It must have taken both my parents to lift that trunk. I imagined them holding those heavy handles, surprised by the weight of them, and then a noisy heave as they brought the trunk over the threshold. They would have carried it slowly through the dark hallway and down the carpeted stairs to our rumpus room, calling out to each other when they turned the corners. But I wasn’t there to see any of that. It was already enthroned in the deep shag of our rumpus room floor by the time I got home from school, and I found it there, waiting for me.
The things that usually littered our rumpus room: my father’s massive canvases leaning against one wall with only the blond wood frames and frayed canvas edges exposed, the black upright piano with its bench settled underneath, and the old zenith TV on its rolling cart, they stood at attention around the trunk as if eyeing it, challenging it. Who goes there and what right have you here, you unexpected and uninvited stranger?
Iran had become an “other”, foreign, strange, the half of me that was oddly-colored and smelled of celery stew and rose water; the half of me that I tried to ignore. My year there when I was three and four was like a closed chapter of one of my father’s library books full of black and white pictures of artifacts and statues. All that was left were flashes of memory: paper schoolbooks that I couldn’t read, pots of steaming rice and the bright orange of a glass of fresh carrot juice. Iran had become the sound of my mother’s shouts in to our kitchen princess phone on New Years Day each year; her voice desperately reaching through the phone, her loud voice shouting in the language that was familiar yet incomprehensible to me now. Iran was the phone inevitably handed to me to hear a tinny distant voice calling my name in answer to my small hello. The awkward silence when I didn’t know what else to say.
And when this trunk was finally opened it brought forth all these things in a flood that made me breathless. Its heavy rope was cut with our kitchen knife and fell away to expose the heavy padlock that had been hidden underneath. Within minutes my father produced the small key and the top was lifted. Stale air mixed with the smell of sweet moth balls lingered in my nose as I stretched my neck to peer inside. Its dark gut was still and full. My mother, chatty, exuberant, welcomed each item from its depth as she gingerly removed them– small folded rugs with bright patterns, tiny sheep skin hats that I could hardly believe I had ever worn, a tin samovar with small matching tea cups, clothes, wraps, shawls and stiff beaded shoes of gaudy colors. I stood away and poked at these things with outstretched fingers. Everything was scratchy against my skin and the old, weighted smell was so strong it assaulted me and filled the room. I gladly disappeared into the kitchen to make my mother a cup of strong black tea and leave her with these smelly and unexpected relatives.
Satisfied that she had unfolded each item, caressed each with nostalgia and longing and then refolded them with the same creases, Mother began returning them back to their waiting vault. The trunk which witnessed this whole scene was eventually closed with a slam and my mother sprang up from her squat with a light step. Both of my parents seemed to welcome this trunk home. As for me, I was wash with relief when it was all over: the foreigness of these things only served to remind me of my own unexplainable foreigness. The trunk finally took its rightful place amongst the old boxes in our garage and I felt more at ease with its place there, hidden and unseen. Its contents would remain the assemblage of an unknown people. Artifacts of a culture, of a part of myself, that I would never truly know.
