He won’t even remember his life here.
We announced such things and set about to seduce, to want, to join bodies in hope. We took off our early armor and allowed ourselves to be seduced and wanted and filled with hope.
Comically and then desperately and then against our better selves, a few of us even looked about at the elders and wondered, God forbidding of course, who would be the first to die? Like the poor coffin maker in a town without illness or death, our curious glances were tantamount to evil. They were already old, these grandmothers and grandfathers dragged halfway across the world because they couldn’t be left behind, and we looked carefully at them to see if they had grown older. And they had. Since their arrival, the wrinkles had spread deeper and farther about their faces, they leaned in heavier on their crutches, they smoked more and spoke less.
Poor things, we said. And some of us thought about how nice it would be to wash the body, put it in the ground and stand over the fresh dirt, fresh American dirt, and say to ourselves, this square is ours. If nothing else, he is folded into the earth and so this small piece of earth belongs to us. We thought fondly of the ceremonies that followed the death. The third-day and the seventh-day and the fortieth-day gathers when families would come together around the grave and then take to the house of a relative to eat and drink and be among one another. We waited as the elders continued to shuffle among us, and we took the best care of them and tried not to let our thoughts wander back around the sayings, attributed to no one, that circled in our heads, a birth … a death … only then … belong … belong … belong.
Time passed, regardless. Babies came as they do, without any concern for parents or place, and we rejoiced, glad for their instant innocence, for our own new chances, for this life made of love and possibility that would fasten us to this country if only by merit of an American birth certificate that guaranteed life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and other promises that were never made to us.
Not long after that the deaths came too. The oldest of us ended their days in rooms as foreign to them as the food and water that settled in their guts. We washed their bodies, oiled them with rose water and wrapped them in muslin that we bought from the Ethiopian fabric stores. We placed them in the heavy wooden box required by law, lacquered and glazed on the outside and plush on the inside, and lowered the boxes into the ground. It was not as we expected. The ceremonies came and went and we gathered at the green graves and the land did not feel like ours at all. We could not claim the grave, and it looked up at us dully, indistinguishable from all the graves around it, and we wondered why we thought a death would help. The old kept dying and we kept our eyes fastened to the ground, ashamed of our selfish curiosities and the silly superstitions in sayings.
Not until Neusha Farrahi.
Not until Neusha did we feel as if we belonged here. As if someone had finally died in a manner that tied us to this place. On this, regardless of our politics or money or loyalties, we agreed.
He was a bookseller. His father, his whole family, had long been persecuted under the Shah for their bohemian, leftist-leaning politics. Finally in 1980, with nearly a million other Iranians, they left. With the little money his father was able to bring out of Iran, Neusha opened a bookstore on Wilshire. Mostly poetry. Novels and magazines as well. All of it in Farsi. A few of us had been there and could say only the kindest things.
It is like being in high school again. When you were excited to do your homework. He even has the illustrated Rumi and the old stories of Farrokhzad. Such a lover of poetry, reminds me of an uncle of mine. The bookseller will recite Shamlu for you. Hafiz. He even knows some Googoosh songs by heart. Nice young man, inspired, romantic, a bit sad.
It was not uncommon to go to his bookstore to browse, exchange a few words and leave convinced, through your soul, that the world had gone off course and that to be Iranian was not to love the Shah or hate the Shah or support Khomeini or run from the new regime. To be Iranian was to be a poet. To be a lover of the words and worlds that our ancient relatives crafted so that we could better see our selves, both in and out of time.
To be a lover of Iran, to be of Iran is to be a lover of poetry, to be a poet! Nothing more! Nothing less!
Neusha insisted as we stood in his store nodding our heads, wondering how we had forgot such a simple truth.
In those times this was not an easy lesson to remember: 1978. 1979. 1980. 1981. 1982. 1983. A fallen king. A risen mystic. A hostage crisis that will play in history like games between stubborn children. A war with a neighbor over nothing. Forty-five thousand men dead for no gain of land or honor or pride. Two thirds of them younger than thirty years. We forgot the poetry. We fled. We forgot ourselves and from time to time claimed the king was false! The mystic is a fraud! Bring back the king and his son! Death to the king and his son! Stop this senseless war! Give us back our country! But with time we would forget even these ardent claims. Neusha was right; in the silence that followed those years, we remembered and returned to the poetry again and again, our first place of belonging, our first nation.
We did what we could to make a life of this life. The news from the television, from home, from our dreams, spun around us in a sticky web, and we kept our eyes focused on our work, our families, the new language. We did our best. Neusha had done his best and he was finished. He left a long letter. In it he explained the reasons for his actions: By setting fire to myself I am not only protesting the presence of the Iranian butcher Khomeini and his forthcoming trip to the United Nations, but also the poisonous activities of the pro-Shah elements and the ultraright policies of the Reagan administration … The next day Neusha stood in front of the Los Angeles Federal Building with a crowd protesting Khomeini’s arrival. Without warning he poured two tins of motor oil over his head and clothes and did not, according to witnesses, pause before he lit a match. The fire burned for four minutes before bystanders wrestled the burning man down and hit out the flames. By that time 80 percent of his skin had blackened. His hair was gone. He could no longer see. He was thirty-one years old.
The police asked, Who does this to themselves?
The newspapers asked, Where in the world do people burn themselves alive?
The Americans around us asked, Why would anyone do such a thing?
We knew, but did not answer. We did not even discuss it because it was obvious, evident in each and every one of our selves. The published photos showed a man on fire. Fully upright, flames at all angles of his body. A scream frozen on his face. We knew the terror of the flame; we had craved it for months now, and his scream froze in our own throats, just above numb hearts. His burning flesh answered our desire to feel, to melt to belong belong belong.
And just like that, our dead joined us. And just like that, we belonged.
And those of us who paid attention to the silent events of nature looked at the yearly movements in our gardens and in the sky and thought to ourselves, We are not so different from them, but thanks be to God we are the only animals to suffer the migration of the soul, that labyrinthine route of the spirit that takes us not there and back but round and round and round.
Caves
A week after the picnic and Saladin’s sunken mood will not lift. The rug seller finds him asleep behind the warehouse and makes a casual suggestion.
Maybe you should take a few days off. To the ocean perhaps? I hear the girls wear next to nothing, and there is a sport with the waves. Go. Vacation is very important here. Go. Find some American energy.
One Thursday afternoon Saladin makes his way to the beach. Since he left, he has not been back and does not remember exactly how to get there. After half a day of walking and wrong buses he finds Santa Monica and, soon after, the sand. He takes his shoes off and moves north, his one untried direction. For a time the beach is spotted with all of the same people and diversions, one after another with their towels, umbrellas, sleep and suntan oil, again and again, like stamps on the sand. Then, after a time, nothing.
The emptiness is broken by the outlines of three large-bodied beasts that linger and stroll against the flat line of the sea. Saladin walks toward them to see if they are elephants, and if the elephants are as they were in the cinema, enormous gray-skinned puppets used to signify jungles or the circuses or human smallness. When he reaches them, he sees they are creatures unto themselves, with slow eyes and soft gazes and little care for the sadness of man. Around the elephants men and women in loose robes and sandals hit tambourines and sing. At the sight of Saladin they smile through their songs. Without listening too closely he can tell the words are not in English, but Hindi, the language of movies he would only go to if nothing from Hollywood was showing. He looks into their faces and they are not dark or round-mouthed or otherwise similar to the faces of Bombay actors and actresses; their features and colors are American, their joy and smiles American as well. Saladin moves past them, closer to the elephants, which amble in the shallow waters, ankles tied together by a long, loose rope, and watches as they suck up the sea in their trunks. Each time they spray themselves, Saladin shivers with delight.
Though he now knows enough English to approach, he has no desire to be a stranger at their strange party and takes one last look at the animals at play in the surf and then continues on his way. Behind him the voices of men and women rise and fall, and Saladin turns back to see them dancing and singing, their happy smiles directed at no one.
Farther north the land begins to vary. What was flat sand and flat sea is broken now by great volcanic outcroppings that rise up like pyramids. In the sea the rocks take and take the slap of waves, and Saladin stares for long enough to realize this contact never stops. All day and all night and all year and perhaps since the beginning, the rocks have taken the waves, and he turns around to find the land behind him soft and shifting, and he thinks even this edge, this end of America, will soon be eaten by the great sea. For calm he looks at the sky and follows a formation of pelicans as they soar in a low, easy glide, their eyes and beaks and bony wings made of a certain strength and survival from long long ago.
By late afternoon he is north of Malibu and the beach has given way to high sandstone bluffs, craggy and pocked with hundreds of small, deep caves. He moves from one to another until he finds an entrance that rises above the height of his head and stretches past the width of his shoulders, a passageway into which he can fit. Only then does he walk in, and only then does the cave make dark a day that was bright, and loud an ocean that outside was hushed and quiet. In the first darkness he cannot see and must stand still and listen to the sounds of the sea, which are huge and elaborately detailed now, in some constant flux between crash and hush. After all his time on the beach, the three nights and those early days, he has never heard these sounds—the pop of bubbles and roll of thousands of tiny stones—of the sea. He bends to feel if the cave floor is damp, and when his eyes finally make out its shape and distance, there is only sand and a pile of charred wood inside a circle of stones. He cannot see the end of it and pushes farther in, upright and then crouched and then on hands and knees. He comes to a sandy back wall and stops, sits up against it, and in an instant he is both tired and glad, relieved to have found this dark, hidden hole.
It is not his first cave.
In the first cave there were men—fathers, uncles, cousins and brothers—to fill the high stone cavern with song and smoke for the ceremony that would clear Saladin of his foreskin and so place on his name and face and shoulders the mantle of man. To himself he was still a boy, and when the knife came and then the blood and the pain, he cursed his father and sought out Ali’s eyes and found them, sought his brother’s hand and found it, craved his brother’s voice and heard it, steady and proud.
Tomorrow it will be better, Saladin jaan. Tomorrow they will all love you more. Aufareen Saladin.
In this second cave there is no such love. The sand and stones of this vacant hole promise him nothing of a tomorrow where there is more. Saladin waits for the hollow feeling to pass and closes his eyes only to find, behind their lids, a dozen fat and menacing shapes—short men with enormous cocks and hooked noses and nails, boys with the hands of giants, a donkey with no head—all twirling and pulsing in a grotesque display. Fright pushes his heart quickly against his chest and pops open his eyes, and he does not recognize where he is. How has he come to this haunted cave? How far has he gone from that first cave? His brother’s soft hand? That pledged love?
Saladin grabs fitfully at the sand beneath his palms and tries to think clearly. He is Saladin Khourdi. He lives in America today. He worked for a rug seller yesterday, and he will work for the rug seller again tomorrow. He washes and eats at least once each day. Today he sits in a cave, on a vacation, resting. Once, not yesterday, but before, he was a boy surrounded and sworn to men who, by the fact of Saladin’s many steps, no longer exist.
How?
How many steps from that first cave to this?
There were the steps he took with Ali, the two of them marching out of their maman’s womb, one after another, and then the same steps of their boyhood where no one bothered to tell them apart, and their steps into that first cave and then to school, through youth and then in circles during the years of wondering and the terrible death, and finally the fast steps they ran straight out of the wet spring valley where they escaped not as Saladin or Ali, but as Khourdis, as brothers, as one.
Ali, where are you now?
Saladin asks of the nothing around him, and the nothing responds with itself. He does not know where Ali is, so his mind goes to the last time and thoughts of the night raid and the cold airplane hull, and all of it dries the saliva in his throat and Saladin tries to swallow, again and again, but there is no wetness, no flavor or stick, and for a few seconds he must work to keep calm, to think his throat loose and bring out water from a mouth so parched it is as if he has just eaten the handfuls of sand he plays with. He tries to get out from the cave, to go back to the beach, where there is more air, more wind, water and space to swallow or to shout, and as he begins to crawl, a memory locked in the body unlocks. Saladin freezes and lets his body, heart and head grow cold, grow brittle with the shock of remembering the first moment he walked away from his brother and the first moment his brother walked away from him.
Friday. A day of no school and sweets after lunch and chores in the pigeon coop.
The brothers woke early to sweep shit and feathers, water and feed the pigeons and wait patiently for their father to arrive. He would show just as the sun was in the center of the sky, and even though his suit smelled of opium and sleep still creased into his face, he made a great ritual of seriousness as he inspected each bird, checked their water tins and the quantity of seed left in the sack. The brothers knew the worth of their work by his pauses and nods, and if all was done to satisfaction, their father would make a show of inspecting them as well. He spoke gravely to tease them all the more.
Saladin jaan, it seems your wings are a bit dusty today.
A strong hand would tickle him gently in the ribs.
You are a mess. We cannot possibly send you out and away.
A joke between father and son, and week after week Saladin waited for it, for the hand and the laugh that came after, and even for the small terror that shook him at the thought of out or away. Out from what? Away to where? He would hold tight to his father’s hand as the old man walked slowly from bird to bird to select the day’s messenger.
Saladin and Ali could barely tell them apart. There were the well ones and the lame ones, and all the others looked the same. They watched their father carefully—his eyes and fingers and nose—as he touched and smelled and saw each bird separately, and there was always a neck more iridescent or eyes more alive or wings stronger against his tests, and that bird was chosen and carried out to the clearing, where their father took a single small note from his pocket and read it with great authority.
Agha Homayun. What is your wife cooking for dinner? Ghorbonet, Captain Khourdi.
He then rolled the paper around the ankle of the bird and fastened it with twine. When a bird was released, it always did the same thing: flew up first and then out and then away from the trio of Khourdi men, and the young brothers always cheered, for what, they could never say.
They spent the afternoon in wait.
And Saladin did not hesitate to ask.
But how, Baba? How does the pigeon know where our house is? How do they remember?
Instinct.
What is that?
It is the knowing of where you belong. And when.
The pigeons always returned at dusk, and the brothers had to hold still so as not to punch or bite or wrestle the other back from racing to grab the oblivious bird. Finally one was chosen to catch the bird, and the other was chosen to unwrap the note tied to its ankle. Their father would squint and read the news aloud.
Dearest Captain Khourdi, My wife is making lentil-and-lamb stew. Yours, Agha Homayun.
And then grunt.
Does that woman ever make anything else?
And the brothers would laugh, as if on cue from last week and the week before that, happy their father was happy, glad the bird had come back.
One Friday their mother forbade the coop. Saladin was six and Ali was almost eight. She refused to hear their protests of But Baba wants and Baba will be mad if and forced them into a cold bath for a coarse wash. She ordered them into their best wool short pants and took them to town, one in each hand, Saladin crying like a much younger child and his brother taking on the complicated mix of silence and anger that would mark him later, for the rest of his walking days.
They went to a new building that smelled of paint and sawdust and sweat. This first wait was like all first waits, long and without comfort, and the brothers grew stiff and impatient with their mother, the wasted afternoon and the half-dark room without games or birds. When true blackness fell and the screen grew bright and the voice of an invisible man filled the room, their boredom was gone and the brothers sat frozen in a wonder as painful as it was staggering.
The Walking Page 19
