Every Seed of the Pomegranate

Persimmons in Two Gardens

The tree in the back corner of the yard in El Cerrito had dropped half its leaves by the last Sunday of October, and what was left on the branches was fruit. Parisa Tavakoli stood under it in her husband's old fleece with a coffee cup going cold in one hand and counted. Thirty-one, thirty-two. The persimmons were the flat Fuyu kind, the color of a traffic cone in the low morning light, and they were hard enough to bite like apples. Americans ate them that way. She had learned to do it too, after years of refusing.

The fog was lifting off the bay in long gray rags. From the top of the yard she could see a piece of the water and, on clear days, the towers of the Golden Gate standing up out of the white like two red fingers. This morning there was only the white, and a crow on the neighbor's roof complaining about something, and somewhere down the hill a leaf blower starting and stopping.

It was eight o'clock in California. In Tehran it was half past six in the evening, and her mother would be setting the kettle on the samovar's crown and telling her father to come in from the courtyard before the cold got into his chest.

She had already tried twice. The first call rang into nothing. The second connected long enough for her to hear her own name, "Parisa?", in her mother's voice, rising at the end the way it always did, as if the name were a question she had been asking for forty-nine years. Then the line made the sound of a seashell held to the ear and went dead.

She did not try a third time right away. There was a rule she had made for herself during the spring, during the long silence, that she would not call more than three times in an hour, because when she did, she began to imagine reasons the calls did not go through, and the reasons were worse than the silence. So she counted persimmons instead.

Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

At home, in the house on Kucheh Yas, the persimmon tree was older than she was. Her grandfather had planted it the year her parents married, 1974, as a joke, because khormalu was the fruit you had to wait for. You could not eat a khormalu from that tree the day you picked it. It would turn your mouth to felt. You had to set it on the windowsill in a row with the others and leave it alone until the skin went thin and dark and the inside turned to something like jam, and then you ate it with a spoon, standing over the sink, with the juice running to your wrist. Her mother said it was the only fruit that taught patience. Her father said it was the only fruit that taught you to clean the windowsill.

When she was six she had climbed that tree in the second week of Aban, in a red sweater, to reach the highest fruit, the one the crows had not found. She remembered the bark under her palms, smooth and gray and cracked in small squares like old paint. She remembered her mother standing at the edge of the hoz below her, the little pool in the middle of the courtyard, saying in a very calm voice that if Parisa fell she would land in the water and the water was cold and her father would have to take the goldfish out to get her. She remembered the fruit, when she finally had it, was hard as a stone. She had carried it down inside her sweater and set it on the windowsill with the others, and for eleven days she had checked it every morning before school.

Thirty-nine. There might have been more on the side she could not see.

Behind her, the sliding door opened and Dara came out in his socks with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He was holding his phone face out.

"It's your mother," he said. "On mine. She says yours is broken."

Parisa took it. On the screen, in the small square of a video call, was the corner of her parents' kitchen in Tehran: the tiled wall with its pattern of blue birds, the edge of the window with the bars painted white, and half of her mother's face, too close, because her mother held a phone the way she had once held a telephone receiver, against her cheek.

"Maman, hold it away. I can see your ear."

"I don't need you to see my ear. I need you to hear me." But the face moved back, and there she was, Mahin Tavakoli, seventy-seven years old, her silver hair cut short the way she had worn it since she retired, a cardigan the color of wet sand buttoned to the neck. Her glasses were on a cord. Behind her a pot was steaming. "Why does your phone not work and his does?"

"It's the same phone, Maman. It's the network. Some days it goes through on one and not the other."

"Then you should have two husbands," her mother said, and Dara, who understood every word of Persian and spoke it with a Tehrani accent he had kept in a drawer since 1992, laughed out loud on the patio.

"Salaam, Mahin-khanum."

"Salaam, Dara-jan. Are you feeding her?"

"I try. She eats persimmons standing up."

"She has always eaten standing up. Her father too. They think if they sit they will miss something."

The picture froze. Her mother's mouth stayed open on the last word, and Parisa held still, as if holding still would help, and after four or five seconds the face moved again and the sound came back in a rush, slightly ahead of the picture.

"...ripe in two weeks, maybe three. It is so heavy this year. Your father put a stick under the big branch."

"Is he there?"

"He is on the roof."

"Maman. It's dark."

"It is not dark, there is a light. He is looking at the isogam. He says the rain will come through over the back room this winter, and I said Hushang, it has come through over the back room every winter since before you were born, it is a tradition, leave it, and he took his flashlight and went up the ladder." She turned her head and called toward the window, "Hushang! Your daughter!" and then, to the phone, "He cannot hear. He has one ear for the roof and one for the radio."

Parisa laughed, and it came out wrong, too high. She turned so Dara would not see her face.

Since the spring she had learned to watch for small things in these calls. Whether her mother's voice was easy. Whether there were sounds behind her she did not know. Whether her father came to the phone himself or sent a message through Mahin. In March and April there had been no calls to watch at all. Now there were calls, most days, some of them as broken as this one, and she studied them the way she studied the drawings of an old building before she was allowed inside it, looking for cracks.

Tonight there was the steam from the pot, the radio playing faintly somewhere, her father on the roof with a flashlight. These were good things. She told herself to count them.

"How are the prices?" she asked.

Her mother made a face that meant she would not discuss prices on the telephone, or perhaps that prices were beneath discussion, or perhaps only that there was nothing new to say. "We have everything we need. Farangis-khanum's boy brought rice. Babak. He brings everything, that boy, he is forty-four and I still call him a boy. I made ash. You can smell it?"

"I can smell it."

"Liar. Tell me about your building."

So Parisa told her about the building, because her mother liked to hear about the buildings. It was a six-story brick office block in downtown Oakland, built in 1924, and her firm had been hired to keep it standing when the Hayward Fault finally moved, which it would. Inside its walls there were steel columns wrapped in clay tile, and between the columns there was brick that was not tied to anything, and if the ground shook hard enough the brick would come away from the frame in sheets and fall into the street. Her team was designing new concrete walls to go up inside the old ones, hidden, so the building would look the same from the sidewalk and behave differently when it mattered.

"Like a person," her mother said. "The face stays. Inside you put something new."

"I suppose so."

"Your father would like it. He always said Tehran was built by men who never imagined the ground."

The picture froze again. When it came back her mother was looking at someone off screen, and then the phone was turned, too fast, and the kitchen tipped sideways, and there, in the doorway, with a flashlight in one hand and the other hand on the frame, was her father. Hushang Tavakoli, seventy-nine, in a wool vest and his house slippers, a little stooped, his white hair standing up on one side where he had been leaning against something on the roof. He was smiling the way he always smiled at her, with his whole face and no teeth showing, as if he did not want to give away too much at once.

"Mohandes kuchulu," he said. Little engineer. He had called her that since she was six and had asked him why the ceiling did not fall down.

"Baba. Get off the roof."

"I am off the roof. Look." He held up the flashlight as evidence. "The isogam is fine on the front. On the back it is tired. Like me. In spring I will call the man."

"In spring," she repeated.

"Spring is not far," he said. "After the khormalu, the cold. After the cold, the fish in the hoz. Same as always."

Then the screen went black and showed her the words that meant the call had failed, and she stood there in the yard in El Cerrito holding her husband's phone, with the fog lifting and the crow gone, and the persimmons glowing on their branches like small lamps someone had forgotten to turn off.

Dara came and stood beside her. He did not say anything. He took the phone out of her hand and put it in his pocket and then put the same hand on the back of her neck, under her hair, where it was warm.

"They sound good," he said finally.

"They sound good."

"Your dad was on the roof."

"My dad is always on the roof."

They went inside. The kitchen smelled of the toast Dara had burned and then scraped. On the table were his physics quizzes from Friday, a stack of them with a red pen lying across the top, and her laptop, open to the page she had been working on before she went out to count fruit.

It was a page only the family could see. Her cousin Arash in Hamburg had set it up years ago, after his father died, because he said the family was spread across too many countries and nobody could remember who had married whom in 1958. It had started as a family tree and grown, as these things do, into a kind of house with many rooms. There was the tree itself, branching from great-grandparents in Rasht and Kashan down through her parents to her, and then sideways through Dara to his parents and his sister Golnaz and Golnaz's daughter Tara, who at fifteen had put in her own photograph and then taken it out again because she hated her hair. There was a shelf of old photographs. And there was a map.

The map was what Parisa had been working on. It showed the places the family had lived, each one a small pin, and on each pin you could put photographs with their dates. She had begun, months ago, during the silence, adding photographs to the pin for the house on Kucheh Yas, because it was something she could do with her hands at two in the morning when she could not sleep and could not call.

Now there were twenty-three pictures on that pin. The newest was from this summer: the courtyard, taken by Babak from the Nouris' upstairs window, the hoz full and green, the persimmon tree in leaf, a white plastic chair beside the water where her father liked to sit with the newspaper. The oldest was from 1983. She had found it in a box in the garage in a stack her mother had pressed on her during her last visit to Tehran, in 2019. It showed a girl of six in a red sweater, halfway up a tree, looking down at the camera with an expression of pure determination. Someone, probably her father, had written on the back in pencil: Parisa and the last khormalu. Aban 1362.

She had typed the date in both calendars, the Persian and the Western. Aban 1362. November 1983. It seemed important that the picture know where it belonged in both.

Dara looked over her shoulder. "Is that the one?"

"That's the one."

"You look like you're going to fight the tree."

"I won," she said.

She did not tell him what she had been thinking out in the yard, because she had been thinking it for months, and saying it out loud would make it a plan, and she did not know yet whether she was brave enough for it to be a plan. She had not stood in that courtyard since 2019. She had seen her parents last in Istanbul, in March 2024, in a rented apartment in Cihangir with a view of the water, for twelve days that had felt like two. Since then there had been the long silence, and the war that caused it, and the slow return of flights in the spring, and the advisories she read at night on her phone in the dark, which all said, in one wording or another, do not go.

She closed the laptop. Outside, the sun had found the persimmon tree, and the fruit was brighter than the leaves.

"I'll try my phone again at noon," she said. "Half past ten at night their time. My dad will have had his tea."

"Okay."

"And if it doesn't go through I'll try yours."

"Okay," Dara said, and went back to his quizzes, and she stood at the kitchen window and watched the tree for a long time, the way you watch a pot that is not yet ready, the way her mother had taught her to watch fruit on a sill.

The Alley of Plane Trees

Kucheh Yas was not much of an alley. It ran uphill from the avenue for about two hundred steps and ended at a green metal door that belonged to nobody anyone could remember. Along one side there was a jub, a concrete channel a little wider than a child's shoe was long, and in spring the water in it came straight down from the mountains, so cold and fast it made a sound like someone shuffling cards. Plane trees grew along the jub, chenar, with trunks that peeled in patches of cream and olive and gray, and in summer their leaves met overhead so that walking up the alley at noon was like walking up a green tunnel with coins of light on the ground.

Parisa had walked up it to school and back for eleven years. She could still do it with her eyes closed: the Nouris' gate with the dent at knee height where a delivery truck had backed into it in 1985; the old woman on the corner who kept canaries in a cage hung on a nail by her door; the place where the pavement buckled over a root and you had to step long; the smell of the bakery on the avenue, sangak bread coming off the hot pebbles in the oven, so strong you could taste it from the bottom of the alley. Her house was the fifth door on the left, a blue-gray metal door set in a brick wall, with a brass knocker in the shape of a hand that nobody used because there was also a bell.

Behind the door was the courtyard. When people in America asked her what the house was like, she began with the courtyard, because the house was built around it the way a sentence is built around its verb. Rooms on three sides, a high wall on the fourth. A brick floor laid in a herringbone pattern, worn smooth in the paths people walked most. In the middle, the hoz: a rectangle of water about the size of a dining table, edged in stone, painted inside a blue so bright it looked like a piece of sky that had fallen and been kept. At one end, the persimmon tree. At the other, a grapevine on a trellis that gave sour grapes no one ate and good shade everyone wanted. Pots of geraniums along the edge of the hoz. A wooden bench. In summer, a takht, a wide wooden platform with a carpet thrown over it, where the family ate supper outside and her father slept on the hottest nights under the stars and the sound of the neighbors' radios.

In the evenings, when she was small, her father would turn on the hose and wash the bricks down, and the smell of wet brick rising off the hot courtyard was the smell of the end of every summer day of her childhood. Even now, in California, when a sprinkler came on in the late afternoon and hit a warm sidewalk, she would stop walking.

On Monday morning at the office in Oakland, Parisa stood on the fourth floor of the 1924 building with a hard hat on and a flashlight and looked at brick.

The tenants had moved out in September. Now the floors were open and gritty and smelled of old plaster and pigeons, and the windows, tall double-hung ones with wavy glass, let in a light that was clean and white and showed every flaw. Rafael Ortiz, the youngest engineer on her team, had cut an inspection hole in the wall beside a column, and the two of them were looking into it.

"It's not tied," Rafael said. "Look. There's nothing. It's just sitting there against the tile."

"They thought weight was enough," Parisa said. "Weight is enough until it isn't."

She took a photograph. She would put it in the report with a note. She had been doing this work for twenty years, in three cities, and still she liked this part best: the moment of looking inside a wall and seeing what the people who built it had believed. Every old building was an argument about the ground. Some won the argument for a hundred years. Some lost it in fifteen seconds.

Her father had taught her that, in so many words, when she was nine. He had worked for the roads ministry for thirty-one years, mostly on the bridges and retaining walls of the mountain highways north of Tehran, the roads that climbed through the Alborz to the Caspian. He used to say that a road through those mountains was not built so much as negotiated. Every spring the snowmelt came down and tested every wall. Every year some walls failed the test.

"Is your family okay?" Rafael asked. He asked it lightly, looking into the hole and not at her, the way people did now. He was twenty-eight and kind and from Stockton, and his grandmother lived in Michoacán and he called her every Sunday, and he had asked Parisa this question every few weeks since March.

"They're okay," she said. "My dad was on the roof last night."

"In the war?"

"Checking for leaks."

Rafael laughed and then stopped, unsure whether he was allowed to. Parisa laughed too, so he would know he was.

At lunch she sat in the car with the heater running and ate a sandwich and looked at the phone. There were no messages from Tehran. That meant nothing. Messages came in clusters, in the evening their time, when Babak next door had a good signal and brought his phone over so her parents could send pictures.

She opened the family page instead, to the shelf of objects.

That shelf had been her idea. Her cousin Arash had built the tree; she had added the shelf after her last visit, in 2019, when she had walked through the house on Kucheh Yas with her phone and photographed things she was afraid she would forget. Each object had its own small card. You could write who it had belonged to, where it came from, what it was used for, any story you knew.

There were thirty-four objects now. She scrolled to the one she wanted: a slide rule, wooden, with a cursor of yellowed plastic, in a leather case stamped with a maker's mark from Germany. It had been her father's. He had used it at the engineering faculty in Tehran in the late 1960s and on the job for years after, until calculators came, and then he kept it in his desk drawer, and when Parisa left for America in 2003 he had taken it out and given it to her at the airport, in the departures hall, in front of everyone, without explanation. It was in her desk at home now. On its card, under History, she had written what he told her when she asked, years later, why he had given it to her.

He had said: So you would remember that the answer has to fit in your hand before it fits in a computer.

She looked at that for a while in the car, with the heater ticking. Then she wrote a new line under it, because she had remembered something else: that when she was eleven he had let her use it to work out how much water was in the hoz. Length by width by depth. She had gotten it wrong by a factor of ten and he had not corrected her; he had let her fill a bucket and count, all afternoon, until she found the mistake herself.

She typed: Hoz holds about 2,400 liters. I counted. Summer 1988.

Then she sat very still, because the year had brought something else with it.

In the spring of 1988 the city had emptied. She was eleven. That spring, for some weeks, many families left Tehran for a while, and anyone who could go north did. Her father had taped the windows in the house on Kucheh Yas in big X shapes with brown packing tape, and her mother had packed the car, a cream-colored Paykan with a cracked dashboard, with blankets and rice and the setar in its cloth bag, and they had driven north through the mountains on her father's road, the Chalus road, through the Kandovan tunnel where the water dripped from the rock ceiling, down through the forest in the rain to the Caspian.

They had stayed for six weeks in a borrowed house near Nowshahr with two other families, eleven people in four rooms. She remembered almost nothing frightening about it. That was the strange part, and the part she had only understood as an adult: her parents had made sure she would remember almost nothing frightening about it. She remembered the rain on the tin roof. Rice paddies so green they hurt to look at. Orange trees in the neighbor's garden. The gray sea, which was warm, and smelled of nothing like the ocean she would later know in California. She remembered her mother teaching the children of all three families to recite poems on the veranda in the evenings, a line at a time, so that by the end of six weeks every child could say a whole ghazal of Hafez without understanding a word of it. She remembered her father playing the setar after dark, badly, with the lamp turned down, and one of the other fathers singing along, worse, and everyone laughing so hard that the old landlady came out in her nightdress to see what was happening.

And she remembered coming home in June, and the X's of tape still on the windows, and her father climbing up on a chair and peeling them off, one by one, while she held the ladder, and the tape coming away in long brown curls and leaving pale marks on the glass that did not wash off for a year.

That was all. That was what she had of it. A strip of tape curling in her father's hand.

She had never asked her parents what those six weeks had been like for them. She thought now that she should have, and that she should do it soon, and that she did not know how to ask it on a telephone line that dropped every few minutes.

At three o'clock her phone buzzed on the drawing table. It was a message from Babak's number: a photograph, slightly blurred, taken in the dark courtyard with a flash. The persimmon tree, lit from below, every fruit a bright orange circle against the black. Under it, in Persian, her mother's message, which Babak must have typed for her because her mother wrote with one finger and took ten minutes over a sentence:

Your father counted. 212. He wants you to know he did it without a slide rule.

She laughed out loud at the drawing table, and Rafael looked up, and she turned the phone so he could see.

"That's a lot of fruit," he said.

"It's the kind you have to wait for," she said. "You can't eat them yet."

"How long?"

"Until they're ready," she said, which was what her mother always said, and which she had always found infuriating, and which seemed to her today the only possible answer.

Eighty-Eight Days

Afterward, people asked her what the silence had been like, and she found that she could not describe it as a single thing. It had been many small things laid end to end.

It began on the last weekend of February. On the Friday her mother had sent a photograph of a pot of reshteh polo, rice with toasted noodles, which she was making for no reason except that it was cold and her father liked it. On the Saturday the news came, and the messages stopped going through, and the calls rang into a sound Parisa had never heard before, a flat tone that did not even pretend to be a ring. By Sunday the reports said the internet in Iran was almost entirely down. By Monday the airports were closed and the sky over the country was empty of airliners, and on the flight-tracking map she kept open on her laptop, the planes going between Europe and Asia bent around it in long careful curves, like water around a stone.

She did what people do. She called everyone she knew who had family there, and they told her what they had heard, which was nothing. She joined group chats where hundreds of strangers asked the same question in Persian and English: has anyone heard from Shemiran, from Karaj, from Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz. She tried her parents' landline at every hour of the day and night for a week. She tried the Nouris'.

Dara slept badly beside her and did not complain. On the third night she woke at four and he was already awake, sitting up in the dark, reading the news on his phone with the brightness turned all the way down so it would not wake her.

"Anything?" she said.

"Nothing about Shemiran."

"Nothing is good."

"Nothing is good," he agreed, and put the phone face down on the blanket, and they lay there together and listened to the rain on the skylight until it was light.

Nowruz came on the twentieth of March. The moment of the new year, the tahvil, fell at a quarter past six in the evening in Tehran, which was a quarter to eight in the morning in California. Every year of her life she had been on the phone with her parents at that minute, or in the room with them. Every year, at the tahvil, her father would kiss her forehead and her mother would hand her a crisp new banknote folded inside the pages of the divan of Hafez, and then the three of them would eat a piece of sohan, the brittle saffron toffee from Qom that her father bought in a round tin, and he would say, as he said every year, that the sohan was not as good as it used to be.

In 2026 she set the haft-sin alone on the dining table in El Cerrito at six in the morning while Dara slept. Seven things beginning with the letter sin. Sabzeh, the dish of sprouted lentils she had grown on a wet towel on the windowsill for ten days. Samanu, the sweet wheat pudding, which she had bought in a plastic tub from the Persian grocery on San Pablo Avenue. On the telephone pole outside the grocery someone had stapled a poster for a small family circus coming through in the spring, faded by the rain, with BIPPO in red letters across the bottom. She did not stop to read the rest. Senjed, the dried oleaster fruits. Sir, a head of garlic. Sib, a red apple. Somagh, a small dish of sumac. Serkeh, a dish of vinegar. Then the other things that were not sin but belonged: a mirror, painted eggs, a goldfish in a bowl from the pet store, a few coins, a candle, her mother's old copy of Hafez with its broken spine, which Mahin had given her in Istanbul.

At seven-forty-five she lit the candle and sat in front of the table with her phone and called her parents' landline, knowing it would not connect. It did not connect. At seven-forty-six, the tahvil, she sat with the phone against her ear listening to the flat tone and looked at the goldfish turning in its bowl, and she said out loud, in Persian, to nobody, "Sal-e no mobarak," happy new year, and opened the Hafez to wherever it opened and read the first line her eyes found. It was a line about a messenger coming with good news from a friend. She did not believe in it. She read it again anyway.

Dara came downstairs at eight and found her there. He sat down beside her and read the line over her shoulder and did not say anything about believing or not believing. He said, "We should eat the sohan," and she said they didn't have any, and he went out to the car in his pajamas and drove to the grocery on San Pablo and came back with a tin, and they ate it at the dining table in front of the goldfish. It was not as good as it used to be.

The first call came on the fourteenth of April, a Tuesday, at eleven at night California time, from a number she did not recognize with a Tehran area code. She almost did not answer. Then she heard her father's voice say, "Parisa-jan, it's Baba, we are all right, we are all right, your mother is all right," three times, quickly, like a man reading a message he had memorized, and then a pause, and then, in a different voice, his own, "Your mother wants to know if you are eating."

It lasted forty-one seconds. She knew because she looked afterward. She did not remember what she said. Dara told her later she had said "Baba" eleven times. The number belonged to a shop near Tajrish where her father had gone because someone said the international line there sometimes worked. He had waited three hours in a line of people, and when his turn came he had been given one minute.

After that there were more calls, one or two a week, always short, always from somewhere else. In late April the flights began again: first a few domestic routes, then, from the twenty-fifth, international departures from Tehran's international airport to a handful of cities, Istanbul and Muscat and Dubai, on Iranian airlines only. The foreign airlines stayed away. She watched the map and saw the first small plane icons crawl out of Tehran toward Turkey, and she put her hand on the screen.

On the twenty-sixth of May, at ten in the morning, the internet in Iran came partly back on.

Parisa was in a meeting about anchor bolts when her phone began to buzz in her bag. It buzzed and buzzed. She excused herself and stood in the corridor outside the conference room and watched three months of messages arrive at once, the ones her parents had typed and sent into nothing in February and March, which had been waiting all this time somewhere in the machinery and now came in all together, out of order, a flood. A photograph of the reshteh polo. A message from her mother saying the power was out. A message saying the power was back. A message from her father saying, in his formal way, that he hoped she was well and was not worrying, which he must have written at the very beginning. A photograph of a sky with nothing in it.

And then, at the end, the newest: a voice message. Forty seconds long. She pressed it standing in the corridor in Oakland with her back against the wall.

It was her mother, reciting. It was a ghazal of Hafez, one Mahin had taught her students for thirty-two years and had taught Parisa when she was too young to understand it, about a lost one returning, about the house of sorrow becoming a garden one day, and the refrain, after every couplet, was gham makhor. Do not grieve. Her mother's voice was steady and old and a little hoarse, and behind it Parisa could hear the courtyard: a bird, the water dripping from the tap into the hoz, a door somewhere. At the end her mother stopped, and cleared her throat, and said in her ordinary voice, "That's all. That's for you. Your father says to say hello."

Rafael came out to find her ten minutes later and found her sitting on the carpet in the corridor with the phone against her chest.

* * *

In November, after the persimmon count, she began recording her mother on purpose.

She asked first. It seemed important to ask. She called on a Saturday morning when the line was good, and explained, and her mother listened, and then said nothing for long enough that Parisa thought the call had dropped again.

"Maman?"

"I'm here. I'm thinking. What do you want them for?"

"For me. For later. So I have them."

"You have me."

"I have you on a phone that hangs up."

Another pause. In the background, the sound of a knife on a board; her father chopping something, perhaps herbs.

"I have conditions," Mahin said finally. Parisa smiled. Her mother always had conditions. She had been a schoolteacher for thirty-two years at a girls' high school on the north side of the city, teaching Persian literature to girls who were mostly not interested in Persian literature, and she had survived by setting conditions and keeping them.

"Tell me."

"One. If I cough, you take it out. Two. If I make a mistake in a poem, you take it out, and I will say it again. Three. You keep them only for the family. Not for strangers."

"Only the family."

"And Tara," her mother added. "Golnaz's girl. She asked me for words. She can have them."

"Tara is family, Maman."

"I know she is family. I'm saying she can have them." A sound of approval or impatience, hard to tell which. "Four. Your father has to do some too. Not only me. He will say no. Make him."

So it began. On Saturday mornings, Saturday evenings in Tehran, when the connection allowed, Parisa set her phone on the kitchen table in El Cerrito and pressed record, and her mother recited. Sometimes a poem. Sometimes a story about her own mother, Touran, who had kept a korsi in winter, a low table over a brazier with quilts thrown over it, and had told stories under it until the coals went gray. Sometimes a word, said slowly, and its meaning, and how it was used in the family, which was not always how it was used in the dictionary.

Each recording went into the family page, into its own small room with her mother's name on it, with the date in both calendars and a note about what it was. Mahin wanted the coughs taken out, and they were. She wanted the mistakes taken out, and they were, though Parisa kept a copy of one in which her mother lost her place in Sa'di and said a word that Parisa had not known her mother knew, and then laughed for twenty seconds. She did not upload that one. She kept it on her own phone, and listened to it sometimes in the car.

Her father refused for three weeks. Then, one Saturday in late November, he came to the phone after her mother had finished and said, without preamble, "I will tell you about the bridge at the twelfth kilometer."

"What bridge, Baba?"

"Press the button," he said. "I will only say it once."

Saffron at Thanksgiving

The bridge at the twelfth kilometer was a small one, her father said, on a side road above the Karaj River, and nobody had ever heard of it, and that was the point.

He told it in eleven minutes without stopping. In the spring of 1972, his second year at the ministry, a retaining wall above the road had begun to lean after the snowmelt, and the senior engineer had gone to Tehran for a wedding, and Hushang Tavakoli, twenty-five years old, had been left in charge of a crew of nine men, a truck, and a wall that was falling down. He had stood under it with a plumb line for an hour. Then he had done the only thing he could think of, which was to divert the water. Not stop it: you could not stop water in those mountains. He had the men cut a channel above the wall with picks, at an angle, and lay stones in it, and lead the water off the slope and down into the gully beside the bridge, where it could do no harm. It took them four days. The wall stopped leaning. When the senior engineer came back from the wedding he looked at the channel for a long time and said nothing, and then he said, "Who taught you that?", and Hushang said, "The water," and the old man laughed and gave him a cigarette.

"Fifty-four years," her father said at the end of the recording. "I drove past it in 2015 when we went to the north with the Nouris. The wall is still there. The channel is still there. Nobody knows who made it. That is the right way for a wall to be." Then, in a different tone, the tone in which he gave instructions: "Now stop the button."

She stopped the button. She put the recording into his room on the family page, the first thing in it, and under Note she wrote: Baba, the twelfth kilometer, 1972, told November 2026. She sat looking at it. Dara read it over her shoulder and said, "Who taught you that? The water," and shook his head, smiling, and went to find his car keys, because they were late for his mother's.

* * *

Thanksgiving at the Sadeghis' was held every year in a two-bedroom apartment in Walnut Creek with a balcony that looked across a parking lot and a creek full of dry oak leaves toward the brown shoulder of Mount Diablo. Dara's parents had lived there since 2018, when they finally left Tehran to be near their children after years of saying they never would. Manouchehr Sadeghi was eighty-three, a retired accountant who had kept the books for a textile importer near the old bazaar for forty years and still added numbers in his head faster than anyone at the table. Simin Sadeghi was seventy-eight and ran the kitchen as if it were a small, well-armed country.

The turkey was already in the oven when they arrived, rubbed with saffron and butter and orange zest, which was traditional in neither of the family's countries and was what Simin had done every year since 2019, when she read an American magazine recipe and said, "This bird has no flavor, who are these people," and fixed it. Beside it waited two kinds of rice, a plain chelo with its crust of golden tahdig and a jeweled rice with orange peel and barberries and pistachios, and cranberry sauce from a can, because Tara liked the ridges. A pumpkin pie from Costco sat on top of the refrigerator, untouched, waiting for the Americans.

"There are no Americans coming," Dara said, kissing his mother's cheek.

"You are American," Simin said. "Tara is American. Your sister is half American now, she says 'awesome.' Somebody will eat the pie."

Golnaz arrived from Davis at two with Tara and a box of persimmons from a client. She was a veterinarian, Dara's younger sister, forty-six, with her mother's sharp cheekbones and her father's habit of saying things once and not repeating them. Tara was fifteen, tall, and silent in the way of fifteen, with headphones around her neck she did not take off all day and did not put on either.

Tara came and found Parisa on the balcony after the hellos. She stood beside her looking at the parking lot.

"Khaleh," she said. Aunt. She used the Persian word for a mother's sister, though Parisa was married to her mother's brother and the right word was zan-dayi. Nobody had corrected her when she was four, and now it was too late, and Parisa had decided she liked it. "Your mom's word for the thing. The one I asked about. Did she do it?"

"She did three."

Tara took out her phone. Parisa showed her where they were in the family page: a vocabulary list, the kind a teacher would make, except that every word had beside it a small play button, and when you pressed it, Mahin Tavakoli said the word in her own voice from a kitchen in Tehran eight thousand miles away.

Tara was taking Persian at a Saturday school in Sacramento run by a retired engineer from Isfahan out of the back of a community center. She hated it and kept going. She had asked her grandmother Simin to help with homework and Simin had said she was too busy cooking; she had asked her father, who was Golnaz's American husband and spoke no Persian at all; and finally, in October, she had asked Parisa, who had asked her mother.

The first word was delam barat tang shodeh. Tara pressed it. Mahin's voice said it slowly, each part separate, then fast, the way people really said it. Then, in English, which she spoke well and carefully, like a woman who had learned it from books in the 1960s: "It means, my heart has become narrow for you. It is how we say, I miss you. The heart becomes small, like a room with too many things in it."

Tara pressed it again. Then again.

"That's a lot," she said finally.

"It's a lot," Parisa agreed.

"Like, in English it's just 'I miss you.' That's it. Three words."

"In Persian your heart changes size."

Tara thought about this. "That's kind of extra," she said, and pressed it a fourth time, and Parisa saw her mouth move along with it, without sound.

The second word was ghorbunet beram, which her mother had explained was something you said to someone you loved, and meant, more or less, may I be sacrificed for you, and which nobody meant literally; it was what you said when someone brought you tea. The third was a word only their family used, a word Mahin had made up when Parisa was small: khormalu-dast, persimmon-handed, for someone who was impatient, who picked things before they were ready. Her mother explained it in the recording and then added, "Parisa was khormalu-dast. Her father also. Ask her about the tree."

"What tree?" Tara asked.

So Parisa told her about the tree, and the red sweater, and the eleven days on the windowsill, and Tara listened with the headphones around her neck and did not put them on.

* * *

They ate at four. Manouchehr carved the turkey with the concentration of a man auditing an account, and Simin turned out the tahdig onto a platter in one piece, a golden disk of crusted rice that came free of the pot with a sound like a sigh, and everyone at the table said "Ah," which was required. Then they argued about the tahdig, which was also required. Golnaz said it was the best one yet. Dara said it was almost as good as the one in 2021. Manouchehr said nothing and took the largest piece, which in his case was the highest praise.

Parisa broke a piece with her fingers. It was crisp and buttery and tasted of saffron and very faintly of burned, the right amount of burned. She had tried to make it in her own kitchen for twenty years. She knew the instructions. It was a matter of the sound, her mother said: a moment when the rice began to crackle at the bottom of the pot in a certain way, and you had to hear it, and turn down the flame, and wait. Parisa had never once heard it. Simin heard it without trying, from the other room, over the television.

Over tea, Manouchehr asked the question.

He asked it the way he asked everything, directly, after a long silence, holding his glass of tea with the sugar cube between his teeth. "When are you going?"

The table went quiet. Golnaz looked at her plate. Tara looked from one adult to another.

"I don't know that I'm going," Parisa said.

"You're going," Manouchehr said. "I can see it. You have the face. When Dara was seventeen and he wanted to come here, he had the face for a year before he said anything."

"Baba," Dara said.

"I'm not saying she should go. I'm saying she has the face." He set down his glass. "I will tell you what I think, since nobody asked. I think it is too dangerous. The American government says do not go. The British government says do not go. Everybody says do not go. You are a citizen of two countries and the one you are going to recognizes only one of them. There is no embassy there for you if something happens. There are only the Swiss, who look after Americans there, and they can do very little. If the airspace closes while you are there, you are there until it opens, and nobody can tell you when. That is what I think."

"Manouchehr," said Simin.

"I'm not finished. I also think that I left my mother in Tehran in 2018 and told her I would come back in the spring, and she died in the winter, and I did not go back for the funeral because of the green card papers and the money and a hundred reasons, and every one of those reasons was a good reason." He picked up his tea again. "Now I am finished."

Nobody spoke. The television in the other room was playing a football game with the sound off. Outside, the light on Mount Diablo was turning from brown to pink.

Simin got up and began clearing plates, and as she passed behind Parisa's chair she put her hand for a moment on Parisa's shoulder, and pressed, and moved on.

Later, in the car on the way home through the Caldecott Tunnel, Dara drove with both hands on the wheel and said, "I can't go with you. You know that."

"I know that."

He had left Iran in 1992, at seventeen, on a student visa arranged by an uncle in Los Angeles, before he was old enough to do his two years of military service. For thirty-four years that unfinished service had stood between him and the country like a locked gate. Men in his position could sometimes settle it, with paperwork and fees and time, and some did. He had looked into it more than once. Each time, something had changed, or the cost had risen, or the advice he got was to wait. Now, with the war, nobody was advising anyone to try anything.

"If I could go, I'd go with you."

"I know."

"I want you to know I'd go."

"I know, Dara."

They came out of the tunnel into the dark on the Oakland side, and the lights of the city lay spread out below them down to the black water of the bay, and beyond it, faint and gold, San Francisco on its hills.

"Your dad's right," she said. "About the face."

"He's usually right. It's very annoying." Dara changed lanes. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to look at flights," Parisa said. "Just look."

Snow in Urbana

She had not fled anything. People sometimes assumed she had, Americans especially, when they heard where she was from; their faces arranged themselves into sympathy before she had finished the sentence. She had learned to let it pass. The truth was smaller and harder to explain. Life had simply opened a door, and she had walked through it, and then another, and then another, and one day she had looked up and found that she had been on the far side of the world for more than twenty years.

The first door was a letter from the University of Illinois in the spring of 2003, offering her a place in the doctoral program in structural engineering and a research assistantship that would pay her tuition and a little more. She was twenty-six. She had a master's degree from the University of Tehran and a job at a consulting firm off Vanak Square designing apartment blocks, which she was good at and bored by. She had applied to four American schools mostly to see whether she could get in. When the letter came she read it on the takht in the courtyard in the June heat and then went to find her father, who was on the roof.

He read it standing on the roof. He read it twice. Then he climbed down the ladder, which took a while, and went into his study, and came back out with a map of the United States that he had owned since the 1970s, folded so many times it was soft as cloth, and spread it on the bricks beside the hoz, and the two of them knelt on it and looked for Urbana.

"It's flat," he said finally, with professional disappointment. "There's nothing there. No mountains. No sea."

"There's a university."

"There's corn," her father said, running his finger across the state. "I've read about it. Corn up to here." He held his hand at his chin. Then he looked at her across the map and said, "Go and see. If you don't like it, come home. The house is not going anywhere."

At the airport in August, in the departures hall at Mehrabad at four in the morning, he gave her the slide rule. Her mother gave her a jar of dried herbs for ghormeh sabzi wrapped in three plastic bags and a sweater she had knitted, which was too warm for August and which Parisa would wear every day from November to March. Neither of them cried. They had agreed in advance, it turned out, separately, that they would not. Parisa cried on the plane over the Caspian, in the window seat, looking down at the dark water and the scattered lights of the towns along the coast where she had spent six weeks in 1988, and the woman beside her, a grandmother from Rasht going to see a new grandson in Toronto, held her hand without a word until they crossed into the night over Russia.

The first winter, the snow came in late November, at night. She woke and the light in her room was blue and strange and the silence outside was total. She went to the window and the whole town was white, the cars, the sidewalks, the bare trees, the roofs, and the snow was still falling under the streetlights in big slow pieces. In Tehran it snowed, of course, every winter; she had built snowmen in the courtyard and thrown snowballs at Ladan in the alley and gone up to the ski slopes at Dizin with her father. But Tehran snow came and was gone in a few days, turning gray in the streets and running away down the jub. This snow stayed. It stayed until March. It squeaked under her boots at fifteen below zero, a sound she had never heard snow make, and when she called home on a phone card from the pay phone in the lobby of Newmark Lab she held the receiver out toward the window so her mother could hear the wind.

The phone cards. She remembered them now with something like tenderness. You bought them at the gas station on Green Street, ten dollars for a certain number of minutes to Iran, and scratched off a silver strip to find the code, and dialed a long string of numbers, and if you were lucky you got through, and if you were not you got a recorded voice saying something in Spanish. She kept the used cards in a shoebox. There were dozens of them by the end of the first year. Her mother called them her report cards.

She was in two worlds from the beginning, though she did not have the words for it yet. At the lab she was Parisa, which her advisor, a kind man from Minnesota, pronounced Pa-REE-sa, with the stress in the wrong place, for five years, and she never corrected him because by the time she noticed it seemed rude. At the Iranian Students' potlucks on Friday nights, in somebody's apartment that smelled of rice and wet coats, she was Parisa with the stress where it belonged, at the end, and people asked her which neighborhood, which school, which year, and found within ten minutes the cousin of a friend of a neighbor they had in common. She went home from the lab speaking English and arrived at the potluck speaking Persian, and somewhere on the walk between, in the cold, under the streetlights, she changed.

The second door was a job in Houston, designing offshore platforms for an engineering company with offices in a glass tower near the Galleria. It was the opposite of Urbana. Houston was hot and wet and sprawled in every direction under a white sky, and the air in August felt like a towel just out of the dryer. She had never been so hot. She had also never eaten so well. There were Iranian restaurants and Iranian bakeries and an Iranian grocery on Hillcroft where the old men sat outside on plastic chairs drinking tea and arguing about football. It was in Houston, in April 2009, at a Sizdah Bedar picnic in Hermann Park, that she met Dara.

He was knotting grass. That was the first thing she saw. On Sizdah Bedar, the thirteenth day of the new year, families went out of doors and spent the day in the open, and at the end of the day they threw the sabzeh, the dish of sprouted grass from the haft-sin, into running water to carry off the bad luck of the year, and before they threw it the unmarried girls tied knots in the blades of grass and made a wish for a husband. It was a girls' custom and a joke, and everyone knew it was a joke. Dara Sadeghi, thirty-four, a physics teacher at a public high school on the southwest side, was sitting on a blanket near the bayou with a group of teenage girls, his students, the daughters of Iranian families, showing them how to tie a knot with one hand.

"That's for the girls," Parisa said, passing with a plate of kuku.

"I'm teaching knot theory," Dara said. "It's applied mathematics."

"What are you wishing for?"

"Tenure," he said, and the girls shrieked, and she sat down on the edge of the blanket, and that was the beginning.

They married in 2011 in Istanbul. It was the only way. He could not go to Tehran, because of the military service, and her parents could not easily come to America. So the two families flew in from Tehran on the same day, met for the first time in the arrivals hall at Atatürk airport, and a week later the wedding was held in the garden of a small hotel near the Bosphorus. Her father danced, with his arms up and his fingers snapping, the way men of his generation did at weddings in Tehran, and at the end of the night he sat down beside her on the hotel steps, out of breath, and said, "Your husband explains physics too much. That is a good sign. A man who explains is a man who stays."

The third door was the Bay Area, in 2013, when a structural firm in Oakland asked her to lead its seismic group, and Dara got a job teaching physics in Richmond, and they bought a small house in El Cerrito with a view of a slice of the bay and a persimmon tree in the back that the seller's agent did not mention because she did not know what it was.

Her parents visited once, in the summer of 2015, for six weeks. Her mother was cold the entire time; she had not believed Parisa that July in San Francisco would feel colder than January in Tehran, and she wore the same knitted sweater she had given Parisa in 2003, which Parisa had kept. Her father rode BART end to end, from Richmond to Millbrae and back, with the route map unfolded on his knees, and declared the system adequate. He stood on the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog for an hour with his hand on the railing, feeling it move. He came back and told her, with great satisfaction, that it moved.

It was the only time. Each year after that the long trip to America seemed a little harder to arrange, and then a little harder again, and her parents stopped asking. They saw each other in Istanbul when they could. Twice in Istanbul, once in Yerevan. It was not the same as the courtyard. It was something.

* * *

In the first week of December, Parisa looked at flights.

She told Dara she was only looking. He nodded and did not believe her, and she knew he did not believe her, and they both let it go.

There was a flight on Tuesday the fifteenth of December from San Francisco to Istanbul, overnight, and a connection the next evening from Istanbul to Tehran's international airport on an Iranian airline, landing in Tehran in the small hours of the seventeenth. She could be in the courtyard on Kucheh Yas by sunrise. She could be there for Yalda, the longest night of the year, on the twenty-first, for the first time since 2002. She could stay three weeks.

She went to see Ellen Marsh, the principal at her firm, a tall woman from Montana with gray hair in a braid who had hired her in 2013 and trusted her completely. Ellen listened with her hands folded on the desk.

"Take the time," she said. "Take whatever you need. You have weeks banked." Then, more carefully: "But no laptop. Nothing of ours goes there. Legal will want me to say that and I'm saying it."

"I know."

"And you'll tell me you're safe. Every day you can."

"Every day I can."

Ellen looked at her for a while. "My grandmother came over from Norway at nineteen," she said. "She never went back. Not once. Her mother died in 1931 and she found out from a letter four months later." She unfolded her hands. "Go see your folks, Parisa."

That night, at the kitchen table, with Dara beside her, she booked it. Her hand was steady on the mouse. She was surprised by that. She pressed the button and the confirmation came up on the screen with its codes and times and seat numbers, and she sat looking at it, and Dara said, "Okay," the way he said it when a student finally got an answer right, and she began, quietly, to laugh, and then to do the other thing, and he put his arm around her and they sat there in the kitchen while the dishwasher ran.

She called Tehran on Saturday and told her mother.

There was a long silence on the line. She thought it had dropped.

"Maman?"

"Bring your father the pills for his blood pressure," her mother said. "The ones from America. Here they are very expensive now. And a hat. You will need a hat. It is cold." A pause. "And I will make the room ready."

That was all. But afterward, Babak sent a photograph from next door. It showed Parisa's old room, the one off the courtyard with the window onto the hoz, with the shutters thrown open and the bedding hung over the windowsill to air in the winter sun, and her mother standing in the doorway with her back to the camera, one hand on the frame, looking in.

The Longest Night

The message from the airline came at 6:12 on the morning of Sunday the thirteenth of December. Parisa was already awake. She had been awake since four, because at four Dara's phone had lit up on the nightstand with a news alert, and he had read it and put the phone face down, and she had said, "What," and he had said, "Go back to sleep," which was how she knew.

The airspace over Iran was closed again. There had been no warning that she could find. There was a notice to airmen, posted in the early hours, in the short capital-letter language of such notices, and two lines in the news, and then, over the next hour, more lines, none of them saying much. She did not read past the first few. She did not want to know the reasons. The reasons belonged to people far away from her kitchen, and she had learned in the spring that reading their reasons at four in the morning did nothing for the courtyard on Kucheh Yas except to make it feel farther away.

The airline's message was in English and Persian. Due to the closure of the airspace, all flights between Istanbul and Tehran were cancelled until further notice. Passengers would be contacted.

She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the cold floor. Dara sat up behind her.

"I could still fly to Istanbul," she said. "And wait."

"For how long?"

"Until it opens."

"And if it opens for two days and closes again while you're there? In Tehran?"

She did not answer. That was the whole question, the one she had been not asking herself for three weeks. It was not whether she could get in. It was whether she could get out. People who went now went knowing that the door could close behind them without warning and stay closed for a day or a week or fifty-eight days, as it had in the spring, and there would be nobody on the other side to open it for them. Her mother-in-law's sister, who lived in Tehran, had a neighbor whose daughter had flown in from Frankfurt for a wedding in February and had been unable to leave until May. She had been fine. She had lost her job.

The calls to Tehran did not go through that morning. At noon Babak sent one line from his phone, in English, because he liked to practice: Everyone here okay. Your parents say do not worry. Also do not come.

* * *

On Tuesday the cafeteria on the ground floor of the firm's building smelled of tomato soup and wet umbrellas. Parisa sat at the end of a table by the window with a cup of tea and her phone face down beside it, which was as close as she could come to not looking at it.

Dev Malhotra sat down across from her with a paper bag. He was one of the younger engineers in the seismic group, broad in the shoulders and quiet, a man who measured twice before he spoke. He drove home to Sacramento most weekends, and he did not ask how her family was. Everybody else had asked, and she was tired of being grateful.

He took a pomegranate out of the bag and set it on a napkin between them. It was dark red, with a split down one side where it had ripened past what the skin could hold.

"My mother's tree," he said. "She sent me back with eleven. Nobody can eat eleven pomegranates."

"Anar," Parisa said, before she could stop herself.

He looked up. "Anar. That's what my grandmother calls it."

"That's what my grandmother called it."

He laughed, and so did she, for the first time since Sunday. Two grandmothers at two ends of a very old road, with the same word for it.

He scored the skin with the plastic knife from the soup counter, around the crown and down the ridges, as neatly as marking up a drawing, and broke it open over a second napkin. The seeds sat packed in their pale rooms, shining. He pushed half across to her. They ate with their fingers. The juice ran onto the napkins and the cuff of her sleeve, and for a while neither of them said anything.

She was eating them one at a time, she noticed, and without meaning to she had begun giving each one a name. That one was her mother. That one was Baba on the roof with his flashlight. Babak. Ladan from up the alley. Her grandmother in Amirieh, gone twenty-five years. She ran out of people before she ran out of seeds, and started again from the top.

"My father says a pomegranate is a family," Dev said. "He says it with his whole upper body. At my cousin's wedding in Fremont he explained it to the groom's entire family. I used to think it was just a thing he said."

"It isn't," Parisa said.

When he stood to throw the peel away, a card slid out of his wallet and landed face up by her tea. It was an ordinary white card, soft at the corners from years in a pocket, with nothing on it but a small figure eight drawn sideways in ink, the way you write infinity.

"What is that?"

Dev picked it up and looked at it as if he had not seen it in a while. "My dad and I broke down on Highway 1 once, years ago, north of anywhere. A man stopped. Old car, older stopwatch, hardly said ten words. He had us running again in twenty minutes and wouldn't take anything for it. That was on the windshield when we came back from the bushes." He tucked it away. "Dad says we owe somebody one. He just never says who."

On Friday there was a pomegranate on her desk with a sticky note in Dev's small square capitals: 10 LEFT. After that, all winter, whoever had one brought one, and they split it at the table by the window, and nobody else in the cafeteria understood why two engineers were so happy about a piece of fruit.

* * *

The airspace reopened on Thursday the seventeenth. Flights from Istanbul resumed on the nineteenth, on a reduced schedule, and the first seat she could find on any of them was in the second week of January. She sat at the kitchen table on the night of the nineteenth with the airline's website open and looked at the January seat for a long time, and then closed the laptop without buying it.

"Not now," she said to Dara.

"Okay."

"I'm not saying never."

"I know."

"I just can't do it twice in a month. Pack and unpack."

"I know," Dara said, and took her plate, which she had not touched, and put foil over it and put it in the refrigerator for later.

* * *

Yalda fell on Monday the twenty-first. It was the night of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and in Iran families stayed up through it together, as people there had done since long before anyone could remember, to keep each other company until the light came back. You ate red things, pomegranates and watermelon, because red was the color of dawn. You ate nuts and dried fruit. You read Hafez. You told stories. You did not go to bed early. That was all. It was the simplest holiday she knew.

Simin had decided that Yalda would be at Parisa's house this year, since Parisa had been going to be in Tehran and now was not. This was Simin's way of saying many things without saying any of them. She arrived at four in the afternoon in Golnaz's car with Manouchehr and two shopping bags and a watermelon the size of a small dog, which she had found at a Persian grocery in San Jose after calling eleven stores, because watermelon in December in California was not easy, and Yalda without watermelon was not Yalda.

"It will taste like water," Manouchehr said, carrying it in. "December watermelon. From Mexico. It will taste like water and cost like gold."

"Then you will eat the water," Simin said, "and be quiet."

They set the table in the living room low, on a cloth on the rug, because Simin said Yalda was not a table holiday, it was a floor holiday. Bowls of pomegranate seeds, red as garnets, that Golnaz and Tara had spent an hour seeding in the kitchen, the juice running down their wrists. A platter of the watermelon cut in triangles. Ajil, the mixture of roasted nuts and dried fruit, pistachios and almonds and hazelnuts, dried mulberries, raisins, roasted chickpeas, in a cut-glass bowl that had belonged to Simin's mother. Persimmons from Parisa's own tree, sliced. A plate of baqali, fava beans steamed in their skins and dusted with golpar, the gray-green powder of the Persian hogweed seed that smelled like nothing else on earth. Tea in a pot. Candles. In the middle, on a folded cloth, Simin's own copy of Hafez, the edition with a green cover that every Iranian household seemed to own.

At home, in the house on Kucheh Yas, her parents would be sitting down to the same table eleven and a half hours ahead. It was nearly half past four in the morning of the twenty-second there now, Parisa realized, doing the arithmetic, so their Yalda was nearly over. They had sat down to it this morning, while she was making coffee. She had not thought of that. Somehow in her mind they had always been going to share the night.

At five o'clock California time she opened the family calendar, out of habit, to check when to call. Her mother had added Yalda to it in October, with Babak's help, the way she added every family day: the birthdays and anniversaries, the death days of grandparents, the first day of school in Tehran, the day the goldfish went into the hoz. Beside Yalda her mother had typed, in Persian, a note that Parisa had not seen before: Tehran 20:00, California 08:30. I will call you at 8:30 your morning. You will still be in pajamas.

So her mother had planned to call this morning. Parisa had been in pajamas. Her phone had been on the kitchen counter, and had not rung, and she had not noticed, because she had not known.

She called now. It was half past four in the morning in Tehran. She did not care.

It rang. It rang again. Her mother answered on the fourth ring in a voice thick with sleep and said, before Parisa could say anything, "I tried. It would not go. I tried six times."

"I know, Maman. I'm sorry. I didn't see the note."

"What note?"

"On the calendar."

"Oh. Babak did that. I told him to." A rustle; her mother sitting up in bed. "Is everybody there?"

"Everybody's here. Simin-khanum brought a watermelon."

"In December? From where?"

"From Mexico."

"Mexico," said her mother, impressed. "Tell her it was a good idea."

Simin, who had been listening from the doorway, took the phone. The two mothers had met exactly four times in their lives, and they spoke to each other with the elaborate courtesies of their generation, ta'arof, each insisting the other was too kind, each refusing a compliment without returning two. Simin said the watermelon was nothing. Mahin said it was a very great thing. The line dropped.

Parisa called back. It rang. Her father answered this time.

"Your mother has gone to wash her face," he said. "She says she cannot speak to Simin-khanum with a face like this." Then: "Hold the phone up. I want to see the table."

She turned the phone. He studied the cloth on the rug, the pomegranates, the watermelon, Manouchehr cross-legged on a cushion with a plate on his knees, Tara on the couch pretending not to look.

"Good," he said. "That is a good table. Is the watermelon red?"

"It's red."

"Then everything is all right." And the picture stopped, and broke into squares, and went black.

It went like that for an hour. Six calls, seven. None lasted more than three minutes. In between, the family ate and talked and waited. Manouchehr ate the watermelon and conceded, after the second triangle, that it did not taste entirely like water. Golnaz told a story about a horse in Woodland that had swallowed a man's keys. Tara ate pomegranate seeds one at a time and listened.

When Parisa was small, Yalda had been held at her grandmother Touran's narrow brick house in Amirieh, in the old part of the city. In winter her grandmother kept a korsi in the main room, a low table over a brazier of coals with a great quilt thrown over it to the floor, and on Yalda night the whole family sat around it with their legs under the quilt, twelve or fifteen people, the children in the gaps between the adults like seeds in a pomegranate. You could feel the heat on the soles of your feet and the cold on the back of your neck. Her grandmother told the old stories, the bird that raised a prince on a mountaintop, the king who wore a peasant's shoes, and the children fell asleep under the quilt one by one, and the adults laid them in a row on the carpet like loaves and went on talking.

Her grandfather peeled pomegranates. He scored the skin and broke each one open over a bowl so that nothing was lost, and when he held up the last red seed between two fingers he said the same thing every year: "Every seed is somebody at this korsi. Not one of them gets left in the skin." That was his job. He scored the skin in a circle with a small knife and broke them open over a bowl and knocked out the seeds with the back of a spoon, and he did not eat any himself. When he died, in 1986, her father took over. When her father's hands began to stiffen, a few years ago, her mother took over, and did it badly, and said so.

At eight o'clock, the last call of the night went through, and it was clear, by some accident, for almost ten minutes.

"Now," said her mother. She had washed her face and put on her glasses and was sitting at the kitchen table with the blue birds behind her, in her cardigan, in the gray early light of a Tehran morning. In front of her was her own Hafez, the old one with its spine taped. "We do the fal."

The fal was the old game of Hafez: you held a wish in your mind, without saying it, and opened the book at random, and the poem you found was your answer. It was a game, the way the knotted grass on Sizdah Bedar was a game. Everybody knew that. Everybody played it seriously anyway.

"I'll do yours," her mother said. "You do mine. Simin-khanum can do Manouchehr-khan's. Tara can do whoever she likes."

"Maman, I don't have—"

"You have Simin-khanum's book. Open it."

So Parisa held a wish, which she did not need to put into words because it had been the same wish since the end of February, and on the other side of the world her mother closed her eyes and opened her book and put her finger on the page and read.

Her mother read the whole ghazal. She read it the way she had read to her students for thirty-two years, slowly, with the stresses where they belonged, letting the lines rise and fall. It was not a poem Parisa knew well. It was about a traveler on a road at night, and a lamp in a window far off, and the promise that the one who kept walking would arrive. It was about patience, and the night, and the morning. Somewhere around the fifth couplet the picture froze, and her mother's voice went on, slightly broken, a word missing here and there like stones missing from a path, and then the picture came back, and she was still reading, she had not noticed.

When she finished, she closed the book.

"There," she said. "That's yours. Now do mine."

Parisa opened Simin's book with her eyes closed, and read the first poem her finger found, and her mother listened with her eyes closed too, and at the end said, "Good. That's a good one," and did not say what she had wished for.

Then the call dropped for the last time, and did not come back, and Parisa sat on the floor of her living room in El Cerrito among the pomegranate seeds and the empty plates with Simin's book open in her lap. Nobody said anything. Then Manouchehr, who had been watching her from his cushion, said, "Next year at the korsi," and Simin said, "Next year," and Tara, from the couch, said quietly, the way she might try out a new word in class, "Delam barat tang shodeh," and nobody corrected her pronunciation, though it needed some correcting.

They stayed up until midnight. It was not hard. It was the longest night of the year.

The Engineer's Wrist

It snowed in Tehran on the ninth of January, a Saturday. Parisa knew because her mother sent a photograph at seven in the morning Tehran time, which was half past seven on Friday night in El Cerrito, while she and Dara were watching a movie neither of them was following. The photograph showed the courtyard under four inches of snow, the hoz drained for the winter and filled with white like a bowl of sugar, the persimmon tree bare and black with a line of snow along every branch, and above the wall, faint and huge in the clearing sky, the mountains. Under it her mother had written: Your father wants to sweep. I said wait for the sun.

Parisa sent back a heart. Then she sent: Tell him to wait for the sun. Then she went to bed.

She woke at six on Saturday. There was nothing on her phone. She made coffee and tried the call, and it did not go through, and she went for a run along the Ohlone Greenway under the BART tracks in the cold bright morning, past the community gardens with their winter kale, and came home and tried again.

At eleven, Babak's message came. It had been sent, the time stamp said, at 21:40 Tehran time, which was ten past ten in the morning in California, and had taken an hour to arrive.

Parisa-khanum, everything is fine now, do not worry. Your father fell in the courtyard this morning on the ice. His wrist is broken. We went to the hospital in Tajrish. They put a cast. He is home. He is complaining. Your mother is fine. Everything is fine. Please do not worry.

She read it four times. Then she sat down on the floor of the kitchen with her back against the dishwasher, because her legs had decided that for her.

This morning. He had fallen this morning. At, she worked it out, perhaps nine or ten in the morning Tehran time, while she was asleep. He had lain on the ice in the courtyard, or sat, or stood up by himself, she did not know which, and someone had called Babak, and Babak had come over the wall or through the gate and gotten him to his car and driven him down the hill through the snow to the hospital, and they had waited, and he had been x-rayed and set and put in a cast, and they had driven back up the hill, and he had sat down in his chair in the warm room off the kitchen and begun to complain. All of that had happened. A whole day had happened. And she had gone running past the kale.

Thirteen hours. She had not known for thirteen hours.

Dara found her on the floor. He read the message over her shoulder and then sat down beside her on the tiles.

"It's a wrist," he said after a while. "People break wrists."

"He's seventy-nine."

"He'll be eighty in two weeks. People break wrists at eighty."

"He was sweeping. I told him to wait for the sun."

"You told your mother to tell him to wait for the sun," Dara said. "Which she did. And he went out anyway. Because he's your father." He put his hand on her knee. "This is not your fault."

"I'm not saying it's my fault."

"You're thinking it."

She did not answer, because he was right, and because what she was thinking about was less fault than distance. Before the war, the eight thousand miles between El Cerrito and Kucheh Yas had been a distance you could cross: expensive, tiring, but you could get a call at midnight and be in the courtyard in thirty hours. Now there was no plane at noon. There might be a plane in a week, or in a month. Or the door might close the day before.

She called. On the third try it went through.

Her father answered. He was in his chair; she could see the back of it, the old brown leather patched at the arm with tape. He was holding the phone in his left hand, awkwardly, too close, the way her mother did, and his right arm lay across his chest in a white cast from the knuckles to the elbow, in a sling made from what she recognized as one of her mother's silk scarves, the green one with the paisleys.

"I am not made of glass," he said before she could speak.

"Baba."

"I know what you're going to say. Don't say it. I've heard it from your mother. I've heard it from Babak. I've heard it from the doctor, who is twelve years old. I've heard it from Farangis-khanum over the wall. I'm not hearing it from America too."

"How did you fall?"

"The ordinary way. Down." He moved the phone and she saw his face, and it was gray, grayer than she had ever seen it, and there was a bruise on his cheekbone that he had not mentioned. "There was ice by the hoz. I knew it was there. I went around it. Then I went around it again, the other way, and forgot. That's all. That's the whole engineering report."

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes," he said simply. "Now let me talk to Dara. He'll be sensible."

* * *

For the next two weeks she called every day and got through on most of them. The cast stayed on. Her father could not hold a pen, or a teacup in his right hand, or the newspaper open, or the setar, which he had not played in years anyway but now, suddenly, wanted to. Her mother cut his food and buttoned his shirts and said, on the phone, in his hearing, that she had not known when she married him that she was marrying a second child, and he said from the chair that she had known perfectly well, and Parisa could hear in their voices how frightened they both had been, and how much they did not want her to hear it.

His eightieth birthday fell on Sunday the twenty-fourth of January.

It had been on the family calendar for a year. In the original plan, the one from before the war, Parisa and Dara were going to meet her parents in Istanbul that week, in the same apartment in Cihangir, and take her father on a boat up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. That plan was a long way behind them now. In its place, in the second week of January, while the cast was still new, her cousin Arash in Hamburg made a page.

It was a private page, only for the family and the people they invited, and it was for her father's birthday. It had a photograph of him at the top that Arash had found somewhere: Hushang at about thirty, in a short-sleeved shirt and sunglasses, standing on a half-built bridge in the mountains with his hands on his hips and a dusty truck behind him, squinting into the sun. Below the photograph was an open space, and in it, over twelve days, people left him wishes.

They came from everywhere. Arash wrote from Hamburg, in a long, formal paragraph in Persian, that his uncle Hushang had taught him to drive in 1991 in the empty parking lot of a stadium and had not once raised his voice, even when Arash drove into a lamppost. Nazanin, Parisa's school friend, wrote from Toronto, in English, that Agha-ye Tavakoli was the only father on Kucheh Yas who had ever played volleyball with the girls. Golnaz wrote. Simin wrote at great length, and Manouchehr added one line underneath that said only: From one old man to another, the first eighty are the hardest. Tara recorded a video of herself saying "Tavalodet mobarak, Agha-ye Tavakoli," happy birthday, and then, in a rush, before she lost her nerve, "khormalu-dast," and then covered her face with her hands and ended the video. Ladan, Parisa's oldest friend, wrote a short poem in Persian, terrible on purpose, rhyming Hushang with zang, which meant bell, and with palang, which meant leopard. A man in Karaj whose name Parisa did not know wrote that his father had worked on the crew of Mohandes Tavakoli on the Chalus road in the 1970s and had talked about him until the day he died, and that his father had once said Mohandes Tavakoli was the only engineer who ever ate lunch sitting on the ground with the men.

Parisa wrote last. She wrote it the night before, at the kitchen table, and deleted it twice, and in the end she wrote only a few lines. She wrote about the map of America on the courtyard bricks in 2003. She wrote about the slide rule. She wrote: You told me to go and see. I went and I saw. Now I want to come and see you.

On the morning of the twenty-fourth, Babak brought his tablet over to the house on Kucheh Yas and propped it on the table in front of the brown chair, and her father read the wishes. Parisa watched him do it, on a video call, holding her own phone at the kitchen counter in El Cerrito at nine o'clock at night on the twenty-third, which was half past eight on the morning of his birthday. He read with his glasses on the end of his nose, scrolling slowly with his left forefinger, which he was not good at. He did not say anything. Sometimes he stopped scrolling and sat still for a while. When he got to the man from Karaj he took his glasses off and put his left hand over his eyes and kept it there.

When he got to hers he read it twice. Then he looked up at the camera.

"You want to come," he said.

"I want to come."

"Your mother says no."

"I know."

"I say no," he said. "Also." He set the glasses down. "And I say, when you were eleven, and we went to the north, I asked your mother if we were right to take you. Through the mountains. In that car. With nobody able to tell us how long. She said, Hushang, there is no right. There is only what we will be able to live with afterward."

The courtyard behind him was bright with winter sun on old snow. Parisa did not speak. She had been waiting since November for a good line to ask him about 1988, and here it was, and she did not want to break it.

"What was it like, Baba?" she said finally. "Those weeks. For you and Maman."

Her father was quiet for a long time.

"We were frightened every minute," he said. "Every single minute. Day and night. For six weeks." He picked up his glasses again and turned them over in his good hand. "And we decided you would not be. So we sang. We made the other fathers sing. Your mother taught all the children Hafez. We went swimming in the rain. It was a great deal of work, not being frightened in front of you. It was the hardest job I ever did. Harder than the twelfth kilometer." He smiled, without teeth. "And you remember the rain on the roof. Yes?"

"I remember the rain on the roof."

"Good. Then we did it right." He looked away from the camera, toward the kitchen, where her mother must have been standing. "That's what you wanted. Now you have it. Put it in your machine."

She had not pressed record. She realized it only afterward, when the call had ended and she was sitting alone at the counter with the phone dark in her hand. There was no recording of it anywhere, only what she would remember.

She sat for a while. Then she opened his room on the family page and, under the bridge at the twelfth kilometer, she wrote a note in her own words, as close as she could remember to what he had said, with the date in both calendars. She wrote it down because he had told it to her, and because she knew he would not tell it twice.

Two Kinds of Fear

In her work there was a way of thinking about danger that Parisa had trusted for twenty years. You did not ask whether a building would fail. Every building would fail, given enough time and a big enough shake. You asked how likely the shake was, and how big, and what the building would do, and what it would cost, in money and in lives, if it did. You put numbers on all of it. You built a table. And then you decided how much risk you were willing to carry, and you designed to that, and you wrote it down so that anyone could check your thinking.

On the last Sunday in January she sat at the kitchen table with a pad of graph paper and tried to do it for herself.

She drew a line down the middle of the page. On the left she wrote Go. On the right she wrote Don't go. Then she sat looking at it with the pen in her hand.

Under Go, she could write what everyone said. The advisory from her own government, which had said Do Not Travel for years, in plain bureaucratic wording that she had read so often she could recite it: the risks to any traveler, and the particular risk to people like her, who held both passports, because the country she would be entering did not recognize the second one and would treat her only as its own. The absence of any embassy that could help her if something went wrong. The airspace that had closed in February for fifty-eight days and in December for four and could close again at any hour. The fact that nearly every flight in was on an Iranian airline, on routes that changed from week to week. The fact that if she were stuck, she would be stuck, and nobody could say for how long.

She could write all of that. It was real. But when she tried to put a number on it, the number would not come. How likely was it that the airspace would close while she was there? Nobody knew. Most people who went came back, quietly, and did not talk about it much afterward. Some did not come back when they meant to. She had read their stories too.

Under Don't go she wrote nothing at first. Then she wrote: Baba is 80. Maman is 77. His wrist. Then: Manouchehr's mother. Then she stopped, because she did not want to write the next thing, which was the real thing, which was that she had not stood in the courtyard on Kucheh Yas in seven years and there was no promise anywhere in the world that she would get another chance.

That was the other kind of fear. It was quieter than the first. It did not keep her awake at four in the morning reading news. It sat with her in the afternoon, at her desk in Oakland, while she was looking at drawings, and said nothing, and was there.

She turned the pad over and did not finish the table. Some loads you could not estimate. Her father had told her that once, about the mountains. You could estimate the snow. You could estimate the rain. You could not estimate the one spring in fifty when both came at once, and the slope let go. For that one, you built the wall as well as you could and then you went and stood under it and watched.

* * *

She talked to Nazanin on the first of February.

Nazanin Farzad had sat beside her at school from the age of twelve. She had gone to Canada in 1999 and lived now in Toronto with her husband and two grown sons and a dog the size of a sofa. Her mother, eighty-four, lived alone in an apartment in Yusefabad, and in October Nazanin had gone to see her for three weeks.

"Tell me the truth," Parisa said.

"The truth is, it was fine," Nazanin said. She was on a video call from her kitchen, with the dog's head resting on the table beside her coffee. "And the truth is, I didn't sleep for three weeks."

"Tell me how you did it."

So Nazanin told her, practically, the way you told someone how to get to a restaurant. She had flown Toronto to Istanbul and spent a night in a hotel near the airport. She had flown to Tehran on an Iranian airline in the evening. She had traveled on her Iranian passport, as she had to; the other one she had kept in the bottom of her bag, in a zipped pocket, and had not taken it out until she was back in Istanbul. She had not carried her work laptop. She had bought a cheap phone for the trip and put almost nothing on it. At passport control in Tehran the officer had asked her where she lived and why she had come and how long she would stay, and looked at her for a while, and stamped her passport, and she had walked out into the arrivals hall at three in the morning and her brother was there with flowers from a gas station.

"And then?"

"And then it was Tehran," Nazanin said. "It was my mother's apartment. It was tea. It was her friends coming over every afternoon to look at me. It was the same as always and it was completely different." She stroked the dog's ear. "Things are hard there, Parisa. Prices. People are tired. There are buildings you will see on the drive in that you won't want to look at. And you will spend every day listening for a sound, and you will never hear it, and you will spend every day checking the flights on your phone, and nothing will happen, and you will come home and sleep for two days. That's what it's like."

"Would you go again?"

Nazanin did not answer right away. She looked away from the camera, out of her kitchen window, where it was snowing on Toronto.

"My mother sat on the edge of my bed every night," she said. "Every night of the three weeks. Like when I was ten. She didn't say anything. She just sat there for five minutes and then went to bed." She looked back. "Yes. I would go again. I'm going again in April if I can."

* * *

Her fiftieth birthday was Tuesday the ninth of February. She had not wanted to make anything of it. Dara made something of it anyway, quietly, the way he did things: he took her to dinner at a small place in Berkeley that served food from northern Iran, from Gilan, by the Caspian, where the owner was a woman from Rasht who made mirza ghasemi, smoked eggplant with garlic and egg, exactly the way it was made in Rasht and nowhere else. They sat by the window on Shattuck Avenue in the rain. The eggplant tasted of smoke and the north and the six weeks in 1988, and Parisa ate it slowly and did not talk much, and Dara did not make her.

At the end of the meal he took an envelope out of his jacket and put it on the table.

"It's not for now," he said.

The envelope was sealed. On the front, in his neat teacher's handwriting, it said: For Parisa, to open at 60.

"Dara."

"I wrote it this month. I've been thinking about what I'd want you to know in ten years. It's going in the box." There was a box in the family page for such things, letters written now to be opened later, each with a date on which it would unlock; the paper copy went in a real box in the closet, a tin that had once held Simin's saffron. "Your mother has one in there too. She dictated it to Babak in December. I'm not supposed to tell you that."

"What does it say?"

"I don't know. It's locked until your sixtieth. That's how it works." He took her hand across the table. "I just wanted you to know that there's a lot of people planning on you being around in ten years. In case that helps with your graph paper."

She had not told him about the graph paper. He had found it, she supposed, on the kitchen table.

The call from Tehran came at eleven that night, when they were home, which was half past ten in the morning of the tenth in Tehran. Both her parents were on it, side by side at the kitchen table, her father with his cast now off and his wrist in a black brace. Her mother had a candle in front of her, lit, in the daytime, and a small cake from the bakery on the avenue with a single number five and a zero, and they sang, her mother clapping and her father keeping time with his left hand on the table, a birthday song that every Iranian child knew, and they sang it badly and loudly and happily, and the call held all the way to the end.

When they finished, her mother blew out the candle for her, since Parisa could not, and then sat looking at her through the screen for a while.

"Fifty," her mother said.

"Fifty."

"When you were born it was snowing. Did I ever tell you? Your father drove to the hospital in the snow in the Paykan with no chains, and he went the wrong way twice, and I told him if he went the wrong way a third time I would have you in the car." Her mother smiled. "And now you are fifty and you live by the sea and you have a husband who teaches physics and you are an engineer like your father, and better than your father, he says so himself."

"I never said so," said her father.

"You said so in 2003. I was there."

They were quiet. Then her mother said, "Parisa-jan. Listen to me."

"I'm listening."

"In December I said don't come. I said it because I am your mother and it is my job to say it." She looked down at the cake, at the candle smoking. "Now I am saying something else. I am not saying come. I will never say come. I am saying, if you come, come for Nowruz. Come before the new year. We will paint the hoz. Your father wants to paint the hoz and he can't do it with that arm and he won't let Babak because Babak paints like a soldier. You will paint it with him. Then you go home." She looked up. "That's all I'm saying."

Her father, beside her, said nothing. He put his good hand over his wife's on the table.

When the call ended Parisa went to the kitchen and took out the pad of graph paper and looked at the table she had not finished. Go. Don't go. All the true things on one side, and the other true things on the other. She thought about the shake you could not estimate, and the wall, and standing under it.

She thought about her father on the roof in October with a flashlight, saying spring was not far. After the khormalu, the cold. After the cold, the fish in the hoz.

Then she opened her laptop and found a seat on the Thursday, the fourth of March, San Francisco to Istanbul, and a connection on the evening of the fifth on an Iranian airline into Tehran, landing in the small hours of the sixth. She found a return for the fourth of April, two days after Sizdah Bedar. She looked at it for a long time, as she had looked at the December seat and the January seat. Then she went upstairs and woke Dara, who had fallen asleep with the light on and a book on his chest, and showed him the screen.

He read it. He looked at her for a long moment.

"Okay," he said, and this time it sounded different.

She went back downstairs and pressed the button.

What Goes in the Suitcase

The suitcase stood open on the floor of the spare room for three weeks, and things went into it and came out of it and went back in, the way water finds its level.

The first thing in was the medicine. Her father's blood pressure pills, six months' worth, in their American bottles. Her mother's eye drops. Vitamin D. A wrist brace, a better one than the hospital had given him, black with a steel stay along the palm. All of it in a clear zipped bag with the prescriptions folded inside, in English and in a Persian translation she had typed herself.

The second thing in was her Iranian passport. It was dark red-brown, the color of dried pomegranate skin, and it was good until 2028; she had renewed it in 2023 by mail through the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, a slow process with a great many photocopies, back when renewing it had seemed like a formality, the kind of thing you kept current the way you kept a spare key under a pot. She held it now in the spare room and turned the pages. The photograph was three years old and looked like someone else, someone less tired. The last stamp in it was from the airport in Tehran, November 2019.

Her other passport, the blue one, went in a separate place: a zipped inside pocket of her shoulder bag, at the very bottom, under a fold of fabric. She would need it in Istanbul, going and coming. Between Istanbul and Istanbul she would not take it out.

The third thing in was a phone. A cheap one, new, bought at a store on San Pablo, with almost nothing on it: her parents' numbers, Babak's, Ladan's, Dara's, the airline. No work email. No laptop at all. Ellen had said it, and Nazanin had said it, and she would have done it anyway. She would carry a paper notebook and a pencil. It occurred to her, packing it, that she had not traveled anywhere with only a paper notebook since 2003.

Then came the gifts, which were harder. Nobody in an Iranian family came home from abroad with empty hands; the returning suitcase was opened in the living room in front of everyone, each thing drawn out and exclaimed over. She remembered her uncle back from Germany with chocolate and a red plastic camera, and the smell of the open suitcase, like airplane air and new clothes. Now she was the one with the suitcase, and she did not know what to bring to a house that had needed rice in October.

She asked her mother. Her mother said to bring nothing. This meant bring something, but not too much, and nothing showy, and nothing that would make the neighbors think the Tavakolis' daughter was rich. She asked her father. Her father said to bring a good flashlight. So she bought a good flashlight, one with a rechargeable battery and a strap for the head, and a box of spare batteries. For her mother, a soft gray wool scarf from a shop in Berkeley and three paperback novels in English, because Mahin read English novels to keep her English and could not get new ones now. For Farangis-khanum next door, hand cream and a box of See's chocolates, which every Iranian in California brought home and which Farangis would pretend to be surprised by. For Babak, who had carried her father to the car in the snow, she did not know what you brought. She asked Dara.

"Nothing you can carry," Dara said. "Just thank him."

She bought him a good pair of work gloves anyway.

Simin brought a package on the last Sunday of February. It was for her sister, Parvin, who lived in an apartment in Tehran near Vanak Square and whom Simin had not seen since 2018. It was about the size of a shoebox and wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, the way packages had been wrapped when Simin was young. Simin did not say what was in it. She put it on the spare room bed beside the suitcase and stood looking at it.

"Reading glasses," she said finally. "Plus two and a half. She can't get the good ones. Some vitamins. A photograph." She smoothed the string. "Of Tara. She's never met Tara. Fifteen years."

"I'll take it to her myself," Parisa said.

"You don't have to go to Vanak. Babak can—"

"I'll take it myself, Simin-khanum."

Simin nodded. She did not cry; she was not a crier. She went out to the kitchen and began washing dishes that were already clean.

Tara sent a list. It came by message on a Wednesday night, in English, with a subject line in Persian that she had clearly spelled with help: Kalameh-ha baraye Maman-e Khaleh. Words for Aunt's Mother. It was twenty-two words long. Some of them were ordinary, words from her Saturday school textbook that she wanted to hear in a real voice: window, courtyard, tree, water, snow. Some of them were words she had heard her grandmother Simin use and could not find in any dictionary, spelled the way they sounded to her. Some of them were questions. What is the word for the little pool? What is the word for when you miss a place, not a person? Is there a word for the smell of rain on hot bricks? Mom says there is.

"Ask her in person," Tara had written at the bottom. "Not on the phone. On the phone it cuts out."

Parisa printed the list and folded it into the paper notebook.

Arash called from Hamburg the same week. He wanted her to photograph things.

"While you're there," he said. "The objects. Everything in the house that has a story. The samovar. Your grandfather's radio. The setar. The carpet in the front room, the one with the birds. Get your mother to tell you where each thing came from and record her saying it. Put it on the shelf." He paused. Arash was fifty-two, a civil servant in the Hamburg port authority, careful and organized in the way of a man who had left Tehran at seventeen and had been arranging things ever since. "I've been thinking about it since the spring. Those three months. If something had happened to that house, we wouldn't even know what was in it."

"Nothing is going to happen to the house."

"I know. Take the pictures anyway."

* * *

The night before she left, she packed for the last time.

She laid everything out on the bed first, the way her father had taught her to lay out tools before a job. Medicine. Passport. Phone, charged. Flashlight. Gifts. Simin's package. Clothes for a Tehran March, which could be anything: snow on the mountains and blossom in the gardens in the same week, cold mornings and warm afternoons, rain that came down from the north in sheets and was gone in an hour. Two long coats, modest, one light and one heavy. Scarves. Flat shoes for walking. Work gloves for painting a pool. The paper notebook with Tara's list in it.

And one more thing, which she had been putting in and taking out for three weeks, and which she put in now for good: the slide rule. In its leather case. She did not know why. It was a ridiculous thing to carry across the world. She wanted her father to see it.

Then she closed the suitcase, and knelt on it to make the zipper meet, and sat back on her heels on the floor of the spare room and looked at it. It was an ordinary suitcase, dark green, with a scuff on one corner from a taxi trunk in Istanbul in 2024. It sat there on the carpet, full and closed and ready, and it was the most frightening object she had ever seen.

Dara came and stood in the doorway.

"Done?"

"Done."

He came in and sat down on the floor beside her, his back against the bed, and for a while neither of them said anything.

"I keep thinking," he said finally, "that I should say something useful. Some advice. Something about the airport. And I've got nothing. I haven't been there in thirty-four years. You know more about it than I do." He picked at the carpet. "The last time I was in Tehran I was seventeen and I was mostly worried about whether a girl named Shohreh was going to write to me."

"Did she?"

"Twice. Then she married a dentist." He smiled. "So I've got nothing useful. I've just got, come back."

"I'm coming back."

"I know. I'm saying it anyway. That's all I've got. Come back, and if you can't come back when you mean to, don't panic, and call me, and I'll be here, and we'll figure it out. I'll be here the whole time." He looked at the suitcase. "And bring me a sangak. A whole one. I don't care how you get it through customs."

"You can't bring bread into the country, Dara."

"Then eat one for me," he said. "Standing up. In the bakery. While it's hot."

* * *

At the international terminal at San Francisco on Thursday afternoon, the fourth of March, it was raining. Dara parked in the short-term lot and carried the suitcase himself, though it had wheels, and they walked through the big glass hall under the hanging art, past the families and the students and the businessmen and the old women in wheelchairs with their tags around their necks, to the check-in counter.

Manouchehr and Simin were there. She had not known they were coming. They had come on BART from Walnut Creek, an hour and a half each way, and were standing by a pillar near the counter in their good coats, Simin holding a small plant in a pot that she clearly had not thought through, since it could not go on an airplane.

"For luck," Simin said, and gave it to Dara to hold.

Manouchehr shook Parisa's hand, which he had never done before, and in the handshake there was a folded envelope, which she knew without looking was money, American dollars, for an emergency, and she knew better than to refuse it in public. He did not say anything about it. He said, "When you get there, go to the courtyard first. Before you sleep. Before anything. Go and stand in the courtyard."

"I will, Manouchehr-khan."

"And tell your father the first eighty are the hardest." He let go of her hand.

She checked the suitcase. She watched it ride away down the belt behind the counter and through the rubber flaps into the dark, green and scuffed, with Simin's package and the slide rule and the flashlight and her father's pills inside, and she thought, There it goes, and then, Now I'm really going.

At security, Dara held her for a long time. He did not say come back again. He did not need to.

Through the glass, as the line moved her forward, she saw the three of them standing together by the pillar: her husband, tall, with his hands in his pockets, and his parents on either side of him, his mother holding the useless little plant again, all three of them watching her, not waving, just watching, the way you watch someone walk up a mountain path until they are around the bend.

Gate of the Night Flight

Istanbul Airport was enormous and new and bright, a city under one roof, with ceilings so high that the pigeons who had gotten in lived their whole lives up there among the steel beams and never came down. Parisa had landed in the late afternoon after thirteen hours over the top of the world, over Greenland white and empty under the wing, and she walked now through the long halls in the smell of coffee and perfume from the duty-free shops, with her shoulder bag held close and her blue passport, for the last time for a month, in her hand.

Her connection was at ten at night. She had five hours. She found the gate first, the way her father always did, so that she would know where it was; it was at the far end of a long pier, past the shops and the restaurants, in the part of the terminal where the gates went to Tbilisi and Baku and Yerevan and Erbil, and the people waiting had a different look, more luggage, more plastic bags, more grandmothers. The screen above the gate said TEHRAN and the flight number and ON TIME. She stood looking at it for a while as if it might change if she looked away.

Then she went into the women's room and, in a stall, took the blue passport and put it in the zipped pocket at the bottom of her shoulder bag, under the fold of fabric, and zipped it, and took out the red-brown one. She came out and washed her hands and looked at herself in the mirror under the hard light. A fifty-year-old woman with gray coming in at the temples, in a long dark coat, tired. Nobody in particular. That was what she wanted to be.

She called Dara from a bench by the window. It was seven in the morning in El Cerrito. He was in the kitchen; she could hear the coffee grinder.

"I'm in Istanbul."

"I know. I've been watching the map. You went over Greenland."

"It was white."

"I bet it was." A pause. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," she said, and then, because it was Dara, "I'm scared."

"Yeah," he said. "Me too." The grinder stopped. "Are you at the gate?"

"I found it. It says on time."

"Then go eat something. Something hot. Not a sandwich."

She ate a bowl of lentil soup at a counter with a view of the runway, red lentils with a squeeze of lemon and dried mint and red pepper, which was what Turkish airport food was when it was good, and it was good. She watched the planes come and go in the dusk. Somewhere out there was the Bosphorus, and the hotel garden where she had been married, and the apartment in Cihangir where she had last held her mother. She did not try to see them. She finished the soup.

Her phone was at nine percent. The outlet under the counter took the round two-pin plug of Europe, and the adapter she had bought for the trip was, she realized, in the suitcase, somewhere beneath her in the belly of the airport. She was looking at the outlet the way people look at bad news when the man on the next stool set a small black adapter on the counter and pushed it over to her with one finger.

He was somewhere in his fifties, with close-cut graying hair and a face that had spent time in sun and wind, Indian by the look of him and Californian by the sound of the two words he said, which were "Go ahead." Beside his cup of black tea lay an old steel stopwatch, its face worn pale. While her phone charged he watched the runway, and twice, as a plane touched down, she saw his thumb press the crown, and press it again when the plane turned off, and he glanced at the number as if the runway had kept a promise.

"You're timing them," she said.

"Habit." He did not explain it. When they called a flight to San Francisco he finished his tea, put the stopwatch in his pocket and stood, and she held out the adapter. "Keep it," he said. "The plugs are the same where you're going. Most of it will be waiting. Waiting is all right." Then he was gone into the crowd. On the flat side of the adapter someone had drawn, in small careful ink, a figure eight lying on its side. She used it every night for a month in her old room on Kucheh Yas and never learned who he was.

* * *

By nine the gate area had filled. She sat in a row of metal seats and looked at the people, because she could not read, and because they were the people she was going home with.

There were young couples and students, a heavy man in a suit with three suitcases bound in plastic wrap, four women in their sixties sharing pistachios and laughing in the too-loud way of people who are frightened and have agreed not to say so. There was an old man.

He sat two seats down from her. He was very thin, in a gray suit that had been good once and a hat, an actual hat, gray felt, and he held on his knees a plastic bag from a Los Angeles pharmacy with what looked like boxes of pills inside. He was perhaps eighty. When he saw her looking he lifted his hat an inch.

"From where?" he said in Persian.

"California. San Francisco."

"Ah, the north. I'm from the south. Los Angeles. Westwood." He said it the way people of his generation said it, Vest-vood. "Jahanbin. Ebrahim Jahanbin." He leaned over and they shook hands, and his hand was dry and light. "Going to see my sister. She is eighty-six. I am eighty-one. She says, Ebrahim, don't come, are you crazy, at your age, with everything. I say, Pouran, at my age, with everything, when should I come? After?" He shrugged. "So I'm coming."

"I'm going to see my parents."

"Of course you are." He looked at her with the frankness of the very old. "First time since?"

"Since 2019."

"Ah. Me, since 2016." He patted the pharmacy bag. "Her medicine. Mine too, but mostly hers. You have medicine?"

"For my father."

"Everyone has medicine," Mr. Jahanbin said. "This whole gate. Look. Every bag. Pills and chocolate. That is how you can tell who is going to Tehran. Pills and chocolate."

She laughed, and it was the first time in two days.

They called the flight at half past nine. The plane was an older Airbus with a worn blue interior and seats whose fabric had been patched, and the crew were Iranian, young women with their hair under neat scarves and calm, professional faces, and a steward of about sixty who walked up and down the aisle before takeoff with the air of a man who had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. Parisa had a window seat. Mr. Jahanbin, by chance or by some arrangement of his own, was across the aisle.

When the plane lifted off over the dark Sea of Marmara and turned east, she watched the lights of Istanbul tilt and fall away and thought, There is the last door. And then, because she was her father's daughter: No. Doors open both ways.

It was a three-and-a-half-hour flight. They served a tray of rice and chicken with a little dish of yogurt and a sweet, and tea. The four women with the pistachios stopped laughing and slept. The man in the suit stopped talking on his phones. Somewhere over eastern Turkey, in the dark, the steward came down the aisle and quietly reminded people that they would soon be entering Iranian airspace, and up and down the cabin the women who had not yet done so took scarves from their bags and put them on, without discussion, in the same practiced way they would have put on a seatbelt, and Parisa did too.

She looked out of the window. There was nothing to see for a long time, only darkness and, far below, now and then, a small scatter of lights, a town, a road. Then the plane began to descend, and the engines changed their note, and the lights below grew thicker, and then there was a line of them, a long chain of lights running east and west, and beyond it, to the north, against the faint glow of the sky, a darkness that was not sky. A great wall of darkness, enormous, filling the window. It took her a moment to understand. It was the mountains. It was the Alborz, black against the night, with snow on the highest ridges catching some faint light from nowhere, and below it, spread out across the plain for as far as she could see, the city.

Tehran at night. She had seen it from the air perhaps twenty times in her life and it had never failed to stop her breath. Fifteen million people, give or take, in a bowl of lights at the foot of the mountains, the lights orange and white and gold, the great avenues running north and south in lines of brightness, the dark patches of the parks. It was quieter than she remembered. There were fewer lights in some places than she remembered, dark stretches she did not understand. But it was there. It was there.

Across the aisle, Mr. Jahanbin had his hat in his hands and his face very close to the window, and he was saying something to himself under his breath that she could not hear.

* * *

They landed at ten past two in the morning.

The terminal was large and half lit and smelled of floor cleaner and cigarettes from somewhere. Their flight was the only one arriving. The passengers walked in a long, quiet line through the corridors, under signs in Persian and English, with their carry-on bags, toward passport control, and nobody talked, and the only sound was the wheels of the bags on the floor.

There were four booths open. The line moved slowly. Parisa stood in it with the red-brown passport in her hand and felt her heart in her throat, beating, so hard she was sure the man in front of her could hear it. She made herself breathe. She thought about load paths. She thought about the persimmon tree. She thought about her mother saying gham makhor, do not grieve.

Then it was her turn.

The officer was a young man, perhaps thirty, with a short beard and tired eyes and a cup of tea beside his computer. He took her passport and opened it and looked at the photograph and then at her and then at the screen. He typed. He asked where she lived. She told him: in America, in California. He asked what she did. She told him: an engineer, buildings. He asked why she had come. She said, to see my parents, my father is eighty, he broke his wrist in January. He asked how long. She said, one month, until after Sizdah Bedar.

He typed for a while. Then he stood up, with her passport, and said, "One moment, khanum," politely, and walked away from the booth through a door behind him.

She stood there.

It was four minutes. She knew because there was a clock on the wall above the booths, a plain white clock with a red second hand, and she watched it go around four times. The line behind her waited. Nobody said anything. In the next booth Mr. Jahanbin was having his passport stamped, and he looked over at her once, and then looked away, carefully, the way you look away from someone who is trying not to cry. She did not cry. She stood with her hands at her sides and her bag on her shoulder and watched the red second hand go around, and she thought, very clearly, I knew this might happen and I came anyway, and whatever happens now I chose, and then she thought, Baba, I'm here, I'm in the building, and then she did not think anything at all.

The door opened. The officer came back. He sat down. He picked up his tea and drank some of it. He opened her passport to a clean page and stamped it, twice, and handed it back to her through the window.

"Welcome," he said in Persian, and then, after a pause, as she was turning away: "My father also broke his wrist. Two years ago. Tell yours to squeeze a tennis ball. Every day. It helps."

She said thank you. She did not remember afterward what words she used. She walked through the gate into the baggage hall and stood by the carousel and waited for her green suitcase and found that her legs were shaking, and she let them.

The suitcase came. Customs passed it through a scanner and a woman in a dark uniform asked about the pills and looked at the printed prescriptions and the Persian translation and nodded and waved her on. The doors slid open.

The arrivals hall at three in the morning was nearly empty: a few drivers holding signs, a cleaner with a mop, a kiosk selling tea and cake with its shutter half down. And at the barrier, in a heavy coat and a wool cap, with his right arm in a black brace held across his chest and his left hand gripping the rail, against every instruction anyone had given him, her father.

Babak stood behind him, a big man in a work jacket, looking apologetic.

"I told him," Babak said. "Parisa-khanum, I told him. Your mother told him. He came anyway."

Her father did not say anything. He let go of the rail and opened his left arm, and she walked into it, and put her face against his coat, which smelled of wool and cold air and the cigarettes he had given up in 1999 and somehow still smelled of, and of the house, and he held her with one arm as hard as he could, which was not very hard anymore, and said into her hair, "Mohandes kuchulu. You came."

"I came, Baba."

Mr. Jahanbin passed behind them with his luggage cart, on his way to an old woman in a wheelchair who was waiting near the kiosk with a man who must have been her son. As he passed he lifted his hat an inch. Parisa saw him reach the wheelchair, and bend, and saw the old woman take his face in both hands.

* * *

They drove north in Babak's car through the empty city. It was an hour. The freeway ran straight across the dark plain, then through the southern edges of Tehran, the factories and warehouses, then up into the city itself. The streetlights were on. Some of them. The avenues were empty, a few taxis, a garbage truck, a man on a motorcycle with a load of flatbread tied behind him in a cloth, going to some shop to open it. The air coming through the gap in the window was cold and smelled of dust and diesel and, faintly, of snow from the mountains. She had forgotten that smell. She had not known she had forgotten it until it came in through the window and she began to cry, finally, silently, in the back seat, with her father's left hand reaching back between the seats to find hers.

Somewhere in the middle of the city, under a streetlight, they passed a building she did not look at for long. It was a tall building, an apartment block, and part of its face was gone, and the open floors were wrapped in green mesh that moved a little in the wind. Babak did not slow down. Her father kept his eyes ahead. She looked at it until it was behind them, and then she looked at the back of her father's head, at his white hair under the wool cap, and did not look anywhere else.

They came up the long slope to the north, and the air got colder, and the mountains came closer, black and enormous, filling the whole windshield. Then there was Tajrish square, empty and shuttered, and the avenue, and the bakery, closed but with a light on in the back where someone was already starting the dough. Then the bottom of Kucheh Yas. The plane trees, bare. The jub, running. The canaries' nail by the corner door, empty. Babak drove slowly up the alley and stopped at the fifth door on the left.

The door was open. The light in the courtyard was on.

She remembered what Manouchehr had said. She got out of the car before anyone could help her with anything and walked through the open door into the courtyard and stood there.

The bricks, wet from the night, in their herringbone. The hoz, empty and dry, its blue paint pale and peeling, a few dead leaves in the bottom. The persimmon tree, bare, black, every branch exact against the lit wall. The grapevine on its trellis. The bench. The pots of geraniums, cut back for winter. Above the wall, the mountains, black, and above them the last of the stars, with no gray in the east yet, though it could not be long.

And in the doorway of the kitchen, in her sand-colored cardigan, with her glasses on their cord and her hand on the frame, her mother.

Neither of them moved for a moment. Then Mahin said, in her ordinary voice, the voice of every morning of Parisa's childhood, "You must be hungry. Come in. The tea is ready."

The Things in the House

She slept until two in the afternoon in her old room off the courtyard, under a quilt that smelled of the sun it had been aired in, and when she woke the light through the shutters was striped across the ceiling exactly as it had been striped across it when she was nine, and for a few seconds she did not know what year it was.

Then she heard her parents in the kitchen, arguing in low voices about whether to wake her, and she knew.

The first days were strange and simple. She did not go anywhere. She did not want to. She sat in the kitchen with her mother and drank tea from the samovar, glass after glass, with sugar cubes held between her teeth the way she had not done since she left, because in California it had seemed like an affectation and here it was only how tea was drunk. She sat in the courtyard in the weak March sun in a coat with her father, who sat in his white plastic chair beside the empty hoz squeezing a green tennis ball in his right hand, as the passport officer had advised and as he had begun doing the very next morning with an obedience that astonished her mother. She slept in the afternoons. She ate.

Her mother cooked as if a regiment had arrived. Ghormeh sabzi the first evening, the dark herb stew with dried limes that every Iranian abroad dreamed of and none of them could make the way it was made at home. Kuku sabzi the second. Ash-e reshteh the third, with fried mint and whey poured over it in swirls. Parisa ate all of it, at the table under the blue birds, and her mother watched her eat, which was the real meal, and her father said every evening that the food was not as good as it used to be, and every evening took a second plate.

The house had grown older. She saw it slowly, in pieces, the way you notice a friend's hair has gone gray. Peeling paint in the corner of the front room where the rain came through. A loose tread on the roof stairs marked with red tape. A diagonal crack in the hallway plaster that she looked at with a professional eye, decided was old and cosmetic, and looked at again the next morning to make sure. A dripping tap. Her parents moved through all of it without seeing it.

They had grown older too. She saw that more slowly, and did not want to. Her mother stopped halfway up the two steps from the courtyard to the kitchen and put her hand on the wall, briefly, and went on. Her father fell asleep in the middle of sentences in the afternoon and woke and finished them. Both of them had lost weight. Neither of them would talk about prices, but Parisa went with her mother on the third day to the fruit shop on the avenue and saw her mother look at the price of the oranges and put three back.

She did not say anything. She went back the next day alone and bought a crate of oranges, and her mother said she was crazy, and they ate oranges for two weeks.

* * *

On the fourth day she began the photographs.

She started with the samovar because it was the easiest: it sat on its tray on the counter by the window, brass and enormous and dented, with a teapot on its crown, steaming from six in the morning until midnight. She photographed it from four sides with the phone she had bought on San Pablo Avenue, and then asked her mother to tell her about it.

Her mother was cutting herbs at the table. She did not stop. "It was my mother's. From Tula. In Russia. It came across the Caspian on a boat in 1911 with my grandfather, who was a tea merchant in Rasht, a very bad one. He went bankrupt twice. The samovar is the only thing that was left the second time. My mother got it when she married, in 1941. I got it when she died, in 2001. It has a dent on the left side from 2001, when your father dropped it bringing it here from her house. He was carrying it and a box of books at the same time, because he will not make two trips, ever, in his life."

"I did not drop it," said her father from the courtyard, through the open door. "I set it down quickly."

"He set it down quickly on the stone step."

Parisa recorded all of it. She did not tell her mother she was recording. Then, at the end, she showed her, and asked, and her mother looked at the phone for a while and said, "Take out the part about the bankrupt. My grandfather was a very proud man." And then: "No. Leave it. It's true. He was very bad with money and very good with tea. Leave it."

The radio was next, an old brown valve set with a cloth front and a dial lit amber from behind, which had belonged to her father's father and still worked, mostly. Her father told that one. The carpet in the front room was next, a Kashan with a pattern of birds in a garden, birds and branches and pomegranates, worn to the knots in a path from the door to the window where people had walked for fifty years. Her mother told that one; it had been her dowry, chosen by her own mother at a shop near the bazaar after three days of bargaining. Then her mother's red pen, which she had used to correct essays for thirty-two years and still kept in a jar on the shelf, uncapped, dried out, because she could not throw it away. Then a small brass bell. Then a photograph in a frame of a group of young men in front of a truck in the mountains, one of them Hushang. Then a cassette.

The cassette was in a drawer in her father's study with sixty or seventy others, in a cardboard box that had once held oranges. Most of them were music, old radio recordings of the singers her parents had loved, the Golha programs from the 1950s and '60s with their long slow songs and the sound of the tar and the santur. Parisa had grown up with those recordings playing in the kitchen on Friday mornings. Some were labeled in her father's handwriting with the names of singers and dates. One was not labeled at all.

"What's this one?" she asked.

Her father took it in his left hand and turned it over and looked at it.

"That's your grandmother," he said. "Touran. My mother-in-law. Your Maman Bozorg." He set it down on the desk. "Yalda, 1985. At the korsi. I had a tape recorder from the office. I put it under the quilt."

She stared at him. "There's a recording of Maman Bozorg?"

"Telling stories. The whole tape, both sides. The battery died near the end of the second side." He looked at the cassette. "I haven't listened to it since she died. Your mother doesn't know it's there. Or she knows and doesn't say."

"Does the player still work?"

"Everything in this house still works," her father said. "Some things slowly."

They listened to it that night, the three of them, in the front room on the carpet with the birds. The cassette player was a heavy silver one from the 1980s with a handle, and her father wiped the heads with a cotton bud dipped in rubbing alcohol from Ladan's pharmacy, and it hissed and clicked and began. At first there was only noise, a rustling, voices far off, a child laughing who Parisa realized after a moment was herself, eight years old, under the korsi. Then a voice close to the microphone, an old woman's voice, dry and amused and unhurried, saying, "All right, all right, quiet, I'll tell it, but if anyone falls asleep they don't get pomegranate," and beginning the story of the bird on the mountaintop who raised a boy who had been left there by his father.

Her mother sat absolutely still. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the cassette player and did not move for the whole first side, forty-five minutes. When it clicked off at the end she said, "Turn it over," in a voice Parisa did not recognize, and her father turned it over.

Afterward, very late, Parisa recorded the cassette onto her phone, both sides, with her father holding the player close to the microphone, and put it in the family page, in a new room with her grandmother's name on it. It was the first thing in the room. She wrote the date in both calendars, and where it had been made, and who had made it, and that her father had put the recorder under the quilt without telling anyone, which was how her mother finally found out, reading over Parisa's shoulder. Her mother hit her father on the arm, the good one, quite hard, and then went into the kitchen and did not come back for some time.

* * *

On the sixth day, a Thursday, the phones went off.

It happened in the late afternoon. Parisa noticed it because she was trying to send Dara a photograph of the cassette player, and it would not go. Then she tried to call him, and the call would not connect, and then she looked at the top of the screen and saw that there was no signal at all. She went to the kitchen. Her mother was looking at her own phone with an expression of mild irritation.

"It does this," her mother said. "Sometimes. It comes back."

"When?"

"When it comes back."

Her father was in the courtyard, in his chair, with the tennis ball. He did not look up. "Sit down," he said. "Drink tea. It's nothing."

She sat down. She drank tea. She did not ask what it was, because she knew nobody in the house knew, and because her father had said it was nothing in the voice he had used in 1988 on the veranda near Nowshahr, she understood now, the voice of a man doing the hardest job he had ever done.

It was five hours. She spent them in the courtyard, mostly. She did not look at the phone. She swept the dead leaves out of the bottom of the empty hoz with a hand broom, which took twenty minutes, and then sat on its stone edge in her coat and looked at the persimmon tree. She noticed that the buds were beginning to swell at the ends of the branches, small and hard and brown, not yet green. She went inside and helped her mother make dinner, which was rice and yogurt and the last of the ash, and they ate it in the kitchen with the radio on, the old brown radio, which got one station clearly and played music, an old song, a woman singing about a garden. Her father hummed along with it, off key. Nobody mentioned anything.

At ten o'clock, her phone, on the table, buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then again, and again, the messages from the last five hours arriving all at once, the way they had come in May, most of them from Dara, three of them from Ellen, one from Tara that said only: is it true there's a word for the rain smell.

Her mother looked at the phone and then at her and said, "See? It came back."

That night, when Parisa had gone to bed and turned off the light, there was a knock on her door, and her mother came in in the dark and sat down on the edge of the bed. She did not say anything. She sat there for a few minutes, the weight of her pressing down the mattress near Parisa's knees, the way Nazanin had said her own mother did, every night, like when she was ten. Then she patted the quilt twice and got up and went out and closed the door.

Parisa lay in the dark and listened to the house: the drip of the bathroom tap, the hum of the refrigerator, her father's radio murmuring faintly through the wall where he had fallen asleep with it on, and outside, through the shutters, the sound of the jub in the alley, running down from the mountains, the way it had run every spring of her life.

Up the River at Darband

Simin's package went to Vanak on the fifth day. Parisa took a taxi down the long slope of Valiasr Street under the bare plane trees, the longest street in the city, eighteen kilometers of it, the trees so old and so tall that their branches met over the traffic. The taxi driver talked the whole way about his son, who was studying in Yerevan, and asked her three times where she was from, because her accent puzzled him; she said Tehran each time, and each time he said, "No, before that," and laughed.

Parvin was eighty, smaller than her sister and sharper, in a fourth-floor apartment full of plants. She opened the package at her dining table with a pair of kitchen scissors, cutting the string carefully so that it could be used again. The reading glasses she put on at once. The vitamins she set aside. The photograph she held in both hands, under the lamp, and did not put down: Tara, at fifteen, on the balcony in Walnut Creek with Mount Diablo behind her, not smiling, headphones around her neck.

"She looks like my mother," Parvin said at last. "The mouth. Look at the mouth. Exactly." She put the photograph against the sugar bowl, where she could see it. "Does she speak?"

"She's learning."

"Tell her," Parvin said, "that her great-grandmother had that mouth and used it to argue with everybody in Tehran for ninety years. Tell her it's a good mouth."

* * *

On Friday, the twelfth, Ladan came for them at eight in the morning in a small white car, and they went up to Darband.

Ladan Moshiri had lived three doors up from the Tavakolis on Kucheh Yas until she was nineteen. She and Parisa had walked to school together for eleven years, had fought over a boy named Kaveh for most of 1992 until they discovered he could not spell, had sat on the Nouris' wall eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into the jub. She was a pharmacist now, with her own pharmacy on the avenue below Tajrish square, a husband who taught history at a high school, and a son of twenty-two studying engineering at Sharif, who had told his mother at Nowruz last year that he was not leaving the country and then, in the autumn, that he was thinking about it, and then, in January, that he did not know.

She hugged Parisa in the courtyard without speaking. Then she held her at arm's length and said, "You're old," and Parisa said, "You're older," and they both started laughing like girls.

Her father insisted on coming. Her mother said he was out of his mind. He said that he had walked up to Darband every spring since 1968 and was not going to stop because of a wrist, which was not a leg. In the end the compromise was that he would come as far as the first café above the square, and sit, and drink tea, and wait.

Darband began at Sarband, a small square at the top of the city where the streets ended, and from there a path climbed beside the river between walls of rock, lined with cafés built out over the water on platforms, where in summer you sat on a takht and ate with the river roaring under you. In March many were still shuttered. But the river was loud with snowmelt, gray-white and fast, the air so cold and clean it made Parisa's teeth ache, and the stalls that were open were selling the winter things.

Laboo. She had forgotten laboo. A man with a cart and a great steaming pot was selling beets, whole beets boiled for hours until they were dark and soft and sweet as candy, cut open on a tin plate and sprinkled with nothing. Her father bought three, one each, and they ate them standing beside the cart with their fingers turning red, the steam rising off the plates into the cold, the river going by. Then, a little farther up, a woman with a basket of walnuts soaked in salt water, fresh and pale and bitter-sweet. Then lavashak, the thin sheets of dried fruit leather, sour plum and apricot and pomegranate, rolled into tubes and hanging on strings from a stall like colored paper. Ladan bought a sour plum one and tore it in three. It was so sour that Parisa's eyes watered, and her father laughed at her face, and Ladan took a photograph.

They left him at the first café, on a takht under an awning, with a pot of tea and a hookah he was not allowed to use and did not try to, and a view of the river, and an old man at the next takht who already, within two minutes, knew his name and his profession and the history of his wrist.

"Go," her father said. "Go up. I'll be here."

They went up.

* * *

The path climbed. It narrowed between the rocks, and the shuttered cafés fell behind, and there were patches of old snow in the shadows of the boulders, gray and hard, and the river got louder. Ladan walked ahead. She had walked this path a thousand times. Parisa followed and found that her body remembered it, the places to step, the slick rock to avoid, the turn where the valley opened and you could see, suddenly, far up, the white ridges of the mountain.

"You remember Tochal," Ladan said, over her shoulder.

"I remember."

In the summer of 1993, when she was sixteen, her father had taken her up Tochal on foot. Not by the cable car from Velenjak, which everybody took, but on foot, from the bottom, a climb of most of a day, up the long ridge to the summit at nearly four thousand meters, where there was snow in July and the whole city lay spread out below in its brown haze like a map. She had wanted to do it for a year. Halfway up, on a slope of loose scree, she had stopped and could not go on. Not from tiredness. From fear. The slope fell away below her to nothing, and the stones moved under her shoes, and she had stood there with her hands shaking and told her father she was going down.

He had not argued. He had come and stood beside her on the scree and looked down at the drop with her for a while, companionably, as if they were looking at a view.

"The mountain doesn't care that you're afraid," he had said finally. "It isn't interested. It's only interested in your feet. So don't think about the fear. Think about your feet. Where's the next one going? Here?" He pointed. "Good. Now the next one."

She had gone up. One foot. The next. She had stood on the summit at four in the afternoon with snow around her ankles in July and the whole of Tehran below her in the haze, and she had cried, and her father had pretended not to see, and they had eaten cucumbers he had carried up in his pack, peeled, with salt, the best thing she had ever tasted.

"I thought about that," Parisa said now, on the path, "in the airport. At passport control."

Ladan stopped and turned. "What happened at passport control?"

"Nothing. He took my passport away for four minutes. Then he came back and stamped it and told me my father should squeeze a tennis ball."

Ladan looked at her.

"Four minutes," she said.

"I counted the second hand."

Ladan came back down the path and put her arms around Parisa, there on the rocks above the river in the cold, and held her, and they stood like that while a family went past them going down, a man and a woman and an old grandmother on a stick, who looked at them and smiled, and said, "Nowruz-etan pishapish mobarak," happy new year in advance, the way people did in the weeks before Nowruz, and went on.

* * *

They sat on a rock in the sun above a bend in the river where the water came down in a long white chute and broke over a boulder into spray. Ladan had a thermos of tea and two glasses and a packet of gaz, the soft white nougat from Isfahan with pistachios in it, wrapped in paper and dusted with flour. They ate it slowly.

"Your Persian," Ladan said, "is from 2003."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you sound like my mother. You say things nobody says anymore. You said a word yesterday at the fruit shop that I haven't heard since high school. The boy at the counter thought you were from the provinces." She laughed. "Or from abroad. They can tell, you know. The shopkeepers. Before you open your mouth. It's the way you stand. The way you wait in line. You wait in line like an American."

"How do Americans wait in line?"

"Patiently. Like they believe in it."

Parisa laughed. But it stayed with her, and she knew it was true. She had felt it all week: the strange double sense of being home and being a visitor at the same time. She knew where everything was. She knew the price of nothing. She knew the words for things and not the new words, the slang Ladan's son used, the names of the new streets and highways. In Tehran people saw her accent and her coat and the way she stood, and thought: from abroad. In America, for twenty-three years, people had heard her name and thought: from abroad. She was from abroad in both places. She had grown used to it in California. She had not expected it here.

"In America," she said slowly, "I'm the Iranian. Here I'm the American."

"You're Parisa," Ladan said. "From the fifth door on the left. Who couldn't climb a scree slope and spat sunflower shells farther than any boy on the alley." She poured more tea. "That's who you are here. The shopkeepers can think what they want."

They talked then, on the rock, until the sun moved off it, about everything and nothing. About who had left the alley and who had stayed. Kaveh who could not spell was in Melbourne, a dentist. The canary woman on the corner had died in 2020, and her son had taken the cage to his apartment in Karaj. The Nouris were still there, and would always be there. Half of their class from school was abroad now: Toronto, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Los Angeles, Dubai. The other half was here. Ladan was one of the here.

"Did you ever think about going?" Parisa asked.

"Every year." Ladan looked at the water. "Then my father got sick. Then I opened the pharmacy. Then my mother got old. Then Sina was born. There's always a reason to stay. There's always a reason to go. You don't choose once. You choose every year." She shrugged. "I chose. I'm here. Someone has to be here to meet the ones who come home at three in the morning."

"And Sina?"

"Sina will choose for himself," Ladan said. "That's what we're for. To have something here for him to choose."

Below them the river went on crashing white over its boulder, carrying the snow of the Alborz down through the city in the jubs and the channels and the pipes, past the house on Kucheh Yas and the bakery and the fruit shop and all the old courtyards with their dry pools waiting for spring.

Parisa took out the paper notebook and Tara's list.

"I have a question for you," she said. "From my niece. In California. Is there a word for the smell of rain on hot bricks?"

Ladan thought about it. "Not one word," she said. "We say bu-ye khak-e baran-khordeh. The smell of earth that rain has touched. For bricks, I don't know. Ask your mother. She'll have one. She has a word for everything."

Parisa wrote it down. Then, because she was there, she held up the phone and asked Ladan to say it, and Ladan said it, slowly, with the river behind her, and laughed at herself, and said it again.

They walked back down in the afternoon. Her father was where they had left him, on the takht under the awning, asleep, with his good hand on his chest and his braced hand in his lap and the old man at the next takht keeping watch over him, and when they woke him he said, without opening his eyes, "Did you get to the top?" and Parisa said, "Not the top, Baba. Far enough," and he said, "Good. Far enough is the top for today," and held out his left hand to be helped up.

Fire in the Alley

They painted the hoz on the fourteenth and fifteenth of March, a Sunday and a Monday, in clear weather, with the mountains white and sharp above the wall and the first green just showing at the tips of the grapevine.

Her father had bought the paint in February, before his wrist was out of the cast, at a hardware shop in Tajrish that had sold him the same paint every spring for thirty years: a pool enamel in a color the shop called firuzeh, turquoise, though it was bluer than any turquoise Parisa had ever seen in a stone. Two cans. He had kept them under the stairs with a brush and a roller and a wire brush and a stack of old newspapers, waiting.

First they scraped. That was the first day. Parisa climbed down into the empty pool in her oldest jeans and Babak's work gloves, which she had given him and he had given back for the purpose, and went over every inch of the inside with the wire brush, getting off the flaking paint and the dirt and the dry green ghost of last summer's algae. It was a small pool, but it took all morning. Her father sat in his white chair on the edge and directed. He did not do it the way a man directs a crew. He did it the way he had once directed her through the multiplication tables, quietly, with patience, pointing.

"There. In the corner. You missed the corner."

"I didn't miss it, I'm coming back to it."

"That's what the men on the Chalus road always said. Then they forgot."

At noon her mother brought out bread and cheese and fresh herbs, sabzi khordan, a whole platter of them, mint and basil and tarragon and radishes and green onions, and they ate sitting on the edge of the empty pool with their feet hanging into it. The sun was warm on the bricks. A sparrow came and sat on the persimmon tree and looked at the bread.

In the afternoon they washed it down with the hose and let it dry. Her father measured it while it dried, with the old steel tape measure from his desk, holding the end with his left hand and directing Parisa to the other end with his chin: length, width, depth at the shallow end, depth at the deep end. He wrote the figures in pencil on a piece of newspaper. Then, without looking up, he said, "How much water?"

She looked at him. He was not smiling.

She went inside to her suitcase and came back with the slide rule in its leather case and sat down on the edge of the pool beside him and took it out.

He looked at it without a word. Then he held out his left hand, and she put it in his palm, and he turned it over and slid the cursor back and forth once with his thumb, and handed it back.

"Go on," he said.

She worked it out on the slide rule, the way he had taught her when she was eleven: length times width, times the average of the two depths. She had to think about it; it had been a long time. Her answer was a little under two and a half thousand liters.

"And in 1988," her father said, "you said twenty-four thousand. And you filled the bucket all afternoon."

"You let me."

"Of course I let you. You'd never have believed it otherwise." He took the newspaper with his figures on it and looked at it. "Two thousand four hundred and some. The hoz hasn't changed." He folded the newspaper. "Some things don't."

* * *

On the second day they painted. Her father was allowed to hold the brush for the edges, with his left hand, badly, and he did the top edge all the way around while Parisa did the rest with the roller, and the turquoise went on wet and shining and so bright against the old gray stone that the whole courtyard seemed to change color around it. The smell of the enamel was sharp and chemical and filled the courtyard, and her mother came to the kitchen door twice to complain about it, and both times stood there a little longer than she needed to, looking.

When it was done they sat side by side on the bench by the grapevine and looked at it. A rectangle of fallen sky in the middle of the bricks, wet, perfect, with the bare persimmon tree standing over it.

"Your mother will want it filled by Thursday," her father said. "For the fish. It needs three days to dry. We'll fill it Thursday afternoon. The water from the hose is cold. It will be cold for the fish until May." He was quiet for a moment. "Every year I think, this is the last year I paint it. Every year I paint it."

"You'll paint it next year."

"Maybe. Maybe you'll paint it." He looked at her sideways. "Or maybe Babak, like a soldier. We'll see."

* * *

Chaharshanbe Suri fell on Tuesday night, the sixteenth.

It was the eve of the last Wednesday of the old year, when Iranians everywhere went out after dark and jumped over small fires, to leave the sickness and tiredness of the year in the flames and take the fire's warmth into the new one. When Parisa was a child it had been the loudest night of the year on Kucheh Yas, firecrackers until midnight and mothers shouting from doorways, and children going door to door banging a spoon on a bowl for sweets.

This year was different, and everybody on the alley knew it would be without having to say so. In the afternoon the neighbors met in the street, Farangis-khanum and the Nouris and the young couple who had bought the canary woman's house and two families from farther up, and agreed: small fires, no firecrackers, nothing that went bang. Nobody explained why. It did not need explaining. A year when the sky itself had been frightening was not a year for loud noises in the dark.

So at dusk Babak built three small fires down the middle of the alley from bundles of dry brush he had brought in his car, three neat piles a few steps apart, and lit them, and the whole alley came out. Old people brought kitchen chairs and sat along the walls in their coats. The young couple from the canary house brought a speaker and played old songs quietly, songs from the 1970s that everybody's parents had danced to, and some of the old people sang along. Someone passed around a tray of ajil, the special mixture for that night with dried figs and white mulberries and raisins and roasted chickpeas, the one people said solved problems if you ate it while making a wish. Farangis-khanum, seventy-five, small and fierce in a black coat, organized everybody.

And they jumped. The young ones first, the couple from the canary house, Ladan's son Sina, who had come up from his dormitory for the night, and two teenagers from up the alley, running and leaping over the flames with their coats flying, shouting the old words as they went over: zardi-ye man az to, sorkhi-ye to az man. My yellow to you, your red to me. My paleness, my sickness, to the fire. The fire's red health to me. Then the middle-aged ones, Babak and his wife and Ladan, more carefully. Then Parisa.

She stood at the top of the alley and looked at the three small fires burning in a row down the slope in the dark, the sparks going up into the bare branches of the plane trees, the faces of her neighbors lit orange along the walls, and she thought of a night in 1989, when she was twelve, when she had jumped all three without stopping and her mother had screamed. Then she ran and jumped, all three, and did not stop, and at the bottom, out of breath, she heard someone behind her clapping, and turned, and it was her mother, in her sand-colored cardigan and a coat over it, clapping.

Her father stood up from his kitchen chair by the door of the house.

"Baba, no," said Parisa.

"The small one," he said. "The last one. Give me your hand."

Babak let the last fire burn down until it was low, a ring of embers and a few small flames no higher than a hand. Her father walked down to it slowly, with his braced arm across his chest. Parisa took his left hand. Her mother stood on the other side of the fire with her hands pressed together at her mouth. The whole alley watched.

He did not jump. He stepped. He lifted one foot over the low flames and set it down on the other side and brought the other foot after it, carefully, as if stepping over a sleeping dog, and said, quietly, so that only Parisa heard him, "Zardi-ye man az to." Then, on the other side, he let go of her hand and stood up straight, and the alley clapped and cheered, and Farangis-khanum shouted that he was a madman and should be ashamed of himself, and he bowed.

Later, when the fires were out and the alley had gone in, Parisa and her mother went down with a bucket and swept the ashes into it, as the old custom said you should, and carried them down to the bottom of the alley and emptied them into the jub, where the running water took them away in the dark.

* * *

The next morning, Wednesday, she woke at six to her phone buzzing.

It was Dara. It was half past seven the evening before in California. He had sent eleven messages. The first one said: Are you okay. The rest of them said, in various ways, that there were reports that the airspace over the western part of the country had been closed overnight, and that he did not know what it meant, and was she okay.

She went out into the courtyard in her coat. The air was cold and still. The sky over the mountains was clear and pink. There was no sound but the sparrows in the persimmon tree and a radio somewhere up the alley. The new paint in the hoz shone turquoise in the early light.

She called him. It went through.

"I'm fine," she said. "Everyone's fine. It's quiet. I didn't hear anything."

"There's nothing about Tehran," Dara said. His voice was tight. "It's in the west. They're saying it's temporary. But the airline has a notice up about Istanbul. It says the schedule is under review."

Under review. She stood by the hoz and looked at the water stain on the wall where the downspout ran, and felt the old cold thing come back into her chest, the thing from the passport booth and from the spring, and she let it come, and stood there with it.

"My flight is the fourth," she said. "That's two and a half weeks."

"I know."

"Things change in two and a half weeks."

"I know." He breathed. "I just wanted to hear you."

Her father came out of the kitchen in his vest and slippers, with a glass of tea in his left hand, and saw her face, and came and sat down in his white chair beside the hoz, and drank his tea, and did not ask. He sat there with her. That was all he did.

By nine o'clock the reports said the western airspace had reopened. By noon the airline had taken down its notice. The flights from Istanbul that evening landed on time. Her flight on the fourth of April still existed, unchanged, in the airline's system and in her paper notebook.

On Thursday afternoon, as planned, she and her father filled the hoz. He held the hose with his left hand, and she guided it, and the cold water from the mountains ran in over the new turquoise paint and rose slowly, clear as air, and the color under it deepened as it rose until it was the color of every spring of her childhood, and her father turned off the tap and they stood and looked at it.

"Now," her father said, "the fish."

The Persimmon Will Keep

Her mother set the haft-sin on Saturday morning, the twentieth, on the low table in the front room, on the carpet with the birds.

She did it alone. She did not want help. Parisa sat in the doorway with a glass of tea and watched her lay the white cloth with the border of embroidered quinces, and set out the seven things one by one, each in its own dish, in an order she had kept for fifty years. The sabzeh, wheat sprouts grown on a plate for two weeks on the kitchen windowsill, thick and green as a lawn, tied around the middle with a red ribbon. The samanu, which she had made herself, stirring it for a whole night in the old way while Farangis-khanum kept her company. The senjed, the garlic, the red apples, the sumac, the vinegar. Then the mirror, and the candles, and the painted eggs, and a bowl of oranges from Parisa's crate with one orange floating in water. Then the old Hafez with its taped spine. Then a glass bowl of water, waiting for the fish.

Parisa and her father had bought the fish at the Tajrish bazaar on Friday, from a man with tanks of them under an awning, hundreds of small red-gold fish turning in the green water. Her father had chosen them himself, two, pointing with his left hand, rejecting several on grounds he did not explain. They were in a bucket now in the kitchen, waiting.

"Tara's words," her mother said, without turning around. "Bring the phone. Let's do them now, while it's quiet."

They sat in the courtyard beside the full hoz in the late morning sun and went through the list. Window. Courtyard. Tree. Water. Snow. Her mother said each one slowly, clearly, the way she had said words to girls in a classroom for thirty-two years, and then said it again fast, the way people said it, and then said something about it that was not in any textbook. The word for the little pool, hoz, and how in old Tehran every house had one and the women washed the vegetables in it and the children were told that a fairy lived at the bottom. The word for missing a place, not a person, which was the same as for a person, her mother said: delam baraye inja tang shodeh. My heart has narrowed for this place. "In Persian," she said, "a place is a person. You miss it the same."

Then the last word on the list. Is there a word for the smell of rain on hot bricks?

Her mother was quiet for a while, looking at the herringbone bricks around the hoz, dry now in the sun.

"There is no dictionary word," she said finally. "Ladan is right. Khak-e baran-khordeh, earth that the rain has touched. But in this house we had a word." She looked at Parisa. "You don't remember? You made it. You were five. Your father was washing the courtyard in the evening, in August, and you came out and smelled it and said, Maman, the bricks are drinking. Ajor-ha ab mikhorand. After that we said it every summer. Every evening, when he turned on the hose: the bricks are drinking." She smiled. "Tell Tara that. Tell her it's a family word. She can have it."

Parisa did not trust herself to answer. She held the phone and recorded her mother saying it, and saying what it meant, and where it came from, and then put it at the end of Tara's list, with the date in both calendars.

* * *

The new year came that night at a few minutes before midnight, Tehran time.

In California it would be early on Saturday afternoon, and the whole family was gathering at Simin's apartment in Walnut Creek around their own haft-sin to be on the call: Dara, Simin and Manouchehr, Golnaz and Tara. Arash had promised to join from Hamburg, where it would be half past nine at night. Nazanin had said she would try from Toronto. Babak's family and Farangis-khanum came over the wall at eleven, and Ladan and her husband and Sina arrived at half past with a box of pastries, and the front room was full, people on cushions and on the carpet and in the doorway, the candles lit, the television on with the sound down showing the countdown.

Babak propped his tablet against the Hafez, and for once, by some grace, the connection held. There was Dara's face, close, and behind him Simin's living room and Manouchehr in his good suit and Tara with her headphones around her neck. There was Arash in Hamburg in a sweater, raising a glass of tea. There, for a minute, was Nazanin, waving from a kitchen in Toronto, before her square froze and vanished.

Ten minutes before the tahvil her father stood up and took the glass bowl of water from the table and held it out, and Parisa went to the kitchen and brought the bucket, and with a cup, carefully, poured the two fish into the bowl. They turned in the water, red and gold, under the candles.

With a minute to go her mother went to the kitchen and came back with something in her hand, wrapped in a white napkin, and sat down beside Parisa on the carpet and put it in her lap.

"Open it," she said.

It was cold. Parisa unwrapped it. Inside the napkin, hard as stone and covered in a fine frost, dark orange, was a persimmon.

"From the tree," her mother said. "In Aban. The best one. The highest one, that the crows didn't find. I picked it with the long pole and I put it in the freezer, in the bottom drawer, and I told your father if he touched it I would leave him." She folded her hands. "I said I would keep one for you. I kept it."

On the television the countdown reached zero. The cannon sounded on the broadcast, the old sound, and the music started, and the room stood up all at once and everybody was kissing everybody, and on the tablet Dara's family was shouting sal-e no mobarak from eight thousand miles away and Arash was raising his tea. Her father kissed her forehead, the way he had at every tahvil of her life. Her mother took from the pages of the Hafez a new banknote, folded, and pressed it into her hand. Ladan was crying. Farangis-khanum was handing out coins to everyone. And Parisa sat on the carpet with the frozen persimmon in her lap in its white napkin and could not move.

Later, at one in the morning, when the neighbors had gone and the tablet was dark, the three of them sat at the kitchen table under the blue birds with the persimmon on a plate between them, half thawed, soft at the edges and still icy at the heart. Her mother cut it in three with a knife. They ate it with spoons. It was cold and sweet and tasted of autumn and the courtyard and the long patience of a fruit you could not hurry, and it melted on Parisa's tongue like a kind of sherbet, and her father said it was not as good as it used to be, and ate his piece down to the skin.

In the morning they carried the fish out to the courtyard and poured them into the hoz, as her father had done every Nowruz since 1974. The two small fish hung for a moment in the turquoise water, astonished by all that room. Then they began to explore.

* * *

The two weeks of the new year went by in visits, the way they always did. Old relatives came, and they went to old relatives. Parvin came up from Vanak in a taxi and sat with Mahin in the courtyard all afternoon, two old women talking about everyone they had ever known. Parisa recorded some of it, with permission, and some she simply listened to. In the evenings her father played the setar.

He had not played it in years. On the night after the tahvil he asked her to bring it from its cloth bag in his study, and she did, and he sat in the brown chair with it across his lap and tried. His right hand in its brace could barely make the strokes with its forefinger. He played a few notes, slow and uneven, a phrase from an old melody she knew from the cassettes. Then he stopped and flexed his fingers and played the phrase again. Then again. Each night a little more. On the last night he played it all the way through, very simply, a minute and a half, and her mother sat with her eyes closed. Parisa recorded it. She put it in his room on the family page, after the twelfth kilometer and the note about 1988, and under it she wrote only: Baba, setar, after the wrist. Farvardin 1406. April 2027.

On the second of April, Sizdah Bedar, the whole alley went out of doors as the custom said they must. The Tavakolis and the Nouris and Ladan's family went up to Jamshidieh, the park on the mountain slope at the top of the city, and spread blankets under the pines among a thousand other families, and ate all day: kebabs from a little brazier Babak carried up, and fruit, and tea, and the first green plums of the year, sour and hard, with salt.

At the end of the afternoon, her mother handed Parisa the sabzeh from the haft-sin, the plate of wheat grass, long and yellowing now, and said, "Tie one."

"Maman, I'm fifty and married."

"Tie one anyway. Wish for something else."

So she tied a knot in two blades of grass, as she had seen Dara teach his students on a blanket in Houston eighteen years before, and made a wish, and they walked down to the stream that ran through the park, full and fast with snowmelt, and her mother threw the sabzeh in, and the water took it, and it went turning away downhill, down toward the city, toward the jubs and the alleys and the courtyards and the long road south.

* * *

She left on the fourth of April, a Sunday, before dawn.

Her mother did not come to the airport. She stood in the doorway of the house in her cardigan, and as Parisa walked down the alley toward Babak's car with her green suitcase, she heard behind her the sound she had been waiting for, the sound of water: her mother pouring a bowl of water onto the bricks behind her, as Iranian mothers had always done for travelers, so that the road would be smooth and the traveler would come back. Parisa did not turn around. You were not supposed to turn around. She got into the car.

Her father came. Nobody tried to stop him this time.

At the airport, at passport control, the officer was a woman in her forties who looked at her passport and her face and her stamp from the sixth of March, asked her two questions, and stamped it. It took less than a minute. Parisa walked through the gate and stood on the other side and turned, and through the glass she could see her father at the barrier with his braced arm across his chest, as he had stood on the sixth of March, and he lifted his left hand, once, and turned, and walked away with Babak toward the doors, slowly, upright, not looking back, the way he had not looked back at Mehrabad in 2003.

The plane rose out of Tehran into a clear morning. She had a window. Below her the city lay in its bowl, brown and gray and enormous, and beyond it the Alborz, every ridge white, every valley in blue shadow, and she looked for Tochal, and found it, and looked until the clouds closed.

In Istanbul she went into the women's room and took the blue passport out of the bottom of her bag and called Dara.

"I'm out," she said.

He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, "Okay," the way he said it, and she heard him put the phone down on the kitchen counter in El Cerrito for a moment, and then pick it up again.

* * *

On the second Sunday of April she stood in her own yard in El Cerrito in the morning with a cup of coffee and looked at the Fuyu tree. It had leaves now, new ones, small and bright and green as lettuce, unfolding along every branch. The fog was lifting off the bay. The crow was back on the neighbor's roof.

At eight she called Tehran, half past six in the evening there, and the call went through on the first try, and there was the kitchen, and the blue birds, and her mother's ear, too close.

"Maman, hold it away."

"I'm holding it." The face moved back. "The fish are fine. Your father feeds them too much. The khormalu has leaves. Small ones. Like a baby's hand." A pause. "Tara called me. On Babak's phone. She said the bricks are drinking. Her accent is terrible. I told her it was perfect."

Parisa laughed. Behind her mother, through the window, she could see the courtyard in the evening light, the turquoise hoz, and her father in his white chair beside it with the newspaper, and a hose running on the bricks.

"In Aban," her mother said, "I'll keep you another one. In the bottom drawer. It will keep."

"It will keep," Parisa said.

She stood under her tree for a long time after the call ended, in the California sun, with the coffee going cold in her hand, thinking of a fruit that could not be hurried and a door that opened both ways, and of an autumn that was still a long way off, and of the bricks of a courtyard eight thousand miles away, drinking.