Aziz always sat beside him and made sure his plate never wanted for anything. He did not talk much, but held his wife’s hand as much as possible. You can already feel it, can’t you, in all this happiness, that some horrible darkness perched outside the houses watching Aziz.
And those nights in the saffron fields would be the best she ever got.
* * *
LISTEN TO ME FOR a second.
The life of Aziz is a tragic one.
It was a real life. She was a happy mazloom girl in this part, but I only knew her as an old woman—bent in two, with a face like dry soap, shut off from the world, shuffling around her little sod house by the ravine in her coverings like a black ghost.
She would look at me—I remember because she would smile and the lines in her face twisted into unfamiliar shapes—almost like a grimace, almost like she was looking at me from the bottom of a well.
She offered sesame candy from a dish beside the lamp that also had buttons in it. I remember because it was the first time in my life I refused candy.
Those are the only two memories I have of Aziz: the little river of flowers and sewage, and a sad old grin giving me stale candy. I’m telling you this because it’s important to count the memories. The rest is other people’s memories. Stories they told me some thousands of nights ago.
Now that we are here in Oklahoma, I will never see Aziz again, because she is too old to travel and I can never go back.
Sometimes on the bus to school, I think of her and hope she has a gentle death. I hope she has more memories that I do, and I hope she forgives me for the ones I have of her. In my head, I tell her I will always think of her as the princess of a kingdom of laughing flowers.
But the truth is that we are both exiles and will never go home again.
* * *
THE DAY AZIZ BECAME an exile is also the day she lost her father, the great khan, forever.
The legend goes that the khan had to take a long trip. His fields stretched from northern Iran into Azerbaijan, which, at the time, was a part of the Russian Empire. For centuries, Russian and Persian dynasties fought over it—but at this time, it was peaceful and the khan rode back and forth without trouble.
In the stories the calamity is sudden. Somewhere else in the world, a mad king sent out his army.
Not an important king.
Aziz wouldn’t even know his name. But the stars and the moon and every heavenly thing aligned to make the worst of all outcomes. And so the far-off kingdoms of Europe and Russia tumbled into the second Great War.
The drums of war had not yet silenced the laughter of the harvesters, but Aziz felt the first pinch of heartache when her father didn’t return on the appointed day.
They say he was in Azerbaijan when the war began, and the borders were closed. I imagine it like an iron fence shutting behind him and scaring his horse. No one knows what happened after that. His fields on that side of the Aras River were taken by faceless enemies. And the khan was never heard from again.
It’s easy to imagine it from our side of history. To see the khan’s horse rear up at an encroaching darkness that pounces on him like a pack of wolves.
To imagine him immediately drowned.
To see his top hat floating away in a red river.
But Aziz and her mother didn’t have the comfort of certainty. To her, the darkness across the river was a cloud of endless unknowing.
At any moment, she might see her baba emerge with tales of adventure and a pocket full of sesame candy.
Until the very last day, Aziz stared in the direction of the northern fields and wished for the khan’s return.
But that was months after he disappeared, and by then her uncles had already done their evil.
* * *
FOR MY CLASS PROJECT, I would like to present the 1,001 Nights, which will unconfuse you about some very important things.
First, you have to know about Shahryar, who was a Persian king—not in true history, but in myth history.
He had a wife we will not name, because it would be embarrassing to her family. In the story everyone except Scheherazade is a shame for their family, but the queen is especially shameful because she’s an oath breaker.
The king finds his wife in the garden copulating—that means sexing, but I use the official word because Mrs. Miller would freak out if I said “sex” in class and Tanner would make kissy noises and Kelly J. would say, “Gross!” either because of Tanner being slurpy or because she thinks I’m gross and “sex” reminded her to remind me.
So anyway, the king finds her cheating on him and goes crazy.
He has everyone killed, which is why we’ll just call him “the king” from now on. In the story he mends his broken heart by turning it to stone.
Every night after that, the king marries a young woman and kills her in the morning. The night he marries Scheherazade, we are not told what number wife she is.
This is how the thousand nights begin, with Scheherazade entertaining the king with a story. Before she can finish each one, we are told “the morning overtook Scheherazade, who lapsed into silence,” leaving the king burning to hear the rest.
And so each morning he spares her life in order to hear the end of the story. And each night Scheherazade weaves the tales together so that they always end on a cliffhanger. The brilliant part is that the king always thinks it’s his idea for them to keep going. And at important parts, she stops and lets the king fill in the story so he feels good.
For a thousand and one nights she does this, but really, it’s forever, because we don’t have all thousand and one stories recorded. Nobody wants them to end. They’re all the stories people tell after dinner, over glasses of tea. Like with the phrase “Once upon a time,” a storyteller will say, “And so the following night, Scheherazade began her tale once again.”
There are endless variations from teller to teller. The Tale of the Three Brothers and the Djinn might be a comedy if you hear it in the market in Isfahan, or it might be a hero’s journey around a bonfire in Ardestan. Every possible version exists somewhere. In the mind of Scheherazade there are a thousand times a thousand times a thousand tales.
She tells them forever without stopping.
Even this is one of them.
But lunchtime has overtaken me and I cannot finish my report on what I did this summer.
* * *
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE to do with Aziz as she awaited her father, you might ask.
How does this unconfuse anything?
The answer is that now you know two true things.
One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.
And two, the story of Aziz could have gone a million different ways.
* * *
IN A DIFFERENT TALE, the khan has an odyssey in the Azerbaijani hill country.
He dances with every member of a village of lepers, and heals them with nothing more than a kind touch.
He steals a key ring from the horn of a sleeping djinn and throws it to a mermaid imprisoned on a salt stone at the center of a pink lake.
He sits for tea in the den of a demon who believes in God and together they write the saddest of poems, a poem so immeasurably sad that it quenches the flames of the demon’s seat in hell.
And he returns in time to tell it.
The khan returns in the final moment to save his daughter from her uncles.