“Who? The county?”
“A policeman came to here last evening. He told to my husband he will deport us.” Her eyes began to shine, but she kept sitting straight and still. “Please, you do not for understand, they will kill us. Please, they will to shootmy children.”She began to blink, then covered her face with both hands and pressed her chin to her chest. At first she made no sound at all; there was just the up and down movement of her shoulders, but when she got her breath she let out a long moan, and I reached over and touched her knee, small as bird bones. There was a box of Kleenex on the lamp table beside their family picture and I took some, and patted her small thin back, telling her not to worry, no one was going to deport her. But she didn’t seem to hear me or understand. She held her hands to her face and cried. I patted and looked around my old living room, at the family portrait, the broken silver coffee table on its side against the couch, the framed painting of the swordsmen on horseback, the black-and-white photograph of the colonel with the Shah of Iran.
She straightened up and thanked me, taking a tissue and wiping under her eyes. I sat across from her, feeling a little hopeful all of this might get worked out after all.
“No one wants to deport anybody, Mrs. Barmeeny. I was just hoping if I talked with you, you might be able to convince your husband to sell the house back to me—I mean the county.”
“Please, you are very nice girl. Please—” She reached behind all the flowers on the counter and pulled out a blank writing pad and pencil. “Write for me everything. I want for to understand for discussing with my husband.”
I thanked her and squeezed her hand, the one with the wet tissue in it, and I started to write everything I’d just said. At the top of the blank page was someone’s Middle Eastern writing. The letters were beautiful, long curving lines and loops and ovals, some with two or three dots marked in or around them, others underlined with a long snakelike curve. It looked exotic to me, and somehow the sight of it gave me even more hope as I wrote in very plain English, in neat block print, my situation. And while I did, she told me how hard it had been for her husband since the family left Persia, that he was a very important man there. He worked his whole life to be in that position and then came the revolution of the people and all was lost. “But he is good man. He wants for his family only the best, this is all. But these things I did not know you have told to me. You are nice girl. We never want cause trouble for people.”
It was hard to write and listen at the same time, but I didn’t want to offend her in any way so I kept looking up every line or two to nod my head. She said she’d called her country today because it was her youngest sister’s birthday, who she hadn’t seen in over fourteen years when her sister was only nineteen and now she is a wife and mother with three children, nieces and nephews she has never met, only received pictures of in the mail. She got quiet then. I glanced up at her and saw she was staring at the broken table on the floor, her eyeliner a faint smear on her cheeks.
I finished writing, and handed her the pad of paper and pencil. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Barmeeny. Am I pronouncing your name correctly?”
“It is Behrani.” She smiled, her dark eyes bottomless, like she’d seen everything in the world at least once. “Do you not have husband? Children?”
I could see she was sincere, the rest of her face still and expressionless, as if I was a small animal she didn’t want to scare away with any sudden movement.
“I was married, but we never had kids.” I glanced over at the family portrait of her and the colonel, the two children in front of them, their handsome young son, their daughter dressed in white, her hair black and shiny, her eyes like her mother’s, her teeth clean and straight as she smiled into the camera. “Yours are beautiful, Mrs. Behrani.”
“You could be twin of our Soraya. You look as her, you see?”
I couldn’t believe she’d said that. I was probably fifteen years older than her daughter, and even at twenty or twenty-one I never had the kind of light this girl let off. And it wasn’t just her physical features; there was an air about her, even in a photograph, of being something special and knowing it, one of the chosen, and at that age I was married to a welder from Charlestown, both of us snorting white snakes until I guess wefelt chosen. But every morning the kick was gone and left us thick-tongued and stupid, not even wanting to touch each other. But Mrs. Behrani was smiling at me, and I could see she meant what she said. She asked if my family was Greek, or Armenian.
“Italian.” I stood to see myself to the door. The day had turned gray, the sun gone, but Mrs. Behrani squinted her eyes and held her fingers to her forehead. She was telling me in her thick Middle Eastern accent how much she loved the Italian people: Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren,but I was already starting to brood; I would never have what her daughter did, her clean and respectful past, her comfortable present, her promising future; I wanted to get into my car and drive, but Mrs. Behrani was telling me how she once met Sophia Loren at a party on vacation to Italy long ago, so I waited, smiling and nodding my head..
S AN BRUNO WAS UNDER THE SUN, BUT THE STREETS OF CORONA AREin a fog from the beach, a cool mist whose presence has convinced me to nap as soon as I return to the bungalow. I did not rest well last evening upon the sofa, and I of course was up with the morning birds to wake Esmail for his new newspaper route, so I felt sleep coming for me even as I purchased necessary items at the hardware store; glue for Nadi’s table, three new property for sale signs on wooden stakes, and a long iron wrecking bar. It is a useful tool to own and I believe because of this fact I was able to purchase it without thinking of it as a weapon.
At the base of Bisgrove Street, I halt the auto in front of the utility post I attached my notice to last evening and I use the wrecking bar to drive into the ground one of my new signs. I tell to myself I must return to draw an arrow upon it, one that points up the hill towards the bungalow, but this I will do after resting. Simply the effort of swinging the iron over my head has fatigued me further, and as I drive up the hill I am hoping—for this moment—that my wife is still in her room with her melancholy music and her self-pity, that Esmail has taken the BART train to visit his skateboarding friends in Berkeley, that I may lie upon the carpet in my office to sleep until I am rested. But Nadereh is not in her bedroom. She is outdoors, standing upon the step speaking with a woman whose back is to the road. The woman wears short pants and the bright blue T-shirt of a tourist, but I recognize her red automobile parked beside the woodland and I accelerate and swing my Buick loudly into the driveway. Both women turn their eyes to me, their faces masks, as if I have caught them openly discussing a precious secret. I stop the car so abruptly it rocks once forwards and backwards but my feet are already upon the ground as I approach my wife and this gendeh, this whore. Nadi says loudly, “Nakon,Behrani, don’t.”But I have put both hands upon Kathy Nicolo, squeezing her arms, pushing her back across the lawn, her face heavy with cheap cosmetics, her lips parted to speak. She attempts to pull away, and my voice comes through my teeth: “Do you think you can frighten me? Do you think you can frighten me with that stupid deputy?Coming here and telling lies?”I shake her, the hair falling into her face. We are nearly in the street and Nadi screams behind me to leave the girl alone, velashkon!But I shake the woman again, squeezing her bare arms with all my strength, pushing her backward. “Who do you think I am? Tell me that. Am I stupid? Do you think I am stupid?”
The woman is crying quietly, as if she cannot get enough air to breathe, her brown hair across her face. I want to break her, I want to push her against her automobile. Nadi’s screaming grows louder, and I hear her running into the street behind me, but I do not stop. I pull open the car door, and push the crying gendeh onto the driver’s seat. She bumps the back of her head upon the roof, and just after she pulls inside her bare leg I slam shut the door and lean into the window, my face only one or two centimeters from hers. I am breathing with difficulty. “In my country, you would not be worthy to raise your eyes to me. You are nothing. Nothing.”