by Sam Tranum
Then Michael reaches right over me, so that his chest hovers over mine. I can feel his heat and smell his body underneath the perfume. He takes my right shoulder in his left hand, turning me slowly and firmly to face him. I can see stubble beginning to form on his neck. The skin there is looser than I remember.
‘I’m only saying this ‘cause I’m looking out for you,’ he says.
In his voice is a conspiratorial smile. I raise my eyes slowly to take in his face again. The smile sits only on his lips. His eyes seem cold. I shiver. Had they always been like that and I just hadn’t noticed? As soon as the thought occurs to me, though, I forget it.
He goes on.
‘I’ve heard such stories about what happens to people who get found with false papers. You’re lucky. Your visa’s the best. No one will know unless you tell them. Stick with me and Mr Tang, and we’ll look out for you. But find yourself talking to the police or anyone like that, and you’re on your own, and wuh …’
He shakes his head solemnly, then adds:
‘God help you!’
He crosses himself with his spare hand. The movement is awkward. His body is still spread across my side of the car. His weight falls briefly on my shoulder. For the second time in so few days, I am doing all I can to hold back the tears.
Inside the airport, winding queues are leading everywhere. There are uniforms and activity along the edges of the massive high-ceilinged hall, brightly lit and busy after the darkening night. The snakes of people shuffle slowly, swatting bugs and stirring clammy air with the large brown manila envelopes of OFWs. A group of foreign tourists stand awkwardly in one of the queues, unnaturally tall, with big luggage and thongs on their feet. Some people in darker uniforms patrol among the crowds. Sometimes they make marks on their clipboards. Sometimes they give instructions to the people around them.
Why did I bring my Holy Communion Bible instead of the Tagalog history book I won at the ceremony? The Bible’s extra weight cuts into my shoulder. I fold my arms across my chest, around the manila envelope of documents. Truth is, I have to keep clutching it like that to stop my hands from shaking. I try to stand straight, to look like the woman Michael saw in me at the weekend. To try to feel like her too.
Michael’s standing close behind me, and I reassure myself that this fast heart, this lack of breath, this pain in my chest, it’s normal. It’s just how love feels. To keep myself from running away, I concentrate on a pair of guys directly in front of me. They’re older than me, but not much. They have sports bags at their feet, which they push along the ground as the line moves. One is done up with brown parcel tape. Either side of the tape, the broken zip sags. Their voices are quiet, like in a church, so I can’t hear what they say except to know that they’re from another island. They wear ironed shirts and baseball caps. The high ceiling makes them seem small, though they must both be taller than me by at least a head.
Focussing on the other travellers makes me feel calmer but, suddenly, Michael’s hand is on my shoulder, directing me towards a desk that has become free. I tell myself his grip is reassuring. Behind the desk, a woman looks down. She is dressed like all the other women behind the desks to the right and to the left: red hat, white veil hanging from one side. The woman’s smile is drawn on with perfect red lipstick that matches her hat. Her black eyeliner is immaculate.
‘Your tickets, ma’am.’
I make to hand her the envelope. Once my hand has left my chest, it shakes freely and the envelope flaps at the woman, who snatches it, manicured nails tlacking against the paper.
The nothing inside now fills me in waves that threaten to make me black out, and I put my hand, empty of envelope, on the desk for support. Michael still stands behind, though now a few steps back. I can’t tell if I miss his presence or feel relieved at the space. The woman with the perfect red lips takes an eternity to examine the contents and raises one of her perfect eyebrows when I confirm that my school bag is my only bag.
Stepping away from the desk, manila envelope again gripped to my chest, I almost fall into Michael, who takes my shoulder tightly and directs me around the winding queues. I nod and shake my head and reassure him that I don’t have cold feet, and he kisses me gently on the forehead. It makes my heart beat even faster. I want to shout or hide, but don’t know if it’s from love or fear or something else entirely. I wish Mom had said something before I left.
Soon, we reach a pair of glass doors, sliding back and forth only slightly as each person passes through, never closing completely. He turns me to face him.
‘We’ll embrace goodbye here. When we next meet, we’ll be in New York and we can start looking for your dad!’
He smiles again with his rubbery lips which have touched mine and pulls me to him. I turn my face aside and put my hands around his body in an embrace I’ve never given José, that I’ve dreamed of giving Dad. But I don’t squeeze. I hold my breath against the exotic perfume under which I can now also identify nicotine and stale smells from the noodle shop. The rough lapel of his suit jacket pushes against my cheek and the unexpected bulge of his belt buckle feels uncomfortable against my stomach. It doesn’t feel like they say in the magazines. To be honest, by now I just feel numb.
It’s a long time before he loosens his arms enough to lean down and kiss me, this time wetly, on my closed lips. At the touch, something finally slices through me. I tell myself it isn’t fear, that I’m too old to be so childish. This is love. It must be. He releases me. I walk like a drunk into the flow of people moving through the glass doors, and hear him saying he’ll miss me, that we’ll soon be eating pizza in New York, and that I’ll introduce him to Dad. I don’t turn.
Standing in the mass, the swaying light-headedness begins to subside, and I look around at the unsympathetic whiteness of the hall. The young men from before are a little ahead of me. Above them is a large plastic sign, swinging, with letters big and proud, ‘OFW’. I wish I could just smile and be one of them, but something is holding me back. At the other end of the hall are more desks, and people fan out from the queue to stand at them, handing over their envelopes. Each desk has ‘OFW’ written across the top of the glass that separates the officials from the crowd. At the far corner, an identical desk invites, in multiple languages, ‘all other passport holders’, and a scanty line of foreigners wait by it, looking out of place.
I wish I could tell José about it. I’m surprised by how urgently I wish it. He’ll be at home now. Wondering where I am. Maybe he’s gone into my room to look for me. I wish I had left a note.
It is with this in my mind that I hand over the manila envelope for the second time. The official frowns and points to a small sign that asks passengers to take their documents out of their envelopes before coming to the counter. He clicks his tongue against the top of his mouth as he spreads the papers across his desk, shaking his head. I think of Michael crossing himself and the dizziness returns. I grab the side of the counter. The official looks up, but only for a second. As he focuses again on the papers, I try to interpret what had been in his eyes.
Finally, he gathers everything together, hands it back in a pile with the envelope at the bottom, and tells me to go to gate T-3-4. Able again to breathe, I leave the desk, reciting ‘T-3-4-T-3-4 …’ to myself, looking desperately at the many signs suspended from the plasterboard ceiling, with arrows pointing here and there. I pass shops selling bags and bracelets and cigarettes and a big wooden mural map of the world. I stop only briefly to breathe the glorious, fresh saltiness of a noodle shop, and then continue again to follow signs, down some steps, under a blue billboard on which a happy woman in a northern city from a postcard declares, ‘Non-bank remittance services you can trust’.
Relieved to be through the security checks, I start to feel anxious about Michael. I feel bad for mistrusting him even for a second, and I hope I still managed to say a proper goodbye. I hope he’s not cross or upset, that he doesn’t feel like I used him to get to go to New York. I resolve to buy him a prese
nt once I’m making money, in time to give to him when he comes. I wish he could be with me now, holding my hand.
Down the stairs, more kiosks sell snacks and I finally find myself at T-3-4. Someone lets me through a rope barrier into a seating area, where rows of plastic seats face a see-through plastic hoarding. In front of it stands an enormous flat-screen TV, flanked by glowing blue and white ‘Samsung’ hoardings. My jeans are sticking to the backs of my thighs.
At home, we’ve had cable TV for ages now, and I recognise the fast pace and commentator patter of an NBA game. Every few minutes, the game stops for American infomercials for slimming products or muscle enhancers. In some weird way, it reminds me of church, Father Patrice speaking about paradise or hope or something, with everyone facing the same way, feeling uncomfortable in the plastic seats. Like at chapel, I snatch glances at the people on either side of me. Some stare at their hands. Others talk urgently into mobile phones. They speak more openly than they usually would in public. In their voices, the same weight that hangs in the air over the pews.
My mind is filling with evenings without José, of conversations un-pursued with the girls at school, the teachers. There’ll be no more awards ceremonies. And Mom will now lie alone, without a daughter to cook or talk to her. A chill is spreading through my belly and across my forehead. I try to remind myself about Mr Tang, and Dad, wherever he might be, and about Michael, who’ll help me find him.
But, however much I try to be calm, what I’m doing suddenly seems enormous and I feel Dad, a decade ago, himself the child of an OFW, sitting in this seat, the same sweat sticking his jeans to his thighs, not knowing whether he would return. He hasn’t.
The world feels heavy and inevitable. It’s too late to change my mind.
People start passing by, on the other side of the hoarding in front of us. I try to see their faces through the thick plastic but I can’t. Soon, the ladies in red hats with identical bright red lips start to float between the plastic seats, summoning groups of people by ticket numbers.
I stand stiffly when my number is called. There’s nothing else I can do. I follow the others through the open gate to the hot tarmac, towards the metal steps. And so it is, uselessly looking around for a familiar face, that I take my last steps from the city.
9.
Kaveh Mirzaee and the Woman from Lashar
Lily Mabura
Kaveh Mirzaee was a miniature artist from Ābādān – that small island city between two rivers that flow into the Persian Gulf. The people of Ābādān love their city; it is a garden of palm trees edged with old wooden boats rocking in the surrounding waters. In Ābādān, one can smell the sea in the breeze and in the bounty of hammour and shrimp in the open fish markets. But Kaveh Mirzaee now lived away from Ābādān on the top floor of his building and kept to himself.
Being from Ābādān was not information he volunteered easily for he had seen the garden that was Ābādān torched and its oil refinery flaming red and black into the open skies of the gulf. Besides, the jokes that were made about people from Ābādān – with their Ray-Ban sunglasses, cowboy boots, obsession with soccer, bandari music, and a sweet tooth entirely devoted to doughnuts – was something he wished to avoid, even in jest. This, plus a host of other reasons, was behind his refusal to take part in an Eid progressive dinner with his neighbours.
Of course, it was absolutely true that, in his younger, motor-biking years, he had been in possession of a second-hand pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a pair of black, lace-up Western boots that had matched his Kurdish riding pants. And that he had long harboured a dream of donning the yellow-and-blue uniform of Sanat Naft FC and celebrating match victories in a bandari den. Then the First Persian Gulf War had begun with the September Siege of Ābādān in 1980 and had dragged on for eight years. Nothing had remained the same after that war – it had ravaged the nation like leprosy ravages the body and leaves indelible marks.
This is how he had found himself living on a war-vet allowance in a government-subsidised studio miles away from Ābādān. His home was on a tree-lined street that meandered its way up to the Tochal look-out point in Tehran. The street had narrow qanats on either side, in which water ran down from the surrounding mountains, irrigating sycamore trees that towered as high as the buildings before branching out in a green profusion that arched over the street below. Traffic peaked in the early morning and evening hours, but it was ten o’clock now, and the traffic had eased out considerably, leaving the street to a group of construction workers, who were completing an old apartment block close by.
Such grand incompleteness this was: gray stone and concrete under scaffolding that had been weathered by Tehran’s alternating harsh winters and summers into something of an old frock. ‘Everything in the world,’ the building seemed to say to Kaveh Mirzaee, ‘is as incomplete as I am in this old frock that beats in the wind like a Qashqaee nomad’s tent in the mountains. I wait out the winters like the nomads with their horses and cattle and sheep do in the valleys and then hide away from the summer’s high sun up in the mountains, seeking whatever grasses remain on the mountain slopes and harvested wheat fields. Look around you and you will see other incomplete buildings in this lull, Kaveh Mirzaee – even incomplete people, for that matter, with incomplete lives and incomplete hearts and incomplete memories. Should not the construction workers be set on this inherent incompleteness?’
The construction workers were mainly young Afghan men who laboured in Tehran at the onset of spring and wintered back home – ever on the road from one place to another. Kaveh Mirzaee was seated at his desk, painting, the adjacent window open to let in some fresh air, and could hear these seasonal Afghans steeped in their work.
During the Siege of Ābādān, he had been taken prisoner and held till the end of the war in a shabestan in Ramadi, Iraq. The silence of the underground colonnaded brick shabestan, which was all arches and domes, was only broken by the howls of frequent gusts of wind that buffeted the tower above and the slow, shuffling steps of the old man who brought him food each day. It was for this reason that Kaveh Mirzaee was a man attuned to sounds and smells. The noise that the Afghans were making in the street below did not disturb him at all. He listened to them hammer and drill and lift and drop and call out to each other in all their youthful zest, while that old frock of a scaffolding beat in the wind and baked in the sun. In the midst of it all, he also heard pigeons cooing in the sycamore trees close to his window.
Sometimes he left little pieces of bread on the windowsill and he would watch the birds wheel down and peck at them. When skies were red over Tehran, blighted by fierce sandstorms blowing in from the deserts of Iraq, the pigeons not only pecked at the bread, but sometimes ventured in as well. They did so because they did not fear Kaveh Mirzaee – he had the stillness of the brick shabestan he had lived in for eight years within him; this stillness ran through his soul like the crescent dune fields of Rig-e Jenn in the Great Salt Desert, where not even the ancient caravan roads had ever crossed and nothing but wild spirits and onagers lived.
It was there in the way he moved. While neighbours hurriedly barred their windows and doors as the sandstorms blew in, Kaveh Mirzaee did so slowly, letting the pigeons in until the last minute. Then he would sit back with the pigeons about him and listen to the sand-laden storm toppling potted plants and garden statues from the balconies of his neighbourhood. There was nothing one could really do when it came to the storms and even less when it came to the fine sand they carried. It always found its way through all the barred doors and windows, seeping in through the finest of cracks. Later, one would find specks of sand on silk prayer rugs, under the fridge, in a barley sack, amongst rice cookies stored in a closed tin box in the larder, and in the pockets of winter coats stashed in the farthest corners of wardrobes. Kaveh Mirzaee moved quietly, hardly fretting, in the midst and aftermath of all this. Yes, so it was there in the way he moved and in the way he spoke – on the rare occasions that he did speak.
Because Kav
eh Mirzaee had not yet stepped out to buy some bread this morning, there were no pigeons hovering at his window to be fed. He had hit his stride in his work and did not want to interrupt it with a walk to the bakery. He, instead, brewed some imported black Kenyan tea, which he usually purchased in small packets from the building’s corner shop, and sweetened it with brown crystallised sugar.
He had been working for three straight hours when hunger set in. So he decided to take a shower and then head out to the bakery. Taking a shower was a ritual for Kaveh Mirzaee. When he had been unchained from the shabestan to be handed over to the Red Crescent for repatriation, his keepers, an elderly Iraqi Kurdish couple whose Ramadi country home and services had been requisitioned by the Iraqi army, had prepared a bath for him in a thick olive tree grove. He had cleansed himself under broken sunlight with rose-scented water and goat-milk soap, in a shelter of Ba’shiqa olive trees.
The elderly Kurdish couple had two sons: one had emigrated to Palestine, while the other had fallen in battle fighting for Iraqi troops. Kaveh Mirzaee had dressed with an assortment of these sons’ clothes and left, a free man, in the Red Crescent van. From Ramadi, he had carried with him the stillness of the shabestan and everything that the old Kurdish man had taught him about miniature art. In memory of this day of freedom, Kaveh Mirzaee had decorated his Tehran bathroom with an olive-tree tile mosaic and used nothing but goat-milk soap for his skin, which had grown too sensitive for anything else.
These were the recurring memories occupying his mind when he stepped out of the bathroom, his trim black hair – shot through with silver – still wet, his pale skin moist, and the scent of goat-milk soap in the now humidified air. His bare feet had just touched the yellow Azarshahr travertine tile floor outside the bathroom when he noticed a sudden movement, only to realise that he had narrowly missed stepping on what looked like a snake.