I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  But my new friend’s place had a locking door, a couch, and running water. I gladly gave him one hundred dollars, and the second he was gone, I took the longest shower of my life. I had just gotten dressed when I heard the doorknob jiggle and in walked a man I had never seen before, a man who looked just as stunned to see me. He yelled at me, and I didn’t have to speak English to understand—I had invaded his space. I tried in my broken English to explain that I had paid for the room, but I didn’t know the words for “rent,” “landlord,” or “tenant,” and this guy didn’t seem like a patient person. He jumped on me and we rolled on the floor, hollering in our respective languages and drawing the neighbors. In the melee, I heard someone ask who the hell I was in Farsi. I screamed in Farsi to please translate for me, and the Farsi voice said something in English that made the intruder stop pummeling me. My savior was a Persian neighbor who carefully took me into the hallway and explained that the man I was fighting with was a very dangerous drug dealer who lived in the room.

  “How did you get in there?”

  My story sounded so stupid, but it was true.

  “This man said I could stay there for a month for one hundred dollars.”

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know his name. He was about this tall . . .”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Look, brother, you can’t stay here. I will explain to everybody what happened. But for your safety, you should leave right now.”

  I walked out into the night, homeless again. And, of course, my bike was gone. The fat clouds opened up, and suddenly I was in a downpour. You know how you sometimes see a person sprawled out on the street, totally given up on life, and you wonder what in the world happened to that guy? Well that guy probably did what he was told all his life, worked hard, had a family, and one day he finally admitted that all he was doing was running in place, and he simply stopped moving his feet. I know that guy. After ten days of sleeping in the park, that guy was about to be me.

  When I was down to my last fifty cents, I approached a hot dog vendor who looked Iranian and offered him the coins.

  “Hot dog, OK?” My stomach was empty, and I hoped he would take pity.

  “Are you Iranian?” he asked in Farsi.

  “Yes! I’m sorry, this is all the money I have; I was hoping to pay you back.”

  He lifted the lid and reached into the depths of his cart where the hot dogs were kept warm, then placed three in my hands, waving away the money.

  “On me. Are you new here?”

  It was so thrilling to have someone to listen that I told him everything, from Masjed Soleyman to saving the Iraqi soldier to Ramadi camp to jumping ship and living al fresco in Vancouver. He listened for two hours, pausing only to serve a customer, nodding knowingly and occasionally uttering a word of sympathy and understanding. It was like I had been waiting for this man my whole life.

  “Are you a refugee, then?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are you homeless? The government can help you, you know.”

  I had yet to fill out an application for refugee status. It was probably safe now, but I didn’t know where to begin. I asked the vendor what I should do. He offered to call someone who could help me and opened his cell phone. He spoke in English, and I worried he might be calling the police, but something made me trust him.

  “My friend says you can stay with him and he will help you with your refugee claim.”

  Ten minutes later, a man drove up to the hot dog stand and waved me into his car. I was frightened, but the alternative was sleeping outside in the rain again. The stranger let me stay in a room in his house for several days, and took me to a government office where I told my story to an immigration officer with the help of an interpreter. The officer already knew my name and a little bit about me, because the ship captain had reported me missing.

  “Your captain reported you are an honest man and not a thief in Iran. Is that correct?”

  “Correct.” The officer didn’t have to know about my brief stint in debt recovery services in Iran.

  “Did the captain tell you that I was a child soldier? That I was tortured as a prisoner of war?”

  The officer shuffled through his papers. “No, there’s nothing about that here,” he replied.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked.

  I began with running away from home at thirteen. Three hours later, I finished with the story of the hot dog vendor. At the end of it all, he asked me to sign my name to a promise I would not commit any crimes in Canada, then gave me two hundred dollars and a letter of introduction to a place called Welcome House, where I could stay temporarily with other new immigrants while I looked for work.

  I went directly to the address and found a corner building made of beige bricks, with offices below and two floors of apartments above. I pushed open the glass door and walked to the receptionist, who to my delight was also Persian. She read my letter from the immigration office and then took me down a hallway decorated with children’s finger paintings, past the cluttered offices of social workers, and up a flight of stairs to the apartments. She opened the second door on the right, and I found myself in a small room that was divided into a kitchen and a living room. There was a faded foldout couch and a big television, and if I turned left, I faced a miniscule bathroom flanked by two bedrooms, each with three cots inside. Only two of the cots were taken, both by Iranians: Akbar of the Ray-Ban sunglasses, a reedy guy with sharp cheekbones who was about my age and had been in a different battalion in Khorramshahr; and roly-poly Hamid with a receding hairline and no military experience and the irritating air of someone who dismisses anyone younger than himself. He was about a decade older than Akbar and me, and a Communist who made no attempt in my first week at Welcome House to disguise his opinion that we were political rubes. I liked Akbar, and we ganged up on Hamid by silently farting in the living room whenever he was watching Gladiator, which was like every third day.

  But as far as roommates go, I was a dud. Now that my fight-or-flight-response could recede with my indoor sleeping arrangements, I had time to really think about my life. And it was a depressing picture, to put it mildly. Here I was, thirty-three, living with two strangers in a barren subsidized apartment, not knowing if I would ever see my wife and daughter again. I missed them so much that I would cry spontaneously throughout the day: in the middle of brushing my teeth, while boiling an egg, while watching my clothes tumble in the dryer, in the middle of a dream. Akbar and Hamid tried to cheer me up, bringing me glasses of water and Kleenex, but I was inconsolable. They tried to get me out of the apartment to get fresh air, but I couldn’t find anything more appealing than sleep. I had fallen into depressions before, but this one felt like I was buried in a crucible of hardened lead. I was a man composed of nothing, a professional loser who had let his job, his money, his motherland, his wife, and his daughter slip through his fingers. I wanted to work, but that would require me to learn English, and right then, that seemed like one more mountain in my way, perhaps one that I just didn’t have any more strength to climb.

  So I wallowed in the valley, letting the days go by without calling Maryam. She did not marry the person I had become, and I couldn’t let her find that out. Setayesh would have a jailbird for a dad if I returned to Iran, and it would kill me to watch her admiration for me slowly melt away as she grew up and realized her father couldn’t give her everything she deserved. My own self-hatred I could live with; it was their disappointment in me that I couldn’t bear. So that is why, in early July, I began venturing outside to root around in the Dumpsters until finally I found a good piece of rope. I tied it into a noose and hid it behind the children’s climbing structure just outside my apartment door, and thought about it. And after a couple days of consideration, I came to this: It would be a relief to both Maryam and Setayesh if I didn’t exist. That was the only thing left that I could give them. I could spare them from getting dragged down with me.

  “You sur
e you don’t want to go with us?”

  Hamid and Akbar were on their way to the waterfront to see the fireworks. All week there had been Canada Day celebrations for the country’s birthday. I rolled on my cot to face the wall and waved them away.

  “Suit yourself,” Hamid said.

  I listened to them clomp down the stairwell, then I walked to the narrow crank window in the living room, too small to fit through, and watched them round the corner out of view. I dragged two chairs from the dining room table and positioned them side by side under the living-room light fixture. I stood on one arm of each chair, unscrewed the fixture from the ceiling, and removed the light, revealing a hole in the popcorn plaster and exposing a wooden ceiling beam. I looped the rope over the beam and secured it. I took a deep breath, put my head through the noose, and kicked the chairs away.

  I heard a crack like a walnut shell being crushed, and realized with horror that the sound came from my neck. As the rope constricted my throat, currents of pain radiated through my body as if I had just been shocked with a megavolt. My lizard brain suddenly woke from hibernation, and I realized that I wanted to live. I kicked and thrashed, trying to reach one of the chairs with my foot, but they were mockingly out of reach. The sound of my pulse became louder and louder in my temple, like a drumbeat counting down to my death. The dirge inside my head intensified, like my own regret was knocking to get out, then my whole body began to convulse with the tempo.

  Fuck me, I thought.

  And then Akbar had his mouth on mine. I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was his crooked nose, bent from being broken so many times during the war. I was on my back, and he was blowing air into my lungs. He had come back for his sunglasses, found me swinging, and cut me down. The middle-aged neighbor from Afghanistan was also in the room, and when she saw me open my eyes, she slapped me across the face.

  “Stupid! What’d you do that for?”

  It was what my own mother would have done, and I instantly loved her for it. Then she dropped to her knees and rocked me in her arms as I wept.

  “Don’t cry. I lost two sons; I lost my husband, my sister, my brother, my mother. They killed all my family. But life goes on. You still have your wife and daughter. Why would you go and kill yourself?”

  If I could have stopped crying and formed words, I would have told her that I realized that now. I’d come to the same thoughts while struggling for oxygen, right before I blacked out.

  Hamid huffed into the room, and my roommates each took an elbow and helped me walk to the emergency room at St. Paul’s Hospital, about fifteen minutes away. Nurses gave me fluids and kept me overnight for observation, and in the morning a doctor said I could be released on one condition: that I go immediately for psychological counseling at an immigrant help center called VAST—the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture.

  TWENTY

  ANGELS

  Getting fired from the recycling plant was the best thing that could have happened. Self-employment has always suited me better, and it didn’t take long before I had charmed the flea market overlords into giving me the prime stall next to the entrance, and my customer base grew so quickly that buyers began showing up at four in the morning when I arrived so they could cherry-pick.

  My inventory was top-notch, and that was because I had started a moving company with my van, and to my great delight I discovered that often customers hired me to clear out homes and storage lockers after the owners had died. They often didn’t want to hassle with the contents and asked me to haul them to the dump, so I had a steady stream of nice antiques. I watched this American television show with my brother called Antiques Roadshow to learn about the provenances of paintings and jewelry and furniture, to make sure I never let anything go for less than it was worth. I had found a house to rent near some organic farms outside of downtown Vancouver proper, and I was on my way to finishing the paperwork to become a permanent Canadian resident. My ultimate goal was Canadian citizenship and a passport, and then I would fly back to Basra and search for Alyaa and Amjad. And for the first time since I left her with our baby in her arms, I started to truly believe that we’d be together again. The old pride I felt when I ran Bruce Lee Restaurant was coming out of the deep freeze now that I had my own business, employees, a roof over my head, and money in my pocket. Every day I woke up tickled pink that I was alive. Behold the return of the Falafel King!

  Even Dad was with me again. Jasem and I had convinced him to move from Jordan to Vancouver, where we could take care of him, now that his heart was giving him trouble and he was starting to lose his memory. We assumed he would love Canada as much as we did, but the adjustment was harder on an old man set in his ways. He complained of the noise and the rainy weather and refused to learn English words or eat anything that didn’t come from Fatemah’s kitchen. My brother and I started worrying that he was becoming depressed, so we arranged for him to get counseling once a week at an immigration services agency. Jasem would translate between Dad and a therapist, and because my brother has poor eyesight, I drove them and waited in the lobby until they were finished.

  It was Dad’s third or fourth therapy appointment at the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture, and I filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee and took my usual seat on the run-down leather sofa in the waiting room. There was a guy sitting in a chair across from the sofa in a short-sleeved shirt with one of those intense stares that gives you the heebie-jeebies.

  “Salaam,” I said, to be polite, then picked up a magazine to avoid conversation and pretended to read it.

  “Salaam,” he answered.

  The man cleared his throat, and even though I didn’t look up, I could feel his eyes on me and sense that he wanted to talk.

  “Are you Iranian?”

  Oh, buddy, you couldn’t be more wrong.

  “Yes,” I said in Farsi, hoping he would leave me alone. I kept my eyes on the pages and waited for the next stupid question.

  “Where in Iran?”

  “Tehran.”

  “Why are you in Canada?”

  I pulled out my cell phone and checked my messages. “Work,” I said.

  Mr. Chatty wouldn’t let it go.

  “I don’t think you’re from Tehran. Your accent sounds like you are a villager.”

  Busted. I laughed it off. “I was just pulling your leg; I’m not Iranian.”

  “Afghani?”

  “Iraqi.”

  He still didn’t believe me. “But you speak good Farsi.”

  “I spent a lot of time in Iran.”

  “As a tourist?”

  “No. Prisoner of war.”

  That ought to have shut him up. But instead he leaned forward in his seat and drilled his eyes into mine so that I couldn’t look away.

  “I was a POW, too.”

  Now this strange little man had my attention. I leaned in toward him. “How long?”

  “Two years, four months, seventeen days, eight hours, and twenty-three minutes.”

  He was telling the truth. Only a real POW would have an answer like that.

  “Did you serve in the military in Iran?” I asked.

  “I was in the Basij. I participated in the liberation of Khorramshahr.”

  I dropped the magazine on the floor. “I was in Khorramshahr. That’s where I was injured and taken prisoner.”

  The man clapped his hands together and squeezed them as if begging for something. He asked me to tell him more.

  “I don’t remember much. I was in a bunker. The Iranians were killing all of us. Suddenly a child soldier, too young to have a beard, came and saved me. He was like an angel sent from God.”

  The man jumped to his feet, his voice rising. “What year?”

  “1982.”

  “Was it May?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have a Koran in your pocket?”

  Now I stood up. “I did. And it had a photo in it.”

  Then the strange man finished my sentence for me:


  “Of a woman holding a baby.”

  Now the man was looking at my teeth.

  “Your teeth, are they missing because someone hit you with their rifle?”

  Now we were shrieking.

  “You! You were the one who saved me?”

  “That was me!”

  I heard people running and saw my brother, father, and the entire office staff running toward the lobby, certain a fight was breaking out, but instead they found two sworn enemies wrapped in a fierce hug. I was overcome with a tremendous sense of destiny, like a connection to something larger, more powerful and mysterious than any religion, something from the deep past that will continue forward for eternity.

  Some people call this God or fate or Mother Nature or karma or magic or the will of the universe. There are many words for explaining what we cannot explain.

  I call it humanity.

  My angel and I may not be brothers by blood or nationality, but we are brothers in the human spirit, and that lasts longer than any culture or tradition or history, and will continue to exist long past life itself. The war destroyed so much—entire towns and families and battalions are now gone. But this one act of grace survived.

  When we finally pulled apart, I asked him a question I’d been holding onto for nineteen years: “Angel, who are you?”

  EPILOGUE

  Zahed and Najah were living just ten miles apart when they bumped into each other in Vancouver in the summer of 2001. Since then, they have become as close as real brothers, with blended families and shared histories. Their reunion gave Zahed a reason to live again, and it gave Najah the chance to finally repay Zahed’s act of mercy on the battlefield. Both men now have Canadian citizenship.

  Zahed opened his own auto shop in Vancouver, Best Man Auto, and was able to bring his wife, Maryam, and his daughter, Setayesh, to live with him in 2004. They had a son, Niayesh, two years later, who has grown to become something of a karate sensation in his community. In 2014 Zahed announced on his stepforpeace.ca website that he is fund-raising for a 3,500-mile peace walk across Canada to New York, where he plans to present the United Nations with signatures collected along the way calling for an end to war and weapons manufacturing. He has had some skin cancers removed from his arm where he was exposed to chemicals in Halabja, and today is very proud of his physical comeback, which he will gladly demonstrate by doing thumb push-ups—a feat more impressive than the great Bruce Lee’s push-ups on a finger and a thumb. During the writing of this book in 2016, Zahed and his father, Ali Askar, reconciled over many difficult phone conversations. His father apologized for his abuse, and Zahed began the long process of forgiveness.