“Yes.”
“He is a good boy. Very nice. You should be friends with him.”
I had never been ordered to befriend someone before.
I glanced back at Sohrab, who crinkled up his eyes and shook his head.
My ears burned.
“Sohrab. It’s fine. Leave it.”
“Baleh, Agha Bahrami.”
Babou asked Sohrab something in Farsi, but all I caught wasMamouandrobe, which is pomegranate molasses.
Like I said, I could usually recognize food words.
“Of course. Darioush, you want to come?”
“Um. Where?”
“His amou’s store,” Babou said. “Go with him, baba.”
“Okay.”
“Come on, Darioush,” Sohrab said. “Let’s go.”
I laced up my Vans while Babou handed Sohrab a few folded bills, and we headed out.
Yazd was blinding in the daylight. I had to blink for a moment and sneeze. Without the shade of Babou’s fig trees, the neighborhood was a luminous white, so bright, I was certain I could feel my optic nerves cooking.
Now that it was daytime, and I wasn’t quite so sleep deprived, I could appreciate how each house on Mamou’s block had its own character. Some were newer and some were older; some had large gardens like Babou’s, and some had an extra lane to park a car behind the house. There were khaki houses and beige houses and off-white houses and even some that had been worn to a light tan.
Nearly every car parked on the street (or occasionally up on the curb) was light-colored and angular, makes and models I had never seen before.
I wondered where Iranian cars came from.
I wondered what Stephen Kellner thought of Iranian cars, and how they compared to his Audi.
I wondered if he was still asleep. If he’d wake up and we’d be able to get along, the way he wanted.
Sohrab cleared his throat. “Darioush.” He kicked a white stone off the sidewalk. “What do you think of Yazd?”
“Oh.” I swallowed. “Um. I haven’t seen much yet. But it’s neat. You live close by?”
Sohrab waved behind him. “The other way.”
“Oh.”
Sohrab led me out of Mamou’s neighborhood, past more khaki walls and old wooden doors and little shaded gardens, and onto a larger street with a tree-lined median that we would have called a boulevard back home.
I didn’t know the Farsi word forboulevard.
Stores with brightly colored awnings lined the side opposite us, and the houses on our side got smaller as we walked.
It was weird, seeing real-life Iranians walking down the sidewalks, popping in and out of the stores, carrying plastic bags of groceries or whatever. Most of the women had on headscarves and long-sleeved jackets, but some wore full chadors: big black robes that covered them from head to toe, except the perfect hole where their faces peered out.
I wondered how they didn’t overheat, covered in black.
