Like you, I want a friend.
* * *
MY DAD CALLS ONCE a month, on a Sunday afternoon.
“Allo?”
“Yeah, hello?”
“Allo, Khosrou?”
“Yeah, Baba, it’s me.”
“Allo?”
“Yes. What.”
“You son of a dog, why didn’t you answer me?”
“I did.”
“Don’t speak to your father that way.”
He speaks in poetry by the great Persian writers. Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi. It is two in the morning in Isfahan. I imagine him sitting in the dark house where we all used to live together. The doves in the aviary are asleep.
My sister tells me he is probably drunk or on a drug. I think he is in the trance of a thousand-year-old verse. I stand in the kitchen of our house in Edmond, Oklahoma, watching our cocker spaniel sleep in a sunny spot by the back door.
In my ear, my Baba’s deep voice murmurs the refrains. “‘Uncheh shiranrah konad rubbeh mesaj, ezdevaj ast ezdevaj ast ezdevaj.’ Do you understand?” he says.
It’s an ancient Farsi that I can only sort of catch.
“No,” I say.
“You are forgetting already. You’re forgetting your own family. And your history. These are the poets you should be reading in school.”
“Tell me what it means.”
“It’s a clever joke. Your Baba Haji made it from a common phrase. It says, ‘The thing that turns a lion into a little fox is need.’ Do you understand that?”
“No.”
“Akh. Okay, so lions are strong champion creatures, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And a fox is a coward, yes?”
“Really?”
“Yes. In Persian literature, a fox is a coward.”
“In America it’s a tricky animal.”
“Persian literature is ten times older than America!”
“Okay, okay. Fox is a coward, got it.”
“So the riddle asks, what makes the champion a coward?”
“Need?”
“Yes. The weakness of needing something. Now the lion must beg for it. He is no king if he needs anything.”
“Okay, how is that a joke?”
“Because your Baba Haji changed the word ‘need’ to ‘marriage.’ Now it says, ‘What turns a great lion into a needy fox? Marriage.’”
I pause.
“Because ‘ehtiaj’ rhymes with ‘ezdevaj,’ so the change is clever.”
“Okay.”
If ever there was cleverness in the joke, it has been wrung out like a dish towel.
“I was a lion,” says my father.
He wants me to understand so badly. He wants me to know the Persian poets like I know American rappers. I feel desperate to give him the connection, but can’t.
“I was a lion,” he says, “and I married and now I sit by the phone and beg to speak to my children. Do you see?”
His voice crumbles.
I imagine the telephone wire going from my hand into our wall into the ground under our yard up the telephone pole across the flat prairie to the Gulf of Mexico under the water under the Atlantic past Gibraltar across the Mediterranean under Turkey into Iran over the Zagros Mountains to Isfahan to our street to our house to my Baba’s chair to his ear where he sits crying. I listen to him weep into the phone.
When he’s finished, he says, “Are you doing well in school?”
“Straight As.”
“Good. Good. You’re my champion of champions.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Okay, be good.”
“Okay.”
“Send pictures.”
“Okay.”
And we say good-bye.
* * *
THEY SAY MY FATHER’S family got their land from the king of India, in gratitude for saving his daughter’s life.
This was generations upon generations ago, before Oklahoma was even a state. No one ever told me exactly when. There was never enough time for details. There were no lazy Sunday afternoons sitting beside the fountain in the courtyard with aunts or uncles, no moment to ask, “Was this ancestor around when they had horse-drawn carriages? Or was he around when the phoenix flew its fiery wings over hillside villages? Did he know the prophet Daniel, when he came to Persia, or did he know the doctor Ibn Sina twelve hundred years later? This greatest of grandfathers, was he from the age of myth, the age of heroes, or the age of history?”
Dastan. Persia. Iran.
The boundaries of these three countries are nothing but ten feet of fog.
In Dastan land, the mythical age, my great-great-great-……………………………………great-grandfather was a doctor.
Nobody in Mrs. Miller’s class had trouble believing this, because doctors aren’t all that special anyway. It wasn’t like I said he was a beast master.
Anyway, he was a doctor. Not a rich guy with a stethoscope. Don’t imagine that. More like a young man who spent all his time in the library of the university, or the private archives of the local magistrate. He spent his money on herbs and plant roots and oils to make things like ointments for burns and cuts.
And he spent the rest of his money on paper and ink so he could take notes on what worked and what didn’t.
He was poor, they said, but generous.
He lived in an ancient city.
“How ancient,” Jared S. said, when I told this part to my class.
“It’s just a city,” I said.
“Like from Aladdin.”
“Yeah, like that.”
In myths they don’t spend time describing things like cities.
The herbs aren’t fenugreek, wormwood, and yarrow.
They’re just herbs.
He’s not a specific man, with shoulders built strong on his father’s plow. He’s just a guy who left home and became a student.
A myth is only an explanation, not an exploration.
This one explains how my father’s family became kings.
But if this was a story in the heroic age, they would give my great-grandfather a name, Jamshid, and a personality—ever-laughing Jamshid with a limp in the foot his father crushed with a plow. Jamshid who took even a broken finch as his most honored patient.
He lived in Isfahan, the city of covered bridges. The city that smelled of jasmine.
The young doctor was soon famous for his willingness to help the poor and the untouchables. He even sat with those who weren’t sick, only sad, broken-hearted, or lost.
They would sit in his small garden under an apricot tree. He would give them tea and sesame cookies, and he would listen.
“Doktor, I am going to die.”
“Come now, sir, don’t say such things.”
“It is true! I am half-dead already! Three quarters almost.”
“What can I do, then?”
“Hemlock.”
“I can’t.”
“It must be hemlock.”
“Hemlock is poisonous.”
“Then belladonna.”
“Also poisonous.”
“I know, Doktor, I know.”
“This is about that lovely Maryam, isn’t it?”
“Akh! Doktor, send me now to a world without her. I am the unhappiest of men.”