of the accident as a not-so-gentle nudge to stop moping directionless at my parents’ home after college and to get my life going already.
Our experience of time distorted, we are visited by moments, tableaus. We attribute different degrees of importance to them by storing and dramatizing certain episodes, rendering them integral to our essence and being. Our sense of self is a game of Russian roulette.
While reaching back in time, I searched the internet for old images of my schools. Every time, I type the name of the school of my hearts, Ettefagh.
My mother was so exacting about my education that she would enroll me at the beginning of each school year in a name school that promised the moon: the American school, the French school among them. She would interrogate me every day after school to get to the bottom of how the day was structured, gauge if I had learned enough, and how much homework I had. Sure enough, no school ever passed muster, and two weeks into the school year, and a whole new school uniform to buy, I would return to Ettefagh, a public school with a reputation for high academic standards. In addition to being closed on Fridays, the Sabbath in Iran, Ettefagh school was also closed on Saturdays, following Jewish Sabbath, which was normally the first day of the week in Iran. I grew up with an unusual two-day weekend. To make up for the lost time, our school days were long, 8 a.m.–4 p.m. with a full load of academic classes. My arms were weighed down by a heavy leather bag of textbooks and notebooks, including ones with black nylon covers with a hologram design. I loved the time at the end of summer when we shopped for new school supplies. I loved choosing which notebook for which subject, writing my name in them with my favorite four-color pens in my well-practiced and eye-pleasing handwriting, keeping everything neat. At home I settled at my desk for several hours of homework each night. The endurance.
People just like me had posted their old photographs. Others had found vintage video clips, captioning them with nostalgic notes: Does anyone remember this? Our beloved school!
I looked hard into those black-and-white or faded images and shaky sepia clips for something. Anything—the window of my first grade class where I learned the letters A, B, and D in the first phrase we learn at school, Baba ahb dahd. Father water gave. The wide windows of the lunch hall where I would take my little first-grader brother’s hand after anxiously looking for him among the hundreds of uniformed, unleashed children running erratically like atoms under heat in the school yard, where we would haul our large, insulated, black lunch thermoses lovingly stacked with our mother’s homemade foods to eat together. My brother would not remember later that I cared for him like a worried mother.
I need pieces of the past to help me move forward. I pore over old photographs, images that enthrall me endlessly. I depend on them to live. They are frozen yet never stilted to my eyes. Private gazes into scenes summon shadows of memories, memories that are reverse engineered, manufactured from the photographs and mistaken, stored, and embedded as real memories. Each time I look at or think of them they animate whole fictions, myths that are more ancient and modern versions than the myths they conjure. While many fragments recede, some fragments magnify to become primitive symbols of my fears and drives. I redescribe their implications through my own experience. These myths are personal and sacred not because they are flights into an imagined antiquity, or remembrances of beauty, but because they express to me something real in myself, something ungraspable to me through other means, what fulfills a dim longing to belong to a greater sense.1
In these images, I looked for scale. Was that really the entrance that I went through every day? Where was the grand hallway through which my glamorous mother would strut like a movie star in her long fur coat to fetch me? Was it in reality a dingy corridor? Was she really wearing fur? Was what I imagined as the gilded gateway to Constantinople or some other rich, ancient city only a dilapidated and unused iron gate to the forlorn ramp next to the playground? Was that the temple with the high ceilings I would visit each morning before class, that endless field-maze of platforms and tables and podiums and Torahs we played hide-and-seek through? Where was that football field of a playground at the end of which the tastiest, greasy, chocolate donuts we called pirashki, and negrokees—chocolate-covered marshmallow treats—were sold from a low, gated portal in the wall? How far down the street was the stationery store with the puffy stickers, glitter, and designer erasers that smelled of fruits and bubble gum that I would sniff in sustained inhalations and even put in my mouth, they were so enticing.
We pronounced the name for the marshmallow treats as one word, negrokees, like necropolis, not realizing the Latin roots and racist reference of Negro kiss. The only black people I had seen were my African nanny and her husband. I only know this because I saw a photograph of them with my family on the occasion of their daughter’s birthday. I was a newborn. We were still in England. My petite young mother next to the large husband in native garb. I don’t know which country in Africa. In another photograph, my nanny, a nurse in the hospital where my father received his ophthalmology fellowship, is holding me on her lap, and my mother is standing behind her chair gazing at me in adoration with a craned neck. In Iran, I played with Jewish and Christian children in the same apartment complex, in the same school yards. I was exposed.
We peer so deeply into images of lost places and times for a hint of meaning as to who we were. We hope to superimpose our ghosts onto these spaces to make an imaginary film of our days, but the discrepancy between what we think was and what really was as we yearn to bridge in some way to what is lost, evaporated into another dimension of time, is our actual lives.
I once stood in a circle of other ten-year-olds, many of them well-toned Arab boys in tight designer jeans and shiny belts and crisp shirts and turbans, who took my fellow boarding-school mate, a blue-eyed, blond-haired Greek girl with honey skin who looked like our image of a Biblical angel, and passed her around and pummeled her inside the circle.
We were in a secluded part of the grounds near the woods. It was a misty summer by the southern sea of the English Channel. Five or six boys beating one girl. I remember freezing, staring dumbfounded. Before I knew it, the young-man-handling and assault was over.
Even early on I knew this was a Terror of Beauty—
which I later read about in Rilke’s Duino Elegies.
Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear 2
The violence against me had not started then.
Not yet…
Decades earlier, in 1931, a boy of six, a future poet with the pen name Alef Bamdad, meaning A. Dawn or A. Daybreak, witnessed the bloody public lashing of a lowly soldier. A feeling overcame him, he said, and he knew.
He wrote:
I am Daybreak, in the end
weary
…
I was six the first time I laid eyes
upon grief-stricken Abel receiving
a whipping from himself
public ceremony
in full befitting swing:
there was a row of soldiers, a pageant of cold,
silent chess pawns,
