It was Thursday. The door was open when Nima turned up. He rang the doorbell anyway, and Jo’s father called to him to come in, greeting him like an old friend. Then he explained that the women would be along later, fetched a bottle of white wine from the fridge with the words “So much the better—all the more for us”, and poured Nima a glass.
Jo had told her father everything about Nima, at least everything she knew. And now they, the men, were to prepare bouillabaisse together for their womenfolk, get acquainted. Over wine and music.
Artur stood on the other side of the kitchen island, which he called his “workbench”, red-faced, his amiable, plump hands caressing the seabass he had just descaled. He set the fish down in a convenient position, put the knife in place and picked out the liver-brown, shimmering gill lamellae before removing them with a neat incision above and below the gills. Less like a cook, more like a vet relieving an anaesthetized fish of a parasite or an ingrown angler’s hook. Almost lovingly. Then he held the gills out to Nima, as if he’d found a pearl in an oyster.
He turned the fish over. On the other side: fish again, seabass again, gills again, and Nima wondered whether Artur would have acted the same way if he’d been Italian or French. Artur pulled out a drawer, extracted a little box and opened it carefully. Lifted the lid just a little, without removing it. Like a child with a grasshopper in a matchbox, scared it might escape if he opened the box. His eyes shining, his expression mischievous, triumphant.
The box contained saffron. Iranian saffron, he stressed.
Artur had gone all the way to Charlottenburg to get it.
He’d stepped into the Iranian corner shop with an energetic “Salam aleikum”, which the shop-owning couple had only ever heard in such resolute tones from mullahs and stern militiamen, and he would have frightened them to death if it hadn’t been for his pronunciation (which struck a false note from the very first letter) and the typically German stress pattern, whose hard, static character had, paradoxically, defused the standard greeting. The shopkeeper’s wife had responded with an “Aleikum al Salam” in the same fashion, squeezing the words out of her throat, though beaming at the same time. The parodic aspect of this had escaped Artur, who’d been cheered by her friendly smile. An elegant misunderstanding, in which he’d seen an invitation to a subsequent expedition more like an exotic journey than a shopping trip. An eclectic, anachronistic journey to the Near East, to ancient Persia, to Mesopotamia. He’d pointed at the recipe books, miniatures and calligraphy on the shelf behind the cash desk and asked questions. Within the forty-five square metres of the shop floor, he’d encountered Assyrians, Arameans, Jews and Parsees. Danced with dervishes, fasted with fakirs, hunted with nomads, played polo with Persian kings, impressed them with knowledge acquired from the National Geographic, which was correct, and from Medicus magazine, which was not. In the city of Bam, he’d plucked a single date, succulent and black. He had witnessed the Battle of Karbala from a distant hilltop, after which he’d travelled on to the Caspian Sea, where he had found repose and drunk tea from the neighbouring plantations. He had ridden along the Silk Road on the backs of horses, camels and elephants. He’d made friendships, learned languages, purchased cardamom—and the box of saffron itself. Handing over a twenty-euro note, he’d consciously forborne to count the change. He had been trusting. They would meet again. He would come back. Maybe even with Nima. His friend.
And now he was standing there, brimming with adventures and white wine, tremulous with excitement. With the saffron in his hand and “Think of all the things you can make with this!” in his eyes, to which Nima had no response. Saffron, yeah. He’d heard of it. Important somehow, wasn’t it. Or expensive. But he hadn’t a clue about all the things you could do with it, and he suspected that Artur would find that disappointing.
It was rare for anything colourful or aromatic to emerge from Jamshid’s or Saam’s kitchen. Though Jamshid cooked too, if you’d forced him at gunpoint to compile his recipes in book form, the resultant volume would have been called Quelling Hunger. If you’d forced him to write a regional recipe book, he’d have chosen a title like The Eternal Yoke of Folklore. But his pragmatism didn’t spring from need. Or at any rate not just from need. Its principal wellspring was his rejection of bourgeois decadence as expressed in simple pleasure, which was unacceptably obscene by Jamshid’s lights. Other people’s enjoyment of their food didn’t arouse his indignation. Nothing aroused his indignation any longer: he merely thought it decadent, the way others thought it decadent to have a home help and therefore did without. Jamshid, in whose world the hunger strike, the resolution to starve oneself to death, and the readiness to do so constituted a weapon that quite a few of his friends had deployed, simply found little enjoyment in taking in sustenance. That was all.
Nima would have been able to say something about cardamom. Cardamom pods were something you put in tea. But saffron?
Artur placed the box on the table, opened it properly now, extracted a few threads, sorted them in the palm of his hand, then dropped them into the simmering liquid while he told the story of the patches on the flanks of the St Peter’s fish. These were where the Apostle Peter, according to the Bible, had touched the fish to make it yield up a coin, a two-drachma gold coin to pay the Temple tax. Mind you, he was supposed to have pulled the fish out of the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake, whereas the St Peter’s fish is a saltwater species.
Nima looked about, trying to find a reason—among the ingredients that had been set out, the fennel, carrots and onions—why all of this should be of any interest to him.
Then Artur decided that they wouldn’t cook the fish at the same time, but fry it à la minute, when everyone was at table.
“What do you think of the wine?” Artur asked.
“Pretty good?” Nima asked in reply.
Then Artur rubbed his fingertips together, his tongue rolling around his mouth as if he were chewing the wine, smacking his palate, and after swallowing he said, “Yeasty.”
Nima chewed for a moment too, nodded: “Yes.”
This was followed by a shorter monologue than the one about the St Peter’s fish, this time about slate, steep slopes, the wine-growing regions south of the Loire, and wines produced with the saignée technique, which Nima endured like a rendition of “Happy Birthday”.
Uta Maybach had on a pistachio-green cashmere sweater when she came downstairs. A bracelet of dark wood and simple red coral earrings that appeared antique. She looked like a presidential spouse or a figure from a porn fantasy. Shortly afterwards, Jo arrived too, nipping in through the front door, gave Nima a kiss, adjusted her father’s shirt, raced upstairs and came down wearing a silk blouson. She was in good spirits. Because of the food, and because Artur seemed to like Nima.
Later, after the second bottle of wine and the bouillabaisse, Jo filled the silence with what she called a “serious issue”. She’d read in the paper about a young Black man in the States who’d basically been executed: a policeman had shot him several times, point blank. Jo read newspapers.
“I just can’t imagine how anyone can be scared of the police. I mean, I know I’m the typical white girl they’re there to protect, and I do realize there are scumbags and racists among them, but surely something’s got to happen first for them to beat someone up or shoot them. Something. Nobody can be that cold-blooded, surely.”
Naivety and realism seemed to make natural bedfellows in Jo’s world. Nima pictured her stumbling across three cops beating a Black man on the ground with their truncheons and putting a stop to it through her mere presence. She wouldn’t yell and scream or throw herself into the fray. She’d just stand there and remind the policemen that they were police officers, and that they should kindly remember that. And it might even work.
Uta Maybach, who had noticed Nima’s lack of involvement, tried to draw him in.
“And what does Nima have to say?”
Nima would have preferred to say nothing. But saying nothing seemed unlikely to meet with the Maybachs’ approval.
“Yeah, reckon you’ve got a point. Must be some way not to get shot when they stop your car,” he replied.
Artur, who clearly expected more criticism and resistance, or even just youthful energy, from his daughter, or at any rate from her new, dark-complexioned boyfriend, seemed disappointed.
“Of course there’s a way not to get shot. It’s just that some people are dark-skinned and have to work out what to do with a revolver in their face, while others don’t,” said Artur, hoping the penny had dropped for Nima.
But Nima didn’t see himself as dark-skinned. While Saam was clearly identifiable as a child of the Near East, Nima was hard to place. He could have passed for an Italian, Frenchman or Greek, but might equally well have been Argentinian or Colombian. He might even have been a German with a great-grandfather from the Urals or Hungary or some such place. He sat there, absent-mindedly swilling the wine around in his glass, as he’d watched Artur do, and smiling what Heydar called his six-million-dollar smile, though if anything he looked rather anxious.
After dinner, Nima and Jo cleared away the crockery. Artur browsed among his Krautrock and prog rock records. “We’d better be upstairs before Artur gets out Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert,” Jo whispered.
They didn’t go upstairs. Artur asked Nima if he knew King Crimson, Genesis’s old numbers with Peter Gabriel, or The Monks. Nima didn’t know any of them.
“Don’t make it too hard going, please,” said Uta Maybach. And because Nima had vaguely heard of Pink Floyd, Artur put on The Dark Side of the Moon.
“Cabasse Pearl!” said Artur, presenting the globe-shaped speakers as if announcing a musician whom everyone knew and who needed no introduction, while the heartbeats leading into the first song, “Speak to Me”, filled the room, followed by snippets of speech and laughter that gave way to the sound of a helicopter so close at hand that you’d have thought it had just flown over their heads. While Uta and Jo went out onto the patio, Artur nudged Nima into the middle of the room, where the sound was apparently even fuller and even clearer, closed his eyes and breathed gently. He stayed that way until the first “Breathe in the air”, then shook his head incredulously, giving Nima the same look as when he’d opened the box of saffron. Nima smiled and nodded. Then they went outside, and Artur set about putting a few logs in the fire pit and lighting them. Nima sat down beside Jo, who was gazing into the sky. Jo laid her head on his shoulder and said nothing.
Nima thought about how long they might be able to live on the food stacked in the fridges and on the shelves if he got up now, closed the door from the inside and locked everyone in. He thought about his shoes, which were in front of the glass door. Saam had bought them for him. Just like his first skateboard. Maybe it was a good thing Saam was out of the way. Maybe doing time would help him get a grip on himself. Maybe he’d learn patience and self-control in jail. Nima didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from, but he didn’t want freedom for Saam. Except perhaps for one last night. Which, in Nima’s imaginings, he would spend quietly, on his own. Sitting on the electrical distribution pillar beside the playground where they used to hang out, or climbing onto a roof and looking down at the city, smoking a last joint. Having a last beer. Walking through the streets again, greeting people here and there and not letting on. A last thought of Nima perhaps, knowing he was in safety.
Knowing that the shoes had taken him a long way—to safety. To a different galaxy, ten, twelve kilometres away, where a soup could be a topic of conversation and people played The Dark Side of the Moon through speakers their owners believed in, which they spoke of as if of cathedrals. A galaxy where you went through adventures for the sake of saffron. Where the dependable whirring of the dishwasher promised security. Where earrings lasted for a hundred years, and violence was hypothetical. Where you were always a winner.
Nima was where Saam would have liked to see him had he known this place, and maybe he’d even have hoped that Nima would close the door and stay inside until all the provisions were used up. Maybe this place didn’t contain the whole truth, but this truth existed too. It was just as real. Nima had made his way into this truth, he sat on its chairs, slept in its bed. Why shouldn’t he be able to pull the curtains to or close the door as well.
Jo gazed into the fire, silent. Artur sat down and did likewise.
The speakers played “On the Run”. Uta Maybach smiled at Nima as mothers—and lovers—do. Her earrings swayed.
YESTERDAY
Jamshid opened the letterbox as seldom as possible. It was hard to say whether this represented a triumph—a form of self-empowerment—or a failure, there being no way for him to raise any objections to the letters anyway. And that was how he came to be holding the two letters from the district court, addressed to Saam, at the same time, and too late, as both had been posted a fortnight ago. On the other hand, there was no such thing as too late, since Saam had already been in pre-trial detention for nearly a month now, and posting letters to his home address was either very mindless or very meticulous. Both, probably. Each country has its own kind of idiocy, thought Jamshid, closing the ramshackle letterbox door again. Now his hand would smell of rust and bad news. He brushed it off on his upper thigh. The mere smell was reason enough to avoid the letterbox.
Having hung his black jacket over his shoulders like a cape, he pulled himself up the stairs with one hand on the banister. The amputation was over two decades in the past, yet whenever he walked up a flight of stairs, he could still feel that ache in the foot that was no longer there. And he was still unable to identify the toe that ached. With his upper body inclined, he bent over the banister after each stair, and in doing so he turned his hip awkwardly.
Dr Farhadi can kiss my arse, he thought. His GP, that Shah-worshipper, hadn’t even had the balls to set foot on Iranian soil to support his lord and master, and now he wanted to tell Jamshid how to walk.
“You need to take little jumps. Just use one leg, the sound one. Otherwise, you’re putting too much pressure on your hip joint, which won’t do your vertebral column any good either. Too much pressure, too much abrasion. That’s not good. Not good at all.”
Yes, he knew all about how to go easy on his spine, the traitor. Little jumps. That was his thing all right. All it had taken was a scholarship, and now, thirty years on, the old flag with the lion and the sun still stood on Dr Farhadi’s desk, as if his practice housed the Shah’s secret consulate. Yes, little jumps were something he understood. Jamshid wouldn’t be taking any little jumps. He’d carry on leaning on the banisters to drag himself upstairs, straining his hip, grinding it down, like a man. All the way up to the third floor and down again.
At the top, he opened the door and placed the letters on the chest of drawers in the hallway. They’d have to wait their turn. After that, he went into the kitchen and put water on to boil, then into the living room to check on the canary. The bird had everything it needed, but that wasn’t the point. Jamshid took out the water dispenser, went into the bathroom and filled it with fresh water, talking to the bird all the while as if to a young child, though not in a sing-song tone. The water was boiling now but would have to wait: it was the turn of the letters now. They were important. Not because of what they represented, but because of the scale of their impact. Of course. He opened the first one. The mere fact that it bore a reference number offended him.
“In the criminal case against . . . for aggravated robbery . . . ”
The words “criminal case” had no business here in this flat—let alone “robbery”. The letter induced claustrophobia. He went on reading. The court hearing had been held the day before. That meant everything was already decided. Maybe that was better. Yes. It was better that way. Saam would have . . . but it didn’t matter. The judgment was a fait accompli. The water had reached the boil. Jamshid wanted to go out, but he wasn’t the man to run away from a letter. No, he would drink his tea. Check on the canary again. See to its food. He felt an ache in the foot that wasn’t there. Taking a morsel of sugar from the blue glass dish on the table, he dipped it briefly in the tea until it was saturated, then let it slip slowly into his glass so that no bubbles formed on the surface. He didn’t use German sugar cubes, but went to Hameed Agha the grocer to buy Iranian sugar pressed into cones, which he ceremoniously broke up into smaller pieces with a pair of pincers over a sheet of newspaper, squatting on the floor while listening to Persian classics, mainly Shajarian or Nazeri. Ghavami too, in summer. Iranian sugar was more fine-grained, and Jamshid was convinced that it was compressed more firmly and therefore contained less air—and less air meant fewer bubbles. Fewer bubbles, fewer sounds when pouring and stirring tea. That was all it took to distinguish civilization from barbarism, and when he’d watched a documentary about Bedouins somewhere in the Maghreb that showed them intentionally pouring their tea into glasses in a long, thin jet, making it foam “like camel piss”, there was nothing left to be proven or demonstrated. He didn’t stir his tea with a spoon, but twirled the glass with delicate movements of the wrist.
When Nima got home, Jamshid wasn’t in. His tea glass stood half-empty on the kitchen table, and the letters lay opened on the chest of drawers in the hallway like an invitation to which Nima accordingly responded.
He read them: the date gave him a shock. What were they supposed to do with these letters? Keep them? His father wouldn’t put them away safely, but he wouldn’t chuck them out either. They’d stay where they were, and other letters would land on top of them, putting their contents in context. And at some point or other, he would have thrown out a mixed pile of paper, not these letters. So he left them where they were.
There was nowhere to put them that would have felt right. Nima pulled a pen and a scrap of paper out of his bag and wrote down the dates, although he didn’t know why. Then he went into the kitchen, opened the bin and carefully put the letters inside, as if he was afraid of startling someone. They lay on top of the eggshells and the burnt rice, Jamshid’s attempts at cooking from the day before.
He put the light off and went out of the kitchen. Then he turned, switched the light on again, picked the letters out of the rubbish, and slipped into Saam’s room.
RHIZOME
Thursdays were family evenings in the Maybach household. On the evenings when they weren’t cooking, they would go out to dinner in the Kantstraße. To the Italian restaurant that West Berlin swore by. And sometimes they’d take Nima along. Artur always said good evening and ordered in Italian. The waiters tried to pretend that it wouldn’t be easier and less time-consuming if he didn’t. The topic over dinner was the food itself, and Artur was the main speaker. When it came to the limoncello-versus-grappa question, the proprietor and chef would come to their table in person and raise a toast to life, health and love. He must have been good-looking once, before the fatty liver, the worn-down spinal discs and the Ibuprofen-thinned blood. Once he complained about a shortage of staff, and Artur suggested he let Nima do a trial shift. The restaurateur looked at Nima with yellow eyes under droopy lids and nodded. Nima didn’t nod, and Jo gave her father a look that was surprised and guarded to begin with, then stiffly amicable, and when the proprietor assented and Nima could no longer say no without causing offence, she clapped twice like a delighted child. Nima observed closely how she sought at first to protect him from Artur’s benevolent interference, then yielded, before finally committing this well-mannered betrayal.
The next Wednesday he went to do his agreed trial shift. He borrowed a black knitted tie from Artur, who said it “rocked”, and Uta tied it for him.
“There are two ways to learn things. You can experiment, or you can copy other people,” said the restaurateur straight away when he greeted Nima at the bar, while tapping a lungo from the espresso machine. “Don’t experiment here!”
Nima didn’t experiment. He copied others. And he was good at it. With the plates, the espresso machine, the clientele, the accent, the waitress who showed him how to knot a tie, and even with the proprietor’s wife, who, sozzled on champagne after ten at night, liked Nima in a way she shouldn’t, and who sometimes had her husband make him zabaglione at the end of his shift, causing the Italians to grin in a way that Nima didn’t understand until later.
There were jealous episodes and envy among the other waiters, but Nima’s smile guaranteed ten per cent tips. They would send him to collect the money and divide up the tips unfairly. After a while, the waitress said she felt sorry for him, because the others were exploiting him and not sharing the tips. They gave him a twenty-euro note almost every evening, he said, and she told him how the money ought to be divided up if it were done fairly, and who earned what for an hour’s work. They were in the changing room. Nima realized he was being cheated, looked into the mirror and smiled his smile.
He continued to work his shifts, learned some Italian, collected the money, let the waiters cheat him, even served the Maybachs occasionally, poured Artur’s wine and let him perorate about the special qualities of the vintage as if it were Nima who wanted to buy it, not him. He ate his zabaglione, and when one of the boys who’d been at Jo’s party came in to have dinner with his parents, he went out to the nearest kiosk to get cigarettes for him. None of this felt right or good, but nor did it feel wrong or bad enough for him to hand in his notice. And he was setting money aside. When his friends from the Yard started to deal drugs, first grass, then pills, when cocaine made its way into the city and the cars in Kreuzberg and Neukölln got bigger and swankier, he found himself in the right hotspot. Not only that, but he now had the means to get into the business. That was when he handed in his notice at the restaurant.
And he handed in his notice to the Maybachs too. This well-intentioned life they’d shown him; the act of giving with which they exalted themselves; their inquisitiveness, which assumed the guise of tolerance and interest on Thursdays, and which couldn’t accept any lack of a reason, any “that’s just how it is”. The questions had mounted up: about Saam, about his mother and, once, even about the credibility of his parents’ story.
It was after one of those therapeutic “We can talk about everything” evenings. He was standing with Jo in her room.
“So what do you think? Wasn’t it tough on her, being in the resistance? With two kids?” Jo asked.
“OK. Let’s talk about my mum then. She’s dead. What else do you want to know? My dad? He’s alive. I’ve got a brother, Saam. Don’t see him much. My dad’s a nice guy. My brother? He’s OK. My name’s Nima. My favourite colour’s blue. Blueish turquoise.”
“Listen,” replied Jo, “if you don’t want to talk, then that’s up to you, but I’m not going to hang around till you’ve replaced every feeling by a joke, OK? I’d like to be with someone I know something about—who he is and what he feels.” She said this in a quiet voice, icy and controlled.
“All right. I haven’t a clue whether it was tough for my mother in the resistance. We can’t exactly ask her.” It revolted him that she’d even allowed herself to think about this, and he went on: “So? Have we talked it over now?”
Jo answered, “We’ve started to talk about it, yes. What does your father have to say about it?”
“It’s not something I can ask him about. Don’t want to, either.”
“You can’t ask. Never talked about it?”
“Exactly. I can’t. Because we’re Persians. Because there’s a code of behaviour. Because we close the toilet door behind us. I can’t just . . . My father still wears black. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means? He’ll wear black till he dies. My father’s name is Jamshid. Not Johannes. We’re not . . . We’re not ‘potatoes’. Things don’t have to just carry on somehow or other. I know you call that self-pity. But it’s grief. He’ll take it to the grave with him. That’s what he’s planned. What he’s decided. That OK by you?”
Jo snorted as if in fury. But in reality she was just serious. Fury would have been preferable, thought Nima. He’d been right. It wasn’t good when Germans were curious.
He walked out of the room and down the stairs. In the hall, Artur’s jeans and jacket were hanging over the banister. His jeans were inside-out, as if a child had taken them off and tossed them aside. The jacket was bobbly, washed out. He grabbed his skateboard, left the house and set off. Hardly a car in the streets. It was already dark. And the sound of the wheels rolling over the asphalt was blissful.
Jamshid was sitting in the kitchen when he got in. There were three newspapers on the table in front of him: the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Süddeutsche and the Berliner Zeitung. All three lay open, and he was shifting them around an inch at a time, laying them on top of each other or beside each other, as if comparing the typefaces or the length of the articles.
He didn’t look up. The next evening, Nima snogged a girl in the Yard who wore Oilily scent and tennis socks, who knocked back shots of Kleiner Feigling and swigged Smirnoff Ice, and whose name he didn’t bother to learn.
Jo wrote a long goodbye letter and handed it to Nima during breaktime at school. He read it.
