“Akh. So cute. The cutest boy you have ever seen,” my mom would say.
I am now in school in Oklahoma and no one agrees with this.
I am told it would be dusk in the village of Ardestan by the time we arrived. The sun shined red behind a dusty mountain. The house was surrounded by a wall, ten feet high. It was six hundred years old and made of stone.
The garden was inside the wall. It was lined with mosaic tiles. The trees were almond, peach, and fig. At the center was an inlay fountain that cooled you with its whisper. In the corner was the well.
But we hadn’t seen any of this that first time. I just know it because it’s a place in my mind. I could go there now if I wanted. When teachers brought us to the sod house in Oklahoma and told us it was ninety-eight years old, I asked why they’d made a museum out of it.
The teacher looked at me like I was simple.
“Because we preserve and cherish historical things,” she said.
“But no one lives in it?”
“No.”
“So every ninety-eight years, people move out of their houses and turn them into museums?”
She looked away at this point, probably because her answer would have been, “What’re you, simple?”
“Okay, class, hold a buddy’s hand and keep moving.”
The first time we went to Ardestan, the time I’m telling you about, we got out of the car outside of the walls, and heard the sound of men shouting and hooves clonking on the stone.
My dad said, “Stay here,” and ran around to the entrance, to see if it was one of those demons who hide behind the hedgerows.
We didn’t stay there, of course. He wasn’t the kind of father you listened to.
I remember approaching the gate. Louder and louder the men shouted. Curses. “Yalla! Yalla!”
I turned the corner.
In the courtyard, by the well, was a bull.
Four grown men from the village struggled to hold it down.
A giant beast. Its eye was black and bigger than any marble in my collection. In it was a swirl of panic.
Sweating.
Shaking.
Insane with fear.
A knife lay on the stone where one of the men had dropped it.
The bull saw me.
Its eye looked at me.
I remember this, because it was the only time I have ever been begged for anything. The bull let out a sound I can only say was like opening your mouth and trying to push all the food out of your stomach.
One of the men slipped off the wet hindquarters and fell.
My dad ran over to help.
But before he reached them, my grandfather emerged from the house. He wore sandals and his muslin pants were rolled up to his knees. I knew it was my Baba Haji even though I think this was the first time I had seen him.
He stepped off the porch and walked toward the confusion. He shook his head at the mess they had made and sucked his teeth in disgust.
In a single motion he leaned over, picked up the knife, and pushed aside the man grappling with the bull’s horns. I heard him say, “Here,” like, “Here, let me do it.”
Then, with one hand, he grabbed the bull’s horn and pulled it sideways. I could no longer see the bull’s eye, only its exposed neck. With the other hand, my grandfather stabbed the knife into the bull, below its ear, then pulled down and around to the other ear.
The whole neck opened.
Blood poured onto my grandfather’s bare feet.
The bull’s legs buckled.
I heard a gargle.
The men stepped back, relieved and embarrassed.
It collapsed.
My mother must have been the one who screamed.
My vision went black. She had covered my eyes. I heard her say, “Akh, Masoud!” as if my dad should have known.
Underneath her hand was the color red.
My next memory is back at the car, outside the walls. Mom very angry. Dad kinda laughing cause whatever, farm life, you know? He thinks she’s overreacting.
She won’t go back until they clean up the blood.
He explains the men were running late. The bull should have been slaughtered hours ago. My grandfather’s only grandson (me) had come. What else did she expect?
It occurs to me at this point that the feast was for me.
The bull must have known I was the right person to beg.
I could have saved it.
My three-year-old brain doesn’t know what that even means.
When I tell this whole story, I don’t tell anyone about that part. I was just a little kid back then. Still. They’ll think I want their pity. In America they distrust unhappy people. But I don’t want pity. I just wonder if they’ve had that feeling too. The one where you realize it’s your fault that something beautiful is dead. And you know you weren’t worth the trouble.
When I opened my eyes, my Baba Haji was looking at me. This is the only memory I have of his face. It was craggy, his beard white and red. He had a knit skullcap and a permanent squint from working in the sun.
He reached for my cheeks.
He smiled at me.
His hands were still red with blood.
Behind him the animal was bleeding on the stone. The blood pooled and flowed toward the drain. A red river.
Oklahoma also has a Red River.
It is not red.
In some places, it’s not even a river.
* * *
THAT WAS MY FIRST MEMORY of my grandfather. My second memory is not a true one. It is the kind you invent in your head because you need to.
On the phone once, with my dad—I was in Oklahoma, he was in Iran where he stayed—he said, “Your Baba Haji has a picture of you on his mantel. Every day, he weeps and kisses it.”
I imagine him doing this.
I don’t know what the mantel of his home looks like, so I make one in my mind out of rough stone. I don’t know the picture he had of me, so I make it the one from Will Rogers Elementary School in Edmond, Oklahoma.
He holds the frame in his shaking hand.
He cries for me. “Akh!”
My dad tells me Baba Haji’s only wish is to see me before he dies.
I say, “Okay.”
It is my job to give this to him. If he dies before he sees me, he will be the bull. It will be my fault. I make up this whole memory of Baba Haji, the vision of him by his mantel, so that I can hold it every day.
That is all I know about him for sure.
I don’t want to speak about it anymore.
* * *
OF MY GRANDMOTHER MAMAN MASSEY—Baba Haji’s wife—I have three memories.
The first is of her feeding me sweet dates dipped in thick yogurt she made.
The second is her sitting on a wooden stool weaving a Persian rug in the dark on a giant loom hidden deep in the cellar of their house.
The third is her voice on the phone from across the world, when I realized I would never see her again.
* * *
HERE IN OKLAHOMA, THE KIDS like to fight me because they know I won’t tell anyone.
Our bus is 209. The teachers call it “the troublesome bus,” because the kids are so bad a substitute driver once stopped in the middle of the route, shouted that we were all hooligans, and walked out. Everybody sat there, then everybody screamed and shot even more paper clips at each other and Brandon Goff pinned me down and shoved spitballs in my ear.
Bus 209 is also known as the poor kid bus, because it goes to Brentwood Apartments and Forest Oaks, which are the bad neighborhoods with houses that don’t have basements for when tornadoes come.