The foreman is a friend, a Kurd as well. He knows me. Tell him I sent you and he will give you work, and food. The city is big enough. You will be left alone. Khodafez.
The foreman was a tall, bald man with ink stained deep into his fingernails. In a mix of Kurdish and Turkish he explained the work: a printing press, for a daily newspaper, not left, not right, something in the middle … the machines are old and moody and need attention. He offered to pay them time and a half. You know, for night hours. And at the end of their first day his wife had set up a meal of okra stew, bread and rice on a small plastic table in the courtyard behind the press. When they left, it was dawn and they found themselves in a huge city of tiered fountains and water taxis, seas that glistened gold and skies that spread above them in bright oranges and pinks.
During their first week in Istanbul the brothers could take no wrong steps. They moved across high and low bridges, off and on water buses and down busy boulevards where bodies bumped into them without apology. They explored hilly neighborhood streets lined with five- and six-story apartment buildings where children and laundry and cats held on to railings and defied all gravity. Whenever he could, Saladin let himself go blind with the constant lights of cars and signs and storefronts, deaf from the shouts and blares of every hidden radio and television and record player. And in that first week the brothers did not close their jaws or steel themselves to the laughter of passing girls.
They arrived at the printing press each evening at ten and left each morning at six with money carefully folded in their pockets and stomachs full of the same okra stew. They walked through the waking city until they found a clean and grassy park where they slept with newspaper pillows and newspaper shades and woke rested and warm. In the afternoons they walked down the waterfront promenades and sampled the sweet ice cream and candies.
One afternoon they came across a group of men playing a fast and youthful game of soccer in a flat, mostly green park. They stood at the edges long enough for someone to call out to them in Turkish, and when it happened, the brothers looked at each other and jogged to join in. Ali went to the opposite end of the pitch, and Saladin shouted, Careful with your fancy tricks! And just as in the mountain town he did his best to guard his brother but could not keep up as Ali took passes that came from nowhere and escaped with the ball as if it belonged only to him and not to the team or the game. No matter how Saladin tried to keep Ali in the corner of his eye, he was always gone and down the field, and for every one of his three goals Saladin was forced to laugh and curse and laugh again as the other team clapped his brother’s shoulder and shook his brother’s hand.
That night they ate dinner at a sidewalk café on a busy commercial street. The waiter served them without taking their order, and small dishes of fried and cured foods came out one after another. When two green bottles of beer were placed before them, the brothers did not resist, and Saladin raised his as he had seen done in movies and Ali joined, and in the sudden grip of pleasure that comes with doing anything for the first time, Saladin toasted.
To America!
He put his bottle down without drinking. Embarrassment filled his face and he stared away from the table to hide it. What was wrong with him? Why did some part of his heart, his head, his body, insist on America? Why wasn’t this enough? There were lights, and noise, they were far. Ali was not happy but he was not upset or mean. Saladin looked out at the street. It was full of walkers and shoppers and other eaters and drinkers spilled out onto the sidewalk. There were women in stylish sunglasses and high-heel shoes like stilts and men with briefcases and mustaches and thin jackets. The storefronts were filled with same-faced mannequins in blond wigs and light dresses, and every inch of wall that was not glass was covered with posters advertising films he had never heard of, from Italy, France, Hollywood. He knew that all he saw around him, the expertise and fashion and attitude, came from someplace else, from America, and Saladin wanted not this simulacrum or reproduction but the origin, the actual thing, the first place. From beyond the din of the street the sound of a muezzin blared with the high, nasal voice of a mullah that wove itself into all the other noises until it was indistinguishable, both ever present and disappeared. Ali smiled and took a sip of beer. He grimaced briefly, then smiled. He began to eat heartily.
An amazing city, no, Saladin jaan? Even if Maman had told us about it, read about it in one of her books, I would not have believed her. So much water! Can you believe it? The city just ends in the water, to the west and south. Unless you are a fish, there is no place to go.
Ali smacked happily on the bones of some small creature.
But, I must thank you.
For what?
You knew it. I don’t know how, but you were right. No one recognizes us. The city is big. There is work, it is easy to live day to day, and when the time comes, simple to go back. We can go the way we came. Trucks to Ankara, Van, then over the mountains, then home. This is the right place for us. For now. You were right to keep walking, to bring us to this city where we are safe. I am grateful.
Saladin had no energy to argue. Ali shook the empty beer bottle in the air until the waiter noticed. When another beer appeared, Ali took another sip and, in a voice reserved for elders, for the old Kurds they were told to respect without knowing why, announced, bottle in the air.
To our hero.
Saladin did not match the gesture. That word had only come from his brother a few times, and only when he talked of the famous men of the mountain, dead men who gave their lives to keep the town and the Kurds in it. By his brother’s definition Saladin was no hero. He had fled, like a coward, and now he wanted to follow an uncertain dream, for fear of the nightmare just behind. It was his brother who was brave, the hero, as they knew the word. A long time passed and Saladin could not meet his brother’s eye.
Saladin looked at his lap and then to the street where a trio of girls giggled and the traffic of a few cars stopped. It was a city, yes, bigger than the mountain town, fuller with the traffic of cars, and, yes, the people had fashionable clothes and attitudes but everything else about them was similar—hair and eyes and skin—to that of the people Saladin had known his whole life. He imagined explaining Istanbul to his mother, the ways in which it was different, the ways in which it was the same. Even in the imaginary conversation he felt her disappointment, heard her chide, But you have gone so far. You are so much closer! If only you went a bit more, it would be just as we imagined. Amreeka. California … Saladin watched his brother eat and drink like a happy traveler, a man who enjoys everything of the new worlds because his heart is always at home, warm and tucked away like some white ember. A feeling came upon Saladin and he sensed that the shape of his life, as he planned it, was changing. What he long imagined to be a straight line, a mark, arrow-led, dream-led, from the mountain town to Los Angeles, California, America, could also take the form of a circle, a round and closed loop, here and back. The trio of girls brought their laughter closer and lit cigarettes they pulled at through thick, colored lips. Saladin stood and the girls smiled.
Our hero.
His brother repeated in Kurdish, and Saladin pulled a few bills from his pocket.
Work is not for a few hours yet, baba. And these girls. We should invite them for a beer. Here … I have a few lira too …
Let’s go to work. I want to go now. Please, Ali. Let’s go.
Ali smiled at the girls and left a small mass of bills and change on the table and ran to catch up to Saladin.
Okay. Okay. You never worked so hard in Kermanshah.
His brother punched Saladin’s shoulder lightly.
Who knows? Maybe travel is good for you.
There was some relief in work. They worked apart, and the presses made enough noise that Saladin could not hear Ali’s chipper whistle. They kept to their own corners, and Saladin let his thoughts whir to the speed of the oily machines until he was flooded in questions and lost to wonderings: Why is my brother so glad? Is this the end? Where
is the end? How do you stop? When do you stop? Why? How do brothers leave a city of water if they cannot, like fish or whales, swim?
Except for the mess, the work that night was no different from all the nights before. How many nights had it been since they arrived? Six? Seven? More? What was happening to time? Each day the paper printed a date on the top right corner, and every day Saladin ignored it. He did not know how long it had been since they had left, or even how long it was to where they were going, and he realized that all the days fell, one after the next like rain or snow, irrespective of what came before or after. These thoughts of time, its loss and gain, the knowing that the days before no longer belonged and the days to come were unknown and blank, confused Saladin to the point of panic.
The morning’s headline was large and followed by a halfpage photograph. The extra ink for the font and photo slowed the machines with wet-balled jams that made a mess of his hands and arms, but Saladin paid little attention and worked steadily at clearing the rollers and cogs as they became stuck, his mind and mouth occupied with arrangements, arguments and pleas. Ali, we must leave tomorrow because … Ali, we must get out of Istanbul or else … Ali, we cannot stay, they will find us here … I don’t know how, but the mullahs will … Various and frantic, none of them felt convincing enough, and his steps dragged from paper jam to paper jam as he felt his own best efforts wane. The city had swallowed them and they were safe. When the machines came to a sharp halt and a thousand fans and belts and gaskets went silent, Saladin heard the sound of his own unconvincing voice, begging, out loud, But, Ali … we must.
The foreman shouted for everyone to wait. Saladin looked for somewhere to sit that wouldn’t mark his only pair of pants. At his feet the concrete was splashed with twenty years of ink, and the pages of the next day’s paper were already making a messy second layer. He stood and stared at his feet and, below them, the day’s headline and front-page photo.
As it was in life, it was in the photograph. A firing squad. A green valley. A line of crouching, faceless executioners with rifles for arms and bullets for selves. Eleven revolutionary guards, eleven men shot, three fallen, seven falling and one still upright, his bandaged hand over his heart, his face calm the instant before death. Even in black and white, the valley was clearly wet from a recent rain. A ring of mountains circled all the distances of the photo, and at the far end of the firing squad a tall, satisfied mullah stood beside a captain with a clumped and spotty face, the ink blurred in the small space where his features should have been. In the foreground of the photo stood the heads and shoulders and silhouettes of two boys, men maybe, brothers even, so similar were they in their height and shape and disbelief.
Waves slam into the pier and Saladin jolts from sleep and hits his head on the low, wooden beams of the pier. It is day again. Another day, the second in America, and where he wants to celebrate or excite, but there is a pain in his head and a deep ache of hunger in the center of him. Did he dream it? What did he dream? Ali drowning in the Bosporus, just out of Saladin’s reach. Saladin shouting to his brother, Swim. Swim. You can swim! His brother flapping in the water like a bird. The small tugboat floating by and the two Turkish men with hooks for hands picking Ali out from the water, taking him to a safety Saladin cannot see. Terror in the details. Saladin’s hoarse shouts, the hooked hands, his brother’s wet back, safe on the boat, moving away.
Saladin slides his body sideways until it is out from underneath the wood shelter of the pier and extends now to the pale yellow light of early morning. The beach is misty and emptier than when he fell asleep, but otherwise just as he left it yesterday: the enormous sea, flat and without mark, the boardwalk and the scattered trash. He cracks his neck and shakes out his clothes and walks away from the ocean and the sand, through the tiny streets of Venice’s neighborhoods and the even tinier alleys between houses, and though he is nowhere and his whole life this morning is without certainty or plan, Saladin walks confident and tall, sure these streets will lead to bigger streets, to a center of the Los Angeles where all life meets.
What Does and Does Not Follow
This is what does not follow us when we go.
Our grandmother’s tea set, the eight gilded glasses and their saucers, antiques by now. Sentimental, we know, but no other glasses will sound the same when clinked together, no other saucers held the hot tea my grandfather would pour into a pool and blow on until just cool enough.
The favorite towel does not come after us. Where did it come from anyway? We can’t remember, but it was always there, waiting for us to come out of the bath. Soft enough to absorb water, thin enough that we could still feel our muscles and bones beneath. Who would have thought a towel could be kind, but it was, in its own way.
The Chinese lamp does not follow, the one our uncle made when he began his fascination with simple electrical wiring.
Look!
He would call from the basement.
I’ve wired this cheap, imported vase and now it is a lamp!
And though we wanted to make fun of him, he was right, it was an elegant object as long as you didn’t look inside … the stone chessboard; the rosewood-and-pearl backgammon table; the smooth pieces; the lucky dice. We should have brought the lucky dice. The smell of camphor in our closets; the green-glass ashtray from the hyatt; the neighbor every afternoon who screams at her devilish son, his cries, their reconciliation, the sound of candy as it is unwrapped. The favorite cream puffs from sweetshops. The hajii agha who cleans the steps that lead up to the mosque, the shuffle of his slippers and his wet snorts.
The walk to the bakery does not follow us. How can it? With that lovely first corner in the shade, its second corner in the early sun, then the long stretch under the patched shadow of the Italian pines that hold the smell of warm yeast in their high, narrow boughs; the smell of hunger and its near-immediate end.
Though we may want otherwise, none of this comes with us when we go.
What follows us most ardently, in dogged pursuit like a neglected neighbor or a new ghost, is news of home. No matter how far we have gone, the distance between here and there irrelevant, the news—from newspapers at kiosks, the broadcasts on television sets at the back of restaurants, announcements on taxi radios—greets us when we arrive and helps send us further on our way.
It is there when we are looking and there when we are not. Dispatches, reports, official accounts, unofficial accounts, imagined and recounted accounts. As we said, in pursuit. Our dogged new friend.
We who left in ’76, ’77, ’78, soothsayers every last one of us, heard the first reports of nationwide demonstrations; every city rallied to protest the Shah, the cruelty of SAVAK, the joblessness, poverty, the mysterious incarcerations and disappearances. February 1977 there were riots in every square, the public in public calling for better conditions, for a revision of their lives. And these were followed with brutal backlashes; the many dead (the actual number never exactly clear, never counted exactly) and the deaths demanded public rituals of mourning that spawned more riots, more deaths, more rituals and on and on; a cycle in spin, of its own energy, without end. We listened closely and watched carefully to know the exact details of the countrymen’s dissatisfaction, sorrow and desperation and to know if it matched ours, and, yes, there were a few parallels, if not more.
We who leave early catch first sight and sound of this Ayatollah when he is still exiled in France. We listen to him speak gravely, incessantly, on behalf of all those oppressed by the regime of the Shah and demand that Iran be returned to the Iranians, to us. We wonder, who is this man? With a voice like a dear old father, its timbre soothing and soft, he calls for an end of exploitation of Iran by the British, the Americans, the rest; calls for a country built on itself, responsible and available to itself; calls for an Islamic state similar to the Islamic empires of ancient times; and promises what only a father can: to bring the people of this noble country integrity, justice and a spiritual righteousness that can only come from God. He gives a
few television interviews and is always photographed among an entourage of journalists and mullahs, turbans and tape recorders in his face. And his face. We who leave early look carefully at that face, the heavy brow, the creased skin, the visage of a man complete and relaxed and not at all moved by the words that stream angry and quiet from his thin lips. What demons live in that turban, we wonder? What demons will be born from it? If we left in 1976, 1977, 1978, we listen, we know, we turn away, turn off and start moving.
Those of us who left in the early months of 1979 must have thought there was still a chance the country could be saved from chaos. But after the Black Friday Massacre in Shah Square, only the most naive among us could feign shock that the number of dead would be unknown, the arrests, countless. If there still remained a question in our heads—Who knows what is going to happen?—then the Cinema Rex fire answered it and we sat shocked before televisions and radios to hear that the entire cinema had burned to the ground with not one survivor among the four hundred in the audience. No one was alive to testify that masked men set the projector room on fire, escaped the building, barred the doors with long planks of wood, and did not let one soul out as they burned and pushed and burned. The building was lit for eighteen hours, and the spirits of the dead took their time floating up into the sky from which they followed the ball of blame as it was tossed from the Shah’s insidious SAVAK to Khomeini’s zealous supporters and back. No one claimed the crime. For many of us that was enough. When an evening out with your husband or mother or best friend is the death of you, when an afternoon at the cinema can kill, why stay? For what?
The Walking Page 7
