“Buchstabiere es wie A-D-A-M!” he said.
Madam Wu, a former Chinese literature teacher and professional calligraphist, purged from her homeland during the Cultural Revolution, had given up on explaining to customers the difference between logography and phonemic orthography. She stepped into the man, grabbed the paper from his hand, and ripped it into little pieces.
Shazdehpoor shook his head. He thought of his apartment. His radio. The cognac that awaited him at the end of the day, a cognac that he drank each night with great relief and ceremony.
A group of break-dancers with face paint and colorful clown wigs were setting up their boom box. Each week there were more and more street acts, all of them flashier, louder, and more youthful than his calligraphy. Gypsy children darted through the crowd today, selling plastic glasses for the eclipse this evening, long after Shazdehpoor would already be back in the cool, comforting isolation of his living room. For weeks, the eclipse was all anyone in Paris had spoken about, the first one visible in the city for thirty-three years.
“Three euros,” said the Gypsy girl. Her face was golden brown, her mouth smeared with dark familiar juice. He leaned in, smelling the ripe sticky perfume of the cherries she had eaten. Handful by handful. Stolen, perhaps, from the Marché de Belleville. Or scavenged from the discarded bruised lots behind the stands.
“Gilas,” he whispered with closed eyes.
She startled, and jumped back, alarmed by his foreign-sounding word, one she seemed to think was a curse. He was an old man to her, with a perfume of his own, that of brittle skin and sour breath and perhaps a little death. Off she fled. On the ground, the pair of glasses lay at his feet where she had dropped them. He had no need for glasses. Nor any need to join the crowds on the riverbank that evening. He had seen the sky go dark before, the shadows cast as the moon slowly swallowed the sun, until there was nothing left but a faint ring of fire in pitch black. He had stood in that darkness so total that nothing was visible outside his own mind. That was thirty years ago also, in another world, on the golden plains of Naishapur, in the orchard of his family. White snowy flowers clung to branches of the apple trees. Clusters of green cherries hung densely on the branches. In the breeze, there was the smell of pears and the droning of bees and the clean snap of cotton as the sofreh opened and his family gathered for lunch. It was spring, always spring, the sun ablaze overhead.
WINTER’S END 1978
The Mirdamad orchard was in the city of Naishapur, or “the new city of King Shapur,” in the northeast region of Khorasan, known as “the land where the sun rises.” The orchard had been in Bibi-Khanoom’s family for generations, built by her great-great-grandfather. He had purchased four hectares of arid land from the local government and worked with engineers to build aqueducts that brought water onto the land from the Binalud Mountains in the north. The orchard was surrounded by one continuous adobe wall with massive wooden doors on the southwest corner. Upon entering, you followed a pebbled path that ran adjacent to the western wall. The path was lined on either side with trees and two narrow streams that led to the family living quarters. Most of the fruit trees were planted together in the southeast. There were various stone fruits such as plums, apricots, cherries, and sour cherries, and pome fruits such as apples and pears. The yearly harvest brought a steady income to the family coffers and supplied all the fruits for their own consumption, including preserves, jams, compotes, and dried fruit.
It was a good ten-minute walk to reach the end of the orchard, where you arrived at a fountain filled with red, gold, bronze, and black goldfish, and a large imposing black walnut tree. Up two steps lay the platform of the house. Along the northern wall was a small barn that housed a few goats and sheep along with a chicken coop. Next door was a storage room filled with grains, rice, spices, and all manner of staple foods. The northern wall, where the aqueducts entered the orchard underground, was covered in grapevines. On the south side of the house was a massive flower bed where rows of irises, tulips, and lilacs encircled a rosebush.
Bibi-Khanoom was the orchard’s sole keeper and lived in it with her husband, a retired judge, and their adopted ten-year-old son, Jafar, who never spoke. Now, in the final weeks of winter, the orchard was coming back to life after its hibernation. That morning’s light had melted the frost, and water dripped from the trees until there was nothing left but moist bark and branches. A slow-rising polyphony of birdsong and insect mating calls chirped and chirred through the greenery. Ants busily dug their subterranean dwellings. Birds gathered twigs for nests. Bees circled flower buds for nectar. And Bibi-Khanoom worked her way around the rooms, packing up the winter clothes and the blankets strewn over the southern wing of the house, where the family had spent the brutal cold months, as this wing had the most natural light. For the coming warm months, they needed the shade of the eastern wing, and it was Bibi-Khanoom who took charge of their relocation each year.
She made her way east through the vestibule and looked out the French doors. Mirza, her Afghan helper, had hung all the carpets from the spring quarters of the house. Furiously he beat them with a stick, dust billowing up in the sunlit air. Bibi-Khanoom pulled her chador over her mouth, breathing through the long, white, gauze-thin fabric.
“Mirza-jan,” she said—using the old familiar term of endearment. “Leave that for now. We have to start preparing lunch.”
Bibi-Khanoom’s husband had spent the morning sitting under his tree, which was the only tree that stood separate from the others in the orchard, the black walnut tree planted by Bibi-Khanoom’s great-great-grandfather just in front of the platform by the northern entrance of the house. The long heavy branches hung low, creating a canopy around the thick trunk at the base of which the roots bulged like veins on a hand, spreading outward and disappearing beneath the soil. The judge, as everyone called Bibi-Khanoom’s husband, had laid out his carpet at the base of the trunk, sitting in between two of these roots, as if they were the arms of a chair. He had discovered this spot on the day of his wedding. It shaded him in the summer and blanketed him in the winter. It was where he read his books, held his conversations, and contemplated his thoughts. It was also where he first kissed his wife.
Though ten years had passed since his retirement from his judicial post, colleagues and former pupils still stopped by the orchard to sit with him on his carpet under the tree and present the merits of their court cases over tea. Passing judgment on his fellow human beings had always weighed heavily on the judge. To spend the final chapters of his life leaning on a tree watching a bee pollinate a milk thistle filled him with a peace and stoicism that many mistook for coldness.
This particular day, a former colleague had sat with him for more than an hour, when a scorpion that lived beneath the nearby rosebush scuttled out from its resting place. It did this every day, at exactly the same time, but today it happened on a wounded bee that had fallen from the hive above. Immediately the scorpion snapped its telson into the bee, paralyzing it before nibbling off a piece of insect. The judge’s colleague continued to discuss his court case and how unsettled he was over its outcome. When the scorpion was finished with its meal, it turned and scampered back into its hole. The judge turned to his colleague, who had not noticed a thing, and said, “The laws of nature seem clear and without malice. Even in their arbitrary cruelty. While the laws of men seem vague and malicious. Even in their attempt at equity.”
Mirza brought a crate filled with vegetables into the kitchen from the winter storage bin in the west end of the house along with some meat from the freezer box and frozen eggplant slices that had already been fried. Bibi-Khanoom took the tray of eggplant. She chopped onions and fried them in a pot while Mirza washed the meat under lukewarm water, cut it into small cubes, and added them to the pot. Bibi-Khanoom then added the eggplant. They continued their preparation for lunch in silence, moving around each other with the ease and coordination that comes with years of repetition.
Once the dish was done, Bibi-Khanoom evaluated the task ahead. Two pots with different stews simmered on the stove, a large bowl of uncooked rice soaked in water and salt, fresh tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers lay on a chopping block ready to be made into salad, and bunches of tarragon, basil, mint, and cilantro lay drying in a sieve. She wiped