Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  I stepped outside of the dressing room and looked around at the preoccupied shoppers, wondering if anyone else had ever had a gun pointed at their forehead. In a country full of refugees and migrants, mine couldn’t be the craziest story.

  Karo appeared with two beach towels and blue swimming trunks draped over his arm. “Let’s find a Canadian Tire,” he said, taking my yellow suit and heading toward the register.

  I couldn’t fathom why we’d want a tire for the beach. It turned out we didn’t—it was just the name of another huge store. I walked down an aisle and saw a woman in a loose-fitting and stained black shirt, one trouser cuff up, one down, brushing her gray hair and smiling into a mirror. A green tag reading $5.25 dangled from the brush. Karo patted my shoulder. I looked back and saw the toothless corner of her mouth as she smiled broadly at her jubilant reflection. “I think she’s going on a date,” I told Karo, who looked around to see who I was talking about. “Perhaps with the shabby man outside the subway station.”

  “Where do you get these ideas from?” he asked. I remembered Chia and his constant nagging about my idea folder, and my heart flickered.

  I gaped as we walked down a different aisle toward the registers. “So many colorful crayons! Lots of them. Look—there are five shades of red! Hundreds of crayons.” He stared at me as I almost danced on the spot, moving my arms and wiggling my hips left and right. “I bet you didn’t yearn for these when you were a kid.” I bought a pack of a hundred crayons for only three dollars.

  At the waterfront, we stood in line to board the ferry for some time. I looked at the people passing by, carefree, dressed however they pleased. I wanted to stop them and ask if they were thrilled to be in Canada. But they didn’t look as overjoyed as I expected them to be. Looking back at what I had observed in the past hour, I almost understood why.

  We boarded the ferry to Centre Island and sailed over Toronto’s equivalent of beautiful Zrebar, named Lake Ontario—but unlike Zrebar, it didn’t have a mystical source. The water, shining silver under the sunlight with the glint of a thousand mirrors, flooded me with exhilaration. As the ferry pulled away from the city I looked back at the skyline, at the CN Tower rising up, the high-rises growing smaller on the horizon.

  Centre Island was our hostess through the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Children ran around, shrieking with laughter as they played, reminding me of my jubilant childhood days spent at Zrebar, running around with Shiler and later Chia.

  “That cloud looks like a fluffy little monkey.” I pointed and twirled.

  We rented bikes and pedaled along the boardwalk by the lake. The wind brushed through my hair and over my face. “Look at that grin,” Karo said, cycling by my side.

  He’d have one too if the ruling clergies had deemed biking inappropriate for men. “I haven’t ridden a bike in twenty years.”

  I cycled away. Chia, where are you right now? Right this moment. I wish you could see me growing younger with each pedal, reclaiming the years stolen from me.

  I pedaled so fast that it felt like the wind was slapping me, but I carried on, faster and faster, tears sliding sideways down my face. Chia, you used to bike after me. Now you’re the uncatchable one, no matter how fast I ride after you . . .

  I didn’t stop until I’d completely run out of breath. When I looked behind me, Karo was nowhere to be found. I pedaled slowly back in the direction I’d come from to find him, too afraid to ask anyone simple directions in English, too guilty after forgetting about Karo like that.

  I found him sitting on a rock across from the bike rental booth, running a stick over the asphalt, writing a diary entry visible only to him.

  “I’m so sorry.” I had made a spectacle of myself.

  He looked ahead and away. We returned the bikes, changed into our swimsuits in the mildewy changing booths, and hit the beach. I went barefoot to feel the sand, squish it between my toes, but the sensation of being so exposed slowed my steps. The sideways looks from my fellow beachgoers prickled my skin.

  We spread a beach towel on a patch of sand and sat down. Silence. I gazed blankly at the life forms around me: shore birds, kids in motion, stationary adults baking in the sun, some bobbing their heads to radios, some reading, some napping facedown.

  A middle-aged couple was sitting on a dune nearby. The woman put a small piece of sandwich into her partner’s mouth. The man bit her fingers. She laughed. Louder than a woman was supposed to. Was there a permitted female decibel level here? I looked around and imagined the Police of Enjoining Good and Forbidding Vice swarming the beach, their stampede toward women scantily clad in bikinis. Of course, they didn’t show up.

  Lying down in the sun, taking in the scenery, the sight of happy and relaxed people, I felt I had died and, having received some undreamed-of and unhoped-for special pardon, was now in paradise. Perhaps for the rest of the crowd my heaven was just another nice day.

  Several times, I caught Karo staring at my chest. “What are you looking at?” I finally blurted out.

  “Ah, I think you should put on sunscreen.”

  “I’m going to . . .” I stood up and pointed to the lake.

  “Swim? Want to swim?” He moved to rise, frozen in a strange position between standing and sitting, his palm on the ground, his hip up.

  “Ummm . . .” I needed to be alone.

  “Ah, okay, go ahead.” He sat down and wiped the sand off his palm.

  The waves tugged me forward, and I struggled to keep my balance. They swept away the tiny pebbles of the beach and tickled the soles of my feet. I rocked in the water and felt like I was part of infinity, a relative to the sun and the sky. I waded in the shallow tide and let the water surround me like a loving mother hugging her tired, wounded daughter. At least I belonged to Mother Nature.

  When I made my way back to Karo, he wrapped a towel around me.

  “Will you put some sunscreen on me?” He lay down on his stomach.

  I kneeled beside him and tried to cover his back with the lotion, dismissing the warning tug in my gut. His skin was soft, warm, and moist, his muscles hard, his neck and shoulders already red from sun exposure. “We should have gotten one of the sprays.” I handed him the lotion so he could do the rest himself.

  “Are you dry yet?” he asked.

  “I don’t need sunscreen.”

  “Oh yes you do, unless you want to scratch your back every night while your skin peels off.”

  My skin tingled under his fingers. Once we were both well slathered, I followed him back to the water, unafraid of the waves. Immersed in our game of Frisbee, I forgot my inner struggles. With his hair pressed to his scalp, water dripping down his face, and with his eyes squinting at the sun, Karo was a dazzling titan.

  “Please, Karo,” I said when we got home that night. “I feel like a colonizer. I’ll be much more comfortable if you let me sleep on the floor.”

  “Good night.” He hid his head under the blanket, and not long after, his rhythmic breathing revealed that he was asleep. I stared at the ceiling again until my eyes gave in to exhaustion.

  The next day we went to the top of the CN Tower, daring one another to lie down on the glass floor. We took pictures and put coins in the telescopes to magnify the view of the city.

  “Having a good day?” Karo put an arm across my shoulders in the elevator. I felt his breath on my face.

  “Oh, I can’t remember being this happy since . . . you know.” Since the day you urged my brother to come with you. I placed my hand on his hand, but only to remove it from my shoulder. Then I took the camera from him to snap my own photos, to crush the stinging memory under my shoes like a cigarette butt.

  On day three I witnessed the grandeur of the Niagara Falls, which put the smallness of my wounds to shame. I felt that a cover had been torn away from my senses. The sinister forces that had beset my life started to recede. That night I dreamed my chest expanded. It cracked open, and a phoenix rose into the air.

  By the weekend, my massive
sorrows began to shrink as I walked among the roses, impatiens, and lilies in the lakeside Music Garden and the West End’s High Park. Occasionally during the week of sightseeing, I felt a deep peace as my overwhelming rage and fear shifted to calm acceptance of my trials. Could I possibly exist above my history? At a café in Allen Gardens, while Karo went in search of a washroom, I wrote on a napkin: Trees and flowers bloom despite human barbarism. Maybe I can too?

  Karo took too long, and I got bored. I strolled out of the café and breathed in the scent of flowers. I touched the bud of a peony lovingly and, for the first time in a long while, felt the pulse in my wrist and fingertips strengthen. I hadn’t noticed how numb I’d been. Karo appeared before me with a smile so broad and beautiful it startled me.

  The dark shapes of the birds were etched against the sunlit sky. Before Karo’s concerned eyes, I lay down on the damp garden grass. The cool spray of a sprinkler landed on me. I pressed my eyelids and welcomed the intermittent shower on my face and hair. When I opened my eyes, the trees were greener, the red, yellow, and purple in the peonies and roses brighter.

  A shout arose from my throat, a long-stifled cry was released.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Karo and I dealt with the issue of our abstinence by stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it. Each day I let my eyes linger on him a little longer when he changed shirts or came into the room wrapped in a towel. Each night, as he snoozed on the mattress at my feet, I listened to my body yearning for his.

  I was amazed by his incredible willpower, and yet I couldn’t help wondering if he had a problem or maybe a safety valve. Could he be so traditional to assume intimacy was “using” a woman? Shiler and Chia used to say that I was too uptight. Could Karo be concerned that I’d be troubled if he made a move? As for me, I could only initiate in my fantasies, afraid of the implications and consequences, afraid that my attraction was one-sided.

  But Karo wasn’t the only thing that made my head spin in this new, beautiful country. The English vocabulary I used with ease in my mind came out garbled whenever I faced a native speaker. My ears weren’t used to such a variety of accents, and my own mispronunciations erected walls between me and almost everyone I wanted to talk to. Too shy to ask people to speak slowly or repeat their words, I often ended up confused, misunderstanding and misunderstood. The city was filled with newcomers, and not many Torontonians had patience for so many individuals handicapped by their limited means of communication. Any gain in confidence was instantly dissolved with one mispronounced word. Even a small mistake like catching the wrong streetcar triggered frustration and defeatism. Even the doors were puzzling; accustomed to doors in Iran, which could only be entered from one side by pulling, I was constantly tugging on doors meant to be pushed.

  At night, after Karo fell asleep, I silently recited poems until my eyelids felt heavy. Chia’s face was all I could see when my eyes were closed. “Acclimation can be a lifesaver,” I declared one night.

  “What, dear?” Chia asked, surrounded by poppy fields.

  “Conditioning and familiarity. You believed they were ‘the end of creativity’ and ‘the killers of inquisitiveness.’ Had it not been for the power of adaptation, I’d have been irrecoverable.”

  “Habituation is brain-deadening.” Chia was now swimming in Lake Zrebar.

  I stamped my feet. “And brain-saving! Saves it from exploding.”

  “What is it that you are trying so hard to get used to?” Chia asked, now behind bars, his eyes full of enthusiasm for life, his broken chin shivering.

  “Leave me alone, you. Let me be. I love you. I love you, but let me be. You didn’t listen to me when I begged you to stay away from trouble. You ignored me. Let me be.” I woke up drenched in sweat and bit into my pillow to stifle my sobs. The tears soaked into the cotton pillowcase. I longed to crawl under Karo’s bedcovers and ask him to hold me until my shudders ended, but the possible ramifications stopped me. His friendship was all I had left. His steady snore was the most reassuring sound.

  At the end of my first month in Toronto, Karo and I went to Earl Bales, a vast park not too far from home. My mother-in-law and her friends showed up uninvited, which was a surprise, since she and I never exchanged many words beyond respectful pleasantries. I was conscious of her complicated feelings toward the Kurds, her hatred of her husband’s deception, how she had denied her children the truth of their heritage. I assumed she was cursing fate for having me as a daughter-in-law as well.

  She and her friends were overdressed for a picnic and showing off bright red lipsticks and matching nails and toes, perhaps dropping by before heading to a party. The women were making fun of a new girl at their hot yoga class who had a wealthy husband but whose family and background nobody knew anything about. She was a snobbish girl, they said, who arrived early, always carried a book, and ignored the others.

  Self-conscious before their gazes, I isolated myself in a way that could only be interpreted as aloofness.

  “God knows what she’s up to,” one of them scoffed. “Loners always turn out to be someone with something to hide.”

  I took the first bite of my egg salad sandwich but found it hard to swallow.

  “These bi-kas-o-kar women!” my mother-in-law spat out. Her friends laughed, but their Botox didn’t allow their eyes to crinkle, making them freakish in their amusement.

  The morsel got stuck in my mouth, refusing to move down my gullet. The epithet bi-kas-o-kar—literally meaning “who has no one,” implying “of no account” or “unreliable”—rang in my head. My throat constricted, and I breathed with great difficulty through my nose, suddenly feeling the onset of a panic attack. Glancing up to look my mother-in-law in the eye, I tried to determine whether she and her friends were indirectly attacking me—as if one could tell just by looking.

  I squinted at her, hated her. These women had left their roots behind and struggled in Canada to escape dictators. Little did they know that they had become tyrants themselves. If Chia were alive, no one would dare call me this.

  Karo laughed, talking on his cell phone, unaware of the army that had beset me. I excused myself and marched away briskly. The past, with all its ghosts, swirled around my head like a colony of mosquitoes. I spat out the salad, sat on a bench with my back to the people and my face to the stagnant water. I missed Chia desperately; I felt I was being stabbed in the throat.

  The next morning I left the basement before Karo woke and strolled aimlessly along Bayview Avenue, wondering if people could tell that I was breathing with an invisible dagger still in my throat.

  I ordered a small black coffee in a ubiquitous Canadian café called Tim Hortons and sat near the window, watching the few yellow leaves fall on the cars waiting in the drive-through lane. “Didn’t I tell you/that they will kidnap you from the path?/They will steal your warmth and take your devotion away./I am your fire, I am your heartbeat, I am the life in your breath . . .” I recited Rumi silently, but it offered no solace.

  “Shiler, where are you when I need you?” I typed on my new cell phone. “Karo’s married me but doesn’t touch me, lest he disrespect me. His mother thinks his son is too good for a bi-kas-o-kar like me. I traveled over the ocean to suffer the same discriminatory mentality I thought I had escaped. Admitting that I am attracted to Karo feels like betraying Chia. Denying it is a lie. I need Joanna, I need a country, I need you. How are you doing on top of the mountains? Getting bombed every day? Are you also done with crying? My tears have gone on strike, because each time they appeared I deported them. How’s your home on the hills? Are the mountains actually friends of Kurds? The apparent splendor of Western life is so alienating.”

  “I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?” The red socks this elderly gentleman wore glowed between his black shoes and bright blue pants. I wondered if he expected me to confirm that he had indeed seen me. I shook my head, hoping he’d go away and leave me to my email.

  “I live around here. You live near here?” he asked.


  “Sorry. No English.” I looked at the clock behind the cashier. I still had two more hours before my English class, and right away I felt bad for having rejected such a cheery person. He was probably lonely too, but I was in no mood to hear “pardon me” and “what’s that” a million times. “No English” was the easiest way for an immigrant to refuse people who’d perhaps think, “Why the hell are you here, then?” The old man heard my words, looked at my dark eyes and black hair, and yet pushed a chair back and sat down opposite me. I smiled wordlessly, a puppet without its ventriloquist.

  “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” he said.

  I nodded and wanted to say that I liked the rainbows. But I was afraid of speaking, of suddenly bursting into tears like a maniac.

  “John,” an older woman standing at the door called out. “Hey, Caroline.” My potential interlocutor got up to join her.

  “Shiler, I miss your goofy grins,” I typed, and let the email fly away across the planet, from the side that manufactured weapons to the side that used them.

  My coffee wasn’t steaming anymore. I walked down a side street off Sheppard Avenue until a “Hiring” sign at a café called Soul beckoned me. The place had couches on one side and tables and chairs at the other end.

  “You worked before?” The expressionless Asian owner asked, his accent thicker than mine.

  “I’ve worked.” I kept crossing and uncrossing my arms. “I am a . . . I am a quick learner. Experienced at customer service.”

  “You speak Iranian? Lots of Iranian customers here.”