The Walking

by Laleh Khadivi

  On his third day in America Saladin wakes with the same stomach of acid and bile. He is covered in an unfamiliar blanket and does not know if the memories of the men locked and tossed were a nightmare of this recent sleep or some tragedy from another world. He pretends the blanket is his own, that something is his, and tries to get comfortable beneath it, but the scents are too many and keep his brain busy with their puzzles. Motor oil, sweat and old feces and then, below it all, burnt sugar from a cake or cookie. When he catches this scent, Saladin holds to it like a dog and sniffs out the blanket for more, maybe something cooked, maybe meat, and his hunger swells and there is no more reason to smell what he can’t eat, and he stands up and searches his pockets for the nothing he knows is in them and imagines the bread he will buy, the egg plate he watched an old lady eat at a diner, the possibility of food.

  With empty hands and nowhere to go, he kicks the blanket until the gray wool mass and all its thousand smells are partially buried in the sand. He goes to the water and washes his hands and face in the salty foam and walks east into the city. It is early yet and already this day is longer than the rest.

  As it was with his few American days before, it is today again: Saladin cannot find the city itself, the core of polished steel and elegant women and invitations from tall, suited men to come and have a meal, a seat, take this job, this money, this dream. He ambles through the early-morning fog with no sense of direction and tries his best not to think, Who has ever been this hungry? Who, in the American movies, has ever been so lost? He moves up Venice Boulevard and recognizes the few landmarks he knows, the cinema that is closed and broken, the storefront that advertises headless mannequins in costumes of strapped leather and spikes, the big, blue Dumpster where, just yesterday, he watched a bearded, blond man dig through to find and eat hunks of bread, halves of sandwiches, a bitten apple. Saladin’s stomach cringed at the sight, but he stared anyway, and the bearded man noticed him, laughed and rubbed his stomach like a sated king. Today Saladin walks past them all, turns in an unfamiliar direction and pushes himself to go, go on.

  By midday the clouds tear apart and the great heat starts to seep into the city. Saladin is in a hilly neighborhood where the curbs are swept and palm trees grow in long, straight lines and the women trail tiny dogs on leather leads. The order of this world is the order of the world he knows from the movies, even, clean and without haste, and he tries to feel arrived, tries to relax into this setting, but the hunger burns holes in his stomach and he feels his spine fold down, his shoulders stiffen, and his feet take only the smallest, angriest steps.

  At an intersection where two gas stations face each other, Saladin watches a man with his age and color and hairstyle run to meet each car as it drives in. He greets the drivers with a tremendous smile and then rushes to stick the nozzle into their cars, clean the windows and check the oil as the drivers sit, fix their hair and pick their noses. When it is done, Saladin sees the easy exchange of money from driver hand to attendant hand, and he thinks about it. Fast. Little talking. Many cars. Cash. The light changes and Saladin lifts his heavy feet to cross the street. On the other side a tall girl with her hair nearly white from the sun smiles as she walks past him in the opposite direction. Her dress is long and thin and light in the wind and sun, and he turns to find her figure is nearly visible beneath it. She floats away from him, and whatever parts of her he cannot see, Saladin makes up and remembers he did not move to America to work at a gas station.

  He walks a long distance to the east and the hunger comes and goes in episodes, each new issue sharper and more relentless. He stops to sit frequently, and on one shaded bench he stays long enough for his heart to finally steady. An odd calm comes over him, its edges tinged with euphoria. In a schoolyard across the street the children are busy on playground swings with games in cement squares, competitions with balls and hoops. They are various in color and age, but divided evenly into groups of boys and girls. At the far edge of the yard some play a game of running and touching and standing frozen, and closer to him a pair of girls sit across from each other and sing a rhyme over the intricate rhythms of their fast-clapping hands. Saladin sees boys he could have been and boys, lonely and preoccupied, that could be him. They are schoolchildren just like the schoolchildren in the mountain town except that a few of them are very fat, larger than children as he remembers them. Saladin leans against the bench and gives himself over to their games with such pleasure that when a boy with tight, curly hair scores in the game of the ball and high net, Saladin has to stop himself from standing up to cheer.

  At intervals the students are called to gather. They form lines, and one group leaves the yard as another group comes on. In the new group everything is the same as the last with the exception of two overly large boys, no more than eleven or twelve, who forgo the games to walk the perimeter of the yard slowly and without purpose. One eats small, triangular crisps out of a bag, and the other sucks on a candy fastened to a stick. When they near him, Saladin tries his best not to stare, but he cannot look away from the fat of their faces and necks and small, bloated hands. The calm is gone now and Saladin watches the two as they eat slowly and without end and lets the hunger gnarl in his gut and malice fill his head, and he would like nothing more than to climb the fence into the yard and take the crispy snack from the boy and then lick the salt off each salty finger and perhaps eat the finger itself.

  He stands to leave and his head spins in a thousand directions, and he forces himself, with the help of the bench, to move out into the sun, where he is nearer to the boys, who are now stopped so the one can swallow the remaining contents directly from the bag and then toss the bag onto the grass, where the wind fills and lifts it off the ground.

  The boy, no longer distracted by his food, looks over at Saladin and shouts.

  Hey, faggot! What are you staring at?

  The two boys laugh and turn their back to him, and Saladin walks away, his steps neither quick nor proud.

  He must breathe. But when he does, the smell of meat fills his nose. He tries to stand away from the building it comes out of, to stop his inhales so he can stop the smell and so stop the hunger. With held breath he stands on the sidewalk and thinks about death for the first time in his American life. He stares at the busy street beside him and sees his own body in the gutter, flat out, his hair and hands and feet loose as if they were under water. He goes to touch his forehead, and his hand feels only concrete and a copper coin under his finger. He exhales and takes up the coin, bites it to see if it is true or, like his laid-out death, a fantasy of his dire imagination. It is real and he takes it his hand and walks quickly toward the smell of kebab that maddens him.

  All along the front of the building are windows, and everyone eats outside beneath a large metal shade or on picnic tables in the sun. Saladin looks twice, and it is as it is in the movies with the hamburgers and the french fries, and all that is missing are the girls on roller skates and the music. But the smell that was never in the cinema is here now, and it draws him as it is food and fat and salt and oil, and with hunger as his only imperative he walks to a window with a square cut out of it and announces himself.

  Hello. My name is Saladin. One hamburger, please.

  The man behind the glass is black skinned and wears a stiff, white paper cap. He writes something on a small sheet of lined paper and then looks to Saladin.

  That’s a dollah twenty-five.

  — — —

  I said, that’s one twenty five.

  Saladin produces the penny, and the young man laughs and calls to another young, black-skinned man and the two stand there passing the coin back and forth and laughing. They call another, and a man emerges from the back, darker and older.

  One of the young men holds up the coin.

  We got a Mexican here trying to pay us a penny.

  He turns to Saladin.

  You know this is a penny, right?

  Saladin does not move.

  The old man, his hair
white at the tips as if dusted with ash, looks at Saladin and then at the coin.

  Giver here.

  He takes it, rubs it with the corner of his apron, and puts it in his pocket. Then he rests his eyes on Saladin as if he can see all that is behind and around and in front of him.

  Where you from?

  — — —

  Where are your people?

  — — —

  The old man turns away and shouts over his shoulder to the younger workers.

  Give him a couple of cheeseburgers with bacon, fries, and a shake. You like shakes or sodas?

  The younger boys shake their heads as if they cannot believe it.

  Give him a shake. Chocolate.

  For his fortune a box full of food appears, and Saladin eats like an addict, beyond his fill, desperately and without thought. When he stands to leave, the street blurs and his feet are not lighter or stronger for the nourishment. The afternoon is hot now and he makes a sluggish exit out of the parking lot, down a busy street where even the noise and speed of cars are muted by this sudden fullness. His stomach churns, and by the end of the second block he vomits in front of a store full of washers and dryers. He vomits again and the street ignores him. When he is empty he stands straight, spits and marches forward, light now and wanting only a glass of cold water.

  He walks down streets of endless parking lots, strips of stores, gas station after gas station. He holds an old woman by the arm as she crosses the street and explains, as she tries to shake him off, that his own mother considered him a gentleman and it was only right … The Farsi frightens her, and when they are on the sidewalk again, she walks briskly away from him. Saladin nurtures his good mood and lets himself smile at women, young and old, and he looks nobly at the strange men who might one day be his boss, brother or friend.

  You ever lift a pump before?

  He is at his fourth gas station of the day. The manager looks at him directly. When there is no answer, he repeats the question.

  You ever lift a pump?

  At the first station Saladin lied when the manager asked, Ever done it? At the second station he rushed to prove himself and stood beside the pump until a car arrived, and he faked expertise with the cap and the nozzle and the latch, only to end up covered in gasoline. One after another the managers dismissed him with little more than a wave of the hand.

  The third manager, a Chinese, refused to let him even touch the pump.

  No. No. You are too dirty. Too smelly. Your clothes, a mess.

  Saladin looked down to the center of his chest where the short man was pointing and knew what he meant. He had not taken anything more than a sea bath, and if he held his fingers to his nose he could still smell the island. No arrogance or imagination could sidestep the truth of his filth: he was a man without a home who had pissed between parked cars and in alleys and had not yet, from lack of food or fear, taken his first American shit, and for this he felt all the more soiled.

  Well? Have you?

  The manager asks again. He is an old man with a half crown of white hair below his ears and a bulbous nose, red and inflated.

  Yes. Every day. Professional.

  Saladin walks to the pump, pulls the nozzle out and lifts the latch. There are no cars but he stands there anyway, nozzle up in the air, waiting. He gives his best cinema smile, and the manager lets out a chortle.

  All right, all right. You look professional enough. Lucky for you I had my guy quit on me just this morning. Niggers. That’s what you get for being an equal-opportunity employer. Come on in and we can fill out the paperwork.

  The office has a cash register, quarts of oil, washer fluid, candy and gum. From habit Saladin looks around for bread, cheese, something he can buy as soon as the old man pays him for the first day’s work. Sandwiches, days old, taunt him from a small glass refrigerator. He puts his hands in his empty pockets and does not look around anymore.

  The manager slides a piece of paper across the counter.

  Here. Fill this out.

  He pauses and looks long at Saladin, who has not yet spoken.

  I bet you can’t even speak enough English for that. That’s all right. I’ll help you out. Hell, I done it for the last three guys … Lemme find a pen.

  The man bends down to dig in the bottom drawers of a creaky desk, and over the arch of his back a small, black-and-white television flicks a rolling image into the small room. On the screen an anchor with slicked-back hair stiffly holds a few sheets of paper and speaks without moving the muscles of his face. Behind his perfect, immobile head is a map of the Middle East. Saladin recognizes Iran from its shape and because it is the only nation highlighted in white, the surrounding countries left shaded and nameless. In an instant the man and the map disappear and are replaced by images of a square in Tehran where men and women chant in groups and a parade of captives marches slowly through the center of them. Saladin recognizes the place and sees that the faces of the protesters are Iranian faces and that the eyes of the forty or fifty or fifty-two men are covered by wide, white blindfolds no different from the blindfolds knotted at the back of the heads in that green valley, long ago.

  Yet somehow long ago is not long enough, and Iran is in Los Angeles, and at this very moment the fifty-two captives parade around the gas station convenience store where an old man searches for a pen. Just like that Saladin is both in California and also in the Tehran square, standing between a cloaked woman and a young father with his son on his shoulder, his ears deaf from the shouts of Marg! Barg! Amreeka! He is staring at the television at the gas station and he is staring at the mullahs in the square who float, gray robed and severe, just as the mullah in the valley floated, and then it is only a matter of seconds before he is sure that the blindfolds on the fifty-two captives are the exact same as the eleven blindfolds bound on the men in the valley, washed and reused for the purpose that makes one blindfold exactly the same as the other: to block sight; place a thin layer between the known and unknown; form a membrane through which one may be accused and punished and seen but not receive the same in return.

  Behind the counter the old man bends and mumbles, and the news plays on behind his back. The crowds chant.

  Marg barg Amreeka!

  The square-faced announcer translates.

  In a second day of protests crowds have gathered in Azadi Square to shout “Death to America” and show their support for Khomeini and his fifty-two American hostages captured at the American embassy only one week ago. It appears that the hostages have been brought here to walk around Azadi Square, perhaps to demonstrate their good health in continuing captivity.

  Time and space fold on themselves, and Saladin is confused by questions. When did they gather in the square? Does the television show this exact moment or a moment yesterday? Last week? And if this moment is now, how can that be? And if it is now, then what of this journey, these weeks of walking and flying and swimming? Did it happen? Have I escaped enough or not? If I was a guilty man there, am I guilty everywhere?

  I had a damn pen just a minute ago …

  Somewhere outside a car backfires, and Saladin jolts. He is jarred now as the earth is jarred by the random shifts of plates. Inside him the world of then, with its dreams and boyhood and shame, merges with the world of now, where the hunger has returned to shred his stomach and the sun is hot and a kind old man is crazy enough to mumble at the floor. Saladin’s whole body quivers and then shakes, a catastrophe of time and Space, and he cannot stand still. He takes a candy bar off the shelf in front of the register, walks out of the gas station office and disappears down the busy boulevard. A few minutes later the manager will surface with a capless ballpoint pen.

  Damn Arabs. Even when you try and help them … shit, you can’t help anyone in this damn country.

  And turns off the television.

  Saladin moves through an afternoon of orange light, sweet hued and ill, that covers the city. He does not look for the ocean or avoid it, does not crave Hollywood or detest it, f
or all direction is meaningless now in this world that folds on top of itself, buckles beneath and crashes together so that every moment of one place is pushed atop every moment of another place until there is no chance for an exodus and no need to welcome the arrived.

  Evening and the wind blows cool and soft, into the basin that holds the city and its thousand taquerias and rotisseries and dumpling houses and hamburger stands. The more Saladin walks through their aromas, the more he understands his hunger is a furious weakling, wanting and wanting but without muscle or means.

  When he can no longer resist, he forgets about his faulty control of English and his lack of skills and walks into businesses at random. At an Armenian restaurant the smell of garlic and onions makes him mute and he forgets to answer the server, who speaks a poor Farsi heavily accented with Armenian vowels.

  Hello. Can I help you?

  He waits at Saladin’s side for an answer, but Saladin can only take in the smell in deep, long breaths as if vapors alone could sustain him. From the back the voice of a woman shouts something hard and sharp and then Irani! and the waiter escorts Saladin out with a gentle hand to the elbow.

  At a Korean salon a roomful of women giggle at his Hello. Work. Today? I can work. One of them takes his hand and smiles broadly.

  Yes. We work today. Come here. I work for you.

  Her smile is girlish but her teeth are dark and piled, and Saladin shakes himself free and leaves without apology or excuse.

  Like this, he goes down the street. Into and out of businesses that ignore him or mock his clothes or hold their nose to his smell or entertain his query and desperation as long as it serves them.

  Well, now. You say you are in what line of work?

  We have use for only mechanics but you gotta be able to fix a Japanese car.

  Maybe you could work in dry cleaning? Start with you own self.

  By night he is in a neighborhood with more motorcycles than cars and men and women push against each other in phone booths and underneath neon-lit windows. From a dark doorway Saladin hears the familiar notes of the Rolling Stones song his brother tried to translate for him long ago. It is invitation enough and he goes in.