But there is only the life outside his mind. The cars and streetlamps and a woman who does not reach out to take the bills. Saladin thinks to explain.
I was dreaming. That night, when they raided the hangar, I was asleep. Dreaming …
The impatience on her face turns to disbelief and then disgust. The money stays out in front of them, between them, and she does not take her hands out of the pockets of her jacket to accept it.
I am not a whore for you. You cannot pay me.
Saladin extends his arm completely. He does not know how much life costs in America. He knows the price of the cinema, the price of food, the rent on his bunk and breakfast at Calderon’s house, and he offers her all the cash anyway, thinks it is enough to keep her from this corner and the dead ends of a life that should have a few beginnings. He cannot love her and so he thrusts the money toward her, and she steps back and then back again and then turns away and walks down the street.
No … no … it is so you can stop. The work. Here, it will help. For you. I cannot be with you because you are … and I am … and it is not new … But here. This money is for you. Here. A gift for you! Please! Nafaz!
She walks away with a quick step, as if her name were not Nafaz, as if she were another woman with another past and another future in which she is very very busy, with a million places to go.
It is near four months and there is a new routine. After work Saladin takes a long route from the rug warehouse to Calderon’s neighborhood and does not pass the tourists or the multiplex or the stars and handprints and footprints in the sidewalk at Hollywood and Vine. In the evenings he eats a quiet dinner with the other men and refuses their offers of soccer games or pulls from their tequila and goes to the cinema down the street. All the movies are in Spanish, and he watches one after the next and takes in the great fights and greater romances and happy endings of pure rapture.
Ecumenopolis
In truth, we were not alone. No matter how much we thought or felt or wanted it to be otherwise, it was not, and everywhere we looked there were others. They did not share our language or our looks, but in many ways they are more similar to us than our own families.
We saw them in our children’s classrooms, heard their English just as shaky as our own, with attitudes just as defensive and defeated, and faces washed over by the same disbelief that here, in these small and colorful rooms, our children came each day to sing and learn and believe things we ourselves did not yet know.
We saw them at the immigration offices, in large waiting rooms where all of our hearts beat over important documents and we reminded ourselves there was no going back, and if it came to it, pleading, in this case, was not shameful. In that long boredom where we waited for new numbers and new identities, we might have talked, exchanged stories, a family name, a country of origin, all of it hesitant and minimal because really, once we knew we were not alone, we did not have to tell each other about the why or when or how come.
Nevertheless, as it is with people everywhere, stories were told. We told ours to them and listened to the accounts of the Vietnamese, who traveled by boatload, men and women and children, sun-blistered and dehydrated, spotted by helicopter and saved by navy warship. We listened to the story of the Honduran gardener who took his trip on the top of train cars that traveled north through Mexico to the border in Laredo. If there was violence, a thief, a person went crazy with a knife, a fight, there was nowhere to go. We could not jump off. The Soviet Armenians told us that the central government discriminated against them, erratically stopped shipments of medicine, baby formula, teachers. They did not care if we died. So we left. We listened because it made us feel better, and sometimes worse, but regardless it made us feel as if we were among company of some kind. We told our own stories and we were heard.
Imagine our shock when we heard or read that in 1982 alone nine thousand documented foreign immigrants moved to Los Angeles. Here we had come all this way to make ourselves in the mold of Steve McQueen and Farrah Fawcett, and instead we found a city full of our similar selves, not in language and looks, but in fate and circumstance. Imagine our shock when, after some years, we noticed that we had not at all become Americans in that vein, that there was no chance of such shape-shifting, but instead America, California, Los Angeles, became a bit more like us. Entire stretches and blocks of storefront windows were etched in Mandarin, Korean, Farsi, Thai, and the smells that came out of the kitchens belonged to ancient kitchens, and the spices and roots were grown in bathtubs, gallon jugs, coffee cans. The city molded to our superstitions, our sacred behaviors, and when a bus hit an El Salvadorian boy on the corner of Mariposa, the sidewalk took all the flowers and candles and statues of the Virgin Mary the hands of the devout laid down. There were parks where we felt good, at ease, where we could take our walks, hold our auspicious-day festivities, enjoy a cigarette alone on a bench under the dappled light of a plane tree and mistake the moment for another just like it in Tehran/Bombay/Seoul/Juárez/Hanoi.
And each day came with a greater possibility of looking out at a world, once foreign to us, and hoping that, with luck, the group of us—aliens, immigrants, temporary residents—could fashion a new nation in our own image, and we made sure to match eyes with the others, unlike us in language or looks, and recognize that though it might have felt otherwise, we were not alone. On sunny days, sometimes that was enough.
As the world outside of our home grew warm and familiar, the lives lived inside those homes took on a strange and hostile hum. Our children began to misbehave. Notes were sent home from school, from the play yard that emphasized their tantrums, quick temper, overreaction to simple childish taunts. At home things were no better. They looked into our faces and mocked our accents, which were still, at that point, their accents as well. They could not stand our questions as easy as Hello, how are you today? What is that drawing you have there? And they pushed away our offers of help, our food and jokes, the names we gave them and our habitual, ceaseless affection. You kiss too much, they said as they wiped their cheeks with the palms of their hands. Americans don’t kiss like this. It’s gross. What was gross? What was that word? Who were these children? We ask ourselves. They were not the same children we had in Iran. You liked my kisses before when we were in Iran? They push us away and then shamelessly beg for skateboards and video games and makeup and freedom, and when we shake our heads, they drop into a sullen behavior for which we have no recourse but anger, and we are quick with it, honest and clean.
Joonam, we say sweetly, remember I control your fate. We could have easily left you behind. Remember, your visa alone cost us a hand and foot. It is true that they would not make fun of your name, yes. They would use it instead to call you out to the army, where you might have ended up like Arash’s cousin, no arms, no legs, dead and nameless on the Iraqi desert floor.
And if it’s not the children that seem strange, then it is the old people. They complain about the traffic (which is no different from Tehran), the water (also no different), the smog (again, the same). Sometimes they even complain about the salt. Where is the flavor? they bemoan. What a bechareh am I? To live a whole life of delight so that I can die a nobody in the land of plastic. They enjoy exaggeration. We suffer their drama. Out of respect we cannot admonish them, we must sit and listen and wonder, Who are you? Who, Maman jaan, are you? And, Baba joon, where has the man I loved gone?
Then there are quiet questions asked from one soul to another like the questions we ask our beloved when we cannot sleep and our beloved lies beside us, our closest intimate, now a stranger to us in the night. How can I know you in this new life and how can you know me? We are no longer the man and the woman in the wedding photo. That world no longer exists. We are not the couple in the cinema or at the hospital after the birth of our first child. How far have we traveled that you, my heart, are so unfamiliar to me?
Night noises leak in through the windows and fill the dark. We concentrate on them with the hope that somewhere through the shouts
and car horns, sirens and laughs, we can find sleep, but all that comes are the questions that chase our million tails like a frenzied beast. Who are you, love of mine, similar to me in language and looks? How will I come to love you in this new life? How will you know to love me?
Devils, Picnics, Poets
Some days the rug seller wakes up in Los Angeles, and some days he wakes up in a city where he no longer lives. On this day Saladin finds him outside the plate-glass window with his name on it, the store behind him dark and closed. His eyes are frantic with delight, and his mouth buzzes with some constant mutterings.
It is the thirteenth day, the devil’s day, the day the devil comes to work, to the house, comes and takes the luck for the year away.
He paces before the storefront, and when Saladin arrives, he clasps his shoulders with both hands.
Finally, my boy! We must go! It is the thirteenth day, don’t you know! We must go before the devil finds us and curses our fortune. Come come. Yallah!
Outside the store the rug seller seems shorter. He walks ahead of Saladin with the punchy gestures of a horse-mounted warrior leading a thousand horse-mounted warriors. In reality only Saladin follows, and as the two men stand and wait for the crosswalk signal, only one has his feet firmly on the cement corner of Flower and Central Avenue, while the other stands on some cherished corner in Tehran, impatient, en route to his favorite park.
At the park it is just as Saladin has tried to forget it was: blankets enormous enough to fit a dozen relatives, steel and copper pots of stew, sabzi from the sofre, countless cards, kites, charcoal and cigarettes. Somewhere far away, the thump of a daf, and nearby the intricate sounds of a doumbac. In the well of what was, the water rises to the top, rises to what is, and the old place pours over to cover the new place, and though Saladin has done his best to avoid this kind of drowning, today he fails. The park here today is fragrant like there, and it is bright here today as it was, on spring days, there. Here too the men and women are gathered just out of the devil’s reach on this thirteenth day of the new year, the first unlucky day when all must be emptied, homes, offices and stores, so when the devil comes to find and taint you, no one is around. Saladin walks sourly among the happy families like a man pushed back, a man not allowed to move one millimeter east or one millimeter west and forced to keep stiff above an earth that spins beneath such that all these weeks and months of movement have taken him nowhere at all.
The rug seller is here beside him and then away, on a blanket tasting the saffron pudding offered by a jolly mother, and then he is beside Saladin again, with introductions and boasts.
Yes, he works for me. Khourdi. A good man, strong with the heavy rugs, but thinks he’s too handsome for the work, wants to be a famous actor.
The women smile and the men laugh, and Saladin does not shake one hand, does not meet one eye, embarrassed by their familiar faces, their familiar smells, dismayed by the familiar beauty of their daughters as they are offered up to him: flowers plucked too early from far soils, some faces flush with the last of beauty, some already wilting under the hot California sun. It is just a little more than a year after the revolution, and the arrived are gathered to remember and forget. Saladin does not want to recognize them as his own and does not want to be recognized as one of them. He tells himself he sees nothing of his mother’s beauty in the faces of the mothers, hears nothing of his father’s hearty laugh in the men gathered, shoeless and cross-legged, on the blankets all around. Regardless, the smell of kebab is the same, the friendly calls of Mobarak and Befaymin are exact, and each smile is open and familiar, as if Los Angeles were Tehran and all are doing as they have always done. He leaves the picnics without eating and stifles the hunger that rises through his belly and throat.
At the far end of the park a set of swings rock back and forth and let loose dark, aggravating squeaks. Saladin walks to them. Two girls fly and sink, fly and sink, while between them an old man stands, the wisps of his white hair blown by the wind of pumping legs, soaring shoulders and billowing skirts. He is without wrinkles and has skin the color of sand in the shade; he stands still and moves only his mouth, and around him men and women listen to the words as they come out, hold their elbows, their cigarettes, their sorrow and longing. To the rhythm of the unoiled swings he recites:
You think your monarch’s palace of more worth
Than him who fashioned it and all the earth.
The home we seek is in eternity;
The truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop.
The ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams
Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems—
Which matters more, the body or the soul?
Be whole: desire and journey to the whole.
Saladin looks at the girls, who swing back and forth beside the poet in high, even arcs, eyes tearing from the wind. Lucky the child who knows so little about here and less about there. Lucky the child left to fling her legs, let air and aspiration fill her heart. Unlucky the gathered crowd; men with heads bowed and women with hearts clenched, grandmothers who smack lips in disbelief over every bite: Doesn’t taste the same, will never taste the same, how can it ever taste the same?
Damned be the poet who counsels them in the infinite, the whole, the ecstatic, who tries to move the souls stuck in these bodies that force them to blankets, food, each other, the recreation and re-creation of home on this thirteenth day of spring when they must jump, leap, out from under the devil’s grasp, out from the old homes, loved homes where left-behind mother and sisters must shroud themselves in the streets and sons and fathers line up to die in the war. Saladin sees himself among them, on the bright green grass, under the warm sun, just out from under the devil’s grasp, out and away from a country that blackens behind them, and knows they are, swinging girl and grandmother alike, deaf to the poet’s call to go, go home.
Saladin looks about for the rug seller to excuse himself from the celebrations, but in the sea of men on blankets, he is hard to find. Saladin has almost given up when he sees Noori on a blanket surrounded by women. A blond-haired woman seems to be his wife, and the two girls are a few years younger than Saladin. They are telling what seems to be a long joke. He forces himself forward to give his thanks, make his excuse and say his good-bye, but it is not easy because the rug seller is happier than he has ever been and invites Saladin to taste his wife’s famous sholeh zarde.
My boy! You must try it!
Noori offers up a spoonful of the sweet, yellow rice dessert, and Saladin remembers it was the same one his mother, and all the women of Iran, made on special occasions.
Such delicate texture. You must try it. She does not use too much cinnamon like the rest. And meet my daughters. Azar and Yasamine.
The two girls look up at Saladin as he chews and swallows. He tries not to look back, but the youngest one catches his glance with her tremendous lips and her father’s joyful eyes. He tries for a smile, but nothing happens on his face, and embarrassed, he makes excuses and walks away, tossing behind him a series of quick, odd good-byes.
These Kurds, so moody and serious, always at war with something …
The voice of the rug seller’s wife follows Saladin as he steps between blankets and hands and feet and the left-behind toys of children distracted by other things.
He moves past the tall glass buildings and does not stop. He roves the streets with eyes for some sensation of excitement, something anonymous and fast that will be American and nothing else, but it is midday midweek and only men and women in formal clothes are walking in and out, back and forth, as if on predestined rails. He finds a street that goes along a dry concrete river whose cracked, slanted edges sprout tall yellow grass. The concrete is covered in images and letters, the script bloated, and the i
llustrations show anatomies vulgar and unbelievable. Saladin finds a low bridge and follows it over the dry expanse. He stands at the center and looks down onto the concrete and wishes badly for the river to run so he can take the long, clean jump.
The Wait. The Want
Not until a baby is born.
Not until your dead are buried beneath this ground.
Only then can you say that you belong to a place or claim that a place belongs to you.
We overhear this from some mouth or other, and just like that it is impossible to forget; no matter how hard we try to shake it out of our ears, like trapped water it just won’t go.
So comically, desperately, with the bravado of heroes, some of us started fucking.
It if takes a baby to belong here, then a baby it will be!
An American baby, yes, but who cares?
We will teach him the old tongue, feed him the old food, and next month, next year, next lifetime, when all of this is over, we will simply take him back home.
The Walking Page 18
