Here one brother does and the other does not.
At six years old Saladin let go of all time. He forgot that he was a boy, that he belonged to a mother and a father and a brother and two, almost three, sisters and forwent all geography and alliances and let himself dissolve into the screen, become a self just a bit different from the self before, a bit less six, a bit less boy and a bit more shaped into the mold of the cinema seat, L-shaped and upright and stuck. Here he was first seduced by the carved lips of giantesses, the square jaws of suited men, the cars and enormous flying machines and jewels and guns of that other world that came at him without relent. He did not have a moment to turn to his mother or brother and ask, What? Where? How?
There was a story in that first film. Men and women needed to escape but were stuck in a town on the edge of the desert and the sea. There was a battle somewhere, yet there were comforting suggestions between the eyes of one of the men and one of the women throughout. The suggestions went from curiosity, to disgust, to some sort of pull Saladin had never seen, to relief and then to a sadness he had watched cloud his maman’s eyes. There was a black-skinned man who sat at a black box and made music with his fingers. People sat around the black man and his black music box and drank and talked and cried and listened and waited to fly off in enormous metallic machines. All around and through Saladin marvel pulsed as everyone in the mountain town’s first cinema asked themselves and each other, Where? Where? Where? For the first time in their lives the sight of their eyes did not stop at their peripheral vision but extended beyond 180 degrees to wrap all the way back around to the insides of their heads, and then down into their hearts, where they could see, in their imaginations, another world different from their world and the world of their mothers and fathers and all that came before. In the world on the screen they did not see themselves at all and wondered, If I do not exist in this world of shadow and light on the screen, then is that world real? And if it is real, then how can I enter it? And if I enter it, who will I be?
Ali! Ali! Ali, can you believe it?
His brother made no noise and Saladin turned his head from the screen to find him in a tight feigned sleep with eyes pressed closed and furrowed brows.
On the walk home his brother ran ahead, unfazed and shouting.
Hurry! Baba will have already sent the bird! We should be home before it gets back!
But Saladin and his mother did not hear him. They walked mute from enthrallment, and Saladin held his mother’s hand and opened his eyes wider and wider on the old town and country around them, disappointed in all he saw. He asked his mother again and again.
Where was that?
Amreeka.
Yes, but where is it?
I will show you, jaan. One day we might see it together.
When they arrived, his father was on the porch, Ali already at his side.
If it is not back by now, it will not return.
His father kept a cigarette drooped in his lips and he whittled a small piece of wood with his knife.
It is near dark and the skies have clouded since the morning. These birds do not navigate under cloudy skies. They do not navigate well.
He announced it to everyone without looking up, and Saladin watched his mother as she walked past him into the house. His father shouted after her.
You think you can leave us to starve like this? Where is the dinner?
The first step away. Ali kept to the house, to their father, the mountains and the every-week sortie of pigeons.
It is beautiful how they return.
Saladin heard Ali explain to their sisters.
Beautiful like you. Watch. Today we will send them out, and this evening they come back, a life of circles …
And Saladin took to the cinema as if it were a cave or his mother’s belly or the belly of some hungry monster that needed to eat a little piece of him every day. With his mother’s blessing and pocket change he went every afternoon for film after film and burned with questions he took to the teachers at school, to his brother and father: Where? How? Can I? How can I? Only to receive answers of silence; ridicule; heavy-handed smacks that no longer hurt after a while because by eleven years Saladin was, to his own mind, gone.
One afternoon Ali came to follow Saladin as he left the cinema. Ali walked beside and did not say one kind word but teased Saladin for the long walk home.
Baba says you want to be like Maman, that you love the movies like a girl.
Saladin did not pause or restrain himself before reaching out for his brother’s skin and tearing at it with all the force of his fingers and nails until their mother ran to pull them apart. She gave Saladin extra change to go back to the cinema and disciplined Ali with a hard smack.
There were the steps to the cinema that afternoon and then the steps home. The steps away from his mother’s body, later that year, and then away from sisters and father and brother too. There were the steps into his imagination and away from the mountains. Finally there were the steps he took with Ali into the mountains and the steps he refused to take out of the plane. Life, a series of steps taken, avoided, done right, done wrong.
In the near dark of the cave Saladin looks over his hands, one and then the other. He tries to bring back the feeling of his brother’s flesh beneath them as it was when they fought that day. He aches to feel Ali here under his fingers, palms and nails, but nothing comes. His hands fall to the sand again and he picks up the cool particles and lets them run through his fists, handful by handful, until all of his thoughts dissolve and he is no more than tired, no more than hungry and cold.
Outside the cave the day has given up its brilliance. Saladin walks to the water’s edge to see the sky speak out in dark oranges and light blues. At the far end of this horizon a group of osprey are at work. They float high above the water, still in a steady wind, their expert eyes cast down and focused on whatever moves just beneath the surface.
Saladin too has flown, has known the sky well enough to remember the flat way light shone up off the face of the sea, the strange way, aloft, his thoughts belonged more to the sky than spaces inside his own head. For a time, after the plane took off, the engines vibrated so loudly he could not think. The cold of the night had seeped into his bones and he stood after a few clumsy falls. He watched the pilots through the narrow door of the cockpit, and once he was certain they would stay as they had been, stuck before the enormous rectangular glass windows, smoking one cigarette after another, clueless of their stowaway, Saladin pulled himself up. He crawled to the back of the plane, where he found a pile of parachutes, some boxes strapped down to hooks and a small, egg-shaped window that allowed him his first view of the huge, sad ocean; the empty view of the earth from above as only the birds know. Like the rest of the men and women and children of the Iranian exodus, Saladin looked down and felt a great stagnation, the powerful tranquillity of having been forsaken by the earth, cast up, absolved of all ground-bound responsibilities. For this period of time he did not care to see another inch of land, did not care to arrive, to touch America’s dreamed-of shore. In this moment there was only this great height and its proximity to the empires of angels and silences, and that was enough; peace unto itself; a home where he might, at last, rest.
Ahead the ospreys dip and rise with great purpose. Saladin watches as they dive down, quick and sure, and snatch small silver fish in their spread-out talons. He runs his hands over his face to make sure he is seeing it all as it is, life plucked up and out of the water, still alive, and flown up and over him into the green mountains of Malibu just behind. And, yes. It is. The method and determination of the birds is so precise and mesmerizing that Saladin does not notice that the water of the waves has reached his feet and sinks his shoes deeper into the wet sand.
Time and time again the birds curl their claws ever tighter about the guts and gills of the fish whose muscles spasm as they convulse in the dry air. Saladin makes a game of counting the twitching silver bodies that soar above him and shake th
e last flashes of a sea life from their skin. He sees that in every catch there is a moment when both bird and fish suspend, equal, between drowning and flight, and for one second it is unclear which is the fiercer of the two desires. A few catches fail and the birds clumsily drop the fish back into the big sea and fly, tired and finished, behind Saladin. They pass over him with their large white wings spread low to the ground, their bellies hungry and without, and Saladin cannot help but hunch his own shoulders and duck his head under their empty, open claws, a man crouched down for fear that the fate of the fish is his fate, that he is no more than a creature to be plucked off the earth, pulled up from the life he lives and taken far off, somewhere else, to die.
He jerks his feet out from the suck of wet sand and stands back from the water. After a time the birds are fed and gone and the western horizon is empty. Saladin stands at the edge of white wash and listens for the thin whispers of the leviathan. When nothing from beyond calls, he turns his bones south and walks on.
Acknowledgments
The poem cited here is an excerpt from “The Peacock’s Response” in Farid ud-Din Attar’s beautiful book The Conference of Birds.
I am happily indebted to those institutions and individuals who supported me during the writing of this book. My sincere gratitude to the Whiting Foundation, Emory University’s Fiction Fellowship and to Mara Batlin and David Deniger for the generous use of their serene retreat in the Santa Lucia foothills. I am grateful for the detailed and intelligent research assistance of Jane Wongso Suhardjo. A great swell of appreciation for the steadfast (and patient) professional guidance of Anton Mueller, Alexandra Pringle and Ellen Levine, without whom publishing a book would be an insurmountable dream.
As always my heart goes (and goes and goes) to Ariel Ross, Keenan Norris, John Myer, Saneta deVouno Powell, Isabel Wilkerson, Micheline Marcom and, most especially, Timothy Kelly and Kamran and Fereshteh Khadivi, for their ready encouragement and distraction, inspiration, and light.
By the Same Author
The Age of Orphans
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-age-of-orphans-9781408813881/
‘Bold and beautiful ... Khadivi’s language is sensuous and rich ... At a time when western readers’ perceptions of Iran are too often shaped by current affairs, this book and its sequels will shine a necessary light on the country’s dawn, and on its people’s remarkable history’ Financial Times
A nine-year-old Kurdish boy plays in his village in the Persian mountains, gazing over the land of his fathers and forefathers. But when messengers from the hills bring whispers of war and rumours that the Shah’s army is on the march, he must stand alongside his villagers and fight for their land. Years later, he can only faintly recall the brutal murder of his father and cousins. Orphaned on the battlefield, conscripted and given a new name, Reza is married and has risen up the ranks to become Captain. But there are stirrings within his heart. He will soon be sent west to Kermanshah, to rule as the Shah’s servant in the land of his birth.
A Note on the Author
LALEH KHADIVI was born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution her family fled, finally settling in Canada and then the United States. Khadivi received her MFA from Mills College and was a Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction at Emory University. In 2008 she received The Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2009 she published her first novel The Age of Orphans. Laleh Khadivi lives in California.
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in January 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2013 by Laleh Khadivi
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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eISBN: 978-1-4088-1495-6
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