I was eleven going on twelve the year my sister convinced my parents to let me spend the summer with her in east San Diego. It was the summer they told us they were getting a divorce. In a letter, my sister told my mother, and my mother told me, that a house full of children lived in a barn in the canyon below her apartment building. She said they had horses. Sometimes when she was in the shower, the letter said, through the window she could hear children singing. She’ll like that, the letter said. Let her come. She needs to get out of Ohio.
I spent a few days the first week there thinking I’d look for them. The apartment was near the end of a dead-end street where the sidewalk ended abruptly at an abandoned construction site. On the other side of a padlocked gate, a steep dirt road led to the barn in the canyon. I saw a tricycle turned upside down on the driveway. I saw a horse trailer and another trailer, that looked like it was meant to be a place for someone to live, parked under the eaves of the barn. I don’t know if anyone lived on the property or not. I never saw anyone. Maybe they’d moved away. Maybe my sister made it up. But I never saw any horses. And I never heard children singing.
The apartment building was a two-level structure in the shape of an L. At the corner, where the two wings intersected, was a swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence. The pool rules were posted on a sign on the wall of the pump house shed. Rule number five was painted in bold red type: “Children under the age of fifteen are permitted to use the pool only between the hours of three and seven p.m. and only if supervised by a responsible adult.”
My sister lived on the second floor. Her front window looked over the parking lot. A girl called Yalda lived with her mother a few doors down. Sometimes I heard them speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. I knew her name was Yalda because that’s what her mother called out when she couldn’t find her. Yalda? Yalda? As if they were playing hide and seek. Before I knew Yalda, I used to stand at the railing in front of her apartment window because it looked directly over the pool. I had seen a girl about my age standing at the glass watching me through the transparent curtains. At least I liked to think she was watching me, but maybe she was just waiting, as I was, for Mrs. Bigelow, the manager, to unlock the gate to the pool.
When we eventually met, I asked her if she’d ever seen horses in the canyon or heard children singing. She stared at me, as if to say not every question deserves an answer. She could be like that. She was old for her age. She said she was fourteen, but I think she was still thirteen that summer. Thirteen going on fourteen.
I suppose you could say our relationship started to turn into something closer to a friendship when we started whispering together about Mrs. Bigelow’s daughter. She was in Yalda’s class at school, and she had Tourette Syndrome. Her name was Georgina, but her mother called her Georgie and, because that was the name we heard yelled across the courtyard, we called her Georgie too.
Yalda told me Georgie was a good basketball player. “That’s why her knees are knobby. That’s why she walks like a boy.” Then Yalda would lift her chin and blink her eyes and jerk her head back and forth. Her imitations of Georgie were close, but Georgie’s movements weren’t limited to her head. Sometimes she shrugged her shoulders and flapped her arms. Sometimes she grunted and hopped on one foot. Sometimes she repeated what one of us had just said. Sometimes she touched us.
One night we were standing at the railing in front of Yalda’s window, looking down at the pool. It was after nine. Her mother was out. “A friend of hers is getting a divorce,” Yalda said. “She wants to talk to someone who’s been through one.”
“My parents are getting divorced,” I said. “That’s why I’m spending the summer with my sister.”
Yalda changed the subject. “I’m not sure I believe her, though. I think she might be seeing someone.”
I think that was the night she asked me if I wanted to know what her name meant in English. Before I had a chance to say if I did or I didn’t, she told me. “It means the longest night of the year.”
I stared at her blankly.
“Have you never heard of the winter solstice?”
I shrugged. “I guess I have,” I said.
“The winter solstice marks the day of the year with the fewest hours of daylight. I was conceived on the solstice. The twenty-first day of December.”
I could tell by the way she looked at me that she was testing me, but, as usual, I didn’t understand what the test was.
“The shortest day of the year must have the longest night,” she said. Her eyes were impatient. “That’s the other reason my parents named me Yalda. Don’t you get it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Never mind.”
I thought she was tired of me and was going to go inside, but then she told me that Mrs. Bigelow kept a spare key to the locked gate beneath one of the buckets of chlorine crystals behind the pool shed. Georgie had shown her.
We had to stand for a few seconds in the security floodlight that beamed down from the roof. Anyone looking through their sliding glass window could have seen us, but no one came out. I watched the green-lit surface of the pool, rippling in the spotlight, while Yalda pressed the key into the padlock.
It was a smooth fit. Smooth the way the water was smooth, which seemed warmer at night when I touched it. As we stood in the dark behind the diving board, pulling our T-shirts over our swimsuits, I asked her why her mother called me Zhila. I thought it was her way of pronouncing the G at the front of my name, which was Gillian with a kind of French accent, and what seemed to be an Iranian habit of adding an “ah” sound to the end of a word, but Yalda said it was the name of a river.
“A river? That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Why would she call me after a river?”
“Because you’re so quiet,” Yalda said. “My mother said the Zhila is a quiet river. And very slow.”
What she really meant, at least what I think she meant, was that I was slow. Maybe they were right.
That night the lower half of my body floated in the deep end of the pool, while the back of my head rested on the edge of the deck that felt warm and smooth in the dark. I watched while Yalda stood on the diving board and threw the spare key into the deep end. It was a reckless thing to do. She didn’t have goggles. If she couldn’t find it, we’d be caught. But she always found it, even with her eyes closed. Over and over I watched her dive down to touch the bottom of the pool.
Bubbles rose ahead of her face, and her long dark hair lifted and fell like riverweed, brilliantly green in the flood-lit water. When she surfaced, she gulped at the air for a breath. I had stroked to the center of the deep end by then. We were facing each other, treading water in the dark, our eyes resting just above the surface. Then, instead of looking away, as I usually did when she looked into my eyes, I looked back, and what I saw in her eyes for the first time was that I might be worthy of her friendship.
She stroked back to the diving board, talking as she swam, as if she had said nothing to insult me. As if being quiet were nothing to be ashamed of. As if it were a quality, in fact, that she admired.
One day toward the end of the summer, Georgie was knocking a basketball against the olive-green wall of the cavern-like entrance to the apartments. The ceiling was arched like a cave and the artificial rock façade of the walls made it feel cool like a cave. At the end of August in east San Diego, the cave-like entrance to the apartments Mrs. Bigelow managed was a good place to stand around. The screen door to Georgie’s apartment had a silver frame and was marked with a silver letter B for Bigelow, which made it seem like the cool arched entrance was the doorway to Georgie’s personal kingdom.
Yalda was sitting on the curb with the volume turned up on her transistor radio, watching the cars drive by. I was inside the tunnel, leaning against the part of the wall that was covered with rocks, watching Georgie toss the ball. She was very good at catching it on the tips of her fingers when it rebounded. Very good at sending it back without breaking her rhythm. Every once in a while, her neck jerked to the side and her chin shuddered and lifted without control, sometimes for as long as a minute. Then she was herself again, a tall, athletic girl with broad shoulders and strong brown legs in a sturdy pair of shoes and a loose pair of knee-length shorts, pushing a ball against a wall.
I was used to her Tourette episodes by now. They followed a predictable pattern. First her head would start shaking. Then when that stopped, she would go through a phase where she barked short little phrases that didn’t make sense. She usually came out of it in a minute or so. But this time, the barking turned into the mangled words of a song that must have played a thousand times on the radio that summer. Then Georgie was dancing, her shoulders stiff, her arms stretched out in front of her. “Down on Broadway, yeah. There’s a dance, yeah.” She pulled her arms close to her sides and walked in place. Her knees lifted high like a baton twirler in a marching band. Her hip bone cocked one way and then the other. “Funky Broadway. Funky, funky Broadway.” When she couldn’t think of any more of the words, she stopped and stared. Her face was sweaty, and a little bit of saliva had gathered at the corners of her mouth.
Yalda was beside me by then, watching Georgie dance. Listening to Georgie sing. To anyone watching, we would have looked like partners in meanness. But we weren’t. We’d never been partners. Then Yalda was pointing her finger. I hadn’t even noticed. A stream of urine was trickling down the inside of Georgie’s smooth, brown, basketball-strong leg, puddling on the concrete between her shoes.
“Only an imbecile pees on the ground in broad daylight,” Yalda said. For a split second her eyes held mine with what I wanted to believe was the conspiratorial smile she shared only with me. Then her face cracked open with laughter and she was yelling for me to run.
I hadn’t wanted to, but I had nothing else to do, so I followed her back to her apartment. I didn’t run, though. She was already inside when I reached the door. I watched her through the kitchen window, leaning over the plates and glasses stacked at the bottom of the sink, splashing her face and the back of her neck, gulping the water that was cupped in her hands. She was supposed to wash the dishes before her mother came home from work. She was supposed to keep the front door locked. But Yalda didn’t much do what she was supposed to do. That was the day she showed me the quail eggs. And that was the day the way I felt about Yalda changed.
“Shall I introduce you to the members of the family we left behind?”
I followed Yalda into the living room where she stood in front of what she called the étagère, the stack of shelves that held what was left of the mementos her mother had brought from Iran. She pronounced the word étagère the French way, which she had already told me several times she spoke fluently, and pointed to the faces in the ivory framed photographs, positioned like a shrine on the lowest shelf. “This is my mother as a girl. These are my mother’s sisters. And these, I suppose, are my cousins. To think we might have been friends. The tall man standing behind the chair is my grandfather. My mother’s father. We lived with him for a time in Shiraz. The man in the chair wearing the white turban is my grandfather’s father. My great-grandfather.”
“What about your father? Don’t you have pictures of him?”
“My father? If there were any photographs of my father, my mother would have burned them. I haven’t seen my father since we left Iran. He was a petrochemical engineer. When I was three or four, he took a job with an American oil company in Ahvaz, a city in the southwest province of Khuzestan. My mother didn’t want to live in Ahvaz. She considered Khuzestan too rural, too poor, so she and I moved into my grandfather’s house in Shiraz, which was where we lived until my father wrote to say he had been offered a job teaching at an institute of technology in California. He said he would go ahead of us. He said he would send for us when he was established, which he did. I guess he changed his mind. He was supposed to meet us at the airport in Los Angeles when we arrived, but he sent someone else in his stead. I was eight. Eight going on nine by then. My mother forbids me to speak of him. So I don’t.”
I wanted to open the small painted boxes on the shelf above the photographs. “What about these?”
“These,” Yalda said, “are made of papier-mâché.” This word she also pronounced the French way. The boxes were black and just the right size to hold in my hand. One was slightly longer than the other. The lid of the larger one was painted with red-faced flowers and yellow birds with yellow beaks and long, yellow tail feathers. I was already thinking of the things I could hide inside the box if it were mine. The surface of the smaller box was painted with people dressed in orange robes, gathered in a garden.
“You can recognize the difference between the men and the women by their headgear,” Yalda said. “The women wear chadors. The men wear turbans. In the old days, the turbans came in all different shapes and sizes. Some were decorated with long trailing tassels and adorned with jewels and peacock feathers or ostrich feathers. Others were embroidered with yellow finches, like the ones on these boxes, and small quail with crested head plumes.”
“There are coins in this one,” she said, opening it for me to glimpse inside before she snapped the lid closed again.
“What’s inside the box with the yellow birds?”
Yalda looked as if she couldn’t remember and pried the lid open to check. “Only a piece of paper.”
I could see handwriting scrawled in pencil across a narrow sheet of graph paper. “What does it say?”
“Sahar Jazin. It’s someone’s name. Gold and silversmith,” she translated. She closed the lid to change the subject. “We didn’t always live like this,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the Formica table pushed under the kitchen window, the dishes stacked in the sink.
Then, out of nowhere, as if the memory of a dream had just then crossed her mind, she said, “My grandfather hid quail eggs in his turban.”
“Your grandfather wore a turban?”
“Of course. Didn’t you notice his turban in the photograph?” She pulled the photograph of the family portrait from the shelf for me to see again. “He always wore a black turban. He was a very devout Muslim. My mother told me that when my grandfather was a boy in the 1920s, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was then the shah of Iran, banned the turban because he considered it unmodern. But many men, such as my grandfather, were defiant and refused to accept the decree. My mother said he wrote a letter to the shah and signed it with the words of the Prophet Muhammad: “My community shall not fall away so long as they wear the turban.” Finally, those who could prove that they wore the turban as a symbol of dignity and piety were allowed to carry on the tradition. Perhaps my grandfather foresaw that the man my mother married would one day take us away from Iran. I think he wanted me to understand what was important to him before we went away.”
“What do you think he wanted you to understand?” I asked.
Yalda glared at my density. So I asked another question. “Why did he hide quail eggs in his turban?”
“It was a game. Quail eggs are very small.” Yalda held her thumb and forefinger apart. “Four or five of them could fit easily inside this pencil case. I’ll show you.” Yalda pulled a barstool from the kitchen in front of the étagère and climbed on top of it. Resting on the highest shelf, a bird’s nest was pushed away from the edge out of sight. She lifted it down carefully and set it on the chest in front of the couch. It was an ordinary bird’s nest made of twigs and dried grass. Maybe because of its shape or maybe because the grass was wound around and around on itself, it reminded me of the turbans she had described. Inside, six quail eggs rested like six spotted stones. Each was different from the next. Some were pure white and some were a pale brown-white. Some of the spots were points, like freckles; others looked like splotches of spilled ink.
“The shells are empty now,” she said, “otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to save them. They’re very old and very fragile. I’m not supposed to touch them.
“When we lived in my grandfather’s house in Shiraz, he made a great ceremony of coming home at the end of the day. I remember him entering the house wearing a heavy wool coat that reached past his knees. I always thought of his coat as the robe an emperor would wear in a fairy tale. I was always so happy to see him.
“My grandmother had died years before, and my mother worked in an office, so an old woman looked after me during the day. But she was very stern. She couldn’t read, and she didn’t like to play games, so I spent my time in my imagination or I looked out the window or at pictures in books. When he walked through the door, I would run to him and wrap my arms around his knees. He was very tall. I remember thinking of the dark space under his coat as a kind of fortress, and there I would hide until he coaxed me out to play the game.”
“How did you play it?”
“It was something like hide and seek. I was to turn my back and cover my eyes while he went into the kitchen to hide the quail eggs he had brought home from the market in the folds of his turban. Then I had to search for them with my hands. But I had to be very careful so they wouldn’t break when my fingers bumped into the shells. My mother says my grandfather invented the game because I was slow to speak. Quail eggs, it was believed at the time, would help children who were late talkers to express themselves. But it wasn’t that. I remember very well. It wasn’t that I couldn’t speak. I didn’t have a speech impediment. I just didn’t want to.”
“I’m that way,” I said. “I mean, I can be. My sister says being too quiet makes a person look dumb. She said people who are unable to speak are called dumb.”
“Mute,” Yalda said, and then, as was often the case, she turned the conversation back to herself. “The game had rules. Each egg I pulled out of his turban I had to assign a word. What kind of a word? I asked him with my eyes. Anything you like, his eyes said back. Look around the room. Open your book. And so I pointed, and he would say the word, and I would repeat it, and the sound that came out of my mouth rose like a shape in the air.”
“What would you do with the eggs after you found them?”
“The old woman who looked after me pricked the ends of the shells with a needle and blew the contents into a dish. Then I had to eat them. My grandfather said it was the only way the words would stick.”
“We put the last eggs that I pulled out of his turban inside this nest. It used to sit on a shelf in his house. Now here it is in this apartment in east San Diego.”
Sometimes when Yalda’s mother was out late, and late for Yalda’s mother sometimes meant all night, I spent the night with her. We closed the curtains and locked the front door and slept together in her mother’s wide, double bed. But we never went to sleep right away. Yalda liked to talk to me about her life in Shiraz before she moved to California. But only in the dark. Maybe her memory was clearer in the dark. Whatever it was, she told me things in the dark that she wouldn’t have ordinarily revealed about herself. I don’t think she realized that it gave me a kind of advantage.
“In my grandfather’s house there was a small door in the living room wall that opened onto a kind of cellar,” she told me one night. “It wasn’t an ordinary cellar. It was the cistern, where the household water was stored.”
“Didn’t you have indoor plumbing?”
“Oh, yes. There were pipes under the floors that carried the water to the kitchen and the bathroom and the washing machine in the laundry room. But the water didn’t come from the city or from a well in the ground. It came from the cistern.”
“How did the water get inside the cistern?”
“The rain. We drank rain water. I washed my hair in rain water. Sometimes in the dry season, a water truck came. A man dragged a wide canvas hose across the living room floor and, when he turned a switch, all of the water in the tank on the back of the truck emptied into the cistern.
“The door in the wall was the size of a tea tray, the size of a small window shutter. It was made of wood and you turned a small metal latch to open it. If you leaned your head inside, you could see that the cistern was the size of a room. A cold, dark room. The water didn’t fill the room, and you couldn’t see to the bottom, but sometimes you could hear a sound. Like water lapping against the limestone wall.
“I didn’t like to open the door in the wall. I used to imagine a drowned girl in a white dress lying half-submerged at the bottom of it. I could even see a ribbon floating with her long black hair in the rain water. I think I thought she was me. Or what was going to become of me.”
I didn’t tell Yalda, but when she described the girl’s hair floating in the water, I saw her hair, green as river weed, lifting and falling in the floodlight the way it had looked the time we went night swimming.
“Sometimes I thought I heard another sound. I thought it was the drowned girl’s head knocking against the limestone wall.”
“Did you tell anyone about the girl in the cistern?”
“Not until now,” she said. Then she took my hand in hers and held it between her ear and the pillow until she fell asleep.
The clock on the radio beside her mother’s bed was illuminated. Blue numbers on an orange face. I watched the minute hand circle the clock until it was after two in the morning. I needed to use the bathroom. Then I wanted a drink of water. I filled a glass at the kitchen sink and took a sip. I dried my hands on the tea towel hanging on the oven door and looked from the barstool pushed under the counter to the swath of light the security floodlights projected onto the living room wall.
I watched my shadow move across the wall as I carried the barstool toward the shelf of mementos. What I really wanted to take was the papier-mâché box painted with the yellow birds, but there were only three boxes. A box would be too easy to miss. I stood on the stool and reached for the nest on the highest shelf. Did anyone really know there were exactly six eggs inside of it? If weeks or months from now, after I’d returned to Cincinnati, when Yalda or her mother looked in the nest, would they even notice one was missing? I didn’t think they would. I reached cautiously into the nest and remembered how the winding layers of grass and string and twigs had seemed like the turbans Yalda had described, and I imagined Yalda’s three-year-old fingers, reaching inside the folds of her grandfather’s turban until they bumped against one of the quail eggs.
My touch was not so delicate. The first shell crushed into papery shards. I used only the tips of my fingers to lift the second egg out of the nest.
I remembered seeing an extra-large bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet and carried the quail egg, balanced on the palm of my hand, into the bathroom. I closed the door and listened for Yalda before I turned on the light. The cap came off easily and, as I’d guessed, there was a thick wad of cotton pressed down on the tablets inside. The quail egg, resting on a sheet of Kleenex beside the sink, looked like a small potato, speckled with a constellation of black stars. I pulled the cotton apart and made a nest for the egg between the layers. My overnight bag was unzipped on the floor where I’d left it. I hid the aspirin bottle inside and slipped back into bed beside Yalda.
• •
Sometimes at night I hold Yalda’s quail egg in my mouth and wait in the dark to see if it has given me the courage yet to say what I think. Sometimes while I’m waiting, in my mind, I write Yalda a letter. The last two lines are always the same. Maybe I just wanted to say to you what you said to me so many times with your eyes. You shouldn’t have trusted me. And you know what else? You were right. Not every question deserves an answer.
Note
“Yalda & Zhila” is a work of fiction inspired by an op-ed article previously published in the New York Times by Farzaneh Milani, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.
