Anna Badkhen

Everything Pizza

When they were kids, Naheed’s brothers would prepare for prison. Every week they would set aside a loaf of their mother’s bread, stuff it into a clean pillowcase, hide it for a few days, and eat it after it would go stale and moldy. Their mother would get mad, tell them they were wasting her food and risking their health, and they would respond that they were adapting their stomachs, did she want them to get sick and die in prison? Everyone knew the only thing prisoners got to eat was stale, moldy bread, and in the seventies and eighties, everyone knew that most young men sooner or later would spend time in prison. It was different in America. In Naheed’s new neighborhood, everyone assumed that most of the young men here would sooner or later get arrested, too, or at least get pulled over, or stopped in the street, but they always seemed so unprepared. In the movies you always saw them start arguing with the police, “But I didn’t do anything!” Where Naheed grew up, when they came for you, you didn’t argue. You surrendered, or you shot back.

The morning of the West Philly Pizza Flood, Naheed thought of her mother’s bread. Her mother always prepared the dough in the morning, mixing the starter with the water, and then mixing that with flour and salt in a large wooden bowl she had inherited from Naheed’s father’s mother, who died before Naheed was born. The dough would rise all afternoon. Then, in the evening, while Naheed and her brothers sat at the kitchen table with their homework, their mother would spread a clean sheet of linoleum on the floor. She would kneel over the dough, pulling it apart from itself into balls the size of a baby’s head, and roll them out on the linoleum, and then take them into the backyard, squat over the tandoor in the ground and smack the loaves one after another onto hot brick. Her bread was like pizza with no toppings.

When it’s thirty-five degrees, ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, and you’re in a city with few trees, no grass almost, everything paved over, who wants pizza? No one wants pizza, people want ice cream, watermelon. A cold Pepsi is nice. The night before the flood, Jamal’s Pizza across the street from Naheed must have prepared too much dough for not enough customers. (When Naheed first moved here and saw the big red sign from her window, she thought: Jamal, he must be from her country, or maybe from Pakistan, but he was from Cincinnati, Ohio.) Jamal donated eight boxes of pizza dough to the Community Fridge below Naheed’s apartment. The Community Fridge was where people donated perfectly fine food they didn’t need, and local shops sometimes donated food too. It was for poor people, but also if someone was out of milk or oil or they felt like eating a mango they could go and pick it up, for free. Where Naheed grew up, if you ran out of something like oil or milk and you couldn’t get to the store, or you didn’t have money at the moment, you’d ask a neighbor, but Americans didn’t like to know each other well enough to ask. At least in West Philly, neighbors said hello. It didn’t take long for Naheed to notice that whenever she walked in white neighborhoods, people didn’t even greet each other. In any case, the night before the flood Naheed was leaning out the window trying to catch a breeze—her apartment got very stuffy in the summer—and she saw a young boy walk over with the boxes, squat, move something aside, stack the boxes on the bottom shelf. For a second, Naheed wondered if maybe she should go downstairs and get a box and save it for when the weather cooled down enough to want to bake. But she didn’t. First of all, her mother always made bread from scratch, and she didn’t raise Naheed to finish up someone else’s cooking. Second, Naheed didn’t need free food. Her parents didn’t raise a beggar.

Naheed’s parents were retired schoolteachers. They said she had to have education. Education, they said, was the only way out of the violence. They insisted that she continue with the classes even after most of her friends’ parents had ordered their daughters to stop. The school was a thirty-minute walk toward the mountains through some fields, one school for seven villages. It was new and made of concrete and painted green up to the windows. It had a generator. There were eight classrooms, one for each grade, and eight teachers, and a modern automated alarm bell, a gift from the Soviet sister-city of Bucha. The principal had studied in Tashkent and didn’t cover her hair, and she taught English. Naheed could still remember the lessons, even though now she knew that they had little to do with English. This pen is. This teacher pretty is. This notebook is. In his childhood, Vladimir Lenin was industrious and gay. These lessons gave her a start.

The girls went in the afternoon, after the boys, after the morning housework, and came home late. Over the years they heard of older girls who never came home. Naheed’s friends’ parents said it was because there were armed men everywhere. Armed men had been everywhere for years. Armed men had come to her village and took away her eldest brother from their own house in handcuffs. She was in first or second grade: her mother was wailing, she was wailing, her second brother had his hand over her mouth to shush her and his hand was sweaty and trembled like a mulberry leaf on a November mountain. Armed men had taken the twin daughters of Naheed’s next-door neighbors, who were three years older than her and wore lipstick in secret; they had taken the girls from their family compound. Didn’t this mean that staying home was just as dangerous? Her friends’ parents would say, yes, God bless them and keep them all, but any girl who continues to go to the school in the evening is asking for it.

In America people took school for granted. She has read in the neighborhood paper about West Philly High School: reading proficiency—seventeen percent, math—ten percent, dropout rate—almost half. Where she grew up, they risked everything to stay in school to this day, and these kids here? Here in America people threw out everything: perfectly fresh pizza dough, shoes they only wore a couple of years, education.

Naheed did finish her education, though she had to wait till her thirties. But thanks to her degrees she was able to work with the Americans when they came, and that, in turn, allowed her to come to West Philly on asylum and then get a good job in human resources at Brain Science. It wasn’t easy, as God was her witness. Her remaining brother, Rashid, fought with her, fought  with their parents. He begged them to keep her at home. He had carried her on his hip when she was a toddler. He was only two years older and sometimes her toes would drag on the ground, and he'd nicknamed her Plow. When she was old enough, four or five, he took her to the family orchard and taught her to bring down turtledoves with a slingshot. They fell out of the almond trees in such beautiful silent explosions of feathers. Their eldest brother was older than Rashid by five years, almost a grownup, Naheed wasn’t interesting to him, so she was entirely her second brother’s to inculcate and push around and trick into mischief.

But she was a girl, and Rashid had heard of girls waylaid on their way from school. He had heard of what eventually happened to these girls if they did return home, and what he would have to do as Naheed’s brother if she became one of those. He hissed at her: Have you no common sense? He yelled at their parents: Know you no fear? If something happens who will marry her? His rage filled his mouth, and when he yelled at Naheed, she could feel it in the bits of his spit that landed on her neck and chest. He had been her confidant, her best playmate. Now she became afraid of him.

How long did these arguments go on? A month? A year? Two years? At the time, they felt interminable, but in the village of her birth time itself often felt interminable. She didn’t come from a culture that cuts to the chase. Time wasn’t money where she grew up. Nothing was money; at least, not for people like her family. People like her family knew they came from dust, and to dust they shall return, and dust they will stay in between, and knowing that made them move through life a certain way. It took her coming to America to understand that in a way, it was easier to navigate the world when you knew it was against you than when you were told, as Americans liked to say, that it was your oyster. It wasn’t your anything. When you thought you were safe because you have lived honorably, and you lost vigilance—that’s when you found yourself saying, “Officer, but I didn’t do anything.” Of course, everyone sometimes dropped their guard. For example, who could have foreseen the West Philly Pizza Flood?

*

If you were in the city that summer, then you’ll recall that for that whole month Philadelphia having a heat wave. The night before the flood was humid and hot, and Naheed kept the window open for the breeze. At six in the morning, when the sun came up, she heard a strange sound downstairs, like something scraping or dragging. She put on her slippers and her robe, brushed her hair, dabbed on her lipstick, and went outside to see what it was.

The first thing she noticed was that the Community Fridge’s light was off. The fridge had lost power! The people who managed it worked at the coffee shop on the first floor, but they didn’t open till seven. Naheed thought of all the things in the fridge spoiling in the heat, what a waste. Then she thought, maybe she could still rescue something. Because even though she wasn’t raised a beggar, she also wasn’t raised to waste food. Her parents would say: “God does not love the wasteful.” But when she looked inside the Community Fridge, she realized that she was already too late.

She knew it was wrong, and maybe it was even a sin, because of course it was a disaster, but she could hardly look away. It was just an amazing thing to watch. The scraping noise she’d heard from her apartment, that was the pizza dough beginning to rise, pushing out of the boxes, pushing the cardboard apart. And it kept rising before her eyes! It was foaming out like a snail testing what’s beyond the shell, and covering it like it was eating it up: aha, a head of cabbage, next, two cartons of lactose-free milk, good, good, yumm, yumm. Then it kept going, it seemed to be moving faster, over the overripe mangos and potatoes and boxes of heavy cream and mouse droppings at the bottom of the fridge. It ate those up. Was she dreaming? It was so strange, and at the same time there was something splendid about it, almost divine. It was as if the more the dough ate, the hungrier Naheed became to watch it. So she just stood and watched for minutes as it pushed upward, and then as it pushed the door ajar first and then wide open, spilled out onto the sidewalk. That’s when she finally had enough sense to run back upstairs and lock the door. Once she was safe, she brewed some green tea and sat by the window to watch. She didn’t even think to warn the neighbors—for one thing, they weren’t very close, but also, she didn’t want to be distracted from watching the dough rise. And she also didn’t call 911. Where she grew up, people knew not to trust the authorities.

*

On the last day of winter mujaheddin recruiters came through the village, and Rashid signed up. He told Naheed he was going to fight for her freedom to go to school and study English. He told their parents nothing.

She could remember the next day as clearly as if it was yesterday. Or, she thought she remembered it, but memory is tricky, you don’t have to work at Brain Science to know this. Sometimes she wondered if what she remembered was better than what had really happened. It was New Year, and everywhere in the village people were greeting one another, everyone was moving house to house, eating sweet pudding with dried fruit compote. By lunchtime the younger kids had what Americans would call a sugar high, and were goofing off, playing silly games with hoops and dancing, and the adults were smoking shishas in the sun and laughing. Naheed went to several houses with her mother and had so much pudding she felt round. She must have told her brother she could hardly move because he made her hike with him up the foothills above the almond orchard. The slopes were blue with chicory, and he talked about love. He had never talked to Naheed about love before, and she was sure he was in love with some girl. They talked about what it meant to love and how to respect oneself in it, and Rashid said he would only marry out of love and Naheed teased him—your love, or hers? She kept asking him who it was, and he giggled but wouldn’t say. They climbed out of the chicory onto a plateau. There was grass growing chest-high, all dry and silver. Burdock puffs and darts of devil’s grass and spiked balls of some other last-year’s seedpods that looked like wolf’s mouths, and Rashid knew the name for every plant. Naheed wanted to keep teasing him about the girl but he said that since she was so hell-bent on education, this grass was her biology lesson, see how it was textured and each blade apart and also part of a whole. Then he took her hand so that their two hands made one fist, and he raised this fist in the air, and yelled at the sky: I love spring grass, Plow! That’s what I love!

Then he told Naheed that he had joined the resistance.

A few nights later he sneaked out on his first mission. Naheed kissed his right hand and whispered a blessing. She wanted to splash water from a pitcher at his feet, for protection, but he ordered her not to. He said, Stop all this backward bullshit, what do they even teach you in that school! What am I fighting for, eh, Plow? He kissed her forehead. He said, I love you, baby sister.

*

Naheed’s parents taught her that if bread touches the ground or the floor, you pick it up, you dust it off, you kiss it, and then you put it on the table again. But how do you dust off a pizza crust that is a meter tall and twenty square blocks wide?

Later, when Naheed watched the helicopter footage of the pizza flood on TV, she saw that the whole of West Philly looked like a giant waffle. The announcer explained how big the flood was, how badly the traffic was disrupted, how many businesses didn’t open, how lucky it was that UPenn and the other big universities were on summer recess. There wasn’t much on the news about what it had been like for Naheed or the people in her neighborhood. But that was nothing new, people in neighborhoods like Naheed’s aren’t often in the news.

One of the things the newscasts didn’t mention was that there was a little park two blocks away from Naheed’s apartment where some old men stayed on the benches at night. It’s a good thing that pizza crust is flat, like the bread of Naheed’s childhood. And that it’s yeast-based, which makes it porous. If it were dense like American bread, these old men would have suffocated to death.

*

Naheed sipped her tea and watched the pizza rise. It crawled steady, and it picked up everything it could along the way. The cigarette roaches, the nickels that fell out of people’s pockets, the shiny, crinkly potato chips wrappers, the needles. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. The higher the sun rose, the hotter the day grew, the hotter the sidewalk, and the dough began to crust almost immediately as it hit the pavement, with that same sizzling sound as when Naheed’s mother would stick her loaves to the bricks of the tandoor. And it grew and grew. In forty minutes it was probably half a meter deep on the sidewalk and rising, collecting dead birds, a pretty plastic sandal with rhinestones, masks, the tiny burnt ends of joints, lottery tickets. The metal bits glinted at the sky like the little mirrors Naheed’s mother used to sew into the hems of her dresses when she was little. There was no pavement anymore up and down Fifty-Second street, just dough. A lady was trying to push her way out into the street from the building across the road, the residential entrance next to Jamal’s Pizza, but the door was blocked by dough, rising, moving. This once happened in a village back home called Wuima Ut. Heavy spring rain in the mountains dislodged giant sheets of ice, and the snowmelt ran downhill and into Wuima Ut’s irrigation canal, but there was so much water that it rose out of the canal into a pomegranate orchard and a tomato field upstream from the village, and then it crashed through the streets—a wave three meters tall and full of sludge and broken pomegranate trees and whatever else it picked up along the way, furniture, house walls, metal gates, donkey carts. Twenty families lost their homes in the flood, and the rest were like soggy bread. Thank God no one died.

Thank God also that houses in America were made of brick and cement and good wood. And, of course, the pizza dough only rose about a meter at the highest, so it was nothing like Wuima Ut. But Naheed thought of that flood because the pizza dough carried on top of it all the garbage, all the lost things.

Later Naheed would see the lady who was stuck in her building interviewed on live TV, she was the one who called it “everything pizza.” She wore a very nice sweater for the interview, deep red with a beautiful shawl collar. Naheed couldn’t believe her eyes, who would wear a sweater in such heat?

One of the things that she spotted in the pizza dough from her window was a doll. A big doll, plastic, pink skin, dressed in some kind of a shiny costume. But the most remarkable thing about that doll was that it had blue hair. Maybe this was another reason why the flood reminded her of her childhood, because when she was little, she had a doll with blue hair. How many blue-haired dolls were there in the world? Malvina was a Russian doll, from a popular Russian book. It was Naheed’s prized possession, the only doll she’d ever had. Plastic body, rubber head with pursed lips and blue glass eyes and real eyelids, one of which could move and the other was stuck open. A pink lace dress with ruches, which Naheed could take off. The bright blue hair, probably polyester. After some time, the sun bleached the hair and it became yellowish green, but all the village girls still envied her. Russian soldiers had brought it when she was seven or eight years old. They told her the doll’s name, and that she was from a book. They took her eldest brother the same year. She couldn’t remember if they had given her the toy on that same day, or if they returned for him later. What was it like for her parents to see her love that doll so much as they mourned their firstborn son? What is it like for her neighbors in America to watch their young boys be taken from them by their government and then listen to all the speeches about the American Dream? She’d never know, she couldn’t have children because of what happened. In the end, Rashid was right: no one married her. 

Memory is strange: you pull one out and it has another attached to its tail, like a kite on a string, and the wind blows and the memory goes this way and that, you start with one thing and remember something else. At the window, Naheed remembered how her mother would wipe her thin, veined hands on the loose end of her headscarf in between putting her bread loaves into the tandoor. Then she remembered the fist Rashid had made out of their two hands that day on the hill. Then, the way Rashid’s body jiggled on the stretcher when they carried him away, and how silent their mother was that time. Memories collect things along the way, fold these new things into themselves. Whenever a boy got killed in West Philly, she thought of her brothers. Her father went to the capital to look for them several times, first one, then the other. Nothing. The family never found out where they took them, or if it helped that they had practiced eating moldy bread. There were no cameras back then, no cell phones. How could Naheed know that what she remembered was true? Maybe the truth was worse.

“Now there’s only the hangover and the memory of love,” she recited out loud and drummed her fingers on the teacup. She wasn’t that old, by local standards. But back home she’d be considered a grandmother by now. Time weighed differently there than here. It was just that smell, that unmistakable smell of leavened dough hitting hot stone.

*

How old was Rashid when he joined the resistance? He was that age when boys are strong, fearless, and immortal. Maybe that’s why the boys Naheed saw in West Philly were so reckless, like they were taunting danger, walking around with loud boomboxes and shiny jewelry. They are romantic, like her brother. Poets. Showing off for the girls. Planning how they will love.

It was still dark when two strangers knocked at Naheed’s parents’ door, not yet dawn. Rashid brother between them, wrapped in a blanket, pale, limp like an old rug. One of his feet bare, one shod. Something dripping on the floor. They laid him on the carpet in the middle of the living room. Nahid’s father knelt, he kept saying, God, God, God, God. Her mother said nothing. She also said nothing.

The men said they had been lying in ambush on the side of the road, there was supposed to be a convoy. They had guns and some grenades. But when the convoy approached and they were ready to shoot at it, there was an explosion, very close. Someone had buried a bomb in the road; they hadn’t been informed. They said that they were sorry, and that everyone in the first two cars of the convoy was dead, so it was not in vain. They told Nahid’s father, Hajji, your son is a hero.

Father made a small sound like a slingshot turtledove, and bent forward until his forehead was on the carpet next to his middle child, her brother. Or maybe she was misremembering it. When the policewoman shot that young man down the street from Naheed’s apartment, two months before the Pizza Flood, in the news they showed how his mother knelt that way on the sidewalk, so it was possible that she was confusing the images.

Naheed’s teacup was empty. She stood up to replenish it, and also poured some raisins into a small saucer and took it to the window to go with her tea. Naheed’s mother liked to repeat that raisins and wine were born in their country, she liked to sing Paimana Bideh by the great Omar Khayyam. “Bring me the chalice so I may lose myself, I am in love with my beloved’s intoxicating gaze…” Rashid loved that poem so much.

There were tiny black dots on his neck and his right cheek where the shrapnel hit. He kept his eyes closed. Some teeth were missing and for a while blood slowly came out from his mouth. He was not lucid. He was very hot to the touch. Naheed and her mother washed him with warm water and rags, and her mother tried to squeeze some turmeric broth past his lips. Then Naheed sat next to him and held his left hand until sunrise. His right hand was a meaty stump. When the day broke, they pulled Rashid’s carpet closer to the window. About an hour later, the Russians came and loaded him on a stretcher and took the stretcher away. They did not take anything else. They didn’t break anything. Before they left one of the soldiers lifted Naheed’s chin with his fingers and looked in her eyes. He didn’t smile and he kept his gloves on. After the midday prayer Naheed’s mother came out of the bedroom and told her it was time to go to school.

Sometimes Naheed wondered why, even after they had lost both sons, her parents didn’t worry about her going to school. Maybe they did. She was sure they did. She was sure in West Philly, American mothers worried about their sons every day, too, when they watch them go out at night with their underwear showing and their music so loud. Maybe sending her to school as if everything was normal was her parents’ form of resistance. It was too late to ask now. Her mother was baking bread when she came home that night.

*

Naheed saw in the dough what looked like a dead cat, bird-pecked and mangy. It would have been good, Naheed thought, to have a real live cat she could stroke as she watched the flood from her third-floor window, trapped inside her apartment by this unforeseen calamity. Or a little daughter to feed raisins to, to point out things from the window: that is a pen, that is a hubcap, that is a mask made out of pretty fabric with a flower pattern. That would have been a fairy tale: And they waited out the pizza storm in their impenetrable castle. She would have had a husband and a daughter, had it not been for the war. Or a son. But this was not a fairy tale, fairy tales began with “either it was or it wasn’t,” and ended well.

They said America was a land of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures, of stories. What kind of stories? All the people here around her watching the pizza flood from their windows, what kind of stories did they keep inside them? Naheed herself arrived ten years ago with three suitcases, a dual degree in human resource management and English, and an asylum status, and there were other immigrants in West Philly, some from South Asia like her, some from Africa. But the rest of her neighbors hadn’t immigrated. She spoke to the older women in the park sometimes, and they told her stories about growing up in West Philadelphia, and what they described didn’t sound that different from growing up under occupation. You just tried to retain some dignity. In both places, if a boy got killed, only his family and neighbors knew. The difference was, here, if there was a pizza flood, it was international news with helicopter footage. But Naheed only learned about the flood in Wuima Ut because one of her classmates at the university had relatives there.

When the Russians came, they called it “brotherly assistance,” and Naheed’s family called it “occupation.” When they built a bridge to bring their soldiers, they called it Friendship Bridge. In America, they didn’t call it a war either, only some activists and artists did, poets. Poets always tell the truth. They get away with it because people think poets are crazy.

*

It’s true that it’s better to know the world is against you than to think it’s on your side. But even when you are vigilant, something happens that you had not expected. A month after they took Naheed’s second brother, Russians came to the school. It was the end of the first period. By then all the classes for all the grades were held in the same room because most of the girls had stopped showing up, their parents forbade them or they were afraid themselves. The school grouped the remaining students each week into fewer and fewer classrooms, until it made no sense to retain more than one teacher. The principal stayed. When she was not teaching English, she huddled with the younger students in the back of the room and helped them with their coursework.

There were twelve of them, twelve soldiers in three trucks they parked in the dust. Two trained their guns on the principal and the teacher, motioned them to the corner where the students were usually ordered to stand for punishment after they had misbehaved. The others walked through the aisles and motioned the girls into two groups. Like they were sheep. And they were like soundless sheepdogs, no barking. The only noise was the screeching of metal desk and chair legs on the concrete floor. The scared shuffle of the girls’ flipflops. The Russians looked tired. Two of them didn’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes. One had terrible acne. Naheed thought maybe one of them was the one who had touched her face at her house, but she wasn’t sure, she was too scared, both times. When they were done, the smaller girls stood in a circle around the teacher and the principal, and they motioned the rest out into the patio. They were five, five teenage girls. One of the soldiers who stayed behind pointing the guns at the grownups and the younger girls said something in their language. It sounded like a question, or a grievance. One of the other soldiers said something back. Then all the soldiers laughed.

They took two of the girls to the classroom for the seventh grade, and three into the classroom for the second. Naheed was one of the girls in the second-grade classroom. Once upon a time she had carved her name into the green wall paint there with the razor her brother had given her, and when the principal found out she made her stand in the corner for three hours and wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom. Naheed decided to focus all her thoughts on the carving, to see if she could spot it from where the soldiers put her. The school bell went off. After a time, it went off again. Then one of the soldiers left the room and one of the sentries came in. The bell rang again. It was recess.

*

This also wasn’t in the news reports:

No police or firemen or army came to help West Philly dig itself out. None. There was no helicopter rescue. But once the dough stopped moving and the crust seemed to have settled, Naheed and all the other women in the neighborhood stuck their heads out of the windows to assess the situation. This was around ten-thirty in the morning. Then, one of the women—Naheed didn’t know her name, she lived closer to the corner with Larchwood, the two women crossed paths at The Cleanist sometimes—this woman reached back into her apartment, and then she reappeared in the window with her hands outstretched, and in her hands she held a girl. Maybe seven or eight years old, pretty as a flower, in a short dress with pink flowers or dots, Naheed couldn’t tell from that far away. The woman leaned far out of the window and very carefully placed the girl on the pizza crust. Once the girl was standing on the crust, the woman did not let go, she kept holding onto the girl’s waist. Making sure she didn’t sink. Then the girl walked in place a few steps. Then she stomped, and her foot went right through down to her knee, but then she pulled it out, easy. The leg came out clean, like a match Naheed would use to test when she was done baking. And that was how Naheed and her neighbors knew that the pizza had cooked through and cooled down and it was okay to begin digging themselves out.

Many of the men in the neighborhood worked in construction, so they brought out saws, and different other tools, even a plow. Jamal’s Pizza gave away all of its sodas and water for free, and after it ran out of sodas it bought all the sodas and water in all the other shops up and down Fifty-Second Street and gave those away, too. By dusk, people who had big trucks loaded them up and drove the pizza chunks to the high school parking lot—no one was using it during summer recess. The city eventually removed them, but that night, it was just the residents working alone, together. By the time it was nine, ten at night, the streets were clean. But how clean! Naheed had never seen sidewalks so spotless, not a speck on them. No cigarette butts, no needles, no bits of gum stuck to the pavement. And all the people outside, on the porches, in the streets. Everyone hugging. It was like the end of a war. Boys with their boomboxes and low-slung pants, and girls with their nails shiny with sequins, and all the little ones, giggly after all the sweet drinks, out past their bedtime, jumping rope, throwing balls, riding bicycles, so beautiful... It was like a village, like New Year in the village.