Thirty Shadow Birds, page 4
Yalda feels a shiver run down her back as she stands up, struggling to put on a happy face in front of the class.
8.
LOOKING AROUND FOR A SEAT, Yalda finds that her favourite hideout is free. She drags her tired feet across the pub and lands on the corner leather sofa, half-hidden behind a pillar. The furthest and dimmest spot of a basement pub might be the first choice of couples looking for a “love” seat, but luckily there are no customers at this time of day other than Yalda and a man with a shaved head who is slumped over the counter at the other end.
The waiter, a young punk guy with his hair styled in soft spikes, comes to her. Without looking at the menu, she asks for a martini. She’s not going to get drunk, she thinks, but she should lift her spirits. A drink and some alone time are what she needs to get ready for what is coming her way tonight. But what if the jinn, her hamzad, comes to her here and now?
No. The jinn didn’t appear in broad daylight either on the bloody day of her brother’s murder in the December of ‘91, or on the bloody day of her boyfriend’s execution in May of ‘80. After each of those loud bangs, when she felt like her head was about to explode, her hamzad had emerged only during the night.
This may prove that her poor mother, Maman Ashi, was not altogether wrong when she boasted about her expertise in jinn studies. Maman Ashi believed that jinns don’t like to visit in the daytime. She also asserted that one can make a jinn withdraw by uttering the name of God in Arabic. Because Yalda was a non-believer, her jinn supposedly had no fear of her evoking the name of Allah, a practice that is known as bismallah. And maybe her jinn is mature enough to know that daytime is not the right time to reveal insanity.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The sound in her head warns her that what occurred last night triggered a tremendous anxiety and fear of unpredictable threats. Suddenly, Yalda sees the jinn peeping out from behind the pillar and grinning at her. The waiter, bringing her order, blocks her view of the jinn for a minute. She welcomes his interruption, using the time to figure out how to treat her unpunctual hamzad. When the waiter leaves, she looks at the jinn and points to her watch. The jinn, still chuckling, opens her mouth four times to insist that this new loud bang is going to occur. The jinn’s gestures, which remind her of Bollywood dance moves, get on her nerves. She keeps pointing to her watch until the jinn gets the message, shakes her head, and disappears without producing any smoke—more evidence that her hamzad has nothing to do with the jinns known to Maman Ashi.
Yalda breathes a sigh of relief and sips her drink. The man with the shaved head shifts on his bar stool but doesn’t turn around. As long as his back is to her, she can amuse herself by guessing what he looks like. She is only here is to kill time. After her class in Mississauga, she drove home, parked in the basement garage, took the southbound subway downtown and, after a long walk, ended up here.
Distraction for procrastination. Alcohol for dissolution. Betrayal for betrayal. The first two were part of her plan, and the third was at the back of her mind. Jostled while wandering down Yonge Street’s busy sidewalk, she stopped for a second to regain her balance. For some reason, she dug her cell phone out of her purse and browsed the list, as if looking for someone to call for help. She pressed the button when it reached Jimmy’s number. Beep! Beep! Beep! Fixing her eyes on the phone, she felt a flush of shame and a burning sensation in her palm. She turned off the phone and threw it back into the purse. A gust of wind, slapping her face and stinging her skin, let the hot tears run down her cold cheeks.
The shame didn’t come up from a single place. She’s ashamed that she had thought about a lecherous guy like Jimmy even though she had no desire for him, and that she had no male friend, with or without benefits, to turn to in tough times. She’s also ashamed of her plan to seek revenge on Nader, her Little Bird, by sleeping with an unwanted man. It was so stupid—Nader wouldn’t give a damn about what she did or how she felt.
Yalda empties her glass in one gulp and turns her eyes towards the bar to get the waiter’s attention. She notices the broad shoulders of the guy with the shaved head, who looks like he’s sitting on nails. Neither his oval head reflecting the red lamplight nor his thick biceps protruding from his short-sleeved black T-shirt are appealing. She wonders how she found big-chested men attractive when she was a teenager. Her only brother, Dadash Yunes, was tall and slim. With his dark, thick hair, combed to the left, he looked handsome when he was young. But, for one reason or another, he was never idolized by his younger sister. And when Yalda met her first boyfriend, the world changed. She would later name her son after him. Nader, the one who she used to call “Nader-am” (my Nader), changed her perspective. She never found big-chested men attractive again.
Enjoying her second martini, Yalda closes her eyes, imagining a companion. An instant image of a dark, thick-haired man appears behind her closed eyelids. It is not an image of Yunes, from a time when he was so dear to her that he was called Dadashi. She bites her lower lip and opens her eyes. If the image had lasted a little bit longer, she could have said, “Hello dark-haired man!” It was a humorous greeting, one she used to use when she dated Daniel Dunn, the marketing manager of the firm. She liked his dark hair that had resisted turning grey.
Her vibrating cell phone pushes Dan away. Immediately, she begins to worry about her son, Nader. “Stupid woman,” she grumbles while she picks up the phone. Nader never ever calls her when he’s in town, let alone when he’s out camping. She sees Jimmy’s number and feels disgusted with herself. It took a lot of effort for her to make him understand that she wouldn’t be the right partner for a thirty-year-old guy with a wolfish appetite for sex. And now she had opened up the situation again with her silly, impulsive call!
Trying to think of an excuse for calling Jimmy makes Yalda feel dizzy. She gives up and focuses on the soft chitchat of a cuddling couple to her left. She’s getting drunk, she confesses. It’s not time to go home, though. The jinn, never predictable, will be waiting to point out that her son has treated her like crap. As if she was not intelligent enough to get it last night. “Idiot jinn! What the hell are you going to tell me?” she says under her breath. The couple notices her. The man looks about the same age as Dan, but the girl doesn’t look much older than a teenager. He could have been Dan, she says to herself. The girl, giggling, slides her fingers through his hair and lets them slip down to the lines of his forehead. Maybe this guy, like Dan, has four grown-up daughters and a lovely wife sharing not only her bank account but also her free time with him. Maybe he, like Dan, is not willing to put his marriage at risk while he avails himself of affordable fun with other women. Yalda feels an urge to go to the washroom.
Alone in the washroom, there is no need to worry about disguising the sound of her peeing. Although she’s used to suppressing it for her own sake—either by targeting the side of the bowl instead of straight into the water or by flushing first—right now she tells herself that a tipsy woman doesn’t deserve anything nice. She also tells herself that the sound can be the background music for the unwanted memory of her failed love affair, not only with Dan in Toronto, who talked about his wife as if she was a respected but not appealing female neighbour, but also with Marc in Springfield, who never talked about his wife, a stroke victim in a wheelchair.
To suppress her vertigo, Yalda pauses at the dim entrance of the bar. There is no quiet corner anymore. Without looking around, she staggers towards her table and picks up her scarf to leave. On her way to the cash, she bumps into the guy with the shaved head, who turns towards her. Her purse falls onto the floor and she loses her balance. The man, without leaving his stool, holds her with one hand and picks up the purse with the other. Before Yalda can utter a word, the man offers her the empty stool next to his.
9.
ONE LEG STRETCHED OUT, THE OTHER BENT. One arm folded under her breasts, the other half-looped around her head. Lying down on her stomach, she is mesmerized by an image: a swamp surrounded by an unknown forest. A frog rests on a lotus leaf. Out of the blue, a mild moonlit sprinkle turns to heavy, blinding rain. The dark curtain falls.
Yalda opens her eyes and jumps up. Allowing her eyes to get accustomed to the murky darkness, she looks around. She’s on a burgundy sofa. Nearby, a window lets in feeble streetlight. She spots some white curtains, in various sizes, piled here and there in the cluttered space. On the opposite side of the room, there are some blurry posters and marionettes hanging on the wall. A shabby studio, she thinks. She shakes her head to ignite her memory. It must be his place, the man with the shaved head in the pub … the man who turned out to be a shadow player. But where is he now? She stands up to get a better view. In a murky corner of the room she sees the man lying in bed on his back. She holds her breath for a moment to hear better. His slow breathing tells her that he’s in a deep, intoxicated sleep. She should leave before he wakes up. She sits on the edge of the bench. How did she end up here? She recalls that, when they arrived last night, she collapsed onto this bench seat, the first unoccupied space she had spotted.
At the pub, while raising his mug and making a toast, he’d introduced himself as a travelling shadow performer.
“A shadow man, eh?” she asked, not taking her eyes off her glass or expecting an answer.
“A puppeteer,” the guy corrected her with his deep, but soft, voice.
It’s my turn to correct you, she thought. But she decided not to. Let him judge her ability to comprehend English based on her accent. Nevertheless, her thoughts betrayed her, and slipped out of her mouth anyway. “The fact that you are not armed is enough for me right now,” she said.
“Enough for what?” He sounded interested. He didn’t turn to her, though.
She felt like having another drink to banish the disturbing thoughts from her head. “I don’t know … maybe enough to take revenge on him … by sleeping with you,” she replied sarcastically. Sitting side by side, they made no eye contact. Both of them fell silent, drowning in their own worlds. Heads bowed down, eyes fixed on their own drink. Wordless understanding.
“Hmm, sleep with me as revenge?”
“Nope,” she muttered, not only to the shadow man, but also to the boy to whom she’d given birth—the boy to whom she had given all the love she had in the world.
“Lovers are betrayers,” he added.
“Not my lover,” she grumbled. “I’m talking about my son.”
“Come on!” said the man after a long pause. He looked confused, shocked even.
“Shut up!” she replied, though not angrily. When she looked up and asked for another drink, the man inclined his head towards her.
“You’ve had enough,” he warned in a decisive voice.
She opened her mouth to protest, but no words came out.
“Time to go home,” said the man. “You’d better pay your bill and we’ll go.”
For a moment, that devastating cry filled her ears again. “I don’t want to go home,” she mumbled. “I don’t want to get hurt.”
“Does he beat you?”
“Of course not,” she whispered. “But he … he hid his life, his thoughts … his plan to work as an armed guard—an armed guard for an armoured vehicle, like those that transport large quantities of money for banks—he hid that plan as if I were nobody. Oh, yeah. I’m nobody in his life.” She let tears roll down her face.
Another pause stretched into a long silence. Once again, each of them retreated into themselves.
“Another glass, please!” she asked the waiter, trying to look convincingly sober. After the first gulp, she felt steady enough to prove that she was a woman in her right mind. “Let the world go to hell. But we should stay away from guns,” she said, feeling her words disappear into a vacuum.
After a few moments of silence, the man responded, “You need to think differently, change your attitude about this, and maybe you will not feel so hurt.”
Unable to recognize if he was being sarcastic or not, she turned to him. “Violence can not be erased with violence—I’m telling you.”
“Go home and tell that to your son!”
Swallowing his bitter words, she replied, “I won’t. Let me sleep over at your place—just tonight—and instead … instead I’ll tell you a tale that may work for you. I mean for your performance.”
“Well, that’s something,” he said.
She took a last gulp of her drink, and continued. “Yes, I do have a tale for you, shadow man.”
“Well, tell me,” he said, heading towards the exit.
On the way, she called up all her mental energy and began. “Listen! Ever heard of The Canticle of the Birds? It’s a tale told by a Sufi. And it goes like this: “A band of birds heads towards the Mountain Qaf. Why? Well, they’re longing to find the mysterious bird, Simorgh. You know, Simorgh literally means thirty birds. What happens next? Oh! It’s a long, long story. In the end, the thirty birds that were able to endure the hardship of the journey arrive at their destination and realize that they themselves are the Simorgh.”
Yalda remembers telling him the story. As they walked, she stumbled several times, and each time he stopped so that she could regain her balance and keep going. He walked with slow, steady steps and avoided asking any questions. The cold evening wind made the few passersby bend their heads. She followed his bare, upright head. She could find no reason to question what she was doing.
10.
ODDLY ENOUGH, THE KEY, ALWAYS HARD to get into the keyhole and turn, doesn’t give her any trouble tonight. A bonus for a drinking binge, she thinks. Her son’s absence is another bonus. Lingering for a while in the hallway to remove her coat and scarf, she ruminates over the experience of opening the door and feeling relieved that he is not home. A wave of anger overrides the alcohol in her bloodstream. She throws her purse on the rocking chair and tramps toward the kitchen sink to drink a glass of water. When she feels she cannot drink any more, she splashes some water on her face. Before slogging to bed, she glances around. No sign of the jinn, which is good. She removes her clothes and collapses on her bed.
Yalda knows she should cover her eyes and summon flocks of sheep. She is hoping that the residue of alcohol will suppress nightmares. Before she pulls the blanket over her face, her eyes fall on the jasper green curtain, the partition between his room and her den. The curtain evokes a feeling of nostalgia for her childhood. She moves her eyes down and sees the jinn’s shoes at the bottom edge of the curtain: black high heels, the tips of the toes, pointy and curled up. “Hey, you’re here,” Yalda snickers and closes her eyes.
I’m dreaming of something I experienced long ago. It’s the first death, the first loss, the first bang that goes straight through the heart of a young me, little Yalda. We’re in Mati’s room. I see the little girl’s eyes, my eyes, wide open with horror, riveted by Mati’s pale face. Mati is lying in bed, motionless and breathless, her head tilted toward her right shoulder, a lock of black hair stuck to her forehead, a single drop of blood oozing from the corner of her mouth. The aroma of eucalyptus leaves heating in a copper bowl of water mixes with the smell of Mati’s medicine. All the sash windows of Mati’s room are closed. The dark orange sunset turns the patterns of the lace curtains into bloody flowers. Little Yalda dashes to open the windows and screams as loud and long as she can. Nobody is home. Maman Ashi has gone to visit Sister Eti after her latest quarrel with our dad, Agha Jun, last week. Agha Jun never comes home after work when the lady of the house is absent. And Dadashi always goes out after he picks up little Yalda from school and takes her home. Weeping and wailing, this poor little me sits on the windowsill, her clenched fists knocking her head, her restless legs kicking the wall.
The sun sinks behind the opposite roof; as it departs, the brick-paved inner yard, the symmetrical garden beds with their twin persimmon trees burdened with ripe fruit, and the rectangular blue-tiled pool, the howz, are all drowned in darkness.
“Mati, Mati, the day is done. Mati, Matiti, the day is done!”
Little Yalda laments. But Mati, the shining moon, Mati, her sweet elder stepsister, cannot be a refuge for her anymore. Her irrepressible sobbing reminds me of the jinn.
Yalda opens her wet eyes and removes the blanket from her face. She wipes away her tears with her pillowcase, and the water flowing down her nose with the edge of the bed sheet. Her short-term memory guides her to turn towards the jasper green curtain. No shoes, no hooves. An eerie moan from the opposite corner makes her turn around. The jinn, squatting, has covered her feet with her long black skirt. She has removed her high heels with their pointy, curled up toes.
Yalda wants to say, “So you’re going to stay here?” Remembering her usual lack of tact, she resists saying anything unkind. The jinn has her hand over her mouth to suppress her blubbering. Yalda fails to find words of consolation.
BUT THIS IS A DREAM!
A very old dream. A dream that she experienced after the loss of Nader, her boyfriend, and Yunes, her brother. After Mati’s death, Yalda often wished to see her in dreams. Sometimes, she could spot a phantom of Mati in some of the mishmash, those collages where you find the most irrelevant people in the most inappropriate settings. Never alone; never enough. Over the years, Mati has visited Yalda in her dreams twice, when she was mourning the loss of others, each time in one continuous dream that lasted for seven consecutive nights. The first time, Mati appeared to tame a Fury whose beloved man had been shot to death for nothing. The second time, though, Mati came to grieve with Yalda over their dear Dadashi, who had nothing in common with the murder victim in the morgue other than a name. After that, Mati disappeared, just like the jinn disappears—with no tinge, no trace, no smoke—as if Yalda had never had a half-sister who was as complete as a full moon. A wave of embarrassment runs under her skin.
