Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

Back then it was the richest city in the world. Now if you visit, ...

that only museum people care about. On the stones, there’s still writing that says stuf...

of kings, ruler of all that you see before you,” as if you should be impressed, be...

have seen a shiny kingdom, but now you see a colossal wrec...

The library was d...

and so Persian literature doesn’t go back much fu...

They say Alexa...

Great saw what his soldiers had done to the city and regretted it. But that’s like...

and then saying you’...

Anyway, in the library tower of the ...

village dug into the rocks, there might have b...

He’s the guy I made up to

fall in love with Ellie.

Ellie was a poet. And she never chose her husband, and never even grew up to decide what kind of stuff she liked as an adult, or dated anybody with the same interests.

So I just imagine Kaveh the all-alone librarian of Kandovan, who was as tall and thin as his tower, and moved like a cat, and sat in the light from the window at the top of the stairs to read and remember the kings.

IN MY MIND, KAVEH the librarian would sit in his library with a book in his lap and a stack of fruit leather next to him like sheafs of paper. It wouldn’t spill on anything, and he could keep it shelved in between the covers of a book that had no pages after an imam had torn them out for offending Allah.

On every shelf, he had one. A book with fruit leather pages.

In Muslim Iran, it would be a scandal for a man to spend any time alone with a woman, even in a library, but Ellie was a governor’s wife and not always obedient.

She would knock on the crooked door in the mornings. They would sit in the alcoves of each floor reading to each other and eating sheets from the book of fruit leather. They consumed the pages and were consumed by ideas.

And sometimes you fall in love that way, when you’re drowning in a world of pain.

fall in love that way, when you’re drowning in a world of pain.

It’s not a happy love. It’s just whoever manages not to hurt you all the time. You think they must be the best the world has to offer. The little window of time...

But I think Ellie and the librarian in the tower of stone were in real love. Somehow, in all the world, with all the people in it, in all their wonky shapes, they were shaped to fit each other. And they found each other—born in the same country, how lucky—and both loved poetry and fruit snacks—and like poetry they felt their hearts expand infinitely in all directions when they were together, so that it was possible to...

I MADE ALL THAT UP. The only part anyone told me was that Ellie found a lover. They decided to kill her husband, and run away together.

When I tell people my stories, about the hero Rostam or the size of

pomegranates from the orchards on my Baba Haji’s land, the villages

in stone pillars, Orich candy bars, or anything tha...

they never believe me. There is no evidence i...

They think I’m one of the poor kids trying to say I...

But I was. I know it’s crazy that the k...

on welfare who barely spoke English at first used...

But I did. I had a Nintendo an...

tons of store-bought snacks. A house that smelled...

the time, with birds in the walls...

wasn’t alway...

Other kids don’t k...

They think I’...

And if you tell somebody they’re lying all the ti...

believe you a...

They start to question their own memories.

Cause they’re so different than everything

happening around them. They think, maybe I was alway...

never had anything li...

Maybe I’m...

crazy, like Ellie after her exile, making up stori...

about myself. Maybe it would be too painful to...

But I don’t think so. I close my eyes and squee...

on the memory of my Baba Haji, smiling, reac...

my face in his bloody hands. If you could see it lik...