"When I Was Thirteen" by Nayereh Doosti
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue, featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 contributors.
The day we realized Farnaz had run away I was so scared I felt the blood rushing towards my groin, so I had to hide in the bathroom and masturbate. It was a cool February morning. Tarlan, whom at the time I fancied my future wife, brought us the news. It was the day Farnaz was to be discharged, and we were supposed to pick her up from the hospital with Tarlan’s dad.
I had given Grandpa his medicine and was ready to leave, hiding Farnaz’s purple lipstick in my pocket to give to her. I kissed Grandpa on the cheek and he told me to help him with the sugar cubes. I knelt next to him and crushed the sugarloaf with the head of his iron nippers, while he gathered the crumbs on his cloth and cut the larger chunks into uneven cubes.
Uncle Mostafa was snorting heroin in the yard. When Tarlan knocked, he opened the metal door and I watched them through the window. The cracked tiling in the yard was wet from rain and frozen daffodil buds were rising out of the openings. Her socked toes fidgeting with flowers, she stretched her neck above Mostafa’s shoulder and asked for me. “Aradalan isn’t home?”
Her loose, white chador was wrapped around her thin waist: a fashion statement. Look at me! I’ve grown up. Her teeth were chattering the way they had when we were five and the snot on her face was frozen and her dad slapped her for playing in the snow with me and Farnaz and getting her clothes wet. When we were eight and played hide and seek with Farnaz, Tarlan would pull my hand and take me behind the thick trunk of the quince tree. “If we don’t squeeze together really hard, your sister will see us,” she’d say, and sometimes she would suck on my finger until I told her to stop stop stop and Farnaz would hear me and surprise us from behind.
“Just tell me what you want,” Uncle Mostafa said.
Tarlan said she was delivering a message from her dad: “Farnaz ran away.” Simple and brief, like that.
Mostafa cursed her and punched the door. Grandpa bent his knees and leaned against the peeling wallpaper, his hunched back crumbling. “What did she say?” he asked me. His voice was gruff and hollow, a friendly reminder of his four-decade addiction to tobacco.
“Is Farnaz okay?” He patted the spot on the red rug beside him. Grandpa’s hands were so large they could wrap around my whole head, his nails grey, blood forever frozen under his thick skin. Back in the yard Mostafa slammed the door, leaving behind empty air and two pairs of boxers swaying gently on the clothesline. It was a cold but sunny day, perfect for dipping my toes in water. “Come sit next to Grandpa.” He clasped his hands in front of his dark lips and began muttering a prayer in Arabic. I didn’t know where my sister had gone to. I didn’t know what to do. I knocked over Grandpa’s empty plastic chair, ran to the bathroom, and stayed there for what felt like a few long hours.
Maman wasn’t home. She was at work in the vegetable oil factory in the city she had to take four different buses to get to. Baba wasn’t home either. Baba barely existed. He’d disappeared long ago, and Grandpa said the cops must have caught that rascal. I knew he was around, though—I’d seen Mostafa hand small white bags to Baba’s buddies down the alley—but I couldn’t say anything. Once Mostafa had found me doing what we both knew was a sin, and now the two of us shared an unspoken agreement: you shut up, I shut up.
~
Grandpa had a picture in his album of baby me with Mostafa. This was before he became so slim, before his skin started to yellow. In the picture, he is no older than ten, and his blushed cheeks make him look like a completely different person. I am tightly swaddled, but I look content in Mostafa’s arms. On the cement wall behind us the shadow of Maman holds a camera with one hand and waves the other in the air to make me smile. The sunlight is so harsh that the details of my small face fade into it, leaving only the trace of a toothless smile. Grapevines veil the full body of the blooming quince tree and reach the wall. Mostafa is smiling at me, pressing my butt against his stomach and interlocking his fingers across my chest. I’m craning around and gazing up at him as though he is the best little uncle in the world. I don’t exactly remember when he stopped smiling at me, but whenever I was scared of him later on, I’d try to recall that photo. I’d think of how, in middle school, he and Farnaz made me castles with toy blocks. In those days, he had fat cheeks and smiled a lot. But this was how he looked before ninth grade, before he quit school to help Baba sell fruit out of a pickup truck; when a competing seller beat him up and he came back home to find Grandpa yelling for help, because he’d slipped and fallen in the shower. I’d try to remember, just like Grandpa had once said, that Mostafa was just a scared little boy in a rage.
Even as a kid he didn’t get along well with Farnaz. Grandpa says they used to fight and wrestle over small things like who gets the bigger apple or who sits next to Grandpa, and Farnaz would always win. She liked to wash her feet in the howz and show me how to fool the goldfish into kissing our toes: you have to sit on the edge of the pool, roll up your pants, and stay still until they think the flaky dead skin is fish food. They’d easily circle around her feet, like pilgrims in tawaf. They never did that to me. Her feet were bruised and her skin would peel because of the small heels she liked to wear. It seemed as though the goldfish could smell her pain. As though they came to eat it away.
The day the cops came for Mostafa, Farnaz had been sitting in the corner of the living room all morning, playing with the white strings of the carpet. She was wearing her navy blue school uniform, waiting for her socks to dry on the electric heater. Grandpa had made tea in the samovar and was showing me how to unfold our flat bread. He sprinkled water on them with the tips of his coarse fingers so they wouldn’t break. He told Farnaz to go get Mostafa for breakfast.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Yeah, but go get Mostafa,” Grandpa said.
The windows were open and the quince tree had blossomed outside. White as if covered in large snow flakes. Grandpa never let us pick the fruit. He’d do it himself, give us a few, and sell the rest in the neighborhood with other peddlers. Farnaz and I would cook ours together, chop them all and leave them in the oven to soften. Then we’d eat them at the edge of the pool as we watched the goldfish swim. Mostafa said in the city he could sell twice as much. “People there like this kind of homegrown shit,” he said, but Grandpa didn’t budge.
Once Grandpa had given him apples and he’d come back with an olive-colored coat and God knows how much heroin. He said he’d been mugged and that the coat was his friend’s. Grandpa said, “Okay, okay, okay.” But he’d counted on this money for the electricity bills, so he had to use the money he’d saved for Farnaz’s school trip to Mashhad. Farnaz, sixteen and looking forward to her first trip with friends, was beside herself. She went to Mostafa’s little cabin in the yard and punched his rusty blue door until he came out. She screamed, “You dirty thief,” and he screamed back, “Shut up, whore.” Grandpa was sitting in the living room, watching from the window. He said, “Kids, kids, kids.” But Mostafa wasn’t a kid. He was twenty-nine. Farnaz came in and went straight to the room we shared and shut the door behind her. “I’ll show him what whore means,” she yelled. That night I slept with Grandpa and Maman in the living room.
The day the cops came for Mostafa I’d slept in the living room once more. It was only a week after Farnaz and Mostafa’s first fight. They still weren’t talking, though Grandpa used every chance he could to force them into contact, and Farnaz refused. Instead of going to wake him up for breakfast, she kept rolling the white strings of the carpet around her thin fingers, chewing her lips, and looking out the window.
Maman had taken our white curtains for dry cleaning. The windows were stained with blue paint drops and what looked like the remnants of dead insects. I crawled towards Grandpa and pressed my palm against his, feeling the warmth of his hand. He felt my fear and squeezed my fingers. It was so bright in the room I could probably have counted all the brown spots on his hands. He said they were burn marks from hot oil, that he used to work at a nut roasting shop in Vakil bazaar until his knees got worse. The narrow ring of silver hair around his head looked translucent in the sun, sparkling like a halo. When Farnaz was younger, she liked to brush our hair. She would pull back my short black hair into a tiny ponytail and brush and tickle Grandpa’s bald head until they’d be laughing so hard it would make me laugh too.
Mostafa walked out of his cabin, his rusty door squeaking. He was wearing only a pair of black soccer shorts, showing off his chest hair. He’d chosen to live in that cabin, a big chicken coop from the days Grandpa sold eggs. When Mostafa turned eighteen, he did some construction work in the city for a few months, then came home one day with a truck full of bricks. Farnaz told me he’d stolen them, but she was too scared to say anything and I was too young to care. He built up the walls and installed a greenhouse plastic roof. The blue door came later, when he found a sheet of iron somewhere and hung it there. Before that, he and Farnaz had shared the bedroom. In those days Maman was happy her brother and daughter could be playmates.
He finally came in and sat cross-legged with us around the breakfast cloth. His door was open but I couldn’t see the inside of his coop from the window. No one was ever allowed there. Farnaz once said, “You wouldn’t want to be in there anyways. It smells like poop and heroin and corpses.” We all ate in silence while Grandpa listened to his pocket radio. He turned it up and held it close to his ear: a sermon in bad Arabic. Farnaz chewed her lips and stared at Mostafa until we heard the bell ring.
“Farnaz, open the door if you’re not eating,” Grandpa said.
She jumped up, grabbed her socks and backpack, and went in her room. “I have to get ready to go,” she said.
Mostafa opened the door, and I saw him speaking with two men in green uniforms and identical beards. They asked him to put a shirt on first, then they came in to talk to Grandpa and search our room, the living room, and his coop, too. “Call your mom, Farnaz,” Grandpa yelled. But Farnaz had run out when they were searching. The fat cop shook Grandpa’s hand and the young one handcuffed Mostafa. When they were gone, I gave Grandpa his medicine, one blue, two whites, one red. When I finally left for school, he was muttering to Maman on the phone, “Kids, kids, kids,” rocking back and forth and rubbing his inflamed ankles.
When I came back that afternoon Farnaz hadn’t arrived yet. She’d usually come back a few hours after me, but that night she got home late and we had dinner without her. Maman had brought us tomato pilaf from work, which she’d reheated in vegetable oil to make the rice crusty. I liked it when she let her gray hair down at night, so I could smell the dust and the acrid factory smoke she carried with her. Putting more yogurt on Grandpa’s plate, she told us that she’d gone to the police station, and Mostafa was safe. She just needed to find someone to bail him out.
“What about the house,” Grandpa said.
“No way, no way. I’ll figure it out.” She scooped me more rice and pulled a strand of her hair from the plate before handing it to me.
The bitter scent of Farnaz’s perfume woke me up long after dinner. She didn’t dare to come back that late when Mostafa was home.
“What happened after I left?” she asked, and I told her. “Well, he’ll be in there for a while,” she said. “Look what I got, though.” She turned on the light and brought a long, reed flute out of her bag.
“You can play that?” I said.
“Sure, I’ll show you tomorrow.”
She let me hold it, and I pretended I was playing, sliding my fingers on the holes, trying to poke them in. “Where did you get it?”
“I make money.”
“How?”
“It’s a job,” she said.
I took my pillow and blanket and slept in the living room next to Maman and Grandpa, listening to her as she showered, and dreaming of faceless shepherds playing the ney.
Mostafa was in jail for a month. It wasn’t that bad. Farnaz was learning the flute. Every day she’d show me what she’d learned. She was making money and her perfume was getting more and more bitter. Sometimes she’d bring me foreign chocolate and tiny action figures. She even bought a new winter coat for Grandpa. It was a secret, she told me. She told Grandpa the ney was her friend’s, the coat from her school’s donation bin.
She’d learned how to make the flute sound better than a train whistle when Mostafa showed up on a Thursday afternoon. I wasn’t home and she wasn’t home and we never really knew how he’d gotten out. He later told Grandpa that a good friend had helped him. When we got home, there was a broken flute in her closet and a note from Mostafa: “Now you pay.” My action figures were in the trash can too, but I salvaged them: Spiderman with a broken arm and Thor without a hammer. Farnaz didn’t cry. She just brought the note to Grandpa. But when he held it upside down, we remembered he couldn’t read.
“Ardalan, you tell him what it says,” she said. “I’m not lying!”
Mostafa smirked at me, arms akimbo. His recently shaved head made the dark circles around his eyes look larger. You shut up, I shut up, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I cried. Grandpa wrapped his giant hands around my head and kissed my forehead. “Sit on my lap, kid.” Mostafa went back to his cabin and Farnaz ran out after him. Grandpa sighed and pressed my head to his chest. “Kids, kids, kids.” But Farnaz didn’t fight.
Though the thin, white curtains were closed, I could see her silhouette sitting at the edge of the pool. The flute was broken into two even pieces. I took it to her: “They can be glued,” I said. I showed her how by holding the pieces back in place.
“I’m not worried about that,” she said, drawing circles in the water.
“But look!” The edges were jagged and uneven but I pressed them together harder.
“It won’t sound right.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“It’s fine.” She knew the kind of fear Mostafa caused in others, in anyone but her. She made me sit next to her, arms shaved thoroughly, her skin covered in razor burns. “We’ll get another one.”
~
But now that Mostafa was home, she couldn’t work late at night anymore. After he got back from jail, he would leave every day in the morning, then come back right before Farnaz got home from school. He would make sure she arrived before seven, and then retire to his cabin. Farnaz hated to be home and serve tea to Grandpa and Tarlan’s father, Haji Akbar, who lived in the same alley as we did and visited Grandpa every evening. Haji was younger than Grandpa and could read. He’d gone to Hajj, and that was enough for Grandpa to rely on his interpretations of any religious text. He’d recite passages from the Quran for him the way my teachers told me was wrong, his words too guttural and peppered with many mispronunciations. Now that Farnaz was home, Haji Akbar would bring Tarlan with him to keep my sister company. The three of us would sit in the bedroom and try to entertain ourselves. It was on one of those evenings that I saw Farnaz’s phone.
Tarlan was playing with Farnaz’s makeup in front of the mirror, bright-colored eyeshadows and nude lipsticks, half broken and half melted. She was still a little taller than me and her skinny arms were still covered with brown fuzz. I sat in the corner pretending I was playing with my action figures, but I was looking at how carefully she put her dark lip liner on, drawing above the red flesh to make her lips slightly larger. I didn’t like the bright eyeshadows. They made Farnaz’s hazel eyes look orange.
Farnaz was bored with us, so she sat on the carpet and pretended to read her biology textbook. I saw her flip phone hidden behind the book, but Tarlan was too occupied to see. I crawled over to Tarlan and asked her to put some color on me, too. Farnaz snorted with laughter but quickly went back to her phone. Tarlan’s long and tender fingers traced my skin, and I felt goosebumps all over my face. When she rubbed the green shadow under my brows, I stared right into her mouth, wondered what my tongue would feel like on her teeth. “You look like a witch,” she said. Her breath was warm and slightly sour, like an early morning cup of steamed milk. Haji Akbar’s voice, buzzing in the living room, interrupted my fantasies..
“Some lipstick too?” She tapped my dry lips with the creamy stick and started rubbing it in with her little finger. My lips grew sweet and supple like caramel. I kissed her finger, and she smiled.
Farnaz noticed me. “Oh my God!”
Tarlan backed off and started putting the makeup away in the drawers.
“You look gorgeous!” Farnaz kissed me on the cheek and took a picture of me on her phone, as if she’d known I could see it this whole time. “Now you should wash up before Mostafa or Hadji Akbar see, okay?” She tucked the phone under her bra, and in that brief moment I could see under her white shirt that it was pink and had small bows on its strings. Maybe soon Tarlan would grow enough to wear one of those, too.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“From a friend,” she said, standing up. I’d meant the bra not the phone but I thought her answer could be for both. “Help me get some tea for your dad?” she asked Tarlan.
They shut the door behind them, but I could hear Haji Akbar lecturing Grandpa in the living room. He liked Mostafa. He wore collarless shirts and had a long beard. He told Grandpa they should find a good lucky girl for my uncle. Farnaz laughed and said, “yeah, so lucky!” Haji Akbar said he was concerned for Farnaz too. He knew people all over the city. It was he who’d once told Grandpa that Farnaz had skipped school. Grandpa had said, “Okay, I’ll talk to her,” but forgot about it, as he did everything else about her.
~
The day I had a parent meeting for school, Maman wasn’t home and Grandpa’s knees were sore, so Farnaz was supposed to come with me. But she said she would get me a flute if I went to work with her instead.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
She put her nicest manteau on, light purple with cheap golden buttons. She wore nude heels that were too small for her, but she said they made her look older and professional. She asked me, “Purple or red?”
I chose red. She threw the lipstick in her purse and put it on when we got on the bus. The bus station wasn’t crowded. We changed trains three times and then we were in the city. Farnaz looked taller there. She smiled at me and at random people, as if she owned the city. Her hair was down and her white shawl only covered the back of her head. She stopped in a clean public bathroom and I followed. It smelled fresh like sour apples, and the mirrors were wiped clean. She put on rouge, and covered the blemishes on her left cheek with powder. Then, taking her phone out of her back pocket, she sent me out. “Stand there and don’t go anywhere. I have to make a call.”
The phone call didn’t last long. Soon we were in a tall hotel building full of waiters in tuxedos and a concierge who took us to the twelfth floor. We entered a dim hall with brown leather couches and large paintings I couldn’t make sense of. They were just a mixture of happy bright colors that contrasted with the dark furniture. “They’re abstract,” she said. Strutting down the hall, she told me what she saw in every one of those paintings: a big five-bedroom house, birds, trees, wallets, money, large saggy butts, dogs without eyes, and a little boy with a ponytail.
At the end of the hall was a wall made of glass. “You see those mountains?” she said. “We live there.”
I was too scared to look at the city. Shiraz was so big. Bigger than I’d ever thought. So big I was scared the buildings were going to swallow me. She sat me down on a couch, showed me the bathroom, gave me a tabloid magazine, and walked to a door. She knocked three times and stepped in without waiting for a response. I sat there and waited for about ten minutes before growing so bored and anxious I had to go to the bathroom and masturbate. It didn’t take long but when I came out, she was already waiting for me. She’d taken off her manteau. Her tank top was so tight her nipples were showing, and for the first time I saw she had a navel piercing.
She patted me on the shoulder and laughed. “What were you up to, Ardalan?” Her teeth were stained with red lipstick, but she still looked pretty.
The door was open and we heard a croaky voice from inside. “Don’t forget your stuff.”
“Wait here,” she said. She went back in the room and came out with her manteau hanging on her shoulders and a bundle of new, unfolded bills. She put her shawl and manteau on, and we rushed out. She was still buttoning up her coat in the elevator .
“Who was he?” I asked.
“My boss.”
“What does he do?”
“He pays me.” She tickled my nape and wiped her teeth with a tissue.
I was still a little shorter than her, but my shoulders were wider.
“Farnaz?” I said.
“Farangis,” she said. “Call me Farangis here.”
I didn’t protest. She did look like a different person.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ll get a flute for you. Maybe I can sign you up for lessons.” She held my hand and dragged me out of the elevator. “We’re going to have fun tonight.”
We forgot about the ney and lessons, but we did have fun that night. We went to places I’d thought only existed in movies. We had saffron ice cream that cost more than my sneakers. We sat in the brand new subway trains and laughed at people in extravagant clothes, men with tweezed eyebrows and women with high buns like cantaloupes under their headscarves. We even got tickets to a movie, but it wasn’t funny and we didn’t feel like crying. So we left before it ended and went window-shopping in a four-story mall and ate hot dogs and Mexican corn. She bought me an action figure of an unfamiliar character in a yellow bodysuit and black boots. I put it in her purse.
On the way back, we stood in the southbound train and made up stories about people we guessed were homeless. We tried to guess whether one old woman with sunburnt cheeks loved heroin or opium. We laughed at a young man who fell asleep with his mouth wide open. We moved fast in a tunnel, and saw nothing outside except for flashes of light and stained windows. We didn’t want to go home.
“I like trains,” I said. “And Farangis too.”
“You know what’s the best thing about trains?” she said, holding her purse between her legs. “If you’re having a shitty day and you’re tired, and you want always to be moving and moving, all alone, you can just sit in here and ignore everything. When you’re moving fast, you forget about everything else.” She played with my hair. “No one can stop these trains, not even your superheroes. You could even throw yourself in front of it and it wouldn’t stop.”
We took the train that went closest to our neighborhood, then took the last bus that went to our house, then we walked home hand in hand in the dark alley. As we approached, Farnaz tightened her headscarf and traced the walls with her fingers. In the unusual silence of our neighborhood and the low light of the street lamps, I noticed how narrow our alley was. The doors were covered in obituaries and car wash ads. It felt like we were in a tight tunnel again, but one with a destination she didn’t want to reach.
At home, the yard lights were left on. She had a key. We walked in and saw Mostafa sitting at the edge of the shallow pool, blowing smoke. He threw his cigarette in the water when he saw us. The lights inside were off. Grandpa and Maman were sleeping, but he didn’t bother to speak quietly “Where were you two?” he asked.
“Talking to his teachers at school.” She pulled my hand and we walked toward the door.
He got up and followed us. “At midnight?”
Farnaz didn't stop. “Well, I heard he was such a good schoolboy and I wanted to give him a little prize, since no one else in this house cares.” She sounded calm, and so confident I believed we’d gone to my school, believed I was a good boy. But her hands were hot and hesitant. Too hot for that winter night.
“What else did you do with those teachers?” He was in his regular soccer shorts and smelled like fresh sweat. He put his hand on the doorknob before Farnaz could open it.
“Oh, shut up,” she said, and brought out her key.
He raised his voice more. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Shh, you’ll wake them up.” She was trying to unlock the door, but her hands were shaking. I was scared and wanted her to let go of my hand.
“Maybe they should get up and see what you’ve been up to,” he yelled, and pushed her against the door. Her head hit the glass.
Inside a light came on, and Grandpa and Maman sat up.
She was on the ground and he kicked her in the ribs. She remained quiet for all of it, didn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing her pain. Instead I cried for her. It hurt to look at her like that, hugging her knees, her face bleeding. Grandpa was whimpering by the window. Maman had come out and was pushing Mostafa back, but he hit her with his elbow and she fell near the pool, yelling to the sky, “God help us, God help us.” She looked like an old, wrinkled version of Farnaz, who was now lying motionless on the ground. Mostafa grabbed her purse and emptied it in the yard. Her phone broke on the mosaic, her crisp bills scattered, her broken eyeshadow palette staining the ground. My action figure lay there with a rigid smile. I looked at Mostafa panting. For one short second, he made eye contact with me, and I saw in the jutting veins of his neck that he was just a lonely little boy, enraged.
I’d eaten too much; I wanted to throw up. Mostafa went back to his chicken coop and Maman took Farnaz to the hospital with Haji Akbar’s help. They had to spend the night there. So Haji sent Tarlan to our house so that she wouldn’t be alone. Grandpa was coughing all night and I sat next to the old quince tree and cried. Tarlan washed off the mosaic with the hose, then sat next to me. “Do you think it’ll be easier for her if she dies?” she whispered.
I slid my hands inside her shirt and touched her warm, small breasts.
“No, like this.” She tightened my grasp.
I fell asleep holding onto her body with one hand and my action figure with the other. She woke me up when she stood up. Her frame looked larger in the dark, her button-like eyes almost frightening.
“I want to go inside,” she said.
After she left, I threw up in the damp soil by the tree.
~
Two days after Farnaz ran away we heard by phone that some eighteen-year-old from the suburbs had thrown herself in front of a train near the Chamran hotel. The face was so crushed it was hard to identify. A family member had to do it. Maman was already back at work, filling plastic bottles with cheap vegetable oil, and Mostafa hadn’t come back home since Tarlan brought us the news of Farnaz’s escape. Grandpa and I took the bus to the morgue at Chamran Hospital because he didn’t want to set foot in any subway station. It was a quiet ride. A few schoolgirls peered at me and giggled. Grandpa fell asleep with his mouth open and I wondered what stories those girls were making up about us. I wondered what would happen if we ran into Farnaz somewhere in the city and didn’t have to go to the hospital. My eyes were watering and I felt dizzy, because buses are not fast like trains. Bus rides are bumpy and slow and show you every little detail out the window: the bent plane trees, the feral cats, the torn garbage bags, and the girls, who may be going to school, or to tall buildings filled with mysterious men.
In the hospital, all the walls were white and smelled of alcohol. Grandpa came in the elevator but soon grew nauseous and asked me to buy him cigarettes. I led him out of the elevator, bought a pack, and lit one for him like a good, old friend. After making sure he had a nice bench by the garden, I took the elevator to the fifth floor. The face was just a dirty mess of flesh and blood, like a strange abstract painting Farnaz would probably like. Although there was something in the delicate way her long fingers curled that reminded me of Farnaz, of her thin fingers sliding up and down the ney, I could have sworn she was not my sister. I felt it in the buzzing of the white lamps, in the blood drying on her ruffled hair, and in the freezing air of the morgue.
“No, this isn’t my sister,” I said. “I’m sure this isn’t my sister.” I stood straight and walked out without anyone’s help. I heard someone yell after me: “We need your grandfather to sign this form.” But my Grandpa couldn’t read or write and I wanted to be home. My sister was alive, probably playing her ney somewhere in the city. I went to get Grandpa. When I told him it wasn’t her, he put out his cigarette in a rain puddle and started walking towards the bus station.
“I knew it,” he said. “She’ll come back.”
When we got back, the house was heavy with silence, just the two of us and the phone occasionally ringing. Grandpa covered himself in three layers of blankets and snored all afternoon, in tears or deep in nightmares, I don't know. I didn't bother turning on the lights at dusk. Instead, I sat in the azure light for a while, tracing all the cracks on our walls. I waited for Maman to come, but she was late. The house was cold and I wanted someone to come home, even if it was Mostafa. But time wouldn’t stop and the stars were out and Farnaz was somewhere out in the city. So I left the house and knocked on Tarlan’s door.
With her black chador and no makeup on she looked older. “I’m so sorry,” she said, as soon as she saw me.
“It’s okay. It’s been only two days,” I said. “Grandpa says she’ll be back.”
“Weren’t you at the hospital this morning?” she said. “Your mom called. My dad is out there to help her.”
“That’s unnecessary. I told them it wasn't her.”
“It wasn’t?” Her lips twitched.
“Do you want to come to our house?”
She followed me without a word and closed the door behind her.
We sat by the pool and put our bare feet on the glazed tiles. Sweeping the the dirt on the ground with her fingers, she put her chin on my shoulder, her breath touching my earlobe. “It’ll be okay,” she said.
“Farnaz is probably having a fancy dinner right now,” I said.
She pulled one of her wet feet out of the howz and sat with her legs around me. “Do you want to play that game again?”
The house was so quiet I could almost hear Farnaz’s flute tracks playing on her phone. “Listen,” I said. She kissed my ear.
We listened to the water babbling and to Grandpa’s congested snore in the living room. The melody of the ney was growing in my head, like the tinnitus in Mostafa’s ear whenever he ran out of heroin. I buried my head in Tarlan's neck and bit her gently. She pushed me back and said, “I don't like that. It hurts.” I stuck my tongue in her mouth and she said, “Gross. Stop.” She held my hand and put it between her legs, her chador covering us both. I pressed my fingers against her flesh and she started laughing.
“Don't laugh,” I said.
“But it’s ticklish.” She leaned back and let me climb on top of her, tangle my body with hers, blocking Farnaz’s music in my head. I heard Grandpa coughing in the living room, but that soon faded away too, like the whistle of a faraway train.
Nayereh Doosti is a writer and translator from Shiraz, Iran. She graduated from Amherst College and is currently an MFA candidate at Boston University.
