people do it now.
“Do you know, the first time I was pregnant, I thought there were snakes in my belly?”
“Snakes . . . didn’t you know . . . hadn’t you seen pregnant women –”
“Hush,” she snapped. “I knew what pregnant was, but I didn’t know how you become pregnant! I thought I’d married a monster with an evil secret, but I didn’t connect that to my snakes. By the time I sensed Goli in there, I was six months along and the doctor explained.”
“Wasn’t your belly growing? Was the doctor a woman?”
“No,” she said, “he was a man, and he laughed at me and pinched my cheek and said the same things you’re saying now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Darius, feeling like a moron for both judgy remark and apology.
“My belly didn’t grow any more than the rest of my body. I was eating a lot in those days, trying to make myself fat and ugly . . . because your grandfather said on the first night how much he liked that I was tiny . . . ” Darius flinched, but she continued. “And then with Babak and Suri and Pari, I knew. I tried to end those pregnancies, but you can’t do it yourself, and I didn’t know anyone. So. More motherhood.”
Darius’s cheeks felt cold. He wanted to hug her and, at the same time, to run far away. He was annoyed too, at her self-sabotaging choices. “Azizjoon, do you have any Tylenol?”
“I have Paracetamol,” she said. “And the Bailey’s. Do you need a rest?”
“Can I sleep over a few nights?” he asked, forgetting Iranian politeness.
“Here? With me?” she said, “Well, yes, of course. That sounds very nice.”
Darius thanked her. Now he felt an urge to apologize to Beatrice but didn’t. “Do you want me to go out and get us some food? I saw a really chill-looking curry place – ”
“Indian curry? My goodness . . . I’ll make you ghormeh sabzi!”
While she cooked Darius flipped through the letters. Some of them were practical, some heartfelt, some just pages of bad poetry. Though looking closely, they weren’t bad. They were the product of a stellar Iranian literary education rusted by self-conscious late-life English. After reading a few pages, he felt that he could see the beautiful sentiment underneath the adornment.
“Julian is a kind soul,” Azizjoon shouted over sizzling onions and the thwack of her knife on the chopping board. “He’s not like Iranian men. He suffers so much over our situation.”
What Darius wanted to know now was: what is “the situation” in Julian’s mind? Is this a love affair gone wrong? Is he afraid to leave, or waiting out the dying days of a bed-ridden wife? Glancing into the kitchen, Darius snapped a photo of Julian’s name and address. He started to put away his phone, then he checked the kitchen again and took photos of two of the poems, too.
“Azizjoon, do you need help?” he shouted, after his phone was safely in his pocket.
“You relax, darling,” she said. She was wearing a starched-straight floral apron that gave the impression of aged disuse. “I’ll get this meat browned and then I want to hear your stories.”
“Smells good,” said Darius. The air quickly filled with searing onion, turmeric and cumin melting in oil. Now hunger panged in his stomach. He leaned over the sofa to open the small window overlooking an alley below, just behind the chip shop, and as the stale air rushed in, was overcome by nausea. Why did he eat all that sugar? “Do you always eat dessert first?”
She laughed, projecting her voice into the living room for his sake. “I timed the Gü badly, didn’t I? But who knew you were coming?” She paused. “I don’t usually have teatime guests.”
Dinner was comfortably silent. It felt strange eating this familiar food, his father’s best dishes reproduced here in London, by a stranger. She warned him that she had under-salted everything, to suit all palates. “That’s what you learn when you cook for big families,” she said, pushing the saltshaker toward him. “In Iran, I was cooking for fifteen, some kids, some old men. This isn’t salted enough for a young man in his prime.”
“But it’s just us, Azizjoon,” he said, shaking the grains onto his meat.
“Habits,” she said. “I don’t know how much to salt anymore.”
He asked her about her church. Kensington Temple; she said the name proudly. “Will you go with me?” she sat up, back straightening. “I can show you off to my friends.”
“How long have you been going there?” he asked.
“Since I got here,” she said, taking dainty bites of her khoresht with a fork.
“Why are you eating that with a fork?” he asked, shoveling a spoonful of basmati.
Azizjoon looked up and shrugged, then dropped the fork. “You know, you’re right. I haven’t eaten with an Iranian for ages.” Then she squealed, an actual squeal, and said, “What a miracle you’re here.” She got up to clear the dishes, turning on the television on the way out.
“Isn’t Kensington in central London, though?” Though he knew. It was basic diasporic snobbery. What Iranian wants spiritual escape with the riffraff from their own neighborhood?
“It’s not far, darling,” she said, “Just the overground to the Victoria, then the tube to Notting Hill.” She wiped her hand on her apron. “Oh, that reminds me I need to iron my frock.”
Darius got up from the table. The TV blared out some kind of religious revival, an old man in a suit with one arm to heaven, the other clutching a microphone as he beseeched God before an enraptured crowd. “Where’s your remote?”
“No no, darling, Benny Hinn’s on. We can watch him with our coffee.” She brought two brimming coffees in elaborate mugs and set them down on paper doilies, spilling a drop from her own. (Rather, she assigned that one to herself after she deemed it imperfect. Such inconsequential martyrdoms were typical of Persian mothers. Once Kayvan said that in his negotiations course at Fordham, the professor said to sacrifice little things, to label every sacrifice. They laughed and toasted the shrewdness of Persian mothers. It was a long time ago.) Darius thought of all that he’d one day write about these wonderful misfits that made him. He thought of Suri’s loud medical office, rows of vaginal expanders with racially questionable names standing proudly. How much he loved the Amirzadehs and hated them both at once.
That night, in the airless room, streetlights glaring past flimsy curtains, Darius couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned on the narrow guest twin, his cheek pressed against a roughly piped cushion, his big toe catching in the nooks of a loose crochet throw. He tried to recall an Alice Munro story he’d once loved. What was it called? A poet with a husband and child travels to Toronto. She’s chasing a married man who gave her a ride home once. She is consumed with longing for this stranger who may or may not want her. She sends him 52 a note that feels like putting a letter in a bottle and hoping to reach Japan. To Reach Japan. That’s it. On the train, this mother leaves her kid alone to go fuck some guy that two pages earlier she described as “a boy.” He once said to Kayvan, “Every time I get bored with life, I think about how much of a prude I am compared to Alice Munro’s 1950s mothers.” And yet, he’d hated that story the first time he read it. He hated the mother for her selfishness, so wrapped up in her own physical need. Is there anything more deplorable than abandoning mothers? Doesn’t motherhood give you all the animal instincts and pheromones that you need to protect that child, even at the expense of yourself? Or do only some children inspire that jungle protection in their mothers? Was he too male, too swarthy, too stout, for his mother to want to tuck him under a warm flank? There had been days that he’d wished that his mother was the Amirzadeh, instead of his father, because then at least he could blame genetics, that leaving itch that Azizjoon shared. But Darius’s mother was just an ordinary white woman, an Alice Munro housewife. And worst of all, she knew exactly what she was saddling Darius with, all of Baba’s shit. She knew that Darius would spend his childhood lining up condiments and counting his blue socks simply because he refused to be like her, a deserter. His mother didn’t have Azizjoon’s excuse. She wasn’t a raped and exploited and perpetually gaslit child bride. Darius thought of the sweet way Azizjoon described her “papers.” What did she have? Diaries? More letters? He wanted to read them all.
The next day, Darius found the Munro story online – Azizjoon’s computer was riddled with viruses and pop-ups; he’d fix that later – and read it to his grandmother over “Breakfast Tea.”
She sipped from a dainty cup as she listened, nodding or frowning. When he asked her what she thought, she made a bored comment about God’s will, and how, if the couple on the train were meant to be together, God would bring them together in marriage whatever their sinful beginnings. This frustrated Darius, her singular focus. She scraped butter off her toast and said, “You know, one day I saw Julian pass me on the street. I chased him for a block, and then I realized, it wasn’t him. I sat on a bench and tried so hard to remember his face. I commanded it, in the name of Jesus, to appear, but poof, it had vanished from my brain.” She eyed his clothes, the same ones he’d worn the day before. “I noticed you haven’t moved your bowels since – ”
“Azizjoon!” he laughed. Her gaze was unmoving, so he said, “I did it in the night.”
He managed to dodge a shopping trip to M&S by tempting Azizjoon to read her letters aloud. They spent most of Saturday leafing 53 through old letters. For years, she’d written to her four children, keeping copies of everything. Medical school encouragements for Suri. Organic farming tips for Pari. Instructions for Goli. Praise for Babak. And so, Saturday was spent.
Darius went with her to Sunday church service, where she clung onto his arm with such intense devotion that he started to think of all the ways this fragile person, alone in a big city, might fall apart, taking with it her even more fragile universe, her budding sense of herself.
During the hymns, his grandmother sprang to life. She waved her arms, and sang in her sweet accent, and danced with her hips, rising to her tiptoes as the music peaked. By the second chorus of “Shine, Jesus, Shine” she’d forgotten herself, swaying as none of the English women around her were doing. This made Darius love her – really love her – for the first time. He wanted to dance, too, but felt self-conscious in this strange congregation (or any congregation), so he tapped his feet. Azizjoon didn’t notice; her eyes didn’t open the entire song. It pained him to think she was praying, claiming Julian again as some TV charlatan had taught her.
Then the rustle of a hundred skirts sitting, the patter of the preacher’s thick forefinger tapping the mic. Darius felt a wave of peace, of intense safety. This sanctuary was filled with grandparents well past the worries that now consumed him, past the rat race, the cycles of ambition and crippling inadequacy, the endless wanting. What they craved now was their children, their grandchildren, God. Some of them had undoubtedly done great things (this was Kensington, after all). Others not so much. And yet, here, this morning, they were all drinking the same instant coffee and asking Jesus to shine his face upon them so they could carry this collective joy into the pub where they’d order Yorkshire puddings and gossip about the same things they’d gossiped about as teenagers: crushes, betrayals.
As his grandmother drank in the sermon, an idea occurred to Darius. What if he were to meet Julian, be charming, let Azizjoon show off a bit? The romance couldn’t be real (he felt sure of that), but at least Julian could fill in some gaps, sit down to tea, maybe, and tell Darius the rest of the story. Azizjoon was the mystery that had called Darius to London, but the letters, and Julian’s vantagepoint on them, would give him his literary breakthrough. In exchange, Darius could smooth the situation in a way Azizjoon couldn’t. And he could be her stand-in family, like in old-world proposals where the families offer themselves for each other’s judgement.
He turned over his Sunday bulletin and scribbled with the halfpencil for prayer requests, Let’s visit Julian. He slid it over to his grand- 54 mother. She squinted, her eyes clearly weaker than she was willing to admit. Then her eyebrows shot up and she looked at him with big, happy eyes.
He regretted it instantly. What good could possibly come of visiting Julian? It was a bad impulse, a coffee rush intensified by praise songs. Azizjoon looked so joyful, guileless. It’s fine, he told himself, it’d be an adventure, a way to bond with his grandmother. But shame scorched him head to toe; he knew why he’d suggested it. He had a sudden urge to protect this fragile woman from himself. All her life she’d been used and discarded, rejected by her children. Now she stared wistfully into the middle distance, clutching his hand with all kinds of foolish trust.
That afternoon, he flipped through the photos he’d taken of Azizjoon’s old letters. He remembered himself in those years, terrified after his mother ran off, a little boy stuck caring for a fussy, traumatized father who refused to see professionals. Nothing wrong with the blood. Darius had done all his diagnosing himself, on the internet and, later, in the stacks at Firestone Library. Babak’s sisters with their six-hour screaming matches about a random day twenty years ago. Babak tiptoeing in, timidly, with sensibly timed tidbits of memory, then, without warning, speed walking to his bedroom to bury his head under a blanket.
While his grandmother cooked, he used her computer to research Julian. He had a private Instagram. Darius was tempted to log in and friend him but stopped short of typing his password on the virusriddled computer. He entered Julian’s address into Google Satellite. His house was less isolated, more modest, than his leafy photos suggested, the next garden within spitting distance. Sensing the creepiness of this, he closed the browser. The last time anyone had gone knocking on doors for Azizjoon’s potential husband, she’d been handed into domestic slavery.
Azizjoon appeared over his shoulder. “Should we call first?” Darius asked.
She shook her head. “His wife . . . Let’s just go. I feel God’s hand in this idea.” She closed her eyes and mumbled, “I’m coming, my love.”
Jesus. It was clear now that Azizjoon considered Darius’s presence game-changing. Whereas a solo visit might have been stalking, this visit would be legitimate and ordained and conclusive. He considered going on his own. Would Julian tell him what this was, then? Alone, Darius would be freer to say what was needed, to massage things, away from her eager ears.
Darius imagined walking up to the door. He imagined knocking, 55 being greeted by a benign English smile. “Can I help you?” the man in the Instagram photo would ask, kindness blooming on his reddish cheeks, teetering on his toes. Crossing the threshold, maybe he’d step on the morning paper, covering someone’s byline with his dress shoes. Was this the man reading Azizjoon’s letters? Maybe Azizjoon was writing into a void, as Darius, too, had been. Maybe her letters had gone the way of her Microsoft emails – into someone’s trash – and there was no story here. Again, Darius felt this bitter new truth: nobody was waiting out in the world.
That night Darius slept badly. He photographed more letters, but his grandmother stirred behind the thin wall, and he felt the day’s exhaustion in his shoulders. Tomorrow he’d stand his ground. He’d tell Azizjoon that going to Julian’s house was insane. He’d say that he believed her about their love, but it was wiser to let Julian come to her, given his situation. He’d apologize for suggesting the visit. I’ve never been to a church. I was overcome by something, ecstasy or joy or whatever else church is meant to inspire. Please forgive me. Maybe he’d promise to contact Julian on a future visit (wouldn’t that be nice?), or to help Azizjoon write a decent memoir.
He’d tell her that he understood what it is to be alone in this rigid family; he understood it more than most. He’d lived alone, grown up alone. “I had a very short childhood,” Azizjoon had said. Well, Darius had a short childhood too. Most nights he fell asleep to horrified thoughts of living out his days alone, without warmth or softness or kindness nearby. And years of dating had taught him that you can’t force anyone to stay. Even if you luck into a warm body and a kind face, she’ll be gone by morning, leaving you with nothing but a memory and perfumed sheets. Marriage won’t make a man stay forever, Azizjoon. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t blame her for the awful way she sent her own mother to her grave. “She deserved it,” he’d say. “She was responsible for your rape.” But that didn’t mean that all that motherly debt was Darius’s burden now. He was a lost kid, too. He’d suffered, too. His world, too, was full of nightmare.
Now the fear came over him again and he switched on the lights, tried to breathe again. He resented his grandmother for bringing back this panic. And what was Julian’s deal in all this? He wasn’t innocent. Even if Azizjoon was delusional (a big if, since she was relatively young, lucid, her memory so precise), what kind of a jerk doesn’t at least call a poor old lady to let her down gently? Caught up now in despising Julian and his confusing silence, he decided to write to Beatrice, to break things off officially, decently, with words. He stared at her humiliating final message. I’m not your mother. Anger rose up in 56 his chest again, but he stamped it down and started typing: I’m sorry we didn’t work out, and that I asked to use your flat. You’re right, you don’t owe me anything. She didn’t reply, probably never would.
In the morning, Azizjoon found a blue cotton dress in her closet. She pressed it and tried it on under a long wool cardigan, her soft curls blooming out from under a reasonably priced hat. As she ironed, she muttered softly to God, and Darius’s shame almost burned him to ash. How had he let it go so far? How did he get tangled in his own rope like this?
“Azizjoon, are you sure you want to go?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes earnest. “Of course. If God opens a door, we have to walk in.”
Briefly he wavered. What’s the harm of trying? But then, watching her get ready to meet her imaginary love, he thought of Baba’s socks, his rows of spoons, and his unchangeable ways.
“Azizjoon, I don’t feel great,” he said, “and I have my flight. Can we go next time?”
Her face fell, her eyes grew wet behind her glasses. “What next time?” she said.
“Next time I visit. I’ll come back soon, I promise.”
He remembered Baba’s bafflement when Darius’s mother went away, the months of quiet afterward. Darius understood now that he, and even Azizjoon herself, had misjudged what she truly wanted. She had been abused and raped and now she’d found a man willing to go precisely as far as she could, a safe married man to write letters to and plan and pray for, and gossip about. Her church told her that the only honest pursuit was marriage, so she pursued it. But if Darius took this quest any further, he’d break her best thing, her audience for her letters, a spiritual and literary kinship that he, too, had craved for years.
He wished he’d understood this earlier, before he’d rifled through her papers, when they were just a pair of estranged relatives catching up over Baileys and Harrod’s “Festive Afternoon.”
“But . . .” she looked down at her dress. “But we’re going. We planned to go.” Her voice grew less insistent, though, as if she were speaking only to herself. They were silent for a long time. Azizjoon dropped onto the couch and smoothed her skirt as she muttered quietly to her hands. She unpinned her hat and cast it off, her lavender perfume wafting from the underbrim.
“Next time,” Darius reassured her. “Do you want to go for a whiskey?” he asked, desperate not to lose access to this sacred space that had opened up between them, though only days before she’d hardly existed. By some miracle, he’d found this ancestor who resembled 57 him in a thousand ways, whose kinship he craved, who was a mother to him, despite everything.
But Azizjoon was in another world, her stare faraway. “I’ll order us a curry,” she muttered to no one. Darius glanced at her loafers, placed neatly by the door. He wondered if she ever wore the high heels she’d craved so badly as a girl. She lifted herself off the couch, turned on the television, and shuffled into the kitchen to make more tea. Benny Hinn boomed into the flat like a beckoning ghost. You are a little messiah on earth! Darius sat for a long time with himself – with this self, whatever it was, that was only now coming into view.
Dina Nayeri is the author of two books of creative nonfiction from Catapult, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) and Who Gets Believed? (2023), and two novels from Riverhead, A Teaspoon of Salt and Sea (2013) and Refuge (2017). Her short dramas have been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London, and her short fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Longreads, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Decameron Project (New York Times, 2020), The Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories.