All fighting is the same. See. Look. One will punch and the other will take the punch, and then they will reverse it, and he will try and the other will move away. In my mother’s village there was a time when Russians and the mujahideen punched each other with all their strength at the same time. That village no longer exists. You can only find it now on the oldest maps.
At the sight of a mother and daughter walking hand in hand, Nafaz talks of her mother and the rosewater perfumes she used after her baths.
Only the loveliest fragrances. She was a very beautiful woman.
And just as instantly a small boy is her little brother, and she talks without stop about his night frights and hate of lentils and their shared afternoon naps where she would start a story for him to finish.
But he never did. He always fell asleep during my half. Silly.
Saladin waited for her to continue, to tell him more, to take him back to a place like the place he had come from. Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t, and he told himself not to ask for more.
One night they see the movie of a starving shark. Another night they see a movie of space travel and planets with two moons. They see a sad film where the beautiful woman leaves her husband to be with her lover and loses her family and home, and in the dark Nafaz takes Saladin by the hand and he holds her small palm, as warm and soft as he imagined it, and tries to keep his breath steady and strong.
When the film is finished, she does not let go and leads him away from the cinema and the crowds up a side street and then up a small, winding road where the houses are barely lit, and soon they are climbing and breathless and silent. At the end of the road there is a park, and before it the city spreads out, lights from the mountains to the dark sea. Saladin stares over it, tries to know his here and there, his work and bed, but there are only lights, spilled and scattered across the huge basin, and he can only find in it beauty and more beauty. He holds tightly to Nafaz’s hand and she holds tightly back.
I have been with seven men. Two Mexicans, a black. The rest were Americans, I guess.
The city glimmers and he cannot turn away from it to see her face as she says what she says.
And still my life here is safer than my life in Kabul. I have made many sacrifices to be here … this is the way.
She talks, with wandering eyes and nervous hands, as if she were telling the city, but only Saladin listens. The story is long and slow and she starts at the beginning, at the place from which nothing could stay the same, on the afternoon she heard that her mother and father and two brothers had been killed under a Russian bomb.
I was away, at my uncle’s house in Kabul, taking school exams for the fifth form. He came to me outside the library and said, It is gone. Your family. Your town. You live here now, with me. My entire family, in one moment …
She spoke without sadness and explained situations as if they had no emotion.
In the beginning he was kind. He sold my father’s goods in the market, and after a while there was nothing to sell and my uncle grew poor and angry and after a few weeks cursed me and said I had brought him bad luck. The mujahideen would come to our door and promise money, guns, food, if my uncle fought with them. They said he was a good Muslim, but to be a great Muslim he should join with them. They said I was a tempting girl and that he should make sure I covered and did not dishonor him. They offered him great sums of money every time they visited our house. We had less and less, food, electricity, tea, and finally when we had nothing, he took what they gave him and burned my clothes and told me to wear a sheet over my head and body at all times. I did as he said, and for some reason that only made him angrier.
From the broad valley the sirens of two fire trucks sing around them for a time and she stops talking. Saladin feels her hand grow moist in his. He tries to pull it out but her grip is tight.
I think it was pleasurable for him to beat me. He had no other power, and at first all he did was force me to cook for him, to clean and lie in his bed. He told me the cinema was forbidden but I disobeyed. I would make him a heavy, heavy lunch, full of stews and naan, and when the house filled with his snores, I snuck out to the afternoon movies at one of the last cinemas in Kabul. I watched the women, I sat and waited through film after film just to watch the women. What beauties.
She looks ahead of her, her eyes light with some old joy, the same face Saladin has seen her wear in the cinema, concentrated with delight.
Bergman. Doris Day. Lizbet Taylor, Grace Kelly. Gina Lollobrigida. Even the Hindi women. They were like royalty to me, and even though I was just a girl, I knew that royalty was inside me too, because one day I would be a woman, beautiful like them. I had seen myself in the mirror, I had seen myself in the eyes of men who stared at me. I knew I had a wealth of some sort.
When she speaks, Saladin first hears the pretty lilt of her voice, then the odd Afghani Farsi, and then, only a few seconds later, is he able to hear her meaning. She talks about her uncle, his rabid devotion, the letter he received from the American consulate that thanked him for his cooperation with the Taliban, offered him a green card and a free move to the United States.
But the monster did not know how to read. I took the letter and kept it, and soon after that he became very sick. Amazingly sick. No one knew where the illness came from. He would not eat, could not sleep. He sweated through each night in high fevers and the doctors were confused: Such a young man, so much vigor … He would get better, gain weight and walk the garden, and the doctors seemed sure that with rest and the care of a beautiful, dutiful niece, full recovery was inevitable. But I did not take care of him. If he called for water, I pretended that I did not hear. If he cried out after a fall, I watched him struggle to stand and remembered the nights he took his heavy hand to my face, my chest and shoulders and the mornings he pressed himself into me and cursed my mother all the while. I made his meals, his tea, his bed. Who is to say I did not put in too much medicine or not enough? People, the neighbors, the men who would come to visit him, just shook their heads and said things like Look what war will do … bechareh … Then one day, like the sick do, he died. There were few mourners. If anyone suspected anything, they did not say.
Her hand is like a vise, as if the skin and muscle have been pressed away. She holds Saladin tightly now, bone to bone.
The American consulate passed his green card to me. They knew I was an orphan, a woman without husband or family stuck in a destroyed city with no hope. I left that same week. There was little packing to do, no one to tell good-bye.
She lights a cigarette, and the fire travels back and forth to her face, and Saladin can see how light it really is, in feature and color and weight, and on this night it seems nearly buoyant, as if it were filled with the smoke of the cigarette and nothing else. Behind them the noise of small footsteps catches their attention, and they turn to see an old Mexican woman with a bucket of roses. She does not smile, does not increase her speed or pull up the shawl that drags behind her on the ground.
Para la señora. La enamorada.
The roses in the bucket are dried at the edges and wilted through the stems. All these weeks Saladin has bought Nafaz cinema tickets, ice cream, and waited for the moment to touch her, to pull her face to his and feel the press of lips, but the moment never came. He walked toward it every day and wondered at his patience, at the small resistance he had to taking what he thought was slowly being offered and now under the stare of the Mexican woman, it becomes clear. Saladin tries to pull his hand from hers, but Nafaz does not let go. Through the hand he feels her hope—for the bouquet, the gift of flowers, for his forgiveness—as it exits her body and enters his. He shakes his head no and the old Mexican walks away with same small steps and long, dragged shawl.
Saladin pulls Nafaz by the hand and moves them down the hill, down through the neighborhood and back onto the streets of Hollywood, where the lights are bright and the noise of cars and people weaves between them. He shakes off her hand and steps back to look at he
r, to assess and understand and regard her as they are to each other: familiars; a family of halves; brother and sister. He sees the lightness leave her face and follows it as it drains all the way down her slim body to the tiny heels that stab the long, thin shadow that sways behind her, darker than dark. Nafaz returns his glare, and though Saladin cannot see the man she sees, he knows the life he has lived, the person he is, the ways he too has cheated the old homes and the old loves for this American night. She takes a step back and then another and then turns and, without a word, is gone. Saladin walks against her, away, and they disappear, this man and this woman, into a happy Hollywood and all the night’s noise.
If he told her, what would he say?
I loved the cinema too? I was a child of the cinema just like you … I have done terrible things, left behind my life, to live in the cinema.
How would he say it?
Where does he start? Istanbul? In the dusty town? In the green valley, in his mother’s lap, in his boyhood bed? As far back the womb or the womb before that?
Would he tell a clear story with a beginning, middle and end or sum it up in a sentence, thrown off and haphazard?
Does anger shake his voice or will he cry?
Does he confess that he left behind a brother for this Los Angeles? Would he say his brother left him?
Hollywood is far behind now, and Saladin walks briskly through an unfamiliar neighborhood of enormous houses and steep, long hills. There are no people, only lawns like rugs and ornate streetlamps. The more he thinks to say it, the how and when and which way to tell her, the faster his feet move, just as on that first night when he ran to outpace his nerves, to keep off the shock of survival. How did it happen? Perhaps it didn’t happen at all? Maybe he dreamed it? Maybe he was asleep in the hull of the plane, dreaming. Yes. That much is true: he was dreaming. When he tells it to her, that is where he will start.
I dream.
I have always been dreaming.
That night I slept in the hull of the plane, I dreamt.
The metal of the plane was cold and refused to warm from his body heat. In his half sleep he dreamed of a Los Angeles he had not yet seen, every street corner and shop window and taxicab filled with faces from the mountain town. In the episodes of shivering wakefulness he could hear Ali, just a few meters away, awake, quietly singing the Beatles song. And so it was as it had been all the days of this journey, one brother waiting for the night to push him forward, and the other waiting for the same night to take them back.
When the first noise of jeeps and trucks came, Saladin tried to incorporate their throttle and the loud shouts into his frigid dreams, but they would not fit. He woke and crawled slowly to the opening in the back of the plane and saw the ten, maybe twelve men who roved about the hangar in uniforms with white sashes, each with a small, portable light in one hand and tiny pistol in the other. They kicked the men awake and off the floor, and when they had pushed everyone up against the far wall, the demands began. They spoke in a language that was neither English nor the language of the island, but both mixed to senselessness. The white sashes pushed at the men with their loud voices and flat hands.
Name! Nomeh?
From? From? Afghan? Iran? Turkey?
The recently arrived men were still sleepy and had not yet woken into indignation, into the refusal or the sharp wit that would help them to lie, to save themselves. They answered without guile.
Reza Amanizabeh.
From!?
Iran.
Esfandear Tafreshi.
From!
Iran.
Alone?
Yes.
Name!
Houseein Oshalinpour.
Alone?
No. With cousin.
… Father.
… Uncle, here.
And on and on down the line. Saladin crouched farther back into the plane, so to wait out this terror, to hide until the mass was gone and dawn came and the plane would take him up into some questionless space. He heard the voice of the light-eyed father, and then, the hushed sobs of his light-eyed son and saw a white sash turn the hand light on them both.
Where!
— — —
Where?!
The pistol waved just beneath the man’s chin, and in the bright light the color of his eyes opened and shone as if, with enough illumination, you could see into and through them.
The light-eyed man looked into the tiny bulb and answered.
Iran.
Bem.
… where we will be killed.
The white sash pushed them aside, and Saladin saw a group was forming, and all the men, except for him and his brother, were in it.
When he tells her, he will tell her honestly. He will say, My brother saved me from the raid that he arranged. My brother, my only brother, Ali, was willing, maybe wanting, to see me go. He could do without me. Saladin will say it as he feels it. I had a brother who abandoned me. I had a brother, he was kind and cruel.
In the hangar a single voice shouted.
Ali Khourdi! Ali Khourdi!
They knew his name. They shouted it the same way his boyhood friends shouted it on the soccer field in the mountain town—urgently, with confidence, excited for the signature long, clean pass—and for a moment Saladin closed his eyes against this dark chaos and waited for the image of that game, the green grass, the gray, open skies of his hometown. In that world he heard Ali’s voice.
Yes. I am here.
Everyone here? Is this all the men?
Yes.
You are sure? All men here?
Yes.
And you? No brother?
No.
The boy today? The boy, in the town? Who?
No one.
Alone?
Yes. No brother.
Some of the gathered men made noises as if to say yes, yes, he does, he has a brother. The light-eyed man said nothing, and Saladin saw him cover his son’s mouth, but the others let it be known there was one more, there was another. The hand lights shot through the hangar like a dozen roving stars and floated over bunched blankets, sacks and pushed-off shoes, tossed aside blankets, maps and prayer beads.
Where!
The man demanded, and all the lights returned to Ali’s face. In the brightness Saladin saw his brother, as he had known him his whole life, as he was in the square the morning the Kurdish men were sentenced to death, the same calm eyes beneath heavy brows, the flat line of a set, satisfied mouth.
I have no brother.
The white sash waited, and the sequestered men waited, and Saladin waited, and then, just like that, all that had been spoken was true.
Bem. To the buses.
They pushed the men onto the buses, and the hangar emptied of all sound and light and breath. Saladin kept his eyes on Ali, who did not get on the bus with the rest of them but took a seat in the backseat of the jeep, where he accepted a cigarette from a white sash. Saladin stared at his brother but could not bring himself to leave the plane, to jump out and yell, But you said you would come! Why are you not coming! Together. We have to go together. You will die in Iran!
But his body did not move. To call him would mean going back, being known, arrested, redirected from Los Angeles to some other place. Saladin let every part of him stick to the surface of the metal hull, and where he should have felt sadness or confusion or fear, Saladin felt only a long, fierce cold. He curled into himself for heat, and still his body shivered and his teeth clicked and he shook and sweated and pulled his shoulders tight against his ears. He had no clothes but the shirt and pants and shoes he had put on in the dark the morning their father yelled them awake days? weeks? months? ago. He had no money or suitcase or passport, no promise of a bed tomorrow or the day after that. And if he died on this night, a chunk of frozen flesh, he had chosen not to have a brother who could say, His name is. His age was. He was born in this town. Our mother was. Our father was. Yes. He was my brother.
That night there was no sleep. Saladin shiv
ered and tried to find warmth in his armpits, in his crotch, in the breath he pushed into cupped hands. When the plane took off just after dawn, he barely noticed that he had just done as the birds did and taken to the sky. He held to himself and kept quiet, the only smuggled man aboard, a stowaway who would never do the two months of factory work, but who would, instead, do the work of untangling a great deceit between brothers, for the rest of his life.
For a week Saladin avoids the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. He stays late at the warehouse and begs the rug seller to give him more work, more hours, so he can make more money. The rug seller asks no questions and obliges, and by the end of the week nearly no rugs are left to vacuum or stack or roll or ship, and Saladin asks Calderon if there are things he can do around the house.
Calderon shakes his head.
No, no, hermano. Relax. You work too much. This is California! All America comes here to go on vacation. Take a break.
When Saladin wakes up the next morning, a ten-dollar bill is underneath his door. It is casually crumpled as if dropped. Saladin knows better but puts the bill in his pocket anyway and skips breakfast, embarrassed to look Calderon in the eye. With his pockets full of money he walks through the city, goes in and out of his day at the shop and then back to the corner with the multiplex and the tourists and the girls who call out.
Hey, Sal … hey, Sal. How come you aren’t going to see your movie? You ready for another kind of show? It’s about time …
He misses the five o’clock show he would see alone and then the seven he would watch with her and stands in front of the closed flower shop and waits. Just after dark a bus groans to a stop at the end of the block, and she walks to him slowly without a smile. Her face is impatient. A shield of anger braces her across the shoulders, chest and hips.
Yes?
I have brought …
He begins in Farsi, then switches to English.
For you.
He tries to hand the stack of bills, almost ironed, more American money than he has ever had, to her. In his mind she takes it and they walk to get ice cream and he explains to her all that he has thought about, all that he is ready to tell. He tells her the events of the night he left his brother to the police so he could come to America. She forgives him. He tells her he does not know where Ali is today, if he is alive or dead or where, and it is bad for a brother not to know. Isn’t it bad that a brother does not know? She forgives him. He explains he cannot love her the way the men and women in the cinema love, that they are too alike, brother and sister, and he wants an American woman, someone who has not forgone all family and love. Someone new. It is what his mother would want, now that he has made it all this way. Nafaz smiles and accepts his explanation and forgives him. In his mind he buys her another ice cream.
The Walking Page 17
