Hamid Oskou’s Father

Hamid Oskou had a magazine stand near the university. You wouldn’t think anybody buys magazines anymore, would you? he told me. I don’t understand it myself. Each one of them thinks they’re the only one still buying them. It’s nice to let them think so. I liked him because he was the kind of Iranian I would never have known as a kid—an old man who preferred to speak in English over Farsi. We hadn’t been here long enough then. Everybody we knew was new to this place like us. I used to say certain American expressions and ask my brother if he thought I was the first Iranian in history to say it.

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” I’d say.

“Some Iranian has said that.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.”

It was nice to think I wasn’t the first.

“You can take a horse to water.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t ask me if an Iranian has said it if you don’t know the whole thing.”

“You think they’ve said half of it?”

Hamid sounded like a man who’d said all those things. His people were the university people, wherever they were from. I felt proud watching how he moved amongst them. It was all in English, but it was Iranian in spirit. Sometimes I’d try a little Farsi with him, and he’d light up for a moment, and then he’d swing things back to English. It wasn’t anything bad. I figured he wanted to stay connected to the customers even when he was talking to me. He was someone who was talking with everybody when he was talking with one person.

I asked my friend Dara if he knew him. He taught Farsi at the school. I thought Hamid was the kind of guy he would like. 

“He came to my night class,” Dara said. “He stayed for a few weeks and then he never came back. I don’t know why.”

The boy I had been couldn’t have imagined an old Iranian man in a Farsi class. In those days they were always looking at me kindly but sternly, asking me in Farsi about my career plans. My brother would tell me to forget about telling them I wanted to be a writer.

“Why?”

“Just tell them you’re choosing between becoming a doctor and an engineer.”

“Why do they all recite poetry at the end of the night when they come to our house?”

“That’s Farsi poetry. That’s different.”

“Why?”

“In Iran you’re supposed to be a doctor or an engineer who can recite poetry.”

“Somebody’s got to still write the stuff, don’t they?”

“In English?”

“Why not?”

“They’ll think that’s cute. They’ll think that’s very cute if you tell them that.”

I liked Hamid even more after Dara told me he’d gone to his night class. It was nice to think there were enough of us now and we’d been here long enough that an old man could sit in a Farsi class. The old men of my youth would never have guessed it.

“You think he was embarrassed?” I asked Dara.

“No. It was something else. He was past embarrassment.”

“Language can be funny that way.”

“Oh, it can be funny all right. But he was past embarrassment. It was something else. I wish I knew.”

“He switches to English when I say something in Farsi. But everything he does is Iranian.”

“I know. The way he left my class was Iranian.”

“How?”

“He made a formal apology.”

“Without telling you the reason.”

“That’s right.”

“We are very good at formal apologies.”

“We’re the best. They are so good we don’t need reasons.”

“Well, I’m glad he can do that stuff. Even if he doesn’t do them in Farsi.”

“I wish he’d stuck around and taught the class formal apologies.”

“I hope you cover that this semester.”

Whenever I saw him, Hamid Oskou was so good at being Iranian in English that I thought he must secretly be an expert in our language. I thought he must be like the old men who could recite poetry late at night at our house. I remembered how I finally told them that I wanted to be a writer myself. I told them there were some very good American poets, one of whose books I happened to be reading. It was worse than I thought. They smiled and looked at my father, who looked ready to make a formal apology.

“Don’t worry about them,” my brother said. “They came to America to work. They don’t need poetry here.”

“What about us?”

“They think the language ought to be enough for us.”

“The language?”

“Yes. They see English as the work language and Farsi as poetry. Especially now that they’re far away.”

“Well, I’m going to show them.”

My brother smiled too, but not like the old men. He was leaving for college soon.

“I’m going to miss you, Payman.”

“I’m going to write some good letters.”

“I’m sure you are.”

Maybe Hamid Oskou hadn’t had a brother growing up to soften the edges between English and Farsi. Maybe he’d felt like he had to pick a side. I’d felt that way sometimes. I’d written in English as a rock to throw at those old men. I had needed to do it, but I’d gotten to where I didn’t need writing to be throwing anything at anybody. They could throw things at me if they wanted to. I wanted my writing to be soft enough that I could take it. Your only shot was to be all of who you were, to be all of the languages you were and all of everything else. You had to be all of it to be soft enough for everything they were going to throw your way. Any borders you had inside yourself were just going to make you hard.

Hamid Oskou looked like a man who knew the borders inside himself, and could laugh at them, which was why I couldn’t understand why he’d quit the Farsi class.

Dara told me he’d wanted to visit Hamid at his stand, but he didn’t want to embarrass him about leaving the class.

“I don’t mind that he left. I felt embarrassed to be teaching him.”

“Why?”

“He understands language. He understands what it’s for. All right, so I could give him a vocabulary list. That’s not language. That’s not what he does all day with the people who come to his place.”

“Maybe I could ask him.”

“Don’t ask him. If you ask him, tell him I was learning from him.”

“All right.”

“It’s like listening to a symphony versus learning notes. They come in thinking it’s a matter of learning notes.”

“What is?”

“Language. The more I do this, the more I want to give them the symphony. Maybe Hamid would have stayed in the class.”

I told him about how there were no Iranians like Hamid when I was a kid. Dara had left Iran when he was twenty. He liked hearing about the Iranians in America from me and I liked hearing about the ones in Iran from him. We could usually get a little symphony going about it.

I walked from the campus to Hamid’s stand. I didn’t know how I was going to ask him, but I trusted the music still in me to ask him in the right way. “It was my father,” Hamid said. “It was my mother too, but it was mostly my father. He was a nice man. We didn’t know many other Iranians when I was growing up, so everything I learned about Iran was from him. I didn’t know it till I sat down in your friend’s class. He is a good teacher. Please tell him I said that he is a good teacher. Something happened when I sat down in his class. I saw that a man could be anything in Farsi. He could be rageful. He could be spiteful. We had the whole language in front of us. I don’t know why I never realized it before. My father was never any of those things. I never saw it at least. I thought the language was gentle, as gentle as him. It was nothing against the class. Your friend is a very good teacher. But when you see the whole language open up like that, and you see that it does not just belong to your father, then you don’t want to lose something by learning the whole thing. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t learn that everything sorrowful and miserable has happened in Farsi too. My father was a nice man. He has been dead thirty years but that doesn’t matter. Tell your friend I am sorry. I would have liked to learn from him. The class was a good class. Please tell him that I would have liked to stay. I should have known by now that a man can be anything in any language. I do know that in English, you know. It’s funny. Please tell your friend I am sorry. I tried to remember a time when my father was petty. I thought if I could remember that, I could stay in the class and learn everything. I tried to remember a time when my father was small and petty, in a small and selfish way. Then maybe the language could be anything. I couldn’t do it. It is very hard to learn a whole language after that. Please tell him if I could have remembered that, I would have stayed.”