Call Me Zebra Read online

At the end of each lesson, my father instructed me to open my eyes. He pulled out a broken piece of chalk from his pocket and transcribed several verses from memory on the front of his blackboard, which he refused to remove lest someone was shooting at close range. As a result, all the verses were lopsided. He had me recite them back to him, a difficult task. No one should have to carve words on their heart, and no one should be expected to read that writing. But I did.

  There were lines from Dante Alighieri, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Baldwin, Matsuo Bashō, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Wollstonecraft, Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī (alias Hāfez), Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. My father’s head was like the library of Babel. Each day, he transcribed different verses. I stored them all away so I could feed on their marrow during the starved days of exile that lay ahead. They were a balm to my wounds; a remedy against the brutal winds that would blow through my void, causing its craggy walls to sting. The line I remember most often goes like this: Like desert camels of thirst dying while on their backs water bearing. We walked hundreds of miles with that sentence scribbled on the front of my father’s blackboard. We were those camels, only instead of water we carried literature’s bountiful load on our backs. We were united in our struggle against hunger, the frigid air that kept us raw, the excruciating pain of my mother’s sudden death.

  When we arrived at one of the promontories of Mount Sahand, that comatose beast of a volcano looming over Iran’s northwestern border, my father looked east toward Tehran, south toward Baghdad, and northwest toward Van, the first destination in our long journey of exile, just over the Turkish border. It was the end of winter.

  There was a terrible silence as we stood there surveying the land surrounding us. I wondered if I would ever lay eyes on that land again. Then my father spat on the rocky ground, and said: “I spit on you, you bunch of patriarchal nepotists!” His face, ordinarily wafer-thin, puffed up with rage and grew red. It looked like a swelling pool of blood. I had never seen this side of him before. I felt an odd terror. The wind beat the taut sheet of my heart as if it were a drum. It hammered and beveled that sheet until it was in tatters. I felt indignation rise in wafts through the hollows. I felt my ears grow hot with fear and scorn.

  We were near Lake Urmia along the Iranian-Turkish border when my father gave me the last literature lesson I would receive within the confines of our bludgeoned nation. The shallow, salty waters of the lake were full of bloated waterfowl, dead from Saddam’s waves of poison gas. Greater flamingos were languidly drifting across the saline surface. My father took one look at those dead birds, and said: “According to the illustrious poet Abū-Mansūr Qatrān al-Jili al-Azerbaijani, Those who perished were saved from misfortune and badness, while the living are plunged in a sea of deep sadness.” I stared ahead, thinking of my mother’s flattened face. My heart folded over itself like an envelope, but I said nothing.

  After that, time warped. It slowed down and sped up at random. At some point, I remember my father removing the clothes of a dead Kurdish man, who, like many other borderland Kurds, had been fighting against Saddam alongside the Iranians. My father put the man’s clothes on himself and informed me of his twofold plan to avoid our being identified as Iranian deserters and intercepted by the border police. Since he had neglected to teach me Kurdish, I would have to pretend I was a deaf-mute about to go blind while he, who spoke impeccable Kurdish, would pretend to be a Kurdish father who was taking me to be seen by the only doctor in the world who had given us hope, a Berlin-educated Kurdish eye surgeon in Van. I had no idea how he had come up with all this. I had no idea what was going through his head.

  “The Kurds are like us,” he said. “They are the kind of unlucky men who help their ill-fated brothers. They’ll help us get across the border into Van. You’ll see.”

  But I saw nothing. He had tied a strip of black cloth, torn from the clothes of the dead man, around my eyes. I was blindfolded and mute. Like a good pickle, I was soaking in the brine of death.

  The next thing I remember, my father and I were sitting in the back of an open-air truck, pressed tightly against other bodies. I could hear my father’s voice over the engine. I understood nothing except the following declaration, which he repeated with childish ebullience—“Kurdistan is like Hiroshima!” It was received with feverish enthusiasm by his fake compatriots. “Kurdistan is like Hiroshima!” they repeated with warmth and complicity, clapping, sighing, and patting one another on the shoulders. The sound of their laughter rushed at my ears as if from across a great distance. I felt lonely, cut off from my father, ugly, wretched, as pitiful as a soiled manuscript forgotten in a damp trench.

  But upon arriving in Van, my father removed the black band he had placed over my eyes. He held my hand, and said, with a bucolic euphoria, “We made it across the border!” I looked at Van. The city lay on the eastern shores of an emerald green lake ringed by pleated mountains, where sheets of snow were starting to melt. It was spring, but there was still a chill in the air. We had survived, each of us one of the few who hadn’t been caught or killed, and the knowledge of it would estrange us from the world for good. We were perched on the edge of Van Castle, atop a steep bluff overlooking the craggy ruins of an old city. All that remained were the blunted edges of fallen homes.

  “Look at the ancient city of Van,” my father said, pointing at that decimated land below us. “Here, the Armenians were wrenched by history, exterminated at the hands of the Ottomans. The first Holocaust!” he muttered, pitifully pulling on the ends of his stained mustache.

  I leaned over the edge of the castle. My head was still spinning from the smell of the rotting corpses in that no-man’s-land, from my mother’s death. I looked at the leveled city, which is known as the Pearl of the East. No bigger lie has ever been uttered. Its remains shone like copper wires in the winter sun. The Pearl of the East! Let those who want to lie to themselves lie to themselves, I thought. I remembered the slimy pearl of truth: remorseless, monstrous, and full of a terrible stench.

  Before we continued on, my father returned the black band to my eyes, and I was plunged once more into a deep lacuna. But over time, that black band heightened my senses. Deprived of sight, I saw the immense magnitude of the darkness that surrounds us more clearly than ever before; I smelled the eternal return of the residue of history; I heard the ringing void of the long exile that lay ahead of us, first in Turkey, then in Spain, and finally in the New World; the white noise of death—the past death of my mother, the future death of my father, the death of the Kurds, of Iranians, of Armenians, of Iraqis—booming in the margins of the universe. One day, I told myself, I will emerge from the void of exile, and I will drag the stench of death out with me. After all, I am the youngest of the Hosseinis, the last in a long lineage; it is my job to exhume the buried corpse of our deadly collective history—our truth.

  New York City

  The Story of My Father’s Death and Burial and the Consequent Formation of My Multiple Irregular Minds

  After leaving Van, my father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini, and I spent years moving across the surface of the earth in search of a place to think. We were like the slugs that come out after a hard rain: ugly, weather-beaten, dispossessed, the refuse of the world. So it goes. No matter how many times you try to replant an uprooted tree, it seems always to fail to take to the soil. The exile never outruns history. Such are the consequences of being born unlucky in an inhospitable world. There is a line by Baudelaire that sums it up rather well: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas. I encountered that same line, written in the words of Paul Auster, after we’d settled in the wretched New World: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place I am not. It seemed just as prophetic then.

  By the time we did reach that so-called New World, many years had passed since my mother’s death, since our harrowing fugue from Iran—an egress that had chilled our bones and left our hands permanently cold. From that point on, I had maintained the temperature of
a corpse. Under the specter of grief, we moved through Turkey, and after a series of digressions designed to renew or falsify this or that paper, we arrived in Barcelona, our destination, the City of Bombs. There, my father hoped to meet other Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists. But events never unfold the way one imagines they will. Barcelona, cautious, worn down by the years of oppression it was subjected to by the childish whims of General Franco—that wide-eyed despot—ultimately disappointed him, and soon we were on the road again.

  At times, during our long journey, we seemed to make progress in leaps and bounds. We would move across huge chunks of this uneven universe at the speed of light, then, suddenly, breathless and exhausted, we’d be unable to proceed and would move backward again. The path we had taken would fold over itself, looping backward as if it were leading us toward some information we had been too impatient to discover the first time. We would scurry back in a panic only to discover that there was nothing there. This sense that we had forgotten something—the haunting aftereffect of an indigestible loss—had turned both of us into entirely unintelligible beings. I don’t know how long we stayed in each place. I drifted in and out of the light. I was often lost to myself, and even when I wasn’t, I had no idea how it was that we had come to be wherever it was we were. I still don’t know. All I know is that when we finally arrived in Barcelona I was two years older than when we had first left Iran. Three years later, we were in New York City—hopeless, disoriented, famished.

  More than a decade had gone by somehow. Now twenty-two, I still burn with rage, grief, and confusion at the arduous path of my past. I stood with my back to the Cloisters and looked out over the river. The Cuxa, the Bonnefont, the Saint-Guilhem, and the Trie were behind me, all having been clinically sliced from medieval French abbeys and rearranged here into an artificial whole. The Hudson was below me: green, serpentine, slithering lazily by. I sat down on a bench to take in the commanding view. The fog climbed up the sides of Fort Tryon Park. Suspended over the water, caught in the gauzy winter light, the George Washington Bridge looked like a giant mosquito net. It was a dreary, damp day.

  My father was in our Inwood apartment, lying supine on his mattress, approaching death. Soon I would have to bury him, just as I had buried my mother. I would have to lower his body into the ground. I would have no one left to love. Sitting on that bench, watching the fog rise over the river, I thought to myself, years have passed since we left Iran. I sat there and yearned for the most banal things: figs, pomegranate trees, hydrangeas, date palms, birds of paradise. Then I thought, enough: There is no point in pining over a country with a thousand heads, a country that is always changing, that had become unrecognizable to us.

  I got off the bench and walked up to the railing that runs along the perimeter of the park. I leaned over the edge. I could hear the river down below—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. The moving water made the same sound the sentences written by my ingenious forebears made as they swirled around the infinite abyss of my mind. I could no longer see out; the fog was covering everything. Instead, I looked inside myself. I saw acres of consciousness decimated by the lacunae of exile. I felt indignant, downtrodden, lost.

  I considered leaping into the river. I didn’t want to survive my father’s death. Then I thought: No. I am truculent, combative, as good as any other human at kicking around the dust piled up on this miserable earth. And if I were to kill myself off, why should I do it here? I looked around. I said, “Never.” If I’m going to die, I thought, let it be among estranged brethren. As forlorn as I was, I would never leap off the edge of this New World, this land of thieves, with my back to a conglomeration of fake cloisters that have been dismantled from real French abbeys and reassembled here. As if the Old World were a mausoleum. What a laughable lack of perspective.

  I marched back out of the park with new resolve. It was time to check in on my father. He hardly ever left our apartment, a fourth-floor, rat-infested, rent-controlled studio we had partitioned into two rooms with an old bookshelf. Like many other exiles, we had traveled across the world, dying and resurrecting along the way. But now, I reminded myself, as if to prepare, my father was approaching physical death—the least final but most tangible of all deaths.

  I opened the door to find him talking to himself. He had grown gaunt, grim, fragile. His cheeks sagged. His hands were blue and freckled. Our vagabond life had taken a toll on him. I saw him lurching across our studio with an ashen face, leaning against this or that, mumbling from beneath his mustache into the cold air: “Exile is death’s muse.” I watched his curtained lips form the word exile. But I heard forced separation, expulsion, the refuse of the world. I couldn’t stand to see his diminished figure.

  It was time to drag him out of the house. Perhaps an outing would revive his spirits. The next morning, I took him to Brighton Beach, where the waters are as dark and oily as the Caspian. The fog had lifted, but there was a bitter chill. It was the middle of winter. The beach was deserted. Lead-colored waves were scraping the metallic underbelly of the sky. Scattered across the shore, between briny patches of sea foam, were piles of seaweed and dead fish rotting in the wind and sand. Those fish activated my father’s trauma. Dead animals often brought on his rage. He staggered over and weakly pointed his cane at those limbless vertebrates, then wailed that the sea had heaved out all those scaly, gilled creatures in the same way we had been forced to flee our bludgeoned country and that now we all had been left to die on the fringes of the New World. As I watched his fury unfold, I realized more clearly than ever that we could have been living anywhere: in a hut in Cambodia, a houseboat docked in the canals of Amsterdam, a tent made of coconut hair in India, a prison at the bottom of a snow-capped mountain in Tibet. Our address would always be the same: the Nation of Exiles, neither here nor there. With him gone, I would be alone in that boundless nation, aimless and adrift. I felt an intense dread approach from far off. Then I pushed away the thought and all the feelings it had the power to exhume. I refocused on my mustached father.

  In honor of the Hosseini family tradition, I had brought a stack of books with me to the beach. When my father was done airing his frustrations, I helped him down to the sand. He could no longer read. His eyes were too weak. He suffered from advanced macular degeneration. So he sat there, hunched over, mouth downturned, cheeks puffy, sulking while I read out loud to him. I took turns cracking each book open to a random page as if it were an oracle. There were certain sentences that delivered an electric pulse and momentarily brought him back to life. It worked like a charm. There was no denying it: There are units of language that have a mysterious aura about them, a metaphysical force. Encouraged, I got to my feet and walked in circles around my father like an old peripatetic Greek. Better yet, like an old Sufi mystic, the way I had walked in that oval library as a child.

  My father slapped his knee with enthusiasm. The pink tip of his tongue protruded through his lips; it grazed the ends of his mustache. He was content. The man had persevered for my sake through that nauseating no-man’s-land, through the toxic fumes of war. The least I could do now was continue reading despite the brutal winter chill and the fact that my feet kept sinking into the sand, causing my knees to buckle. So I opened the books one after the other and recited ominous sentences in a prophetic tone.

  In a clipped voice, I repeated the following: Things are going to be spoiled by those who are already rotting. Dalí. One of my favorites. A man with a tongue as sharp as a rigger brush who wasn’t afraid to use it. I could tell my father was happy because he dug the end of his cane into the sand like a child, making little holes. His eyes moved inquisitively from side to side, and beneath them, his mustache looked as if it were about to levitate. I felt useful, invigorated, blithe. When I was sure I had committed the lines to memory, I sat back down. We shared the view of the Atlantic under that gunmetal sky a moment longer. Then we got on the subway and rode back to Inwood.

  You could say I am the AAA’s most militant member. I have a tattoo of our fami
ly seal on my left forearm: three As enclosed in a circle. In deep black ink, our family motto appears beneath the seal: In this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths. Upon my father’s passing, I will be the only Hosseini left, the last in a long lineage. My inheritance of their intellectual prowess will be complete. I don’t take the charge lightly. I have always been schooled by my father just as he was schooled by his. But, truth be told, the tutorials with my father had ended long ago. I could no longer study with him because he was nearly blind and, as a result, extremely impatient. He struggled to access his mind. I watched, bewildered by his helplessness. It was like watching a toothless dog gnaw on a bone, resolute despite his inadequate resources. For a time, fearful of betraying our family’s long tradition, I remained mentorless. Guruless. I worked on my mind alone. I prepared for the desolation that lay ahead. Once my father was gone, I would be leading a life with no railing to lean on. A life with no foothold. But we had not come all this way just to surrender to this unscrupulous New World. No. I had no other recourse but to continue fortifying my mind—which he had worked so hard to arm with languages and literature—by stuffing it with even more texts.

  Over the years, I had received an endless stream of mail from this or that recruiting university offering me a variety of scholarships. I have no idea how the universities got my name or address, perhaps through the tortured process of acquiring our residency papers. No matter. I rejected all their offers. I was certain that this mail was just another way for the New World to shed its white guilt while simultaneously exploiting Iran’s ousted intelligentsia. This is perfectly in keeping with American foreign policy, in my humble opinion, which seems to subscribe to the following mission: Interfere with and profit from far-flung governments at the peril of their citizens, and once those poor, unfortunate souls have been dispatched to the Four Corners of the World, in exile and on their knees, offer a scattering of them asylum and a compensatory education. But the buck stops here! I, an ill-fated member of this infested universe, a Hosseini descendent, would never give in to such effacement. I would never eradicate my difference.