My Mother’s Heart by Mehr-Afarin Kohan

The first time I ever saw a heart was on our kitchen floor. Mother was dissecting a chicken on the tiles. It was the time of war and the best you could get from the meat market was a fully plucked chicken with the head still dangling from a thin layer of skin. The long neck was the most delicious part.

Mother would call me in to see all the internal organs: lungs, bowels, kidneys, gall bladder, liver that she’d skillfully remove with a knife the size of my arm and pile on a pool of fat and juice. 

“Can I chop the head off?” I’d say.

One day she put a brown rubbery thing in the middle of my palm.

“Here’s the heart,” she said, but it wasn’t shaped at all like a heart.

“Where’s the blood?” I said. 

“The butcher drains it or we’ll have a pool of blood here.”

I knew what she meant by “a pool of blood” even at six. I’d seen a stream of blood spurt out from a sheep’s neck my grandfather slaughtered in the backyard. It gathered in a pool before getting sucked into the drain. Mother was angry that grandfather let me watch, especially since the sheep snorted and kicked while dying. 

“It’s not worse than what she sees on television every day,” grandfather said, and I knew what he meant because they always showed footages from the frontlines; injured Irani soldiers and captured Iraqis. 

Looking at mother, I said, “I only watch cartoons. I don’t watch the news.”

Then I splashed them both with water from the hose. She screamed and I ran. 

“You have to let the child play,” I heard my grandfather say. 

“My heart is weak and she doesn’t listen.”

***

The first time I broke my mother’s heart, I was five. 

I was in the bathtub. The summer was hot. The water was soft. I dived chest first into it. I licked the droplets on my skin. I let it rain in my mouth. I dived and splashed. I bombed and splashed. The droplets scattered on the tiles, on the mirror that held behind it my father’s razor, mother’s perfume— back then, these things didn’t come easy, mother always reminded me.

The droplets ran down the foggy mirror, soaked the worn-out rug under the sink and formed little ponds in mother’s red slippers. I wasted the soap, making bubbles that floated around my ankles and turned yellow with my urine. I cupped the bubbles and threw them in the air. They shot up and came down like fireworks I’d seen on the horizon at night, where mother said the desert was, with all the tanks fighting the enemy. 

Back then, the enemy appeared in the form of minuscule planes far away from our house. Always far away from ours, I was still convinced at that time, even though we’d duct-taped X’s on the windows. 

The bubbles were light. They danced in the air, stuck to my towel hung at the door. When it opened, there was the figure of mother behind it. She was skinny and short. Her hair, bushy and up. Her gaze slid across the bathroom, pausing on her slippers, too wet to wear. She tiptoed onto the rug, yelling, “Your father’s going to hear about this!”

I lay in the tub, ears submerged. Her voice echoed under water and I chuckled. I chuckled until she tumbled down on the toilet seat bending forward, pressing a fist to her heart.

“My heart, oh god, my heart,” she cried. “Look what you’ve done! You ruined everything, you ungrateful child! Look at the mess! Oh god, I’m having a heart attack.”

I crawled on all fours and raised myself up. Standing there naked, shivering from the breeze from the open door, I watched my mother rock back and forth and have a heart attack. 

“Call your father! Tell him I’m dying,” she cried. She knew I hadn’t learned how to dial a phone yet. 

“It’s nothing of the sort,” the doctor told my father when he took mother to the hospital later that day after she finally found him at work. And he repeated the doctor’s words to everyone who heard the story of how I almost gave mother a heart attack.     

“It definitely was,” mother insisted. “This child will kill me one day.”

***

There were days that I did my best to kill my mother, particularly during the year school was shut down due to frequent bombardments. I made our television into a tank, pointing the long antennas at her bottom every time she passed from the bedroom to the kitchen and back until the antennas broke and our screen became forever blurry— those were the times that nobody could afford a new television. 

But that didn’t matter much to me anyway. I preferred not to sit and listen to the boring lady on Channel One, fully covered in brown clothing, teaching me the alphabets or math. But growing up illiterate wasn’t an option and I was sentenced to a family meeting scheduled for when father arrived home. I was forced to stay awake on the couch when my bedtime came and went. 

“Your father will know what to do with you,” my mother said, with a potato and peeler in her hands. “Nobody grows up illiterate under my roof, war or no war!” 

She cried for half an hour, pressing the potato to her heart and whispering under her breath. 

I knew father was going to be very late, like he’d been every other night over the past months. He was starting a new business, after two others had gone bankrupt. His first idea, plastic slippers with extendable handles, turned out to be too heavy and slow a method for killing the giant cockroaches that’d infested Tehran. His bubble umbrellas gathered dust in storage because it didn’t rain all that year. People said it was the heat from the oil that burnt on the waters of the Persian Gulf. 

So father changed course in the other direction. In this heat, he said, people needed to fan themselves while riding on the bus, walking in the bazar, waiting in long lines for milk and bread. Mother disagreed. He should just get back to teaching, she said. But since being fired from his job at the university for “anti-revolutionary conduct”, father said he was through with teaching.         

Knowing father was going to be late, I stuck two matchsticks on the corners of my eyes, between the fold of my eyebrow and my lower eyelid, to keep them from drooping. I’d learned this trick from a movie. 

In the movie, the man was determined to cycle for days without falling. He circled around a square while a crowd gathered to watch him, waiting for him to fall. The most serious threat to this man’s survival was the need for sleep. So he held open his eyelids with matches. 

The trick didn’t work for me that night. I fell asleep and a rocket hit a small house at the end of our street and killed my friend, Saba. In the morning, on his way to work,  my father must’ve passed by a pile of rubble where Saba’s house used to be. 

I woke up to a large banner pinned to the top of my bed, detailing my daily schedule. This included my house chores, nap time, homework time and a play time during mother’s afternoon nap. As I examined the extent of my defeat, I heard a short gasp erupting from mother and then everything fell silent for a few seconds before she hung up the phone.  

Mother was beating a piece of steak on the chopping board when I stepped into the kitchen. 

“I’m making grilled beef for lunch,” she said, banging the mallet as hard as she could. “You better have finished your homework by then.”

She walked around me as I stood in the middle of the kitchen, a muted ghost, for a long time. She dripped blood as she moved the pieces of flat meat from the board to the frying pan. She even stepped on my toes without noticing. 

We never talked about Saba. Not as we heard sirens, trucks, people shouting on our street white we ate lunch that day. Not as father arrived home early and turned up the news on the murky screen. So much as the words began to form on his lips, mother cut him off with a sharp look. Not as we passed by their house— half of the structure still erect, showing some of the furniture. Even as the war ended, schools re-opened and Saba never showed up. Talking was in itself the worst act of betrayal and mother was relieved when eventually the other half of the house was demolished.

***

A few years after I left Iran, I decided to write letters to my mother about those days. She claims that I only remember the bad parts and this fault of my memory is worsening her heart condition. In fact, she prefers that I stop writing to her altogether. But I keep sending her letters with a kind of vengeance, my words little drops of poison.

I did once write to her about a good memory. It was about a sunny autumn day before schools closed down. I convinced Saba to add our coins together to buy a twin popsicle that broke in the middle from a street vendor mother had warned me was too dirty to buy from. We hid in an alley, removed our head coverings and licked the dribbling popsicles until our tongues were orange. Seeing the color would give it away; we pledged not to speak for the whole night and the artificial acidic taste of our secret cracked our tongues until the next morning. I told mother that I bet she hadn’t even noticed. 

Mother replied, “You never had a childhood friend with this name. So typical of you, making up stories that never happened.”

I can tell her things she’d like to hear — stories about birds still chirping in the morning, flowers still blossoming despite all of it. I can swallow the acid. I can let the matchsticks drop. I can make room for the cheers of the crowd for a few moments before I fall off the bicycle. And I can let her do the same.

But I know that if I do that, it’ll all be a lie. 

Mehr-Afarin Kohan is a Toronto-based writer, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Her fiction appears in The Missouri Review, The Citron Review, and The Antigonish Review amongst others. She was awarded Best Small Fictions 2021. She lives with her husband and three-year-old daughter. You can find her at mehrafarinkohan.com.

11 March 2022