AIAW Featured Writer: PARISSA EBRAHIMZADEH

Parissa Ebrahimzadeh - Iranian American Writer

Jallal had always been an active boy, a busy child – and I am recalling the days well before the bombs falling and the nights where we slept on the basement floor, beds comprised of folded blankets, our backpacks strapped to our backs, ready to jump up, evacuate – leave everything behind. I am talking about the times earlier than that. When he was fidgety, not out of fear, but because every limb was curious to move around, touch something, push an object from its resting place, see what would happen when he caused change. That anxious energy has returned, fuller in force, more hungry to create a transformation he could claim as his own handiwork. What he craved now carried intensity because the power that fueled it was not that of a small boy’s. It was that of an emerging man’s. I believe it is this place that has given him something more. Of course, there is the physical change. His frame has swollen, his chest puffed out like the sails of wind powered ship. He moves forward always with a gliding confidence, an air around him that challenges only because it has conquered. His walk reminds me that he has survived, and that in surviving, he is somehow, super in strength. What could crush him now, he must think. Nothing. His previously bony legs and pinched shoulders are no more, these parts now thicker, the hair on them coarser, every exposed inch of his flesh, rugged. Honestly, from the back, I do not recognize him to be my own brother. From the front, the distinction of who he is, is no easier. The eyebrows, like his hair, have darkened from their rich brown to a dark, almost black. Where the face was soft, black stubble casts shadows on a firm jaw line, a hardened chin. The bridge of his nose, since it broke, has formed a bony knot that pushes against the smooth skin there, creating sharp angles that appear to want to tear out from beneath where the flesh and cartilage were once tender.

On one of the first days after we arrived, my father sought out work, and we sat, mixing ourselves with the others, who had like us arrived to this someplace that was not home. I sat and watched the girls as they talked, laughing as they minced languages between them, trying to figure out who comprehended what and if together, it could all make sense. In our awkward silent pauses, we watched the boys on the field in front of us, the grass long ago dried and yellowed. Jallal was among them, teams had been formed and their soccer game was already halfway over. The boys had done something smarter than us, I remember thinking. We sat, trying to find the words to speak. They circumscribed words - used legs, kicks, yells, smiles and competitive pushes to communicate. Teammates cheered one another in any language, and when the offense came on too strong, whether they knew the words, everyone understood the curses that came from the defensive team. Context gave meaning to their sounds.

This was the game when Jallal fit in. Not just with the boys here, or with the girls who stopped to stare at him run across the field. He fit in with himself. There was even an exact moment that sealed it. The ball was kicked, hard, straight into the goal from the opposition’s team. The goalie on Jallal’s team caught it quickly before it entered behind the imagined net, and as his team cheered loud, languages became uniform in their cries. Jallal turned to look. The goalie kicked the ball up high, celebrating his success. And everyone, including Jallal watched it come straight down. He was cheering himself, mouth open wide, screaming his smiles, when the ball hit his face directly. Still screaming, he put his hand over his face, and I saw the bright red of blood appearing. Moving his hand away, he looked at me, knowing I would be standing, scared. Frozen with concern. I saw that it the blood came from directly from his nose, smearing red across his face. I also saw this: he was still smiling. Right then, this place gave him something else. Something a boy needs to become a man. He waved at me, hand bloodied. He continued to play, wiping off his face, not caring about what soon became the forever crooked part of his nose. When I see him now, when he is eating for instance, sitting at our tilted table at home, quickly and quietly wiping his plate clean, I observe the profile of this new man. It is not the profile of the little brother I had before. I always think, he is lucky, at least this place is giving him something more. Something new.

After another silent meal between the three of us, Jallal gives me the playful wink, and when Babba lies down on the couch, Jallal slips out. I can hear the pack of boys that await him at the bottom of the building, their sudden laughs at crude jokes caught by the wind and carried up seven floors, gliding through the window. The uneven laughter slips into the room beneath my soapy hands in the sink, where I am washing dishes. I catch myself laughing in parts I couldn’t even bring myself to repeat.

They wait for Jallal to come out every night, anticipating what adventures the night will bring. It is natural for Jallal to enjoy being here.

However, I don’t pretend that I enjoy it. Instead, I make it obvious, but not to the people it will hurt, more so towards the people who couldn’t notice my rage. The ones who don’t know me well enough to think I am different here, they just assume I have always been this foul tempered. They only know me in the now. Blame the ‘now’ is what I want them to do. At least we will be blaming it together.

My father bought two large flowers, potted in bright blue clay pots, the color of blue you see everywhere here. It is the blue of blended sea and sky, too bright to be the ocean, too rich to be sky. But the perfect mixture of the two. The color that stands out in ideal contrast from the rich creamy hills, the beiges and browns of the buildings. We made no real purchases for this home, Jallal sleeping on a bed we push up against the wall in the mornings, my father refusing to sleep on anything by the couch. Uncomfortable enough to keep reminding us all that this had to be temporary.

Babba could tell then that I needed something more. The illusion of roots perhaps. This sparked the idea for giving me these two massive flowering plants. When he went to bed, and Jallal’s herd had left from ear shot, I walk into my room to find them, filling up the small iron balcony with color.

Forget that there were two of them, the exact number of people missing from our family. I am sure he was not considering that in his purchase. Not consciously at least, but there seems to be a pattern to grief. Nothing can exist without creating longing. The void is has left is a painful one, one that requires you to ignore it, push it aside. And like many things we push away, it pushes back at us with force. So here they are, failing to cheer me up.

I ignore them for the first week, leave them to fend for themselves, teetering when the wind blows, the clay pot sometimes rattling. I encourage them to fall. When they succeed to continue living, the infrequent morning showers enough of a replacement for what should be my own care and watering, I decide to do something else. I pulled their heavy bodies from the sunny side of the balcony to the moist shaded side. The side where even on sunny days, the shadows cast will not allow warmth and the sun cannot shine over the adjacent building blocking its rays.

A week later, I walk by those plants. The deep burgundy flowers in one pot, the majestic yellow in the other. And they had moved. Completely. Their long necks arched, the bodies pulled toward the balcony – the mouths of their petals – open and awaiting – directed towards the sun. I wanted them to suffer in their silent ways. But they were quietly successful, moving in invisible increments until again, as needed to survive, their faces kissed the sunlight. I love them for it. Took to them with a new tenderness I never knew I could have for plants. I became a champion for their achievements. But I have not moved them into the bright side of the balcony. And still, once every few weeks, I turn them around completely, forcing their smiling faces to look at the empty wall. I need to remind myself that they will move again. I need to see that they want to. That unfailingly, they will again and again persevere.


Parissa Ebrahimzadeh

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