The End of What We Know (Emerging Writer's Contest Winner: NONFICTION)
In nonfiction, our winner is J Lazar, for her piece “The End of What We Know.’”
Of the essay, nonfiction judge Meghan O’Rourke says, “In formally exploratory and lyrical prose, the author explores the stakes—and losses—entailed in migration. If migration is the ‘end of what we know,’ the essay asks, then how can nonfiction adequately explore it? It is hard to innovate formally in the personal essay genre, but this essay does just that, entwining research and fiction to build out a past that time has eroded. While the stakes here are intimately personal, the essay ambitiously plays with form, allowing the writer to explore the far-reaching implications of her family’s emigration from Iran, powerfully meditating on diaspora, loss, and language.”
When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? Or, when did you first call yourself a writer?
I was lucky enough to marry into an incredible extended family of artists and activists from Central Appalachia who, upon meeting me as a fearful-to-self-define twenty-year-old college student, firmly proclaimed: You MUST call yourself a writer, an artist! You must take yourself and what you create seriously in this world and take your space, because no one else will ever do it for you. I didn’t know how to listen to their voices then, but now I’m grateful for them every day.
Ten years later, I helped co-found a traveling high school and the very same message was echoed back to me by our students. They kept challenging me: If you want us to take our creative work seriously, what about you? What about yours? They were the ones who dared me outright to begin writing a book about my family stories, and it was such a bold and honest dare, I couldn’t refuse. They called me a writer, so I had to write.
Finally, I began to call myself a writer without any prompting, cajoling, or dares, when I was 37 years old. I did it because I was sitting in a doctors’ office with my newborn child in my lap and filling out the line “mother’s occupation” on one of her medical forms. I laughed. What had been occupying me besides breastfeeding and trying to keep both of us alive? Stories. Books and ink and tellings and re-tellings… The one other huge labor that woke me in the morning and filled my dreams at night. Mother’s Occupation: I put the word writer down in my own handwriting. It’s been easy to call myself a writer since.
What inspired “The End of What We Know”?
I’d heard so many tales about my great-grandparents’ migration out of Tehran. I’d heard them from the mouths of the people who did the leaving, and their children, and their children’s children … each story was mesmerizing but never complete. There was always some point at which the teller just trailed off and chose to go no further. And the stories never matched up with each other. It was like a book of fairytales, all set in vaguely the same world, same time, with overlapping characters, but always slightly askance. I began researching the history of the Middle East in the early twentieth century when I was in college … it wasn’t until many years later, when I was pregnant and I realized that I was about to become the next teller of these stories, that I wanted to find a way to write it all down: the myriad family myths, what I gleaned from historical archive and documents, even my strange dreams and questions, the made up stories I told myself as a child, everything! Just to try to get to the most complete telling I could and see what it would feel like to pass that forward.
Do you have any advice for new or aspiring writers?
Gosh, may we all be a little less lonely and a little less afraid? I think that might really be it. And it begins, I think, with a generosity of spirit extended toward ourselves and the rest out there (the writers, editors, agents, teachers, residency and fellowship directors, etc.).
This work is real and hard and humbling. Sometimes when I’m having a shit day, I try imagine the whole invisible world of us who are trying to bring stories and poems and verse into the world. All of us out here, talking to ourselves and overwhelmed and doing our best and wondering if it’s ever good enough.
I take extra care, then, to email or call someone with real openness and gratitude. To ask after their work, or their family, or the condition of their heart, to cheer on a new publication, a prize recipient, or a book I can’t wait to read … to suggest we trade haikus or dirty limericks or do something else gentle, funny, soft. When I write to literary magazines, I hope the editors know that I know what an undertaking of love their labor is. Same with agents. I like to imagine all these people in my tiny living room lying on the floor trying to breathe through living in this moment in time just like I am … because that’s all that’s really happening. We’re all out here trying to survive the hardest and bend towards the best of ourselves. To serve stories that grow a braver world. This kind of creative work demands so much, and the world doesn’t know how to honor us, so … it’s true, we have to do it for ourselves. Even if it’s just imagining us all closer together, well-fed, laughing, celebrating every lovely sentence. Even if it’s just an idea of what closeness means and then I keep walking towards it.
What projects are you working on now? Where is your writing headed?
I’m revising the full manuscript this essay is excerpted from, seeking representation for that book, and experimenting with some ideas for a new work of fiction. I’m writing a lot about my family’s international postage stamp business and the inner workings of that incredibly niche industry: the colonial roots of metered exchange, the realities of trading reams of paper perforated like hot lace and calling it a “hobby” for generations. I have some essays about postage stamps and family inheritance and migration waiting in the wings while I continue to explore a possible leap into fiction.
Migration happens at the end of what we know. Fiction happens at the end of what we know. Tunnels of light, voices of ancestors, a flicker in the eye of time.
I feel that flicker. Lights on, lights off, dry thunder in the distance. There has been no rain for weeks. We are ninety-six days into quarantine, a pandemic of global consequence pinning me, my husband, my child, the cat, to the small safety of our Vermont home. I wonder if our wooden floors wear more quickly now as we pace the rooms together, watching the wide outdoors turn from snow to melt to mud to ash. This is its own kind of passage: our stillness, our hungers, our fictions are how we survive.
Lights on, lights off. That flicker. The air smells hot like dust I shouldn’t remember, but I do.
Mimi, he said.
He was so tall. All Zivar’s children were. All of the ones that lived long enough to stand up on their own two feet. But this one, her Nedjat, he blocked the sun. Just for a moment, as he was backlit in the doorway, she couldn’t see his face at all and the boy stood like a shadow of a man beneath the crumbling clay archway, shoulders square, smooth chin jutted out just slightly. What a beautiful boy, what a terrible waste, she thought but said nothing.
Mimi, shall I go get the water?
She had no daughters left, though she guessed the one growing inside her was again, sadly, a girl. The girls never made it long. And so, instead, this one, her favorite, fetched the water and set the fire each day, tucked the other sons in at night. She nodded. He was eleven. Yes, water. Her hands continued to quietly scour the surface of the naked bird in the bowl on her lap, finding and pulling any bit of cuticle or feather, smoothing the skin. By the time she was twenty-six, Zivar had birthed eight children and buried four: one during childbirth, two from hunger, and the last from fever. She sold her breastmilk to keep the remaining children, and herself, alive.
My own child is asleep in the other room. For months after she was born, I thought neither of us might survive her birth. My desire for us to live thrashed out of me, and my own body writhed and pawed at the heavy blanket of my despair. I sobbed and shook and leaked. At night, I lay next to my daughter, counting her breaths as my body, a ship trying to right itself, seeped and rocked. We fed and changed, she and I, every two hours.
We survived. I don’t think that’s needless to say. Other mothers and children did not.
We are toddlers now, somehow thriving here at the edge of what we know, navigating multiple, entwined global crises together. Learning to walk, rarely leaving the house. Today, cautiously, as if already aware of the enormous stakes of something, she took three steps in the thin grass of our front yard and then dropped to her knees, solemn. I grinned, willing us both joy, and I kept grinning until she grinned back. In my mind, though, I was remembering something else. A chalky taste, smoke, air thick like bread. How the only thing that kept me tethered to sanity during our darkest days was the weight of her body against my chest. How I used to wake terrified that she would be gone.
Ifshan was huddled in the front of the house against the clay wall, and when Nedjat left the house, willing his mother to come outside, he stopped to consider his brother. Head down on his arms, face pressed to the wall, Ifshan emitted only small, sad sounds, a low hum as the boy tried to soothe himself. When a child felt sick with fever, it was forbidden for his siblings to come near or touch him. Even parents tried to keep as much distance as they could bear to try to prevent contamination. Still, Nedjat could not resist, and he instinctively placed his hand between the small child’s shoulders. Heat. Damp, clammy, searing heat, the body shuddering in its skin. Nedjat closed his eyes. His mother would be out in a minute. He tried to imagine cool air rushing down his arm and through his fingertips, tried to imagine his own slow, steady breath cooling his brother’s rabbit lungs.
It’s okay, he murmured, rubbing a small, gentle circle like their mother had done when he was younger. It’s okay. But the little boy’s whimpers just grew louder. Nedjat withdrew and took up the jug. I’ll get you some cool water, Ifshan. I’ll be right back. Maman is coming. She’s coming. It’s okay.
Zivar, from inside the door, watched Nedjat secure a muslin wrap around his face. She watched him attempt to soothe his brother and watched him stride down the narrow street before she stepped out to Ifshan and lifted his shivering body to her chest. A wet, empty sack, he clung there, light as a bird. She felt him shake. She felt the whole world shake as she carried him into the house, untangled his thin arms and legs, and gently washed his body with a wet cloth. She felt herself shake as she pressed the child’s face to her chest, coaxing him to take the breast.
Now there was only this thin whimper, barely audible, a high, light moan in the back of his dry throat. He turned his head from the breast, eyes closed, breath shallow, again and again. And again and again, she turned him back and parted his lips with her nipple.
Years later, Nedjat would say that this was the day he decided to leave the narrow, ash-filled streets of Sarchal, the ghetto of his birth, leave Tehran all together, even if it meant leaving his mother. He was there at the well at the edge of the map, and he dropped a bucket into its dark channel. He heard the bucket hit water far below, and something in him stirred. On the other end of the darkness was life. As he pulled handfuls of rope to the surface, Nedjat imagined drawing his entire family free.
He returned to find Zivar, tears streaming down her face, stubbornly nursing his littlest brother. By sunrise, the boy was dead, slung across her lap while his mother just stared and stared, eyes unblinking. Nedjat woke early. Without a word, he rose and moved around his snoring father and brothers. He added wood to the ash of their fire and then went to fetch his aunt.
It was his aunt, gaunt and gravelly voiced, who would, in just a few short weeks, provide Nedjat his way out. During the few months before Ifshan’s death, her own breast had grown hard and strange, tender and hot to the touch. Cancer, his uncle had whispered to Zivar across the table late one night while the rest of them, save Nedjat, snored away on their mattresses. Nedjat lay there, pressed between his father and his older brothers, holding his breath, waiting, listening, watching.
His mother and her brother had always been close. It was his uncle who always brought extra food and salt from his travels, wool for Zivar to make warm clothes, assurances when her own husband had none. Her sister-in-law, a steady woman with a low voice, had birthed five children, lost only one, but over the last year had grown rapidly thinner. The heat, the drought, Nedjat’s uncle was trying to explain with his hands, the shit bread the government is feeding us. They had all assumed she was struggling the same as the rest, no food, no rest, but hard like—his uncle, unable to find more words, made a fist and held it up for Zivar to see. Zivar shook her head and turned to her sister-in-law who offered her breast for inspection.
Heat? Compresses? Packed curry leaves? Date palm oil? Massage? Zivar’s hands ran gently down the swell as she rattled off everything that helped when her own breasts were bound hard, the milk ducts inflamed and furious, but his aunt just sadly nodded her head at her suggestions.
When his uncle mentioned Paris, Nedjat expected to hear his mother sigh, and she did. When his uncle felt desperate, he would dream of the time he had spent in Europe decades earlier and decree how everything would be better if only they were all there now. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Iranians migrated to Paris for school or business. He had been there, had seen the incredible city, what it held for their family. Zivar would sigh and gently change the subject every time her brother began his devotional. Have you heard anything about the tobacco tax? Will it double like they say?
But this time, she didn’t say anything, and the silence that followed stretched long enough that Nedjat wondered if, perhaps, he had fallen asleep. He thought perhaps he was dreaming when he heard his mother say quietly, You should go.
With all the children? In this dream, his uncle’s voice should have been incredulous, joyful. Instead, it was heavy, practical. You know how much work Monir is. Could we travel with a child who is both blind and lame? Would she make it? And what then, in Paris? How would we …?
That silence again. Nedjat felt a prickle rise from his arms to his neck. Sometimes it happens like this: the big moments in our lives, the ones that will later ring of courage and audacity, happen more by instinct than will. He was moving as if by reflex, gently pushing himself out of the sheets. He was already padding across the room into the dim light of the lantern before he knew what he was doing.
Uncle?
Nedjat, I thought you were sleeping. Zivar moved to push him back toward bed but he shrugged her off.
I was, but I woke up. Uncle—
Nedjat, pesar, go back to bed, I’m talking with your mother.
I know—Uncle, I can marry Monir.
Nedjat knew that Monir was ugly and blind and lame. She had one leg that was two inches longer than the other, and she loped like a broken table in the street. She used a cane, for balance, and to help her see the space around her. She was always stumbling and falling, her face always scratched; she was always dirty.
These were not her worst qualities. No, the biggest issue, Nedjat knew from listening to his mother and aunt, was her personality.
That child complains nonstop. Last week she was mad that I told her she was lazy, and she threw the entire bowl of soaking rice to the ground. I made her pick up every grain. Moaning all the time that she was blind, and how could she find the tiny rice … Idiot, then don’t throw it on the ground in the first place!
In Sarchal, complaining was an offense. Nedjat understood that if you couldn’t walk or see, or were born with your face misshapen or pock-marked, no one could blame you, only God. But being insufferable? There was no forgiveness.
Nedjat had only witnessed Monir a handful of times; she rarely left the house. The last time he saw her, boys were teasing her from the side of the road while she followed her mother and sisters, lagging behind with her cane. Nedjat remembered thinking that a slightly longer cane, or even two canes, would probably help Monir more easily. There are solutions for most things, he thought.
He repeated the words, I can marry Monir.
Everyone started whispering furiously and stopped only because Nedjat’s father rolled over in his sloppy, drooling sleep and grunted. Silence again then until the snoring resumed. And then Nedjat spoke.
Listen, Amu, if you are going to Europe to fix Amme, you are going to need help. Monir can’t even take care of herself. I will travel with you and help with the others. Khanbaba and I can make sure the little ones and Monir make the journey. Once we are in Paris, and I can work in the marketplace, then Monir and I will be married. It is the easiest way.
Bah! His uncle said, throwing up his hands and turning away. This eleven-year-old giving a sudden speech in the middle of the night, talking about markets of which he knows nothing, thousands of miles away.
It was Zivar who spoke next. The conservatives don’t like what the Shah is saying. They don’t want us all to be equal, they want to keep their power.
Zivar, his uncle’s voice broke in with a note of reassurance. It’s true. They don’t want to be equal with Jews, rats like us. All this business about the new future, the new nation. Zivar shook her head and sighed again, a different sigh, and then looked wearily at her son.
Nedjat? You want to go?
The two of them faced each other for a long moment, mother and son. In each other’s eyes was all there was to say.
We must get out of here.
There is no place on Earth safe for us.
Mother, I will find it.
Through the Smithsonian and Getty online museum collections, I scour photographs of Jews in the ghetto, the mahaleh in Tehran, from this time of our ancestors. Camel hair and mud and bleak adobe bricks and dust. The faces of children match the texture of the streets, the dust-clogged sky, the heaviness of the worked muslin and wool around their shoulders. I wonder how many days passed between the dark night when they agreed and the dark morning when Nedjat kissed his mother and brothers and, yes, even his father goodbye and walked alongside his uncle’s wagon out of the city of his birth, away from this place and time forever.
I know that he walked. On my own two feet, he would tell me, years later, leaning back into his straight-backed chair and lifting each slippered foot, one at a time. They walked for months. West through Tabriz and on to Turkey. Into the mountains and across the desert plain of Anatolia to Lake Van, the soil there steeped with the still-wet blood of the Armenian women and children who had been marched to the edge of the Euphrates, their bodies carved, ravaged, and then, unceremoniously, pushed in. They walked through abandoned camps, past mass graves; they came near towns so submerged in disease that they knew by the black flags and fires to walk wide around and keep going. Eventually, in Istanbul, they rested. I think they may have even managed to sell enough muslin and silver to catch a ride on a train for part of the remaining journey through eastern Europe. Two months, my Pepe shrugs when I asked him how long he walked, maybe three, four? We had no sense of time—we were just walking. There was no point in keeping time until we got there. But when we arrived, ma chérie, that is the important part of the story—when we arrived!
This is the story I have held in memory for most of my life. For over thirty years, I have closed my eyes and seen my great-grandparents, betrothed children, charting the desert with only the unknown before them. I have walked with them.
But my great aunt Janine says it didn’t really happen like that. Her parents, Nedjat and Monir, did not leave from Tehran together. They did not get married until they were both in Paris, in 1931. Nedjat was probably almost seventeen, Monir more like twenty-one. And Monir, she was lovely and gentle. Blind as a bat, but capable and funny. Her limp and the canes didn’t come till she was much older. There was nothing like that. She played the guitar. She loved to sing. Nedjat liked her. He really, really liked her.
Why did I ever believe otherwise, and believe so completely? she wants to know. The truth is, no one would talk of this time when I was young, or, if they did, they would only skim the emotional surface, let the story be told by the absence of language: a deep sigh at the dinner table, a sad smile, those times were hard, ma chérie. They served me extra rice.
And so I did what children do: I listened around the edges, I collected scraps, I assembled what I could. My grandmother Christiane’s characterization of her mother-in-law, of Meme: difficult woman, made her husband do everything for her. The images of desert migrations I saw in movies. My family’s embarrassed jokes about our intermarried ancestors; the assurance that it was simply a business deal. I knit a family narrative from these yarns, the assumptions and biases of third and fourth generations removed. Others who weren’t there and had also interpreted the heavy sighs around the table. Others who had made their own histories out of the silences handed down.
Some rain has finally come, and I telephone our farmer friends. Weeeee! I shout into my end of the line. Can’t talk; Noami is breathless in the phone receiver. Her baby and mine are both squalling in the background, and we laugh. We’re getting rain! she shouts the obvious. The line is thick with the sound of rain and our daughters’ voices. We hang up, voices drowned by these blessings.
Later in the morning, Aunt Janine calls. Janine, whose hair and skin are smooth and dark and beautiful. She must be in her eighties but looks fifty and no one says. Janine, who takes family and history very seriously but is always smiling and speaking in a beautiful singsong voice. She would greet me by putting both hands on my belly and humming, When oh when will you be giving us a baby?
Since my grandfather died, Janine is the oldest of Nedjat’s children. She lives in Plainview, a suburban hamlet in the very middle of Long Island, just ten to fifteen minutes away from each of her children’s families. She calls now to check in on me and the baby and to ask if my father is well because he has not returned her calls. She asks about my writing, and when I tell her what I’m working on, she tells me I’ve got the story all wrong, again. Meme Zivar traveled with Pepe! They left after the pandemic, in the 20s. He never left his mother—it was she who refused to leave him! He was her youngest, her sweet boy, the only baby left. The other two were already married.
The other two. We don’t name the nine that didn’t make it. Nine or ten, no one is exactly sure how many babies Zivar lost. Everyone tells the story, everyone tells it differently, omitting what we prefer not to say, changing the dates, coloring the surface to tell it best. Everyone’s voices echo in my head.
It wasn’t 1920, it was 1918.
What about the father?
Whose father?
HIS father.
Oh, he was a drunk, a menace.
He was pious and always on pilgrimage.
He was a businessman, through and through.
We don’t speak of him. We don’t remember his name, that one. No one knows his name.
Staring into the blissful prism of this rain, I don’t interrupt Janine’s clarifications to tell her that I know. That, though she has already explained her account, the separate paths of Pepe and Meme’s migrations, the vague time stamps and maps of their independent journeys, my mind still insists on starting with its own version of the story. The truth is, neither of us was there. Neither of us knows, and yet these silenced stories somehow still continue to find their way to us. All of us are unreliable narrators. Children of history trying merely to divine its truths.
The phone line crackles with some far-off midsummer thunder, and my child presses her face against my neck. Someone was there. Someone lived to tell the tale and then chose not to tell. I hold the phone between my cheek and my shoulder so that my hand is free to smooth the back of that tiny, burrowing head. Aunt Janine is working through some math regarding ages and dates of changed citizenship. She is certainly more likely to be accurate than I am, but I can’t help but marvel over how she and I are both stuck here, muddling through, our everyday lives and prejudices coloring in the lines of our dreamwork. For thirty-some-odd years, I believed our family’s migration story was the tale of one young man to save us all. Her father, broad shoulders, the world strapped to his back, leading his family through the desert. But if what Janine says is true, then it was Monir, blind and unwed, who went first.
I can close my eyes and find the story. I can see her mother. Monir was the reason that they left Tehran, and they left when she was just ten. Ten years old and blind, lying atop bolts of muslin and silk in a wagon drawn by mules, trying to imagine the idea of color and the idea of the sky. She traveled with her father and her brother, Khanbaba, for roughly two months. They went the northern route, through what is now Armenia and Azerbaijan, and into Russia. What she remembers from her travels is what she could discern by the bump and rumble of the wagon, how the air felt, how cold it was at night. Somewhere along the way, it stopped smelling like the hot dust and funk of the city and started to smell like jasmine, and then it stopped smelling and it began to get cold and rocky, sometimes very cold. Her father carried her on his back sometimes to keep her warm.
They left Tehran in March of 1920. Springtime in Tehran so that their northern travels would coincide with warm weather, the possibility of finding food. They left midway through what would, decades later, be called the Great Persian Famine, the first recorded climate catastrophe of the Middle East, that swelled and bloomed on the tail end of a global pandemic not unlike our own. They left in the early morning, bellies swollen with determination, not knowing the wheel of history was turning for all.
Monir had been hungry for as long as she could remember, and, though everyone said now was worse than usual, she just assumed that the empty feeling in her stomach was normal. The same as having arms and legs. The same as being able to do what everyone called “see.”
In just another year, the Qajar dynasty that had ruled Persia for one hundred and forty years would crumble in the face of a coup when a Cossack-style militia brigade took the streets of the capital. With the city leveled by disease and starvation, the brigade, dressed in formal dark uniforms and European handlebar mustaches, met little to no resistance as they marched into the burning streets of Tehran. For years, Russia and then Britain trained and maintained control over this peasant army in the rural hinterlands of the Persian empire and used it to do its bidding, destabilizing the government, sowing civil unrest and ethnic tension, and wiping out any resistance to foreign colonial powers.
Taoon. That’s what they called it when an entire family was sick. Monir knew the smell of it in the mahaleh, hot and thick, putrid ash pouring through the streets. They burned the houses when an entire family was lost. Sometimes they burned the bodies right in the houses, Khanbaba told her—the babies, even. Sometimes they just burn it all. The religious elders of Sarchal were scrambling amid the flames, offering blessings, singing in the streets. They trained children to give burial rites to their siblings so that even the littlest souls could find their way in the after.
Monir knew that the ash had caused her blindness, but she couldn’t remember a time before, a time with what everyone called seeing. They told her about her sight: how, as a baby girl, she had deep brown eyes, clear and bright; how she would laugh when someone peered into her face and waggled their tongue. They told her that dust and ash had done this—stuck to her eyes while her mother carried her in the streets.
This was before everyone knew to stay indoors, before the air was so thick that no one went out without a face covering. Monir’s eyes thickened and clouded. Then came the puss and the flies. Her parents had scraped at that infection, using salts and sugars to gently rub at the screaming infant’s eyes. They didn’t know they were tearing apart her tiny corneas. Then they packed them tight with astringent tea leaves. They didn’t know they blinded her. By the age of three, she was fully unable to see.
In Paris you would see, her father had muttered, Monir in his lap, stroking her dark hair. He stayed by her side for every new and different treatment, crawling in his skin at her suffering while his wife had to leave the house and retreat to her sister-in-law’s arms. They tried teas and the ointments, wrapped her tiny forehead tight with muslin and forced the bitter herbs down her throat.
We love you, we love you, we love you, her father had choked into her hair while she sobbed throughout rounds of hijamat and fasd, traditional cupping and bleeding. As the healer used hot clay cups to draw Monir’s vessels to the surface of her back and neck and then, using quick firm strokes, cut at the skin to bleed the blindness out, her father had held her down to the table, his face buried against hers, both of them crying.
I don’t want to see, Monir finally declared one night after dinner. She must have been only eight, maybe nine. Whatever this seeing was, this thing that they swore she could once do and now, no longer could, she didn’t want it. No more, she whispered, no more. And her father and mother had nodded, but of course she couldn’t see. Real doctors, we need real doctors, her father muttered as her mother murmured, Alright, it’s alright, my love.
Monir felt that the darkness was welcome, the gentlest of her senses in a world oppressively hot and stinking with the city’s dead. Her father bartered for a tiny guitar, and she taught herself to play. In the evenings, when her siblings were tired and restless, she sang them silly songs and sad songs and told stories about strange adventures they would have in their sleep. This is just life, she would tell them, this small blind girl. It’s okay. It’s not so bad. You can even tend the fire! she would tell them. Something she was never allowed to do.
In Paris, her father said again and again when he returned from the marketplace, and at night she heard him whisper hoarsely to her mother, We can’t live like this. We are all going to die here in this city of trash. But her mother stayed calm. She too was sick, a phantom ache deep in her chest, but had no desire to pursue some elusive cure in a foreign land. This is our home. You think there isn’t disease everywhere?
But Monir—
Monir is fine. You heard her.
But in Paris she wouldn’t have to be blind—the doctors, they—
Wake up, her mother sneered. You keep saying Paris, Paris, Paris! Stop wasting your breath.
Monir didn’t like to hear her mother speak like that, and she could feel the sadness on his breath for days. I am worried about papa, she confided one afternoon as they rinsed the rice. Silence hung between them as they circled their hands in the bowl of cold water, the thin grains slipping between Monir’s fingers, her mother’s breath held so that all she heard was the spinning of the water. Finish rinsing the rice so I can fix the fire. She reached around in her consciousness to find her father in the room. He wasn’t there.
It wasn’t much longer until her father made the announcement at dinner. Khanbaba, Monir, and he would be leaving for Europe that spring.
I’ve written to our cousin. He has room for us, he will make room. It was quiet then, but Monir could feel her older brother nodding beside her and then quietly, under the table, he took her hand. Like this, she knew that the two had already discussed this plan.
Monir, her father’s voice trembled as he addressed her, in Paris you won’t have to be blind. I promise you, the doctors there will know what can be done.
Her brother squeezed her hand, and she felt it in her stomach and then in her throat. She could feel his expectation, she could hear her father’s hope, she could smell her mother’s anger, and in her darkness, she could see the blinding light of her own small terror. Her mouth tasted like chalk, the ash of the city pressed tight like bread on her tongue. They waited, all of them, for her to speak.
Monir? The pleading in her father’s thick voice was unmistakable. Slowly, tears began to slide down Monir’s face.
Now see what you’ve done! Her mother hissed and slammed her hands into the table as she rose. You are such a fool. And with that she fled from the table, taking the smallest child with her, leaving the rest in silence.
I don’t want them to hurt me, Monir finally burst out and then her tears fell fast and heavy from her blind eyes, sobs filling the space in the room that her mother had left behind. She felt herself lost in her own tears, floating in a bowl of them, sailing out on a sea; in the distance, the tall outline of the cities her father described in stories. She could see them. Wasn’t this enough?
Her father gathered her in his arms and rocked her as he had when she was a baby, rocking and shushing and holding her tight. She didn’t remember falling asleep in his arms; she only knew when she awoke that she was still pressed against his chest, his forearms holding her still. She listened to a gentle snore rise and fall. She smelled the tobacco smoke on his skin and, unlike the ash in air, it did not make her gag.
Papa, tracing a hand along his belly, her bed, tapping him gently. Papa?
Shhh. He drew circles on her back. Sleep now, sleep.
We will come back for the others, right?
Of course, my love, of course. Shhh, now.
She didn’t know if he was awake, but she believed him.
Drip, drap, drop, the sound of fat rain on our windows. Everyone says something different. There are no birth records, no papers. Pepe and Meme celebrate their birthdays in January, and why not? A new year in America seems as good a time as any. When I asked how old they were at their birthday parties, Meme would wave me off and Pepe would smile. Old, he’d say. How old, chérie? Why, too old. Much too old to count. That old.
Janine says they had no idea. The doctors guessed that they both died in their nineties, Meme being some years senior and dying twelve years before Pepe. Janine says they left Tehran after the pandemic and before the coup took hold. Janine says they were both eleven years old. Or, thirteen. Nine. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Why keep track of ages and years when no one expects to make it? Isn’t it enough measure simply to survive?
Aunt Janine laughs deeply, and I notice that her voice doesn’t turn brittle at the end. She was just seven years old when Pepe and Meme hid her in that Catholic school in Paris so that the German soldiers would not find her. The nuns pushed her telltale nose into a book and stood in front of her, daring the young, terrified soldiers to question their God. She held her breath till the men in green uniforms left the classroom, clicking their boots on the waxed floors as they went. She does not know how many days she spent holding her breath; she knows only that now she breathes.
Janine tells me that Pepe migrated to Europe years after Meme traveled with her father, that he did travel with his own mother and Monir’s, whose breast was hard with cancer. Meme Zivar asked him to come so that the two women would not have to make the journey into the unknown alone.
My aunt Janine tells me many things about my great-grandparents, but she tells only pieces of her own childhood suffering during the war: her time in Catholic school, how she learned to hold her secret Jewishness and the protective layer of their Christ. She is more likely to share stories about her older brother, my grandfather. Those years, the war in Paris, she tells me, were harder for him.
One final story upon which everyone seems to agree. Meme Zivar died in 1978 in Queens, New York, Nedjat and Janine at her bedside. She was old, uncountable old, that old, when she passed. My father’s childhood memories of her include cigar smoking and poker playing, a dirty sense of humor and a method of crossing Queens Boulevard: midday, no traffic lights, blessing herself before stepping off the curb into moving traffic, cane waving above her head, cursing in Farsi at the top of her lungs.
She remained this indomitable spirit until her final year, when her mind began to collapse. They brought a hospital bed into the house and Pepe and Janine took turns caring for Zivar, the oldest mother of our family. But she could not rest. She turned in her hospital bed as if it were a cage, she yelled nonsense in Farsi. Where are they? She gripped the bars of the bed and pulled, whimpering into the night. Where are they?
It was Janine who thought of bringing her one of the grandchildren’s dolls. It was molded plastic, the eyes blinked, the limbs fixed. She loved the children, especially the babies. Janine can’t tell me this part without getting choked up, and I can barely write it. Zivar clung to that hard plastic baby doll, refused to give it up when the aides came to help her bathe or when it was time go to the toilet. She pressed it to her breast and rocked and sang to it at night. She smiled into its beady glass eyes and told it dooset daram, dooset daram, I love you. She died with that plastic baby wrapped in both arms.
It is pouring now, and I feel my mind like the newly saturated soil: soft, brimming, giving way. Tomorrow will be dry again, and my child will practice how to walk. Tomorrow, cities will burn, and the dead will be counted once more. Tomorrow, my daughter and I will wake to a new day living at the very end of what we know. We are always at the end of what we know.
Tomorrow, I will write another version of this story, the one where everyone eventually dies, but before that happens, they live to decide whether or not to tell the tale. They make milk. They make love. They tell tales. They leave home. They scrabble across the crust of this hard, hard Earth. They survive.
A set of archival images and family photographs influenced this essay. To view these images, please visit jenlazar.com.