The Walking

by Laleh Khadivi

  What if we don’t go back? If we keep going?

  His brother laughed.

  Where should we go, dear Saladin of the Ayyubids? Conqueror of the western lands. Where do we go with no money and no family?

  Saladin ignored the joke and picked gently at the buried form. The earth was loosening her grasp, and Saladin could see a hoof, bent at the knee.

  To a city. With electricity. And cars. We could hide in Istanbul. Hamid’s brothers went. He said the girls don’t cover and half of them have blond hair. And there is a cinema on every other corner …

  Beya Baba! Istanbul! What do you know about Istanbul? They put their Kurds in prison for speaking Kurdish there! With what money do you plan to live in Istanbul?

  Saladin had nothing to say against these charges. He dug with greater force and finally the earth let go. The figurine of a goat, solid weight, entirely of gold. The face was complete with details: thin lips, wide eyes and a stern jaw, horns erect, precise. He rubbed it in his hand a few times but could not hold back the excitement of this omen, this sign from the ground itself. He held the goat up in front of Ali’s face.

  Ali, look. This is the money that will take us to Istanbul. It is gold. It can take us even farther.

  Ali grabbed the goat and put it in his mouth, and because there was no room in the hole, the brothers fought sloppily with much grabbing and screaming, and soon the other men came to watch and laugh at the boys wrapped around each other like snakes. They raised them out and chided.

  In our village a brother doesn’t fight his brother.

  Ali spit the goat out and handed it to the old man, who rubbed off the saliva and nodded at the sight of the steady horns and even face.

  Aufareen.

  He passed the figurine to Saladin.

  Here. Our news today, our news tomorrow, the news from one thousand years ago.

  That night the village ate together outside. A lamb roasted on a large iron spit, and a young girl walked from man to woman to man and offered honey candies. She wore no scarf and her hair was the color of the high grains and fell just below her waist. She sat between the brothers on a bench they shared by the fire.

  I am the beekeeper. I must stay to keep the bees.

  They took pieces of her candy and the brothers nodded and sucked as sweetness flooded their mouths, the flavor of every clover for miles.

  Ali faced her.

  May I have another piece?

  The girl obliged and held out the tray. Ali placed the candy in his mouth and smiled. She offered Saladin the sweets on her tray and he refused.

  Ali, we should leave soon. We should leave now. Our time here is done. We have our gold … no one knows our names yet, but tomorrow they might …

  Saladin watched Ali take in his demand and then look at the girl. A gold-haired wife. A return down the mountains with a gold-haired wife, split-legged, atop a horse, singing. They had known the fantasy since they were boys.

  Saladin, relax. I am the one who has done wrong. Not you. Wait here with me for a week more and we will return together, and I will fight and you can hide in the cinema. It is not for me to judge that we are different. Maman and Baba always said …

  For courage Saladin caressed the prize in his pocket. He let his fingers run across the eyes, the stiff legs, the pressed and stubborn face.

  Boshe. I will go by myself. You go back to that town to die and I will go the other way.

  Saladin turned away from the fire, the roasted lamb, the honey candies and walked out from the village of silence and wind. He pulled the last of the honey sweetness from his cheeks and kept his fist tight around the body of the goat and promised himself to walk until he came to a highway full of cars, storefronts full of radios. When he reached the gravel road that had brought them to the village, he heard Ali’s breath and his light footsteps fall in behind his own.

  Okay. Okay. Maybe you are right. Maybe one village away will be safer. What difference does it make as long as we can walk our steps back home? Inshallah.

  The words meant nothing to Saladin, and he let his ears fill with the permission in his brother’s voice, the hard love and hope. He walked forward, fast and ahead.

  Empty Days Made of Heat

  In the hours just before dawn Saladin falls asleep on the beach; sand blanket, sand bed.

  When he wakes, the surf is farther away, pulled down from his feet like sheets left behind by a risen bedmate. The air is full of fog and his body is stiff from the chill of wet clothes and the cool night. Beside his head, bugs jump into and out of the sand, their long, thin forms quick with a logic Saladin, half-awake, cannot make out. He looks beyond them into the thick, blue mist where there are people. Two girls walk hand in hand, heads thrown back, laughing. A tall, thin man moves a flat-bottomed plate tenderly across the sand. Now and again the plate beeps, now and again the man crouches, smells the sand and digs. Closer, a boy of Saladin’s age stretches out in a posture of easy relief. He wears a knitted sweater and a thick winter cap and keeps a bottle close at hand. Saladin does not know the names of these other citizens and cannot call to them in greeting or query, and exhaustion comes over him again, thick and heavy. He puts his head to the damp sand and curls until a coal of warmth heats in his center and he can sleep. After a time the man with the metal detector reaches him. He runs the plate over Saladin. Nothing buzzes, nothing beeps.

  When he wakes again, it is under the glare of a fierce sun. His shirt and pants are baked on now; along with the sand and sweat, the stiffness of his salty clothes aggravates his collar and crotch. He stands to shake it out, and his muscles and bones and clothes break open this thin, new sandy shell and Saladin moves like a crab—quickly, angrily, sideways—to the sea. The ocean is calm with small waves that break on themselves, and he takes his shoes off, rolls up his pants and walks in. The water is crisp and pulls down and out the heat of panic that spreads through and over him, panic of a man without a place in the world. He lets his feet sink down into the wet sand, a little deeper with every wave.

  He looks at the shore of America.

  The wide beach is spotted with families and people lying down alone. A few children play in the water, and a mother is always close by, with a towel, a shovel or a bucket, and Saladin cannot look at the mothers for too long without thinking of his own mother, her wish to spend a day at the sea. He looks back to the sand where people arrange themselves in little colonies of blankets and umbrellas and low metal chairs. They are not as lively as he imagined. There are no boys with guitars and hand drums and no girls dancing. It is a quiet morning at the beach, no more, no less. He looks beyond, to the long wooden boardwalk where people walk and run and roll in front of an endless string of stores whose windows advertise postcards and sunglasses and inflated toys. Some of the men and women wear their swimming suits like regular clothes, and this is an encouraging detail, a reminder that his life is going as planned. It may not be the beach as he knows it from movies, but it is sunny and the people are happy and the people are tan and near naked. He washes his hands and face and arms, pulls his feet up and out of the sand and walks back to shore, where he dries quickly, tucks and buttons his shirt, and moves toward the boardwalk, toward this first day of his Los Angeles life.

  On the boardwalk Saladin steps into a heavy traffic of children on roller skates and men on short boards with wheels and old woman on bicycles. He moves in spurts and tries not to get hit, but it is difficult because the more he moves, the more he notices the asses and breasts that are everywhere, offered and ready for all eyes. The traffic shouts at him.

  Hey!

  Watch out!

  And he jumps and runs from one side of the sunny walk to another. The girls are alone and in groups, dressed in two pieces that cover their breasts and bottoms and little more. Some of them wear short dresses, and some wear cutoff jeans but no shirts. And Saladin cannot stop himself from staring as they pass. He wants badly to talk to a girl, to talk so that one might smile and he might feel the skin sh
e shows, but they move past him without so much as a half glance. A group of dancers perform against a rail, and Saladin stops to watch and gather himself. They are black skinned and young and they fold and unfold to the angry, fast beats that play from a machine that is not plugged in. One of the dancers offers him a hat and Saladin sees that it is full of coins and folded bills, and he shakes his head and moves back into the flow of smiling old women and hairless, muscular men and laughing girls who move their tongues around ice creams and straws and their own lips, and Saladin walks in a bliss of disbelief. He tries to do as they do, to pay no mind to the fantasy all around, and walks straight and with a stiff neck, pulled up and on by the hot, bright sun, and soon he feels as if he has been walking like this for a long time. It is as if this stride on the California boardwalk is no more than a continuation of the steps he and Ali took away from the honey maiden, steps that led them into a lonely, blank dawn and a hot, empty day.

  For the rest of the night the brothers did not speak. At sunrise Saladin still marched ahead, keeping direction as if they had a destination, a place they were expected to be. Behind him Ali moved slower and stopped now and again to look about the wide land and wonder if that was a village over there and maybe they should stop and stay. Saladin said little, only enough to quiet his brother and buy himself more silence. As long as the villages were small and without power, he knew they had to keep going, move on to some place of noise and light. By noon they were in a desolate land without even one village to tempt them to rest or to take shade from the sun that pushed into the crowns of their heads like dull daggers.

  When the first car, a yellow Paykan, slowed and the man leaned his head out the passenger window and shouted:

  A ride?!

  Saladin easily broke his stride and ran to the car, shouting back at his brother with a volume and force he had wanted to use all day:

  Ali, come on! Quick! Let’s go!

  The driver introduced himself as the older brother, and the passenger agreed.

  Of course I am the younger. And more handsome.

  From what Saladin could see the two shared no features. The driver was dark and balding, round over the cheeks and shoulders, and his brother the passenger was fair skinned and sharp featured with yellow hair that spiraled out from his head in huge curls. After the introductions the car began to move, and Ali looked darkly at Saladin and pushed himself between the driver and the passenger.

  Excuse me for asking …

  Ali cleared his throat and the voice that came out was boyish and high. We are grateful for your kind offer. But my brother and I are only going a short distance.

  No one listened and no one answered. The passenger brother was busy twisting the radio knob over patches of broken static cut through with the sound of news. He tuned until the broadcast played clearly and the voice of a news anchor sounded out, calm and proud.

  Today riots in Shiraz brought out ten thousand … A Jewish merchant was arrested and then shot for resisting arrest … No word has been issued from the Shah, who remains in exile in Egypt. There are reports of a grave physical illness … Outside the city of Kermanshah three revolutionary guards have been injured by renegade Kurdish rebels thought now to have escaped to the mountains of the west. The Ayatollah urges citizens to come forth with any information about the rebels. Detractors of any kind are considered a grave threat, and the Ayatollah reminds us that the peace of the republic is in our hands. Thanks be to Allah. The most merciful. Khodafez.

  The passenger brother switched off the radio and answered back.

  Van. We are going to Van. Where are you two going?

  Ali pushed himself back into the seat, and Saladin watched as in seconds his brother was replaced by a ghost, a spirit of fear and nerves, pale faced and covered in a thin sweat. Ali cleared his throat again, and Saladin saw the node in Ali’s neck pulse as it would in a child that swallows again and again, so as not to cry.

  We are going to Van too. We too. Us too. To Van. For exams.

  The passenger brother looked at the driver, who nodded once slowly, then spoke.

  Very convenient. Do you have papers?

  Saladin and Ali remained silent.

  It’s no matter. The border is no problem. We do it all the time. The car has Turkish plates and our mother lives just on the other side, and we are doing nothing more than going to Friday lunch. She lives in one of those old towns, older than old, famous for its crumbling Mongol castle. Hoscap Palace. There is nothing to the crossing, the passenger brother reassured them, his golden curls bouncing around his eyes and jaw. It is simple. I tell the guards the same joke every time. I say, yes, yes, I realize we’ve been back and forth a number of times in the last few months, but what can we do? Our dear maman would die if we did not make it to Friday lunch. One o’clock exactly. What would she do without her four most beloved sons? God bless her, mother of twelve. She was here long before these silly borders. How do you expect an angel like that to understand?

  The passenger brother laughed at his old joke and repeated bits of it beneath his breath. Next to him the driver brother squinted at Saladin in the rearview mirror.

  Can you believe that stupid joke works every time? Imagine …

  They arrived in Tabriz as the city woke from the afternoon nap. The streets filled with men and women on their way to shops or to work. At a busy intersection a revolutionary guard stopped every other car to search the insides and interrogate the drivers. Women in chadors flapped past women in skirts and makeup and each cast back their mean kohl stares. Saladin watched flocks of mullahs move in loud, confident groups and large banners of Khomeini swayed from every available banister, railing and light pole. So many images of the same man. There had been only one image of the Shah, the same one that hung in his father’s barracks, at the school, in the lobby of the cinema, but this new Khomeini came in a dozen faces: ashen against a gray backdrop that spelled PROGRESS; colorful in a photograph that showed him receiving flowers from a young child; heavy lidded and severe before a field of tulips, the word FREEDOM spelled atop his turban. He never smiled and his seriousness seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  They parked the car in an alley beside the bazaar, and the driver and the passenger brothers got out and stretched, spoke quietly to each other and smoked cigarettes. Saladin and Ali waited in the car, and when the brothers were done talking, the younger opened Saladin’s door and asked:

  Well? Are you waiting for the servants to do it?

  The driver brother insisted they eat at a certain kabobi and then take their tea at a particular teahouse and smoke at yet another teahouse and on and on, one after the next, each more delicious than before. The lights of the town had come on and the streets were busy, the glass of the restaurants and teahouses fogged and dripping. Saladin could not help but enjoy himself. Somehow his life was instantly different. What was confined before, by rules and family and a life of familiarity, was let loose and thus possible here. He was in a city, with new friends. He could take tea like a man in a teahouse, smoke like a man with the rest of the men. He could move, if he liked, across a border, away from his childhood and into some great, open unknown. The directions of his life, at this moment, were limitless. Saladin ate greedily and smoked with a fervor, and the tobacco went to his head to make him quick, impatient and crazy.

  Ali did not smoke or eat the offered snacks and took every opportunity to ask the brothers.

  The border. When do we cross the border? Can you stop just before it? My brother and I can make our own way to Van later …

  The driver grew annoyed.

  Eh, baba! Who starts a desert crossing dying of thirst? Drink, drink now and soon enough you will be wishing for water, for the fragrant tea in this lovely teahouse. Relax, we will cross together. No question about it. It is our pleasure to take you.

  At a nearly empty teahouse they were joined by a man in a stiff silk suit who carried a heavy leather satchel. He wore sunglasses with yellow lenses
and a gold watch. He sat and ordered no tea and made no small talk. He looked first at Saladin and then at Ali and then back at Saladin and then at Ali again. There were no introductions and the passenger brother began to speak in a low and formal tone. A few revolutionary guards came in, their faces like masks, and sat to drink tea. Saladin tried to ignore them, but the shine of their new boots caught his eye, so similar were they to the boots that marched through his father’s barracks yesterday. Or was it the day before? Or was it last week? Or the week before? The stylish man paid no attention to the guards and carried on a reserved conversation with the passenger brother that ended with the question:

  Which one will it be?

  The passenger pointed to Ali.

  This one.

  Are you sure?

  The stylish man looked at Ali directly and then around him as if at the aura that came off the edges of his skin and hair.

  Yes. He is more afraid. More afraid of a mistake.

  Very well. There is payment in Ankara. Not before.

  The stylish man stood up and left without handshakes or embraces and left behind his heavy leather satchel.

  They drove into the night, and no matter how many times Saladin put the satchel on Ali’s lap, his brother knocked it off, and after a time Saladin was forced to consider it. What could be of such value to require such precautions? He knew of nothing, aside from gold, or silver perhaps, but the bag was too light. He thought about his father, what he valued most, his uniform, his glass pipes, his opium. His opium. Saladin picked up the bag and smelled through the leather. It smelled of his father’s jacket, the thick musk of dirt and sweat and opium locked in the wool. The smell was the same. In an instant Saladin knew the cost of a border crossing, knew that if they were caught at the border, they would be sent to some dank jail cell just like the one their father used to man. He pushed the bag toward his sleeping brother and stared out the window at the night desert that passed, part star, part earth, and stopped himself from thinking too much about what could or could not be.