Siamak Vossoughi

A SPORTSWRITER

When I saw the article my brother had written in the school paper, I thought that he’d gotten everybody once and for all, and the whole vast country of America had been given the okey-doke, and our family could just sit back and be glad about who we were for a very long time, possibly forever.

“Did you show Baba?” I said.

“Not yet,” he said.

“I want to be there when you do.”

“Ah, it’s not a big deal.”

“He’s going to like it.”

“Ah.”

I didn’t know why he didn’t seem more excited about it. To me it was like he’d punched a hole in America, and yet he’d done it so softly that nobody could call it a punch. It was more like an invitation, an invitation to the kind of conversations we had at our house all the time, like he’d turned everything inside out. Like they had to actually look at us and see us, because the truth was that if we had told somebody in those days that we were Iranian and communist, it was too many fearful things at once, and it always seemed like there was a distinct possibility that we would just look cute. And I was afraid that cute might be good enough.

But my brother had done it, he had done it so gracefully that I looked out the window and thought that the town had been on our side all along. Maybe it had been, only the people didn’t know it.

“You think you’re going to get in trouble?”

“From who?”

“Coach Happel.”

“He said it, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he said it, all right.”

“I’m just the messenger. Anyway, maybe he still doesn’t know.”

“Somebody’s going to tell him.”

My brother didn’t seem to care. What he’d done was, he’d interviewed Coach Happel for the basketball season preview. Coach Happel was a hero on Burris Island for winning three Washington state championships. My brother had asked him if he agreed with the idea of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

“Exactly,” Coach Happel said in the article. “That’s exactly what we’re looking for here. If I can get each of my guys to give me all he can according to his abilities, we’ll have a successful season. Everybody’s got a role in what we’re building together.”

I read it again, and it was just as wonderful the second time.

“You’ve got to show Baba,” I said.

“He was in the real fight, Kian. This is smalltime stuff. I just wanted to prove that basketball is communist.”

A couple of days later, my brother was called into Coach Happel’s office. He told me about it after.

“I heard about the quote you asked me about,” Coach Happel said. “It’s from Karl Marx.”

“Yes,” my brother said.

“He really said that, huh?”

“He did.”

“Is he the bald one?”

“That’s Lenin. Marx had a lot of hair.”

“I have to say, I didn’t see this one coming.”

“I hope no one’s been giving you a hard time, Coach Happel.”

“No, but you could have told me it was Marx.”

“Would you still have agreed with it?”

“Probably not.”

“That’s why I didn’t say it.”

“Why did you say it?”

“I wanted to prove that basketball is communist.”

“Basketball?”

“Yes.”

“I thought basketball was American.”

“I mean the game itself. The movement and the teamwork. All that stuff.”

“I never thought about it like that. Did Marx really say that?”

“Yes.”

“I still wish you would have told me.”

“Sorry, Coach Happel.”

“I only agreed with it because I thought you were talking about sports.”

“I was talking about sports.”

“Marx wasn’t talking about sports.”

“He was talking about life. That’s pretty close.”

My brother had Coach Happel there. He liked to say that he taught more about life than basketball.

“Where are you from?” Coach Happel said.

“Iran.”

“They have communists there?”

“They did. Most of them were killed.”

The way my brother told it, Coach Happel knew not to say, “Good.” The first time it happened that somebody had said something like that to my brother, he’d come home from somewhere in downtown Seattle and he’d gone straight to bed. The next morning, he’d said to me, “Listen, Kian, there’s going to be a time when you tell somebody about Baba and they’re going to say something and you’re going to have a feeling in your body like you might kill them. When that happens, promise me you’ll walk away.”

I promised him, but secretly I was excited for something like that.

“I know you, Kian,” my brother had said. “You’ve heard his stories just like me. You have to walk away.”

My brother didn’t want to fight anybody, but I guess he still wanted to prove that basketball was communist.

“Who killed them?” Coach Happel said.

“First the Shah. Then the Ayatollah.”

“The Ayatollah. But he’s a bad guy, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He was fighting against communists?”

“Yes.”

My brother could see Coach Happel reassess his opinion of the Ayatollah.

“Are you going to be writing about the basketball team all season?” Coach Happel said.

“No. Mrs. Kizer wanted me to write about sports because she thought I’d been writing too many political articles.”

After he told me about it, my brother still wouldn’t show the article to our father.

“I can’t, Kian,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind if he happened to read it, but I can’t give it to him. It would be like saying, Here you go, Baba. You know how you went to prison for something? You know how you were tortured for something? You know how you saw your friends killed for something? Well, I tricked Coach Happel into admitting that basketball is communist.”

That night after everyone had gone to sleep, I went downstairs and put the article close to where my father sat for breakfast. I wanted him to know that we were trying. Sure, it was a foolish kind of trying and we weren’t really changing anything and Coach Happel didn’t even know which one was Lenin and which one was Marx, which I had known since I was a kid. But my brother had helped me by telling me what to do if somebody said something about our father. I wanted to help him too.

I came down to the kitchen in the morning before my brother.

“Did you read your brother’s article?” my father said.

“Yes.”

“Is he writing about basketball?”

“Yes.”

“Why is he talking about Marx?”

“Because he likes him.”

“I like him too, but this is a basketball article.”

Yes, I thought, but this is Coach Happel. He’s the hero of our town. If he has been a Marxist all this time without knowing it, then who knows what we can do?

But I realized that my father didn’t know that Coach Happel was the hero of our town. He had been to one basketball game, and he had sat and smiled in a way like he felt sorry for everyone because they looked happy.

The hero of our town for him was the heroes he already had. They came with him. They were unseen by me and my brother, but we thought we could see them if we knocked down the heroes around us. In a way, it was understandable. We wanted heroes that could travel well. Coach Happel only had to go to an away game in Bellevue or Issaquah or Newport and he would get booed. Of course, the people in all those places would probably do something worse than booing to a family that was Iranian and communist, but then again they might also think that Marx was the bald one too.

It was funny to be so lonely in America. My mother came in and my brother came in and sat down. It was funny to be so lonely in America and so un-lonely in the world. If we were quiet and we listened, we had my father’s heroes too. It was going to mean a lot of quiet, especially if it didn’t help to knock anybody down.

“I read your article,” my father said.

“The political journalist,” my mother said.

“He did not write about politics,” my father said. “He wrote about basketball.”

“Basketball?” my mother said.

“Yes,” my father said. He winked. “Basketball. Nothing else.”

“You are becoming American,” my mother said to my brother. “In Iran the journalists write something critical of the government and get thrown in jail. Six months later they come out and write something even worse.”

“Do you want me to get thrown in jail?” my brother said.

“That is not the point,” my mother said.

My mother picked up the article and read it. When she finished, she looked at my father and said, “You think you are so funny, don’t you?”

My father laughed and shrugged, like he was asking nothing of the world and still asking everything of the world as well. His laugh held us, like it always did, and gave us a home bigger than the one we didn’t know if we had here, like it always did too.

SIAMAK VOSSOUGHI is an Iranian-American writer living in Seattle. He has had stories published in Columbia Journal, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, and West Branch. His first collection, Better Than War, received the 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award, and his second, A Sense of the Whole, is coming out with Orison Books.