Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  “It’s the real people that worry me.”

  “Well then come and meet some. I’ll call you this week. You can drop by the office and see who shows up. You can’t know these people and not want to help them. I’m not inviting you. I’m asking you please to come.”

  The idea was sound, she must have thought. It had arrived before her as if out of its own integrity.

  “Dangerous people are often attractive. Dangerous work is often noble.”

  “I’m riding off now.”

  She turned on her light.

  “Think about what I’ve said, Kim.”

  “I’ll call.”

  She was gliding away from him. In forty-some minutes she’d be gagged, falling.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  Without looking back she waved with one hand and with the other shook the handlebars, tossed out a little wobble for effect, and the weak beam shivered before her, then steadied on its small spot of the world to come.

  She drifted, looking for signs. Something she might have read in the flux, the weave of light street to street, face to face. Always she landed on the same hours, from four days before the attack, when she’d felt a foreignness pass into her that now seemed a kind of fate.

  Just past sunrise she had left the museum in her blue and grey guard’s uniforms and pedalled onto campus, riding crouched across the playing field with her shadow running long before her in the shape of a huge keyhole on the grass, turning north and west along a strip of coffee shops just opening, the bakery smells mixing with the morning’s first blasts of exhaust, past a kid bent in a doorway with tattooed forearms and a mop of hair cutting straps from bundled weeklies, the city getting to its feet, these best hours when she felt that she was racing it, dodging delivery vans, a quick stop-and-go at the international newsstand, sweating in her polyester clothes in the fumes. She dipped away from a car door and swerved onto the sidewalk, rebalancing, to coast past produce vendors and people stooped over newspaper boxes, reading the stories above the fold. On into the west-end residential streets, still cool, with the light now tall on red- and burnt-yellow-brick houses, open doors, small pissing dogs, shoulder bags hitched up, wet-haired workers leaving their houses, patting their pockets, pointing remotes at car locks, tossing blind waves behind them, the morning emerging in each yard, until finally she arrived at her three-storey building, to begin the end of her day.

  In the hallway she passed fumigation notices that conjured images of men in masks with metal wands in private spaces, uncovering all variety of secretings and abandonments, onward to her numbered door. She went in to find a handwritten message on the entryway stand: “gone out – Sadaf.” On the small desk Sadaf’s laptop sat open, not yet dormant, with text on the screen, the blinking cursor stopped mid-sentence. She read the half-composed story and felt the little tremor in her core at the descriptions of events in the infamous prison in Tehran. The story was a version of Sadaf’s own, altered to give to another refugee claimant in her world of local Iranians. A good story, without the fatal inconsistencies of the original. The other claimant had her own history to tell, but wanted a better one.

  The screen went dark.

  She stepped into the kitchen and stopped. There was something wrong she couldn’t place. She saw the phone reflected enormously in the toaster. Empty dish rack. Artwork fridge magnets, Kahlo, Mondrian. The tray of sunflower seeds on the counter. Someone, Sadaf, had run a finger through, dividing them into continents.

  From her bag she took a two-week-old edition of the Asr-e Azadegan, what she understood to be a liberal Iranian newspaper, flipped it open, and tried to penetrate a page featuring a photo of someone she guessed was a government official and lines of lettering like slow handstrokes on tickertape. She put it down next to the phone, and there, out of place, was an onyx chess piece, a knight that she’d found on the lawn of the hospital at the time of her mother’s first surgery. It belonged on the teak side table. Sadaf must have picked it up and held it absently, while moving to the kitchen. Kim looked at the piece closely. Had she ever really seen it before? The horse’s bevelled neck, serrations along the mane.

  She sat on the stool. Then she looked up and saw it.

  An empty slot in the knife block. It was absent her one good long knife.

  And the text had been fresh on the screen.

  She stilled herself.

  “Sadaf. It’s me.”

  She started down the hallway and she knew now there was someone there. She stopped in the bedroom doorway and said again, “Sadaf, it’s just me, Kim.” She listened for movement, restrained breathing, and heard only her own. In the mirror mounted on the slightly ajar closet door was her believing face. Either there was someone there behind the cold mirror or there was no one.

  Kim pictured her kneeling in the closet, the knife raised and ready. The image was movie-born, exotic, to be dismissed.

  But there’d been kneeling and knives in the prison account, not to be dismissed.

  Kim stepped forward and opened the door, and this was her closet in her place in her city and so there was nothing until, on delay, a sudden chill and weakness mixed with disappointment in herself. She went back to the kitchen and sat on a stool and wondered at her imaginings.

  The referral from GROUND warned that Sadaf might be paranoid. She was convinced that the men who’d come to her apartment the week before weren’t removals guys from Immigration but assassins from her government. She’d been out, up in the north of the city, in so-called Tehranto, selling spices in a strip mall, and came home to a neighbour’s description of the men, and was now more or less on the run. And it was apparently true that the assassins existed, or had existed over the past decades in Western countries, killing dissidents. It just hadn’t happened in Canada yet, as far as anyone knew. But Sadaf was an unlikely target, despite her past. Three hours before collecting her, Kim had received the outlines of her story from the office. Sadaf’s history was in the records, some of them in Iran, some filed with Canadian court documents. The verifiable facts were that her religious name was Zahara, her family was Shia, she’d studied Islamic law at the Something-or-other university in Tehran. What couldn’t be established for the Review Board’s satisfaction was that she had been arrested for writing human rights articles in a student paper and had had to leave the country because she caught the attention of a particular government official, or anything that had happened thereafter.

  Even at GROUND Kim had never directly witnessed real fear. The dimensions were beyond her. She had no idea how to meet it, or even its retreat.

  The knife must have just been misplaced. Of course, it would be in the utensil drawer, and she slid it open, and there it was.

  And this is what she thought: that it made you suggestible, this business of helping survivors. What she didn’t think, only came to realize, is that when you work at the nexus of a thousand bad histories, you breathe something in, some essence of dire luck. Your body knows it before your mind, but the days slowly fill with seeming accidents, nicked fingers, bad timings, a general slippage in the works, as if you’ve been forgotten in the thoughts of loved ones. The signs are everywhere, you might even be able to mark them, but their meaning will not open until it’s too late.

  Sadaf appeared at the door, wearing a rapoosh, was the word in Persian, unbuttoned for comfort and in the spirit of near emancipation. She’d been drawn out by the sunrise to walk and returned now with a steaming waxed paper cup of tea, and looked at Kim, a severe brow set into a dry, open face, round with thought. Kim felt herself focused upon, and she realized she was still wearing her security uniform. That first night she’d explained that no real authority attached to it, that the museum’s nighttime security guards were mostly musicians and artists who wore their uniforms somewhat ironically, but the point had been lost. Now, three days later, there was no way to recover it.

  This boarding of illegals was still new to her. Sadaf was only the third woman to stay there. None had remained
for more than a week. They’d all eventually found new apartments, new bad jobs, and resumed their newly undramatic, invisible lives.

  They ate a breakfast of muffins together, sitting on the stools. Kim explained the concept of fumigation, that they’d have to vacate the apartment tomorrow afternoon. Sadaf nodded, as if at a timeless condition. She’d taken no interest in the newspaper. Out of politeness, to dispel the silence, Kim asked where she’d learned English.

  “As a girl. At home.”

  “Do you speak other languages?”

  “I speak Persian, Arabic. French, a little. What are your languages?”

  “French and Spanish. I’ve worked on Russian lately.”

  “You learned in school?”

  “They come from my father, mostly. He’s a professor of history. We lived in France and Mexico City when I was young.” Kim chose not to add that her stepfather was also a professor. But then Donald had never moved her to new countries, had never meant the world to her, so to speak, as Harold had.

  She knew from their other conversations that Sadaf had also travelled with her father when she was young. This fact complicated her view of the woman. She was educated, cosmopolitan, but as a girl during Muharram she’d worn a shroud and marched to the religious monuments.

  Kim needed sleep. She felt heavy and floating at once, dream-deprived, as if the dreams might from the sheer need to discharge themselves break through into her waking mind. Two mornings ago she’d skipped a day’s sleep, going straight from the museum to take the morning shift at GROUND, and found herself barely able to read. She couldn’t make sense of a letter presented to her by a woman named Rahel, who’d been sheltered by an Ethiopian evangelical church. She explained to Rahel that her application on humanitarian and compassionate grounds had been denied. The H&C had not been accompanied by persuasive, objective evidence that she would be in danger upon her return to Ethiopia. Kim had trouble grasping the words “lack of compelling risk material.” Because she spoke Spanish, Kim dealt most closely with the Latin Americans, but when explicating the subtleties of judgments or warrants without a common tongue, or when an interpreter’s English was incomprehensible, she felt worlds of desperation falling through her.

  But Kim couldn’t remember whether she’d left a message for Marlene about Rahel. How could a person’s fate completely slip her mind? She’d been making mistakes recently, losing details, moments. Losing numbers and names, mixing up words. Checking her burners thrice. It terrified her to think what was riding on her memory. There were worlds kept alive through Post-it notes. She would call Marlene after breakfast.

  The phone rang, too loudly. It was Sarah, the one volunteer doctor at GROUND. She had found an Iranian family to take Sadaf in for the indefinite future. Someone would come by around noon. Sadaf received the news without comment. Their few conversations ran with lurching assertions and half-statements. Kim was never entirely certain she’d made herself understood.

  “Where is your mother when you are young?” Sadaf asked.

  “She was with us. She raised me.”

  Sadaf wasn’t much older than she was, and her voice was young, but age had taken up in her hands and eyes.

  “And your father came home with the languages.”

  “Yes. I wish I knew more of them, though. How do you say ‘home’ in Persian?”

  “And your mother accepts the husband’s will?”

  “She sort of accommodates him.”

  Hearing herself, Kim wasn’t sure if she meant Harold or Donald.

  “And does she accommodate God’s will?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Does your mother see God’s will is not the husband’s will?”

  “I don’t think she sees God’s will at all, Sadaf. Our family doesn’t really have God.”

  Again she evinced no response. There was a long silence.

  “Khona,” said Sadaf finally. “The word is khona. It can mean home, or the house of God. For Sufis, khona is the highest state of … I don’t know the word. In the mind.”

  “Consciousness.”

  “Yes.” Were there words for what Sadaf had lost, and how she thought about her losses? “And boshgah means a place to be, a real place and a place beyond. And a place where travellers stay before carrying on with their journey.”

  A distance then passed over her and she was closed.

  Kim could only hope that she ran a good boshgah, here for this soul unexampled to her.

  You couldn’t read the prison narrative and keep free of certain pictures. What happens to a woman after she has grieved for herself in fear? Lost to trauma, then to exile, is the old self locked away? But then memory wouldn’t allow it. And the body would always go cold at the opening of a door. And yet Sadaf had gone out alone simply to buy herself tea.

  Kim knew next to nothing in her bones but she trusted her heart. Her heart was willing to imagine itself into the fears of others, but it was not always capable.

  The men came at noon. Rather than let them in, Kim went into the hallway to discuss the arrangements. Sarah’s assistant from the clinic, Colin, introduced her to an unsmiling man named Ramin whose family Sadaf would be staying with. He was in his thirties, Kim guessed. He wore an ill-fitting brown suit and had an air of dramatic impenetrability, a serious man on serious business.

  Kim left them in the hallway and closed the door.

  “Sadaf, my friend Colin has brought the man whose family you’ll be living with for a little while. His name is Ramin.” She went to the kitchen for a pen and paper. “If you need me, call this number and I’ll come right away. Do you understand?”

  She held out the number and detected a slight hesitation in Sadaf’s decision to take it. She was from a world where the wrong number in your possession could get you killed or tortured, violated in front of your loved ones.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Kim opened the door and began the introductions, but Sadaf interrupted her.

  “You know these men?” she asked.

  “Never mind,” said Kim. She grabbed her keys from the table beside the door. “I’m coming with you.”

  Two hours later she was home again. She closed the blinds against the day and got ready for bed. The ritual involved washing her face and applying a once-weekly brown mud mask that she let dry while clearing a day’s worth of phone and email messages. Donald had called to remind her he was leaving town for the weekend and thanked her for arranging dinner with her mother and Harold. Someone hung up. Her old friend Shenny called to make a lunch date, as if they hadn’t fallen away from one another. Someone hung up. The caller’s number was unavailable. The members of GROUND and its connected services had been sent two list-serv emails, the first about a proposed change in federal law that would increase the authority of Immigration investigators, the second a “vigilance alert” concerning the need not to volunteer confidential information to the police. Someone had slipped somewhere. Kim hoped it hadn’t been her.

  Moving Sadaf had been uneventful. When Ramin ushered them into his apartment they were greeted by his sisters and brothers-in-law and their small children. Sadaf accepted their attentions patiently, with grace. Kim tried to read in her an undercurrent of wariness, but didn’t know her face well enough, and the inflections of her native language were impossible to construe. A smiling woman whom Kim took to be Ramin’s wife invited her to stay for coffee but she declined. At the door Kim took Sadaf’s hand in hers and squeezed it, suppressing an urge to hug her, and reminded her to call if she needed anything. Sadaf nodded and turned back into the apartment, and seemed to forget her.

  She had squeezed Sadaf’s hand but the gesture was not returned. No expression of gratitude – she hadn’t wanted one, really, hadn’t expected one – but neither of much warmth. She told herself not to read too much into the goodbyes. The woman had some meaning for her that she hadn’t yet worked through, and letting go of her hand had touched off this feeling still in her, a small, necessary
regret.

  She felt what the skin-care tube called “ancient sea mud” beginning to pull at her pores and then because she was still punch-drunk tired the sound of the words “ancient sea” made her think “H&C” and she remembered Rahel and called the office to leave Marlene a message. The impossible complexity of this volunteer work, never knowing enough about histories and languages, religions and laws and social customs, the migrating politics of gender here, of personal space there, of scarification, headdresses, the entering of rooms, exposed skin. Until a claimant was landed, deported, or dead, the only clarity was muddle. Failing to see muddle was failing to see clearly.

  She went to the kitchen and prepared chamomile tea. She opened the cupboard and found her Imovane. She shook out a blue oval pill.

  With her tongue she lifted the pill inside and swallowed it with tea.

  For no good reason she rechecked the phone for the dial tone. Then she unplugged it.

  Through the window she heard cicadas buzzing in the trees like electrical wires and again she thought of the prison account. Sadaf had found a way to move past her sufferings, yet Kim felt them inside her now, a heaviness in her legs, call it dread, some chemical reaction to sharp understanding, to knowing you don’t know enough.

  She set her tea down and went to the bathroom and stripped to her panties and weighed herself and washed her face again and brushed her teeth and didn’t floss and peed. She applied moisturizer to her face and arms, and put on a T-shirt and set her alarm clock and got into bed. It was 3:20 p.m.

  In four days she’d have dinner at the house with her complicated parents.

  These simple moments were the best part of the day. For ten minutes she read Under the Volcano, which she’d read before but more or less forgotten. Then she turned out the light and closed her eyes.

  Next came the names. It was prayer or it wasn’t, she didn’t know the word for this offering-up. There was no god to receive the names, she knew, but she needed the old consolation of solemn address. She asserted that she had them in mind, the people she knew were in need. Tonight when she’d thought of Marian and then came to Harold’s name, as usual the offering got lost, and so she moved on, name by name, saying Sadaf and her new keepers and Rahel and Sarah and Maureen and everyone at GROUND, pausing with each one to try to truly hold them in mind, towards her own name at the end of the sequence. Sometimes she was asleep before she came to it, and sometimes, like today, she wasn’t, wishing now only for a long, untroubled sleep, and then tended to herself further, conjuring lovers, former ones and possible ones. Lately she thought of a lawyer with GROUND named Greg Etterly. He worked for free and was always on call. She’d seen him save lives with arguments and papers. He was long and muscular, though he didn’t dress to accentuate his body. He was rumoured to have had several lovers. Long ago, one of them had broken his heart. She thought of Greg and began to touch herself but he wasn’t quite there for her so she let it go and then she was floating over the city high enough that she could almost see it whole and there were the people, she could make them out, see their faces though she shouldn’t have been able to from this height, and she knew she’d found the secret to it all in a mistake of scale. She looked down with a satellite eye. When she was fourteen, after Harold had left the family, and then returned, he had taken her and Marian west to the Rockies. One night on the prairies he led them out behind a motel and found a place they could sleep under the night sky. He taught her to distinguish the stars from the satellites, and the satellites from the American B-52s carrying nuclear warheads, heading north to the last allowable mile. It was the summer she’d begun kissing boys. It would be years before she realized that the B-52s were simply Harold’s brand of fairy tale.