Martyr!

Brooklyn, Day 3. That Sunday, Cyrus arrives at the Brooklyn Museum 10 minutes before it opens, with two coffees—one for Orkideh. He realizes at once that he’ll have to throw the coffee away to get through security and feels bad about it, having learned at an early age to do things like eat around the mold on food to avoid waste, due to Ali’s poverty. He throws it away when he gets caught, regretfully.

Cyrus goes into see Orkideh, noticing the museum is less crowded today. Orkideh is happy to see him. He tells her he’s considering re-titling his book of martyrs from The Book of Martyrs to Earth Martyrs. She is happy to have given him the idea. Cyrus asks if he can ask an uncomfortable question: why isn’t Orkideh spending time with family and loved ones? She says simply that she’s an artist who gives her time to art. Cyrus wants to object, but before he can, Orkideh says that she’s lived a full life with love in it.

Cyrus asks Orkideh the trick to how peaceful she seems. She says she doesn’t know and might not tell Cyrus if she did. But then the two of them just laugh. Orkideh asks Cyrus if he’s worried that him becoming a martyr would hurt his loved ones. He admits that he does have close friends, like Zee. Orkideh tells Cyrus about her own friend, a novelist, who had a saying about her writing process, “Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.” Cyrus doesn’t fully understand, but Orkideh thinks this quote could help Cyrus with finding a satisfying ending to his own book of martyrs.

Cyrus tells Orkideh about the death of his mother when he was a baby. All of a sudden, when he was 15 or 16, the grief of this death, which he hadn’t thought much about before, hit him in an unexpectedly strong way. Orkideh asked how Cyrus felt afterwards, but Cyrus says that after he felt normal again, nothing had changed. Cyrus apologizes for getting so personal. Orkideh says it’s no problem—she said yesterday a woman with a daughter in a coma came in asking Orkideh whether or not to pull the plug on the daughter. Orkideh didn’t know what to say and tried to avoid a direct answer.

Cyrus blurts out to Orkideh that he’s been sober for a few years too. She is interested, until Cyrus stops himself and says he came to talk to Orkideh about her life for his book of martyrs, not the other way around. He praises her Death-Speak exhibit again, but she continues to downplay its significance. Cyrus explains that he feels his own work is insignificant, unable to bring meaningful change into the world, and Orkideh agrees, saying it must be hard to know that nothing Cyrus does will bring back his mother or the other people on her flight.

Orkideh says she has been lucky to talk to Cyrus and invites him back the next day, which he promises to do. He asks to give her a hug, and she encourages him to. He leaves the museum still thinking of their conversation, only realizing then how strange it was that Orkideh mentioned his mother being on a flight when Cyrus is pretty sure he never told her about his mother dying on Flight 655.

Interlude. In the land of Tus there is a young boy named Ferdowsi. He likes adventure and one day goes down to the Tus River and sees that a storm has swept away the bridge that used to connect the two sides. He wants to build a better, permanent bridge, but everyone tells him he won’t be able to.

Ferdowsi grows up into a man and writes a poem for the king that he thinks is the best poem Tus has ever produced. He takes it to King Mahmoud. King Mahmoud praises him for indeed writing the greatest poem in Tus. He asks Ferdowsi to compose a new poem for him and agrees to pay one gold coin for every couplet after the poem is complete. They sign a contract, and for years Ferdowsi writes and writes. The king ages and eventually starts to demand the poem, but Ferdowsi replies that you can’t rush poetry. Ferdowsi doesn’t stop writing even on the day when his son, Sohrab, drowns.

After four decades, Ferdowsi tells King Mahmud his poem is finished. He calls it Shahnameh, meaning “The Book of Kings.” The king is angry that he’ll have to pay Ferdowsi for 50,000 couplets and that it will take four camels to carry the whole poem. King Mahmud is amazed at the size and doesn’t want to pay that much. He sends servants to pay Ferdowsi in copper coins instead of gold. Ferdowsi tells the king’s servants who bring him the money to keep the money for themselves, splitting it evenly, so that they no longer have to work for the deceitful king. The copper would not have been enough to buy a bridge, so Ferdowsi figures the servants have more use for it than Ferdowsi himself.

King Mahmud is furious when his servants don’t return, and he bans poetry in his castle. But one year later, he gets a poem from Ferdowsi that ends with the lines: “Heaven’s vengeance will not forget./Shrink, tyrant, from my fire,/and tremble.” The poem frightens the king, but he tries not to show it. He orders a courtier at once to pay Ferdowsi the gold coins, with interest. The courtier travels with the coins, but when he reaches the destination, he finds that Ferdowsi is dead and he has come across Ferdowsi’s funeral caravan. Ferdowsi’s daughter, Tahmina, accepts the money and uses it to build a bridge called The Poet’s Bridge, which still stands today.