She liked being the smart one, and she had a big imagination and a wicked little heart. Sometimes I too blame Mahtab for abandoning Saba, who was so much more the dependent one. I just can’t help it—may God forgive me—but without her sister, Saba has lost her magic. I remember all this now that the distance between them isn’t measured by tiny fingers or by gossiping lips to eager ears, but by so much earth and water. How much earth, Saba asked me once after the big loss of half her family. How many scoops of my teaspoon would get me all the way from here to there? She held that spoon poised against the earth as if she were ready to start digging to her sister. She knew just how to break my heart.
“He isn’t paid enough,” Mahtab said that day about the Sun and Moon Man. “The sun is hot, especially to carry by hand.” And Saba knew it was true, because at the end of every tale, the storyteller is required to do the truth-and-lies poem, the one that rhymes “yogurt” and “yogurt soda” ( maast and doogh ) with “truth” and “lies” ( raast and doroogh) .
Up we went and there was maast, Down we came and there was doogh. And our story was doroogh (lie!).
Or:
Up we went and there was doogh, Down we came and there was maast, And our story was raast (truth!).
We mothers know to respect this poem, and so when we tell made-up stories like Leyli and Majnoon, or the city mouse and village mouse, we do the first version, and when we tell the history of the Prophet Muhammad or King Xerxes we do the second. After telling her story about the hiking trip and the Sun and Moon Man, Mahtab did the second version, and so she said her story was true. That’s why Mahtab wasn’t a real storyteller, little rule-breaking rat. Now Saba has learned her sister’s lies, because Reza told me that after her Mahtab story in the alley in Rasht, Saba did the second version too.
Chapter Two
AUTUMN 1984
T
he autumns of Saba’s adolescence are spent battling the Gilan sky. She is ever suspicious of the wet, insatiable months after most of Iran’s rice crop is harvested from lush fields. These dewy shalizar mornings have a way of distracting from truth—everything bursting out in eerie contrast and forcing the people to crave the fresh and the new, to pretend nothing has been lost since the last harvest. In the fall, leaves in a hundred shades of orange and red break into little pieces and mix with airborne drops of the Caspian. They create a vapor that slithers into noses and invades bodies, causing people to forget all but the sea and its fruits. It makes them ravenous for fish and rice. It erases the memory of last year’s sorrows and faraway relatives. But not for Saba, who has been in the deep parts of the water. The constant rainfall frightens her. She is baffled by the white nimbus of mist that hangs just below the top of the Alborz Mountains and above the sea (at the point where the two seem to crash into each other), and by the stilt houses disappearing in both directions, their tops and bottoms lost in water and in cloud.
Every year the vision of her mother in the airport lounge holding Mahtab’s hand grows hazier. Was she standing by the gate or in the security line? Saba used to be sure that it was at the gate, but now she knows that it couldn’t have been, because Saba and her father didn’t make it past security after she ran off to chase Mahtab. And what was her mother wearing? A manteau? A scarf? She used to think that it was her favorite green one, but a few months ago Saba found the fading scarf in the back of a storage closet. Then, just as she was on the verge of releasing the vision to the chasm of forgotten daydreams and spotty memories, she stumbled on a copy of her mother’s visa to America. Proof . But of what? Saba conjures the airport image often and the faces never blur. Her mother and sister rushing toward the plane and floating away into an oblivion filled with magazines and rock music
“He isn’t paid enough,” Mahtab said that day about the Sun and Moon Man. “The sun is hot, especially to carry by hand.” And Saba knew it was true, because at the end of every tale, the storyteller is required to do the truth-and-lies poem, the one that rhymes “yogurt” and “yogurt soda” ( maast and doogh ) with “truth” and “lies” ( raast and doroogh) .
Up we went and there was maast, Down we came and there was doogh. And our story was doroogh (lie!).
Or:
Up we went and there was doogh, Down we came and there was maast, And our story was raast (truth!).
We mothers know to respect this poem, and so when we tell made-up stories like Leyli and Majnoon, or the city mouse and village mouse, we do the first version, and when we tell the history of the Prophet Muhammad or King Xerxes we do the second. After telling her story about the hiking trip and the Sun and Moon Man, Mahtab did the second version, and so she said her story was true. That’s why Mahtab wasn’t a real storyteller, little rule-breaking rat. Now Saba has learned her sister’s lies, because Reza told me that after her Mahtab story in the alley in Rasht, Saba did the second version too.
Chapter Two
AUTUMN 1984
T
he autumns of Saba’s adolescence are spent battling the Gilan sky. She is ever suspicious of the wet, insatiable months after most of Iran’s rice crop is harvested from lush fields. These dewy shalizar mornings have a way of distracting from truth—everything bursting out in eerie contrast and forcing the people to crave the fresh and the new, to pretend nothing has been lost since the last harvest. In the fall, leaves in a hundred shades of orange and red break into little pieces and mix with airborne drops of the Caspian. They create a vapor that slithers into noses and invades bodies, causing people to forget all but the sea and its fruits. It makes them ravenous for fish and rice. It erases the memory of last year’s sorrows and faraway relatives. But not for Saba, who has been in the deep parts of the water. The constant rainfall frightens her. She is baffled by the white nimbus of mist that hangs just below the top of the Alborz Mountains and above the sea (at the point where the two seem to crash into each other), and by the stilt houses disappearing in both directions, their tops and bottoms lost in water and in cloud.
Every year the vision of her mother in the airport lounge holding Mahtab’s hand grows hazier. Was she standing by the gate or in the security line? Saba used to be sure that it was at the gate, but now she knows that it couldn’t have been, because Saba and her father didn’t make it past security after she ran off to chase Mahtab. And what was her mother wearing? A manteau? A scarf? She used to think that it was her favorite green one, but a few months ago Saba found the fading scarf in the back of a storage closet. Then, just as she was on the verge of releasing the vision to the chasm of forgotten daydreams and spotty memories, she stumbled on a copy of her mother’s visa to America. Proof . But of what? Saba conjures the airport image often and the faces never blur. Her mother and sister rushing toward the plane and floating away into an oblivion filled with magazines and rock music
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