“Do you know what ‘assassinated’ means?” I asked her. My doll listened to my whispers, her black-bean eyes attentive. “Listen, you must make sure men don’t see your ribboned pigtail.” Nishtman fell asleep in the middle of my lecture.
THERE WAS NO school the next day, so Chia and I were allowed to sleep in. Mama boiled potatoes for breakfast and lunch and left for work early, stepping over Baba, who was still snoring in the hallway. After I woke, I checked on my treasure in the cabinet. The grease on the countertop glistened in the daylight, and cobwebs clung to the corners where the ceiling met the wall. My apricot potion, however, tasted just perfect. All I needed to do was to wait for Baba to leave the house. I started doodling in the living room across from the kitchen, where I could keep an eye on my stash. Soon Chia was up too, playing with his toys.
“Ehhhhhh!” he shrieked as one of his toy cars braked to avoid an accident, but then: “Boooom!”
“Your cars sound like horses.” I started drawing what looked like a horse, at least to me.
“Your holse looks like a chicken!” he announced, unable to pronounce his r’s.
“Roll your tongue,” I said. “Say ‘rrrrrrrr.’”
“Llllll.”
“So cute!” I splashed a kiss on his chubby cheek.
Around noon, Baba finally dragged himself up off the floor and showered. The aroma of lavender soap, which masked the strong scent of his body, filled my nostrils as he went to the kitchen to make tea, boil an egg, and gulp down an aspirin. His beige towel covered only his lower body, putting the map on his back on display yet again. I stared at the network of scars from repeated lashings. The sight of them pierced my gut like the point of a sliver blade. I looked into Chia’s eyes, and he into mine, but we never talked about the lines cut into Baba’s flesh.
He went up to the attic and came down a few minutes later, changed into his loose-fitting gray trousers and a brown sleeveless undershirt. I’d noticed that fewer of Baba’s things remained inside the bedroom he used to share with Mama. Positioning a pillow behind his back, he sat down with a steaming cup of tea in his favorite spot in the house: on the handmade rug, one of the few things of his mother’s he still had. Firm and finely woven, it was made of symmetrical knots of crimson, white, and blue thread over a wool foundation; its many hues tied together our otherwise mismatched cast-off furniture.
Baba spread a tablecloth over the rug and fed us potato salad. His face was drawn and pale, but otherwise he looked recuperated from the night before.
“Have you had any more nightmares?” he asked me absentmindedly as he chewed. I nodded and started to reply, but he raised the old radio to his ear and turned the dial. It emitted a harsh buzz of static that bored into my eardrums. The government jammed foreign radio signals.
“Baba’s radio sounds like a flock of cicadas with sore throats,” I whispered.
Chia burst into loud laughter.
“Hush!” Baba warned.
“—Sadegh Sharafkandi, the secretary general of a Kurdish-Iranian opposition party, was assassinated yesterday in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, Germany,” a cold voice recited. Baba covered his eyes with his hairy hands; his veins stood out. “This comes just three years after his predecessor was killed in Vienna in 1989. The gunmen are believed to be working for the Iranian government . . .”
The radio droned on. I hummed a lullaby, wanting to drown out the broadcast and protect Baba from the news. He didn’t hear me, just sat motionless, jaw clenched and face ashen. I motioned to Chia, and we ran out into the backyard. The skinny cherry trees were turning orange and yellow. We wanted to get to the fruit before the birds and worms did, to bite into the cherries without washing them first and snigger at our little act of defiance. But there was no fruit left on the branches.
“Is Baba okay?” Chia asked, kicking the dust.
“I don’t know.”
“Why do they want to kill us, Leila?”
“I think they want our land.”
“But where do we go if we give them our land?” He shook his tiny fists.
“Maybe the underworld?”
“If we lived under the earth, Baba wouldn’t be sad?” Chia tilted his head, his brows rising.
“I want to empty Baba’s bottles and fill them up with water,” I whispered, and we giggled. “Hey, be careful never to mention the bottles at school, okay?”
Children were initiated into an Iranian double life starting as young as kindergarten, when teachers and government agents began questioning students about possible non-Islamic activities that may happen at home. Chia nodded.
“Let’s water the trees so they give us cherries again,” I offered.
His chubby legs, arms, and cheeks jiggled as he ran to fetch me the water hose. I corroborated what everyone else used to say: “You are bitable.”
He frowned. “Biting’s bad.”
I grabbed the hose and started telling Chia the movie I was directing in my head. “Once upon a time, there was a king who said to his son, ‘You should go and kill your sister. She is a bad girl.’”
Chia tilted his head and frowned. “She’s a bad girl?”
“She wasn’t, but the vizier wanted to cut her head off.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he had Alzheimer’s.”
His hazel eyes darkened in puzzlement. “What’s Alzheimer’s?”
“Like Grandma. Now she doesn’t even like you.”
I was too lazy to recite all the details of the story, and I didn’t want the girl in my version of this tale to endure so many tests before she could prove her innocence, but I still wanted her to meet the prince.
“So the daughter told her father . . .” I let go of the hose and held onto the trunk of the only cherry tree that the water had not yet reached, turning in slow circles around it. “She told her Baba, ‘I will let you kill me, but you should listen to me first.’ When she spoke before the court, she showed them all what a hypocrite the vizier was. So her brave words defeated the evil man, her father loved her, and a prince who was present as a reporter fell in love with her courage.”
I stopped circling the tree and laughed at the thought of a prince as a journalist and at Chia’s confused expression. I ran around the yard, and he chased after me. We laughed.
“Don’t soak the trees.” Baba’s hoarse voice announced his presence before he appeared in the yard, carrying a light jacket over his arm.
Chia explained, “We’re watering the trees to make the cherries grow.”
Baba turned off the tap. “Chawshin gian, you’re drowning the trees with the water and me with the utility bill.”
I wanted to reply, “At least we didn’t forget about them,” but my nerve failed me. I was nothing like the girls in my stories.
“Leila, watch your brother, and stay in the yard.” Baba shut the gate behind him. Chia pouted and looked to me to gauge my reaction.
I didn’t speak, didn’t cry, didn’t sulk. I jumped on my bicycle. Shrieking like a banshee, I pedaled around the water faucet in the middle of the tiled backyard hundreds of times. Chia cycled after me.
Once I was sure Baba was far enough away, I told Chia about my plans to earn enough money to buy a camera. He could be my model when I became an award-winning photographer, if he helped me. We fetched the bowl of soaked apricots from the kitchen along with an assortment of chipped and cracked mugs, neatly arranged them on top of two boxes, and waited in front of our door for passersby.