The Walking

by Laleh Khadivi

  Ali laughed behind him.

  Hurry! Maybe it will land on your finger!

  The Iranian air force pilot took no questions. He explained himself once slowly, and then again, and then no more.

  If you have nothing to exchange for the trip, you will work for us, in our warehouse in Los Angeles, for two months per person. You will fly for the cost of your labor. If you are two, you will work for two months each, or four if you have an old man or a child. That is the cost of your trip. The work is easy and you will be excused after the two months. We can take you all. We leave at seven tomorrow morning.

  The men’s voices rose up in a flood of questions, and the pilot waited for the silence and repeated himself exactly, then walked up the sloped steps into the narrow, oval door. Saladin understood the man completely, and when Ali returned from his walk, Saladin acted as if nothing had changed.

  How was the walk?

  Beautiful. They have birds here that can whistle whole songs.

  Yes?

  And I ate a meal with a fried sweet banana in it. Saladin, you really should try—

  Saladin could no longer refrain. The words and thoughts and dreams all came out in a calamitous, senseless rush.

  After our two months I am going to take work anywhere I can. Well, not anywhere, not a gas station or anything with garbage. Maybe something to do with banks. Hosseini worked in a bank. What do you think factory work is like? Do you think we will be able to afford motorcycles or should we first buy a car to share? Easy I am sure. Ali, can you believe it? Can you believe we can finally go? Tomorrow they said, directly to Los Angeles, without stop?

  Ali stared at him as if he were crazy.

  What are you talking about?

  Saladin had forgotten to mention the pilots, the plane, the negotiation of work. He laughed at himself.

  That plane. The big one. The pilots will take us to Los Angeles. We have to work for them, factory work, for two months when we get there. That is the cost. But we don’t need papers, passports. We don’t need money.

  And you believe them?

  Yes. They said—

  Ali sat down on his cot and spoke in a stern voice.

  Saladin jaan, if this is true, then you go, but I will not come. It is not the way I am going.

  Ali kicked off his shoes and stared at them on the ground.

  The excitement had made Saladin unstable, and the thought of his brother’s leaving him, of the journey going in two directions, riled him and he felt the hot water of tears streak his face. He had planned for America all his life, yes, but he had never planned a life without Ali. Even in his plans from before, Saladin had always imagined his brother would, after a time, join him, take his own place in the American dream. Now, just as America was a true possibility, as close and probable as the plane that rested behind them, Saladin understood that it could be otherwise, that there could be a future, in America, without brother and alone. He had begged of his brother before—for his help to build the pool, money for the cinema, to please leave Van, Istanbul, to keep going—and there was no pride to stop him from doing it again.

  Saladin knelt and found his brother’s eyes.

  You would go back without me? Let me go on the plane alone?

  Ali met Saladin’s stare and made no gesture of yes, no gesture of no.

  There is work, Ali. We can get an apartment. Girlfriends … Maman would be proud of us. She told me it is what she wanted most, for her children to live their lives in America without guns, or Kurds, or …

  A fire sparked in Ali’s eyes.

  I am not foolish enough to follow my dreaming brother, Maman’s favorite, who lived in the cinema since he was six and took the movies in like milk and thinks our dead mother will be proud of him for making it to America. Even if she were alive, she would only be proud of you. Maman was never proud of me.

  Ali, you must come. Otherwise, if you stay, if you go back, you are dead.

  Ali stood and walked away. He leaned against the wide entry of the hangar. His figure was small against the jungle, and he kept still, tilted with one hand on his hip, for a long time. Saladin kept focused on Ali as if, at any moment his brother could, on the strength of his will alone, evaporate from the hangar, from this island, from Saladin’s life.

  When Ali came back, the cold anger had gone from his body and his face. He walked casually and wore the soft smile he used to dole out gifts for their sisters. He shook his head back and forth, disbelieving.

  Saladin jaan. Who would have guessed? The two of us? In Los Angeles? If that is the way it must be, that is the way. Every day I say let’s stay, let’s go back, but every day you say no, let’s go, and we go. The gods must be on your side … who am I to resist?

  If Saladin had known his whole life at that moment, had known every direction of all the dead before him and the details of the various futures ahead, he would have looked more carefully at his brother, questioned the sudden smile on his face and the flat, far-off eyes. But Saladin and everyone else asleep in the hangar knew only what they knew: that today they were here, locked in this purgatory, and tomorrow they would be up and gone to the next test, and Saladin felt a strong gladness fill his head and breast at the thought of his brother, his companion, his blood for all time, beside him now and tomorrow and the next day as they flew and then walked and then slept in their new American lives. Saladin wanted badly to embrace Ali. To hold his hand and feel his brother’s flesh as some sort of promise.

  Ali spread out on his cot and spoke to the ceiling.

  Let us take what is given … The gods, just like Maman, were always on your side.

  Ali closed his eyes.

  Maybe you should sleep in the plane tonight. To make sure we have a place there tomorrow. We are surrounded by desperate men.

  Saladin could not believe his brother’s foresight, the light, ready thinking he had that had dragged since that first dash out of the wet valley, when all of Ali’s steps had been heavy and every push forward was Saladin’s heave.

  Then we will know for sure that we are going. You will have secured a space.

  Come with me, Ali! We can sleep together, they will know there are two of us …

  Saladin’s voice sounded like a child’s and he stopped himself.

  Ali smiled up at him.

  Na, baba, I like it here. It is cool. I like the air of this place. Let me enjoy it for one last night. You go. Sleep. Dream of motorcycles and I will dream of … I don’t know what I will dream of … girls. Brigitte Bardot.

  But she is not Amreekayee, she is …

  Ali turned over to face the far wall and yawned.

  Yes, Saladin, I know. Please … let me make my own dreams.

  A long platform slanted out and down from the back of the plane. Saladin walked quietly up and found a place between the boxes where he could stretch out his legs and lay down his shoulders.

  For a long time his heart did not slow. Afraid the dull, hollow thuds of his heartbeat could be heard against the metal hull of the plane, he changed from one position to another and breathed in long, slow intervals. Saladin dropped his head and let in the heavy, marvelous thoughts of what it meant to have a brother: one who could walk ahead or behind and also right beside; another kind of self; another who is still you, with you, regardless of his life, obsessions, fates. Saladin let sleep drop him beneath the plane, below the soil of the island, deep into a center of the earth, where there is no spin.

  Love and All the Opposites

  Enough days have passed that few moments are first moments. In the month since he stumbled down the plank of the cargo plane, stomach full of island fish stew, Saladin has become, to his mind, American and moves about Los Angeles as if nothing in this new life could shock or surprise him. As if.

  He is busy as he thought Americans would be busy, without pause or distraction, occupied by the many demands of his day. He wakes early to help Calderon with the first meal and even helps to clean before he catches the bus that takes
him to the rug shop, where the rug seller meets him at the door with a cup of tea.

  Thank you, Agha, but I just …

  The rug seller hears none of it.

  First we take tea. We must take tea. We have been starting with tea for thousands of years. Here. Take the tea, otherwise we turn into them.

  He gestures out the windows with the enameled demitasse and grumbles.

  Machines.

  The days are made of dust and rugs—rolled, stacked, vacuumed, beaten—and by late afternoon Saladin is on his way to the cinema with cash in his pocket. It is always the same multiplex between Highland and La Brea, where if he does it right, he can watch two or even three films for the price of one. When he is finished, it is night, and the walk home is cool and Saladin is careful to stay away from bars and girls and the television sets that play face-out from glass storefronts. He keeps his head low so to make it home, to the bunk in Calderon’s house, where he can sleep easy and orient his soul in the direction of another day, exactly the same, without memory or fear.

  Like this, he triangulates between Wilshire, Highland, Vine and Ponderosa, and every step has its own destination, a face, a job, the evening’s pleasure, and there is little risk of getting or being lost. No longer does he need to stop at the corner of Westwood and Santa Monica to stare in fascination at the billboard of the near-naked girl who smiles over her shoulder as a boy unties the knot that holds up a bikini that is forever almost slipping off. No longer does he have to look up and shout, Hello! My name is Saladin. Of the Ayyubids. Great hero of the Kurds. Conqueror of Richard the Lionheart himself. You are very pretty! All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you! Now the days are plain and she is plain in them, and Saladin walks underneath her enormousness, her almost nudity, and the warm glow of her eyes that seems directed at him and keeps on, past the tease of her shoulder, her eyes, the tease of her offerings, the tease of the tease of chance.

  Soon the days make more than a month and near two months, and nothing has changed, not even the weather. There has not been one day of cloud, wind or rain, and Saladin wonders about the monotony of American weather. He asks the rug seller about snow and winter and spring rain, and the merchant stares at him with true curiosity.

  But this is paradise, Saladin jaan. There is no snow in paradise …

  At breakfast Saladin asks Calderon, and the landlord laughs at him and all his teeth show.

  What’s the matter, my friend? You don’t like sunny California?

  Two months pass, and Saladin is certain he does not like it. The constant sun is an agitation; its brightness shines down on the city of metal, chrome, aluminum and glass, which then shine back up so the world is bright from below as well as above and vibrates like some loud off-key hum. Worse are the shadows that plaster themselves to Saladin at every moment of every day, everywhere he goes. He wishes for a cloudy day to relieve him of this constant dark stamp or some great shade that will erase the print of himself that follows and leads, follows and leads, and does not, except in the cinema, leave him alone. Even the night has no reprieve with its fluorescent lights and streetlamps, and Saladin can always find the version of this silhouette that sticks to him like a dim, dull friend. Less than three months since he has arrived and he spends every hot, white day planning for the dark, cool cinema, where he is alone at last, a man separate and alone.

  The relief is short. After the cinema he must adjust his eyes to the bright night streets, where the light pours off the marquees, down from the neon of stores and bars, blasts from cars’s headlights and washes all over Hollywood Boulevard, where men and women and children gather to perform their contests of stillness, feats of gymnastics, dances and tricks, while beneath them dark second selves shift about the pavement like a flattened circus. There are tourists, Americans from another part of America Saladin has yet to imagine, who walk hand in hand with their families, their shadows forming the patterns of cutout dolls. Even the women who gather just in front of the cinema in restless postures of anxiety and serenity, boredom and agitation, anchor their shadows down with the sharp spikes of their high high heels.

  Saladin has seen these women early in the evening when the sun is low and their shadows are long, he has heard their talk about the money tonight and the money last week and the police two weeks ago and No, no, not again. He wears a brown jacket. Know him by the brown jacket, honey. Watch out for that man. After enough nights he has seen their details, the spaces between their heel and shoe, their breast and bra, he has seen them hide in the alley between the cinema and the house of wax, where their shadows are thrown on the bricks behind them, overlarge, tawdry and mocking. Sometimes they are scattered out at the far corners of the block where they pace near and into traffic, bend over and lean through passenger windows to see and be seen, negotiate and lure, and their shadows lie out to one side just beneath the tires of the stopped car.

  In the first month they approached him with regularity.

  Hey, honey! Hooooney, why don’t you stop here a minute.

  No one leaves Hollywood without a suck from a star.

  Special rate for you, honey, we love Mexicans.

  What’s your name? … What? … What kind of name is that? We gonna call you Sal.

  Heeeey, Saaaal. My name is Maria, or Marilyn if you like, or Betty. I am Zsa Zsa …

  Giant and stilted and teetering, they circled around him with their swarm of offers. He tried not to catch their eyes, not to stare too long at their presentations of fantasy and desire: the glossed lips, exposed backs and hips with tattoos of hearts and roses and children’s faces as authentic as old photographs. They walked about laughing and sad, and Saladin pushes past, unable to find in them, on them, near them, some safe corner to tuck his desire.

  No, thank you. Please. No, thank you.

  Behind him they always shouted, Saaaal, Saaal. Come on, Saaaaaal needs a suck, and other things that had the timbre of calls between children at play, at once happy and mean.

  There is a night when the film is terrible. A wealthy girl and a wealthy boy. A love story. Death. The boy is weak in his grief, and Saladin does not respect him. He leaves the cinema annoyed for reasons he does not bother to tease apart. As on every night, the women are at the end of the block, and as on every night they throw him a few calls, and once he crosses the street they leave him alone.

  On this night a new girl stands far out from the rest, by herself in front of the windows of a closed flower shop, and far from the traffic of cars and men on the street. There is an urge, quick and biting and rare, to see her face. Saladin tries to pass her to leave the urge behind and take his foul mood to his bunk so that he can sleep and wake up again and start anew. He disciplines himself again and again not to stop, not to look, but he cannot resist and casts half a look at her, and it is done, she is known. He stares without tact or guile and she stares back.

  Yes?

  She smokes a cigarette and speaks the one word. Saladin does not know how to look at her and puts his hands in his back pockets in the posture of a confident American man, and only then does he dare take her in, the chin and cheeks and lips and sky-blue eyes, everything held up and high. It is the face of women he has known: the mother, the sister, the beloved, but lighter, without color or consequence or weight. To speak with her he must tell himself she is from before, from the land and life he had before this one, where he had a brother, father and friends. His courage wanes and he speaks to her as if she were the billboard.

  Hello. My name is Saladin …

  She smokes quietly and looks at the full form of him and laughs until he stops speaking and nearly begins to cry. She answers in Farsi.

  Salaam Saladin. Halleh shomah chetoreh?

  He can and cannot believe it and tries to collect all his scattered thoughts, to put them away and impress her, but he is clumsy and overexcited and talks in a hasty, childish stream.

  Where are you from? When did you come here? Where do you live? Why are you …

&nbs
p; — — —

  Her eyes are alive and her mouth is wide across her teeth, and Saladin steps back to see her small shoulders, the tight bra, the soft stomach and the thin legs that stretch all the way down to the shadow just beneath her feet.

  This is your work? You do this?

  Her smile collapses and she drops the cigarette down and steps on it. She moves toward him and shakes her light hair out of her face.

  If you would like, I will go to the cinema with you.

  Saladin looks around at the street as if the lights, the tourists and the other prostitutes could explain this woman to him.

  She clears her throat and asks again.

  Take me to the cinema. Please. It has been a long time since I saw a film. You can tell me what they are saying. Please. It is right there.

  Almost three months, and the routine has changed. Saladin watches the first movie alone and, at the cost of paying for the second film, leaves the cinema to meet her in front of the flower shop, and together they see one or two more, depending on the mood. Afterward he buys her ice cream and she eats it with manners, but Saladin cannot help watching as she attaches her lips to the cream. She talks often and easily and with a girlish joy that maybe, he thinks, she has held back just for him.

  The ice cream is just like in Kabul. The same sweet taste.

  Yes. But better.

  Yes, the ice cream may be better—she laughs—but the movies are the same.

  Like this: the cinema, the ice cream, the walk up and down Highland and the handshakes good-night. They learn each other in increments. They walk up and down the boulevard like tourists, watch the entertainments on display and are two of the millions, a young man and a young woman together, in the city at night, and for this Saladin sleeps deep and solid through every night.

  One evening they pass two young men at the start of a fist-fight, and Saladin pulls Nafaz by the elbow but she resists and stands closer to watch.