I guess I did feel kind of bad about that.
But she had woken up refreshed and anxious to run through the gates and explore. She kept twisting the ends of her soft yellow headscarf around her fingers. It had sunflowers on it.
“Your headscarf looks nice, Laleh,” I said, taking her hand to stop her fidgeting.
She squeezed my hand. I loved the way my sister’s hand fit in mine. “Thank you.”
Babou was still haggling, but Mom stepped up and whispered something in his ear. Babou shook his head, but then Mom thrust a wad of bills under the glass partition before Babou could stop her. The man at the counter seemed alarmed at Mom’s directness, but he handed Babou our tickets and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Ardeshir Bahrami was an intense negotiator.
“Come,” he said. He took Laleh’s other hand, and she let go of me to match his stride.
My sister wanted to look at every single stall in the bazaar that sprawled between the ticket office and the entrance to the ruins, but Babou managed to maneuver her away from them all. Apparently his evasive driving skills extended to navigating Laleh past potential distractions.
“Your sister has so much energy,” Sohrab said.
“Yeah. Too much.”
“You are a good brother, Darioush.”
I didn’t know if that was the truth. But I liked that Sohrab thought that about me.
A row of trees hid the ruins from view. We followed the path—made of sun-bleached wooden beams—up a short hill. Ahead of us, Laleh wiggled out of Babou’s grasp and rabbited through a crumpled stone archway that had stood for thousands of years. Sohrab and I jogged to catch up.
Even though the trees and manicured lawns were green, Persepolis itself was brown and dry. Pillars of stone reached for the sun, their surfaces smoothed by wind and age. I had to crane my neck to see their tops, but the sky was so bright and the sun was so high I started sneezing.
“Wow,” I said when I regained the power of speech.
Dad paused beside us. “Wow is right. Look at it.”
Many of the stone pillars were broken. Some were cracked but still standing, barricaded with Plexiglas to keep people from touching them. Others had already experienced non-passive failures. Huge chunks of brown rubble lay forlorn across the loose rocky ground. Tufts of grass poked out from a few shady spots, but mostly, it was dry and stark.
I felt like I had stepped onto the surface of the planet Vulcan, and was finally going to master the Kolinahr discipline, embracing logic and purging myself of all emotions.
Dad pulled his sketchbook out of his Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag—Dad was never far from his sketchbook—and stepped off the wooden planks onto the gravel to sketch the nearest row of broken pillars.
Laleh and Babou had already wandered off, so Sohrab led me to a giant statue of a lamassu.
A lamassu is pretty much the Persian version of a sphinx: a mishmash animal, with the head of a man, the body of an ox, and the wings of an eagle. As far as I knew, no riddles were involved in mythological encounters with lamassu, but there was probably some extremely high level taarofing.
This lamassu was one of a pair. Its mate had been decapitated at some point, but still, the statues towered over us, mute sentinels of a fallen empire.
“The Gate of All Nations,” Sohrab said. He gestured around to the lamassus and pillars surrounding us. “That’s the name in English.”
It wasn’t much of a gate anymore, since anyone of any nation could have easily stepped around it instead of walking through. But it was still amazing.
Behind the lamassu, more columns sprouted from the ground like ancient trees in a petrified forest, forty feet tall, spindly but still miraculously upright. Giant stone slabs formed the remains of what must once have been a breathtaking structure.
Sohrab held my shoulders and guided me through the Gate of All Nations, then turned me toward another long wood-planked path where Mom and Mamou were waiting for us.
“This is the palace of Darioush the First,” Sohrab said. “Darioush the Great.”
“Wow,” I said.
My vocabulary had failed me.
“Pretty cool, right?” Mom said. She looked back toward the entrance. “Where’s your dad?
