Still some of us, wishful, devoted, reluctant, remained to see the flames die down and the story play out. If we were there when the Shah turned his back to the cameras and boarded the plane, some thought, Now. It is time. Just as so many others who stayed, our brothers, sisters, cousins and friends, thought, Thank God. Now, for Iran, it is time.
Things changed quickly, and one minute we understood what had happened—a revolution to depose an unworthy shah, the possibility of a better future—and the next minute an Islamic state and mass arrests. Stalwarts among us, shortsighted optimists, needed the inspiration of an angry knock on the door, a rude search of our houses by some nameless komiteh guards, our telephones tapped or a few nights in jail.
Have you seen Agha X? It is known he lodged with you for a night. It would do well for you to admit this, to tell us where he has gone.
For some of us it took blood, ours, or that of our loved ones, spilled on the marble floors of our foyers and kitchens. For the most romantic it took a death in our homes or close to our hearts before we packed and fled.
Regardless. The news followed behind, biting at our heels. At the airport, train and bus stations, at the market, the embassy, in taxis and cinemas, on the street and in warm kitchens that didn’t belong to us, the news was always there, nibbling.
Then came the photographs of April 17, 1979. An open massacre. Khomeini’s first determined act is an offensive against the Kurds of the northwest. Eleven men put on trial, eleven verdicts of guilt, ranging from crimes against the new state, illegal loyalty to the Kurdish Democratic Party and on and on. The trial lasts twelve minutes and they are sentenced to immediate execution—the machinery of justice moves brusquely and by dinner everyone is dead. The photographer flees and the photos are broadcast all over the world. Khomeini kills innocent Kurds! A massacre in the mountains! Underneath the headlines is where we found him, the man to haunt us, to put air in our lungs and hurry our steps: the last man standing, hand on his heart, face calm, his executioner slow to fire. In the photographs we saw what the blindfolded eyes could not, and some of us stared. Some of us looked away. All of us kept going.
August 29, 1979: sweeping limitations on the press and all non-Islamic political organizations including the National Democratic Party, the Fedaiyan, the Tudeh.
November 1979: the American embassy in Tehran is overrun by armed students demanding the Shah be returned from the United States to Iran to stand trial. Hostages are taken, kept in poor conditions for 444 days, until liberated by the new president-elect, Ronald Reagan, a man recognized by the young Iranian hostage takers and American hostages alike as a famous actor.
Remember? The movie with the monkey? Bedtime for Bonzo? …
April 1980: the Islamic Cultural Revolution is instituted nationwide. What does this mean? we wondered. Those we left behind explained that the universities had been shut down and all curriculums revised. Courses in Western literature were canceled, history classes amended, Koranic studies made mandatory for all students, and men and women forced into separate classrooms, all women made to sit at the back of the bus. Sharia law was instated nationwide.
What?
We asked.
That ancient thing where every woman has to wear a veil and every thief has his hand severed?
We laughed nervously in the silence after their response.
If we had left by September 1980, the last of the news came chasing after us, tearing at the flesh of our ankles and heels and soft hearts. September 18, Iraqi army battalions invade the western border with Iran. Khomeini calls all boys of a certain age to the front, to their duty for the country and God. Just like that, the country is, for no reason, at war. We stopped to hear this last of all news, to let the bile of terror rise in our throats until we could no longer breathe. When the air came back to us, we turned off radios and televisions, folded newspapers and hung up telephones. We cried at bus stops, in the bathrooms of new jobs, in the dark of the cinema, in the park. We kissed the heads of our carefree children and took them out for ice cream, and still, even after we unplugged the machines, changed the subscriptions, kept the phones quiet, the broadcasts pursued us into our new homes, beds, nightmares and daydreams until the low crackle and constant buzz was with us everywhere, all the time, dogged, snapping, nipping, biting, devouring; as we rushed to catch the merry bells of the afternoon ice cream truck and our children’s calls that trailed behind it.
Maman! Baba! Bastani! Ice cream. Please?!?
We let them run ahead and tried to follow with a light step, but in the end we stood stock-still in the middle of the street, the cold desserts melting onto our fingers and hands as we cried and licked and cried and licked and the salt of tears mixed strangely with the sweet cream.
The Cost of a Ticket
After a morning of walking, Saladin finds the big streets, one after another, an interlocking maze of straight concrete and corners, lampposts and stoplights. It is early. There are few cars and fewer people and he entertains himself with the windows of closed shops and the high, bright billboards. With no map he moves in the direction of the sun’s rise as it peaks and shoots out over the eastern mountains, and he does not feel lost. He has taken direction from the sun before. His first day in America and his last day in Istanbul. After the foreman saw their photo on the front page and translated the headline—11 GUILTY KURDS. 3 REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS INJURED, POSSIBLY KILLED. The Ayatollah has tightened the security presence in the Kurdish region … he told the brothers. Now you will have to follow the sun … and took Saladin and Ali to a back room where he wrote down an address and a name on a small piece of paper and muttered, We Kurds, always running.
The number was for a dock in the port and the name was of a captain the foreman knew.
He owes me a favor. Tell him Adar sent you. Adar knows the cost. You will be gone from Turkey by nightfall, inshallah. The sun will come up in a few hours, go in the direction of the sunrise. The docks are at the eastern edge of the city.
Saladin took the card. On it, a series of numbers, a name written carefully in block letters and the inky fingerprints of the foreman’s stained fingers, whorls that pointed in no direction but circled around and around.
The brothers walked toward the light blue of dawn and then toward the orange of sunrise. They crossed the streets and bridges of Istanbul and did not once ask directions or think they were lost. At the top of a steep hill Saladin insisted they stop and take in the vista, try to use the height to lead them on their way. Around them the city rolled in hills and valleys covered with apartment buildings, parks, minarets and domes. At the far end was a body of water, just as the foreman described, docks full of ships. They rubbed the sweat from their faces and foreheads and walked down the hill with shuffled steps.
Saladin moves across L.A. and thinks, Are these not the same quick steps? Or are they different steps? Where he walks now is flat and he is alone. He comes to an area where tall buildings rise up from both sides of the street, the sky above them in a thin blade. He stops to count the windows from sidewalk to roof. Fifteen. Twenty-two. There is one, lean and made mostly of glass, with forty-eight windows from bottom to top. The city wakes up around him and the streets are busier now, the people hurried with their back and forth. He stands before the tallest building he can find and bends his neck all the way back to see the very top windows and cannot help but wonder about their view. He watches people come and go from the revolving doors and knows there is no cost to enter. An old man with a cane smiles at him and this gives him confidence, and soon Saladin is thinking of the many films where Cary Grant or Rock Hudson walks easily into buildings and easily onto elevators, and there is nothing to stop him from being like them, a man in America.
Saladin forgets about his filthy shirt and the sand in his hair and shoes and walks into the marble lobby of the glass building and goes directly to the groups of men and women who wait for the elevator. They smell of ironing and soap and coffee. When the machine comes, he gets on with the
m, and when it is his turn, he does not push a button. The lift is slight, nothing like the airplane, but his stomach jolts anyway. It stops and goes and stops and empties until Saladin is alone with a short, middle-aged woman with a kind face. She smiles at him and his confidence keeps up and he smiles back. When she gets off, he follows her into a long, bright hallway. The woman turns a corner and disappears, and Saladin walks to the end where a window stretches from floor to ceiling and he takes in as much of the view as he can.
There is the ocean he has just come from, the thin yellow of beach, the ports and piers to the south. There are streets in every direction, highways and freeways lined with buildings. There are whole parking lots filled with the same yellow bus and warehouses without signs or names. There are patches of small homes and lifeless swaths of cement, and the city seems pinned down by billboards and palm trees. Beside him a concrete river cuts through the town, and up above the sky is both blue and brown.
Just as in Istanbul, the vista of Los Angeles calms him. Saladin takes it in like a breath and tries to remember what he sees, the distances between things and the orientation of the mountains to the highways to the seas to the one dry riverbed. He looks straight down to where he just stood and watches the cars and people move about like tiny toys. They move slowly but with purpose, each in its own direction, and Saladin follows one head, a dark, young head of hair just like his, walking down the street. He pretends it is him. That he is a man in a leather jacket with his hands dug deep in his pockets, on his way. The man walks quickly and turns onto a street where most of the buildings have marquee signs, some of them lit and flashing. Not one cinema but a dozen, and Saladin is quick back down the silent hallway where no one has seen or spoken to him, and in front of the elevator again, waiting. He does not know to push a button, and so he waits for five, six, ten minutes until finally a small bell rings and the door opens and a tall man in a suit gets out. Saladin walks in and rides the elevator up for some time, and then, at some point, down.
He finds the street easily, moves slowly past one cinema after another, like a child with a serious choice that matters most and only to him. In one entryway two men approach a glass ticket window and slide money in a thin slit beneath. Two small tickets emerge and the men enter the theater. His confidence fails him and he walks and thinks and walks and remembers all the moments that have required a ticket, all the times on this trip when he and Ali had to pay their way, pay so there might be a way. Low, Saladin walks with measured steps and tries not to look at the glittering marquees, the vivid posters, the happy customers and their pockets of cash.
The Istanbul ports were both old and new, and the brothers walked through labyrinths of concrete and rotted wood and shacks that crumbled beside gangly steel machines that lifted incredible weights over busy men with steel hooks in the place of hands.
They found the pier whose number matched the number on the card and saw docked in it a ship of such size that it blocked out the entire horizon behind it. Like a magnet, Saladin moved toward the freighter just to be close to this enormity of metal, to make sure it was, in fact, a boat, and not some steadfast building or steel mountain jutting up from the sea. The ship was tied to the dock by ropes the thickness of a man’s arm, and there a group of men had gathered, insignificant, clumped and pacing like confused ants, their faces run through with the same anxiety the brothers would have seen on themselves had they caught sight of their reflection in the water all around. Every man clutched an item. A velvet box. Rugs. Paintings. Copper trays and engraved brass samovars. Saladin stopped as he understood it was not for their human lives or desperate need that they would be allowed on, but for the sake and value of whatever goods they could exchange for another week? month? few years? of life. The spirit that had moved him this far flagged and he took his brother’s arm.
Wait, Ali. We have nothing.
Saladin jaan, it is okay. We can always try. Say the foreman’s name. And if not, maybe we can find work here, on the docks for a few months. This is enough of a hiding place. It seems far from the city, safe …
Ali’s voice shook as he spoke. Saladin had never before seen his brother afraid. In their life he was the older, the braver, the one of deep beliefs and great calm, but with each step away from the mountain his brother’s noble traits had dimmed and they stood on the docks as near equals. Equally confused before a boat, equally without means and equally exposed on the front page of every newspaper in the city. Ali looked around at the water, the ship, the gathered men, and didn’t leave his eyes on anything for too long. The men that milled around them were no more at ease. They smoked nervously and paced restlessly.
What is wrong with trying? They say go eat shit? Then we hide in the docks. The photograph will be garbage in a day. Anyway, the foreman is a Kurd, he would not lead us wrong.
Ali walked toward the waiting men and gestured for Saladin to come stand beside him, and after a time he did. The brothers looked no one in the eye and said nothing. The afternoon heat came and went, and before long the sun fell behind the floating mass of steel and the men grew weary beneath the long shadows of the ship.
At dusk three tan seamen walked down the long, metal plank that lowered from the ship to the ground. The gathered took up their valuables and rushed up to meet them. One of the seamen pulled at the strap of a rifle that he wore diagonally across his back, and the men reversed until they, and their belongings, were on the pier again in three orderly lines, one in front of every seaman.
The brothers chose the line of the seaman with the gun. It was the shortest and the seaman wore sunglasses with silver, reflecting lenses Saladin remembered from a Paul Newman film. When they stood before him, Saladin could see himself as he was, empty-handed, arms stained with ink, scared. He saw his brother beside him, a bit taller, just as dirty, the fear gone from his face. He saw Ali’s mouth open calmly and heard his brother introduce himself in a patient, formal Kurdish, and before he was finished, Saladin interrupted him to shout out the foreman’s name.
Of the daily paper! Adar! He says he knows the cost.
In the glasses Saladin saw his desperation, the useless gestures of his hands, the way his face pulled in on itself in a confused anger. The seaman did not move and then shrugged his shoulders and raised a hand to rub his fingers against his thumb in a gesture to signify money, payment. Ali spoke calmly.
Adar sent us. He says he knows the cost. Where is the ship going?
Saladin wondered if the seaman understood anything—the Kurdish, the name, their frantic intentions. He got lost in the image in the glasses and for a moment thought he looked handsome and then jumped in surprise as the seaman screamed at them in English and his reflection in the glasses lunged.
No! Go! Enough!
For the first time there was nowhere to go. Behind them an Istanbul covered in newspapers that showed them as accomplices to a massacre; in front of them, the sea. The brothers stood dumbly and the seaman lowered his voice and repeated himself.
Enough. Go. Not allowed.
In the reflection Saladin saw Ali drop his head and push his hand out to the seaman for a shake. Ali cleared his throat and spoke to the man in his most proper English.
Okay. Thank you very much.
And Saladin watched Ali smile, small and quiet, but a smile nonetheless.
It is done, Saladin jaan. We do not have the money, the worth. It is better anyway. We will hide here a few weeks more and then go back. The newspaper will print a different picture tomorrow and soon no one will remember us. They don’t even remember us now. Come, jaanam. It is best not to go any farther.
What if someone does recognizes us? Then what? Do we go back to see Baba? … It will be bad for us. Terrible. Maybe the ship is safer? Maybe it will take us to Italy? Or maybe London? Then we can go …
Ali ignored him and Saladin stopped talking. The man behind pushed the brothers out of the line, and Saladin stood and watched him offer the seaman a tray engraved with a meadow scene. A pair of doc
ile gazelles in tall grasses, a sitting bull under a tree. The seaman inspected the tray and gestured the man to stand beside the ship. Saladin wanted to tell him they could work, on the ship, for the seamen, clean or cook, or wash their clothes, but he knew there was no use in arguments or begging. The truth of their poverty was far greater than his desire. Money. Money. Money. The idea of it tore through Saladin’s head and he felt his way through its meaning. A man who wants to look for money, what does he do? Saladin searched his back pocket for a wallet where there was none. He dug his hands deep into the front pockets of his slacks and found lint, a coin of little worth and some hard object with limbs, a head and horns.
Gold.
Saladin removed the figurine and rubbed it between his fingers as if it were the fabled lamp. Without Ali he walked to the silver sunglasses and watched, in their reflection, as the goat expanded and magnified until it took up the surfaces of both the right and left lenses. A thousand years of stubborn gold. The seaman called to the man next to him, and after a second inspection the goat disappeared and the seaman pointed to the small circle of men and valuables.
Go. There. Wait. Today.
Ali spoke up with an angry force.
Where? Where? Wait to go where?
The seaman did not look at Ali, did not cast up his reflective glare for the brothers to see their two faces, one that could not believe his good fortune and one that could not believe his bad luck. The seaman pointed to the circle of men. Saladin grabbed his brother by the arm, and when Ali did not move, he reached for his hand and pulled him. Between their palms Saladin felt both his own terror and Ali’s as well.
One question, Saladin jaan, just one question for you.
His brother whispered with a soft, incessant anger.
Why do you think the farther we go the safer we will be? Are we safe in a place where our names mean nothing? A place where we will be no one? Where if we are killed there is no revenge?
The Walking Page 8