Her Scent
by Diane Douglas
They say someone who’s blindfolded can follow the scent trail of a missing person. I don’t know about that, but I do know the opposite is true. I follow scent trails through the East Bay to help me see: see the neighborhood where I live, sense the rhythm of days and seasons, and yes, find missing persons, too.
I visited Farvahar for the first time following a walk through Ohlone Park. It was a humid February evening, the air fresh and close after a sudden rainstorm. I remember that the bistro’s big bay windows were so steamed up, I couldn’t see anything inside. I collapsed my umbrella, dried off my glasses, and opened the front door to a blast of warmth and the succulence of tahdig filling my nose and lungs. My mother’s ghost embraced me, carrying me four decades and oceans away to winter solstice in our Teheran apartment. The kitchen table was laid with plates of sweet pastries, pomegranates, walnuts, and almonds. My parents’ friends and students from the university were present with big bouquets of peonies for my mother, tiny dark chocolates for me, and dancing eyes. They laughed together, sang, and planned together, the promise of revolutionary change on every tongue, in every breath, and bite. Many of them were disappeared together, too. Imprisoned. Tortured. Murdered.
Here in North Berkeley, at the end of my block near the Alvarez’s front gate, January turns to February in the perfumes of Catalina currant and daphne. The moon rises with the scents of white primrose and bricklebush that follow me home from Strawberry Creek Park, and autumn arrives with the winey scent of spice bushes in Poet’s Corner. But it’s the local fruit trees that mean the most to me. Every year, I crisscross neighborhoods to follow lemon, cherry, and plum trees from blossom to harvest. You know, if you hold fresh cherry blossoms under your nose, you’ll smell almost nothing at all. But pluck them, go home, and pour boiling water over them, and you’ll release the fragrance of Sakura tea—the essence of cherries, the essence of spring. I learned this from Mrs. Yamamoto who runs the gift shop at UCSF Hospital where I work.
On my days off, I follow scents to forage for fruit that’s ready for picking. If I come across a blackberry vine growing wild or an overgrown tree in an unkempt yard, or ripe plums leaning into an alleyway, I just take them. If a yard looks tended, I knock at the front door or kitchen window to introduce myself and ask permission. In the gardens, I visit regularly, and with neighbors I’ve come to know as friends over my years here, these harvests are rituals, a lot more civilized, a lot less fraught than when I first arrived in America and ran away from Uncle Babak’s custody to become a teen-age beggar and thief in the gardens and cafes of East L.A. and Wedgewood. That was before foster care, before the Cohens took me in and taught me that while I couldn’t reclaim my past, I could pay tribute to the memory of my parents by following my dream to be a doctor.
Joseph was one of my first patients when I was a new doc here in town. In a pre-op interview before his prostate surgery, I learned that he and Edith arrived as Jewish refugees from Soviet Russia in 1980, the very same year I arrived as a twelve-year-old refugee from Iran. When they told me they escaped with few belongings and no friends or family in America, I felt kinship instant and deep. We shared a common heritage of state terror and its common legacy of persistent displacement and disquiet. Joseph and Edith made a good life here. He sold insurance. She was a homemaker who volunteered weekly at the local library where she’d taken ESL classes and studied for her citizenship test. They owned a modest house in Hayward with a big backyard where the fruit trees and rose beds were Joe’s chief passion and source of pride. They adopted me by way of a fig tree he planted, although I’m not sure they intended that from the start. Knowing how abundant figs are in Iran, they invited me to come pick fruit just six weeks after we met. “We want to thank you for taking such good care of Joe,” Edith insisted, “and it really will be a blessing. There’s too much for just the two of us. We want you to take all the fruit you want, all you can.”
One year’s harvest led to the next and the next, often accompanied by shared meals and conversations that meandered into twilight. Edith cooked saffron rice and stuffed eggplant; I brought chocolate truffles and cinnamon babka. Roused by the garden’s incense of figs and roses, the ghosts of the disappeared, the doomed, and the dead gathered to join us: family, strangers, assailants, friends. Some were protagonists, some bit players in our former lives. Others were vivid but strangely unknown, the connections forgotten, perhaps repressed, now unreachable. Still, we sensed them hum with the bees, as gaps and doubts, pangs and dull aches of loss and longing.
“Tell us more about your parents,” Edith invited gently. I buried my nose in the figs as memory stirred, and laughingly recounted silly birthday songs and tales of balloons and party hats and baby chicks.
Then I found myself falling.
“When I was a boy, we traveled on summer holidays north to the Caspian Sea where we’d frequently take walks and have picnics in orchards. My mother would open a fresh watermelon and bury her index finger inside to the first knuckle. She’d paint three juicy dots—two on my cheeks, one on my nose—and affix blossoms to my sticky skin. Then she’d let me do the same to her. She’d feed me watermelon bites, one by one, as I counted aloud in Farsi. That’s actually how I learned to count.” I swallowed hard. “One day, when I was nine, we stopped to picnic at a familiar orchard. Mother spread a blue cloth on the ground and set out bread, cheese, and cucumbers. Father cut a ripe watermelon and delivered a slice into her ready palms. She smiled at him and winked at me. We painted our faces and, as usual, I began counting: yek, do, se, chahar. Suddenly we heard loud popping noises. A man ran towards us, waving his arms and shouting. We couldn’t understand his words, but my father grabbed my hand, and we started running, too. We ran and ran, faster and faster. It was hard to keep up, hard to breathe. Then Father dropped my hand and stopped short as the blossoms on my mother’s face turned crimson, and new ones sprouted on her leg and chest. Father carried her to our car, but it was too late.”
We sat together in silence with the bees and all of our ghosts buzzing a low insistent dirge. Joseph bowed his head. Edith patted my arm. We finished drinking our tea. Three years later, under the same fig tree, I held Edith’s hand and Joe’s gaze as I delivered the news that cancer had returned to invade his pancreas.
“You need to take home some fruit,” Edith smiled weakly and quickly retreated inside the house to find a brown paper bag.
“I hope you won’t forget her when I’m gone,” Joseph said simply, his brown eyes cloudy with solicitation and sadness. “Please visit when you can.”
“I promise.”
Three months later, during the ritual week of mourning, the garden filled daily with neighbors offering condolences and small parcels of food. That was the first time I made jam: to preserve my connection to Joseph, our garden idylls, and the literal fruit of our friendship. Such a trivial thing, I know, but it was deeply satisfying to create it and then give it away. Purchasing the small Mason jars, sterilizing them in boiling water, filling them with hand-picked fruits and herbs. The incense of simmering figs, lemon, rose water, and memories filled my kitchen and brought me peace.
From then on, I brought three jars of homemade jam to Edith’s house every Labor Day when the figs were ripe, and the backyard was humming with bees. We’d sit on lawn chairs under a canopy of green leaves and purple fruit, the air pungent with their scent and our anticipation. “You know Joe planted this tree himself when we moved here, nearly forty years ago,” Edith would say, retelling a story I knew very well. It was the ‘once-upon-a-time’ to our recollection of memories and sidetracks that brought Joseph back to us in the garden. Over egg salad sandwiches and strong black tea, we reminisced, honored, and missed him. Then I was sent home with a bag of ripe fruit, sometimes two.
Before every Thanksgiving, I deliver two dozen jars of jam to the neighborhood homes where I foraged over the last year. I rap on doors and windows, stop for conversation, or sometimes just leave a jar and a note near the front door in gratitude for all I’ve gleaned. I bring the same to the hospital: two jams for Mrs. Yamamoto and a basketful for my colleagues in oncology.
*****
I was driving to work lost in thought about a seventeen-year-old who presented with a swollen neck, fatigue, and stomach pain. Rosa was referred to me by her nurse practitioner who’d already ruled out a common infection or mononucleosis. I examined her and, fearing lymphoma, ordered a PET scan and biopsy. The lab results came through just before I left the house; the tests proved positive. Rosa and her parents would be my first appointment of the day.
“License and registration. Now.”
I hadn’t noticed the police car following me and didn’t even see the flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I’d been stopped for speeding once before in San Francisco, but this morning, I clearly wasn’t exceeding the posted limit or doing anything else to warrant being pulled over. I had nothing to hide. Logic told me I’d be cleared quickly once I showed my credentials. Yet when the officer stepped in close and motioned for me to roll down my window, I trembled visibly and broke into a cold sweat. As a child in Teheran, police stops and seizures became so routine that driving was fearful all of the time. In our last year in the city, Mother and I held our breath as Father’s afternoon commute from the university extended longer and longer into the evening, until the June night when he didn’t return home at all.
“OK, Dr. Ahmadi. You can be on your way.” The stout blond policeman handed me back my license and registration and dismissed me nonchalantly, totally oblivious to the trauma he triggered. I tried to mirror his detachment. I thanked him politely, restarted my engine, and drove straight to the hospital, not too slowly, not too fast. But after I parked my Volvo, I entered the ER without greeting anyone, flashed my badge, and headed straight back to the surgeons’ locker room. I hoped a hot shower would quiet my trembling, wash away the acrid sweat of my fear, and help me prepare for meeting Rosa’s family. It was 7 am on a Tuesday morning in the first week of May, forty-one years since I’d fled Teheran.
My father taught me that you can tell a lot about people from their handshakes. A firm grip, steady gaze, and quickly extended fingers imply strength and confidence. An accompanying warm smile offers an invitation. To search for the information I didn’t see or hear from them directly during rounds, I often sniff my own fingers shortly after meeting patients and shaking their hands. The smells of UCSF hospital’s hallways tell stories, too. Exhaustion. Resilience. Hope. Defeat. All vital signs for the diagnostician. The scents of Rosa’s courage and her parents’ worry perfused our consultation.
*****
My friend, Myra, says it will probably return quickly after my fever subsides. I understand the pandemic is new, and there isn’t much data yet on anosmia as a common COVID-19 side effect. Everyone asks about my fatigue, my breathing, but few even pause when I tell them I can’t smell anything.
“It’s relatively common.” “It will pass,” I’m reassured, and at first, I can suppress my fear in my colleagues’ calm. Quarantined alone at home, I can’t help them, can’t help my patients in this deepening crisis. I miss them. I miss my friends. More distressing still, it feels like my basic faculties are failing. I can’t follow familiar scent trails. Cheese, fruit, coffee, beer—all taste like wax, and I have little interest in eating. In bed at night, I wander the hospital’s wards, but there’s no one about, and the doors are all locked. I wander L.A. streets, stealing oranges and selling them to tourists, always looking back over my shoulder. By day, try as I might, I can’t recover my mother’s scent or an image of her face.
This morning I was cleared to return to work in two weeks. I can taste and smell now, but only in gross terms. Coffee is just bitter, cake just sweet, a hamburger only somewhat salty. I still don’t smell the jasmine in front of my house. I don’t smell the cat’s litter box. The macabre thing is that I’ve begun sensing random smells– urine, sulphur—without any identifiable source or stimulant. When that happens, my chest and throat constrict. I feel panic, immediate and unbounded, and I start questioning my instincts as a healer. I want so much to return to work, to return to normalcy, but I wonder if I can, if I’m ready, if I’m competent.
Myra doesn’t understand why this has shattered me so. I can’t blame her really. By all accounts, I’m extremely privileged and lucky. I’m recovering. I have my profession. I have long-standing and deep friendships and community. But this loss of smell hampers my ability to navigate, consort and contend with how I know what I know and what I remember. I’m losing my ghosts. I’m fearful about losing home again, here now, and in my past.
I talk to Edith weekly by phone or Zoom. Her spirits are good. She’s happy Joseph didn’t have to suffer through this, that we could be with him in the hospital when he passed. She reassures me that groceries and prescriptions are being delivered regularly, and the Abramovs next door pick up any odds-and-ends she needs.
“There’s only one thing. If you have any, would you bring me a jar of your jam, Hooman? I would so enjoy that, and maybe we can sit and visit for a little bit? A springtime reunion. The fig tree is just about to bloom.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for a visit, Edith, dear. We can’t take any chances of exposing you to pathogens. But yes, I will surely bring jam. I’ll make it tonight and drive over tomorrow afternoon. I’ll ring the bell, and we can wave through the window.”
The season for foraging figs is long gone, but I know a yard in Oakland where I can find lemons. I slice six ripe fruits into a pot of water, adding a dollop of sugar and pinches of cardamom and cinnamon. My hands move swiftly and confidently, balancing the tart, the sweet, and the fragrant by rote, by habit. The pot simmers. I smell nothing. The fruit collapses, darkens, and thickens. I smell nothing. I cannot conjure Joseph. I cannot conjure Father. I think about how sometimes, these sudden jolts of memory have been so painful they’ve brought me to my knees, yet now that I can’t smell, I long for their trenchant intrusions. I pour the golden marmalade into two glass jars to cool, and they are gorgeous, radiant in the sun-drenched kitchen. My eyes fill with tears. This beauty, too, is true. It is not nothing. Tomorrow at Edith’s house, I’ll make her smile through the doorway. I’ll poke my head around back to check for fig buds. Perhaps there will be roses. Perhaps I’ll sit awhile to catch the humming of the bees.
BIO: “I've previously published art criticism and a book, Choosing Craft, but lately returned to writing fiction. It was a path not taken early in my professional life when I thought I might have the craft, but not the life experiences, to tell good stories. Now it's a means to dive deeply into memories and ethics that haunt me. This story is one of many I’m writing about the legacies –gestures, recipes, fears, traits--we carry with us from our own childhoods and the lives of those who shaped ours. I’m interested in how boldness, pain, wisdom, ease transfer through families, generation to generation.”