“Even Good Water”

by Quinn Tyler Jackson

[Note: The version of “Two Brothers” presented here has been substantially adapted from the original as a reader resource connected to The Fourth Winter. Within the novel’s diegesis, the adapted story is “Even Good Water,” written by Cohen Benjamin in 1992 and later published in the fictional Commonwealth Quarterly Review; the story itself does not appear in the novel, but is referred to there. This online version preserves the central narrative, characters, and thematic structure of the earlier story while recasting its language, period detail, and narrative voice to fit Cohen’s early literary career and the larger fictional architecture surrounding The Fourth Winter.

• “Two Brothers,” Tickled by Thunder, Vol. 8 No. 20, 1997.

• “Two Brothers,” Tickled by Thunder’s Year’s Best Fiction 1997.​​]

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“Even Good Water”

Even good water wouldn’t go down Mahmoud Zamani’s throat. That was what his brother Reza always told him, usually after Mahmoud had found some objection to America, New York, his work, his English, or anything else Reza had decided ought simply to be accepted.

“Ever since we came here, you’ve lived a dog’s life,” Reza would say.

“We did not come here, Dadash,” Mahmoud would answer. “We are refugees. They send us here.”

“We are here now. Forget Iran, forget Urmieh, forget the year in Turkey. Learn to live with it.”

Learn to live with it. Mahmoud heard those words often while driving his taxi through Manhattan, particularly when two men in expensive suits climbed into the back seat and began talking about companies as if the companies were vegetables to be bought at market. Four million dollars. Six million dollars. Twenty million if the board agreed. A hostile takeover. A leveraged buyout. Mahmoud understood more of their English than he allowed anyone to believe, and certainly more than they imagined he did.

At the end of the ride he would pull to the curb, look at the meter, and say, “That was be eighteen dollar.”

Sometimes the men smiled. Sometimes they corrected him. Sometimes they handed him twenty and told him to keep the change with the careless generosity of people for whom two dollars had ceased to possess any particular meaning. He knew when they were laughing at his English. He also knew that ten years before the Revolution he had taught young men their age at the college in Urmieh, and that knowledge bought him exactly nothing in Manhattan.

Reza said that this was Mahmoud’s own fault. His younger brother could speak better English if he wished. Mahmoud did not disagree. At first his mistakes had been genuine, but somewhere between Turkey and New York he had begun keeping some of them deliberately. His accent belonged to Urmieh. His grammar carried traces of Persian and Kurdish and the English he had learned from schoolbooks years before the Revolution. Every damaged tense and misplaced article reminded him that English had not been the first language to name the world for him.

​

Reza considered this foolishness. He had worked hard upon his own English until nearly every trace of the old country had been polished away. What remained was a curious mixture of Iranian and Kurdish rhythms beneath the smooth voice of an American television newscaster. Reza had also acquired an enormous collection of rock-and-roll compact discs, a video camera, a new BMW, an apartment large enough to have a dining room, and a working knowledge of baseball.

He had learned to “roll with the punches” and “go with the flow.” He had even begun saying we when discussing American elections. Mahmoud sometimes imagined that his brother had been replanted too successfully. Reza was a quince tree growing apples.

Thanksgiving was one of the fruits.

“To whom are we giving thanks?” Mahmoud asked the first year Reza invited him.

“That isn’t the point.”

“It seems exactly the point.”

“The point is family.”

“We have family in Iran.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Mahmoud said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

The turkey occupied the centre of Reza’s dining table like some enormous roasted accusation. Mahmoud regarded it while his brother stood above the platter with a carving knife. In Urmieh they had never eaten like this, sitting upright around a table with knives and forks arranged according to rules someone had decided everyone ought to know. Food had been placed between people. Bread had been torn by hand. No special annual bird had been required to remind anyone that relatives were supposed to eat together.

Across the table sat Reza’s latest girlfriend, Cécile, a saleswoman from Montreal who had herself moved to New York several years before. Mahmoud was not entirely certain what she sold, only that it was sufficiently expensive to require frequent travel and sufficiently important that Reza mentioned her work whenever introducing her. She spoke English very well.

Another immigrant, Mahmoud thought, helping an immigrant become American.

He smiled.

“What?” Reza asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then stop looking at the turkey like it insulted our mother.”

​

“I am wondering if this is immigration officer.”

Cécile looked at him. “What?”

“The turkey. Maybe immigration officer in effigy.”

“Mahmoud,” Reza warned.

“What? He tell me I should feel ‘damned lucky’ they send me here. Maybe Thanksgiving is when I thank him.”

Mahmoud remembered the immigration officer clearly. By then they had already spent a year in Turkey, living in temporary rooms with temporary documents and temporary permission to remain somewhere no one intended them to stay.

“You should consider yourself damned lucky to be coming here,” the officer had said. “We saved your life, and now you owe it to us to try your hardest to fit in.”

Mahmoud had wondered even then what we meant. The immigration service? America? The West? History? God? He had learned during exile that there were questions one did not ask because the answers could not improve anything. Now a dead turkey waited upon his brother’s grateful table.

​

“Maybe we carve him because he save my life,” Mahmoud said.

Cécile laughed before realizing that Reza was not laughing.

“Pedar-sukhteh,” Mahmoud muttered.

​

“Don’t start.”

Reza began cutting the breast.

“What about last Sizdah beh Dar, Dadash? I invited you to my place.”

“I was busy.”

“You are always busy when holiday is ours.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“You say Thanksgiving is family. Sizdah beh Dar is also family.”

​

“We are here now, Mahmoud. We don’t have that holiday here. Here, New Year is January.”

“New Year’s,” Cécile said.

Reza looked at her. “What?”

“We say ‘New Year’s.’ As in ‘New Year’s Day.’ You said ‘New Year.’”

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Reza smiled and gestured toward her with the carving knife. “You see, Mahmoud? Even Cécile knows how important it is to speak proper English. Thank you, Cécile.”

​

Mahmoud folded his napkin once, then folded it again and placed it beside his plate. “Is true?” he asked her.

​

“What?”

​

“When I teached in Iran, I teached about Quebec. The proud persons of Quebec fight for cultural independency. René Lévesque. FLQ.”

​

“Mahmoud,” Reza said.

​

“You wasn’t a teacher, Reza. You did not studying this.”

“I was just a child during all that nonsense,” Cécile replied.

Mahmoud looked at her carefully. “Nonsense?”

​​

She seemed to hear the word differently after he repeated it. “I only meant—”

​​

“You did not voted Parti Québécois last time?”

​

“Mahmoud.”

​

“You want separation, nah?”

​

Cécile hesitated. “It’s complicated.”

​

“Ah.” Mahmoud nodded. “Complicated.”

​

Reza put down the carving fork. “What exactly are you trying to prove?”

​

“Nothing.”

​

“You’re always trying to prove something.”

​

“No. I am asking why her old country is ‘complicated’ and mine is something I must forget.”

​

Cécile lowered her eyes toward her plate. Reza stared at his brother. “That isn’t fair.”

​

“No?”

​

“No.”

​

“Then explain.”

​

“I’m not doing this with you.”

​

“Of course.”

​

Mahmoud reached for his water. Reza had once explained that it was filtered, although New York already possessed excellent drinking water. Reza had nevertheless purchased a filtering system. Everything in America, apparently, could be improved.

​

The telephone rang. Reza glanced toward the kitchen. “Probably the office.”

​

He wiped his hands upon his napkin and went to answer it. Mahmoud drank some water while Cécile adjusted the food upon her plate without eating it. Reza answered in English. There followed a short silence.

Then he began speaking Persian.

​

Mahmoud lowered his glass. Reza rarely spoke Persian anymore, even with him, unless a word refused to come in English.

​

“Yes,” Reza said into the telephone. “Yes, I hear you.” Another silence followed. Mahmoud watched his brother’s back.

​

“God. No.” Reza gripped the telephone cord. “No, you are lying. God.”

​

Mahmoud knew before his brother turned around. Perhaps it was something in Reza’s shoulders. Perhaps it was the Persian itself.

​

After a few more words, spoken too quietly for Mahmoud to hear, Reza placed the receiver down and remained facing the wall for several seconds. When he finally returned to the dining room, his face had changed.

​

“I have bad news,” he said in Kurdish.

​

Mahmoud felt something close in his throat. It had been years since Reza had addressed him in Kurdish. Persian had become the language of family business. English belonged to America. Kurdish remained buried underneath both, reserved without anyone having decided it for their mother’s anger, their grandmother’s stories, childhood, and news too painful for newer languages.

​

“From back home,” Reza said.

​

Mahmoud looked at him. “Home? Is your home in Iran or here now, Dadash?”

​

“Damn you, Mahmoud! Effat is dead. Dead, do you understand?”

​​

Mahmoud understood. He had understood for five years. All three of them had been arrested on the same day. Mahmoud and Reza had eventually been released. Effat had not. At first there had been messages, then rumours, then only the unreliable reports that travelled between people who themselves did not know whether they were telling the truth. Someone had heard she was alive. Someone said she had been transferred. Someone said she had converted. Someone said she had refused.

​

Eventually there had seemed only two possible endings. Effat would cease being Effat, or Effat would cease being alive. Now one uncertainty had been removed.

​​

Mahmoud waited for grief to arrive with the violence he expected of it, but what came first was something quieter and more shameful. Relief. His sister no longer waited for footsteps outside a cell. She no longer wondered which door would open. She no longer had to fit anywhere.

​

The thought of her in prison disappeared almost immediately and was replaced by Effat at seventeen, laughing so hard at something Reza had said that tea came from her nose. Mahmoud had not remembered that moment in years.

​

He stood. “It takes Effat’s death for you to call it home again, Reza-aziz?” This time he spoke Persian.

​​

Reza stared at him. Mahmoud wiped the corner of his mouth with his napkin and placed it beside the plate. For an instant he wanted to return every word his brother had ever given him. Forget Iran. Forget Urmieh. Forget Turkey. We are here now. Learn to live with it. ​Most of all, he wanted to say the last one. He did not.

​​

Cécile looked from one brother to the other. She had understood nothing since the telephone call. Persian and Kurdish had carried the entire catastrophe around her without allowing her inside it. Mahmoud looked at her and, unexpectedly, felt sorry for her. Then he walked toward the door.

​​

“Mahmoud,” Reza said.

​

He stopped. Nothing followed. Mahmoud opened the door and left.

Reza stood there until he heard the elevator doors close somewhere beyond the apartment. Then he returned to the dining room and sat across from Mahmoud’s empty chair.

​​

“What happened?” Cécile asked.

​

He wanted to cry, but could not bring himself to do so in front of her. Perhaps that was the reason. Perhaps there were others. The turkey had begun to cool. Mahmoud’s plate remained almost untouched. Reza reached for his wine. It was German. Someone at the office had recommended it because it went particularly well with turkey. He lifted the glass toward his mouth, but Mahmoud’s empty chair seemed to occupy more room than his brother had when sitting in it.

​​

For years Reza had believed Mahmoud was the one who had refused to live. His younger brother had dragged Urmieh behind him through Manhattan like a broken suitcase, preserving his accent, his grammar, his anger, and every other useless piece of a country that had expelled them. Reza had travelled lighter. He had learned the language, acquired the car, learned the holidays, bought the right music, and discovered which wine went with turkey.

​​

This was what survival meant. Now he was no longer certain which brother had left more behind. Reza put the wine down without drinking it. Cécile touched his wrist and softly said his name, but he reached instead for Mahmoud’s glass of water.

​​

Even good water wouldn’t go down Reza Zamani’s throat.