which surely explains a lot about all of it to someone, though not especially to me. Besides which, I wasn’t talking about Skandar, who doesn’t come into the story until much later, but about Sirena, to whom he was—and is—married, who is Italian and an artist.
You’d be forgiven for thinking Sirena was herself from the Middle East, on account of her skin, that fine olive skin, which on her son looked as though he’d been dusted with powder, glaucous almost, but on her elegant bones appeared at once old and young, young because her cheeks were so smooth and full, like fruit. She didn’t have any wrinkles except at the corners of her eyes, and there, spectacular crow’s-feet as if she’d spent her life grinning or squinting into the sun. And she had grooves from the edges of her nose to the corners of her mouth, but these weren’t wrinkles, exactly, they were expression. Her nose was avian, strong, Italian, I suppose, and the fine skin was pulled tight across it, a little shiny sometimes. There, on its bridge, were dotted a few freckles, like a small spray of sand. She had the eyes, Reza’s eyes, and the fierce black brows, and straight glossy black hair streaked with silver. She wasn’t young—even when I met her, when Reza was eight, she must have been around forty-five; but you wouldn’t have put her age so high. It was in the eyes—the life in the eyes—and the crow’s-feet. Ironically, they made her seem younger.
I should have met her at the Back to School Night at the end of September—the evening on which the parents come to the classroom at dinnertime, having mysteriously disposed of their offspring, and cram themselves into their children’s tiny desks and listen to the teacher expound with infectious enthusiasm on the joys of multiplication tables and the mysterious importance of learning cursive. This presentation is followed by a speech from the principal, Shauna McPhee, in the auditorium, and the requisite tepid, gelatinous pizza and warm soda afterward that we, the beleaguered and by now exhausted teachers, must stay behind to clean up.
If I’d met Sirena then, I would have made the effort to approach her, I know that; but as it was, I met her before, because Reza got beaten up. Not quite true: I’ve always been prone to exaggeration. But he did get attacked, and he did get hurt.
In the third week of school, on the playground after classes on Wednesday, the first truly crisp and autumnal day of the season, three fifth-grade boys ganged up on Reza while he was playing on the climbing structure by himself—or “by his own,” as the children sometimes charmingly put it. First they threw balls at him—not small balls, big ones, basketballs, and not in fun but hard, with vicious aim. “I thought they were playing dodgeball,” said another kid who’d been nearby; but unfortunately nobody proposed the game to Reza, who wouldn’t have known what it was anyway—and then, somehow, things deteriorated further, and one of them, Owen, a large boy and a stupid one, I have to say, having taught him for a year and struggled mightily to be able to promote him at the end of it, grabbed Reza by the collar, hauled him up against a metal pillar and punched him in the ear. He called Reza “a terrorist” and told him the playground was for Americans. It took a while to get the story clear, and somewhere it involved Owen’s uncle suffering from PTSD following a tour in Iraq; but nothing, frankly, could excuse or explain the whole appalling fiasco.
I was going over the kids’ essays—well, that’s a big word for them, three paragraphs on “What I liked most about our apple-picking field trip”; but I was working at my desk in the classroom—when Bethany, one of the three girls barely out of college who are in charge of after-school free play, brought him in to me. She’d had the wit to slap an ice pack on his red and swelling ear, but Reza was blanched and trembling, his lashes clumped with tears. Bethany was too young or too timid to do what most obviously needed to be done, which was to sit him down and put an arm around him and breathe right along with him, to slow him down, and then without moving out of sight, to get the cell and his file and call his mother and tell her to come and