Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

I don’t know what the American grown-ups have for memories, but they can’t be as beautiful as mine.

When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love. All the good stuff is in between and around the things that happen.

It was so quick that he became human to me again, in the real world of Oklahoma, where you could buy cinnamon rolls at a stand in the airport. Before that, he was a voice from the other side of the world. And before that a memory of a face, and a smell. And before that a myth, a poem of what his father had been, what fathers could be, what place we took in the story of our people. He was all of Ardestan—all the saffron fields, all the walnut trees, the platter of pomegranates and wedges of cheese. He was the lonely mountain and the snake, the pheasant in the mulberry tree. He was the bull and the boulevard of jasmine. And tea. He was the house with the birds in the wall and the Ferris wheel in the desert. He was the fountains of Isfahan, the steps in the stone, cut by the hand of Farhad. He was the city of kings, and the voice of Scheherazade, the whirling dervishes that leap, the fire worshippers, the nomad Kurds, and the eighteen sheep. He was the sizzling kebab, from the land that once belonged to Cyrus, the late great shah-in-shah. He was the rug and the flaw. And now he was so small.