Bedtime Story [5]

Amoo Hoshang sends the babas up the trunks to shake the branches, the cousins to the roots with strips of cloth. My mama, still decades from mothering me, eats figs, sour cherries, peaches. She sucks at the fruit until her eyes swell from pollen and the juice stings split skin and her stomach bulges so full she wants to vomit. The cousins make up their own name for the orchard: deh, little village. In my American school, buzz-cut boys only know Iran as a news story, an axis to bomb, but in this story?—fairy-tale anemoia: from the dried slabs Mama buys in bulk, I taste fresh figs off a tree. My mama tastes it too. Our bodies warm from the other’s heat under covers, she tells me she misses Shah. She says, I didn’t know then that those were the good days. The way she tells it, the cousins always sleep in one big room at night, and they hide fruit under pillows like alms. It is years before I begin reading history books, before I learn to ask, why do you miss SAVAK? In both of these countries I come from, once the grown-ups sleep, the children open every window.