In that corn-fed desert, she built an oasis. Native xenophobia counted for nothing against a good rosewater rice pudding. Once the Iowans supped from her font, even lifelong steak-and-potato men came back for more. Culture had impaired no palate so severely that it could not recover on a few tastes of heaven.
Rosemary, the managing partner, drew up an exotic, Orientalized business card and christened the reborn business Iranian Delights. Des Moines never knew their likes. Nothing matched them for miles. They were a hit, producing a demand that they could not satisfy. They delivered the full, unknown flavor that life forever promised, for the same price as pork and beans.
After November 1979 they changed the name again, to Persian Delights, just as Anglo-Iranian had once changed discreetly into British Petroleum. But the greater Des Moines area still sounded the call to arms, patriotically renouncing all things spicy and suspect. Culinary multiculturalism surrendered its tenuous beachhead in the tall corn, beaten by geopolitics. Iowa renounced its ideal convert citizen, returned her to immigrant status in her adopted homeland.
Reconstructing her story is good for burning an hour, when you most need it. But the pain of imagining her is worse than the agony of time. Her details do you in. You'd call them vicious irony, if you still believed in so benign a thing. How she marched in the streets as a teen, beating her breasts, reciting slices of a Qur'an that she'd memorized in inscrutable Arabic, to the horror of her Westernized parents. How she sealed the lifelong pact with her American serviceman, whose greatest wartime experience had consisted of helping to move Patton's fictitious landing army around England, the thousands of cardboard and balloon tanks replete with recorded mechanical sounds meant to fool the Nazis into imagining that the Allies would land at Calais. How your parents embarked on eternal matrimony in an Anglican church, in a country that belonged to neither, yet held them both by the colonial lapels. How, Westernized, apostate, she all but lost her native Farsi. And now, from the street below, how the Arabic texts she once committed to memory percolate up nightly to serenade her monolingual son's window.
You spend a lifetime, another afternoon, trying to recall what it meant, growing up, to say you were half Persian. Never much more than the usual North American party game of Mongrel's Papers. Quarter Irish. Three-fifths Lapp. Nothing more than your run-of-the-mill experiment in high-school chemistry dilution. But you always felt a little pride at being more than the prevailing flavor, an offbeat breed, at least in this stretch of the prairie. Your sound-bite biography always made for good show-and-tell. It tied you to a country where you'd never been, one that you didn't know from Eden.
On into adulthood, you carried around this membership in a place forever closed to you. The year that you hoped finally to go visit, the door slammed permanently shut. The revolution would as soon jail the sons of the golden-haired Pahlevis as grant them visas. For months on the nightly broadcasts, you saw more of your homeland than you'd seen in the two preceding decades. Your mythic home-away-from-homeland turned, by an unholy alliance of mullahs and American television networks, into a demented parody, a nation of breast-beating crazies run by militant clerics with foot-long beards who captured innocent Americans and held them hostage.
That's not how it really is, your mother told anyone who would listen. Above all, her boys. Believe me, the crushed-olive lips begged. But her eyes studied the assaulting broadcasts, flecked with doubt at the distance between what she remembered and this latest round of electronic proof. It's an old country, she insisted, her fleshy face frightened. Older than all this nonsense. Persians were masters of the world back when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.
Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.
All through the summer, words come back to you. At meals, or during your half-hour sprints along your oval track, or in the middle of the morning bathroom ritual, now trimmed back to a frenzied seven minutes. Forgotten vocabulary, sometimes in your mother's voice, sometimes in the voice of those grandparents, fictional to you except for two short childhood trips Stateside when the Brits still pumped the oil and the Shah still issued the travel visas. Words return. The names of foods. The primary colors. The numbers from one to ten.
More than words: chunks of your mother's favorite stories, in translation. The one about the white-haired baby who grows up to be a mighty king. The one about a flock of birds who set out to find the fabulous Simurgh. They cross the seven valleys of Journey, Love, Knowing, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation, the thirty straggling survivors hanging on just long enough to discover, or rather to remember, that Simurgh means nothing more than "thirty birds."
Your cell is a nave. A ship, a dinghy adrift on the currents of wrecked empire. You lie back in the stern, shackled to your radiator, this room's rudder. Open seas leach you. You drift on the longest day of the year, bobbing near madness, the black overtaking you, infinite time, unfillable, longer even than those childhood nights when your own prison bedroom ran with a dread so palpable that sleep seemed certain death and death far better than this standing terror.
And then that frightened, fleshy face is there, next to yours, laughing in the dark.
What in all the world does a child have to be scared of? The old Persians, your people, called their walls daeza. Pairi meant anything that surrounds. See? Pairi daeza. You have a wall running all the way around you. That, my little Tai-Jan, is the source of Paradise.
29
At last, deep in winter, the RL team stood and watched the thing that that year had been building toward. It was as if arrival had waited on the cold and dark. Consequence held out for the vesper service, when light ducked below the horizon and inevitability tucked itself in for the evening. The Cavern workers stood by and saw a country unmake itself in one searchlit midnight, teeming with people.
Revelation carried the look of video. Late-night cameras combed the crowd, a mass milling to as many agendas as it had legs. Thick-coated people carried their hastily penned proclamations out into the night, along with their picks and flares and emergency champagne. A stamping winter herd steamed the air with raw breath. Deep in the Standing Now, lost between euphoria and panic, America watched Europe gather for its millennial bash, a decade too soon.
Sooner or later, everyone alive saw this happen, if not live, then on delayed broadcast, if not on archival tape, then in garbled pantomime. Once more the builders of the next world gathered together in the Cavern to witness the end of the previous one. But everything that each of them saw, he saw alone.
A woman who'd devoted her adult life to the religious avoidance of politics, who fled in revulsion from any system bigger than herself, stared in horror at the midnight party. She braced for the tanks again and could not look away. But this time, somehow, the tanks failed
to come.
A man who'd landed in California as an orphaned child, who saw through the sham of identity by the age of seven and thus never bothered to build himself one, looked on the crowd smashing to bits the very stage they danced upon, and thought: My country is next. All boundaries will come down. There will be one Korea, as there was in the beginning. They will find my family, scattered in that chaos. My parents will want me back. I'll return to a home where I've never been.